It still took them another twenty minutes to get out of the sub shop and back to the store – there always seemed to be something else to talk about. It took another fifteen minutes after that to get Debbie out of the store with the ad in her hand, and it only happened then because a woman came in to ask about a new microwave oven; there was a woman talking new washer-dryer set right after that. Both turned into sales, and Danny told the second woman that he’d deliver her new appliances right after noon tomorrow and pick up the old ones; he couldn’t do it tonight since he had other commitments. She said that was fine.

Finally, it slowed down a little; Danny loaded the woman’s new washer and dryer into the van so it would be ready to deliver the first thing after he closed tomorrow, and then sat down to reflect on the heady two and a half hours he’d had around lunch.

Debbie was an interesting woman, downright fascinating. Her background was very different from his, and so were her interests. In a way, that bothered him a little – not that he was repulsed by her interests in her culture and heritage by any degree, but because he had very little that he was remotely as interested in as passionately as she was. It made him seem rather bland and dull and wishy-washy by comparison.

Again he had doubts, not so much about Debbie as about himself. He thought of the people he was closest to around Spearfish Lake, and how many of them had deep, passionate interests in something. There was the Club for his folks, of course, and Jennifer and Blake had their music, Blake and Randy had their martial arts, Brandy had her sports, Phil, Josh, Tiffany, and now Candice had their dog sledding. John was pretty serious about his kids and their sports, and now that tax season was over he was often back in his basement working on his model of the Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad. Danny had once had a fairly serious interest in volleyball, but that had been left behind with Marsha and had been dying for a while even before things blew up between them – and there was nothing to replace it. Hell, even thinking back to the Redlite Ranch – Jennlynn with her flying, Frenchy with her kids, Peppermint Patty with her medical studies, especially given her idea of light reading in off hours was Gray’s Anatomy. He’d once described Jennlynn, to Debbie at that, as an "incomplete personality." Right now, he was feeling his own personality was rather incomplete.

But maybe that was just temporary, with the next thing waiting to happen. And . . . maybe it was happening. And, maybe not, too – but it had been a very interesting time, and more beckoned for the evening. Yes, Debbie had issues, but she seemed to have a handle on them, better than he had on his own, which admittedly were still wrapped up to some degree with the breakup with Marsha, and the general aimlessness and loneliness that had followed. But for the moment, it looked vaguely promising. Mostly he’d listened to Debbie over that period, digging her out a little, and each layer that he’d uncovered seemed more fascinating than the one before. A complex individual, indeed. He hadn’t talked that much about himself, but at least that was partly due to the fact that the subject hadn’t worked its way around to him at all. Besides, superficially at least, Debbie knew a lot more about him than he’d known about her, thanks to her contact with his mother over the years. So, for now, maybe that didn’t matter as much. And, she’d seemed about as interested in him as he had been in her.

It was just a little surprising, and a little troubling in its way, that Debbie didn’t have a current boyfriend. But, on the other hand, she was an Indian in Spearfish Lake, after all, and was known to have serious interest in her cultural background, to the point where a lot of guys might shy away. But, at the same time, to go for so long? Danny searched his memory of the conversation they’d had, and could not remember any of the obvious "serious loner" cues that he’d easily picked up from Jennlynn, and had been written all over Marsha, at least after that issue came into focus for him. On the other hand, he had a lot of friends in the air on their way to Alaska at that very instant, heading to the wedding of a woman who had gone almost twenty years from high school before finding a guy who seemed to ring her bell. Much of that time had been in Alaska, where the guy-to-girl ratio was supposedly much higher. He only remembered Shelly vaguely, but those memories and the stories that the dog sledders told about her didn’t sound very "loner" to him. No way of telling, of course, and probably not a fair comparison to Debbie’s situation . . . but it meant that going without a boyfriend for what? – seven years she’d been at the Record-Herald, and Kenny had been before that? It might mean nothing at all.

So, at a minimum, worth more digging and investigation, that much was clear. And, in the long run? At this point, at least as good a bet as Amy, and without the obvious downsides. That meant for the moment any thoughts of Amy were way on the back burner, even with her showing up here in a couple weeks. Things could be a lot clearer by then.

