“Getting a new one is the only practical answer,” Lou said. “What you’ll save in electricity costs will pay for getting a new one. Hell, you probably could sell this one to an antique dealer.”
“Heretic!” Cassidy hunted through a battered red metal toolbox. “You’re missing the whole point!”
“Cassidy,” the youngest said. “You just said getting a new one is human nature.”
“What’s the point?” asked the eldest man.
“It’s a landmark. A tradition.” Cassidy stood, her back to Ukiah. “We’ve got here the old hardware store. The old pickle barrel.” She gave said pickle barrel a kick. “The old Indians sitting around talking life to death.” She waved a crescent wrench toward the men. “And the Coke machine. If I replaced it, then it would be: Oh, it’s a shame about the hardware store. Cassidy got hold of it and just gutted it down to the bones!”
“Gutted” was emphasized with a wild swing of the hand holding the crescent wrench; it would have caught Ukiah in the temple with the backhand if he hadn’t ducked. The local men all flinched for his sake.
“Don’t give me that look,” Cassidy growled at the local men and crawled behind the Coke machine again. “Don’t think I don’t hear it. ‘What does that insane red woman think she’s doing, buying a hardware store? What does she know about hardware?’ Well, helloooooooo! I have an industrial engineering degree, people. I know a crescent wrench”—she stuck the crescent wrench out and waved it—“from a screwdriver! Really, if a white man can run this place, then I should be able to do it in my sleep!”
“If you have an industrial engineering degree, why did you buy this place?” Ukiah asked. “Why not do—industrial engineering?”
“Bwah!” she shouted into the guts of the Coke machine. He wasn’t sure if this was a laugh or not. “I did the token red-woman bit, and no thank you. Here, if people act like your friend, you know they mean it because otherwise they don’t bother, I don’t have to spend a fortune in clothes, and all I have to do is show that I know how to repair things.” The Coke machine purred to life. “There! And that’s why I can’t throw this old baby away.”
She came up grinning, grease smudging her face. She was an older version of Zoey, from wry mouth and dark laughing eyes, down to a face that was more strong than pretty. She wore her thick sienna hair pulled into one ponytail instead of dual braids like Zoey. Despite the grease on her hands and face, she managed to get none on her crisp blue oxford. Nearly hidden by her collar, she wore a leather-and-bone choker, beaded with chunks of tumbled turquoise and a center silver medallion. She smelled of bruised pine needles, cut cedar, and machine grease.
She looked at Ukiah in surprise. “Oh, you’re the one asking dumb questions.”
“Sorry,” Ukiah said.
She waved away the apology. “It’s just these guys heard the rant so often, I was surprised anyone asked. What happened to you, good-looking?”
“The crutch?” Ukiah risked standing on both legs to swing his crutch about. Breakfast was kicking in and his body was speedily mending itself.
She laughed. “Yes, the crutch and the cast.”
“Oh, I fell. Actually, I was shot and then I fell.”
She looked at him for a minute, blinking in surprise, and then giggled, covering her mouth with a greasy hand, smudging black fingerprints across her face. “You’re the new Umatilla Wolf Boy?” She went into gales of laughter when he nodded. “Oh, Jared told me about you, but he didn’t say how cute you were.”
There was an interesting mix of reactions among the men. Two were laughing. The eldest one looked at him thoughtfully. The youngest glared jealously at him.
“So, what’s your name?” Cassidy asked.
“The woman that adopted me called me Ukiah Oregon.”
“Like the town?”
“Yes.” He balanced on his crutches to take out his wallet and dug awkwardly into it to pull out his business card. “She found me in Umatilla Park just out of Ukiah and took me to Pittsburgh, eight years ago.” Then, because he had tucked the picture into his wallet, he pulled out the photo of him at thirteen. “This was what I looked like back then.”
She ignored the card, taking the photo instead, carefully as not to smudge it with grease. Some of the laughter went out of her eyes. She looked up at him again, studying him.
“Actually, you haven’t changed much.” She went off into a side room. There was the slight hum of a machine. “I’m surprised to see you up and around. Jared gave the family a full report on your injuries, including the hocus-pocus stuff.”
