Not all the days of March were that dark for Danny, but it did seem to define to him that things were sliding downhill, slowly but surely.

There were up moments, and the real big one came the following weekend, at the Welcome Home party for Phil – and Brandy and Candice, of course. Most of the people who had been at the finish party were there, among others.

Candice was bubbling, of course – it had been a real adventure for her, and it was clear that she’d had a great time. Phil got Danny off to the side at one point and informed him that, yes, the Iditarod bug had bitten her badly, just like they’d anticipated, but don’t even hint of it to John – he thought she was joking, and when he finally realized she wasn’t, things might not be pretty.

But Candice had an extra adventure, too. The previous year, Brandy had gone through hell and still not been able to get a ticket on the Alaska Airlines flight to Nome, and had resorted to a desperate expedient – chartering a Learjet to fly out there. This year, she’d played it safe, and long had two tickets – but when she and Candice got to the terminal, along with Shelly, John’s old high school chum who ran the Alaska base for Run-8, they found out they were bumped again. Brandy’s temper at such times was legendary, but she knew the drill – and to her surprise, Shelly knew the number of the charter company by memory.

"Was the charter pilot a tall, good-looking babe with a full head of black hair?" Randy asked.

"No, but it was about as interesting," Brandy reported smugly.

And with good reason. Shelly drove Brandy and Candice over to the charter outfit, and greeted the chief pilot with a big kiss. He was the guy who’d flown Brandy to Nome the year before – and he was now Shelly’s fiancé!

"They’re getting married in June," Candice added. "He’s a tall, good-looking guy, got some gray, quite a bit older than she is, but she flew out to Nome and back again."

"I didn’t catch his name last year," Brandy smiled. "I did this year. As of June, your contact in Alaska is going to be Mrs. Jack Daniels."

"WHAT?" Jackie Gravengood gasped, slack-jawed. Jackie was Josh’s half sister, quite a bit older.

"Jack Daniels," Brandy repeated. "He says he remembers you crazy people from Spearfish Lake that rented that Cessna 185 back a few years ago to follow the race."

"Oh, my God!" Jackie shook her head. "Jack Daniels is the guy who ran me through my private pilot’s license in Colorado thirty years ago."

"Yeah, that’d be about right, he’s about your age," Candice nodded.

"Phil and I are talking about flying up for the wedding," Brandy reported.

"John and I are talking about it too," Candice grinned. "I have to get him to Alaska somehow, that might do it."

"I don’t think Mark and I would mind going," Jackie shook her head and smiled.

"Cripe, that means Tiff and I are going to have to do it, too," Josh shook his head. "That’s going to turn into a mob scene. Maybe we can get a group discount on tickets."

"Maybe charter a Learjet yourself," Nicole laughed from a little outside the group. "After all, Danny knows someone in Phoenix who has one for charter."

"Oh, good grief!" Tiffany shook her head. "Wouldn’t that just take the prize? We’d never hear the end of it."

"Seriously, you might want to look into it," Blake suggested. "Probably not Danny’s friend from Phoenix, as it could add to you people’s reputation even more, but we occasionally charter a bizjet from an outfit in Camden. If you’ve got a planeload it’s about level with first class costs, and you get to set your own schedule. We usually fly right out of here, so there’s not that messing around, either."

"Let’s catch our breath for a few days and kick it around," Phil smiled. "It might not be the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t mind looking into that a little, anyway. I wasn’t real thrilled about the way the dogs were handled by the airline."

They didn’t even catch their breath for a few minutes. Before long a weekend jaunt to Alaska was on the schedule for June; while Blake and Jennifer weren’t planning on going, Blake promised to use a little leverage with the charter company to see what kind of a deal they could come up with.

All in all, it was a good party, and Danny went home smiling – but he went home to an empty house, and the mere thought was a little depressing.

