But before she could reply she saw her father coming toward the concession stand, pushing his ash-blond hair back over his head, his gait longer than it should have been, his shoulders slightly stooped. Perhaps for the first time she saw the complex man who would never be at home in the world, a Mennonite farm boy who went to war as a healer and became a killer in the Phoenix Program, a recovered intravenous addict who published poems and whose soft voice belied the potential that burned just below his skin, a father who mourned his wife and loved his daughter and brooked no intrusion into the life of his family.
Doc's right hand bit into Terry Witherspoon's arm, squeezing the muscle into the bone.
"You're the boy who left that note?" he said.
"I might have. Take your hand off-" Witherspoon said.
"Don't find any reason to get near me or Maisey, son. Now, you get back over there with your friends. While you're at it, you tell them those are grand flags on their camper and sonsofbitches like them don't have any right to fly them."
"I don't have to do anything you tell me, you old fuck."
Doc pulled Witherspoon out of the line and marched him by one arm through the crowd toward the camper. When Witherspoon tripped and fell, Doc knotted the back of his T-shirt in his fist and hauled him out of the dust and pushed him through the crowd like a rag doll.
In the shade of the tarp Carl Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon sat in canvas recliners, drinking canned beer, gazing benignly at the stage.
Behind them, Sue Lynn Big Medicine sat in the doorway of the camper, wearing shorts and a halter and no shoes, her face fatigued, her lipstick on crooked. Doc shoved Witherspoon into their midst. "Your man here got lost. Make sure he stays on a short tether," Doc said.
"Goodness gracious, sir, you behave like somebody just spit in your dinner plate. Sue Lynn, get Dr. Voss a cold drink. Terry wasn't rude to your daughter, was he? He got one sniff of her and ain't talked about nothing else," Wyatt Dixon said.
Wyatt Dixon turned his attention back to the stage, grinning at nothing, his body supine, one hand cupped on his scrotum, while Carl Hinkel puffed on his cob pipe as though the events taking place around him had nothing to do with his life.
I draped my arm around Doc's shoulders and walked him toward the concession stands. "Wrong place to take them on," I said. "If you're the voice of reason, Billy Bob, we're in trouble," he replied.
A half HOUR LATER Sue Lynn found Lucas behind the bandstand. He was kneeling on a blanket, replacing a broken treble string on his Martin, twisting the tuning peg until the string whined with tension.
"Where have you been? I went by your place three times today. Your uncle said you took his car and didn't tell him where you were going," he said, getting to his feet.
"I went back and got a few clothes. I'm staying at Wyatt's awhile," she replied.
"Wyatt's? Are you insane?"
"I have to, Lucas."
/> "Tell those government buttwipes to kiss your ass."
"Lower your voice."
"I mean it, Sue Lynn. Eighty-six this stuff. This is a free country."
"We can't be together again. You have to accept that."
He stared at her, then looked out at a deep, shadowed chasm that cut through the mountains.
"Don't tell me stuff like that. I'm not gonna listen," he said.
"I'm going to jail or I'm going to be killed. You want to be killed, too?"
"Come out to Doc's and talk to Billy Bob."
"Try to understand. I have to make a decision about something. It eats on me all the time. I might have to go away for a long time, for something you don't know about."
"Go away where?"
She gave up.
"Don't get around Wyatt," she said. "Dr. Voss just humiliated Terry in front of a bunch of college kids. Terry is Wyatt's punk. That means Wyatt has to hurt somebody so Terry can feel he's important again. That's the way they do things inside."
"Who cares what these guys do? They're scum… Stop backing away from me."