Five o’clock and quitting time could not come fast enough, and for the last few minutes Danny had been dreading a customer showing up at the last minute and wanting a long, dragged-out shit-shoot and sales session over some minor household appliance. None did, and he didn’t give anyone showing up as much as ten seconds late the chance, he was out of there that quick. Since this was going to involve a run right off the bat, there was no point in a quick shower, but he did change into his running shorts and a T shirt, and threw some clean clothes in a duffel bag. Maybe he could borrow Debbie’s bathroom for a quick shower and change afterward. Or, as far as that went, part of the trailer park fronted the lake, still colder than snot by Florida standards, but a quick dip would probably serve just as well, and he could do that in his running gear; either way, it would work.

He didn’t check his watch but it must have been about twenty after five when he pulled the Lumina in behind the blue Geo Tracker that sat under Debbie’s carport. She must have heard him drive in, for she came out of the trailer and down the steps as he was getting out of the car, dressed in red running shorts and a white tank top, with running shoes. "I take it Sally didn’t get too upset about your disappearing over lunch hour," he grinned.

"Oh, no problem," she told him, bending over to stretch a little as he did the same thing. "It was a slow day and I was working ahead a bit. It kept me out of the office for a while."

They took their time on the run, starting off heading through the park, out onto Lakeshore and across the bridge over the channel between the head of the cove and the backwater where the trailer park was located. They went down past Randy and Nicole’s house, with no sign of either of them around, then down to the beach area and towards downtown. Before they got there, Debbie led them off into the side streets behind the lake, past John and Candice’s house – and they had to be pretty near Alaska by this point – and a little later, Carole Carter’s house. Following that, they went down other side streets, through a city park with ball diamonds, a back path, and somehow or other came back out on Lakeshore again, on the far side of Hannegan’s Cove and the trailer park. What little talking they did wasn’t deep thoughts or anything, just a little friendly chatter about people they both knew, and some events of the past few years Danny had missed while being away from Spearfish Lake. They slowed down in the last couple hundred yards to walk off the last of the run, easing down slowly.

At his suggestion, they both headed into the backwater, which proved to be cold, not as cold as the main lake, perhaps, but cold enough for any purposes needed. There was a little yelling at the shock of the cold, and they spent a minute or two splashing each other and grabassing like they were a couple of little kids, before heading slowly back up to the trailer. Danny used her bathroom for a few minutes to dry off and change into dry clothes, while she used the bedroom. She came out after he did, wearing a light-brown tank top dress, and the same beadwork and quillwork choker that she’d worn earlier in the day. She ducked into the bathroom for a moment to brush her still lake-damp hair, and asked, "Are you up for dinner yet?"

"Not really," he said. "I could stand a drink. I mean, fruit juice or something. I probably won’t be interested in food for a little while."

"I don’t have anything in the house," she said. "But I could borrow a beer from the neighbors, or something."

"No, Debbie," he said flatly. "I remember what you said about alcohol. I drink a little, once in a while. I don’t need to drink at all. I will not drink in front of you, now or ever."

"Danny," she smiled. "You don’t have to do that. It’s not that bad. It’s not like I’m struggling every minute to keep from having a drink. It’s just that I know what it could do if I let it get out of control."

"Doesn’t matter," he said. "I just don’t want to flaunt it in front of you, OK?"

"Danny, I appreciate the thought," she nodded. "That’s kind of you."

"Like I said, it’s not like I have to have a drink," he smiled. "In fact, the one time in my life that I absolutely knew I needed a drink I happened to grab a bottle of bourbon about as foul as you can buy legally. Anything worse has to be bootleg. That cured me."

"Tell you what," she laughed. "It’s a nice evening. Let me grab some carrot and celery sticks, we can take some diet soda out and sit on the lawn chairs, then we can get down to some serious talking."

