Shortly before eight, Mike, the evening bartender, showed up. Shirley was off duty as manager now, and Sarah was gone from the kitchen, replaced by a big heavy-set fiftyish guy by the name of Ralph, but LouAnne, the evening manager, made the introductions. Things were busy, although not terribly so, as LouAnne explained; Friday night, a couple days away, would likely be wild, and some of the weekend girls would be in, along with Learjet Jenn, who already was scheduled tight.

It had been a long day, and an unexpected one; Danny was a little overwhelmed by the flood of things he’d learned today, most of which he’d never thought about or even dreamed about, and he needed some time to think about them and put things together. He clocked out and had Tammy bring him the dinner special; unlike the girls, he had to pay for it, but the cost was reasonable and he was hungry. He settled back at a quiet table in the corner to watch the action and think about it as it went on before him.

As always, Marsha was never far from his mind, and that was especially true this evening. Once again, he wondered how he could have been so goddamn dumb and so goddamn blind. The irritating thing was that he’d known Marsha most of his life and hadn’t particularly liked her for the vast majority of it – why did he ever think that they could get along? And why the hell had he stuck it out so long?

They had literally known each other since they’d been kids in day care, back in the early seventies. Marsha’s folks and her sister had been summer people, belonging to the same club as his father and mother. They’d not gotten along very well any of that time; tolerated each other, but that was about all.

Then, the summer before he was going to be a high school senior, his best buddy Josh Archer had been taken with Marsha’s sister Amy. Danny could understand, at least objectively; although his tastes ran a little different than Josh’s, Amy was a cute little blonde with a nice body and long hair, and it wouldn’t be hard for anyone to get taken with her. But, Josh had been obsessing about her, so Danny thought he’d do his friend a favor, it being summer and not much else going on. Amy’s folks weren’t very happy about the idea of her going out with someone who wasn’t in the club, but after some negotiation, it was worked out that they’d go along on a double date, if Marsha was included. Danny wasn’t terribly thrilled with the idea – he still didn’t get along with her very well – but out of kindness to his friend, he went along with it.

Absolutely nothing on the date turned out to plan. Josh was driving, five miles or so south of Spearfish Lake, with Danny and Marsha in the back, when an oncoming car cut across the road in front of them. Josh stood on the brakes, cut to the left, and was still hoping for a miss as the brown car flashed by on their right. In the rear-view mirror, he could see the car go into the ditch and roll over. The kids stopped quickly to see if they could help, and it was all hands doing first aid and CPR on the victims until an ambulance arrived and people who really knew what they were doing took over, people equipped to do the job. Only then did Danny find out that the couple was Mr. and Mrs. Sloat, and Mr. Sloat worked with Josh’s father on the local short-line railroad.

A lot of things spun out of that incident. In the short term, it cemented four kids who had been more than a little uncomfortable with each other into four musketeers. They ran around together a lot that summer, hung out on the beach some when the guys weren’t working, and did other things. They spent some time playing kissy-face and touchy-more out at a few traditional but isolated spots, with Josh and Amy more or less taking the lead, and Danny and Marsha sort of following along. It lasted till the girls went back to Camden in the fall.

The next summer, when Josh was going to be a senior and after Danny had graduated, it picked right back up again. With a little bit of juggling, they turned some double dates into single dates – the girls’ parents still insisted on doubles – and out on Turtle Hill one night, Danny and Marsha took each other’s virginity. At that, from the looks of things, they thought they were trailing along behind Josh and Amy.

Danny could look back on that memorable night, and some of those that followed, and wonder why he hadn’t seen trouble coming. Their first experiences with sex really didn’t work out too well; Danny enjoyed what he was doing, but got the impression that Marsha did less so. They talked it over, and figured that lack of experience had something to do with it, and as the summer dwindled to a close, worked on getting some more experience.

The girls’ parents were graduates of Athens University; it had long been understood that the girls were expected to go there, too. Danny got a pretty good athletic scholarship at Athens, and since Marsha was going there too it looked like a natural. As it turned out, Danny hurt his knee and was dropped from the football program, but was picked up by the baseball program, which continued his scholarship on a lower level. But, with the trials and tribulations of that fall, and without Josh and Amy around, Danny and Marsha sort of let things slide a little and were drifting apart. But, the plan was that Josh and Amy would be coming to Athens next year, and the four of them could be the fearsome foursome again.

