Al leaned back in the big wooden lawn chair out in back of Buddha's house, watching Randy stack wood in the fire pit in the failing light. He was stacking it up pretty high; it was going to be hard to get a stack that big going, but Randy was a big boy; he'd let him figure it out.

Damn, it was good to be here, good to be away from the Canyon for a while just to be reminded of how truly wonderful it is. One of the byproducts of discovering that Crystal was his daughter was the rediscovery of Buddha. He'd lost track of him decades ago. Buddha had changed a lot, but hell, who hasn't, he thought. I've sure changed. Still can surf well enough, despite the bum knee, but it's hell not being 16 again when you could really do all that stuff.

He glanced over at Karin. He wouldn't have been here, found Buddha again, if she hadn't come out of the mists of time for him. Talk about a string of miracles! It had been a year ago last fall since they'd rediscovered each other. Now her divorce was final, but they'd made up their minds months ago that they'd wait to get married until they could do it at the water pocket there above Sapphire, and that would have to wait till they could get all the pieces in place. When they were down here last year, Buddha had agreed to be the best man and to bring Giselle along, too. Buddha hadn't wanted to get away until the flat weather of late spring, early summer. No big deal. He'd waited over twenty-five years for Karin, what were another few months? He sure looked forward to showing Buddha the Canyon -- he loved the Canyon the way Buddha loved the sea.

Karin kept surprising him, too. Back a year and a half ago he'd figured her for maybe a camp cook on the trips, an occasional helper, but damned last year if she didn't show signs of turning into a boatman too. She proved to have a hell of an eye in the rapids, just like Crystal. Didn't have the stamina for a long pull on the flats, but she was working at it. He should have known; when they'd come down here last year she'd never been on a surfboard, and he'd had her figured for sitting on the beach and watching. But no, she was game as all hell. Buddha and Giselle and Crystal had worked with her. She fell in a lot at first but soon she started to get it; now she was pretty good and probably enjoyed it more than anyone. Al understood what she had been trying to do, even if she didn't -- she was trying to make up for some of what she'd missed when she'd been married.

Strange how it worked out. He and Louise had never had any children but had been happy with each other. When she died it put a big hole in his life. Then Karin came along, and now all of a sudden he had a family after all, what with Crystal, Karin's son, Jon, and his wife, Tanisha. Now there was a couple for you. He'd never seen kids quite in love like that. They worked at the same job together and just could not stand to be apart from each other. They might go weeks before being separated for a couple of hours. They'd been together for going on four years, and Al had taken newlyweds down the Canyon who weren't in love as much as those two were.

He was woolgathering and he knew it, but it was fun. Fun to just be here and relax with the gang. He glanced over at Crystal, who was jabbering with Myleigh and Scooter, and shook his head. Back at the water pocket that afternoon when Karin told him Crystal was his daughter, she'd said, "It's a pity there are no large mirrors in the Canyon, but when we get out go find one and stand next to each other. The resemblance is astounding." They did, and so it was. Crystal was a couple inches shorter, but had the same big, muscular build, the same nose, the same sandy hair -- although, to be honest, his was now more than a little speckled with gray. But there hadn't been any question by then anyway; once the statement had been made it had been pretty obvious.

Then there was Scooter. Al had come to like Scooter, and so had everyone else. The last two off seasons, she and Crystal and sometimes Michelle had surfed and sailed and skied and basically blew the money they'd made all the summer before by having fun. Nice to do that when you're a kid, not that Scooter was exactly a kid anymore; she was turning thirty this year. She'd only been with Canyon Tours for two years, but she'd been guiding on eastern rivers for ten years before that, and was in fact the second most experienced boatman Canyon Tours had after Al himself. She'd be taking over a crew as trip leader this summer. With her hair sun-bleached to a dirty blonde she was sort of a smaller, older, coarser version of Crystal. She liked to set the tone for a trip by being seen smoking a cigar when the tour bus arrived, as opposed to Michelle . . . oh, well. He had a bunch of competent individuals working for him, and that was how he liked it, even if they got a little assertively individual.

He looked over at Randy; he'd built up a pretty good stack of big logs, but it was fairly open. It would burn pretty good if he could get it burning at all. He couldn't help himself any longer. "Randy, just how the hell do you plan on getting that going?"

"No problem," Randy said, walking over to a lawn chair on the far side of the fire pit. "You just have to know how to do it. Just a little trick Nicole learned at Girl Scout camp," he said as he pulled a white pint bottle out of a duffel bag. He went back over to the fire, and started pouring it carefully so the contents reached well down into the heart of the stack.

"Oh, a little Girl Scout water, huh?" Al laughed.

"Yep," Randy said, lighting a match on the block of the fire pit. He tossed the match on the pile; there was a nearly inaudible "whoof!" All of a sudden there was fire throughout the pile.

