Read The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do for Free Online Page A

agreement, then closed the door and went into Pio’s.
    For reasons that Shade found to be too tangled to articulate and too elusive to grasp, he liked How Blanchette. That put him in a very small club. But he’d known Blanchette too long, their Frogtown pasts were too interwoven for him not to forgive him, even for the unforgivable.
    How had started life in Frogtown, about three alleys north of the Shades, as Arthur Blanchette. His father, the eccentric and locally cherished Leigh Blanchette, had provided material for exuberant, arm-spreading barroom tales, and closely huddled, snide, post-mass anecdotes that were recounted by several generations of Frogtowners, while sticking his son with a nickname that would become both his burden and his distinction.
    When How was fifteen and still known as Arthur, the Dunne family, who lived behind them, had given their sons bows and arrows as birthday presents. Soon they had an informal archery range, sending arrows flying toward the bank of dirt that formed the boundary between the Dunne and Blanchette backyards. Pappy Dunne was an Irishman with fantasies of personal talent, enormous tabs at neighborhood taverns, and a job at Jerry’s Seat Covers. He wanted his children to be better than he was, better at all things, so one evening after seriously exercising his elbow with several mugs of brew, he decided to show them the proper form of archery. He pulled an arrow back, and aimed it with bold innovation by timing his staggers, then letting it fly at the zenith of his lurch. The fateful arrow cleared the dirt mound by several feet, glided past the trees in the adjacent yard, and crashed through the window of the Blanchettes’ TV room.
    History would never get it straight, for it was an incident clouded with possibilities from the beginning. But Leigh Blanchette did come slowly, almost furtively, into the backyard with the catalyst arrow in his hand. He gave it back to the concerned Pappy Dunne, then reclined on the dirt. It had given him quite a start, he explained, that arrow tearing through the window toward his heart. Handball is all that saved him, he reported. It gave him the reflexes to twist just that necessary bit to the side and allow the razor-tipped vessel of death to pass. Pappy Dunne was drunk but comfortable in that state and mentioned that it was just a blunt-ended kid’s arrow that might KO a bird if it caught it just right, but was no real threat to your average accidental target. “Gunsmoke,” Pere Blanchette responded. Could it be more than coincidence that he was watching “Gunsmoke” at the exact time when an arrow, a danger that had never before occurred to him, came at him from ambush? That’s not on on Tuesdays, Pappy Dunne said. No one was listening.
    Within a week Pere Blanchette would explain that he had been mystically chosen by the wily spirits of warriors past and rained upon by arrows of such number and deadly force that all he could do was cross himself in wonder that he had survived. And the really inspirational thing was, he said, that he’d been watching television and it was just atthe point where Tom Jeffords and Cochise shake hands in Broken Arrow when atavistic combat interceded in his life. Many bottles of red wine were garnered through the elaboration of his tale, and within a month Pere Blanchette had begun to haunt secondhand shops and the Goodwill, searching for Navajo rugs and plaster Indians.
    As Shade could well recall, for he and his brothers, Tip and Francois, had been as guilty as any, Arthur Blanchette began to be greeted on the street by upraised palms and grunts of “How.” He was portly even then, and his face would redden while his hands clenched. It was well known that if Arthur got you down and dropped the bomb of his weight upon you it would mean victory for him, but it was equally well known that any but the most feeble of leg could outdistance him, and the more talented local hand-on-meat percussionists could do