For the next four days, the question was never far from Danny’s mind. He knew he shouldn’t do it – but he knew goddamn well he was going to do it unless he talked himself out of it. He was that goddamn lonely.

For some unknown reason, possibly something like a dentist appointment, Keyhole rolled out early on Thursday, and they stormed right along. About four, Josh called the store to announce that Keyhole was running way early, and Anson was ready to roll early if he was. Danny put the "Out On Service Call" sign in the door; at five, an hour ahead of schedule, he and Anson were already heading north on Beepit. Anson was pushing it too, and several things went well. So a little to their surprise, when three AM came they had just finished tying up for the night in Spearfish Lake, a good two hours before they normally got in. That meant that Danny could actually have something resembling a good night’s sleep and still get into the store early to relieve his dad, who could then head on out to the Club for the weekend.

Gil was obviously surprised to see him come in about 10:30, looking reasonably chipper and carrying a takeout coffee from Rick’s – which meant he could get out of there. "You got any plans for the weekend?" he asked casually as he gathered up a few things.

"Not really," Danny admitted. "Get a few miles on, catch up on my sleep. Anything hanging?"

"No service calls at this point," his father told him. "There’s an ad for the Record-Herald in the folder on the desk if Debbie should come wandering in. Really, kind of slow for a Friday."

In minutes, his father was gone, heading for the Club. He was getting some good time in out there this summer, Danny thought, some real relaxation and winding down. They seemed to be getting the message that he wasn’t going to be joining them this summer, too; there hadn’t even been a veiled invitation to drop out for dinner or something.

It was quiet around the store. Danny could think of a few minor chores to do, but at the moment, he thought he could avoid them for a bit yet. He got the computer online, checked the world news – not a lot happening – and the weekend weather, which looked decent, no major storms or anything, not too hot. On a whim, he checked the weather for Anchorage – this was the weekend that Shelly was getting married, and he knew that in a couple hours a number of his friends were going to be getting on a Cessna Citation out at the airport and heading for Alaska. The weather looked promising there, too.

It would be nice to be on that flight, but he couldn’t even think about being jealous. He just wasn’t part of Shelly’s circle of friends and that was that. Maybe he could get to Alaska sometime to check it out, probably no time soon. No, he had to face up to the fact that he was going to have a quiet, uninteresting weekend alone in Spearfish Lake. Most of it was probably going to be spent agonizing over whether to even call Amy when she showed up in a couple weeks, and possibly open the gate to heading down that road. Maybe it was better to not take the first step . . .

He heard the doorbell ring and glanced up to see Debbie Elkstalker walk in, carrying her briefcase, wearing a nice yellow summer dress with black trim, business-like, not real short. She had on a beadwork choker, obviously Indian inspired. It struck Danny he’d always seen her wearing some sort of Indian jewelry or something that touched on it, as if her face didn’t already say "Indian." Not a bad looking woman, he thought, not for the first time. "Well, hello stranger," he smiled.

"Well, hi stranger yourself," she laughed. "Guess I’ve missed you the last two or three weeks. You’ve been out railroading?"

"That or sleeping it off," he said. "That’s what happens when you work weird hours."

"I can understand," she nodded, and turned slightly businesslike. "Your dad already split for the Club, I take it?"

"Yeah, you missed him by about half an hour."

"You know," she shook her head and leaned casually onto the counter, "I’ve known your dad and mom for a lot of years but I’ve never quite been able to understand why they do that. It must be my Indian heritage, or something."

"It’s probably not the Indian heritage," Danny said, leaning back in his chair a little. He’d been defensive about the Club most of his life, but he’d reached the point in his life where he could be a little objective about it, too. "I think it’s safe to say that most people don’t understand it. To tell you the truth, I don’t understand it deep down inside. I just grew up with it, so it’s normal to me. It’s kind of like you grew up as an Indian. There it is, what can you say?"

"Do you go out there much?" she asked, just a little curious. While the Evachevskis and a couple other families around town were well known as Club members, it was something not often talked about in Spearfish Lake anymore.

"Not if I can help it," he told her. "So far this year, I’ve been able to help it, and I plan on keeping it that way."

"It doesn’t interest you that much?" she asked with a smile.

"Not really," he shrugged. He was sure that she knew a lot about him, at least in general terms, from having worked with his mother for years. The lunchtime bull sessions in the back room of theRecord-Herald were legendary, and he had to be the subject of at least a few of them, so there was no point in pulling any punches. "First off, my ex’s parents are out there, and I really don’t want to see them. Beyond that, I don’t play volleyball anymore. Mike tried to get me into the city league, but we went out to practice and every time I walked out onto the sand I remembered my ex and got pissed all over again." He realized his rant was getting a little heavy, so decided to lighten it up. "I left my golf clubs in Florida. I’m a lousy golfer anyway, and you can go through twenty bucks worth of golf balls in nine holes out there. Beyond that, I’ve seen enough old and naked fat people to last me ten lifetimes. And," he added with a grin, "don’t you dare breathe a word of what I just said to my folks or I’ll hunt you down if I have to chase you to the four corners of the earth."