"That's not gas," Al commented.

"No, stove alcohol," Randy said. "Had an extra bottle, and I can't take it home on the plane. Works better than gas since it doesn't just explode on you. It takes it a while to burn and gives the wood longer to get going."

"Hmmm," Al said. "Have to remember that. You can teach an old dog new tricks." They didn't often have fires in the Canyon, only driftwood fires in early spring and late fall since they weren't allowed in the summer. That was part of the reason they were doing the wedding trip so early -- they could have fires. "You like those alcohol stoves, huh?"

"Beats the hell out of listening to a gas stove roaring," Randy said. "Or, a propane blaster, for that matter."

"Yeah they are kind of loud," Al admitted. "But we have to do a lot of cooking down there. I'm looking forward to having you and Nicole down there with us next spring."

"Looking forward to it," Randy grinned. "I wish we didn't have to go tomorrow, but Nicole has to be back in the classroom Tuesday."

"Nicole," Karin spoke up, "That makes me wonder. Do you two consider today your anniversary, or tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Nicole grinned. "That's what happens when you get married at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve."

"While you're wondering in the back of your head whether the lights are going to go out," Al grinned. Randy and Nicole had figured that the dawn of the new millennium would be an interesting time to get married.

"There were some kerosene lanterns out in the back room just in case," Randy grinned. "We didn't think it was going to happen, but there was no point in not being ready for it in case it did. It makes your anniversary a little hard to forget."

"I've got to ask," Al grinned, "Whether you're going to carry on the tradition you started at the reception."

Nicole blushed, and looked a little uncomfortable. "That was a little different, wasn't it?" she said noncommittally.

"Well, it was an interesting accessory to your wedding dress," Crystal prodded.

Buddha frowned. "I've heard that your reception was a little wild, but I don't think I've heard this story."

Al heard some laughing go around. It had been pretty funny. Well, Buddha and Giselle hadn't been there, and not Trey, either; but everybody else had.

Nicole blushed a little, and said, "Oh, it was just something I brought on myself."

"She won't tell you unless you dig it out of her, Buddha," Myleigh laughed. "Randy had her in handcuffs at their wedding reception."

Giselle looked at the both of them with a strange expression. "He did what?" she asked curiously.

"Oh, hell," Nicole said. "It's a long story, and the only way I can tell it is tell all of it. Back there for a couple years before Randy and I got married we just didn't see a lot of each other. I mean, we got together on the weekends once in a while when I was in school, and we went to Florida for a few days a couple of times. But when I was out of school, it seemed like I was in Mosquito Valley or out at OLTA or something, and us getting together kind of got pushed to the side."

"One time she went through Spearfish Lake like it was a NASCAR pit stop," Randy explained. "Four tires, a full load of fuel, change the crap in the trunk and on her way in fifteen seconds. I was the jack man on that one."

"It wasn't quite that bad," Nicole protested. "But I was on my way from OLTA to Mosquito Valley and I was running late, so I was in town less than an hour. Anyway, when I got back from Mosquito Valley a couple months later, Jackpine and I had already agreed that we were going to do the Appalachian Trail the next summer. Randy had already known that it was a possibility, and I think he was more disappointed than he let on that it came off."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Randy explained. "She was getting to go do fun stuff like OLTA and the AT, while I was working twelve and sixteen hours a day, pushing on rush projects all summer, so yeah, I was a little jealous."

"He kept it covered up pretty well," Nicole went on. "But, the next time he saw me, he told me that he was going to stop off at the hardware store and get some chain and padlocks, because he was going to make darn sure I was going to be around Spearfish Lake for a while after I did the AT. It was sort of a joke between us there for over a year, it helped relieve the tension a little. I think he threatened to chain me down to keep me in town six or eight times -- all good natured, of course."

"She kept up her part of it, too," Randy laughed. "She'd say she was tempted to go do something after the AT, but if she did, she knew I'd make a trip to the hardware store."

"Anyway, about a month before we got married, I was down at the Women's Fitness Center," Nicole continued. "And, I happened to mention the story to this friend, Carole Carter, and we got laughing about it. I don't know what I was thinking but for some strange reason, I said I ought to give Randy a pair of handcuffs at the wedding reception, just as a gag gift. I was just joking, you know? But, I said I didn't know where I'd find any and let it go at that. So, about a week later she stopped by my folks' house and gave me this box all wrapped up like a gift, and tells me it's my gag gift to Randy. I didn't think much about it -- I'd half forgotten what she and I had talked about. So, we're at the reception, just about to cut the cake, when Mom handed me the box, and said she didn't know what was in it either. So, I gave it to Randy and said, 'Here's a special wedding gift from me to you.'"

