Tainted Trail

  “Perhaps at one time. Things have changed a lot since the 1870s. When we started working on the tour, it was just a hole in the wall into the speakeasy. They used it as a secret passage during police raids.”

  Frank opened the far door.

  The smell of mothballs washed into the room. Ukiah glimpsed a tin ceiling in the room beyond. Utter terror hit him—then was gone. He stumbled backward, fighting the urge to bolt. What was that? What happened to Rennie here?

  No. Rennie never had been in this odd-shaped area beyond the butcher shop’s windows.

  I remember this. I was terrified here. Ukiah walked forward, trembling with the recalled terror and the excitement of finally having discovered one of his own memories.

  The room beyond was set up like the card room. The smell of mothballs came from cloth bags dangling from the tin ceiling. He gazed around, but nothing else came. He stepped back into the light well.

  A sliver of memory. One brilliant, hard moment.

  . . . the ground of the room had been up to the level of the window sill. He lay in the dirt, frightened beyond rational thoughts. He stared at the speakeasy’s door, which then had been a much smaller hole in the wall, cut into the back of a cupboard . . .

  And then the memory stopped.

  “You okay?” Frank asked. “Some people get hit with claustrophobia. They don’t expect it. It’s just a basement, but after all the twists and turns, sometimes . . .”

  “I was here, once, as a child,” Ukiah said. “Something bad happened. It frightened me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t have any memories of my childhood. It’s a complete blank. I was a John Doe who my adoptive parents renamed.”

  “So, Ukiah Oregon isn’t your original name?”

  “No.” The Kicking Deers, he realized, had only called him Uncle. What had been his name?

  Frank looked like he was about to launch into more questions.

  “Tell me about Alicia,” Ukiah detoured him.

  Frank indicated Ukiah to follow him. He juggled the ladder through to the speakeasy, pausing to close doors behind him.

  “She was one of twenty people that I took through, hmm, almost a month ago.” Frank continued. “She seemed to be with this little woman, Italian-looking. I don’t think she said anything to me. She laughed at my jokes. She seemed to be a feminist. Now, the Chinese and the Indians really got a raw deal out of this town. All this land once belonged to the plateau Indians. When the white men came over the mountains, more times than not, they were starving. The Indians would greet them in peace and sell them food so they wouldn’t die.”

  “What does this have to do with Alicia?”

  Frank stopped under another gray, burned-out lightbulb. On the wall was a map, showing the city street, bearing the names that Rennie remembered.

  “Well, the first part of the tour I talk about how badly the Chinese and Indians were treated.” Frank set up the ladder. “The Chinese were indentured servants, which meant they were one step removed from slaves, and treated as such. The Indians were rounded up and confined to the reservation. All through this, Alicia is fine.

  “Second part of the tour, though, we go up to the Cozy Rooms, a brothel, and suddenly you can see the hurt feelings all over her face. These were white women that suffered.”

  Frank held out his hand for a new bulb.

  Ukiah glared at him, angry that this stranger passed judgment on Alicia. “You’re saying she’s a bigot.”

  “That’s simplifying something that’s a whole lot more complicated than that,” Frank said, folding his arms across the top of the ladder. “What’s a Chinese man that lived a hundred years ago to an American woman of 2004? She feels sorry for him, but, hell, he’s dead. This is America! We’ve pissed on everyone, at one point or another, but we’re over all that, right? She hasn’t seen the Chinese mistreated lately, so she assumes that all that badness is over. On the other hand, we’ve still got whores.”

  “I suppose.” Ukiah’s anger retreated into confusion. Indigo’s family never spoke about discrimination, but did that mean that they faced none?

  Frank reached out again for the new bulb, and Ukiah handed it to him. “She’s a friend of yours?” Frank asked, his attention on the socket.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope you find her.” He handed down the old bulb. “Folks come to this area. They gamble at the casino and tour the Tamástslikt. They see the miles of rolling farmland, and that the reservation is marked with only a sign and not a tall fence with barbed wire on top, and they go away with the wrong idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They think that the past is dead. They don’t see that the past is just the beginning of the future.”

