A Dangerous Breed Read online

  “Finish that fast,” Granddad said as he tightened bolts through the worktable to hold the grinder in place, “and I’ll teach you to use this. About time you worked with something other than hand tools.”

  “What are you making?” I said. He had brought a sack of metal rods from the hardware store.

  “Some disposable punches. For knocking out hinges and locks and the like.”

  “What locks?”

  “Never mind that. Get to it.”

  I turned back to the papers. It wasn’t tough to sort them. Usually the first page of each bunch told me what pile the papers belonged to.

  Then I found one lone page, stuck in the middle of a manual for a power wrench. A lined sheet of notebook paper, with a girl’s handwriting.

  Moira Shaw

  Ms. Cullen, Room 17

  Native American Tribes of the Northwest

  Mom?

  I stared at the loops and slants of the letters. This had been hers. She had written it, touched the paper with her own hand.

  Paragraphs in the same writing covered both sides. She’d gotten an A on the paper. If there had been more pages to it, they were missing. The top corner of the paper was torn, probably where a staple used to be.

  I knew Ms. Cullen. She taught fifth grade at Bertha Landes Elementary. My school.

  “Did Mom go to Landes?” I said.

  “Eh?” Granddad looked up. “What’s that?”

  “It’s Mom’s. Was Mom’s.” I showed him. He took the page from me. “Did she go to my school?”

  “She did.” Granddad’s eye moved over the paper.

  “You never said.”

  He didn’t answer. Just held the page by his fingertips, like it would rip if he pressed any harder. Granddad had big hands, even for somebody as tall as he was, and I was suddenly worried he would decide to crumple the fragile page to dust.

  “Was she at Hovick Middle School too?” I said quickly. “That’s where I’ll be going.”

  “Next year. I’m aware.” Granddad set the homework sheet on the upper shelf with his router set.

  “Because maybe some of the teachers remember her—”

  “You’ve work to do.”

  I knew better than to keep talking. I went back to the box, rummaging through the stack even faster than before, hoping to discover more of Mom’s stuff. Our house didn’t have anything of hers inside, not even a photo of Mom as a kid.

  But I reached the bottom of the box without finding anything else of hers. The realization made a lump in my chest. I looked around the garage. Maybe there was another pile of old papers. Or books or toys or anything that might have been hers. All I saw was more of Granddad’s tools and a lot of paint and varnish cans.

  “How come we don’t have any pictures?” I said. “Of Mom, or Grandma Fi? Or anybody?”

  “Because I don’t want them around.”

  “Why not?”

  “Pictures are false. Better my haziest memory than the clearest photograph.” He hadn’t turned away from his task of putting a new wheel on the grinder.

  Weird. But then a lot of things Granddad did were strange. Or scary. My friends from school didn’t like to come to our house. Only Davey Tolan was brave enough, and that’s because his home wasn’t much better.

  Later, when Granddad went up the stone steps to the house to grab us coffee and a Coke, I stood on a stepladder to reach the upper shelf and Mom’s school paper. I folded the page into a square and slipped it into my back pocket.

  When kids at school talked about their parents, I avoided the subject. If they didn’t get the hint or a teacher asked me a direct question, I just told them my mom and dad were dead and that usually shut them up fast. At least half of that answer was true, anyway. Maybe all of it.

  Granddad wasn’t going to say any more. But Ms. Cullen or some of the other teachers might. They’d met her. Mom. I wanted to learn whatever they could tell me.

  Anything would be more than I knew now.

  In the warehouse, the whole derby squad was on the track, doing laps. Their trainer with the thick dark braid of hair stood in the center, shouting out the elapsed time from a stopwatch. Two minutes. Two-thirty. The skaters pushed harder, racing to achieve some goal unknown to me. The older teens skated in a line, with long fluid strides that ate up the track, weaving like a Chinese parade dragon around kids like Cyndra, who doggedly ground out their own laps in disorganized and gasping clumps.

  Impossible to say who tripped first. One girl went down on the far side of the track, and then three and four, most of them just tapping the concrete with their kneepads before bouncing right back up.