It didn’t work out that way, due to another piece of fallout from the accident that afternoon thirteen years before. It was a life changer in another way, and it was biggest for Josh. With Mr. Sloat in the hospital, the railroad was shorthanded, and Mr. Ellsberg, who owned it, figured that he owed the kids big time. So, after not having been able to turn up other summer jobs, both Danny and Josh spent the summer working for the railroad, mostly as trainee brakemen and mechanics. It turned into a steady summer job for Danny; he spent the next four summers braking the rock trains that ran from Summit Pit and Big Pit up by Walsenberg down to the barge loader near Camden. It was a solid job that paid good money for not working too hard, and Danny had enjoyed it, even though it sometimes got a little boring on the hot days.

But there were other things going on while Danny was away at Athens. Josh really hadn’t been all that hot on going to Athens, anyway, and only got accepted on an alternate list. Mr. Ellsberg found out about it, and made Josh a counter offer – if he’d come to work for the railroad full time, he’d pay the cost of sending him to some maintenance schools. The Camden and Spearfish Lake was busy as hell in the summertime, although pretty slow in the winter, and the job and the schooling fit Josh’s plans just fine – because he’d picked up another fascination along the way.

The summer of the accident, Josh’s brother-in-law, Mark, and his friend and neighbor, Mike, got interested in dog sled racing, and Josh sort of got caught up in it as well. Danny and Marsha and Amy had spent a number of hours out in Mark’s back forty, watching the three of them work with the dogs, along with Mike’s ten-year-old daughter, Tiffany. The winter that Danny was a senior in high school, Josh wound up running some dog sled races – and acquired an unlikely partner. Tiffany, still age ten, was absolutely convinced that she’d been put on earth to run a dog team. At the state championships that winter, there was a pretty good team that the owner was trying to give away, because he’d been transferred to Texas and couldn’t run a sled on the amount of snow they had there. Tiffany wanted a team of dogs of her own, not just a chance to play with her father’s team once in a while. On her own, she cooked up an idea – Josh had one more year of high school – if he would get the team and leave it at Mark’s place – when Josh went off to college, maybe she could take it over – come on, Josh, pleeeeeease?

Except that wasn’t how it worked out. Josh ran second in the hundred-mile race out to Warsaw and back that winter, and had been leading until he had a dog go lame. He was hooked, and not working in the winter at the railroad would mean that he had more time to train. The lackluster acceptance that he got from Athens, along with Mr. Ellsberg’s offer, was enough to do the deed. When Marsha and Amy came up from Camden the following spring, with Amy all full of the things that she and Josh would do at Athens, she was less than pleased to find out that he wasn’t going to Athens, and that he wasn’t planning on going to college at all. That wasn’t part of her game plan, and to say that she dropped him like a hot potato would be too mild. To the best of Danny’s knowledge, the two had never seen each other again, even in passing on the street.

It was an uncomfortable summer for Danny. At that point, he and Marsha hadn’t had sex in nearly a year, for one reason and another, and he felt like he was drifting away from her again. It was made worse by the fact that he was also working for the railroad that summer, along with Josh, although they never ran together. But neither Amy nor Marsha had good word about his old friend, and he tried to keep the peace, mostly by staying away from Josh. Marsha helped lure him away, too – the sex started up again, and Danny could look back now and see that it was the best they’d ever had, and figured now that it was mostly because Marsha was trying to spite Josh with her body.

Nor did they get it on often while they were back in Athens the following winter – Amy was now around, and was something of a chaperone, and he and Marsha could only rarely get together in circumstances where they could do something along that line. He could look back now and see that he’d seen warning signs aplenty, and he’d ignored all of them.

