Bitterroot

"The bad guys are a lot slicker today," I said.

"They ain't no slicker, son. The good guys are just dumber."

I started to smile at his joke, but then looked at his face. He was staring out the back of the barn at the thoroughbred and Appaloosa in the pasture, an unrelieved glint of sadness in his eyes. The horses were grazing next to a ribbon-like stream that wound through Indian paintbrush and harebells, tearing at the grass, their tails switching across their rumps.

"What are you studying on?" I asked.

He shook the moment out of his face.

"Remember when we chased that bunch of coke mules across the sand flats? We painted red flowers all over those stovepipe cactus. We took a rum flask out of a dead man's pocket and had a drink and poured the rest on his face. You miss it sometimes?" he said.

"No," I replied.

L.Q. pulled his Stetson down over his brow and turned away from me to hide the gentle reproach in his eyes. When I looked at him again he had gone.

I don't miss it. I know I don't, I said to myself as I walked back toward the house, like the alcoholic on his way to the saloon, denying the nature of his own insatiable desires.

"Talking to yourself?" a voice said from the porch.

"Oh, hi, Maisey, I didn't see you there," I said.

"No kidding?" she said. She wore makeup and khakis and sandals and a low-cut embroidered white peasant blouse and looked older than her years. She picked up an oversize can of beer that was wrapped in a paper bag. She salted the top and drank from it.

"Where's your old man?" I asked.

"In town."

"Early in the morning for a cold one, isn't it?"

"Billy Bob?"

"Yes?"

"Mind your own business. By the way, Lucas said to tell you he was going down to the Milltown Bar with Sue Ly

The Milltown Bar was a legendary clapboard blue-collar anachronism squeezed between river shacks and railroad tracks and a sawmill at the southern tip of the Blackfoot Valley.

Lucas had no trouble getting a four-night-a-week slot in the house band. Besides guitar, he could sing and play banjo, mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, and stand-up bass. Also, he didn't bother to ask the bar owner how much he would be paid.

It should have been a fine morning for Lucas. It wasn't. This was the first time he'd seen Sue Ly

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

"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 di

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 Bo

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 Ly

"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 Ly

"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 Ly

"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 thi

"Just a minute," Lucas said to Sue Ly

He waded into the river and picked up the Frisbee and walked to the shade of the rock, where the college boys were sitting on blankets with an ice chest set among them. They were sunta

"This dog's wore out. If you want to feed him, why not just do it? Don't make him drown hisself to get a little food," Lucas said.

One of the boys propped himself up on his elbow and squinted into the sun with one eye.

"You think that up all by yourself?" he asked.

"It's five of y'all, one of me. I know what you can do. But don't torment a dumb animal," Lucas said.

One of the other boys removed his sunglasses and started to his feet, sand sifting off of his body. But the boy who was propped on one elbow put a hand on his friend's arm.

"You got a point. Why don't you feed him?" he said, and tossed a sack of lunch trash to Lucas.

Lucas started up the trail, then knelt and gave the dog a half-eaten weenie.

"Hey, buddy, what's your name?" the college boy yelled after him.

"Lucas Smothers."

"How about throwing our Frisbee back, Lucas Smothers?"

Lucas sailed it through the air, then picked up the dog under the stomach and put it into the backseat of Sue Ly

Sue Ly