Author's note: Hey there!

I'd warn that this one's odd, but by now that's like crying wolf. So I'll give you just-the-facts (and Enos would be so proud of me for that):

This is an alternate timeline story, another look at the question of "what if the boys hadn't gotten caught on that 'shine run." The last time I did this, it led to Walking in the Shadows of a Past Reality, with which I was not wholly satisfied. So this one is entirely different.

The parameters this time were that it had to stick to canon as much as possible, while having the boys continue to run moonshine (and as an auxiliary, not be on probation and thus not confined to Hazzard). So you'll recognize a lot of the people as they come by, but they won't necessarily do or say precisely what you expect them to. (Because they can't. Because the circumstances have changed. Because I'm a fool with whacked out ideas.) It's been weird to write, so I am sure it will be weird to read.

While canon events do happen, I did not want to just write canon all over again, so there will be places where it might help if you already know the series pretty well. I don't tell all the details of each episode, but I do go into the boys' heads in a way that the series never could. (Oh, and the boys have built the General and Daisy does work in the Boar's Nest. So while I stick to most canon, as usual, I dismiss Happy Birthday General Lee. For some reason, I never can reconcile myself to that particular history for the boys.)

Upshot: in order to understand what I am talking about, you may just have to read the story. I hope you will read it, and that you'll enjoy it. Cheers!


Chapter 1 - One-Armed Bandits and Two-Armed Girls

Today:

There's this: the girl, feet solidly planted and a smirk of superiority playing across her otherwise reasonably attractive face, the freckles adorning her nose stretching and merging with the contortion. Hand on her hip, the whole of her body an unspoken challenge and a boundary just begging to be crossed. Dust in the air, smell of sweat mixed with fumes and exhaust, and somewhere behind all of that, her perfume. Too sweet to be believed; no more real than anything else about her.

There's also this: a boy, improbably long-legged, mouth set in a manufactured sneer that carries no more veracity than the girl's scent. Like the barely pubescent brat that he was just a few short years back, he's pretending at a white-hot hatred for her, quite simply because her presence makes him warm – under the collar for starts, but it ends quite a bit south of there. Hot, flushed, sweaty palms leaving him clumsy and awkward. He wants her – to like him, to want him back with the same kind of instinctive longing that he wants her, to accompany him to public places where he can be seen in her company and private ones where he might be able to talk her out of her clothes. He steadfastly does not want to be mocked by her, to have her call his manhood into question. All the negative polarity of her angry and manipulative little soul pulls the beautiful blonde boy under her spell with a speed that he cannot, for all his racing experience, comprehend.

And then there's this: a car, startling power in its custom-built engine, growling in its guts with a ferocious urgency to help the foolishly smitten boy prove himself worthy of whatever twisted admiration this girl is capable of giving him.

Finally, there's this: the boy's sense-talking kin, utterly dismissed. Rejected, ignored and immediately forgotten, the years invested in keeping his fool self alive tossed aside like yesterday's leftovers.


Yesterday:

"Luke." He'd kept it inside long enough. There came a point when a man had to be honest, to speak the truth and take his lumps. "I got to tell you something."

Rolled eyes and, "You couldn't wait?" from over there in the passenger seat. Followed by, "Hold her steady, Bo."

But this was why he couldn't wait. Because it was inside him, had been stuck there for a whole day with no one else but him to bear it. Okay, at first it was nothing but the whine of a mosquito droning from somewhere in his gut. A tuneless song about time passing and a decision to be made and how he—

"Luke," he tried again, because his cousin was folded over the bench seat, reaching into the back for some fireworks or a weapon, and it wouldn't take him any time at all to find them. After that there'd be the climbing, slipping out of the relative safety of Sweet Tilly's cradling cockpit with nothing to hold him up but the night air and Bo's steady hand on the wheel.

Which wasn't likely to be steady, considering the way that the harmless mosquito had started eating away at his insides, gnawing for all it was worth, leaving him itchy and twitchy and nervous.

A low chuckle and Luke was back beside him, sitting properly. Whatever he'd fished forward from the back of the car seemed to please him inordinately. "Andy," he mumbled, and then there was a hiss and bright flash – a match getting lit. "You're going to wish you stayed in bed."