The following summer would have been worse and might have brought things to an end, except for the fact that the girls’ grandfather coughed up the money for the two girls to spend the summer in Europe. It really distressed Danny, but a few days after he got to work it turned into a huge relief. Under the press of a tight personnel situation, Mr. Ellsberg put Josh in the engineer’s seat of one of the rock trains, with Danny as his brakeman. Both of them were really too inexperienced to be out there together, but there wasn’t any real choice and it was the simplest run. Josh worked very hard to be competent and careful that summer, and Danny, realizing what this meant for his friend, tried to help as much as he could, just glad that Marsha wasn’t around to bitch at him for spending his days with the guy who had, as far as she could see, dumped Amy. When the three of them met at Athens again in the fall, Danny made a point of not saying who he’d been spending ten hours a day, five and six days a week with.

The following summer, the one before Danny was a senior at Athens, was again uncomfortable, what with both Josh and Danny working on the railroad and Marsha bitching about it. Just to make things go a little more easily, Danny had a talk with Mr. Ellsberg, and wound up spending the summer braking for Josh’s father instead of Josh. It took some of the heat from Marsha off of him – in fact, he only kept her from being too hot about it by giving her an engagement ring.

For two winters, they’d talked about getting an apartment together, rather than living in the dorm, but with Amy watching over their shoulders, it just didn’t seem like a good idea. Danny wished now he’d been a little more firm about it for his senior year; it was about his last chance to really discover what he was letting himself in for – which is to say, a true bitch who only lived for the hope of making some man’s life miserable. But again, he hadn’t realized it at the time, and figured that once he was away from the railroad and Amy was no longer watching over their shoulders, and they actually had a chance to live together, things would go better.

They were married a month after they graduated. Even now, Danny was ashamed that he hadn’t dared invite his best friend Josh to the wedding, but he’d realized even then that it was going to cause problems if he did. Danny had majored in business administration and had a job lined up at a factory in Camden. Marsha, however, announced that, no, they weren’t going to live in Camden; they were going to live in Florida where her grandfather had worked up an opportunity for them. Again, he realized now that he should have put his foot down, but for the sake of keeping the peace and hoping things would work out, he went along with the idea.

Danny hated Florida. He liked winter, he liked the cold. Florida ground at him in a number of ways, and his job ground at him even more. It was not a great job; the pay was less than he’d been offered in Camden, and in fact in eight years never got up to the point of what the starting wage would have been up north. It was, as he told George, wholesale sales of herbal supplements and vitamins, for a company that Marsha’s grandfather had great faith and a fair amount invested in, but which Danny thought was, at best, full of shit. Over the years, he learned more about herbal supplements and vitamins than he’d ever wanted to know, and frankly thought that most of them would be best thrown out the window except for the fact that birds might eat them. Some probably had some useful value, but most of them, and virtually all of what was said about them, was pure bullshit in his opinion. In his opinion, he was a con man taking advantage of people who didn’t have a lick of sense, and he was not happy about taking their money.

For the next few years, Danny only got home to Spearfish Lake on the average of every other year, and then only for a week or so. Most of that time had to be spent with Marsha’s family out at the West Turtle Lake Club, which wasn’t all that bad, since his folks were out there a lot, too. But he rarely got to see his old friends, like Josh – he didn’t dare – and it hardly seemed like home. Of the five Evachevski kids, only Jennifer was living in Spearfish Lake. She and her bodyguard and boyfriend, Blake, had decided to move back from her home in California about the time Danny graduated from high school, but she still had to travel, do movies and tours a lot in the next few summers. Danny rarely saw her – and then, hardly ever without Marsha.

The second year after Danny and Marsha were married, she got the idea that she wanted to start her own distributing company for a new line of herbal supplements. Danny, of course, didn’t think much of the idea, and thought that what Marsha was proposing was even more bullshit than what he was already dealing with. However, Marsha knew that Jennifer had a lot of money, earned from recordings and movies, and figured that not only could she get Jennifer to come up with the start-up money, maybe she could, on the strength of family ties, get an endorsement or some other support. Danny didn’t find out about it until Blake called him one afternoon. A little pissed that Marsha had gone behind his back, and a little pissed at her at that moment, anyway, Danny warned Blake that it was a scam at best and to not have anything to do with it, but don’t tell Marsha that he said so.

Needless to say, after that, "Jenny Easton" was a name around Danny and Marsha’s house equal in mud to "Josh Archer." Even "Spearfish Lake" wasn’t very far behind. When Danny wanted to talk to his folks, which wasn’t often, he called them from out on the road some place.

