They sat in the store all morning, talking when Danny wasn’t busy with customers – which, as it was a fairly busy Saturday, was less time to talk than they would have had normally. Finally, noon came. While Debbie went shopping for a couple of things she said she needed, Danny had a couple of store chores to do, like delivering the washer and dryer, hooking them up and loading up the old ones. Along in the morning there had been a service call develop, a woman saying her dryer smelled very hot, like it was trying to catch fire, so Danny figured he’d better check that. He was amazed to find that the vent was absolutely plugged from one end to the other with lint, and no one had ever showed this woman how to clean the lint trap – that could have turned into a fire department call at any time. Shaking his head, Danny cleaned out the vent, cleaned the filter and wrote up a charge slip.

It took him a couple hours to work through all of that. As soon as it was over with he raced back to the house, took a quick shower to get rid of all the loose lint, threw a few clothes and some useful odds and ends like a razor and shaving cream in a duffel bag and was out of the house in something approaching NASCAR pit-stop time.

Debbie hadn’t been back home long, either, and was just pulling a light lunch together. They sat and ate and talked; rarely did they have trouble trying to find something to talk about. "All right," she said finally as she picked up the dishes, "do you have any plans for the afternoon?"

"Well, more of the same," he shrugged. "I really enjoy talking to you. Maybe for a break, we could go swimming or something."

"Swimming?" she snorted. "Danny, sometimes you can be the most frustrating tamboura I could imagine! I’ve been sitting here trying to be polite and not physically drag you off to the bedroom, and you just want to jump in the lake to cool me off?"

"I was trying to be polite, too," he said smugly. "But since you put it that way . . . "

It did not take them long to get to the bedroom, with clothes coming off along the way. "Danny?" she asked a few seconds later. "I know we talked about your problems with sex and being nude. I think that’s something we need to work on sometime, but is this enough clothes for now?"

He glanced up as she took off the wrap-around green skirt, to see that she was wearing a garter belt and nylons – nothing else. "Could not be better," he said. "And yeah, I know a katara I’d like to work on that problem with sometime. But not today, I think."

"Me either," she smiled. "It could be a little frustrating. But if you want frustrating, you have no idea how hard it is to find these after noontime in Spearfish Lake. I got a couple other things to get us through the weekend, and then it’s going to either have to be mail order or a quick trip to Camden."

"You’ll have all week," he smiled, taking her in his arms. "I’m on nights again next week."

"Oh, damn," she shook her head, and sighed. "Perhaps it’s just as well, I think I’m going to be busy a couple evenings, anyway. But then," she smiled, "I plan on having a busy afternoon."

Several hours later, the bed was a mess, both of them were hot, sweaty, exhausted, and, for the moment, sated. He had played her like a violin, and, with a little coaching, she was well on the way to doing the same thing for him. And, also well on the way to playing each other like clarinets, too, and a few other instruments . . . it had been a most interesting afternoon. "You know," she sighed as they lay cuddled together after their latest jam session, "I almost think that swim would feel good, now."

"I could use a break, maybe hydrate a little, get charged back up a little," he smiled. "That was a pretty good workout."

It took them a while to stir totally. His running shorts were still in the bathroom from the day before; they would do for a swimsuit. He headed off to the bathroom to get them, and came back to find her pulling on a black one-piece swimsuit with multi-colored stripes on the sides and bodice. "Wow, Debbie," he commented, "that sure looks sexy on you."

She shook her head. "I have a bikini but I think it makes me look fat. I’ll never be as thin as I’d like to be, I don’t have the bone structure for it."

"I don’t think it makes you look fat at all, I think you look like a woman."

"You’re laying it on a little thick," she smiled.

"I don’t think so," he laughed. "Redlite Ranch story time. You remember me telling you about the gal and her husband who wanted to play at being prostitute and client? Like I told you, they had a little fake lineup, and I was the fake other client. She was, well, a little shorter than you are, but she’s like you, got curves, and they’re the real thing. The other two girls were, well, anorexic would be a good word. They went through their little lineup routine, and I said to the – well, I guess you could call her a turnout – ‘You must be new here. Looks like they finally got a real woman, not like these fence posts.’ Well, one of the regular girls sort of sneered, ‘Fence posts, my ass.’ I wanted to say that since this was a ranch she’d better watch out if anyone came around her ass with barbed wire and staples, but I didn’t think I’d like it if she hit me."

"Good thinking there, Danny boy," she laughed.

"The point is, I know what my taste is. To my taste, you look like a real woman, not a fence post."