"Luke, dang it," Bo protested. Because it was one thing to imagine himself running Sweet Tilly into a rut and dislodging his cousin from his perch on the windowsill or the black matte finish of the roof. It was enough to worry about an errant spasm in his fingers hurting Luke, he didn't want to picture the both of them careening off the road because his dare-devil cousin had gotten overeager and lit the wick of a quarter stick of dynamite in the car instead of climbing out to where he could lob it, first.

Stop, he wanted to say, and listen to me. But the sizzle of flame next to him seemed to indicate that there were better courses of action. If only he could figure out what they were.

"Hang on, Bo," Luke answered, then leaned out the window – halfway only, and Bo would be grateful for small mercies if there weren't so many dangers surrounding them. The way the road was narrowly etched into the mountainside, for starts, and then there was the revenuer nipping at their tail feathers. The fireworks in Luke's hand and that thing itching and burning inside his belly, begging to be shared.

A cough from his cousin and then a left-handed lob. Squeal of tires behind and old Andy Roach's car skidding to a sudden halt. And Luke's voice, close again, "What're you waiting for, Bo?"

What was he waiting for – well. It all started with indecision, he guessed. Wanting two things when he could only have one, trying to pick and it wasn't fair. Because there was family and then there was love, there was the farm and there was his future. There was the only home he'd even known and one place he'd ever considered living, and then there was that other thing. The way his heart raced, and his mouth just kept on spilling out fool words because his brain couldn't keep up.

"Go!" Go. Yeah, he could do that.

"I'm leaving," he blurted.

"What?" came back at him, but Luke wasn't really listening. Too busy sliding and shoving his way into Bo's half of the moonshine runner's seat, foot encroaching on Bo's space. Left foot, used to mashing down a clutch with full force. Car lurching forward with all due speed – whiplash of overcompensation and it was hardly moving at all but Luke was still coming, still shoving himself over to try to get his right foot on the gas pedal and—

"To Macon." The leaving thing, seemed like he'd better explain it. Since Luke was crowding into his seat with him and all, taking over the driving like he thought Bo was about to slip out the door and disappear right now. "With Jill."

"Bo." Harassed, annoyed, one-hundred percent Luke Duke on a mission with his silly little cousin in the way. "Move."

Move. Yeah, he was planning to do that, planning to move right on out of Hazzard and everything he'd ever known. Into a city with the one girl who had ever been able to spook and scare him until the hair stood up on the back of his neck, who'd been able to unnerve him and uproot him and spin him around faster than a bootlegger's turn on a switchback road. And yeah, he wanted Luke's blessing. Or not that, because he couldn't imagine it ever being given. But he wanted peace between cousins, wanted to know that even if Luke didn't approve of his decision, there'd still be that undying support between them.

He didn't want or expect Luke to be in such an all-fired hurry to get rid of him that he'd be pushing him out the door. Or up against it.

But then it changed. Not so much shoving as slipping, lifting, sliding, and then everything was heavy cousin, halfway in his lap. Elbow in his chest and boot heel stomping down on his toes, fuzzy hair in his eyes and his mouth and a quiet syllable of pain that could have been uttered by either of them. Luke had lost weight in the service that he still hadn't gotten around to gaining back, but he was dense and solid and squashing Bo in his eagerness to be rid of him.

"Luke," was a natural response to being crushed into the seat, and if it came out a little constricted, that could be blamed on the fact that he could barely breathe.

"Bo," came snapping back at him, all frustration and annoyance. This here was Luke Duke giving an order – one he wanted obeyed regardless of the way he was smothering the person he was ordering around. "Get out of the way. Andy ain't going to stay put forever."

Andy? Oh, right, Andy. This was what came of letting mosquitoes chomp away at his insides, of keeping his thoughts and plans to himself instead of sharing them with Luke. Here was his brain, all tangled up in Jilly Rae Dodson (just Jill now, long legged with hair the color of fresh cut straw, kisses doled out sparingly like well-earned prizes for withstanding her resistance, her soft fingers tilting his chin how she wanted it while her other hand stroked from elbow to shoulder and back, exploring his farm-grown muscles), while Revenue Agent Andy Roach still lingered in their rear view mirror as Luke fought inertia and the weight of a fully loaded moonshine runner to get them moving – at high speed – the hell out of there.

