| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 3
About a week later, after a couple of plane changes and long day, Phil’s wife Brandy met Duane and Michelle at the Camden airport, and took them back to Spearfish Lake. They only had a couple of carry-on bags apiece with them; the majority of their heavy winter gear they’d shipped from Anchorage the day before they left directly to Michelle’s parents in Grand Canyon Village.
By now there were signs of spring in the North Country around Spearfish Lake. A lot of the snow had gone away, but there was still some of it back in the woods, though it was looking in sad shape. The weather was somewhat warmer than it had been in Alaska. Getting back to Spearfish Lake seemed a lot like getting home in a way. They’d spent two winters in Spearfish Lake, after all, and they had friends in the town, Brandy near the head of the list.
They spent the night with Brandy and arranged to have breakfast the next morning with Randy and Nicole, who was now getting close to delivering her first child. It was nice to see them again; they’d been good friends the past two winters. Since Randy and Nicole were sort of peripherally Canyon Tours people, they were the only two people in Spearfish Lake who Duane and Michelle could talk Grand Canyon with and know that they were being understood. After a nice visit, Brandy drove them out to the dog barn.
The previous year they’d driven Duane’s Jeep from Flagstaff to Spearfish Lake, since the four-wheel drive was nice to have in the winter conditions on the back road where Run-8 Kennels was located. This year, as they hadn’t planned on being in Spearfish Lake much, they’d taken Michelle’s Mustang, since it was a lot easier on gas. Phil had even let them park it in the dog barn for the three months they were in Alaska, so they didn’t have to dig it out from under a pile of snow. It was good to see the car again, and it didn’t take them long to get their relatively small amount of gear into it and get on the road.
It was a long drive to Duane’s home in Bradford, over five hundred miles. By now, even with Daylight Savings Time in effect and the lengthening days of spring, it was still after dark before they turned off I-67 near the Indiana line and drove through Bradford to his home. They found Jason and Vicky waiting for them, Jason wearing a work kilt, of course. There were hugs all around, and in light of his experience, Duane was wearing his Iditarod Finisher belt buckle as a point of pride.
“Aye, son, ’tis good to see ye again,” the tall, bearded Jason said in his broad (and fake) Scottish accent. “’Tis a bit warmer around here, is it not?”
“Not bad,” Duane grinned. “Enough warmer to notice, but not like the Canyon on a hot day.”
“Have you two eaten yet?” Vicky asked. She was a solid woman, a brunette about Michelle’s height, with a nice smile. “I can find something for you if you haven’t.”
“We hit a drive-through up around Grand Rapids,” Duane admitted. “We didn’t know if you’d eaten or not. Speaking for myself, it didn’t stick with me very well.”
“I’ve got a cherry pie that ought to be out of the oven in a few minutes,” Vicky smiled. “That might help fill you up. How long can the two of you stay?”
“Not long,” Michelle replied. “A day or so at the most, since we’ve still got rigging to do in Flagstaff and not a lot of time to do it in. We’d talked about leaving the morning of the day after tomorrow.”
“Aye, that’ll work,” Jason said. “There’s a few people around who would like to hear the tales of your winter, an’ I was thinkin’ we could have some of them over tomorrow evenin’ for a wee céilidh.”
“It’s all people you know: Emily and Kevin, Mom and Dad, maybe a few kids you knew from school,” Vicky explained, “although there’s not many of them left around here anymore, from what I hear. There’s a chance we could get Cory and his wife to come. The last time we saw him, he was really curious after hearing about the stuff you’d been up to.”
“It’d be nice to see him again,” Duane sighed. “It’s been years since we’ve seen each other, ever since he bombed out on doing the Appalachian Trail with me.” Unstated in Duane’s reply was the thought that he’d still like to rub Cory’s nose in all the fun and adventure he’d missed out on. It may have been for the best all around, but it still bugged him a little. At least Duane could look back and say that Cory had bombed out on him in time for him to change his plans around so he could do the hike solo. “What’s he been up to, anyway?”
“Pretty conventional, I guess,” Vicky shrugged. “I haven’t really seen a lot of him. Wife, kids, job, mortgage. Nothing like some stepson of mine.”
It was still hard for Duane to think of Vicky as being his stepmother – she wasn’t much older than he was, eight years or so. He’d known Vicky all his life, and she’d often been his babysitter when he’d been a lot younger.