It got more depressing as he thought about it. He knew Shelly Goodlock a little of course, remembered her from school when she ran around with Brandy and John, but she was enough older that he really couldn’t call her a friend. He knew from Josh that she’d been single a long time, and had just about given up on getting married, but had chanced onto Jack in the last year, inadvertently through Brandy. That evening, he found out that Jack was a widower with grown kids, and that the Gravengoods thought pretty highly of him. It looked to him like she’d waited years to get lucky; how long would it take him?

It would have been sort of nice to be able to go on that trip, but he didn’t know Shelly well enough and couldn’t have afforded it, anyway, and once more he felt left out in the cold, not so much by friends this time, but by fate.

The people at the party this evening who were more or less in his age group had all made pretty good successes of themselves: Phil and Brandy, and Jennifer and Blake, quite wealthy and successful, of course, the former, at least technically, had retired while still in their thirties.

Josh and Tiffany weren’t what you would call wealthy, but were finally making decent money. Josh had a solid job with potentially much more responsibility and money in the future, and Tiffany’s store and touring business was growing rapidly. Both were highly respected in the community and the world of their sport.

John and Candice were better off financially than Josh and Tiffany to begin with, just through a little luck, had a nice family, and John was going to be moderately wealthy when he finished buying Joe McGuinness out.

Randy and Nicole, quite a bit younger than he was, were still fairly newly married, the youngest of the bunch, but both had good jobs and Randy’s was going to be a much bigger one in a very few years; they lived in an awesome house. Both had a fair shot of adventure in their pasts, and Randy was highly skilled in his martial arts hobby as well – and that sort of rankled Danny in a special way, in that Randy was closer to Gil in several ways than he was.

Three of the group had run the Iditarod successfully and a fourth was probably going to give it a try.

He could spread it around further, but that was bad enough when he considered himself: a failed husband, whose best job financially had been selling quack herbal vitamin supplements, not terribly remuneratively, whose most satisfying job had been as a bartender in a whorehouse, and who now was a part-time appliance salesman and would soon be a part-time railroad brakeman. Measure that against any of his friends, and he was not only a failure, but a dismal one. He’d once had big hopes for his life, but he’d let them turn to shit – well, let Marsha turn a lot of them to shit, but he’d been dumb enough to allow her to do it, so it counted for the same thing.

Maybe coming home wasn’t such a good idea after all, to have those kinds of yardsticks to measure himself against and come up short. On the other hand, he hadn’t had any brilliant ideas for anything better to do.

In any case, he wasn’t going to do anything else right now; he was pretty well committed to both his father and to Josh to hang around through the rock hauling season on the railroad. Next winter looked pretty slow, laid off from the railroad, probably part time at the store – but he should have built up some savings by then, maybe he could take off, think of something else to do. This was getting to be one of those times when tending bar at the Redlite Ranch seemed like not such a bad deal after all. At least it was interesting, it rarely failed for that, while he knew that the appliance business was not going to be thrilling but often boring, and knew from experience that riding the rock trains was going to be even more boring yet.

At least it would give him some time to think. He had a few months to think of something better, after all, and again, perhaps something would come up, although he had little reason to think that it would.

The weather turned nice over the next few days, and it improved his spirits a little. He really hadn’t been getting any exercise since leaving Florida, except for a few miles jogged alongside the highway as trucks screamed past Antelope Valley before Art had taken him over to the Redlite Ranch. Now, with the weather warming up, he thought he might as well start to get in shape a little, because he knew he’d be spending a lot of time sitting and doing nothing much in the months to come. There wasn’t much light after work, since Daylight Savings Time hadn’t started yet, but there was enough if he got right on it from work before he headed back to the house.

About the third or fourth night that he was jogging down the sidewalk along the beach on Lakeshore Drive, he saw a jogger coming the other way. It proved to be Carole Carter, who he hadn’t seen in years. They stopped for an instant, said hello, and Carole offered to jog with him for a ways while they got caught up. Though Danny knew, both from the book and from the stories around town, that Carole was still considered pretty weird, she was an old friend, was pleasant, and as far as Danny knew, still single. Although she may have been weird, nobody said she wasn’t good looking and pretty sharp, and they wound up jogging for nearly an hour until it was nearly too dark to see, while serious "well maybes" ran through his mind. But then, she mentioned that her fiancé was coming up for the weekend, like he did most weekends, and invited him to drop by to meet him, and to see Wendy, who liked to have company since she didn’t get out a lot. As Danny felt the tiny little bit of hope in him collapse, he said he might have to do that, but doubted that he would and could see that Carole figured that, too.