"What," Bo asked, his survival instincts catching up with the situation. Priorities, Bo, his cousin might have mocked with a smirk, that was if he hadn't been so singularly focused on jamming himself into the driver's seat. I'll get around to killing you for deciding to run off with a girl once we survive this run. "Did you throw at him anyways?"

"Bo, move over." Over, move over. Not out, but over. Into the passenger seat—yeah, he could do that. Not easily and not without making Luke kick the accelerator too hard then release it again, not without bumps, bruises and accidental scratches, but he could manage. Over, not out – no accounting for how the thought cheered him when he'd been in such a hurry to confess his intent on leaving home. "Wasn't nothing more than a smoke bomb, and we'll be lucky if it holds him for more than a minute or two."

His feet, at least, were out of Luke's way by now. Sure, his left leg was still hung up somewhere between here and there, falling asleep under the density of his farm-solid cousin, but Luke had a clear shot at all the pedals. No explaining why they were still moving forward in erratic fits and starts.

"You ain't," came growling over to him as Luke gave the road a dirty look - for being wet and curved, or maybe just for being there at all. Disappearing was that much easier when they were in the woods instead of on blacktop. "Got enough time to leave or nothing, to run off to Macon before he catches up to us."

Or maybe the glare was for him, just temporarily directed at the road considering his cousin did have to pay attention to what he was doing and all. Because there he was, the unflappable Luke Duke – flapped, flustered, frustrated. Surprised and not liking it one bit.

"I didn't mean right now," Bo corrected. Just for the record. Typical of Luke to go thinking of him going off to Macon as some sort of a means to escape doing his share of the work. "I mean when she goes. Next week." And then because Luke was the absolute master of deliberate misunderstandings – he'd play at pretending you'd said one thing when clearly you'd meant another (and any jury would side with you) until he had wrangled out a confession of every niggling detail that he had no right to know – Bo added, "For keeps, Luke."

Oh, Sweet Tilly stopped bucking right then and shot forward like she meant it. As though she'd had no particular concerns as pertained to keeping the boys safe from a revenuer, but now that Bo had revealed his plans to leave town this thing was about to get interesting, and she reckoned she might as well give them enough time and space to fight it out. Their moonshine runner took after Daisy – content to be placid and pretty, unless there was some good gossip to be had.

But old Andy Roach, he didn't seem too intimidated by the way Tilly marred the pavement with heavy black streaks in her hurry to leave him behind. Seemed like the smoke had cleared and the revenuer's headlights were bearing down on their bumper again.

Tilly swung a hard left, and as his body got crammed up against the door, Bo heard the snort.

"When's the baby due?"

"Luke!" Bump as wheels spun off the pavement, and Bo's head just about rammed the roof. Which he wasn't thrilled about, but then again, he had more pressing complaints. "I ain't been with her that long."

Another snort as the wheel got cranked a hard right this time, leading them down an old deer path. At least that was what it gave all appearances of being, and apparently they had their daddies to thank for that little bit of deception. Family lore had Luke's father and his being two of the more clever moonshine haulers of their generation.

"It might take nine months for the baby to get born," was Luke, reiterating that little lesson on birds and bees that he'd first imparted some ten years back. "But they don't take that long to get themselves started."

"You would know," got him a dirty glare when Luke really should have been paying attention to the trail in front of him or the trees crowding in on either side, or maybe just the pursuing car that was showing no fear in following them right down into the darkness of Black Hollow.

His cousin never had much cared for the rumors that chased him through town and back out to the farm, the ones that got into Jesse's ears as easy as anyone else's, about how some of those kids in the orphanage had bright blue eyes that could only have come from one place.

"They ain't," got asserted at him once again, "mine."

"And Jill ain't got no baby in her belly. Watch that," tree, he might have said if he hadn't been so busy convulsively throwing his arm across his eyes and ducking. But there was no crash or bang, just bumps and Tilly's engine whining against the abuse. Low gear and loose dirt and, "Dang it!" low-hanging branches. "You ain't got to kill me."

"You can stop hiding," got groused at him from the driver's seat, but of all people, Luke ought to know better. About crazy cousins, fast cars and fool stunts that made perfect sense if you were the one behind the wheel. From over here on the right side of the car they gave every appearance of disaster waiting to happen, and Luke had spent too much time under the dashboard himself to be acting like Bo was a coward for trying to protect his skull from picking up a few dents. "And start figuring out how we get Andy off our tail."