  After the cold, damp bleakness of Pendleton’s Underground, Ukiah welcomed the heat shimmering off the wood-plank-patterned cement sidewalk. He stood on the corner, looking at the old street names stamped into the curb. He had forgotten to ask why all the street names had been changed.

  He smelled Cassidy first. A stiff breeze brought him the scent of cut cedar, which brought her to mind moments before her pickup turned the corner. She saw him standing on the sidewalk, lifted her hand to him in recognition, and started past. As if she suddenly changed her mind, though, she stopped her truck half a block down, and honked at him.

  “Hey! Ukiah!” Cassidy leaned out the truck window to wave him over.

  Ukiah checked for traffic and went out to talk to her.

  Her little sister, the blood-swapping candy striper named Zoey, sat in the passenger seat, grinning in welcome. A dog sat between the girls, tense and alert to a stranger’s presence. He nodded to all three. “Hi!”

  “Howdy, Wolf Boy,” Cassidy said. “Jared told me about your friend. I’m sorry. Any luck yet?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to tell. Finding a missing person is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone holds fragments of the puzzle, but not everyone realizes it. Oh, the person with part of the picture that shows the gun or someone tied up knows, but what everyone else holds is too abstract for them to know what they have. To them, it’s a blob of brown, or a flash of red, or just a big chunk of sky-blue.”

  “Do you look for missing people because you were lost once?” Cassidy asked.

  “No. I didn’t feel lost. I just was, as if there was no other way to be.”

  “So, why do you do it?”

  “Because I’m good at it.”

  “Have you found any important pieces of this jigsaw puzzle?” Cassidy asked.

  “Am I supposed to trust you if I have?”

  “Perhaps.” Her smile slipped into something sly-looking. “We are family.”

  “Are we?”

  The smile faded, as if she realized that she had gone too far. “Perhaps. Jared is drumming a different dance, so it’s possible. Come on, trust me. Jared will tell me anyhow. Besides, maybe I can help.”

  “Well, you can tell me now to get to the Tamástslikt. The woman at the bead shop said Alicia asked about information on the tribes. Something to do with my past.”

  Cassidy worked her jaw, thinking. “So, this Alicia, she knew you?”

  “Yes. We’re friends.”

  Cassidy hitched her chin. “Get in. I’ll take you out to the institute. I want to show you something there.”

  Ukiah peered into the truck’s crowded cabin. “There’s no room for me.”

  Cassidy slid back the window behind her, opening it up to the back. “In the back, Elvis. Back.” The dog scrambled into the back. “Zoey, move over.” The girl slid over, making room on the passenger side for Ukiah. “Come on.”

  Ukiah went around to the other side of the truck and got in. The cabin was thick with the smell of cut cedar and white flakes of sawdust whirled about the floor like snow.

  “This is my little sister, Zoey.” Cassidy concentrated on merging with the oncoming traffic. “She’s the baby of the family.”

  Zoe
y used Cassidy’s distraction to turn to him, press a finger to her lips and plead for his silence with her eyes.

  Don’t say what? he tried to communicate silently back, unsure what he wasn’t supposed to say. Surely she didn’t think he would say anything about the stolen vials of blood.

  Her dark eyes went round, growing bigger, and she repeatedly stabbed the finger to her mouth, so he took it to mean Anything! But she was looking ahead, innocently, when Cassidy glanced over at him, apparently suspicious of the silence.

  “Hi!” he tried.

  Zoey rewarded him with a bright smile. “Howdy! I’ve counted. I’m your great-great-great-great-great . . .” Zoey paused, squinting and checking on her fingers. “ . . . great-great-great-grand-niece.”

  My brother or sister’s grandchild. The thought stunned him for a moment. “I-I’m pleased to meet you, Zoey. You can call me Ukiah. It’s what my adopted mothers named me.”

  What had his real mother named him?

  Zoey pressed fingers to his arm. “You feel just like a real person.”

