May brought some relief. Mostly, it brought the two college kids, Eric Aho, the turnout, and Jerome Rakestraw, who had worked part of the previous summer before a deer decided to take a side trip through his windshield. Immediately, the juggling around to fill crews ended and Danny’s hours went from fifty to forty – some weeks would be thirty, but most likely not many. At first, it was ten hours a week less that Danny had to hear Anson bitch. But the relief was moderated by the fact that he immediately had to start putting in even more time at the store.

Back when he and Josh had been kicking schedules around it had been pretty clear that he was going to spend a lot of time working Beepit at night, hope to get in early, have a few desperate hours of sleep, spend the rest of the day at the store, and then the night on Beepit again.

The simple fact of the matter was that Gil didn’t intend to spend any more time at the store than he needed to, mostly to spend more time at the Club – not necessarily for the nudist aspect, but as the Chairman of the Board, he needed to be pretty much on call. The centerpiece of the Club, a huge architectural masterpiece of a log building called "Commons" had been built fifty years before, and was showing some age and needed some maintenance.

It had been the first big project for Brent Clark, Randy’s grandfather and nominal head of Clark Construction. Although Brent had been a member of the Club at the time, he hadn’t been since his wife, Ursula, who designed Commons, died in a car crash in 1959. Given the building’s history, there was no way that anyone besides Clark Construction was going to do the major maintenance. The core of the project had to get done before the season started, for reasons that were pretty obvious, involving the non-nudist construction crews. While there was a good superintendent on the job, he was an Assembly of God elder and didn’t care for nudists, so Brent figured he’d better keep a close eye on things, especially with Randy in the Grand Canyon. Gil figured he’d better keep an eye on things, too.

In practical terms, it meant that rather than Danny’s hours going down from fifty a week, they went up, to between seventy and eighty. Gil tried to help where he could, especially in the mornings when Danny had spent the night on Beepit, but he really needed to be out at the Club whenever possible, since Brent Clark was pushing eighty years old and had a heart condition. Gil didn’t want to put any more stress than necessary on him, even by needing to be hunted up and found.

In reality, it wasn’t anything like the hours that Danny had worked out at the Redlite Ranch – he’d hit 100 hours on the clock one week, and never less than eighty – but those were more concentrated and spread out over seven days, anyway. And, they were more interesting, and even though he had actually worked harder, it was less wearing. About the only thing good that could be said was that a lot of money was going into his bank account since he didn’t have time to spend it. The relatively small loan from Blake and Jennifer had long since been paid off – with more interest than they’d asked for – and if he decided to do something else in the fall he’d have a war chest to do it with, so it was worth the effort.

Toward the middle of the month, things started changing for almost everyone. The worst of the work at the Club was over with – and Randy was back from the Grand Canyon and could cover for his grandfather at least some of the time. But, Randy also had a huge pot load of other things going on, including two jobs of special interest – the house crew that had built his own house was turning to on Josh and Tiffany’s new house, and at the same time the steel and concrete crew was working on the new dog barn behind the hill from the house site. The construction promised a considerable change in Josh and Tiffany’s lives, and it was no surprise that they spent a lot of their time overseeing one job or the other.

Danny did see Josh on occasion, mostly while checking in or out at the office, and they managed to talk a little bit. The Canyon trip had been great, memorable, a real adventure, and they wanted to do it again sometime. A great-news spinoff out of the trip was that one of the raft guides had expressed a lot of interest in working for them as a dog handler and learning dog sledding. He was coming to Spearfish Lake when the rafting season wound down, so they hoped that they’d have a paid dog handler in the future winters. Once they were moved into the new house, Josh and Tiffany were going to move the old mobile home they’d lived in for years over near the new dog barn, to give the dog handler a place to live. It sure was going to be a lot quieter out there without a hundred howling huskies practically next to the house. It wouldn’t be totally quiet as there’d still be some dogs left in the yard, but only a relative handful, mostly retirees, or perhaps a few that wouldn’t adapt well to the dog barn.