  Cyndra stayed down, cradling her arm. In an instant I was running the length of the hangar.

  The trainer reached her first. Two members of the squad around Cyndra’s age hovered anxiously as the woman helped Cyndra stand and roll to the outside of the track.

  “I’m sorry,” one of the girls kept saying.

  “Not your fault, Jaycie,” the trainer said. “Take my stopwatch and call out when they hit five minutes.” The girls reluctantly skated back to the track. The woman held out her hand to Cyndra. “Let me see.”

  Cyndra uncurled her arm. Her fingers were bright pink, the same color as her face, and scraped raw. “I’m fine,” she said. The reflexive answer of any kid embarrassed by sudden attention.

  “Uh huh. Make a fist.” Cyndra did, carefully. “Good. Wiggle your fingers.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Somebody ran over it,” Cyn said. “It’s okay.” She used her other hand to quickly wipe her eyes.

  “It is,” the trainer agreed, “though you need some antibiotic. C’mere.” She led us over to the bench, the two of them floating on wheels, me thudding behind. When the woman knelt to fish an equipment bag from under the bench, her black-coffee braid fell to one side, revealing her derby name stenciled in block white letters on the back of her ebony tank top: pain austen.

  “What do we always say, Mortal Cyn?” she asked.

  “Fall small,” Cyndra answered, giggling despite herself.

  “Got that. Best way to protect your extremities.” The trainer sprayed Neosporin on Cyndra’s knuckles. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she said to me.

  Cyn remembered the manners Addy had been working so hard to instill. “This is Van. He’s . . .” She hesitated. What was I, exactly?

  “Family,” I said.

  Cyndra nodded vigorously. “Yeah. An’ this is Pain.”

  It was the trainer’s turn to grin. It was a good grin. A little crooked, a little self-mocking. She was long of leg and strong-looking in the way naturally slender athletes develop over time, as much sinew as muscle fiber. Kneeling with one leg up and balanced on her skate’s toe-stop seemed to be no effort for her at all.

  This close, the spiral of tattoos on her arm and shoulder was identifiable as a loose line of small birds in flight. Each bird varied slightly in size and radically in style, from photorealistic black and gray to eye-poppingly bright cartoon. The flock winged its way from her wrist all the way up and under the strap of her tight tank top. Her skin beneath the ink was tan, whether by genes or the sun. Not every part of her figure was slim.

  She caught me looking. “My name’s Wren,” she said, nodding at the bird tattoos before turning back to Cyndra. “Teddy bears or pop art?”

  “Art,” Cyndra said. Wren took two bandages with Warhol soup cans and Elvises printed on them and applied them to Cyn’s ointment-covered knuckles. “There. Better than new.”

  “Can I finish?” Cyndra said, looking at the track. The other skaters had collected by the aluminum bleachers to stretch and rehydrate.

  “You better. You owe me laps.”

  Cyn dashed away, injury forgotten.

  “She’s fast,” Wren said as we watched her bank hard into the curve, “for being so new to it.”

  “Making up time,” I said.

  “You’re her stepbrother or something?” sa
id Wren, eyeing me. I knew what she meant: that Cyndra and I looked nothing alike. Cyn was small and blue-eyed and fair, at least when her hair wasn’t dyed. I was none of those things. I’d inherited Dono’s Black Irish looks through Moira.

  “It’s an unusual situation,” I said. “You’ve met Addy? Cyndra’s guardian?”

  “Talk about unusual. She’s amazing. She told me she had a tryout with the Bay Bombers back in like nineteen-sixty-something.”

  I hadn’t known that but didn’t doubt it. Addy seemed to have lived enough lives for a dozen octogenarians.

  “None of us have other relatives,” I said, “except for Cyndra’s dad, who’s down in California. Addy was a neighbor of my grandfather’s. We all sort of adopted each other.”

  “Chosen families can be the best. If you want to help out Mortal Cyn, she could use some resistance training. You look like you’ve seen the inside of a gym.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Show her how to use the weights. Nothing too heavy. Just build up the endurance in her back and legs.”

