She grinned at that. He didn’t tell her about the rep Shadow had.
“Are you just a light-skinned Black guy?” she asked. “Or are you white?”
“Only my mother knows for sure — and she’s not sure,” he quipped. He sighed. “I don’t know,” he said with more honesty than he usually gave such inquiries. “My mother is... well, Lindy says she’s got a borderline personality disorder. Let’s just say she’s not the most stable person in the world. And she slept around. A lot. And by the time I was born? She didn’t know who the father was — not even a short list, I don’t think. Lindy says she thinks he was a Mexican national working on his master’s at the U. But she doesn’t remember his name.”
Mac fell silent for a moment, and Angie just watched him sympathetically.
“So, it’s not a big deal,” he said finally. “I was raised with my cousin — Lindy’s son — by her ex, who is a Black man, and then by her. And I ran with Toby’s friends in the gangs in San Diego, which is where I got the nickname Shadow, because I was a white kid shadowing my Black cousin, and it followed me into the military.”
“But it bugs you,” she observed. “Not to know.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “But more because every time I turn around some form is asking me for my race. We label people all the time. And I get why, I do. But people like me? What do we do?” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment, and then laughed.
“When I was in college, an advisor was helping me get some financial aid, and she was looking at all the journalism scholarships, and then she called someone in Affirmative Action to ask what I was eligible for. She described me as having a white mother, a Mexican-American biological father, and raised by a Black stepfather, which is true enough — or one version of true enough. The answer came back that I wasn’t eligible for any of them. I was considered white. That Mexican-American — Latino — is a cultural designation: I have to be raised in it. Black is a racial designation — genetics. So, if my biological father was Black, and I was raised by a Mexican-American stepfather, I would be both.”
Angie squinted as if that made her head hurt as she parsed through it. “That’s fucked up,” she said finally.
Mac grinned at her. “What, the answer? Or my family?”
She laughed. “Maybe both. And you’re not sure your biological father wasn’t Black?”
“Nope,” he agreed. “Lindy hasn’t said, but I think she was relieved that I looked white when I was born, because she wasn’t sure her husband wasn’t my father. But if that were true, I’d probably look more like her son, and he’s obviously Black.”
“I can see why he’s her ex-husband,” Angie said with a snort.
“Well, that, and Lindy discovered she liked girls about then,” Mac said and laughed. “So back to the reading material? Yeah, those shits were there, but maybe one out of 20? A lot of racist white guys, babe. But you would run into a few with suspicious tats, or who sounded like the guy you just read about. Thing is, it’s easy to ignore that one out of 20, right? There’s at least one out of 20 at the Examiner that I think are racist assholes too.” He stopped, and considered that last comment.
“Maybe more,” he corrected himself. She laughed.
“But that’s still a hell of a lot of vets you’re sending back into civilian society who are disaffected, racists, and now well-trained,” he pointed out.
“So, if they know, why do they blow them off?” she demanded.
He considered that. “Do you believe that we’re headed north to investigate a sheriff who may be involved in training hundreds of men to rise up against the U.S. government and take back the country when shit hits the fan? Think about it. Do you believe that?”
She looked out the window for a while. Then she sighed, and turned back to him. “No,” she said. “That seems unbelievable.”
“And yet? You just read those reports. You were there at the house when that guy took his family hostage. You’ve been online lurking in my Facebook feed,” and he paused to grin at her. She laughed and nodded. She had been. “And you can’t believe in it either. Why not?”
She thought about it. “Because I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I don’t believe they faked 9/11 or faked Sandy Hook. And so, I blow this off too?” she said slowly. “Because it sounds like a liberal version of faking the moon landing.”
Mac nodded and looked at her. “But maybe? Maybe it isn’t paranoia, and they really are out to get you.”
She was silent. Then she picked up her cell and went back to reading.
They were past Everett by then and the traffic hadn’t thinned out. Mac frowned. “Angie? Can you look? Is there some kind of festival up here this weekend?”
She looked up from what she was reading and saw all the traffic. She did a Google search and started laughing.
“Oh man,” she said. “It’s the last weekend of the Tulip Festival.”
Mac groaned. Couple of years back his aunt and her friends had talked him into being their driver for a tour of the Tulip Festival so that they could all drink. Someone rented a van, and he drove, and they drank and admired the tulips.
Acres and acres of tulips. Most in rows. Brightly colored rows for as far as you could