She cocked her head, looked at him for a second, and said, "Get back on that bed, you tamboura. Spirit, you have the talent for saying just the right thing to get me horny all over again."

They never did get out for their swim that afternoon, but later they did take a break for dinner – a brief break. Several hours later, after dark, they were lying on the bed, just cuddled together, holding each other, touching lightly, just enjoying the being close, when out of the clear black sky, Debbie asked in a quiet, almost worried voice, "Danny, you were pissed at Marsha a lot, weren’t you? Did you ever hit her?"

It did not exactly take a house falling on Danny for him to realize what that question was all about, and her life with Kenny was clearly involved. Even so, the best policy was obviously still to tell the truth. "No, I never did," he said softly, rolling to pull her tightly to him. "I often wanted to. A couple times she tried to hit me but . . . well, I wrestled in high school, and you know the stuff Dad teaches upstairs from the store? He taught me some of that back when I was in school, and I went up there a few times this winter, just to brush up, although that’s not my thing. Anyway, when Marsha tried to hit me the second time, I grabbed her arm, got it in a hammerlock and got her on the floor, and I put some muscle into it. I told her that if she ever tried to hit me again I’d tear her arm off. She screamed and bitched and cussed at me for years after that, but she never dared to try to hit me again."

"You didn’t even hit her when you left her?" she asked quietly. "That must really have pissed you off."

"I was about as pissed off as I’ve ever been in my life," he told her. "Debbie, right at the instant I found her and Sheena, I’d have shot both of them if I’d had a gun. Fortunately, I managed to get control of myself and left before they noticed me."

"How did you do that?" she said, a little less timidly.

"Don’t get me wrong, I knew I had to get back at her," he replied. "It wasn’t a good time to do it, I realized that. Looking back, Debbie, I’m not real proud of what I did to Marsha, but at the time it seemed like a good idea and I hope I made my point."

With a little coaxing from her, he told the giant hemorrhoid story he’d told Frenchy months before – not in that kind of detail, especially about the preparations, but about handcuffing her to the bed, gagging her, terrorizing her with the knife and then the rubdowns with the super-high-power capsaicin rubbing compound and his homebrew of itching powder.

"You left her like that for how long?" Debbie asked with an interested grin on her face as he finished the story.

"I don’t know," he said. "It must have been about two in the morning that I got started, and Sheena probably didn’t show up until after work, so fifteen hours at a minimum, plus whatever it took Sheena to get her loose without the keys. Like I said, I’m not real proud of what I did, but I couldn’t have left without doing something like that. But no, I never hit her."

Debbie lay there for a minute, looking him in the eyes, her face devoid of expression. Uh-oh, he thought, thinking he went a little too far. At least he’d been honest.

"It might have been better than beating her up," she smiled. "She might have learned something from it. I mean, I was always a little sorry that I kicked Kenny in the balls. For a long time I wished that I’d just strung him up by them until he sobered up."

"It still wasn’t a very nice thing to do," he said glumly.

"No, it wasn’t," she said. "But I understand why you did it. It took her years to drive you to do that, and Sheena on top of that to touch it off, right? Danny I never want to give you reason to get you that mad at me, and I promise I’ll do my best to avoid it."

"I don’t think it’s a problem," he said. "Debbie, I don’t think you have it in you to get me that mad, otherwise I don’t think you’d have it in you to be a katara. I know we’ve only known each other at all well a couple days, but it’s clear to me that you’re a sweet and gentle soul who has to be pushed real hard to generate the kind of anger that was normal for Marsha. There is no comparison; you are night and day to each other."

"Thank you, Danny," she smiled. "Now, I do have a question. How’d you know about that stuff, the capsaicin, the cowhage, the rose hips?"

"You know what I did most of the time I was in Florida?" he asked.

"Your mom said you sold herbal supplements, vitamins and stuff like that wholesale," she said.

"Yeah, calling on stores, mostly," he told her. "Debbie, I don’t want to offend you, either personally or as a katara, and we haven’t talked about it, but I presume that you use natural herbs in, well, your katara stuff."

"Some," she agreed. "More than a little. Not all of it is medicinal, in fact, only a small amount. Some of it is well, more spiritual, if you want to pull out a word."

