June 1977(2)

I was tossing back whiskey and trying to make the bartender, Rachel Two Bears, laugh. She was tall and lean and hailed from the Crow Rez at the Wyoming border, though now she lived above this bar. She told me she was just there to help out a friend and planned to leave once Labor Day came around, but it seemed like she'd made herself at home, and I was glad about that. I wasn't sure if we liked each other or just hated the same people. Okay, I'm full of shit —I was crazy about her.

"Big push to spring Patty Hearst for good," I said, reading the front page of the Montana Standard. The kidnapped heiress turned bank robber was out on bail while she appealed her con-viction, and newspaper columnists fed us daily dollops of details about how hard life had been for her when she was criming.

"Carter's going to commute her sentence, mark my words," she practically spat.

"You really think so?"

"The best 'justice' system money can buy," she said. She mockingly assumed the voice of a bleeding heart: "Oh, poor girl, she was only nineteen when it started."

"The Marines got me when I was seventeen. Where's my sympathy?"

"Right here," she said and refilled my shot glass.

Rachel's politics were interesting; she seemed to have sympathy for Native American and other civil rights causes, but generally speaking, she was pretty hard-core law-and-order.

Especially when it came to rich white folks gaming the system.