  “He is a real person,” Cassidy murmured.

  “Grandpa said that all of him was alive, and that if you took any one piece away, it’d be alive too. Every drop of his blood, Grandpa says, can be something else.”

  Cassidy clearly wasn’t as startled as he was by this statement. She looked at him with mild curiosity, and then said, “Well?”

  “Well, yes,” Ukiah reluctantly admitted. “That’s basically right. That’s where the mice come in.”

  Zoey dug into her pocket and produced a small box. She opened it up and took out a rectangle of glass. “Here. Show me.”

  “What is that?” Cassidy asked.

  “A glass slide. It came with my microscope.” Seeing Ukiah’s confusion, Zoey explained. “I’m going to be doctor some day, so I asked for a high-quality microscope for my birthday. I told Grandpa about blood typing and he said that you couldn’t type Uncle’s blood because all of him was alive. That as soon as he bled, it became something else.” She pleaded with her eyes. “Can I see?”

  Cassidy threw him a curious look too but said nothing.

  “You can’t tell other people about it,” Ukiah said cautiously.

  “Of course not. It’s a family secret,” Zoey said. “Look, I even got a lancet from a diabetes kit, and gloves.” They were the pale latex gloves they used in the hospital. “One should always take precautions when handling blood. Please? It would only pinch for a minute.”

  “Do you practice that line?” Cassidy asked.

  “Of course,” Zoey said. “Cough. Breath deeply. Say ‘ah.’ ” Zoey caught his hand and squeezed it. “Please?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hold on a minute.” Cassidy guided the car to the berm. They were out of town, on the interstate. Shorn wheat fields extended off on either side to the horizon. “I want to see too.”

  Zoey donned the gloves and lanced his finger with a thin sharp pain. She milked the blood out of his finger onto the glass slide. The flow stopped, the wound healing shut despite the pressure, before Zoey could fumble open a bandage while wearing the gloves. Cassidy had held the slide, and once it was covered with blood, leaned back, as if she wanted it out of his sphere of power.

  The blood gave an unnatural tremble, gathered into a ball, segmented, and hardened. Within a few minutes, a ladybug sat in the blood’s place. The ladybug unshuttered its wings, and with a minute thrum, it rose from the slide, winged over, and settled on his hand.

  “That is creepy,” Cassidy whispered.

  “No, it isn’t,” Zoey said. “It is sooooo cool.”

  The blood reverted back to its original form and seeped into his hand.

  “Oh, wow.” Zoey breathed happiness. “I’ve told Grandpa all about you. You’ve got to come see him.”

  Cassidy gazed at him over the top of her sister’s head. “Yeah. I think you probably should.”

  Tamástslikt was just out of sight of the casino, over a slight rise in the hill. It was a long, low building, like a piece of modern art in and of itself, faced in river stone. Zoey and Cassidy had membership cards. Ukiah paid admission and turned to the sisters, who were conferring quietly.

  Zoey frowned at whatever Cassidy had to say, but then shrugged in compliance.

  “I know you’re really busy,” Cassidy said. “But you say that you don’t remember anything about living with our family. I thought it might be good for you to see all of the museum.”

  “All of it?” He balked at wasting the time.

  “Well, you can skip the videos. It won’t take long. Family legend says that you’ve got a magic memory; you can remember anything you’ve seen. Just run through and think about it later?”

  That seemed reasonable.

  Zoey announced that she had seen it all dozens of time and by now it was “boooooring!” She said she would be in the gift shop. Cassidy guided Ukiah out the cavernous teak entry hall. Beyond, a huge rock formation guarded the entrance proper to the museum. Pictographs decorated the natural stone face. Plaques described the importance of the crude drawings.

  “The museum is set up in three areas,” Cassidy said. “The way we were before the white man, the way we became what we are today, and where we hope to go in the future.”

  Beyond was a collection of artifacts made of stone, wood, leather, and reed. Judging by the amount of fishing equipment—nets, weights, spears—life had revolved around the salmon. A teepee of reeds woven into mats stood beyond it, and from inside it, recorded voices told stories of his people.