Hindsight, he would admit, was a fine thing. Brought a useless kind of clarity to his current situation to recognize now that he should have held his tongue about Macon until after they'd managed to make this run, or at least dump the revenuer in the drink. Now that he'd gone and spilled the beans and upset the applecart, now that the natural order had reversed itself and Luke was driving, he'd gotten himself stuck with the thinking. Which he'd never much cared for.

"We got any more of them smoke bombs?" he asked. Seemed a reasonable request to him, but apparently Luke didn't think so, sparing him a sour look before turning his attention back to the trail in front of them. After all, there was an intersection ahead where wild hogs were known to cross the trail. Best to keep those glowering eyes facing forward in search of pigs.

"Do I look like I'm in the back seat, Bo? Ain't no way to know what we got unless—"

"I get my lazy butt back there. Right." Sometimes it was best just to agree with Luke, even if he was wrong. Saved time on pointless arguments. And if there was one thing they didn't have an abundance of right now, it was time. If they followed this trail out to its ending they'd find themselves smack in the middle of Route 221, across the Choctaw County line. No place to be with a revenuer – who could call in enforcements in the form of one Sheriff 'Hammerhand' Ragsdale – trying to drive up your tailpipe.

Crawling over the seat wasn't nearly as easy or fun as it used to be when he was a kid, but Luke managed to spare a hand off the steering wheel long enough to grab him by the belt and unceremoniously shove him the rest of the way over. To land face-first into whatever mess had already been stirred up on the floorboards back here.

Something… sticky. Paper. Popsickle wrapper.

"Luke," he complained, even though his cousin hadn't been known to eat anything close to an ice cream product in years. "I can't find nothing back here." Except this—what? A few ticks on the clock and the car went over a dip, allowing the revenuer's headlights to shine directly through the back window for a split second. Sock. That one could well have been Luke's so he threw it up into the front seat with his cousin. "It's a mess."

"Babies are messy, Bo." Dropped in just as casual as you please when they were nothing more than a scared rabbit on the run with a bobcat on their tail.

"I already done told you," a box of matches under his left hand – that at least could be helpful. Chucked it up onto the seat beside him and went back to searching for something that would whistle, bang, or otherwise distract the man on their back door. A full load of 'shine in their trunk, enough to weigh them down, then get them sent to prison for a good five years, and Luke was up there telling him things he already knew. "She ain't pregnant."

"Maybe not," his cousin agreed, and they bumped over something hard enough that Bo's head hit the back of the front seat. A root or stone, and maybe Luke was aiming at them on purpose with some misguided notion of knocking some sense into him. But his older cousin, for all his worldliness, had never loved a girl. As far as Bo knew, that was, and Luke was the sort that could keep a secret like a champ if he was of a mind to. But all his instincts told him that Luke guarded his heart pretty carefully and had never given it away. "But she will be. Won't be long, either." Which would have brought a sardonic smile to his face if he hadn't just felt something round and promising that slipped out from his fingers and rolled under the seat. "Girl like that, fixing up the orphanage before going off to some job in the foster care system in Macon? Wants kids, Bo. Lots of them."

And everyone knew that Bo Duke had no real use for anyone under the age of eighteen.

But he had plans for handling that, plans for how he'd convince her that spending her whole day wiping wet noses and cleaning up stinky messes was enough and she didn't need to come home to the same. Besides, those little foster kids needed her, and having her own wouldn't be right, considering. Because she couldn't work and raise kids both—

"And since you ain't the one with the job," Luke called back to him as his fingers closed around another object (their uncle would have their heads on a platter if he knew what a disaster they'd made of his prized car by using it for courting every bit as much as for delivering). Bottle, empty, could be useful so he kept that – "You'd be the one changing diapers all day." Dang it if he wasn't just plain sick of that Duke-cousin mind-reading trick half the time. Sure, it came in handy enough when they needed to pull the wool over old Rosco's eyes using nothing more than a raised eyebrow between them, but moments like now when Luke could not only follow along with his thought processes but jump ahead and lead them, well, he could do without their brains working in that sort of perfect synchrony.