Over the next hour or so, they killed the veggies and four cans of diet soda between them. Without too much prompting, Debbie got him to telling some of the better Redlite Ranch stories, like how he’d wound up there in the first place. She’d already heard about Jennlynn, of course, the story he’d told out at the Spearfish Lake Café back in January had made the rounds at least as far as her, but now she heard the details. Without using any more names than Jennlynn’s, he also told the Jon and Tonia story, and told her about Peppermint Patty and her quest to be a doctor. The last, of course, was not a funny story, it was poignant.

"The poor girl," Debbie shook her head. "She awes me, too. God, I thought I had it rough. I’d have caved in a long time before I went that far to change my life."

"There are stories like that," Danny told her. "But for every one, there’s a half dozen more women who have been through hell and have been lucky to climb up that far in life, and often they haven’t shaken it off. I mean, we’re talking child abuse, forced child prostitution, drugs, booze, lots of nasty shit, and God knows I heard those stories, too. Whatever you may think of the Nevada houses, once you make the admission that prostitution exists at all, you have to think that it’s a pretty good model in comparison to some of the other ways it’s done."

"I know some of those stories," she said sadly. "Girls I went to school with. I mean, you mix drugs, booze, poverty, and no sense of cultural pride, even cultural shame, and it happens. It happens all too often. Really, I didn’t miss it by all that much, just by luck and a hard head. God, if it had happened to me I would have hoped I would have been lucky enough to have wound up in a place like that, but I probably wouldn’t have."

"Which leads me to a question I’ve wondered about ever since I walked into the Redlite Ranch for the first time," he said. "Rural Nevada counties are the only place in the country where an operation like that is fully legal. Now, I don’t know of the ins and outs of the legalities, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the casino at Three Pines and other Indian casinos are actually illegal by state law. They’re allowed to operate because of the sovereignty of the reservation, which means that they get to make their own laws, in spite of what the state wants. Am I right?"

"It’s not quite as simple as that, and I’m no expert either," she said. "In simple terms, where the casino is actually operated on the reservation it’s pretty much true. There are some tribes, not ours, that can operate casinos off the reservations, and there’s some pretty complex politics involved. As I said, I don’t understand it. The casinos have been good for The People in some ways, bad in others."

"Right," he said. "But here’s the question. I know there’s a good cash flow that goes through the Redlite, probably nothing like the casino but nothing to sneeze at. And there’s nothing like it that’s legal any closer than Nevada. Why hasn’t someone opened a place like that on a reservation?"

Debbie shook her head. "Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe they haven’t thought of it. I know I never thought about it until you mentioned it just now." She let out a sigh. "The casino is bad enough. Just do me a favor and don’t mention it around any of the elders. As a katara I wouldn’t want to have my name involved with even the mere suggestion, even the fact that I know you. You’re right, it may be a good model, but it would make a bad reputation even worse."

"OK, I won’t," he said. "It was just talking, anyway. Shall we change the subject?"

"I wouldn’t mind," she said, obviously a little sensitive. "But here’s a stupid question. Why do they call it a ranch? I mean, if I understand you correctly, it’s a building that’s filled with a lot of prostitutes beside a highway and an airstrip."

"Good question," he smiled, glad to be off what was clearly a sensitive topic. "I never did get a straight answer to that one. My own feeling is that it’s just kind of a macho rural name, makes you think Marlboro Man or something, so it’s marketing. One of the shift managers told me one time that way back when, the bordellos used to have corrals, even pastures, and people would swap livestock for services. Sometimes they’d fatten up the livestock before they slaughtered them for the staff and customers. But I’m told that there are a couple of bordellos that are actually sort of dude ranches, on west from where I was. I never saw them, but I talked to girls who had done shifts there. They’re usually pretty small, mostly with regular girls, with a few extras brought in for variety. Some of the regular girls have their own strings of horses and pasture them. They can, uh, either take you for a ride or take you for a ride."

She shook her head and laughed for several seconds. "Now there’s a marketing concept it would have been fun to do a paper about in Buchmeister’s course down at Weatherford! He would have just split a gut!" She shook her head again. "You know, Danny, when your mother mentioned what you’d been doing out there, I thought it was really pretty grotesque. But then, she explained it a little and it didn’t seem quite so bad, like it made a weird sort of sense. Now I see that you were just looking in on it for the sake of the experience, for the learning it could give you, and that it doesn’t really represent what you are. It’s good that you could take some good experiences out of it, some lessons, but apparently the bad side also touched you, too, so you look at it as a mixed blessing. I can see it provoked some thoughts in you, and it has in me. Thank you for sharing it."