Michelle knew that Duane had no memory of his birth mother, Jody. She’d disappeared one day when he was still a baby, apparently not able to handle another dirty diaper, leaving Jason to raise him. Jason had once told Duane that he thought at one time Jody’s parents had some idea of where she was, but they had never admitted it to him, and there had been no further news in a couple decades, not that he really cared very much anymore. Not long after the divorce for abandonment, Jason had married again to Christine, who Duane thought of as his real mother. Tragically, she’d died of leukemia when he was twelve, and subconsciously Jason apparently felt that since Duane had two mothers leave him, maybe he’d be better off just raising him himself.
Ten years went by, and Duane was out of college before his father got around to marrying again – to Vicky, who lived across the back yard from him, and who Duane had known all his life. She had been through a bad marriage and a nasty divorce before she moved back to town. Jason and Vicky had always been good friends, and after her return to Bradford they’d gotten even closer. They had been best friends for years before they finally got through their thick skulls that they’d be better off married to each other. Duane had made a hurried trip back on a break between two river trips to attend their wedding, and after several years it had worked out better than anyone could have believed. They had a two-year-old daughter, Melissa – Duane’s half-sister, and a baby boy, Mike, who wasn’t yet a year old. Duane hadn’t actually met Mike yet – he was asleep and Vicky wasn’t in a mood to bother him. Even though Jason was nearly twenty years older than his wife, by everything Duane had seen they had a great marriage and had pretty well been made for each other.
“Yeah, right, conventional,” Duane snorted, speaking about Cory. “I guess that goes to show you the Marines are right when they say, ‘No guts, no glory.’”
“Well, not everyone can be a Grand Canyon raft guide and run the Iditarod,” his father pointed out. “They also serve who sit at a computer screen and draw a salary.”
“I suppose,” Duane shrugged at the mild admonishment. “But I don’t know how I could live like that.”
“Me, either,” Michelle agreed. “Duane and I have a heck of a hectic life sometimes, but it’s a lot of fun. There’s not much I’d want to change about it. But then, it’s not like the two of you are exactly conventional, either.”
“Aye,” Jason conceded, “but a lot more than you two have been. At least I was drawing retirement from General Hardware Retailers before we started the knife shop. It at least provides some stability that I think we need for raising a second family.”
“How’s the shop going?” Duane asked, looking to change the subject a little; he realized he may have sounded a little arrogant in his statement, justified though it was.
“Pretty good,” Vicky replied – she was the business manager. “I’d even have to say that it’s better than we expected. There’s the odd problem here and there but nothing we haven’t been able to overcome.”
Jason had been making knives as a hobby longer than Duane had been alive. It had been a fairly rewarding hobby; contributing to the fact that Duane had been able to get through college without a penny in student loan debt. When Jason had taken early retirement from the General Hardware Retailers distribution center a few years before, he opened the shop in a former gas station close to the interchange, with Vicky and a friend, Kevin, helping him. At Christmas a year before, Jason and Vicky had given Michelle a beautiful sheath knife with a Grand Canyon rafting scene engraved on it. It didn’t go out on the river – it was much too valuable to risk there. She had seen a somewhat similar knife in the shop’s showcase that had a price tag of $875 on it.
“You know,” Michelle said. “Sometime I ought to talk to my dad and see if he’d like to have a few of your knives in the shop. It would surprise me if they didn’t sell pretty well if they were engraved with Canyon scenes like that one you gave me last year.” Her parents ran a gift shop on the south overlook of the Grand Canyon, and she’d worked there from time to time when she was off the river – it was her family’s business, after all. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff tourists will spend big money on,” she added.
“It might have potential,” Jason agreed. “But hey, if we’re just going to hang around and shoot the bull, let’s go do it in the kitchen where we can sit down to some coffee and pie.”
It turned into a pretty good evening of catching up; after all, Duane got on very well with his father and stepmother. They all had stories to tell, although Jason’s and Vicky’s were a lot more domestic than the kinds of things Duane and Michelle had done in the fifteen months since they’d last been in Bradford. The kitchen chairs could have been a bit more comfortable, but it was convenient to talk there.
It was getting late before Jason and Vicky pointed out that they had to get up first thing in the morning. Duane and Michelle trooped up to his old room, which still bore signs that he’d spent his youth there, and soon were in bed.
“You know,” he whispered to her as they snuggled together in his old bed, “this is the third time you and I have visited here, and I still can’t believe that the two of us can go to bed together in this room with nothing being said.”
“You’ve still got a little straight in you, don’t you?” she giggled. “Do you ever see my folks getting uptight about us being shacked up in my room?”
“Well, no,” he sighed, “although I keep expecting to have the hammer drop every time I walk in the door, or especially when you get into one of your screaming moods when we’re getting it on.”