"I reckon I'll get a job," if he managed to make it out of tonight's little complication with both his life and his freedom, that was. And he'd be doing a whole lot better at it if only Luke would stop slaloming through the trees (or maybe it was boulders or even pigs, though they had to be past that crossing by now).

"Sure you will," Luke contributed from his comfortable perch in the front seat. "Would you hurry up back there?" Yeah, he would. Had himself a fine idea now and all it would take was revealing the contents behind the plastic paneling that lined the seat back here. "Last I knew there wasn't no openings for moonshine runners in Macon." No, he didn't figure there were. And it was an awful shame, too, because he could see turning those unfortunate city cops on their ears if they decided to take out after him. Their whole careers spent driving straight roads with intersections at right angles, and not a one of them would be able to follow Bo Duke as he wound through them at top speed, not when he'd cut his teeth on serpentine mountain switchbacks.

A factory job, maybe. Both Duke boys had some small experience with that – a month here or there at the Hazzard Cotton Mill when the corn wouldn't grow or the liquor wouldn't sell, when times were lean and Daisy's paycheck couldn't stretch out far enough to reach all the corners of their lives – mortgage, electricity, food and gasoline. Hadn't ever been fun, but then they'd always been given the heavy jobs, lifting and toting because they were big, strong farm boys and sod busters besides. The sort that had no long-term prospects, figured to be slow learners and strictly temporary besides, so their brawn was useful, but not their brains.

Or their real skills. Maybe in Macon he'd at least get to drive the forklift.

Of course, a big, strong sod buster like him shouldn't be struggling nearly this much just to pull some lightweight plastic paneling back to get at what was behind it. He'd only done it a hundred or more times before. Just never while the car bumped and jostled around him.

"I reckon I'll manage to find some kind of work, Luke." And finally, his fingertips wormed around the edges, the panel pulling free with a percussive pop. Made his cool cousin's head turn, the intensity of those blue eyes caught in the pursuing beam of Andy Roach's headlights as he tried to figure out what Bo was up to. "You just watch the road," Bo admonished. Dug out a jug of Jesse's finest from where it had been hidden, unsealed the cap. Yeah, what he was doing would mean delivering one open jug amongst the forty-nine sealed ones, and old Silas wouldn't much care for that. There'd be complaining and wheedling, but old Luke up there was a pretty slick horse trader when it came to these things. He'd work it down to a two-dollar deduction off the agreed-to price, and when you held that up against the prison time they'd serve if Andy caught them, well, he figured Jesse'd forgive his little indiscretion. "And anyways, Macon ain't that far away. I'll still come up here and show you how a real 'shine runner drives."

Hindsight again, having its way with him, laughing as the car caromed off to the left under his cousin's wide fingers and just maybe taunting Luke wasn't the wisest choice he could have made under the current circumstances. Not when he was trying to pour moonshine from a wide-mouthed jug into a narrow-necked old beer bottle without anything so useful as a funnel to make it reasonably doable. A splash of Jesse's finest lost to the vinyl of a back seat, and there went another two of Silas's dollars, dribbled away.

"How you going to get back up here?" Luke spat back at him, but at least Tilly was running smooth now. Almost as if she were on blacktop (and he'd better hurry his preparations along). "You ain't," in that barking, Marine Sergeant's voice, the one that couldn't be disobeyed, except when it could. "Taking the General."

Yeah, he knew that. Or he'd halfway figured it out, how the powerful car would get all colicky and queasy if he had to drive city streets on a regular basis. Heck, the engine had taken to sputtering after only a few hours in Atlanta last time they'd taken him there.

Didn't bother answering Luke back on that one – when a man was right he was right, and when a man was done transferring moonshine from one vessel to another (while sparing a bracing sip for himself), it was time to get back into the front seat.

"Where'd that sock get to?" he mumbled when he got there, legs splayed all willy-nilly, but his booty intact.

"I ain't go no idea," his answer came, but Luke's big old hand went pawing around the seat anyway until it found fabric, then tossed it over to Bo. Nasty thing, too, and nothing he had any powerful desire to be hit in the face with. Luckily he had good reflexes.

