Tainted Trail

  “Oregon.” Ukiah moved off into the darkened café for a little privacy.

  “This is Jared Kicking Deer. You wanted to see my grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you come out to the farm, you can meet him.”

  Jesse Kicking Deer was the oldest man that Ukiah had ever seen. His skin folded again and again like a prune’s. He sat on the edge of the folding lawn chair, seeming too excited to relax into the green-and-white webbing. Cassidy had claimed that her grandfather was nearly a hundred; Ukiah had expected someone fragile with age. Jesse Kicking Deer radiated health, from thick white hair, sound teeth, and long hard fingernails.

  “Is this him?” Jesse asked.

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Jared leaned in the doorway of the back porch. He had greeted Ukiah and Max at the front door, shown them through the house to the back porch where Jesse and Uncle Quince waited, and yet paused at the door, as if not wanting to commit fully to their presence. “He thinks he’s Magic Boy. We think he might be too.”

  Jesse considered Ukiah with fierce dark eyes. “His face is very familiar.” His wrinkled hands came up and moved through smooth hand signs. “The eyes. The nose. It’s been so long. I did not think I would forget a face so loved.”

  “Father,” Uncle Quince murmured in Nez Percé. “Kee-ji-nah is dead.”

  Kee-ji-nah was Cayuse, not Nez Percé. Magic Boy. The liquid syllables struck something deep inside Ukiah that resonated. Kee-ji-nah. That’s my name!

  “I saw him,” Jesse replied to his son in Nez Percé while Ukiah sat dumbstruck. “After your brother was born. I hunted elk in the mountains, and I saw him. His hair was matted. His eyes were wild as the wolves. It was Kee-ji-nah. He did not know me. He ran away, frightened.”

  “Father, I’ve seen the photographs.” The last word, in English, jarred against the native words Quince used. “He is dead.”

  “Then what happened to his body?” Jesse asked. “Why did it vanish?”

  “It vanished?” Ukiah asked, feeling cold. “Were they sure he was dead?”

  They looked at him, startled.

  “How was he killed?” he pressed.

  They continued to look at him in surprise. Ukiah wondered why, then realized that he asked his questions in Nez Percé. There was anger gathering in Uncle Quince’s face, as if Ukiah had intentionally eavesdropped when they thought they spoke in private. Trying to outrun that storm, Ukiah turned to the old man.

  “Please,” he begged in Nez Percé. “I’ve lost all my memories but those of running with the wolves. I want to know about my mother.”

  The old man shook his head, and said in English. “You talk too fast. The young ones, they speak the tongue of the white man. They fumble with our own language. I have not heard our tongue spoken like running water for so many years.

  “When I was born, Magic Boy lived with my parents, and he cared for me. He changed my diapers. He put me down for naps. He rocked me to sleep. He kissed the little wounds. He played baby games with me. I loved him as much as I loved my father and mother, my grandparents. He seemed old and wise and wonderful.

  “Then I grew older, into a boy, and he became my guide. He took me to the best wading holes. He showed me how to fish. He taught me how to track. He knew the stories and jokes old as the Blue Mountains that I, as a child, had never heard.

  “When I got older, I started to wonder. Why didn’t Magic Boy go to school? Why didn’t we celebrate his birthday? Why did my father and grandfather call him Uncle, when he was so young? Who had been his parents? At first, my parents said that they would tell me when I was older. Then, when I was fourteen, and starting to pass my old clothes down to Uncle to wear, they started to tell me.

  “Magic Boy had been born before the white man came to Oregon. He grew until he was twelve, and then, never grew older, never grew up. His mother had been my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. It was family tradition, that the oldest son, when he had a home of his own and children needing care, would adopt Magic Boy, and the cycle would start again. My grandfather had been raised with Magic Boy’s help, and my father, as were my brothers and I.

  “Eventually, Uncle became like my little brother, to be loved but barely tolerated as I entered the world of being an adult. I had my friends and dated girls. I was the oldest. When I married, and after my children were born, I would have taken Magic Boy to live with me, to help raise my sons and daughters as he had helped raise me.”