“Maybe we’d better do it tonight,” she laughed. “I feel one of those moods coming on. But I’ll bet your dad and Vicky won’t say anything about it, unless we keep them awake too late.”
“That’s a good reason to not do it, for once,” he grinned. “I mean, I’d love to, but as late as it is already I think I’d have to gag you or something.”
“Aw, your dad and Vicky wouldn’t say anything. They’d just be happy that you’ve found someone who really enjoys what you do to her. They are so cool it’s not funny. You don’t expect to find someone that cool in a little town like this.”
“Yeah, I keep getting reminded of that,” he replied. “One of the few downsides to spending most of my time in places like Alaska and the Grand Canyon is that I rarely get to see them.”
“Yeah, me too. I wouldn’t mind if I got to see them more. Maybe if it works out that we don’t go to Alaska next winter we could work it around to spend a few days here, rather than just doing a quick in and out.”
Jason had already left for the knife shop when they got up the next morning, but Vicky was there to make them breakfast before a sitter showed up, which would allow her to go out and pitch in at the shop. Her specialty was engraving and scrimshaw, and she was even better at it than Jason. That left Duane and Michelle a little at loose ends for the day, and while they spent some time at the knife shop just on general principles, Duane also spent some time trying to hunt down some of his old high school classmates to invite to the party that evening.
It wasn’t easy and he didn’t have much success. Like most small rural towns, when kids graduated from high school they scattered to the four winds, either to go to college and never return, or to go someplace where jobs were easier to find, or to just get a taste of a bigger town, maybe even a city.. In fact, the big General Hardware Retailers distribution center at the edge of town meant that a somewhat higher percentage of high school graduates now stayed in the area than in similar small towns. Still, most of the kids he’d known in school had, in the local slang, “taken the on-ramp” of the Interstate at the edge of town, to go someplace where the prospects seemed better. Duane hadn’t seen many of his classmates in his few appearances in town during the last few years, and he was acutely aware that he’d taken the on-ramp more spectacularly than anyone else he knew. In fact, that was part of the reason he wanted to see some of his old classmates, not so much to rub it in as to, well, rub it in.
Part of the problem was that very few of the “headed for college” kids he’d hung around with were still in the area, not that he’d ever hung around with his classmates at all after getting out of high school. Most of the ones still living here had been the kids headed to General, or other local businesses, and even then there were few of them. In almost every high school class there was someone who tried to keep in touch with their classmates; Vicky’s best friend Emily was the contact person for her class, the 1988 graduates. But if someone had become the contact person for his class, he didn’t know who it was, and even Emily, the owner of the local newspaper, couldn’t help him with it.
Emily, however, was able to turn up in the newspaper’s mailing list the fact that Heather Jameson – her maiden name – was still living in town with her husband, Brian Deskins. Duane had dated Heather a few times back in high school, but it had never gone anywhere. They’d just been sort of friends who went out together a few times when there seemed to be a good reason to go somewhere with someone of the opposite sex; several times it had been out to the race track west of town. A quick phone call from the newspaper office revealed that Heather was a stay-at-home mom and that Brian worked in the plant out at General. Duane had known Brian a little – he was a class or two ahead of them – and hadn’t particularly liked him. But still, they would do to invite to the party; between Heather and Cory they ought to be able to tell a few stories around his old classmates.
Beyond that they didn’t do much but get in a little badly needed nap time and put together some munchies for the party, an effort which didn’t by any means exhaust their talants; throwing something like that together was what they were used to doing for lunches as boatmen. Along about seven o’clock people started to show up, and there was some standing around talking before the real storytelling began.
Duane hardly recognized Heather when she and Brian arrived. She’d been moderately slender in high school, but had put on what he estimated had to have been a hundred pounds. Probably a part of that came from having three kids, which fortunately they’d found a sitter tonight for, but some of the weight had to have been a result of getting a ring on her finger so she could quit trying. Heather had been a fairly sociable girl in high school if not the sharpest pencil in the box, which was most of the reason why he hadn’t gotten even slightly serious about her. He could look at her now, compare her to Michelle, and be grateful that he’d kept his emotions in check back then – Michelle was just a hell of a lot prettier than Heather had ever been. Still, Heather was friendly, if a little awed by some of the things that Duane had done since they’d last seen each other. Brian seemed a little sullen, and apparently glad that Duane wasn’t going to be around much longer, not that Duane wanted anything further to do with Heather except for a little catching up with her and what she knew of any other classmates.
