Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I shot the pinball machine,

But it caused me bad luck.

All I ever made

On a pinball machine

Was four katty-corners,

Then I'd miss the sixteen."

He rested his arm across the top of the Martin, careful not to scratch the finish with the button on the cuff of his denim shirt.

"That's one of them old ones," he said.

"Really?" I said, trying not to smile at what he considered old. "Where is everybody?"

"Doc and Maisey had a fight. I don't know where he went, but she took off with some high school boy.

Does Maisey act kind of funny for a girl who's been raped?" he said.

"How's that?"

"The way she was dressed and acting. Hoop earrings, fire-engine makeup, one of them bras that-" His eyes went away from mine, as they always did when he felt he had to protect me from his generation's knowledge of the world.

"That what?" I said.

"It don't exactly signal a guy to keep his big-boy in his britches."

"That's how it works, Lucas."

"What works?" he asked.

"Rape victims want to show they still have control. So they try to fly back through the candle flame."

He seemed to study the thought, his fingers chord-ing without sound on the neck of the guitar. "An Indian gal was looking for you," he said.

"Sue Lynn?"

"She didn't say. She has blond streaks in her hair. What's the deal on her?" He threaded his plectrum through the strings at the top of the guitar neck and adjusted his straw hat and gazed abstractly at the river.

"Why?" I said.

"No reason. She said she liked country music. I was showing her some chords."

"I'd leave her alone."

"She seemed pretty nice."

"She hangs with some bad dudes. Why not keep things simple and enjoy the trout fishing?"

He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and nodded his head slowly, as though humbly agreeing with a profound statement.

"That's how come you been milking through Doc's fence?" he said.

I walked on inside the house and hung my hat on a wood peg and poured a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. Through the front door I could see him putting his guitar inside its case, tucking the cloth strap around its edges, gum snapping in his jaw, his eyes bright with a thought he couldn't handle. He got up from the porch step, the guitar case still open, and came inside.

"I didn't mean to say that."