  “Core strength. To get up every time she falls.”

  “You got it.” Wren’s eyes were a lighter shade of brown than her hair, a splash of cream mixed in the coffee. With tiny flecks of gold near the center. “Come to practice again. Let me know how it goes.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  She glided away to join the girls, who had collected by the aluminum bleachers to shed their gear and goof around, not in that order. One of the older teens handed out popsicles from a cooler. Wren waited until Cyndra had finished her laps, then she had the skaters shout out the team name three times to close practice. Kids or not, they could yell like drill sergeants.

  Rain pelted down, bouncing like hail off every hard surface. Cyndra and I ran for the car with me carrying her gear bag. She shook water out of her hair while I turned the defroster on full blast.

  “You want food?” I said.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Dumb question.”

  “What’s this?” Cyn said, taking the letter to Moira off the seat.

  “Junk mail.” The AC had cleared the fog of condensation from the bottom few inches of windshield. Good enough to see the road. We pulled out of the lot, the Barracuda’s wheels splashing through a newborn river of water in the gutter.

  “Are you gonna call this person?” Cyndra pointed at Jo Mixon’s number.

  “I’m not going to the reunion.”

  “Yeah, but . . . your mom, right? This woman knew her.”

  “If she really knew my mom she’d know Moira was dead.”

  Cyn frowned. Whatever point she was making, I was obviously too dense to grasp it. “Well, what about your dad? You said you never met him. She could know.”

  “Not likely.”

  “But there’s a chance. Like, you have to call her.”

  I should have expected this. Ever since I’d made the mistake of telling Cyndra about my unknown parentage, she’d romanticized it into thinking I might be the love child of an exiled duke.

  “Cyndra,” I said. “Give it a rest.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Yeah. I’ll call her. But no more about it.”

  “And you have to tell me everything she says.”

  “You want to walk home?”

  She sat back, satisfied.

  A gust of wind rocked the car. At the next stoplight I pulled up the NOAA weather streaming app, letting the monotone male voice of the running forecast play while we drove. After a few minutes the looped recording cycled around to report on the coastal stations nearest Puget Sound. Winds up to forty knots with a small craft advisory in effect for everything south of Port Townsend.

  “I have to go to the marina,” I said. “Do you want me to drop you off first?”

  She looked alarmed. “But food.”

  “On it.”

  The rain hadn’t discouraged many diners from the eternal line outside Dick’s on Broadway. I left Cyn in the warm car playing on her phone while I snagged us two burger-and-shake combos. Double patties for both of us. Cyn could eat nearly as much as me.

  We parked in front of Addy’s quaint yellow house and ate in the car, dumping our fries into a collective pile in the cardboard tray. Cyndra held her Deluxe with one hand and deftly texted with the other.

  “Your trainer Wren says I should teach you how to lift weights,” I said. “Cross-training, you know?”

  “When?”

  “Whenever we want. I can take you to my gym. Once we know what size weights you need, we’ll figure out something to use at home.”

  “D’you like Wren?” she said around her next mouthful.

  “I just met Wren five minutes ago.”

  “But she’s pretty, right?”

  “You want to tell me about Elias?” Elias was a name I’d heard Addy mention at Thanksgiving. Mention only once, because the topic had made Cyndra flush bright pink from her hairline to her throat, as she started to now. “Okay, then.”

  Détente assured, I told Cyn to give Addy’s dog, Stanley, the last bite of my burger and to tell him it was from me. She hauled her bag out of the back and kicked open the fence gate to run to the front door. Addy, ever prepared, opened it before Cyndra reached the porch. I waved to them and pulled away.

  The letter to Moira slipped off the dashboard on the first turn and fell onto the steering column. Refusing to be ignored.

  Addy and Cyndra weren’t my relatives, but neither were my brothers in the Rangers. Both were a kind of chosen family. The difference was that Addy and Cyndra and I had chosen each other, and the Army had chosen the guys in the 75th Regiment, after we’d survived the levels of hell that made up the selection process.

  Blood, though. Dono had been the only blood relation in my life that I had known, beyond scattered and unreliable impressions of my mother.

