Bitterroot

But before he could get out of the yard I waved my hand to stop him. He wore mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my reflection bending down toward him, distorted, a bit comical, the constant deliverer of rhetoric that was meant to compensate for my years of absence as a father.

He waited for me to speak. When I didn't, he said, "What was you go

"Nothing. Y'all have a good time."

"Say, you couldn't let me have a ten-spot till I cash a check, could you? Tickets are twenty-five dollars," he said.

I ate supper with Doc and Maisey, then took a walk along the river and threw pinecones into the current and watched them float downstream into the shade. I saw L.Q. Navarro sitting in the fork of a cottonwood tree.

"Quit picking on that Indian gal," he said.

"She keeps company with people you wouldn't spit on, L.Q. Don't lecture at me."

"You got a way of getting upset when that boy takes up with minority people."

"That's a dadburn lie."

"Then leave him alone."

"All right, I will. Just stop pestering me."

"Where you goin?" L.Q. said.

"None of your business."

I walked back to the house and called Temple Carrol at her motel in Missoula. "You like Merle Haggard?" I asked.

Temple picked me up at Doc's and we drove back down the Blackfoot highway toward Missoula. The sun was still above the mountains in the west, but the bottom of the canyon was already in shadow. When the wind gusted, the leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens along the riverbank flickered like paper against the copperish-green tint of the current.

"Your hot water bottle occupied tonight?" Temple said.

"Pardon?"

"Your girlfriend, the one who works at the clinic on the Reservation."

"I haven't seen her."

"A friend ran her name through NCIC. He got a hit."

"Cleo?"

"Her ex-husband was Mobbed-up with a gangster named Molinari on the West Coast."

"I know all about it," I said.

"Good," she said, and didn't speak again until we reached the top of the long, timber-lined grade that fed into the Jocko Valley.

The concert was being held outdoors on the edge of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The sun had just gone down behind the mountains, and the hills were plum-colored and the floor of the valley a dark green under a light-filled sky that gave you vertigo when you looked directly up into it. The air was heavy with the cool smell of water in irrigation ditches and the pine trees that were in shadow on the hillsides and the faintly acidic warm odor of mules and horses pe

Temple and I sat midway up in the stands. Her cheeks were as red as a doll's, her mouth like a small purple flower, her face glowing with the perfection of the evening. But it was obvious her thoughts were far away.

"I came up to Montana because Doc asked me to. But maybe I should head back to Deaf Smith," she said.

"I need you here, Temple," I said, my eyes looking straight ahead.

"I'm not convinced Doc's an i

"Guilty or i

"Let me put it another way. You've got a girlfriend with Mob co

"The sheriff told you this?"

"Don't worry about who told me. If you want me to work with you, you'd better haul your head out of your ass."

A drunk cowboy in front of us heard the last statement and turned around and gri

"How about saving it till later?" I said to Temple.

"Fine," she replied, and sipped from her soda can, her throat streaked with color.

I touched her on the top of her hand in hopes she would look back at me. But she didn't.

The crowd out on the dance slab was hard-core working class: truck drivers, horse wranglers, waitresses, gypo loggers, Indian feed growers, bale buckers, 4-H kids, women who drank beer with one hand and smoked with the other while they bumped rumps, petty criminals scrolled with jailhouse art, barroom strippers dancing for their own gender with undisguised erotic joy, a group of fist-fighting drunks charter-bused from a saloon, and three Indians who kept squatting down below eye level to inhale huge mouthfuls of white smoke off a crack pipe.

Then I saw my son dancing with Sue Ly

"You going to talk to me at all?" I said to Temple.

She finished her soda and set the empty can between us. She seemed to concentrate on the stage. "Was Haggard really in the pen?" she said.

"Yeah, Quentin or Folsom."

"I don't think he's the only graduate here. Take a look at that bunch by the side of the stage," she said.

Three head-shaved, bare-chested young men, wearing laced, steel-toed boots and bleached jeans without belts, were drinking ca

"Is that Carl Hinkel with them?" Temple said.

"That's the man. The George Lincoln Rockwell of the Bitterroot Valley."

Then two other men walked from the rest room area and joined them. One was a slender kid with glasses and a crooked smile on his mouth, an ever-present facial insult that allowed him to offend others without giving them sufficient provocation to tear him apart. His companion had large, wide-set teeth and virtually colorless eyes and wore a flowered green shirt with purple garters on the sleeves, a polished rodeo buckle against his corrugated stomach, and new, stiff jeans that were hitched tightly around his genitalia.

Temple was watching my face. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"That's Wyatt Dixon. I can't think of a worse time for that guy to show up."

Dixon had seen Lucas and Sue Ly

When, as a father, do you intervene in your son's life and perhaps steal his self-respect? I'd never had an answer to that question.

"I'll be back," I said to Temple, and walked down the wood stairs onto the cement slab.

Dixon stood inches from Lucas and Sue Ly

"You want to talk to me, Mr. Dixon?" I said.

He screwed his head around, his cigar clenched in his teeth, his profiled right eye like a clear glass bubble.

"I declare, people from all walks of life has shown up here tonight. It ain't accident you and the boy favor, is it?" he said.