The Oregon Experiment (15 page)

Sequoia pried her thin wrists apart—yanking too hard—“I told you to stop!” and then, frightened by the onslaught of her own voice, she looked from the drawing to her daughter, who was staring wide-eyed at the door.

“Uh-oh,” Trinity said.

Sequoia looked over her shoulder as Ron fell through the screen door and hit the floor with a thud. Journey yelped. Sequoia rushed over to him—a heap on the floor—and dropped to her knees in the clay shards of a broken bowl, touching his grimacing face. “You’re crying,” Ron said, his breathing strained, and she wiped her nose, then tasted blood: the shards had cut her palms.

“Damn knees,” Ron explained. “Second time they gave out this week. Gotta do the surgery.”

And as Sequoia helped him to his feet, his heavy arm across her shoulder, and led him hobbling to a chair, a cop clomped across the porch and came through the door.

Ron cringed, rubbing his elbow.

“Some water?” Sequoia offered.

He winced. “Latte.”

“Sequoia Green?” the cop asked.

She’d stained the sleeve of Ron’s shirt with her blood.

“A summons,” the cop said, then read a litany of her crimes as Trinity drifted within inches of him, enchanted by the weapons and Velcro cases strapped to his belt. When it sounded like he’d exhausted the list, Trinity asked him, “Do you have any stickers?”

The cop slipped a sticker of a gold badge and one of McGruff the Crime Dog from his breast pocket and handed them down to her.

“That latte,” Ron said.

The cop flipped through the summons. “Oh, here’s one more,” he said. “Accessory to a hit-and-run.”

Sequoia glanced out the front window at Ron’s Volvo, parked at the curb. Its owner straightened and bent his knee like he was ratcheting a rusty lever to make a tennis net taut. “Make it a double, will ya?” he said, wincing.

Trinity patted the police badge to her chest, then held up her drawing—a heart with M-O-M written inside. “See, Momma. It wasn’t him,” she pleaded. Red marks from Sequoia’s grip still burned on her wrists. “I wasn’t drawing the broken boy. I wasn’t.” It was Sequoia’s greatest fear: that she was passing her own trauma to her daughter.

Slammed into the purple. Blinding purple pain. “More drugs!” she screamed, and the nurse said, “Not long now,” and Scanlon’s face hovered above her cooing, “Hee-hee-hee-hoo.”

And here finally was her doctor saying, “Good job.” Everyone praising Naomi for such a good job.
How about doing yours?
And the wrong thing about her doctor was she wore a fleece jacket that was purple! Maybe plum, they might call it plum, but by any name it was fucking excruciating. “We’re pushing now,” someone was saying.
Impossible!
she thought.
It won’t go. This baby is deformed
. A head like a toaster. Naomi was pushing a four-slice toaster out of her vagina. And there was a disturbance in the back, under the TV. They were filing in. Tall men, broad-shouldered, dark-blue fireman uniforms, identical badges and patches. Then a second row, and she was ignoring her husband and the doctor, their obsequious coaching and praise.
Tongs
, she hoped she screamed.
Use the fucking tongs!
She smelled watery scrambled eggs being wheeled down the hall, Chinese food on her doctor’s breath, and, coming off the firemen, chrome polish.

As the hard plastic toaster handles tore her open, she peered through the purple and counted the firemen. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine bearded firemen, their hands folded in front of their crotches. Cringing. Slumping. Trying to get smaller.
Nine Bearded Firemen
. Every mother Naomi knew was writing a children’s book—this could be hers. She looked at her husband.
And one more makes ten
. Then the firemen’s faces all changed. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine bearded faces. Four with grins. Five with horror. Pain rushed out. A bump, a slip, then the purple faded and she heard the tiny cry, and she panicked:
Get the baby!
she was trying to say.
Don’t let them take the baby!
But Scanlon was gazing at her, his eyes beaming, tears running down his cheeks. Frantic, she reached her arms toward the cry, a wail rising from her throat, then Scanlon stepped aside: her baby in the doctor’s hands, now delivered to her. She held his hot body to her chest and put her nose to his shoulder and ear, both of them burrowing. She smelled afterbirth and blood, and
searched beneath those smells for his own skin, grown and nourished inside her for these nine months and finally beside her forever. She smelled the beginnings of his whole life, the essence of her boy: the scent of almonds.

Scanlon’s hand covered their baby’s back. His face pressed close to Naomi’s. His beard seemed fuller, transforming him into a very kind lumberjack. Mr. Douglas.

“I love you,” he mouthed, pushing slick hair off her face, then kissing her forehead.

She grabbed a pinch of his beard—a fatherly beard—and said, “You’re going to win.”

Staring into the fridge. Not much in there, when you thought about a married couple, a household. Leftover ziplocked pizza. Jam, dark bread, skim milk, and spicy mustard. Yogurt, eggs, and a jar—he read the label—of wheat germ. Nothing you’d eat. A bowl of leftover spaghetti with green sauce and chunks. Two bottles of beer. Not even beer—ale! No Mountain Dew.

