Chapter 13

July 31, 1999

Flagstaff

"A mail packet from Randy," Crystal shrugged. "I've kept a post office box in Spearfish Lake since I did the trail, and every now and then he sends me what's collected there. He put in a note, Marlin and Jackpine are through the Whites and ought to be in Maine by now."

"Good grief," Scooter shook her head, "If they're in Maine, they're booking. They started only like the first of March."

"That they are," Crystal agreed. "He said Nicole wants to get done in time to take a final shot at the teacher hiring cycle, but she'll probably wind up subbing all winter again."

"What's this all about?" Michelle asked. "I heard you mention Randy a couple times last fall, but who's this Marlin and Jackpine?"

"They're Appalachian Trail hiker nicknames," Crystal explained. "You knew that both Scooter and I have thru-hiked the trail, don't you? My trail name was 'Diamond.' Scooter's was 'Scooter.'"

"I like it better than Rhonda," Scooter snorted. "I thought about getting it made legal a couple times."

"Anyway, Randy is my old boyfriend, we're still good friends, you know that," Crystal explained. "Marlin is his girlfriend now, her real name's Nicole. Jackpine is a friend of hers; I think her real name is Jacqueline although I only heard it once. Marlin and I are pretty good friends; we hiked together three weeks the summer I did the trail." She let out a sigh and continued, "When we split up, I told her she'd make a better wife for Randy than I would, and I'd get out of her way."

"Second thoughts?" Michelle asked.

"No, not really," Crystal shrugged, "It's still the truth. I couldn't be married to him and working in the Canyon. It wouldn't be fair to him." She was silent for a second, obviously thinking. "Thinking of Randy, and thinking of photos," she added, "Scooter, you never got around to getting those photos you took developed, did you?"

"I finished the roll up last trip, but the film is still in the camera."

"Let's run it through the one-hour," Crystal smiled. "Randy's probably been eating his gut out wanting to be with Nicole on the AT, I might as well send him a couple photos to tease him about my being in the Canyon. He deserves it for turning into a work junkie on Nicole and me."

"This is the guy in the construction company, right?" Michelle asked.

"Right, his grandfather owns it. He's up about eighty; Randy's his executive assistant and will probably be running the company in a few years. He busts his ass but he makes good money. Back before I left last winter, he started building a house on a beautiful lake-shore lot. I saw an architect's drawing of it; it's really gonna be awesome."

"That's still quite a pile of mail," Scooter observed. "Did you get anything else?"

"It's mostly stuff from the Alumni Office at Northern, and like that," she shrugged. "Oh, and a 'hope you're doing fine and I'd like to hear from you' from my mother."

"I take that to mean things aren't going any better," Scooter said casually, knowing she was treading on touchy ground.

When she'd hiked for a month with Crystal over two years before, it frequently had been a topic of discussion, although it had rarely come up this summer. Relations between Crystal and her father, Pete, had been deteriorating for years, mostly over Crystal's active, outdoor lifestyle. He'd been non-supportive and critical of her getting her black belt -- which is probably what kept things from getting out of hand -- over her going to OLTA, her working on becoming a PE teacher, her summer job rafting at Ocoee Adventures, her surfing, skiing, and kayaking. Fortunately, Crystal was in college at Northern Michigan University when things got really bad, so she didn't have to put up with it all the time, at least not face-to-face.

Then, when Crystal was a senior, her younger sister Nanci had announced that she wanted to go to Northern. As far as Crystal was concerned, Nanci was immature and looking for a good time, and going as far away from their Chicago home as Northern would mean that she'd effectively be out from under her parent's eyes. Her father told Crystal that it was going to be her duty to keep her sister out of trouble. Crystal didn't like that one bit -- if Nanci fucked up, as she surely would, then Crystal would get the blame from her parents. Added to that, Crystal had to do an extra semester, and she and Randy had been planning on living together to try and see if maybe they could stand to be married to each other -- but Nanci going to Northern effectively ruled that out. As expected, when Nanci went to college the following fall, she majored in sex with a minor in partying and drinking; she didn't bother to study much, if at all, and wound up on academic probation.

