Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Sue Lynn's history is her own. I didn't make it up."

"That agent said the same thing about you."

"Maybe you should listen to him."

Lucas got up from the table and threw his coffee out the back door. Then he washed the cup in the sink and set it in the dry rack.

"You hurt people when they try to stand up for you. But I don't hold it against you. It's just the way you are. You ain't never gonna change, Billy Bob," he said.

He fitted on his hat and went outside, past the side window, his head bent forward, his face as sharp as an ax blade in the wind.

Chapter 25

Kingdoms are lost for want of a nail in a horse's shoe. I think perhaps lives unravel in the same fashion, sometimes over events as slight as an insult to the pride of a misanthropic young man from North Carolina who thought he was going to be a mountain man.

Lucas was playing that afternoon with a band at a bluegrass festival outside of Hamilton. The bandstand had been knocked together with green lumber at the bottom of a long slope that tapered upward into the shadows of the mountains, and thousands of people sat on folding chairs and blankets in the sunshine, while the electronically amplified songs of Appalachia echoed through the canyons of the Bitterroot Valley.

Doc, Maisey, Temple, and I spread a blanket in the grass, not far from a group of college kids who were red-faced with beer and agitated by a situation of some kind near the concession area.

"Somebody should rip it down. It doesn't belong here. This is Montana," a girl was saying.

"Ignore them. They're a bunch of losers," a boy said.

"There's a black man working at the hot-dog stand. How would you feel if you were a black man and somebody stuck that in your face?" the girl said.

"What's going on with the college kids?" Temple said.

"You got me," I said.

I looked past the crowd at a white camper with a tarp extended from the roof and supported on poles to shade the people who sat under it. On one side of the tarp was a staff that flew the American flag; on the other side, flapping like a red-and-blue martial challenge out of the past, was the battle flag of the Confederacy.

"I'm going to the concession stand. Y'all want anything?" Maisey said.

"Yeah," Doc said, and gave her a twenty-dollar bill.

"Like what do you want?" Maisey asked.

"Whatever you like. Just make sure everything is free of cholesterol and preservatives and none of it is made by Third World child labor and the vendors have sound political attitudes," Doc said.

Maisey made one of her faces to show her tolerance of her father's immaturity and walked off into the crowd, just as Lucas's band came on stage and went into Bill Monroe's "Molly and Tenbrooks."

The sunlight was warm on Maisey's skin as she stood in line, the wind balmy in her face, the timbered slopes of the mountains rising almost straight up into snow that still had not melted with summer. The fields were iridescent with the spray from irrigation wheel lines, and up the incline the aspens and cottonwoods along the drainages rippled in the shadows of the mountains that towered over them.

Then she felt a presence behind her before she saw it, and smelled an odor like a combination of hair tonic and chewing gum and layered deodorant, as though the person emanating it thought a manufactured scent was a form of physical sophistication. "Bet I scared you," Terry Witherspoon said. He wore a white T-shirt and black jeans and engineering boots and a skinning knife on his belt. He grinned at the corner of his mouth and pitched his head to get a strand of hair out of his glasses.

She turned away from him and moved up with the line, her eyes fastening on a jolly fat man frying burgers inside the concession stand.

"Did you get my note?" Terry asked.

"No," she said, hurriedly, then felt her cheeks burn with her lie. She turned and faced him. "I did get it. Please don't leave any more."

"I went way out on a limb for you. You shouldn't talk to me like that."

"Leave me alone," she said, her teeth gritted, her eyes shining with embarrassment at the stares she was now receiving.

He didn't answer. A long moment passed and she thought perhaps Terry had gone away. But when she turned around he was looking down into her face, crinkling his nose under his glasses, his arms hanging straight down, as though he didn't know what else to do with them, one hand locked on his wrist.

"I'll pay for the burgers. Let's walk up the canyon and eat them. There're grouse in the pines. I've got a hand line we can fish with," he said.