Somehow, the next hour just got away from them. There was no accounting for it; it was just gone, as Danny continued one of the more fascinating discussions he’d ever had with a woman – possibly the most fascinating – the talk with Jennlynn that time around Christmas didn’t even come close!

It was after noon before he finally glanced at the clock on the wall and realized that an hour had been shot in the butt – so she must have been interested, too. "Tell you what," he said, "considering the time, if you’d like, I’ll buy lunch."

She glanced at the clock herself, and shook her head. "Good spirits! Where did the time go?" She let out a sigh. "There’s no catching up now till after lunch hour, so I’ll take you up on it, so long as we can do something light."

"How about if we head over to the sub shop on Lakeshore?" he suggested. "We can just walk down the alley, and they do a pretty good low-fat, low-carb turkey and veggie."

"Works for me," she smiled.

He put up the "Out On Service Call" sign and locked up. A few minutes later, they were sitting at a minuscule table in the corner of the shop, and he was nibbling at an all-veggie sub. "I figured a big guy like you, a railroader, would be doing all-meat," she snickered.

"Got used to it," he said. "Mom is pretty vegetarian until Dad starts to lean on her a little. And, I was married to a nutball vegetarian for over eight years, so that played a part."

"I’ve heard stories about that," she nodded. "In fact, a fair number. Was your ex as bad as your mother said?"

"I don’t know how bad she said it was, so it’s probably worse. Did she ever say why I left?"

"No, just that you got fed up with her and left," Debbie told him.

"Like you said a while back, that’s true as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough," he snorted. "Probably you shouldn’t mention around Mom that I told you, but I left because I found Marsha in bed with someone else."

"That would account for being fed up," Debbie nodded.

"It’s worse than that," he said. "It was another woman."

"I sure hadn’t heard that," she said, shaking her head. "That’s got to be a tough kick in the gut."

"It was. I was months getting over it, not that I am yet," he said. "Fortunately, I happened to land in a place that I never expected, but proved to be pretty good at getting my perspectives straightened just a bit, which really surprised me when I thought about it."

Debbie shook her head and smiled. "That . . . uh . . . place in Nevada?" she grinned. "Your mom was pretty embarrassed to mention it."

"I didn’t know that she had," Danny sighed.

"She never said a lot about it, only that it was more innocent for you than she thought at first, and that you’d learned a lot."

"Innocent for me, yeah, pretty much," he said, realizing that except for a couple critical points, Amy at the head of the list, he wasn’t going to lie about his past to this woman. "Part of the deal was that I had to keep my hands off the merchandise, but I learned a ton. A lot of it was stuff that you wouldn’t think would be what you’d learn in a place like that, and I met some of the more interesting people I’ve ever known. The big thing, though, was that I had an awful lot of anger when I went out there, both at Marsha and at myself. By the time I left, I had a lot more sober take on it. I could deal with it. Honestly, it turned into one of the brighter things I’ve done in years, a life-changing experience, almost."

"Funny how breaking up with someone can do that to you," she smiled. "It didn’t work as well for me, but I can look back now and see that it was the first step of the best thing that ever happened to me."

"I didn’t know you’d been married," he said.

"I never was. This was after my mother died, and my father was too drunk to be able to tell anyone his name most of the time. I was trying to go to college, and I had to get out of the house somehow, so I moved in with my boyfriend, Kenny."

"Mom or someone said you were close to getting a degree," he commented.

"Most of that came later. I’d liked to have been able to stay in college," Debbie said wistfully. "But I had problems. I was living with Kenny, and all he wanted to do was drink and screw, and that made it hard to study. The state has a nice grant if you’re an Indian, and after the casino was built, the tribe has matched it, but you have to keep your grades up. We had a lousy school out there, although it’s improved a lot with the casino money, but most of the time I was in school it was a piece of shit. I really wasn’t too well prepared for college. I think I could have kept my grades up, but all the shit I got from Kenny didn’t help."

"What were you studying?"

"Just general stuff. I wanted to be an RN, ’cause they make good money, but I never really got in the program. I have no idea why I ever wanted to be an RN in the first place. Just something to do, I guess, that paid well. After I came to the Record-Herald, it was all computers and graphics and marketing, stuff I could use. Now, someone’s going to have to make me a real good offer to get me out of the Record-Herald, so getting the actual degree isn’t that important, although I have the major requirements in. I gripe about the pay at the paper a little, but it’s actually pretty good considering the other stuff I could be doing. You probably know that the whole system is designed so it gets better the longer you stay there, and it’s better since I became a shareholder."

"I don’t know the details, but I know the general idea," he nodded.

"I’ll get a good boost in the dividends when your mother retires," Debbie continued. "I do like the idea of the employees owning the business; that’s a socialist thing to do, but since the system is slanted for longevity, it’s probably not pure socialist. Now, the casino is owned by the tribe, and that’s made up of its members, so that’s a lot more socialist. I get a check out of that, but it’s nothing I could live on, now or later. Of course, most of my relatives just drink up their dividend as soon as they get it. The ones who make out from the casino are the ones who work there and don’t drink it up, probably darn few of ’em. I’ll be damned if I want to live like that. That’s why I don’t want to live on the reservation or work at the casino, because I don’t want to marry some damn drunk. I came close enough to it once, but fortunately Kenny revealed himself for the drunken asshole he is before we tied the knot. I figure if I lived on the reservation I’d just get hooked up with another drunk."

