"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.

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."

But she was running now, in her moccasins and halter and shorts that were dirty in the rump, and for some reason she made him think of a frightened doe bolting through a forest where the trees took no note of the wild beating of its heart.

Two hours later Lucas, Temple, Doc, Maisey and I loaded up in Temple's Explorer, drowsy on beer and from sitting in the sun, the encounter with Terry Witherspoon pushed out of our minds, the summer evening still blue and pink and filled with promise.

As we snaked our way out of the parking area, I looked through the haze of dust and saw Wyatt Dixon in front of the white camper, dancing with Sue Lynn slung over his shoulder like a side of beef. When she tried to raise her torso erect, he slapped her rump and danced faster and faster in a circle, his knees jerking upward like an Indian's while the Confederate flag flapped over his head.

Lucas was sitting next to me in the backseat. His eyes started to follow mine.