Chapter 35

February 18 - 25, 2000

Back to Flagstaff

Several hours later, Michelle was on an airliner headed for Phoenix, while Crystal and Scooter turned the nose of the van toward Spearfish Lake. There had been times when Crystal had driven the trip close to straight through, but they weren't in that big a hurry and made a night stop along the way, calling to give Randy the head's-up that they were coming.

Crystal pulled the minivan into Randy's driveway about a month and a half after the wedding in Spearfish Lake. It was still the dead of winter there, not any warmer than it had been at the first of the year, but Crystal and Scooter had spent most of the intervening time in Florida and the Bahamas, so it seemed like it was a damned sight colder.

It was now Randy's slowest time of the year. Construction work would be picking up markedly in a few weeks, but right now there wasn't much that could be done, and what planning work there was had to be stretched out so that there'd be something to do when he headed into the office. As a result, Crystal and Randy had the best chance they'd had in years to just sit back and talk.

Randy and Nicole had been married a month and a half now, and they were settling in with each other. Now there was the chance to talk Appalachian Trail with her a lot more seriously than there had been in those hectic days during the wedding, and there was time to catch up on other stuff, too.

It was Scooter who asked the question that she and her two friends had frequently giggled about over the last six weeks. "So, Nicole, how long did he leave the handcuffs on you?"

"Oh, God," she sighed. "Did I ever put my foot in it on that one! I decided I wasn't going to ask Randy to take them off, just to see how long he'd leave them on me."

"It turned out that we were sort of working at cross purposes," Randy said. "I'd decided that I was going to leave them on her until she asked me to take them off. I was curious how long it would take her to ask."

"I wish I'd known that," Nicole shook her head. "I didn't find that out till later. Anyway, the day after we saw you out at the Inn, school started back up. When we got up that morning, I was still wearing the handcuffs and I had to go teach. I couldn't believe Randy was going to send me to work in handcuffs. But, I got dressed up and ready to go with his help, and then he said, 'Hey, you better get moving, you're going to be late.'"

"I couldn't believe that she'd actually go to school without asking me to take them off her," Randy said. "But by then, I'd have left them on her, even if she'd asked, just to see if she'd go through with it."

"I still don't believe I did it," Nicole laughed. "I mean, the principal and a lot of the teachers had seen Randy put them on me at the wedding, and I got some of the goofiest questions on Earth when I got to school. I mean, embarrassed, my God! So, I got to class, and the kids are all howling, and all I could do was make some dumb ass joke about the chains of matrimony, when Randy walked into the classroom and unlocked them. He gave me a kiss right in front of all the kids, and walked out."

"It was more than some dumb ass joke," Randy grinned. "She was standing there cracking jokes like she was Jay Leno or somebody." He shook his head and continued, "Actually, I lost on the deal. I guess we were trying to out-stiff each other. If I hadn't done it, she'd have worn them all day."

"As if I would have had any choice," Nicole laughed. "Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of teaching done that morning, the kids all thought it was a scream, and the story got all over town."

Scooter shook her head. "So, you wore handcuffs what, three days straight?"

"A little more than that," Nicole smiled. "Wearing them was a pain in the butt, but I knew Carole had managed it, so I really couldn't complain."

"You have to admit," Randy laughed, "It did make what there was of our honeymoon even more memorable."

"I can't imagine it," Crystal shook her head. "I mean, even two or three days would strike me as a real pain in the butt. But six years? Unreal!"

"She was still wearing them a lot of the time you were in and out of town," Randy said. "Up till the summer before the winter you spent out at Josh and Tiffany's. I can't believe you hadn't run across her."

"I wasn't here that much," Crystal shook her head. "And most of the time I was fairly busy."

"She was still wearing them when Myleigh met her, that summer she stayed with my folks after she graduated," Randy smiled. "They hit it off pretty well."

"We're moderately close friends," Nicole told them. "A couple different times she's commented that she'd like to meet you, both of you, in fact. I could call over and see if she's free."

"Actually, what we ought to do is take Crystal and Scooter over to see Carole and Wendy," Randy suggested. "Wendy doesn't get a lot of visitors, and she likes them. She'd be impressed with a couple Grand Canyon raft guides dropping by and yarning a bit."

"Good idea," Nicole said. "I could go call."

"Just a second," Randy said. "You can say no if you want to, but the one thing I need to warn you about is that Wendy doesn't get along well with people patronizing her or pitying her. I mean, if you can think of her as someone who needs glasses to get along, just more so, it'll be fine. She's a unique and brilliant person in many ways; it's just that she has to live a life that's a little different than the rest of us."

"You mean like outdoor bums have to live a life that's a little different than the sane world?" Crystal grinned.

"Well, yeah," Randy smiled. "But more so."

Whatever Scooter had ever thought a quadriplegic was like, if she'd thought about it at all, Wendy Carter wasn't it. She was actually fairly independent, mostly because her father was a mechanical engineer with friends who liked to tinker. Wendy more or less lived in the middle of a computer-driven, voice-activated support system called "Jeeves," which could do some remarkable things. She'd written one book, about Carole and a friend, and was deep in writing a complicated fantasy novel. She was quite personable and obviously brilliant, which could also be said of her sister.

"What I can't understand," Scooter said to Carole, being right up front about it, "Is how you could wear handcuffs for six years."

"It's not easy to understand," Carol said. "In fact, I can look back now and say I can't understand it, either. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We all like to feel a little special, a little different. Some people get piercings. Some get tattoos."

"Some people become Grand Canyon raft guides," Wendy snickered.

"Well, yeah," Scooter shook her head. "I see that part of it."

"While it could be tedious at times, it was often interesting," she smiled. "At times, it was a lot of fun, just to watch the reactions people would have when seeing something that outrageous in front of them. Toward the end of the experience, a friend of Wendy's and mine wore handcuffs for two months, partly because she wanted to see what it was like. We had a tremendous amount of fun playing off of each other."

"Randy and I caught Carole and Brenda down on the beach at Ft. Lauderdale one time," Nicole grinned. "They were wearing nothing but bikinis and handcuffs, and they were putting people on so bad that there were times that I had to sneak off to break down and laugh my butt off."

"There were good times and bad," Carole laughed. "That weekend was one of the best. Brenda and I could play off of each other much better than I could do as a solo act. It was a scream." She let out a sigh and continued. "What I did not realize at the time was that I had become thoroughly addicted to wearing them. I mean, I had no particular desire to take them off, but I didn't see that as an addiction. Then Wendy tricked me into taking them off, and then I realized just how bad an addiction it was."