  “This was our culture before the white man came,” Cassidy explained. “Our people have lived on this plateau for ten thousand years.”

  “Look at what they were defending themselves with.” Hex held out short wooden shafts with tips of stone.

  The arrows were amazing objects of craft, but they would have been no true weapon against the aliens, had the Ontongard landed in force. Even if the arrows killed an Ontongard, it only rendered the alien dead for a short period of time.

  “Long before the white man arrived in Oregon, their horses changed our lives.” Cassidy pointed out the next exhibit, centered around two riders on life-sized horses. A plaque described a Cayuse chief leading out a war party, and encountering another tribe with horses. Grasping immediately what the horse could mean to their people, the party had stripped off everything they carried and offered it as trade for a mare and a stallion.

  Ukiah gazed at the mounted pair, wondering if he had known the wise Cayuse chief. Was he related to him?

  “Then the white man himself came.”

  The museum chronicled the beginnings of trade, and then, a purchase between the European French and the East Coast Americans led the United States government to see all of the land to the West Coast as theirs. After exploring the extent of the purchase, the government threw it open to settlement. Any married white couple that traveled to Oregon received a square mile of land. Half a million white people made the journey to claim the land.

  Ukiah stared at the map after reading about the Louisiana Purchase. “But how did the French own it?”

  “Because they were the first white people to arrive.”

  “But what about the natives who already lived here?”

  “They were forced to live on a section of land that the government chose for them.” Cassidy showed him maps depicting a shrinking mass of land. “We used to call all this ours, then the government told us we had to live here. Then they reduced it to this. This is how much we own today.”

  Ukiah traced out the rivers on the map. Few fell within the reservation boundaries. “But we lived on fish.”

  “And we starved.”

  This was nearly as bad as what the Ontongard would have done to the natives. He felt somehow betrayed. He read on, and the history grew even bleaker. The white man brought smallpox and measles to the area. Entire villages died. A white doctor tried to save the natives, but all his patients died. Believing the doctor
was poisoning his patients, the Cayuse killed him, and triggered a war they couldn’t hope to win.

  Finally, Ukiah couldn’t stand any more. He walked quickly through the next section, staring at the floor, trying to avoid the wall displays. Fleeing the truth, he only stopped when they reached the teak entry hall again. As Cassidy said, though, all of it was now etched it into his memory.

  “Why did you think I should see any of this?” he forced out in a hurt whisper. “It’s like drinking poison.”

  “You lived through all this.” Cassidy rubbed his shoulder, trying to comfort him. “The white man stole, and lied, and killed our people. The Cayuse don’t even speak their own language anymore—the white man took it from us in the early 1800s.”

  “I don’t remember,” he hissed. “I don’t remember any of it!”

  If I found a mouse with my old memories, would I even want to reclaim it, knowing what the past held?

  “But if you ever do get back your memory,” Cassidy whispered, “this is what you’re going to remember. You witnessed the white man do these unspeakable things—and now you live with them.”

  Why hadn’t Mom Jo and Mom Lara told him about this? Why keep him ignorant of his true heritage? Why hadn’t Max, in the last few days, warned him what he might discover here? It shook his faith in his moms and Max.

  Ukiah realized he had been right, that first night outside the Kicking Deer home, when he saw the house like a humane cage. His life was irrevocably changed. He could only escape what he just saw by bleeding out the memory and never taking it back.

  Cassidy brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Maybe being forewarned will make it all less of a blow.”

  He ducked his head, and his bangs fell back into his eyes. “Is there something really here relating to Alicia?”

  “Yes. It’s a photograph she might have seen.” Cassidy pointed down a narrow hallway off the grand entrance.

  The hallway had a door into the gift shop to the right, bathrooms on the left, and continued on down to staff offices. A temporary exhibit hung on the wall, past the point of normal public areas. Looking for Alicia on his own, he would have ignored the exhibit. A plaque explained that these were family photographs taken during the annual rodeo.