“I heal quickly.” Ukiah cringed at the thought that all the Kicking Deers knew about the mice.
“You’ve got Zoey convinced, but she always believed.” She came to the door of the small office, using a paper towel to wipe cleanser off her hands along with the black grease. She considered him silently, her face skeptical. “Jared says you’re a fake, but Jared has never believed any of the family stories about Uncle.”
“I haven’t asked anyone to believe anything,” Ukiah protested. “I just wanted to ask a few questions. Who was my mother? What was she like? How did I get lost? What age was I when I was lost? Why did you call me uncle? Are we related? Did my mother have other children?”
“But you have asked us to believe you,” Cassidy said. “Don’t we have to first judge your right to an answer before we give it?”
Ukiah met her dark eyes much like his own. “Can you fairly judge someone you’ve refused to talk to?”
Cassidy gazed at him in silence that went on for several minutes. Ukiah waited, sensing that she was trying to be fair. His patience in listening, Max said once, was one of his greatest strengths.
Cassidy spoke to the youngest man without looking away from Ukiah. “Simon, can you do me a favor?”
“Anything,” Simon answered, leaping to his feet.
“I didn’t bother to refill the machine until I was sure I could repair it.” Cassidy went back into the office and returned with a printout and the photo. She handed the printout to Simon. “Could you go to Swire’s and pick up a case of each in bottles?”
“I’ll do it in a little bit.” Simon looked pointedly at Ukiah.
“Oh, don’t be jealous.” She handed Ukiah his photo. “Didn’t you hear? He’s my long lost great-great-uncle.”
Grudgingly, Simon went and Cassidy considered Ukiah, arms folded over her chest. “The boy we lost was grandfather’s uncle, so that’s what we call him,” she admitted grudgingly. “Jared told me about the mouse thing. He’s positive you faked it. I’ve been dying to know. How did you do it?”
Ukiah was startled at her directness. “What?”
“The trick with the mice. How did you do it?”
He glanced at the listening men.
“Oh, don’t worry. Its just family now.” She indicated the men in turn, starting with the oldest. “This is Uncle Daniel, and Uncle Quince, and Cousin Lou. That’s why I sent Simon out for soda. He’s not family.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ukiah said.
“If you want us to tell you about our missing Uncle,” Cassidy said, jerking up her chin, “you have to tell us about the mice.”
Ukiah considered the four Kicking Deers. An exchange of trust. It felt like he was getting the short end of the bargain, but perhaps they felt the same way too. He tried for a vague explanation. “The mice are just something that happens when I’m hurt.” Oh, that sounded stupid. He winced, and decided to keep his mouth shut.
She laughed at the look on his face. “So, it’s been seventy years! What have you been doing with yourself, Wolf Boy?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Running with the wolves is all I remember. Season after season.”
She walked around him, scratching her chin. “Well, you look damn good for being eighty!”
“I’m not eighty,” Ukiah said quietly. “My father’s people told me how old I was.”
That startled them.
“Yo
ur father’s people?” Cassidy echoed.
“Who are your father’s people?” Uncle Daniel asked.
How did one describe the Pack without using the word “alien”? “They are dangerous, brutal people. Killers. They told me how my mother was taken. How I came to be.” Hex had stunned his mother and taken her to the ship. Prime used the ovipositor to splice his alien genetics into her human DNA and impregnated her. It was sterile rape. “My father planned to kill my mother before I was born.” Prime thought a breeder was too dangerous to let him live. “My father’s people thought he had succeeded, so they didn’t know I existed until recently.”
Puzzlement took over Cassidy’s face. “If you don’t remember anything, and they didn’t know you were born, how did you find your father’s people?”
“Well, actually, they found me.”
“I reiterate.”
Ukiah cocked his head. “You what?”
“Oh, I forgot.” She clapped her hands together. “Wolf boys don’t have a strong grasp of English!”
“I do well enough,” he said. “We think it’s because I lived long enough among humans”—that sounded bad—“before I lived with the wolves, that I picked up English quickly once I was found. I didn’t know it when Mom Jo found me.”