"I can’t speak to that," he said. "But most of what I was dealing with I consider to be pure bullshit. I felt like I was nothing more than a shyster, a con artist, at least a lot of the time. Now, that’s not saying all of the stuff is bullshit, there’s a core of useful stuff there. Realistically, I learned an awful lot about it, especially what works, and what doesn’t. Like, for instance, you know my sleep schedule is real goofy on my job. I learned a long time ago that there’s a couple of herbs that you can buy in bigger stores that in combination puts me to sleep pretty good, but I can wake up without a sleeping pill hangover. Separately, they’re sold for different things that they’re actually useless for, and even together they don’t work for everybody."

"You know quite a bit about herbs, then?" she asked.

"Can I say, a lot more than I really want to know? I mean, I don’t mind putting some of what I learned to use, but, like I said, ninety percent of the claims are bullshit."

"But ten percent isn’t," she said. "Danny, I know a fair amount about the local herbs, at least from a katara viewpoint, and most of it is things I need to know and should know more of."

"Do you go out in the woods to collect this stuff?" he asked curiously.

"Sometimes," Debbie said. "Like I said, I’m still learning most of it. Sometimes Ellen and I go out hunting for them. Sometimes we take Ruth and Toby, he’s very good at finding some things. And there’s a couple other people I go with sometimes. But it’s all local stuff. You probably know a lot more about it in general."

"At least the stuff that’s commercially available," he conceded. "I would guess that there’s a natural component from collecting it yourself that would be important to a katara."

"You guess right," she agreed. "Like this cowhage. I find it interesting that you knew about it and went out and collected it yourself. How did you know about that?"

"Goes with the territory," he said. "I often visited vendors, at least when they were more or less local, to get their angle on things. Some of it is collected, some is grown. Cowhage doesn’t grow around here, north Florida is about the limit of its range. The seeds inside the pod are used in a remedy that I consider pretty useless. But it’s actually fairly common, and it’s collected, not grown specifically. It would be like intentionally growing kudzu anymore."

"Kudzu?" she frowned. "I never heard of that."

"Consider yourself lucky," he smiled. "It’s another one of those bullshit herbs. It was imported from Japan decades ago, and was set out for pasturage and erosion control. The only problem is that it has no natural controls, the damn stuff grows everywhere you don’t want it to in the south, and you can hardly kill it with the defoliants they used in Vietnam. Cowhage isn’t that bad, a North American native plant, and it does have some natural controls. Anyway, I was visiting a vendor one day when I found out how itchy it is, and that the pod hairs are used for commercial itch powder sometimes. And, it is bad, sort of like poison ivy without the rash. When the thing with Marsha happened, I had rose hip powder capsules in my sample case, that’s what actually gave me the idea. I knew I couldn’t get my hands on the cowhage hairs quickly, at least commercially, so I gathered and processed my own."

"You know, some time I want to get you together with Ellen and Ruth to talk herbs," she said thoughtfully. "I know I’d be interested in your take on some of the things we use. And, it’s entirely possible they might learn something from you."

"If you want to, I guess it can’t hurt. But, Debbie, it’s something I’m mostly trying to put behind me, like Marsha. Like I told you, most of the time I considered myself little better than a crook. I did not like that feeling."

"Even crooks know something useful, sometimes," she smiled. "It’s all in how they use it. But I can understand why you’d want to walk away from it. But, I’m curious. Are you going to continue railroading and working in the store like you’re doing now, or what?"

Danny easily recognized another question that went well past its superficial sound – but this one wasn’t as easy to answer, since he hadn’t really considered it himself. "I have to be honest," he sighed. "The future is a little in doubt. This summer schedule is a killer, but the money on the railroad is good. I can get away with a schedule like this one summer, maybe another, but then something will have to give. I mean, I don’t mind the job, it’s a little dull, but it’s all right. But you know how the C&SL works, busy as hell for six or seven months, then dead slow the rest of the time. Josh made it work for him only because an accident in availability made him an engineer ten years before he should have expected to be. It’s a higher pay scale, and he could still draw unemployment in the winter while he trained his dogs. Most of that time he was being subsidized by his sponsorships for racing. Right now, since I’m living at home and don’t have much in the way of debts, I can get along for a while with the income just being part of the year. But, that same accident in availability that made Josh an engineer means that due to seniority it could be twenty or thirty years before I could actually work year round. So, while it’s a good stopgap, it won’t work forever."

"Can’t you fill it in with the store?" she asked. "I mean, that’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it?"

"It is," he said. "But that has problems, too. Short range, the killer schedules. I’m working sixty to eighty hours some weeks now. Realistically, once the rock season ends, it’ll be more like twenty, unless Mom and Dad decide to take off for Florida or someplace like that for an extended period."