And, as expected, when Crystal got home for Christmas, her father didn't have one word of congratulation about her graduating Cum Laude, but was on her ass from his first words about letting Nanci run wild. It was only from a supreme effort at self control that Crystal refrained from using her black belt skills to break every bone in his body; she stormed out the door and hadn't seen him since. When she'd been on the trail with Crystal the following spring, Scooter learned that Nanci had been thrown out of college and that Randy had been involved somehow, but she wasn't real clear about what actually happened, and it was a touchy enough subject that she didn't pry.

Scooter knew that Crystal had been home one more time, after she got off the trail, to discover that Nanci's boyfriend had beaten her up. Whether pissed at her or not, Nanci was still her sister, and Crystal literally kicked the shit out of the hockey player boyfriend -- several days in the hospital worth.

In hanging around with Crystal all summer, Scooter really hadn't learned much else about her relations with her family, not that she'd wanted to. But around various campfires over the summer, Crystal had related some of her adventures since she'd last been home.

She'd more or less based herself out of Randy's parents' home in Spearfish Lake, although she only got there rarely. Randy somehow set up a deal for her to drive a Jeep and travel trailer to Alaska that fall; to save money; she'd hitchhiked back to Seattle on a salmon boat, with memorable and sometimes-harrowing adventures. That winter, she'd worked as a ski instructor in Colorado, and after a series of minor adventures got a job as a crewman on a sailboat to Hawaii and back. A few days after she returned from Hawaii, she stopped at the truck stop on the south side of Flagstaff, saw their ad on a placemat, and unexpectedly wound up working at Canyon Tours. When the season ended, she'd gone back to Spearfish Lake and helped Randy's friends train their dog teams to run the Iditarod, the 1100-mile dogsled race in Alaska.

In that time, Crystal had only talked to her mother, Karin, rarely and her father never -- but her mother had told her that her younger brother Jon had more or less disappeared too, also apparently as a result of Pete's temper. That was surprising; Pete and Jon had been quite close, and Jon was professionally well on his way to following in his father's footsteps. Of Nanci, there was no word other than that she was still apparently running wild in the Chicago area.

"No, things really aren't going any better with my family," Crystal said slowly. "Well, maybe someday," Scooter said noncommittally. In spite of all the problems that Crystal had with her family, Scooter envied her. She had never known her father; her parents had split up before she was born, and her mother had never said much about him -- dead, jail, just gone, whatever; Scooter had never known. Her mother had died in a car wreck the winter after she'd finished the AT, and they hadn't been getting along well for years before. Scooter only had some distant relatives she hadn't seen for years and probably wouldn't know if they walked in the front door of the Canyon Tours office at that instant. At least Crystal had the long-shot prospect of maybe putting things back together someday; Scooter knew it wasn't going to happen for her. It was not the first time this summer that it crossed her mind that she was finding a home in the Grand Canyon just as much as Crystal was. For both their sakes, she decided she'd better change the subject before it got morose. "So, are you going back to Spearfish Lake for the winter?"

"I don't think so," Crystal said. "Oh, I need to stop in and say hi, and like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Randy and Nicole get married this winter, and I'll want to be there for that. But I don't think I want to work for Josh and Tiffany again. Not only is it cold as hell, most of the work is feeding dogs and cleaning up dog shit, although I got to run a dog sled once in a while. Beyond that, I don't have any ideas, other than I think I'd like to be warm. You got anything in mind?"

"Not really," Scooter sighed. "I'd have to find a place to rent if I stayed here in the winter, so I could just as well go somewhere else. Where, and doing what, I don't know, except that I don't think working at that place with Andrea and Debby is a possibility, cover girl or no."