"That’s got to be tough," Danny commented, not being able to think of another thing to say. The prospects seemed dismal, even compared to his life with Marsha.

"I don’t know what I ever saw in that asshole," Debbie replied, shaking her head. "Thought I was in love, I guess, and I guess I overlooked the drinking ’cause most everybody did, but I must have had some smarts, because I decided I’d better live with him for a while before we got married. Well, one night he beat me up pretty bad, and I left him. He came to me later and begged me to come back, and I got softheaded and went back, but told him if he ever hit me again I was gone for good. Two or three months later, he did it again. He was real drunk, and I managed to knock him down and kick him in the nuts a couple times, and I kept my word. That’s when I moved off the reservation, I didn’t want to get involved with another drunken Indian."

"Spearfish Lake seemed like a good place, then? Is that how you wound up at the Record-Herald?"

"It wasn’t that simple. I never planned on working at a newspaper," the dark woman admitted. "I turned down a chance to work at the casino full time after I dropped out of college. I worked there in high school, right after it opened. It was just janitorial, but I saw a lot. I have to say, the casino has been good for the tribe. It’s brought some money into a place where there wasn’t a lot of money before, the schools are better, the houses are better, now. I think most of the people in the tribe think that since the whites stole everything from us, now we get a chance to steal some back. But it wasn’t these whites who stole it; it was the rich people. We’re not stealing it back from the rich people, but from the poor people, though there’s not a lot of people out there on the reservation who see it like that. And, like I said, too many drunken Indians, so I left. I checked the want ads and happened to come up with a job over here, waiting tables in the morning out at the Spearfish Lake Café. Mike goes out there for breakfast most mornings."

"Yeah, I often have breakfast with him there."

"I kind of liked that job," Debbie continued with a smile. "I could bullshit with the customers, sass them a little, tell stories and like that. Breakfast customers are usually pretty glum. Well, anyway one day Mike said to me that anybody that was as smart and full of shit as I was shouldn’t be waiting tables. I asked him what he thought I should be doing, and he said I ought to go down and interview for the ad sales job. I knew a little bit about computers, but nothing about advertising. Kirsten and Sally said they didn’t know anything about advertising when they started there either, and they thought I could do the job. Let me tell you, it beats the hell out of waiting tables. The money’s a lot better, especially now that I’ve been at it a while, and I’m not on my feet so much."

"Hey, I’ve been a bartender off and on, I know how that works," he laughed.

"They were damn good to me at the Record-Herald while I was a rookie," she said. "It really wasn’t much money to start, but this was back in the old building with the junior reporter apartment upstairs. The junior reporter at the time was a girl. She suggested that I move in with her, and that helped. When she left, her replacement was a married guy with a small kid. They didn’t like the apartment because of the stairs, so I wound up living up there for over three years for free while I put together a down payment on the place I have now. I really owe Mike and especially Kirsten a lot for that. George Webb, too, even though he’s retired."

"You own a place?" he asked.

"It’s nothing much, just a trailer in the park out behind Hannegan’s Cove," she said. "But it’s paid for and I’m saving money for a better place. Anyway, I moved out of the junior reporter apartment the summer before Brenda came. I didn’t know Brenda all that well; we hung out a little but not very much. She had her own problems to sort out, and she mostly hung with Carole and Wendy. I had my own set of problems, and I wasn’t doing real good with them. I didn’t have a guy, still don’t, for that matter, but it was eating at me at the time and I started eating more than I should. And I started drinking again. And I was lonely, too. I hadn’t had a guy since Kenny, and I wasn’t being all that picky. All I was looking for was a nice guy with a steady job and I could click with, who doesn’t drink much and doesn’t think he has to use his fist to communicate with his wife. Really, that’s still true. But everybody I find is either married or otherwise engaged, too young, some kind of nut or drunk or trouble, and often as not some other gal has already thrown them back in the lake for the same reason."

"I have used virtually the same words in thinking about looking for women since I’ve been back," Danny smiled, slowly coming to realize that this very interesting woman actually didn’t have a boyfriend or anything. Weird, yes; issues, yes; interesting, yes . . . worth some thought.

"Small town, I guess," she nodded. "Everybody knows everybody. But, who knows, maybe someday. I’m not real anxious. I did learn one thing from Kenny though. I’m not marrying someone until I can shack up with them long enough to find out if they’re some kind of jerk."

"I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble, effort, misery, pain, and expense if I’d done the same thing," he nodded, and tried to push that line of thinking and discussion to the background. It needed some consideration. "So, how’d you break the drinking and the other stuff?"

"It came from an area I didn’t expect," she said. "Danny, you were talking about life-changing experiences a few minutes ago. I always thought Carole Carter was crazy as hell, but what Brenda did was even crazier. Did you ever read the book about the two of them?"

"Andromeda Chained?" he said. "Yeah, about the first thing after I got back last winter. Fascinating."