As pleasant as the conversation had been, the outcome had left him feeling pretty bleak as he headed back home, realizing just how long it had been since he’d had a sit-down conversation with a technically eligible woman: Peppermint Patty. It just underlined how lonely he had become, how desperate he’d become, and reminded him of an at least technically open option. When he got back home, he sat down at the phone. He didn’t need to look up Amy’s number, he’d known it for years – but he stared at the phone, and just couldn’t bring himself to dial it.

Not yet.

*   *   *

Fortunately, things eased up for Danny in the next couple of days when he returned from the store one evening to find the driveway full of motor home. With his folks back, there’d be some human contact to fill the void he’d felt over the last month. So, it was good to see them.

They’d driven down into the southwest where they’d always wanted to go, spent a lot of time in New Mexico and Arizona, and spent some time out in the rest of the desert southwest. It had been a good trip for them; they’d covered some ground and had seen a lot. Maybe this motor home life would work for them, at least part of the time, but somehow they doubted they’d want to be gone as much as Bud and Jane seemed to.

Part of the downside was that Jane’s motor home was an awful big hog on the road, rather gutless, and took a certain amount of managing, especially when passing a gas pump, which was very difficult since it wanted to stop at every one it passed.

Gil and Carrie were full of stories, they’d had some good times, and once they got the worst of the stuff unpacked, they sat down with Danny to go through some of the pictures they’d taken and had developed at one-hour shops along the way. It had only been the previous winter that Danny had started to develop any real appreciation for deserts at all, but they’d worked on it a bit. They’d hit several national parks, including the Grand Canyon – there were pictures of the Canyon from one of the overlooks on the south rim, one of the things that Danny had missed on his hurried trip west to find a lawyer. It looked mighty big and mighty pretty, and it was hard to believe that in little more than a month Josh and Tiffany and Randy and Nicole would be down on that tiny stretch of river that was hard to pick out of the photos.

They’d headed on into Las Vegas, caught a couple of the shows at the bigger places, and Carrie invested twenty dollars in slot machines, her limit. After a couple days, they moved on, heading for Death Valley. Danny knew that road, knew what they had to go past . . . and they had. In fact, not only had they gone past the Redlite Ranch, they’d actually stopped in front of the Sagebrush Motel to take a picture, which they got big grins out of showing him.

He managed to swallow his discomfort by asking, "So, did you stop in for breakfast?" and a couple of red faces and grins told him they hadn’t had the guts. Still, Danny couldn’t help but look at that picture and think who had to be there. It would have been about the time that Frenchy had been scheduled again, Peppermint Patty would have been there, of course, Shirley, George, some of the other regulars . . . friends. Damn it, friends, not the same kind as Spearfish Lake, but friends who had reached out to him, basically a stranger, in his time of need. He wasn’t related; they didn’t even know him . . . friends he could barely admit to; other than George and Jennlynn, he’d not mentioned any of the rest by name.

But the moment passed, the photos went on through the tour of Death Valley, on to San Francisco, back across the mountains on I-80. It had been a heck of a trip, one to be remembered, and now they were thinking about keeping their eyes open for a motor home of their own, maybe one a little smaller and easier on the gas, maybe heading south in the fall for a month or so after the rock trains quit but before Christmas.