  Ukiah shifted uneasily. His mothers had explained once why they had gone through much fuss and bother to have his little sister, Cally. It was not enough, as a lesbian couple, to help raise their nieces and nephews, to always be a second-rank voice of authority, and second place in the children’s heart. “Magic Boy had no children of his own?”

  Jesse looked surprised at the question. “He could not. When he was young, before they knew he would not grow up, they sent him out for the manhood rituals. He was to fast until he saw his totem animal. Again and again, he would go out, but he never saw his spirit animal. He never became a man. He could not marry.” Jesse gave a slight shrug. “Perhaps it was because the spirits knew he would not grow up.”

  But he had. It might be a painful way to grow older, with beatings and death, but at least he could move on. He had a son. He might marry soon. He might father more children. He was no longer locked into an endless childhood. “So, how did you lose him?”

  Jesse took a deep breath and slid back into the chair with a sigh. “We did not take Uncle often to Pendleton. We did not want the white man to know of him. That day, the roundup was at Pendleton. That day, we took Uncle to Pendleton. That day, we dressed him in his finest clothes and took a picture. Until all my aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters died, we still argued among ourselves. ‘Ah, you were supposed to watch. No, no, you were supposed to watch him.’ He had been the thread that binds, and when he unraveled, so did the family.”

  “What happened?”

  “Who knows? One minute he was there, waiting for the parade into the ring, the next he was gone. There was a white man with a camera, he heard the screams and found Magic Boy’s body. He took pictures. People came and saw and left the body alone and when they came back, it was gone, all gone except his bloody clothes. We knew it was him from the clothes.”

  “The ones he was wearing in the photo?”

  “Yes. We looked and looked and found no trace. The white man law said, ‘There is no body, there is no crime,’ and would not investigate.

  “Seventy years, and it still makes me cry. Perhaps because his body vanished. Perhaps because his killing had been so brutal. Perhaps because he would not be dead of old age now. He would have raised my sons, my grandsons, my great-grandsons, and on. He would teach them to track, how to ride, how to beat the drums and sing, how to be truly Cayuse, as the Cayuse were before the white man came. He was a family legacy of love, generations of care, a hundred years or more of tradition, and he was gone.”

  “He is dead,” Uncle Quince said, looking not at Ukiah but at Jared. “There were others that looked like a Cayuse.”

  “None have looked like Magic Boy,” Jared said quietly. “I’ve seen enough to believe. He is Magic Boy.”

  “I was Magic Boy,” Ukiah said quietly. “Whatever happened that day killed that part of me. I’m a different person now. I want to know where I came from, but I can’t go back. I don’t remember the way.”

  Pendleton Public Library, Pendleton, Oregon

  Monday, August 30, 2004

  By Alicia’s planner and Rose’s account, the grad students had visited Pendleton only four times. They spent three nights at the TraveLodge, showering, washing clothes, buying food, and relaxing separately, before returning to the primitive comfort of the tent. The fourth trip had been only to stop for gas and directions to find Jubilee Lake.

  Between the three private investigators, they had already covered all the known locations at which Alicia had visited. At breakfast, Ukiah, Max, Sam, and
Rennie guessed locations where Alicia might have stopped. (Rennie, with his years of hunting out Ontongard, proved to have well-honed detective skills.) They split the resulting list in three, with Rennie shadowing Ukiah, arranging to meet at the library in four hours.

  Although they didn’t discuss it, they were quickly coming to a dead end.

  The library opened at eleven a.m. When they gathered there, none of them had found anything new of interest.

  Max politely requested that Rennie make himself scarce. Rennie had changed over to blue jeans and a T-shirt, but he still managed to radiate menace. Perhaps it was the number of mysterious bulges where he kept weapons hidden. Rennie grinned and promised to keep out of sight.

  The library itself was nearly one wide-open room. The business area was divided off with walls of glass. The circulation desk was to the immediate left of front door, a long L-shaped desk. A woman in her late teens or early twenties, with a long blond braid lying on her shoulder, checked in a stack of books.

  Sam ambled to the counter, saying, “The microfilm sign-in card is here.”