"You should have been there, it was even more fascinating," Debbie said. "It says it in the book, but not well enough. Brenda was always a sharp cookie, but when she showed up there, she was a fat slob with an attitude, not that I wasn’t a fat slob with an attitude at the time myself. But she made up her mind she wasn’t going to continue like that, and she started out losing weight. Then she met Carole, something between them clicked, and Carole and Wendy helped her keep her motivation up. Again, this is in the book but the book doesn’t tell it well enough. Brenda lost fifty-three pounds in four months, still dressed like hell but Wendy got on her ass about that. I tell you what, I was never so shocked in my life to walk into the office the Monday after Christmas and see this gorgeous babe of a redhead sitting at Brenda’s desk, wearing handcuffs."

"Life-changing experience, right," he smiled.

"The funny thing is that it really wasn’t yet, not at that point," Debbie said. "But she wore those handcuffs for two months straight, and that was the life-changing experience that sealed the changes she was trying to make in her life. It was awesome to watch, a real miracle, and hell, I was just a little jealous of her. She’d faced up to her problems and worked at doing something about them. I tried to learn from it. Now, what you have to remember was that the handcuffs for both Brenda and Carole weren’t intended as a life-changing experience in itself, but actually as an experience in being artificially handicapped. It was how Carole identified with Wendy, and Brenda a bit, too. Brenda said at the time, and still does as far as I know, that the biggest thing she learned is that you have to learn to accept what’s happened to you and get on with the program. Somehow, one night, that hit me just right. I had to accept that I was an Indian and get on with the program."

"You were going good until you hit that point," Danny nodded. "And then you lost me."

"It’s not easy to explain," she frowned. "Let me try to describe it this way. There are three ways Indians can deal with white culture, both as individuals and as a group. We can fight back. We Indians spent centuries trying that approach, and we got our asses kicked almost every time. Another is that we can ignore the fact that we’re actually Indians, and try to be as much a white person as we can be. Or we can accept the fact that the white culture exists, try to hold on to as much of our own as we can and regain ground where we can."

"I get it," Danny nodded. "The first approach was out, pointless, and wouldn’t work as an individual anyway. You tried to be a white person for years, ignoring the Indian baggage that you dragged along with you, and it wasn’t working. The only way out was to accept what you were and draw strength from it, rather than weakness."

"Exactly," Debbie smiled. "Of course, I didn’t know how to do that, but I thought I’d ask an old katara by the name of Ellen Standing Bear for her advice. The rest is history. It’s been a very interesting three years."

Danny glanced at his watch. It was already time to be getting back; they’d got a late start out of the store. "Debbie, it’s been absolutely fascinating to sit and talk with you the past couple hours," he told her. "I’d really love to hear more. The katara work, and especially the struggle to keep your culture alive and make it fit into the modern white world is just incredible. We both really need to be heading back to work, but would you be up for dinner tonight?"

She smiled at him. "I can’t believe that I haven’t bored you to tears and you’re just being nice about it."

"In no way," he said. "It’s something incredible, a concept I never had a hint that it even existed."

"There’s a lot more to it than what I’ve been telling you," she said. "I’ve been giving you the short and simple version. But, if you really want to hear more of it, I guess you have to be about as crazy as I am. I like to talk, but Danny, I like to listen, too. Your mom said you had some pretty incredible stories about what you did over the winter, but she hasn’t passed many of them along. I take it you don’t want to talk about them in public?"

"I’d really rather not," Danny said. "I’d hate for them to be taken out of context, and especially my involvement. Most of them aren’t really that, uh, dirty, but some are pretty funny, and some are pretty amazing."

"Well, I’d like to hear some of them," she grinned. "I mean, I can’t imagine what it’s got to be like. I don’t think it’s something I could do, ever."

"Me either," he nodded. "My sister Jennifer says it’s something that most girls consider lightly at one time or another in their lives, but the reality check is pretty real. And it is. Most of it isn’t as pretty as it could be."

"Neither is a drunken Indian," she sighed. "Unfortunately, that’s just as real. Maybe more so, but let’s kick that around tonight or another time. Do I recall your mother saying that you did running sometimes?"

"I try to," he said. "It gets a little spotty with my work schedule."

"Part of my keeping my weight under control is exercise, and I like to get on a few miles after work every day I can. That’s something else I learned from Brenda and Carole, by the way. What do you say you come out to my place right after work, shoot for say 5:30, and we get on four or five miles? I usually don’t want to think about eating much after that, so it’s a good time to have dinner. Maybe I’ll just pull something out of the refrigerator."

"Could not work any more perfectly for me," he nodded. "I know you said the park behind Hannegan’s Cove, but what lot number?"

"Seven, it’s up in the back corner on the left as you go in." She shook her head. "Spirits, I hate to have to go back to work this afternoon."

"Me too, but I guess it’s a gotta," he nodded. "I know you left your briefcase at the store."

"Yeah, I was going to hit on you for an ad but we never got that far," she laughed.

He shrugged and grinned. "Well, I have one sitting on my desk for you, so maybe it’s not a total waste of time, at least as far as the paper is concerned."

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