As if Josh’s name couldn’t get any worse with Marsha, it did that winter and the following spring. That was the year that both Josh and Tiffany ran the Iditarod the first time. From the little that Danny had been able to find out about it over the years, it had been a hell of an adventure, something exciting, something a lot more thrilling and unusual than scamming people with vitamins and herbal supplements in Florida. Danny didn’t find out about it until long afterward, but shortly after the end of the race in Nome, Josh offered Tiffany an engagement ring. He was now twenty-four, she was eighteen – and a very mature eighteen at that, for it takes a lot of maturity to be able to do something like race a dog team over a thousand miles across Alaska and finish in the top half of the field against Alaskans who had been doing the race for years. In their own way, Josh and Tiffany had been going together for eight years, clear back into the Amy days, so the engagement, and the later wedding, was both an affront to Amy and clear proof to Marsha that Josh was some sort of child-molesting pervert. Danny was quietly offered the chance to come to the wedding, but for obvious reasons had to turn it down.

Danny only saw his old friend twice in the next five years and then just for a few minutes each time, once in 1996, the year after Josh married Tiffany, then again last summer, when he and Marsha had been staying at the club and she needed him to pick up a few things from town. Danny stole a few minutes to stop out at Josh and Tiffany’s dog lot, to say hello for old times’ sake, and pass along the thought that he wished things had turned out differently. Josh, who was now the operations manager of the railroad as well as being chief engineer, was not unaware of the fact that things hadn’t gone well with Marsha for some time, and told him that if he ever needed a job, there was a spot as a summer brakeman open for him. Danny was sure Josh was just being kind, but over the next few months, the idea kept coming back to him. The money wasn’t great, but it would be a lot more peaceful – and, at least being a brakeman on a rock train was honest work, something he hadn’t had for a long time.

What really got Danny to thinking were Jennifer and Blake. The two had been together for a long, long time; Blake had first gone to work for Jennifer in 1983, and he was more of a bodyguard and practice accompanist than he was a boyfriend when they moved back to Spearfish Lake in 1988. Even so, they were very, very close then and had only gotten closer since. However, they’d never gotten around to getting married, and Danny sort of wondered about that sometimes. Once or twice, he’d mentioned it to his mother during private phone calls, and his mother’s opinion was that the two had a stable relationship without being married, and didn’t want to upset a delicate balance. But, Danny thought that she was guessing, and something didn’t ring true, but he had no idea what it was and didn’t see Jennifer often enough to explore the issue.

Jennifer’s wedding came as a real surprise. It was held between takes of a live audience recording session for her latest album, Saturday Night With Jenny Easton. The album itself was just released; Danny had only heard it after he left Marsha, and wanted to get a new CD or two to listen to while he drove westward. It was vintage country Jenny Easton, and she’d obviously had fun recording it.

What really hurt was that the wedding only took place a couple days after he and Marsha had headed back to Florida, and he’d never had an inkling of what was happening until he read a story about it in the Miami Herald several days later. He did call Jennifer up to congratulate her, and was told that it was something that had been cooked up at the last minute – but Danny knew she was lying, and knew that Jennifer knew that Marsha would have gone ballistic if they’d been invited. Danny did find out on that phone call – although told strictly to keep it in the family – that Jennifer was pregnant for the first time, at the age of thirty-eight, which was what had precipitated the wedding in the first place.

To have Marsha drive that much of a wedge between him and his family, especially to where he had to be left out of such a milestone event, because of her temper – well, that got Danny to thinking real hard. It really wasn’t like they had much of a marriage anymore – they hadn’t had sex in a couple of years, mostly because she bitched at him for being so horny and inconsiderate all the way through the last few times he’d tried, and finally he’d decided not to push the issue any more. His marriage mostly consisted of being bitched at and trying to keep the peace. He’d given it a fair shake, and he knew it wasn’t working. By the middle of November, just a month ago, he was no longer trying to keep it together, but to figure out a way to get out of it without getting eaten alive in the process. It wasn’t like it had to be done right away; he’d stuck it out for eight years, and really, another five on top of that when they’d been going together. It just wasn’t worth the effort anymore, and all he needed was the right time, the right excuse.

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