"Let me think on that one."

She frowned in annoyance. As she pulled onto Main Street, though, she shrugged. "You owe me, Oregon. Just remember that. You owe me."

CHAPTER SIX.

Zimmerman Hardware, Pendleton, Oregon.

Thursday, August 26, 2004.

Zimmerman's sat midblock on Main Street, hemmed in tight on either side. There were no parking spots available, so Sam stopped near the door.

"There's parking in back, but it's really uneven. This will be easier on you. Go ahead in, I'll catch up with you."

Ukiah climbed carefully out and she pulled away. Tools and signs crowded the window front, an overload of information complete with a historical plaque. A cowbell over the door clanged as Ukiah came through the door, but it was doubtful anyone heard it over a loud banging coming from the back of the store.

Like the window front, the store was a tight pack of everything imaginable. What caught the eye was a moose head, stuffed and hung on a support column, looking dolefully down at Ukiah.

The banging continued in the back. No one was at the front counter, so he limped to the back of the store. A second checkout counter formed a small conversation niche in the back. Four men gathered there, Native Americans, in blue jeans, T-shirts, and baseball hats. The oldest seemed in his seventies, the youngest only nineteen or twenty. They nodded in greeting, eyes curious.The noise came from an old Coke machine, which rattled and banged as if it was about to fling machine parts across the room. The hot grease smell coming from the soda machine's compressor competed, strangely enough, with the heavy scent of fresh-cut cedar.

"Turn it off! Turn it off!" the man leaning against the counter was saying. "Just give it up, it's dead!"

"It's still running, Lou!" A woman wedged in behind the Coke machine called.

"It's time to get a new one, Cassidy," Lou said.

"Oh, no, it isn't," Cassidy shouted over the noise.

The eldest man shook his head. "She's not going to throw it away because that's the way the white man thinks. Throw it away instead of fixing it."

"What did I tell you about that, Uncle Daniel?" Cassidy said. "White man this and white man that.

Bleah on the 'white man.' You give him power by assigning everything to him. Think of it instead as human nature. We see something better and grab hold of it, even if what we've got is perfectly good."

"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.

"Your 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'tknow 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 bom 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."