"Did I just hear a katara talking?"

"Yes and no," she smiled. "I’m always a katara, but I usually don’t talk katara stuff very much, at least around Spearfish Lake. But yeah, there’s a life lesson there that I think you learned well, things and insights that will stay with you a long time. Good ones, mostly, but even the bad ones are good because you know what’s bad and they’ll keep reminding you of it."

"I don’t know," he said. "I know it was more interesting, and I got more out of it in lots of ways than I would have gotten if I’d stayed across the road and read War and Peace to kill that five weeks, so I count it as a positive all around."

"It sounds to me like you did well with it," she said. "Tell you what. It’s getting late enough that the bugs are starting to come out. I’ve got some sliced turkey and some pita in the house, let’s see what else is in the refrigerator."

In the messing around to get sandwiches built, the topic changed on them a little, and Danny didn’t mind. While he wanted to be open and honest with Debbie, it was hard to talk about a place like the Redlite with her, and keep both sides of his impressions honest. And it was clear that the topic could be easily scratched too much – she’d gotten a little ouchy about it a couple of times, although there had been some good laughs, too. He wasn’t going to say that was the end of the Redlite stories he would tell her, but he decided he wouldn’t go out of his way to bring them up. But, the history was established, now; if he needed to reach into that bag for a story or a point to make, she’d know it was there and the why of it.

"You know," he said as he sat on the couch, sandwich in hand. "There were some things you said about your language today that raised a couple questions in my mind. I guess I never realized that your language was that separate. I mean, I always thought the Three Pines people were a band of Ojibwa."

"Couldn’t be further from the truth," she said. "We’re more or less allied with the Ojibwa, and that’s how we’re classified by the BIA. But it’s a very different tribe; there are only a few Ojibwa words in the language, and they’re obviously recent additions. In fact, we’re a completely different people; we just happened to be in the area when the first whites showed up. Can you stand a little lecture?"

"Sure, that’s why I asked."

"Like I told you earlier, we don’t actually know a lot about our history, but we do know a few things, and some of them have been learned relatively recently. From language studies, and more recently from mitochondrial DNA testing, we know that The People are an Athabaskan people. Which is to say, we were living in like northern Alberta and Manitoba around seven or eight hundred years ago. We don’t know exactly why we picked up and moved, there are legends that kataras tell, but the truth is fuzzy and hard to date. But we also know from several climate studies that the weather turned worse for a period of a couple hundred years around that point, and some of the Athabaskan people picked up and moved. The People are one of those groups. We don’t know if we were run out or moved voluntarily, but it may have been a combination of the two. Some time later, probably a couple hundred years but well before the French arrived, we were living roughly where we are now. The Ojibwa and Chippewa came into the area from the east, about the same time or a bit later, and like I said, we ran the Lakota and the other related tribes, the ones incorrectly known as ‘Sioux’, out of the area. Not all of them left; there are still some Dakota around. Are you still with me?"

"Right," he said. "I see why the language is different. Considering you as some kind of offshoot of Ojibwa is bureaucratic stupidity."

"A good term for it," she laughed. "And the truth. But here’s where it gets interesting. Now, a lot of Athabaskans stayed in the area we know as, guess what, Athabaska, and on north and west until you run into Inuit, but some didn’t. Another larger group wandered off on a far different course, displaced to some degree another group known today as the Anasazi, although the climate change had something to do with it, too. Just for fun, would you like to take a wild guess at what the common name of those people is?"

"Haven’t a clue."

"Navajo," she grinned. "You’ve heard of them down in Arizona?"

"You’re kidding!"