One Friday afternoon as Danny was checking in before heading out to the café with Anson to get on Beepit, Josh got him to the side. "Don’t know if you’d be interested," he said, "but Nicole took a bunch of slides of the Canyon trip. We’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to show the few shots we took, but Randy and Nicole say to invite anyone who wants to come over to their house tomorrow for a slide show."

"Sure," Danny said. "I’ll be there. What time?"

"Oh, around seven, don’t be in any rush. We’ll probably pop a few caps and sit around and shoot the shit until it gets a little darker, anyway."

It was actually close to ten before the slide show got under way, since the curtains over the huge windows in Nicole and Randy’s house proved to be a little inadequate to get the place dark enough. Still, no matter; there were several friends there, and it was the first real social occasion other than occasional dinners with Jennifer and Blake that Danny had been to since the Iditarod Welcome-Home party a month and a half before – a real break indeed.

The slides were awesome. Nicole claimed it was hard to take a bad picture in the Grand Canyon, but Josh said she needed to look at his photos before she held onto that statement too hard. Yes, they’d had a ball. It turned out that Danny had not heard that it was a very special trip indeed – it was the very long delayed wedding between Randy and Nicole’s friend Crystal’s father and mother – delayed by a marriage for each of them in between. Since Crystal’s father owned the company, and her mother was fast becoming a boatman herself, there could be no better place than the Canyon for the ceremony.

It was a small trip and an especially close one. At various places in the program, Nicole had close-up slides of the various people on the trip, as individuals and couples – and in one of them, the couple looked awful familiar. "That’s Crystal’s half brother Jon and wife, Tanisha," she explained at the sight of the white guy and black girl. "They work together at some engineering place in Phoenix, and everyone says they’re just about the closest couple they’ve ever seen."

Danny was glad it was dark – his jaw dropped just about to the floor. They were the Jon and Tonia he remembered Jennlynn bringing into the Redlite Ranch! Thank goodness he’d never used the names when he told the story. Don’t say a thing, he thought, don’t even think it. If Jon and Tonia – well, Tanisha – had told the story on the trip, he would have expected Nicole to tease him about it, or say something about Jennlynn. To his relief Nicole went on to the next picture, of Crystal’s half sister, a little blonde who looked like she’d been in a fight not long before.

Good God, how soon would the Redlite Ranch pop out of the woodwork at him again? First his folks, now this. You should have kept your mouth shut, Danny, he thought, shaking his head.

Memorial Day weekend brought a badly needed break, just a breather of two days back to back when Danny neither had to get on a train nor be at the store. Even though the Club schedule opened that weekend, there was no way in hell that Gil or Carrie would miss the town Memorial Day activities. That was the case this time, but Danny not only didn’t mind, it was part of his heritage and he wouldn’t have missed them either, although it seemed like a lot of people did anymore.

By now, the construction work at the Club was long done, and the season had opened like normal. Since it was the height of both mosquito and fly season, even the most naturist and organic of nudists broke out oceans of insect repellant, applied thick enough to strip paint and melt plastic. It had been a major pain in the butt when Danny was a kid, and as he got older, he tried to miss the opening weeks out there as much as he could. Even these days the folks pretty much stayed at the Club and commuted into town to work, which meant he’d be pretty much home alone again, with all the lonely downsides he remembered from March. He hadn’t actually come flat out and said he wasn’t going out to visit again because there was always the chance that he might, but he told his folks he wasn’t up to dealing with the bugs, and besides he wanted to lie pretty low from the Austenfelters, especially this year. While the folks were complacent about the bugs, they conceded him his point on his former in-laws, who were expected to show up that weekend and were pretty well expected to be around all summer. Danny was just a little worried about what would happen between them and his folks – and maybe him.

The breather was welcome, and that meant a short week, too, even though it was all nights, which meant that he had to pretty well put in the days at the store. On the relatively rare weeks that he worked mostly days, his father would have to put in more time there, and it would involve some juggling.

But the schedule stabilized a bit after that, and it was possible to relax a little once in a while, and often he had a nearly four-day weekend once it did, getting off early Friday morning and not having to work on the railroad again till Monday night. While Friday morning and Monday night could be a little tough on the sleep patterns, it could be worked around, and Josh promised to schedule him on days some weeks to give him something of a break.