The rock trains started running not long after that. Danny had known from the beginning that the first month was not going to be typical of the summer – he was going to get his butt worked hard. The Camden and Spearfish Lake used "college-kid" brakemen heavily in the summer, but their summer wasn’t the C&SL’s summer; the kids didn’t show up until the first part of May. Anson, the retiree summer engineer wasn’t expected much before then, so April was known as "April Agony," with a lot of switching around to keep the trains crewed at all. Danny’s availability meant that he worked a lot of hours, which was good as the money was green and pretty generous. The C&SL wasn’t union, couldn’t afford that scale or work rules, but both were fairly liberal anyway, so when the paychecks came Danny’s bank account began to show a solid upward turn. Considering the hours he was working, though, he put in little time at the store.

In some respects, the operating pattern wasn’t a lot different than it had been ten years before, but ongoing track work meant that things went a little quicker than they had in the past. The morning rock train, with a radio call sign of "Keyhole" left Spearfish Lake upbound for Kremmling Pit at eight in the morning. They ran up through Warsaw with a load of empties, on to Walsenberg and on down to the pit, where they’d leave the empties and pick up a load of rock-filled hopper cars. Other than some switch throwing to get out of the yard in Spearfish Lake, it was basically the engineer’s job all the way to Kremmling, with the exception of one switch that had to be thrown at Walsenberg. At Kremmling, it was necessary for Danny to hop off the engine and go start up an old pickup truck – the same one that had been there ten years before – and drive to the far end of the train to change the EOT, the device that radioed brake line pressure to the cab and provided a marker light – from the empties to the loads, then drive back to the head end while the engineer was pumping up train air.

It was always fun to listen to the pair of Studs bellow as they walked the load up out of the pit. But, from there, back down through Walsenberg and Warsaw and Spearfish Lake and the other little towns down to Camden, it was mostly an exercise in trying to keep the engineer awake and trying to stay awake himself. The college kids weren’t normally allowed to do it, but Danny had run the engines on this long dull stretch some in the past and now started doing it again, just to give the engineer a break. About four-and-a-half dull hours after leaving Kremmling they’d be pulling into the barge loader at the north side of Camden. There, they left the loads and picked up a string of empties for Big Pit, west of Walsenberg, again using another battered old pickup to drive the length of the train twice.

Usually pretty close to ten hours had passed by the time they got back to Spearfish Lake from dropping the Kremmling load at Camden. Here, they stopped on the passing track out by the Spearfish Lake Café, where they changed crews, and the train took on the call name of "Beepit." Except for going to Big Pit instead of Kremmling, the operating pattern was exactly the same. Beepit usually tied up in Spearfish Lake between three and six in the morning, depending on how well both trains had done during the day. While they were tied up, Marty Novato, the maintenance chief and hostler, would change out one of the Studs for the third one, which had been fully fueled and any necessary maintenance done; it carried enough fuel to get through until its break day again.

Although there were sometimes odds and ends to be done, that was two of the three main jobs. The third job was "Peddler," the way freight, which usually used the old GP-9s but would occasionally get the third Stud after coming off its maintenance cycle if the train was to be especially large or one of the Geeps needed to be worked on. Peddler actually ran pretty much the same run, dancing around Keyhole. About the time Keyhole headed north in the morning, Peddler headed south, with the cut of traffic for the north side of Camden and anything that needed to be done along the way. To make things work out time-wise, they didn’t go all the way to Camden, but left the cuts for the town on the passing track and picked up outgoings at Meeker, where the switch job out of Camden would take it over and do the distribution. John Penny, Bud’s old accomplice from the Warsaw Fire, had run the Camden Switch job for over twenty years. It was almost a separate operation; the Spearfish Lake people hardly ever saw John and his longtime brakeman, Herm.

Then it was back to Spearfish Lake and on east to Warsaw, to switch the paper plant and wait on the passing track there for Keyhole’s southbound run; people would get pissed if Peddler didn’t beat Keyhole to Warsaw. Once the trains passed, Peddler would head on east, then down past Kremmling to Hugo, to exchange outbounds with the transfer job at the Lordston Northern in Hugo, and pick up inbounds.

