Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

It should have been a fine morning for Lucas. It wasn't. This was the first time he'd seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine since the fight at the dance up in the Jocko. But she didn't act the same anymore. She seemed disconnected, her gaze lingering on his only momentarily, like somehow the fact she was two years older had suddenly become important.

Outside the bar, while he fitted his guitar case into the backseat of her car, he said, "Something wrong, Sue Lynn?"

"Not in a way you can do anything about," she replied.

"I see. There's a problem, but I'm too young or dumb to understand it?"

"Your father doesn't want me around you. He's probably right."

"That's just Billy Bob. You watch. He'll be taking us out to dinner."

But he might as well have been talking to the wind. She started the car, and they drove along the highway, past the sawmill, through the willow-lined streets of Bonner. The car had no windshield and Sue Lynn's hair kept whipping in her face.

He looked at her Roman profile, the coffee-and-milk color of her skin, a threadlike white scar on her cheek, the soft purple hue of her mouth. He wanted to touch her, but her silence and the roar of the gutted muffler against the asphalt fed his irritation and ineptitude.

"Why do you drive a junker like this, anyway?" Lucas said.

"Because I live in a junkyard. Because the government tells me what I have to do. Because I don't have choices about my life," she said.

Her hands had tightened on the wheel. When she looked over at him her eyes were blazing.

"Pull over," he said.

"No!"

"Stop acting like you got to talk in code. It's a real drag, Sue Lynn," he said, and grabbed the wheel so that the car drove across the opposite lane onto a flat turnaround above a sandy beach that flanged the Blackfoot River.

"I made a mistake. I shouldn't have gone to the dance with you. Wyatt Dixon and Carl Hinkel and their friends are animals. They'll tear you in pieces," she said.

"Back home their kind are a dime a tote sack." "You're just a boy. You don't know what you're talking about."

She got out of the car. He thought she was going to kick the door, but instead she stared silently at the river, the wind blowing her hair in her face, a look of regret in her eyes that he couldn't explain.

"I'm sorry for getting mad. I like you a lot, Sue Lynn. But I ain't no kid and you got to stop talking to me like I am one," he said.

"I'm not who you think I am, Lucas. I'm not a good person," she said.

She walked down a footpath to the beach. Five college boys in swim trunks were sitting in the shadow of a huge egg-shaped rock, drinking beer and sailing a red Frisbee out on the river for a mongrel dog to retrieve. Each time the dog brought back the Frisbee, one of the boys would give it a piece of hamburger bun.

Lucas caught up with Sue Lynn by the water's edge. The Frisbee sailed like a dinner plate past her head and landed far out in the current. The dog splashed into the water and swam after it. Its back was lesioned with mange, its ribs etched against its sides.

"What gives you the right to be saying you're no good? That's like telling folks who believe in you they're stupid," Lucas said.

"I'm going to drive you back home now," she said.

"Billy Bob give me two tickets to the Joan Baez concert at the university," he lied.

"I'm glad I met you, Lucas, but I'm not going to see you again."

"That's a rotten damn way to be," he replied.

"One day it'll make sense to you."

"Right," he said.

The dog had just returned the Frisbee to one of the college boys and was trying to nose a piece of bread out of the sand. The dog was trembling with exhaustion, the wet hair on its hindquarters exposing the emaciated thinness of its legs. The college boy flung the Frisbee through the air again. It plopped on top of the riffle and floated downstream.

"Just a minute," Lucas said to Sue Lynn.