A few more drops of Jesse's nectar got splattered onto the knees of Bo's jeans (but that was just more moonshine under the bridge) as he doused the sock with his carefully garnered store from the beer bottle. Jammed the cloth into the short neck, kept out as much length as he could while leaving one end stuffed all the way inside to soak up the liquid. Wanted a long fuse.

Wanted, when it came right down to it, to be where Luke was, to let his cousin do what came next. Sticking to the slippery outer skin of a speeding car, lighting explosives and holding onto them far longer than made sense, waiting for the optimal moment to toss them, that was Luke's specialty and he had nerves of steel. Bo, he was much better at keeping the car steady, sailing along at a quick enough clip that the ground somehow evened up beneath the wheels, dips and ruts getting lost to the forward momentum, and he knew he could keep Luke safe no matter what fool stunt he had in mind to pull. Roles like that weren't meant to be reversed (and he wasn't just thinking that because it was his neck that stood a reasonable chance of getting broken).

But old Agent Roach back there was getting impatient, was savoring the taste of victory as he all but drove up through their back window while no doubt calling for backup. They were running out of trail and Route 221 loomed with the threat of Hammerhand—

"Be careful," came from his cousin; a moment of sincerity in the middle of a storm. "I got you covered." I'll hold her steady for you, and more than that, I'd never let you get hurt.

Nothing for it, then, but to climb out the window with a makeshift weapon in his hand. To perform a precision operation, one in which he gave the revenuer behind them a little gift that landed close enough to scare him but not blow him to bits, because Jesse would tan their hides all the way to Yankee country and back again if anyone got hurt. Which meant no approximations or left-hand lobbing; to properly aim, he'd have to get a good portion of his body on the outside of the car. Handed the matches to Luke for safekeeping with no clear thought other than that he wanted one free hand to grasp the window frame as he climbed out far enough to crouch on the sill. Got his balance there then looked back to retrieve what he'd need. Saw his cousin opening the match box one-handed, then selecting a stick without his eyes ever leaving the path in front of them. Hiss of flame as he cracked the top with his thumbnail, then held it out. More silent words in that gesture – about how Bo could keep holding onto the car with his left hand, if only he'd put his makeshift wick into the flame Luke was offering. Two minds wrapped up together in one thought, one plan.

Took more time than he wanted to get the sock to catch (definitely Luke's then, too much time spent in contact with that contrary body of his cousin's, soaking up negativity along with sweat and refusing to do what would be most useful – just because) but eventually it began to smolder, then burn with a thick, black smoke.

Had to situate himself, to let one foot drop down to the stability of the passenger seat while the rest of him stood taller, up into the cool night air where the branches hung low, and he never had liked riding on the outside of a car half as much as Luke did. (I got you covered – Luke said it and Bo never doubted it was true.) Held onto his makeshift bomb as long as he could stand to, then let loose. Aimed it just above the ornament on the boxy hood of the Oldsmobile behind them, then turned around and slid back into the passenger seat in record time. Bang from behind before he could turn his head around – missed the white-hot explosion, but saw the headlights swing wildly, heard the crunch as good old Agent Roach got up close and personal with a tree. Felt a bump from Luke's right hand as it knocked against his arm, asking for a congratulatory shake before it had to return to the steering wheel. Thud as the trail ended in the asphalt of Route 221, and then there was the vertigo of a bootlegger's turn to head back the way they'd come.

"She ain't all that smart, Bo." Jill, apparently, and the Duke boys were going back over old ground in more ways than one. "And she ain't got no loyalty. She said she was here to help out the orphanage, but she's cutting and running the first chance she gets." Pause in Luke's meticulous listing of all of the poor girl's faults as they retraced their steps to pass Agent Roach's disabled car. The man was standing at his own bumper, watching steam rise from the hole in his radiator, shaking his head and hollering something at the passing moonshine runner. Head tipped laughter from Luke, and then it started up again. "You follow her off to Macon this year and you could be finding yourself in New York the next time she decides to take off."

Over Big Bend Ridge and down through Possum Hollow, across the wilds of the Cherokee Forest the argument chased them. All the way up to the delivery point where Luke slid him sideways glares as he talked Silas into the notion that the open bottle of 'shine was so the wares could be sampled, halfway had the man believing that the Dukes had always operated that way. Took the payoff, not even a dollar short of the original agreement, then picked up the argument with Bo right where it had left off as they headed back down to Hazzard. Still going strong when they got home to find Jesse sitting on the porch waiting for them – or maybe it was trouble that the old man could smell in the air.