Peddler’s schedule may have seemed a bit like a race, but it usually worked. From both the engineer’s and the brakeman’s viewpoints, it was a hell of a lot more interesting than the rock trains; the switching was fun, in a way, as there was some exercise to be had, and things usually seemed a little more lively. The only problem was that the college kids didn’t know enough about being a brakeman to work Peddler, so that meant that in the past the same brakeman had stayed with the train all summer.

This summer was going to be different, because Danny was more of a brakeman than the college kids, who didn’t work the same number of hours anyway. The plan was to switch Danny and Stormy around between the rock trains, which couldn’t have a college kid every trip, and Peddler. Josh had come up with a schedule that looked like it was going to work, but until the college kids showed up it couldn’t be used. And, until the college kids and Anson showed up, it meant that he was going to be working fifty hours a week, and sometimes the brakemen weren’t the regulars, anyway. Josh had a pool of people he could dip into to help fill out the schedule, either on the engines or on braking, and he used them when he had to, but only as little as he had to. They included his father, now retired and in his seventies, Bud himself, and, when he absolutely had to, he’d take Tiffany with him on Beepit – she’d worked as a summer brakeman for two years back before they started the store.

Though the work itself was actually dull, fifty-hour weeks on the railroad and usually several hours at the store, usually on Saturdays but occasionally on weekdays when Danny drew a night run, made April rush by in a hurry. All together the work was boring, though the cabs of the Studs were quiet enough to hold a decent conversation with the engineer. That couldn’t be said if Peddler was running the GP-9s, part of the reason that whoever was running Peddler held out for a Stud if possible, rather than the older Geeps.

There were a few decent conversations to help the hours drag by. Chris would talk about anything under the sun, which was good since they usually could find something to talk about. Dave was a little more limited – if it wasn’t bass fishing or deer hunting, he wasn’t interested. Danny didn’t much care for either topic, but managed to get him interested in a whorehouse story on occasion. For the first three weeks of April until Anson showed up, Josh left himself in the rotation, and there was more stuff to talk about with him, although dogs and Tiffany and the railroad seemed to be his primary topics.

Josh was running under a schedule problem of his own: as the month dragged to an end, he and Tiffany were scheduled to take their Grand Canyon trip with Randy and Nicole, and Randy’s old girlfriend, Crystal – actually, both his old girlfriends, since Myleigh was going, too. Danny couldn’t help but wonder what kind of stories of mayhem Josh would return with, no matter how much both Randy and Nicole insisted that the other girls were friends.

Danny often thought it would have been damn nice to be able to take a trip like that, but again it wasn’t his friends who’d invited them, and he’d been gone from Spearfish Lake when the chance to make the connection had come. Josh was increasingly excited as the days passed and it got closer; except for races and the odd weekend, it was the only real vacation he and Tiffany had ever had, and that went back a long time, fifteen years, so Danny didn’t begrudge him the trip. But, with since his return, he’d come to realize how much now separated him and his old friend; the Iditarod and the dogs, of course, but also Josh’s success. While Josh was still running an engine at the moment, he was part-time assistant manager of the railroad and would be doing it much more when he returned from the Canyon. And, of course, there was Tiffany and the oncoming baby. Josh had other friends, other interests, other things to do – things that necessarily didn’t involve him. It couldn’t help but open up a distance.

Finally, the day came that Harry Anson returned from Florida, just as it was beginning to look as if Josh’s dad, Walt, was going to have to fill in for a few days. As advertised, Anson proved to be a grumpy old fart, but at least knew what he was doing. The conversation in the cab dwindled now; and it got even more boring. About all Anson would talk about was fishing and then bitch about his wife. Danny still didn’t have any interest in fishing but could bitch about his ex all day if Anson wanted. Neither one of them wanted to talk much about that depressing subject once the first go-round was over with.

As the last days of April dragged to an end, Danny spent a lot of time staring out the cab window at the passing forest, trying to imagine what Josh and Tiffany and Randy and Nicole were seeing from a raft at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and wishing that he was with them. Mostly he was wishing he was somewhere else, doing something else, something interesting, and preferably with someone who was interesting and he could really care about.

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