  The woman at the desk looked up, saw it was Sam, nodded and continued working. Sam returned the nod, leaned over to pull open a card file drawer, and pulled out a card. Sam glanced over the card, then held it out to Max and Ukiah. “Look here.”

  Alicia’s name occupied the last filled-in line, dated August 21. Apparently she had come straight from the Tamástslikt and the discovery of the photograph. Sam signed under Alicia’s name.

  The woman at the desk finished up her work and slid across the workspace to beam at Sam. “Hi, Sam.”

  “Hi, Millie.” Sam tapped the card, showing that she signed it.

  Millie leaned across the counter and whispered. “Is that him?”

  “Him who?” Sam tucked the card back into the card file.

  Millie leaned closer to Sam. “The guy Ricky saw you with outside of Red Lion? I heard he’s a cousin of Jared Kicking Deer’s.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Sam ducked her head, a flush of red crawling up her neck to spread across her face.

  Millie looked at Sam’s face and giggled. “He’s cute, but isn’t he a little young for you?”

  Sam tugged on Millie’s braid. “What? You think he’s more your age?”

  Millie glanced at Ukiah, saw that he was listening, and dropped her eyes quickly. “You need a microfilm lens?”

  “Yup.”

  Millie leaned down and fished out a square box. Inside the box, the lens almost looked like gears out of a toddler’s construction set.

  Sam led the way to the small microfilm room hidden behind the reference bookcases. Between the newspaper-stacked bookcases, the two microfilm machines, and several pale green filing cabinets, there was barely room for the four chairs in front of the readers. Ukiah stopped at the door, letting the other two work in the cramped quarters.

  “The big one is the East Oregonian, the local paper.” Sam indicated the larger of the filing cabinets. “The smaller cabinets are papers from Pilot Rock and other neighboring towns.”

  The dates of the newspapers were clearly labeled on the drawer fronts. Max found the correct time range and opened the drawer. He tapped over the square boxes with handwritten labels. “1931. 1932. February, 1933. November, 1933 through—it’s not here.” He indicated an open slot between February and November. “It should be here.”

  Sam looked up from inserting the lens into the first machine. “You’re kidding.”

  Max shook his head, slowly rechecking the boxes. “No. It’s gone.”

  “Maybe Alicia misfiled it.” She joined in the hunt. “Maybe it got replaced under 1943.”

  Ukiah scanned the room from the door, but everything seemed neatly in place. He turned around and glanced over the reference bookcase behind him. The words “Native America” caught his eye. Native America in the Twentieth Century—an Encyclopedia, Mary B. Davis, R 970.004 N213.

  America, not American. What was the difference? Beside the encyclopedia was a book labeled World War II—America At War, 1941-1945, Norman Polmar, R 940.5302 P776. He stared at the library code on the spine. It was the same pattern as the cryptic numbers in Alicia’s daily planner. He went off in search for the matching books.

  OR 364.1523 B26 was a slim book, crudely bound, with only the number visible. He took it down and discovered the title. The Death of Magic by Hannah Barnhart. Alicia’s presence salted the cover. She had handled it for a long period. He opened to the title page. The Death of Magic: Injustice of the Kicking Deer Murder. In the center were photographs. At first he couldn’t grasp what he was looking at, they seemed surreally disjointed photos of body parts clothed in blood-soaked rags. It wasn’t until he hit the beheaded torso that he realized they were pictures of a dismembered child.

  “What’s this?” Max asked as Ukiah handed it wordlessly to him.

  “My death as Magic Boy.”

  Max glanced at the title page, found the photographs, and gave a slight noise of disgust. He shut the book. “God.”

  Ukiah wished he hadn’t looked at the photos. They remained now in his memory, crisp and stark. At least they were black-and-white. “It’s no wonder that most Kicking Deers don’t expect Magic Boy to return.”

  “You okay?” Max gripped his shoulder.