"Your mother has been talking about taking off this winter sometime," Debbie pointed out.

"True, but that won’t be for more than a month or so," he said. "And, part of the problem is that I’ll just about make enough at the store to wipe out my unemployment, so really it’s only loyalty to Dad, rather than the need for money." He let out a sigh. "The real problem is that there just aren’t two incomes in the place, and I knew it from the beginning. But it might not always be the case, and it doesn’t have to come together right away. In fact, this is something I would really appreciate your input on."

"Maybe," she said. "I’m not quite sure what you’re asking."

"Just because you get out and around more than I do, you see what’s out there more," he said. "This isn’t katara stuff, it’s Record-Herald stuff. Here’s the problem. The appliance business is a little iffy, and it has been for years. If we ever get a big box store like a Wal-Mart in here it’ll wipe out half or two thirds of the business."

"Not soon, from what I hear," she said. "They consider us just a little too small. I’m not taking any bets about ten years up the road, though."

"Well, that’s something," he conceded. "We lose enough to the big box stores down in Camden, anyway. Sales in terms of the total number of units are down a little from what I remember as a kid, but there’s other factors involved, too, and I may not be remembering correctly, anyway. I don’t think there’s much chance of expanding sales in things like refrigerators and washers and dryers and like that. Maybe a little with price cutting and increased advertising, which I know you would like, but the bottom line stays about the same with more work required to make that same amount. Now, considering the limits of the appliance market and the possibility of having its butt shot off without much warning, I think the only way to increase business is to diversify. Start dealing in something to go along with large appliances. For example, I’ve been thinking about decorative lighting fixtures. It probably wouldn’t be a real, real big market, nothing that a store in Spearfish Lake could survive on with that as its only business, but might be a good add-on."

"That would be a possibility," she nodded. "I’ll tell you what, it’s struck me for years that we’re a little light in furniture for sale in this town."

"I think so, too," he said. "But that runs into the other problem, and that’s the store itself. Objectively speaking, I’m not thrilled with the location. The place is too small and there’s no room to expand, we’re already crammed in there pretty damn tight. There’s no room for furniture. And, the parking sucks, there’s no other word to describe it. We’re in the metered section, of course, with the idea of keeping traffic moving, and there’s no good parking lot nearby. It limits store traffic because it’s a pain in the ass to find a place to park. Worse, when we get a truck in, there’s no loading dock, we have to have them double-park in the street and block traffic, and sometimes that gets to be a real bitch."

"I can’t disagree with any of that," she agreed. "You’re right, you’re limited by the location and the building."

"Right," he said. "I’ve sort of kicked around the idea of coming up with a bigger place, maybe out on Central away from downtown, toward the highway some. There’s no place out there that looks like it might be available and do the job right now, and the places that are big enough look pretty stable. But, that’s not saying I couldn’t get the money to build." And, he thought without telling Debbie, at pretty damn favorable interest rates, since it would come from Jennifer. He’d have to pay it back, of course, but it would be a real estate deal and even if worse came to worst he couldn’t lose his shirt and his pants, too.

"It has potential," she said thoughtfully. "Speaking from a Chamber of Commerce viewpoint, I’d hate to lose the downtown business, but if you have to, you have to. It’s just too darn bad the oldRecord-Herald site was sold. That’s one of the bigger spots downtown. We all thought the bank would be building there by now, but the rumor mill says that it’s on the back burner since the economy is down in the dumps."

"Yeah, the economy," he snorted. "I know a pair of George Bushes who ought to swap jobs; it would be a better fit for both." He let out a sigh. "But, let’s not go there tonight. The Record-Heraldlot would have made a good site. Maybe a bit small for what I’m thinking, but I only have the vaguest idea of what any possible plans, anyway. And there’s the city parking lot right across Second and up a hair, even though it’s still in the metered section. But, that’s water down the river, and there’s not much that could be done right now, anyway. Dad and I sort of decided we’d get through the rock season, and then sit down to look at options."

"You really ought to have some idea of what the options are and what you could do about them before you have a serious talk with him," she suggested. "Have you kicked this around with him?"

"Only generally," he replied. "You’re right. Maybe I should sound him out a little, do a little more serious thinking about the options. There’s several things involved, and like I said, I’d appreciate your input."

"Let me think about it," she said. "I’ll keep my eyes open, and maybe I’ll come up with something."

"Good deal," he smiled, realizing that there was a very real option starting to open with the woman he was lying in bed with – and that she might have a lot to do with the decisions he might make about the store and his future.

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