"No, I’m not," she said. "I haven’t actually met a Navajo since I’ve spoken Shakahatche well enough to tell, but people like Ellen tell me that they can understand each other pretty well and only occasionally have to resort to English to tell the other what they mean, at least in general, although there’s a lot of words we don’t have in common. Obviously there’s been some language drift on both sides in probably six or eight hundred years, especially considering no written language for most of it. Here’s the kicker. You remember me telling you that we only recently have developed a written language for Shakahatche? It’s adapted from Navajo, and one of their people helped with it. It’s not exact, but it’s pretty close, and it gave a running start. This is recent, Danny, we’re talking the last twenty years. The last few years I’ve spent a lot of time learning from the first people to ever be able to write and read in the language of The People. Granted, there aren’t a lot of us who speak it, but that’s pretty awesome to me."

"It is to me, too," he said. "I mean, not quite up there with Sequoyah, but you can really touch it."

"Sequoyah?" she frowned. "That one got by me."

"You mean I actually get to teach a Shakahatche katara something about Indians?" he laughed. "I’m surprised, this is a pretty well-known story."

"You still have me lost," she smiled.

"OK, this is down in the southeast, so maybe I have a little advantage on you, from all the time I spent in Florida. He’s the Cherokee who developed the written Cherokee language, back in like the 1820s. He was an illiterate and knew little of language structure, nothing of written language at all except for the fact that whites managed to use symbols to write their language somehow. He managed to break the language down into sounds and develop symbols for each of the sounds. In other words, an alphabet. The concept is a little different from how whites do it, but he was running largely blind, nothing to adapt from. So, he’s the only man in the history of the world who can be singled out as having reduced a spoken language to a written one by creating and alphabet from scratch. Almost all other written languages are adaptations of something else way back in history. Not only did he invent it, he taught it. A few years later, there were newspapers in Cherokee."

"Cool!" she smiled. "No, I never heard that one before. I’ll have to look that one up, or maybe ask Ellen about it."

"Let’s drop back to Shakahatche for a minute," he said. "Say something for me."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Oh, anything. The lake is blue. Did you bring home any fish for supper? Doesn’t matter, but fairly simple."

"Well, all right," she said, and gave out a few strange sounding words. "The lake is blue," she finished.

"OK, go back through it, tell me what each of the words is, and something about how the sentence is structured."

"Are you trying to learn this?" she asked.

"Well, a little," he smiled. "I used to have a pretty good ear for languages in college. I never majored or minored in any of them but most of my loose electives were languages. At one time I could speak a little French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Almost none of it now, as it’s use it or lose it. I’m just a little curious about how easily I could pick up Shakahatche."

"It’s not a real simple language; it has a pretty good vocabulary," she warned. "And the sentence structure is more than a little goofy compared to English. Besides, I’m no expert, I’m barely fluent and don’t know all the nuances."

"Let’s give it a quick try, anyway," he smiled. "Just for fun."

In a half hour, a couple things were established. She was right – it wasn’t easy. He was right – it was fun. He did have a good ear for the sounds, and was quickly parroting sentences. Understanding them and constructing them would clearly be a challenge.

Eventually, the topic of discussion wandered off languages, and on to other things, more talk about who they were, where they were going. She persuaded him to talk about Marsha a little, about the frustrations he’d had in trying to cope with his marriage coming to an end, some of the insights he’d had, and that led to some insights of their own.

Eventually, it grew late. "Debbie," he told her, moving around to get up. "This has been one of the most interesting and fun evenings of my life, but unlike some ad salespeople who work five days, I have to work tomorrow morning, then deliver a washer and dryer right after lunch. Maybe we could get together again after that."

"I know it’s late," she said, getting up herself. "But if anything, I’ve enjoyed this evening more than you have. Tomorrow afternoon sounds like a great idea."

They met by the front door. What started as a handshake turned into a hug. She was warm and firm in his arms, a little shorter. The hug went on and on, and soon turned into a kiss. After his time at the Redlite Ranch, he recognized a lot more power in a kiss than he once had.

Eventually their lips came apart. She looked up at his face, and he stared down into her big, beautiful brown eyes as in a pleading, hopeful voice hardly louder than a whisper she said the words that thrilled him as no others had in months, even years: "Danny, please don’t go."

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