Randy shook his head, laughed, and picked up the story. "I unwrapped it and here's this pair of Belgian Soleil handcuffs, still in the wrapper. I said to Nicole, 'Hey, you're really serious about me keeping you around, aren't you?'"

Nicole shook her head. "He was standing there with the handcuffs in his hand and a stupid expression on his face, so I told the crowd about how he'd threatened to chain me up to keep me in Spearfish Lake."

"Some joker in the crowd said, 'Put 'em on her!'" Randy continued. "I'm pretty sure it was some Colorado River raft guide. A bunch of other people joined in, so I figured what the heck. I handcuffed her right there."

"Oh, my word!" Giselle laughed. "I'd have liked to see that."

"It was a little goofy," Nicole shook her head. "But everything was a little goofy anyway. By the time this happened it was about two in the morning. It was a little wild and we'd all had some punch. This was at the Methodist church, and it was supposed to have been dry, but it turned out that a couple of Grand Canyon raft guides who will go nameless had spiked the punch with a quart or two of Everclear."

"Everclear?" Trey frowned. "What's that?"

"190-proof grain alcohol," Randy laughed. "It's pretty tasteless, but really powerful. You don't find it in decent liquor stores; you have to go down on skid row some place. It's the rummy's delight."

"Just as a point of information, you can find it in liquor stores around Indian reservations," Al commented with a glint in his eye. He hadn't actually been involved, but he knew who was. Well, a little involved; he was the one who had suggested Everclear instead of vodka. "You deserved it, for having your wedding reception in a Methodist Church on New Year's night, of all times. I guess it did make things a little loose."

"More than a little," Nicole replied dryly. "I should have known better, but my mother was involved in that decision. So anyway, we did the rest of the wedding reception with me in handcuffs. It was a big laugh, really kind of fun. We'd already figured that it was going to be too late and we were going to be too loaded to go anywhere, so when we finally got out of there at four in the morning I was still wearing the handcuffs. It was kind of a pain in the butt, but I decided I wasn't going to ask Randy to take them off, just to see how long he'd leave them on me. I figured that they'd come off when we got out to the house -- it was the first night we spent there. But no, when we got there he helped me out of my wedding dress and everything else, but left the cuffs on me. So, I wound up spending my wedding night, what there was left of it, wearing nothing but fifteen ounces of stainless steel."

"How'd he get the dress off you?" Giselle was shaking her head and giggling at the thought.

"No big deal," Randy said. "There's a trick to it, but with the spaghetti straps on Nicole's dress it was easy."

"We slept till about noon. I woke up and I've still got the cuffs on," Nicole continued. "We just basically hung around the house all day, doing, uh, newlywed things. It was kind of exciting, since it had been the first night either of us spent there. But I was sort of curious how long he was going to leave them on me."

"It turned out that we were sort of working at cross purposes," Randy said. "I'd decided that I was just going to leave them on her until she asked me to take them off. I was just curious how long it would take her to ask."

"I wish I'd known that," Nicole shook her head. "I didn't find that out till later. Now, one of the bad deals about the timing on our wedding is that we only had New Year's Day for our honeymoon. I had to go back and teach the next day, so we decided to put our real honeymoon off till spring break. So, when we got up the next morning, I was still wearing the handcuffs and I had to go teach, so finally he had to take them off me."

"You have to admit," Randy laughed, "It did make what there was of our honeymoon even more memorable."

"Oh, it did," Nicole agreed. "You're never going to let me forget it, and neither is anyone else who was there either."

"That still doesn't answer my question," Karin said with a huge grin. "Are you going to carry on the tradition?"

"I have to admit," Randy laughed. "I have given it some consideration. Really, I could stand for some advice. What does anyone else think? Should we do it?"

Nicole looked at him, very suspiciously. "You brought them with you, didn't you?"

"Nicole," Randy grinned expansively. "You're the Girl Scout leader. Isn't the motto of the Girl Scouts 'Be Prepared'?"

"Well, it is very nice to have some traditions in the family," Karin said with an evil grin.

"Oh, good grief," Nicole said, holding out her hands to her husband. "You're all going to make me do it, aren't you? Go ahead, Randy."

"Thought you'd never ask," he said, pulling a pair of shiny handcuffs out of the duffel bag beside his chair, and fastening them on his wife's wrists. "Karin's right. It'll make a good anniversary tradition."

"Randy, you're a lucky man," Buddha laughed. "Most wives in this world get upset if you forget your anniversary. You're going to have Nicole wishing you would."

"You're not going to make me wear these home, are you?" Nicole asked as Randy fastened the second cuff.

"No, I don't think they'd let us on the plane," Randy said. "Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't wear them to the airport."

"Karin, do you see what you've started?" Nicole said, in obvious mock anger, holding the handcuffs up so everyone could see them. "But, I have to admit, I'd rather stay here wearing handcuffs than I would go home. This has been a fun few days, hanging out with everybody."