Circles, they'd gone around in enough of them over the course of their lives. Racing laps were preferred, gaining ground towards winning bragging rights and a trophy with each turn, but they'd done enough of this other kind, too. Pointless, just going over places they'd already been because there was no place else to go.

Late-season bumblebees and slow-moving dragonflies dancing lazily at their feet, no ability to remember last week's cold snap, no concern or thought about the fact that their little lives had just about run their course. Bugs didn't plant or harvest, didn't make or deliver anything more potent than honey, didn't run afoul of lawmen or the pellet-filled shotguns belonging to daddies of teenaged girls, and they never, ever spent the afternoon walking in loops around a lake, trying to figure out what to say to heartbroken cousins.

"She was too skinny, anyways." Even the bees didn't like that one, sending a large emissary to buzz close to his left ear.

"Shut up, Luke," Bo mumbled. Again, really, because he'd been saying that to every one of Luke's attempts to make him feel better. But he stayed close, stayed warm where their shoulders bumped as they walked. Stayed focused on the grass beneath them and the foolish insects that lacked the sense to realize that Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

Jesse had not, as anyone with half a brain would have expected, sided with Luke in last night's argument. Equal dark-eyed glares had been leveled at both of them. For fighting, for leaving a revenuer locked in an embrace with a tree without calling in a wrecker to help him, for spilled moonshine and shady negotiations, for anything at all. But not for Bo getting the fool notion in his head to follow off after a girl, not that. Because when it came time for Bo to confess to what they were squabbling about, the old man had gotten a wistful look in his eye, then calmly sat them down. In the kitchen, where civility reigned, because once upon a time, their Aunt Lavinia had insisted on it. Nothing but perfect manners at her table, even if the rest of the house had been a cacophony of disputes. The living room, for example, was a comfortable place that invited thumbed noses and kicked shins – accidentally, of course – in the process of settling into the easy chair or couch. The straight-backed, hard-bottomed kitchen chairs made a man sit up properly and face his foolish deeds.

"Do you love her?" their sage old uncle had asked, all dreamy-eyed with hope. As if it might be his fondest dream for the blonde fool in front of them to fall over himself with giddiness over a girl. Like love mattered when Bo was talking about leaving home.

"I reckon," the idiot had answered, shifting in his chair, a twitch across his cheek, eyebrows down low and tight.

"You reckon?" Utter incredulity on Luke's part. "Bo—" and an old man bear-paw had gripped his forearm, hard. Hush.

"There ain't nothing quite as nice as love." Stars twinkling in his old man eyes, and their uncle had been every bit as big a fool as Bo if he believed—"You got a ring?"

Oh, the lost look Bo's face had worn then: slack-jawed surprise, no words.

That same hand that had been squeezing Luke into silence moved to pat Bo on the shoulder then. "Don't you worry, boy. I've got just the thing." On his feet and out of the kitchen before Bo's open mouth could even get itself closed – for such a big man, their uncle could move deceptively quickly. Revenuers never expected it, either.

"Luke," Bo had managed, voice filled with dread, those deep blue eyes just begging – help me.

"Here you go," and their uncle had come back, face just about cracked open in smiling pride at his sweet little boy, all grown up. "It's the one I gave your Aunt Lavinia when we wasn't a whole lot older than you is now, Bo." Gold glittering as Jesse had held it up and admired it – one last time – in the yellow light of their dim kitchen. "I always figured on giving it to Daisy to pass on to her children," because, as the old man had made clear only days ago, their female cousin was the only hope for the family line. Bo and Luke were fine as brute strength and tireless workers, not to mention delivery boys, but when it came to respectable things like marriage and children, Daisy was the one to place your bets on. "But, here you go." The ring, with its tiny chip of a diamond, had been laid into Bo's hand, which Jesse had proceeded to hold onto with both of his own. Those might or might not have been tears at the corners of his eyes. "Since you've got yourself a nice girl to spend your life with—Oh," had been a fresh inspiration, yet one more happy thought for an already beaming man, "you have to bring her by for dinner before you go. And if you saw fit to put this on her finger right here in this house, well it would be—"

"Jesse." Wretched, that was the way his cousin had sounded. "I—" No more words, but his eyes stayed fixed on Luke. You're the smart one. Get me out of this.