"Now that," she laughed, "I can understand."

"It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that my tastes have changed a little as I’ve grown up," he said honestly. "My brother’s and sisters’ have, too."

"How’d your family get involved in this?" she asked. "I guess I never asked your mother."

"Pretty simple," Danny said, feeling like being expansive and telling a story for once. As far as he knew Debbie had a boyfriend or something, but that didn’t keep her from being a fairly pretty woman who was pleasant to talk to. He could stand the practice, if nothing else. "My dad caught it from my mother, it went with the territory when he married her almost forty years ago. My mom caught it from her mother, and her mother caught it from her father, who caught it in Germany sometime back after World War I. I never met him, he died years before I was born, but all the stories I’ve ever heard are that he was a real nutcase. In any case, it doesn’t always pass along true. There were four kids in my mom’s family, six if you count her half brother and half sister. They were all brought up out there to one extent or other, but Mom is the only one of them who’s still active."

"I guess I knew that," she nodded. "But I’ve never heard it said quite like that."

"Oh, that’s the easy part to understand," Danny laughed, an interesting thought coming to his mind and his lips almost at the same time. "Suppose, for instance, you grew up in a family with an obsession for, oh, collecting pink teddy bears, just to choose something totally absurd. Now, I don’t mean brown ones or blue ones or whatever, just pink, OK? Not only did your parents have it, but your grandparents, some of their parents, too. I mean, somewhere along in there, don’t you think someone is going to want to rebel, and branch out to do something different? Like, say, green teddy bears?"

It probably wasn’t that good a joke but it hit her just right, and she broke out laughing. "You know," she smiled once she settled down, "there’s a lot more truth about that than you think. Sometimes it’s pretty hard to break away from what you grew up with to do something different."

"Sometimes it’s hard to break away from the person you’ve been and do the right thing," he nodded, his thoughts going deeper than his words – in one way or another, it had been his main concern over the last six months.

"Oh spirits, is that ever true," she shook her head. "I can give lectures on that. In fact, I have given them. It’s something I struggle with continually."

"Debbie?" he said quietly, realizing that a pleasant light conversation had just dropped off into an unknown deep hole.

"Danny," she said as she stood up from the counter and started to come around behind to sit in the chair beside the desk. "What do you know about me?"

"Not much," he said. "I know you’re bright, intelligent and personable, you’re from Three Pines, you’ve been at the Record-Herald for several years, and everyone there thinks highly of you. I also know you have a pretty strong interest in your Indian heritage, from what I’ve been told. And really, that’s about it."

"That’s correct as far as it goes," she told him. "But it doesn’t go very far. Danny, most people may consider your folks a little weird, but they’re good people, and respected in the community. Danny, I’m as close to as full-blooded a Shakahatche as anyone is any more. A little French fur trader may have slipped in there way back when, but it wouldn’t be much and no one knows for sure. You know the stories about drunken Indians?"

"Yeah, I’ve heard some," he replied quietly.

"They’re not stories, Danny. I grew up on the reservation before they had the casino, and my family was always piss drunk and piss poor because of it. My parents are both dead. My father wrapped his pickup around a tree one night, driving with a hell of a load on. My mother died from a heart condition, brought on by booze and too many carbohydrates, along with the fact that she weighed well over 300 pounds and didn’t bother to take advantage of the medical help there was available. Danny, among other things, I consider myself to be a potential alcoholic. I don’t drink anymore, but I used to enough to know it. I know I have the genetic predisposition for it, it’s not just an example, and I learned that I didn’t want to have a life like that. That’s why I don’t live at Three Pines, so I don’t have to be around it much, but I can still take advantage of some of the other benefits of being part of the tribe."

"It’s got to take a pretty firm decision to turn away from that," he said thoughtfully. "And yes, I can see how it would be a continual struggle."

"It was very hard, for quite a long time," she said. "I won’t bore you with the details, but they’re nothing I keep secret, your mother knows a lot of it. I struggled for years to deal with that, with a couple other issues, like I also know I have the genetic predisposition to be overweight, which is why I’m basically on a permanent diet. I was slipping pretty badly a few years ago, until I was inspired to turn to my own heritage for the strength to fight it."

"You’re not referring to the more recent alcohol-saddened heritage?" he frowned.

