Three days later, Vikki watched her father and an Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy lead the escapee in an orange jumpsuit and waist and leg chains to the back of an Oklahoma state vehicle and lock him to a D-ring inset in the floor. The escapee was limping badly and could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. His arms were like sticks. His skin seemed to be possessed of a disease that leached it of color. His hair had been cut so that it resembled a rusty Brillo pad glued to his scalp.

“What’s gonna happen to him, Daddy?” Vikki had asked.

“He’ll be cannibalized.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Honey, it means on a day like this, your old man would like to be a full-time musician.”

What would her father say about her and Pete’s situation now? She had always identified her father more with his music than with his career as a lawman. He was always happy, his tanned skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and seldom let the world injure him. He lent money to people who could not pay it back and befriended drunkards and minorities and didn’t allow either politics or organized religion to carry him away. He had collected all the Carter Family’s early music and was immensely proud to have known the patriarch of the family, Alvin Pleasant Carter, who, in a postcard to Vikki’s father, had called him “a fellow musicianer.” His favorite Carter family song was “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.”

Where are you now, Daddy? In heaven? Out there among the mesas or inside the blowing clouds of dust and rain? But you’re somewhere, aren’t you? she said to herself. You always said music never dies; it lives on the trade winds and wraps all the way around the world.

She had to wipe a tear from her eye before she went inside the steak house.

“A couple of famous fellows were asking about you,” the bartender said.

“How do you define ‘famous’?”

The bartender was an ex-rodeo rider nicknamed Stub, for the finger he had pinched off when he caught it in a calf-rope at the Calgary Stampede. He was tall and had a stomach shaped like a water-filled enema bottle and hair that was as slick and black as patent leather. He wore black trousers and a long-sleeve white shirt and a black string tie and was drying champagne glasses and setting them upside down on a white towel while he talked. “They were in last night and wanted to meet you, but you were busy.”

“Stub, would you just answer the question?”

“They said they were from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

“They’re hanging out here rather than Malibu because they like the weather in late August?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Did you give them my name?”

“I said your name was Vikki.”

“Did you give them my last name or tell them where I live?”

“I didn’t tell them where you live.”

“What are their names?”

“They left a card here. Or I think they did.” He looked behind him at two or three dozen business cards in a cardboard box under the cash register. “They liked your singing. One of them said you sounded like Mother something.”

“Maybelle?”

“What?”

“I sound like Mother Maybelle?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Stub-”

“Maybe they’ll come in tonight.”

“Don’t talk about me to anyone. No one, not for any reason. Do you understand?”

Stub shook his head and dried a glass, his back to her.

“Did you hear me?”

He sighed loudly, as though a great weight had been unfairly set on his shoulders. She wanted to hit him in the head with a plate.

Until nine-thirty P.M. she served dinners from the kitchen and drinks from the bar to tourists on their way to Big Bend and family people and lonely utility workers far from home who came in for a beer and the music. Then she took her guitar from a locked storage compartment in back and removed it from the case and tuned the strings she had put on only last week.

The Gibson had probably been manufactured over sixty years ago and was the biggest flattop the company made. It had a double-braced red spruce top and rosewood back and sides. It was known as the instrument of choice of Elvis and Emmylou or any rockabilly who loved the deep-throated warm sound of early acoustic guitars. Its sunburst finish and pearl and flower-motif inlay and dark neck and silver frets seemed to capture light and pools of shadow at the same time and, out of the contrasts, create a separate work of art.

When she made an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the reverberation through the wood was magical. She sang “You Are My Flower” and “Jimmie Brown the Newsboy” and “The Western Hobo.” But she could hardly concentrate on the words. Her gaze kept sweeping the crowd, the tables, the utility workers at the bar, a group of European bicyclists who came in sweaty and unshaved with backpacks hanging from their shoulders. Where was Pete? He was supposed to meet her at ten P.M., when the kitchen closed and she usually started cleaning tables and preparing to leave.

A man who was alone at a front table kept spinning his hat on his finger while he watched her sing; one side of his face was cut with a grin. He wore exaggerated hillbilly sideburns, cowboy boots, a print shirt that looked ironed on his tanned skin, jeans that were stretched to bursting on his thighs, and a big polished brass belt buckle with the Stars and Bars embossed on it. When she glanced at him, he gave her a wink.

Over the heads of the crowd, she saw Stub answer the phone. Then he replaced it in the cradle and said something to a drink waitress, who walked up to the bandstand and told Vikki, “Pete said to tell you not to eat dinner, he’s going to the grocery to fix y’all something.”

“He’s going to the grocery at ten o’clock?”

“They stay open till eleven. Count your blessings. My old man is watching rented porn at his mother’s house.”

Vikki laid her guitar in its case, fastened the clasps, and locked the case in the storage room. At closing time, Pete still had not shown up. She went to the bar and sat down, her feet hurting, her face stiff from smiling when she didn’t feel like it.

“Pretty fagged out?” a voice beside her said.

It was the cowboy with the Confederate belt buckle. He had not sat down but was standing close enough that she could smell the spearmint and chewing tobacco on his breath. He was holding his hat with both hands, straightening the brim, pushing a dent out of the crown, brushing a spot out of the felt. He put it on his head and took it back off, his attention focusing on Vikki. “You off?” he said.

“Am I what?”

“You need a ride? Every foot of wind out there has got three feet of sand in it.”

Stub compressed a small white towel in his palm and dropped it on the bar in front of the cowboy. “Last call for alcohol,” he said.

“Include me out.”

“Good, because this is a family-type joint that closes early. Then Vikki helps me clean up. Then I walk her home.”

“Glad to hear it,” the cowboy said. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, grinning while he did it.

Stub watched him leave, then set a cup of coffee in front of Vikki. “Those guys come back?” he asked.

“The ones who claim they’re with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?”

“You don’t believe they’re the genuine article?”

She was too tired to talk about it. She lifted her coffee cup, then replaced it in the saucer without drinking from it. “I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.

“You want me to walk you home?”

“I’m fine. Thanks for your help, Stub.”

He picked up a business card tucked under the register. “I dug this one out of the box,” he said. He set it in front of her.

She picked it up and looked at the printing across the face. “It says ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’”

“The guy wrote something on the back. I didn’t read it.”

She turned the card over in her palm. “It says he loved my singing.”