"Bob and Linda are not real happy with you," Gil told him at the store the following Tuesday afternoon, when he came in to spell Danny to get a few hours sleep before he headed out on Beepit. "They say that Marsha was in a rage for months. She was going to room with some girl she knew, but that didn’t last long, so she’s back living by herself, now."

"Doesn’t surprise me," he snorted.

"Well, I take that to mean that this friend of hers threw her out, too," Gil smiled. "You don’t suppose it would be for good reason, do you? Anyway, while Bob and Linda are a little pissed at you for leaving the way you did, I think they understand some why you did. They may not know about this friend of Marsha’s, what they really were doing, and your mother and I aren’t going to be the ones to tell them."

"Probably a good idea," Danny conceded. "I don’t think I want to tell them myself. I mean, I don’t owe Marsha a thing, not even that degree of loyalty, but I don’t think Bob and Linda are capable of taking the news about Marsha the way you and Mom took the news about Tara."

"I think you’re right on that, too," Gil agreed. "Incidentally, they tell us that Marsha isn’t planning on coming up this summer, no surprise, but that Amy’ll be in at the end of the month for a week or so. She’s doing some kind of a special seminar, I ain’t real clear about that."

Knowing what had been scheduled back at New Years, what that seminar could be was pretty clear to Danny, but there was no way he was going to say anything about it, either. There was the answer to the question he’d posed himself out at Randy and Nicole’s the other night – when the Redlite Ranch would reach out and touch him again. This time it wasn’t terribly unexpected, though. "They say how she’s getting along?" Danny asked noncommittally.

"About the same, I guess, her ex-husband has the kids for the summer again, so Bob and Linda say she’s going to make good use of her time."

"More power to her," Danny nodded. "Not that she didn’t have her problems, but at least she wasn’t an asshole like Marsha."

Danny pretty well got the news out of his mind while he napped through the afternoon. He got into the office and discovered that he’d drawn Anson as an engineer that week. This was not happy news; Anson didn’t much like working nights and didn’t care who knew, but he occasionally got stuck with Beepit once in a while. Fortunately the nights this far north got pretty short this time of year and there wouldn’t be a lot of running in total darkness, and Danny offered to spell him for a bit as needed. Anson grumped a bit, said he might do that, and powered up the Studs for the run to Big Pit. There wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of work to do for a couple hours, and his father’s news caused him to think a little.

It was a pain in the butt to run with Anson being so grumpy, but if it had to be a night run, Danny would rather he’d be with him than have one of the college kids do it. After all, he’d had years of practice of living with a snarly woman, he could put up with a snarly engineer for short periods once in a while.

But the snippet of news about Marsha got him to thinking about that. Marsha had always been tough to live with, to put up with, even when they were kids out at the Club. Danny had almost always tried to be kind, but it was unappreciated most of the time. For months now, he’d figured that it must have been because Marsha had been a lesbian at heart all that time, and couldn’t quite bring herself to come out of the closet in front of her parents, so she’d kept him around for a front. He’d figured that when she moved in with Sheena, she must have been in hog heaven, Tara and Sylvia revisited.

But, no. The second-hand news wasn’t real clear, who had thrown who out or what had happened, but if Danny had to bet it would have been that Marsha would have reverted to form, if for no more reason than she was highly practiced at it.

And, as far as running true to form, there was Amy. Well, Amelia right now; Danny would have bet every cent he had in the bank that she was out at the Redlite Ranch at that moment. He could close his eyes and visualize the place where he’d spent the five memorable weeks, two of them with Amy around, two weeks that he could never mention except to her. There were some good times there, not necessarily with her – but with friends, and even Jennlynn was a friend of a sort, even though she wasn’t a person who had close friends . . . could it be?

Jennlynn could be quite personable and charming when she wanted to be. Well, so could Marsha, although he rarely saw it. But Jennlynn had said that she was just about incapable of having close personal relationships, her temper was vile and she didn’t like to be interrupted, and he’d seen all the signs he needed to see that she was correct. Back earlier that spring, he’d characterized Jennlynn as a true loner, an incomplete personality. It was hard to imagine being in a close personal relationship with her, it would be very uncomfortable . . . just like it had been with Marsha!