“Reiterate is to repeat,” Cassidy told him. “How did your father’s people find you?”
“There is a knowing, without touching, without speaking.”
She looked angry for a moment, and then a grin took over her mouth. “You do the mystic bullshit pretty good.”
“I was hired to find a missing girl that they were looking for too. Our paths crossed.”
“Oh, the first story was so much better.” She shook her head. “Do you really expect us to believe that you’re an eighty-year-old man?”
“No. I’m older than that,” Ukiah said.
“Ninety?” Cassidy asked.
Ukiah hesitated, wondering how much to tell them. If they were his family, wouldn’t they know this already? “My father’s people say that I was born several hundred years ago.”
“He’s good,” Uncle Quince mumbled. “I nearly believe him.”
“Someone talked again,” Lou said.
“What do you mean?” Ukiah asked.
“Whenever someone comes along with a good story,” Cassidy said, “it always turns out that someone in the family told the wrong person the whole story. You’ve got interesting takes on the story that no one else has tried. And you’ve got that wolfie kind of feel.”
“Look, all I want is to talk to people about my mother, and about myself,” Ukiah said. “My father’s people thought she had been killed before I was born, so they were surprised to find me. They couldn’t tell me how I ended up with the wolves, or how long I had been with the wolves, or what I had done before then.”
“Couldn’t the wolves tell you?” Cassidy asked blandly, getting a laugh from the men.
“They didn’t talk,” Ukiah said. “They knew me well enough to share their kill with me, that was all.”
“Uncle died in 1933,” Uncle Daniel said quietly. “My father never accepted it, but that’s the truth. He thinks he saw Uncle, running with the wolves, even when it was impossible.”
Uncle Quince added, “If all the family legends are true, and Uncle did return to us, you could not be him. If the legends are not true, again, you could not be him.”
Ukiah tried to puzzle this out, but there were too many mysteries fighting for his attention. “He died? How did he die?”
“He was killed,” Lou said.
“Killed!” Cassidy gave a breathless half laugh. “That doesn’t do it justice. Do you know why my brother is a cop? When we were little, Grandpa used to talk about how much Jared was like Uncle. Then one day, we were digging in Grandpa’s things, messing with stuff we shouldn’t have been into, and we found a book with photos of what happened to Uncle.” Judging by the men’s reactions, everyone in the family had seen the book at one point or another. “Jared woke up screaming for a month. It really bothered him that Uncle’s murderer was never found.”
Photos? Police photos of his murder? Ukiah wondered how many times, during his life, the police were going to make a record of his death. This was the second time that he knew of; luckily, his other deaths had gone unnoticed by the police. Both recorded deaths, it seemed, were incredibly violent—then again, anything short of that didn’t put him down long enough for the police to get involved. “What happened? Who killed him? And why does your grandfather think he’s still alive?”
The Kicking Deers—his family—looked at one another, and the eldest among them shook his head.
“We don’t talk about it,” Uncle Daniel said.
“It’s the only defense we have against fakes,” Cassidy said.
“You said yourself that you don’t remember,” Lou said. “So how can you be sure you are our Uncle?”
“I’m not,” Ukiah said. “It just seems that if you’re missing a feral Indian boy, and I was found running with the wolves—well—it just seems likely I’m your Uncle.”
The cowbell clanged as the door opened and Sam came in. She nodded around to the Kicking Deers. “Lou, Dan, Quince. Good to see you. Cassidy. What’s that monstrosity you’ve got blocking up the back?”
“The wood chipper? Shoot I forgot.” Cassidy made a face and pulled keys out of her pocket. “Uncle Quince, can you move that for me?” He nodded, standing, and caught the keys she tossed to him. She went on to explain the wood chipper’s presence as Uncle Quince ambled out the back door. “I got it off the Highway Division. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. It was cheap. I’m making mulch from cedar for the time being.”
“Ah!” Sam said, enlightened. “I had to come back around again and find parking in the front.”
“Sorry. What can I do for you?”