"No," she smiled. "My heritage before the white man’s milk came along to spoil it. There’s a strength there, a strength of the spirits of the ages, the wisdom of time. A lot of it has been lost, but there are some people struggling to preserve what remains. Danny, I’ve given you an extremely simple answer that skips over a lot of stuff, but that’s where I’ve found the strength."

"That’s interesting," he smiled. "I’d be interested in knowing more about that."

"Oh, I can bore most people to tears with it," she laughed. "I bored everybody thoroughly with it down at the Record-Herald, so I don’t even talk about it there much anymore. It’s not an easy thing to understand if you’re not an Indian, I’ve learned that. Hell, most Indians don’t begin to understand it anymore, either. I know this Indian didn’t five years ago."

"This is sort of a Ghost Dancing thing, right?"

Her eyebrows shot up. "How’d you know about that?"

"Read about it somewhere," he replied. "Debbie, I know you’ve got to know a lot about me from knowing my mother for so long, but you may not know that I’m a fairly omnivorous reader. No discipline, I read what happens to catch my interest, and the Lakota caught it a few years ago for a book or two. So this is sort of Ghost Dancing revisited?"

"No, nothing like that. Well, a little bit, maybe," she said, relaxing a little. "It ties in with the objectives of the Ghost Dance, to reach out and touch the culture before the white man, but the spirits can only guide us, not do the work for us. Really, it’s just reaching out to touch our own heritage and beliefs. As far as that goes, the Ghost Dance was mostly a Lakota thing, so we wouldn’t have had much to do with it. After all," she laughed, "it was the Shakahatche and the Chippewa and the Ojibwa that ran their sorry asses out of the heaven of the forests and onto the barren plains in the first place, anyway."

"I don’t remember reading that," he grinned.

"So, the Lakota have had more books written about them than we have," she snorted. "But it’s not surprising that you haven’t read much about it since I don’t even know of much in print about it." She shook her head and got serious again. "The history of The People is just not well recorded, and a lot of it is oral, passed down from generation to generation, mostly by women, often old women. Danny, have you heard the word ‘shaman’ used to describe me?"

"I have," he admitted. "I’m not sure what that means; I guess ‘priestess’ or something."

"It’s not a Shakahatche word and it doesn’t quite mean that, but it has spiritual overtones," she said. "To be crude, most people would think ‘medicine woman.’ In a sense, I don’t mind being described that way since people sort of understand that much, even though it’s not very true. The word The People use is ‘katara,’ and there’s no one English word that translates it very well. ‘Sage’ actually comes pretty close, though, but historian, advisor, rememberer, counselor, mystic, storyteller, mage and, yes, priestess also hit on it a little. I’m pretty much a student as a katara, but a katara is a student until the day they die."

"What kind of things does a katara study?" he asked, getting genuinely interested.

"Everything," she smiled. "Everything to do with The People and our traditions. Some of it is stories, and ‘parable’ or ‘memory aid’ is a good word to describe some of them. Some of us are trying to write down those stories, and many of them have never been recorded in English, so as much as possible we’re trying to do it in both English and Shakahatche. That’s kind of interesting since only in recent years has anyone been able to come up with a written version of the language of our people, and it’s still pretty imperfect."

"Goes to show how much I know," he shrugged. "I didn’t even know there was a separate tribal language."

"There only just barely is, anymore," she said sadly. "There are only thirty-seven people left in the world who speak it. I’m just barely fluent in it, and I’ve only learned what I know in the last three years. There are a few loose words that float around the reservation, but as a kid I rarely heard it spoken, and didn’t learn much besides those few words. And, with the exception of two kids whose parents are trying to bring them up bilingually, I’m the youngest. Some of the speakers are in their eighties, and most of us are women. Virtually all of us are kataras."

"Debbie, I’m not only fascinated, I’m awed," Danny said. "I can’t find a word to describe the courage it takes to hang on with your fingernails and spit into the wind of change like that."

"It’s not courage, it’s desperation," she said sadly. "The simple fact is that if the handful of us don’t do it, it dies forever. There’s no one else, and it can’t be revived once it’s gone."

"I’ll stick with courage," he said. "It’d be awful easy to say the hell with it, it’s a lost cause."

"It would be easy," she agreed. "Most of The People have done exactly that. In fact, we kataras are not necessarily held in high regard, we’re often seen as conservative stick in the muds who are trying to hold onto a past that’s gone."

"But you realize the value of doing it," he said. God, there was a lot to this woman that he’d never dreamed.

"Danny, it’s worked for me," she said. "It’s probably the reason I’m not sitting in a shack on the reservation, drawing welfare, drunk on my ass, weighing 300 pounds and getting the shit kicked out of me by my husband every day whether I need it or not. Is it a fair trade, even though it’s meant I’ve gotten along without a man for the last few years? As far as I’m concerned, you damn well bet it is."

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