He tested the weight of the thought. Liked it. It made sense. Marsha was no more capable of living with Sheena than with him, although he knew she enjoyed the sex more with a girl. But everything else . . . it had been just a reeking, fucking mistake. He’d tried to do the right thing and it was the wrong thing. He was not a loner, he needed company, companionship, intimacy. Marsha didn’t need it, didn’t want it much. No freaking wonder . . . it had been an extremely dumbass mistake on his part, hell, on both their parts, but now that he recognized it maybe he could avoid it again.

But then, speaking of extremely dumbass mistakes, Amy was going to be up here in a couple weeks. Oh, boy, what a mistake that would be! Now, face it, she has a couple things going for her that her sister didn’t. She’s not a loner; she does in fact like people and seemed pretty damn lonely and scared last winter at the Redlite, even when he’d taken her to the airport to go home. And from everything he’d ever heard about her, understood about her, while she did use sex to get her way, she did like sex with men, which is a hell of a lot more than Marsha did. So, give her credit.

On the other hand, he still felt guilty as hell that he didn’t say something back there before Christmas. While he knew prostitutes, liked a few prostitutes as people, understood some of the rationale behind it, some of the motivations . . . let’s face it, it was a hell of a lot different when it was someone you’d known for years, knew their family, some of their friends. While he’d promised he wouldn’t compromise her secret, he’d also told her in such a way that she’d have a hold on him – and then just about the first thing he did when he got home was compromised that by mentioning the Redlite Ranch. It might not have been the most honorable thing to do, but it was done, nevertheless.

Other than the people at the Redlite Ranch, did she have anyone she knew among her friends that she could talk about it with, besides him? Not that he knew of; she’d been close to her sister once but considerably less so in recent years. He knew that she knew about Marsha, if for no more reason than he’d told her. But, did Marsha know about her? Extremely doubtful, especially as it concerned the Redlite Ranch, although her sleeping around in Florida was no secret. The money involved, though . . . well, she’d want to keep it secret, considering her custody arrangements with her kids.

He glanced across the cab at Anson, sitting silently at the throttle, lips tight, the normal scowl on his face. Not a very friendly person in the best of circumstances. Let’s face it, while Danny had friends here, family here, everybody was a little distant, wrapped up in their own interests, their own families . . . and as it should be. But it meant that he was an outsider, even here at Spearfish Lake. Ever since March, on the way back from Tara and Sylvia’s when he realized that he needed a closeness, an intimacy in someone else, he’d been reaching for it a little – and it had been eluding him, drawing further away. There was one thing that he and Amy shared, a secret that they dare tell no one else . . . and if that weren’t intimacy, what was?

It might be possible to see her again, alone, without Bob and Linda knowing, he thought. There were a few things that he might share with her, revelations of the last six months that he could really share with no one else, just as she had secrets that only he could be a part of.

Yes, it might be possible. But was it wise?

Face it, hell no! That had so many pitfalls he didn’t even want to contemplate it. It hadn’t changed a bit from what he’d told Mallory less than five minutes after leaving Amy in her room: What a can of worms that would open! He’d be better off staying away from her . . . but still . . .

He had no idea of what Frenchy’s husband looked like, but as he looked down the tracks toward Warsaw, he almost thought he saw the shades of the two of them sitting out in front of him. He’d never quite figured him out in a way that really satisfied him, gave him understanding why and how that worked, how he could live with it . . . well, different strokes, and all that.

He’d thought about it a lot, and rejected it every time. Down that road lay complexity, trouble, and probably ruin. But maybe, just maybe not. It would probably mean leaving Spearfish Lake, leaving a lot, risking a lot . . . but . . .

He knew he had two or three weeks and then he’d have to make up his mind, at least to take the first step – and a final decision might be a long way off, if it ever came. What surprised him was that he was considering taking that first step at all, but maybe, just maybe, it might be the answer to what had bothered him for months . . . years.

Danny, you goddamn fool, he thought. Don’t even think it.

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