Sam glanced meaningfully at Ukiah.
“We’re through with our business.” Cassidy said, crossing her arms.
“Ah! So, how’s that deputy of your brother’s?”
“Which one? Tommy? What, you sweet on him, Killington?”
“Hell, no!” Sam picked two of the midget-sized peppermint patties out of a box beside the cash register. She fished a fist of change out of her pocket, jiggled it around until she found two quarters, and paid for the candy. “I meant Brody. He any better?”
Cassidy sighed. “No. He’s still shuffling around like a zombie. You whites are too reserved at grieving. You keep all that pain in, swallow it down to poison you. It’s better to wail than to suffer in silence.”
Sam sighed at the news, and tossed one of the candies to Ukiah. “One of the deputies, Matt Brody, lost his kid in June. He’s one of my drowning victims.”
“Oh.”
“He and his wife took it hard. They’re both like stick puppets.”
“A lot of grief in this town lately,” Lou said. “Lots of people walking around shell-shocked.”
“Yeah, it seems like Harry’s death just sucked the life out of Matt.” Cassidy rang up the sale and then indicated Ukiah with a thrust of her jaw. “I wondered how he figured out where to find us.”
“A woman’s got to do business.” Sam leaned against the counter. “I’m just dealing in information. It’s not like I held out for a cut of the reward.”
“Reward?” Ukiah said. And then things clicked. The glut of people wanting to see Jesse Kicking Deer. The unlisted phone numbers. The hostility. “There’s a reward for producing the Umatilla Wolf Boy?”
“You didn’t know?” Sam asked.
“The newspaper clipping we were working from didn’t mention it.”
“Yeah, right,” Cassidy said.
“Look, if it’s the money that’s the problem, I can sign a paper, waiving the reward.”
“Don’t you even want to know how much it is?” Sam asked.
“No. Money isn’t important to me.”
“It’s a hundred thousand dollars,” Sam said. “The Kick
ing Deers have been holding a nest egg for the boy for over seventy years. Jesse Kicking Deer decided to blow it all just to get the boy back.”
“The money isn’t important,” Ukiah repeated.
“Sure it isn’t,” Cassidy said.
Ukiah looked at them, saw the hostility in their eyes, and another connection was made. “Is that why one of you shot me? To keep me from claiming the money?”
He was watching Cassidy, who had been the easiest to read. Confusion came first. Then a look of anger, which gave way to sudden horror.
“No!” Cassidy cried. “That couldn’t have been one of us!”
“You’re not sure, though, are you?” Ukiah said.
The moment of doubt, though, was gone. “If we shot everyone that claimed to be the Umatilla Wolf Boy, Pendleton would be littered with bodies!” Cassidy snapped. “Every idiot in Oregon, California, Washington, and Idaho has besieged us with claims. We’ve had people show up with a child’s skeleton—made in Korea, thank God—a forged John Doe death certificate from Baker County, a little old wrinkled man who turned out to be Navaho, and one bastard that actually dug up a Kicking Deer grave for an authentic dead boy’s body. Him, we would have shot, if we were going to shoot anyone.”
“And can you prove that you were here yesterday,” Ukiah asked, “at the time of the shooting?”
“Yes I can,” Cassidy snapped angrily, then looking at Ukiah’s shattered arm, pulled back some of that anger. “Look, Jared called me the night before last to say another ‘Wolf Boy’ had shown up. He wanted to know how you found Mom’s place. He said that you had the weakest claim yet. You’re the wrong age. You have no physical proof. You didn’t even have a reasonable story. I’m sorry someone hurt you, but it wasn’t one of us.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Sam said. “You mean you’re the Umatilla Wolf Boy?”
“Yes” Ukiah said.
“What’s this ‘John Doe client’ bullshit?” Sam asked.
“It’s not something I like talking about,” Ukiah said. “It’s embarrassing to tell someone that the only childhood memories you have is running naked in the woods. My mothers hired Max to find out who I was. That’s how Max and I first met. He came to Pendleton looking for the identity of a John Doe child between the ages of thirteen and sixteen in 1999.”