  “Yeah.” He’d be better if he could forget. How had he completely forgotten his murder and everything—all one hundred years or more—before it? The most he’d forgotten since then was a few hours—recent memories bled away and not regained later. Memories older than a day were already genetically encoded. Unbidden, the photos surfaced, along with an answer, and he caught his breath. “Oh, Max, I know why I’ve forgotten everything. I’m not Magic Boy. I’m like Kittanning. I’m just a piece of Magic Boy.”

  “What?”

  Ukiah glanced around to make sure no was listening. “When Kittanning was first formed out of my blood, he had all my memories, and Rennie’s—back to the first of the Ontongard. All those ‘old’ memories are genetically coded but stored in a different area than Kittanning’s own memories. Also they don’t seem to be as . . . sturdy. Rennie describes the area like a temporary buffer space in a computer; old information is dumped in favor for new. Every time Kittanning undergoes a change, that area is overwritten, and he forgets.”

  “When Hex forced him to change from a mouse to a human, he lost a lot, but not everything—like you did,” Max said.

  “If he had stayed an adult mouse, he would have kept everything,” Ukiah explained. “As an infant human, though, as he grows, he’s losing memories. Every day. Every minute. In the past two months he’s forgotten everything I know of you, my moms, and Pittsburgh. Rennie’s memories are denser, but they’re fragmenting too. I don’t know if Kitt will retain anything by the time he’s mature.”

  Max pinched the bridge of his nose. “Kid, please don’t take this the wrong way, but your people don’t make sense, evolutionwise. Why have genetic memory passed on to your children, only to have them outgrow it?”

  “Ontongard don’t have children,” Ukiah said. “They reproduce by infecting other creatures. A handful of cells are injected into a host to profligate throughout the body.”

  “Well, this whole old-memory/new-memory thing—”

  “—isn’t normal in Ontongard. Rennie theorizes that it’s part of what allows the Pack be individuals. We can tell where we as an individual end and someone else starts.”

  “Prime passed this mutation on to both you and the Pack?”

  “Luckily.”

  “So, if you’re not Magic Boy, where is he?”

  Ukiah recalled the photos of the scattered limbs. He swallowed hard. “He might not exist anymore. There may be just parts of him, like me, left.”

  Max stared at him for several minutes. “Ukiah, this is fairly empty country. Someone’s bound to notice four or five identical Wolf Boys running around. You would have noticed them. You’ve never said anything about remembering so
meone like you. Was there?”

  Ukiah consulted his earliest memories. “No, there wasn’t.”

  Max tapped the book’s spine into his palm. “I would assume that any Native Americans picked up as a John Doe would have been taken to the reservation. No one has remarked on the similarities between you and someone else in the tribe. Maybe the rest stayed animals. There could be dozens of mice and such flitting around someplace.”

  With just one mouse, Ukiah could recapture his childhood. “I wonder where the murder site was.”

  Max lifted the book. “It’s probably in here. I’m going to copy this.”

  Ukiah pondered if he wanted to look for the murder site and chance finding lost bits of Magic Boy. While Rennie’s memories remained clearly delineated from his own, the memories he recovered from Joe Gary’s cabin—lost for three years—merged seamlessly. What if he couldn’t tell where Magic Boy ended and he began? Which one of him would emerge dominant? The private investigator who lived among the whites, or the Native American who had good cause to hate them?

  Perhaps it would be best to stay ignorant.

  Ukiah joined Sam in checking through the microfilm boxes.

  She glanced up as he entered the room. “Where did Max go?”

  “I found a book he wanted to copy.”

  Sam chewed on her lower lip before saying, “I’m sorry about this whole ‘we’re dating’ mess.”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  She relaxed slightly. “That’s sweet of you to say so.”

  After they checked all the boxes, including opening them and verifying the beginning dates, they checked with Millie. She came and quickly checked over the boxes herself.

  “They were here!” Millie threw up her hands. “That girl was in looking at them.”

  “Alicia Kraynak?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, her. She was in here, bawling her eyes out. I came over to make sure she was okay, and that’s what she had up. September, 1933.”

  “When was this?” Ukiah asked.

  “The Saturday before last. The twenty-first?” Millie went off to call some of the other staff to see if they knew the whereabouts of the missing film.