"Yeah, it's going to be a downer to have to head back to the frozen country," Randy agreed. "Oh well, only three months till the school spring break, and then another month to the Canyon."

"Gonna come back down here for spring break?" Buddha asked.

Randy shrugged. "Don't know yet. If we could get off in early March for break, like we did when we were in college, no problem. It'd sure be fun to spend a few days with Crystal and Michelle and Scooter. That's going to be a ball, but they have to be back in Arizona by the time Nicole gets off for break. She caught it from the school a little to take off in early May for the Canyon trip as it is."

"Maybe another year," Crystal suggested. "Don't know that we're going to do the Bahamas again next year, but maybe. We can't cover the whole place in three weeks. But, maybe down around Cozumel, too. We haven't worked it out yet."

"I'd love to do it," Nicole said, the light from the now-large fire flashing off her handcuffs. "But Randy's right. I'm probably going to have to lay low for a year or two before I ask to take a vacation while school's in session again."

"Three weeks in the Out Islands on a 36 footer," Buddha commented. "Hell, I could be talked into that. Where'd you learn to handle a sailboat like that?"

"When I sailed to Hawaii," Crystal replied. "I mean, I learned about small boat handling and navigation and that before then, and picked up some practical knowledge when I was on that fishing boat in Alaska. In four months to and from Hawaii I learned a chunk about sailing. You know Myleigh, maybe another year we can rig it around so we can do the charter when you're on spring break. Come on along, you'd have a ball."

"I don't know," Myleigh said. "I fear I should be seasick."

"That's what they make patches and pills for," Crystal said. "Besides, the way you handle yourself on a surfboard, you shouldn't have any problems. A sailboat is pretty stable, not rough riding like a fishing boat. And, we're planning on mostly hanging out in harbors like Scooter and Michelle and I did last year."

"It is certainly something to consider," Myleigh said thoughtfully. "Perhaps we might discuss it when we're in the Canyon this spring."

"Sure, no problem," Crystal said. "We can talk about it some next week after Michelle gets here."

Buddha said. "That girl is something else."

"Isn't she, though?" Al grinned. "Somebody had to watch the office. That's why we're heading back in a couple days, so we can relieve her and do tax reports and W-2s and that stuff while the kids are out sailing."

"You still planning on heading out tomorrow, Trey?" Buddha asked.

"I don't know," Trey said. "I want to spend some time with my folks, and I've got a little leeway. If I get up tomorrow and the surf is up pretty good I might just squeeze out another day here, but I've got to be on the road pretty soon."

Al glanced over at Trey. He'd been around for a week now. A touch on the quiet side, but polite and good-natured as all get-out. He'd been the outsider, didn't know anybody, didn't know any of the stories that made everybody else friends, but still he'd somehow fit in. He and Randy had sort of become pals. The thing that had really impressed him was when there was work to be done, especially the scut work like dishes, he was right there at the head of the line pitching in. Seemed to be a good worker, a lot more mature than some of the kids he had working for him in the summers. But then, he's a bit older, too. Well, why not? Couldn't hurt to ask. "Trey, you got a job lined up for the summer?"

"I've got a part-time job that goes through the summer," the kid replied. "The hours are kind of lousy for when school's out. I've taken summer classes the past few years, but I've pretty well taken what I can. I've been looking into an internship, though."

"Well, if you're interested," Al said. "Come spend the summer working for me. I can always use swampers, someone dependable to help out with the heavy lifting and stuff."

"I'd be a liar if I said I hadn't been thinking about asking you," Trey said. "It does sound like a hell of an adventure."

"I've gotta be fair," Scooter said, "Even if Al won't be. The pay's not bad, but it's a hell of a lot of work. We live damn rough. You're up before everybody else, do a lot of shit work, and stay up later than everyone else. You get dirty and it's hotter than hell, especially in July and August. Worst of all, it's addictive. It's like no place else on earth. You'd be a fool not to take him up on the offer, Trey."

"Scooter's got a point, Trey," Al said. "Look, it doesn't have to be all summer. If it works out, it works out, if it doesn't, it doesn't."

"Can you wait a week or two?" Trey asked. "Believe me, I want to do it so bad it's not funny after all the stories I've heard out of you the last few days. I'm pretty well committed to the internship if it comes through, but I don't know that it's going to. I should know right after I get back."

"If you made the commitment then you've got to honor it, I guess," Al said. "That says more about you than you might think in my book. Sure, no problem with a week or two. We're not doing anything this time of year, anyway."

"I'll let you know as soon as I find out," Trey replied. "And, really, whichever way it goes, thanks for the offer."

"Good deal," Crystal smiled. "Hope you can come join us."

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