Cory and his wife Jessica showed up not long afterward, having driven in from their home on the southeastern outskirts of Chicago, Hammond or somewhere like that – Duane never quite got it clear. Duane had never met Jessica as he and Cory had gone to different colleges. She was a decent-enough-looking girl, and pretty friendly, but with one look at her Duane suspected that she’d put on some weight since college too – but then, so had Cory, probably as much as fifty pounds. At least, he was a lot heavier than he’d been when the two of them had hiked the North Country Trail to celebrate graduating from high school.
“So,” Duane asked Cory, “what have you been doing with yourself?”
“Oh, not a lot,” his old friend and hiking buddy replied. “Been getting in a lot of overtime; the design office is backlogged quite a bit. It doesn’t leave any time for fooling around, although it sure helps when the time to make the mortgage payments rolls around.”
“Still in engineering?” Duane asked. “I can remember you saying some firm was hot for you and your skills when we were still planning to do the Appalachian Trail.”
“That one didn’t pan out in the long run,” Cory sighed. “It sounded good, but there was no way in hell I was going to get promoted there. I hadn’t been there a year before I had resumés out. I wound up at a place called KPM Manufacturing just in time for our first kid to be born.”
“Married life is treating you pretty well, then?”
“Oh, we get along,” Cory replied in a tone that indicated that it was something less than thrilling. “We have our ups and downs, I guess. It’s nothing like the life I hear that you’re leading.”
“A lot of it is just plain work. Granted, sometimes it’s interesting work in interesting places. Michelle and I put in some long, long days though. The Grand Canyon may be pretty, but in the height of summer you just about sweat to death. Hundred and fifteen, hundred and twenty, and about the only way to cool off is to jump in the river. Then, when we were in Alaska this winter we saw forty and fifty below zero a lot. Not just out the window, either – we were out in it.”
“Wow,” Heather said, shaking her head. “That sounds pretty extreme. From what I hear, you’ve got to be living a wilder life than anyone else in the Class of ’95.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Duane smiled. “I’d guess that most people in the class are pretty normal.”
“You must be Michelle,” Heather said, turning to her. “Are the two of you married, or what?”
“‘Or what’, right now,” Michelle smiled. “We’ll probably get around to tying the knot sooner or later, but there’s no rush yet.”
“You make good money?” Brian asked in a rather condescending tone.
“Not particularly,” Duane admitted. “But we don’t have to pay rent or a mortgage, and a lot of the year our food is provided, too. It’s hard to spend money when you’re down in the Grand Canyon most of the time. It allowed us to build up some funds to do the race in Alaska last month. We had to contribute a fair chunk of change to do that, but we had the savings built up so we could do it.”
“Michelle,” Heather gushed, “do you run rafts too, or do you just go along for the ride?”
“I made my first trip as a swamper, that’s a helper, back in 1990,” Michelle grinned, getting a hint of the way Duane wanted to over-awe his classmates. “I got a raft of my own in ’93, so I’ve been a boatman a lot longer than Duane has. I’ve been down the Canyon over a hundred times. I’m doing just what I want to do with my life, and having Duane with me makes it even more perfect.”
“Wow,” Cory shook his head and told her, “that’s really something. I envy Duane for the stuff he’s gotten to do. It makes my life seem dull by comparison. I really wish I’d been able to do some of that stuff.”
But Jessica had you so pussy-whipped when the chance came that you blew it off, Duane carefully did not say. Now you’re paying the price. “It just takes being in the right place at the right time with the freedom to do it,” he said, which amounted to the same thing in a slightly less personal jibe.
“But don’t you want to have a home and kids and a regular job?” Heather asked.
“Not really, at least not now,” Duane admitted. “Maybe someday. We’ve got a few years left before we have to think about something like that.”
“How about you, Michelle?” Heather asked, obviously prying a little. “Do you feel the same way?”
“Pretty much,” Michelle grinned. “Oh, every now and then there comes the time that a cozy home with a comfortable bed and maybe a couple of kids running around sounds pretty good. But those times usually come after a long day on the river, when it’s chilly and raining, everything is wet, and the customers are being assholes. When the sun comes out, that feeling usually goes away. I’ve had to work jobs topside now and then over the years, and I’m always anxious to say goodbye to them and get back on the river. The dogsledding is pretty fun too, but mostly it’s something different to get through the winter months until the river-tripping season opens again.”
“That’s quite a life you lead,” Jessica said. “I don’t think I’d like it. I guess I’m just as happy having a home and kids and like that.”
“It takes all kinds, I guess,” Michelle shook her head. “I’d really have trouble getting used to the idea of living your way. I guess I’m just as glad things worked out the way they did.”