  Moira had become pregnant at barely sixteen. She hadn’t told Dono about her boyfriend, but it was possible that she’d trusted a friend. And anyone who was that close a friend had probably gone to Watson High with her.

  This might be my best shot at ever learning who my father was. If I wanted to know. I’d gone a long time and done just fine without that knowledge.

  Air blowing from the car’s vent caught the letter and sent it flying. I snatched it out of the air without thinking. Like I’d been terrified to lose it.

  Three

  I raced the rapidly setting sun toward the west. About as far west as it was possible to go in Seattle, to the big marina at Shilshole Bay. The gale warning on the NOAA broadcast meant enough wind after nightfall to bang boats against docks and maybe shake them free from their moorings. My speedboat was one of the last possessions of my grandfather’s that I still owned, and I didn’t want it sunk by a storm.

  The wind wasn’t waiting for darkness, already pushing the rain half sideways and the Barracuda insistently to the left, as the muscle car’s wide tires sluiced through the streams flowing across Leary Way. The copper-colored Barracuda was a recent acquisition. It still felt disconcertingly low to the ground compared to Dono’s old Dodge pickup, which time and wear had finally forced me to set out to pasture, if an exorbitantly priced space in a long-term garage could be called pasture.

  I parked in the marina lot and dialed the number written in purple pen on the letter.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, sounding rushed, like she’d snatched the phone up while dashing between rooms.

  I explained who I was and about how the reunion letter had found its way to me. The voice belonged to Jo Mixon. She made appropriate sounds of dismay when I informed her that Moira had died long ago.

  “Why I’m calling,” I said, when her torrent of words slowed, “I was wondering if you could put me in touch with anyone who knew Moira then. A school friend, or even a teacher.”

  “Oh. Let me think.”

  The noise of rain on the car roof and kids arguing in the background on her side provided a strange kind of hold music.
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br />   “Here we are,” she said finally. “I had the yearbook out as part of all the work for the reunion. This is who I was trying to remember. Stasia Llewellyn. She and Moira were joined at the hip, you know?”

  “A yearbook? Is there a photograph of Moira?”

  “With the seniors?” I heard her flipping pages. “No, I don’t see that. She was in school.”

  But maybe she had been pregnant with me when class-picture time came around. Not keen to capture the moment.

  “I don’t have any contact information for Stasia,” Jo Mixon said. “I’m sorry.”

  I told her that was fine and asked her to spell Stasia Llewellyn’s name. As we said goodbye, I was already pulling up a browser to search for Moira’s friend.

  Luck was with me: a Stasia Llewellyn-Wiler on Facebook, from Seattle and now living in Philadelphia. Her family pictures focused almost exclusively on a flock of children who ranged from grade school to college. A job profile on two networking sites listed her as a senior comptroller, whatever that was.

  I sent Stasia a message, repeating the basic information I’d given to Jo Mixon and asking her to call me whenever it was convenient.

  At dusk on a wet Sunday the marina was nearly deserted. The floating docks bobbed well below the parking level. I had to watch my step on the wet ramp. Cabin lights of a few liveaboards gleamed through the masts and radio antennae like lanterns in a forest.

  One bright cabin belonged to Hollis Brant on the Francesca, two docks over. I’d just reached the speedboat when he stepped out from the aft door and waved one broad hand in greeting. He may have shouted something as well; it was hard to tell from a hundred yards away over the drumroll of rain pelting on my jacket hood. I waved back, aware that I’d been avoiding Hollis as much as I had Addy and Cyndra lately. He’d broken things off with his latest girlfriend, Gloria, too. Small wonder he might be craving any company, even as lousy as mine was these days.

  The narrow spearhead bow of my twenty-foot speedboat rode high at rest. A consequence of the big Mercury outboard weighing down its stern. Dono had installed the engine and its muffled exhaust not long before his death. The boat had no name, only the registration numbers on the sides. It was painted shark-gray and originally intended for very fast and quiet runs across the Sound and up into the San Juan Islands, usually in the dead of night.