This, which was either a sweetly excited old man that was about to get his heart broken, or a fine, fine acting job. And his boys would never know which, because Jesse could shuck and jive the President of the United States into creating a Department of Moonshine Distillers and granting them full power to make their wares, if he had ever wanted to.

"Uncle Jesse," Luke had butted in. Because Bo over there had been drowning in the hopes and dreams of the man who had raised him. And it was, as always, Luke's job to offer him a branch to grab onto and pull himself to shore. "He wasn't really planning—"

"You didn't," and it had all changed on a dime right then and there. Where everything had been soft and dreamy, it all turned rough, hard, firm and there would be no wiggling past the law their uncle was about to lay down. "Think you was going to go down there and live with her without marrying her first, did you?"

It was, Luke would have to admit, a decidedly direct route to convincing Bo that following off after Jill was a fool's errand. Worked perfectly, had Bo babbling and dismissing any notion of ever wanting to leave Hazzard. Had the boy backtracking all the way to last week, when he was ready to let Jill go, then further back than that. All the way to childhood, when he'd been too cute (and too deeply sorrowful) to ever get a full and proper whipping. Back into the womb of his mother, if he could resurrect her and find a way to climb in there.

And now they were trudging circles in the grass of nowhere special, just far enough from home to keep their kin from stumbling onto them. Walking off the way Bo had to say goodbye to the girl, waiting until he could scrape his emotions together well enough to face the old routine at the farm. Maybe, Luke wasn't sure. This was the kind of thing that always left him feeling clumsy and stupid with the recognition that he could outsmart the sheriff and county commissioner, but he didn't have the first idea how to handle a broken-hearted cousin.

He'd never been much good at tears. He just wanted them to stop, and when they were kids that had always meant depositing Bo in Aunt Lavinia's arms. Even that time when they'd been out in the old Potter's fields and his bumbling little kid of a cousin had stepped on a bee's nest, getting himself stung more times than either of their young brains could count, Luke's only thought had been about guiding the boy home. Hand on the back of his neck, just fingertips really, because he hadn't been entirely sure that there were no welts there. Endless walk and Bo hadn't stopped screaming the whole way as Luke had steered him around holes and tree roots that his eyes were too watery to see. Finally found their aunt on the back porch, where she had been beating the rugs, and she'd taken over from there. She told him he'd done a good job, but he didn't believe her. All he'd managed was to get the boy home; it was her that had soothed him.

"She—" ain't worth getting this upset over, was what he wanted to say, but he'd tried that one already.

"Just—" Bo's hand shoved at his hair where the long summer days in the fields had bleached it to nearly white. Pushed it back away from his eyes, and away went any pretense of being aloof, hardened, above feeling pain. There he was, just a little kid without a mother's arms to hold him, and Luke—Luke didn't have the first idea how to make up for all the things his cousin would never have. "Stop. I already know didn't like her none. You never did."

And that part was not entirely true. Back in those schoolyard days of their sepia-tinted youth, when little boys drew circles in the dust for marbles while little girls traced out squares for hopscotch, little Jilly Rae had been willing to march right across those lines. She never got too upset about dirty knees or broken nails, the ends of her hair had been chewed on and she had a sassy mouth, but she was okay. She could hit a line drive and she wasn't afraid to slide into a base head first, and Luke had picked her for his team more than once.

But he didn't suppose any of that held water against the way his cousin's head dipped low, sorrowing over a two-week fling with the girl. No amount of admitting that she wasn't so terrible would make Bo smile and shrug off his blues.

"Come on," Luke said.

"What?" the cranky man to his left complained, but he followed along anyway. Away from the pond, the listless insects, away from the trail where they were about to be stumbled on by old Nels Anderson and his bird-spying binoculars anyway, up to the patch of dirt off the side of the road. To the General, where he guided Bo to the driver's side, because that was where Luke had always known how to comfort him. To point out at the road and let Bo's foot press down against the accelerator as hard and as long as it needed to until girls were just blurs, already in the past before they could even be fallen for, before they could become broken hearts.