“Oh goody, goody.” Helena sat down on the couch. Jim came in with iced coffee. He set it down, then sat on his guitar stool and tuned up his Dobro. Leo got his harp harness from his room. When he came back into the parlor, Ryder already had his own strapped around his waist and was blowing Jim a C to tune to. Helena sat back in the corner of the couch with her napkin-wrapped beer, smiling up at the three of them. Leo buckled on his harness from his left shoulder to his right hip, then pulled on it until all of his harps hung against his chest. Ryder launched right in with a C lead of something low and funky but fast that Jim began picking to right away. It was a Joe Hill Louis number. Leo pulled a C from its sheath and began sucking out a low bass chord backup to Ryder’s lead. He glanced at Helena on the couch, but she was looking at him, so he closed his eyes and listened to the music and the music only. Jim sang the intro loud and at near perfect pitch:

“Well she may be yours
But she comes to see me sometime,
Well she may be yours
But she comes to see me sometime,
When I go to love my baby
She’s always in the street–”

Ryder took it flying from there and Leo followed as best he could. Ryder was really on a showoff of a roll though, so Leo dropped to a drum beat, sucking the chords out straight without a bend. Jim sang two more refrains with no variations and Leo kept steady while Ryder took it out in a harp-smacking flurry that he ended with a tremolo fade.

Helena put her Pabst on the table and clapped fast and hard, her ball and chain earrings swinging and jerking along her neck. “Oowee, you boys should be famous.”

Jim tapped his boot in time. He nodded at Ryder and Leo, then set off with “Sittin’ on Top of the World.” This time Ryder backed way down for the low chords in a G harp and winked at Leo to pick up the lead. Jim sang the intro, then Leo put the fine metal to his lips, closed his eyes, and blew out the exact sister tune of the song before he sucked in a few wah-wahs of his own, ending them on just the right note for Jim to take off singing from. Now Helena was sitting on the edge of the couch. She slapped the empty Pabst cans in time and a gold ring she wore made a metal tapping sound that fit in pretty well. They played six more tunes without a break, Jim cued them, and all the numbers were upbeat until the last one, “Natchez Burning” by Howling Wolf. On the album, Wolf had only a piano backup going to the guitar, no harps, so Leo wasn’t sure how to proceed. Even Ryder was playing it safe, hitting wide bass chords while Jim sang high to his low thimble-sliding on the Dobro. He looked and sounded wonderful, really; his eyes were closed, his chin was tilted way up, and his voice couldn’t have been truer to the words about the burning of Natchez Mississippi Town, his baby lying on the ground. Leo watched Helena watch Jim. She was sitting back on the couch now, and in the growing dark of the room, her eyes glittered. She was smiling but she seemed sad too; it was an expression Leo had never seen on a man. A man looked either up about something or else downhearted, but Helena seemed to open herself to the whole picture in front of her, and she was prettier in this light.