But in the rack on the door there was a carton of Tropicana with extra pulp, the orange pictured on its side sliced down the middle, oozing juice. Clay pulled out the OJ and looked for a little cup but found only a tall glass. He poured out a splash, stopped, then screwed the cap back on the carton and shook it up. Then he poured a quarter glass, bright thick juice rushing through the round mouth. He tipped in a little more, then more, and kept going until the juice was brimming over the lip.

The biggest glass of orange juice he’d ever held. He gulped some down, then raised the glass to feel the excess of it and wandered over to the silver-framed photo on the hallway wall: Naomi in her wedding dress, laughing so hard there were little wrinkles in her nose. He gulped greedily, and a trickle of juice dripped off his chin and ran down his hairless chest. He was completely naked.

There were laugh wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, too. He used to make Daria laugh like that. He wiped the juice off his chest, then wiped his hand on his thigh, listening to the chug and swish of the washing machine. He’d neatly folded the borrowed clothes and placed the stack on top of the hamper. But when he’d grabbed his own clothes from the heap on the bedroom floor, the gasoline stench was too much. So he put everything in the
washer with his socks and underwear and extra suds. Goddamn bourgeois comforts.

In the bedroom, on the bureau, there was a photo of Naomi pregnant at the beach, a black bathing suit stretched tight over her belly—seven months at least—and ocean water icy at her ankles, wind blowing those wild kinky curls, Italian-looking sunglasses. She could be a movie star in California, or down in Rio.

He took another big gulp, sucking at the tiny plump sacks of nectar until they popped. So damn sweet and cold. A whole meal. Rich. Staring at the picture, he fingered the bumps of his ribs, his hip bone, and then noticed, propped between a jewelry box and a picture of the two of them, a yellow Kodak envelope. He slipped out the pictures, and when he saw the one on top, his head jerked so sharply that juice splattered on the bureau and down his leg to the floor. Naomi, nude, her hands flat on her belly, posing right here on this spot in front of the bureau. He rattled down his glass. His fingers had gone twitchy. She stared straight into the camera. Clay couldn’t stop blinking as he flipped from one picture to the next. Jumbled coils of her hair tickled the bare skin of her shoulders, the tops of her breasts. Her hands lay protectively on her belly, possessively. Through the roll of film her belly grew, casting a darker shadow over the tangle of nearly black hair and her funny, kind of crooked legs.

The washer had long stopped when he chose the most recent, most pregnant, photo. She was turned to the side with one knee forward, hiding what lay between her legs, her arms crossed over her breasts, her long fingers hooked over her shoulders, tangled up in her hair. The other photos, anything more revealing—his heart lagging before each thud—would have been too much.

He slid open a top drawer and pulled out a pair of Scanlon’s socks and used them to wipe the juice from his thigh and the floor and the bureau. Then he stuffed the socks back in the drawer and pushed it shut.

T
he baby squealed, but Scanlon was already awake. It was six a.m., the first day of classes. He rolled out from under the covers and scooped their swaddled boy from the bassinet, then passed him to Naomi in bed. He was a good eater, every two hours all night. Scanlon opened the shades a few inches and cracked the window, letting in fresh morning air, still cool and smelling of night fog, then he crawled back beside his wife and baby in warm milky sheets.

They called him Sammy. Samuel Gilbert Pratt. They also called him Little Man and Mr. Jiggles. Weirdly, he was born with lots of body hair, lanugo, which Scanlon learned wasn’t very unusual, especially for babies who come early. Sammy even had lanugo on his face, and in the delivery room no one had minded the obvious jokes batted around by the firemen about the baby winning the Mr. Douglas contest because they were all so thrilled to be in that place, in that moment, together. For an hour the firemen were their extended family.

Naomi’s hair spiraled down the pillows. Scanlon kissed her nose. For most of the last two weeks, she’d left her cotton pajama top unbuttoned, open, available, offering up her astonishing swollen breasts, her plump nipples oozing milk. Sammy’s feast. Scanlon had never felt more in love
with her—she’d created the gift of their baby—or found her so sexy. “No intercourse for six weeks,” the doctor had said, then added,
“At least,”
with a whip-cracking glare at Scanlon, the sort of authoritarianism that made him resent female doctors.

Sammy’s head looked tiny compared to her breast. His mouth opened enormously, his spread lips covering half of his face. Bred for sucking, like an aquarium creature suctioned onto the glass. After a few minutes Sammy’s face pinkened, the pump in his jaw slowed, then stopped, and Naomi finally popped him off. Head bobbing, milk-drunk, creamy lipped, he collapsed on her shoulder for a belch and a snooze.

By seven, Naomi and the baby were back asleep, and Scanlon had showered and dressed and was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and an empty glass of juice, brushing toast crumbs off an article in the
Union-Gazette
about the torched SUVs.

They’d caught one of the perpetrators, an anarchist from Seattle named Panama, who told the police he’d come down to Douglas “to f— with corporate America’s stranglehold on the people and the planet.” Fair enough, Scanlon thought. The police had chased an accomplice, but Panama wasn’t talking. He’d been arraigned and was awaiting trial while the police harassed local anarchists, skateboarders, and Courthouse Square drummers for a lead on the arsonist who got away. Was Scanlon the only person who knew?

He’d been thinking through an article about the futility of certain radical acts. Blowing up airliners put a crimp in an economy—the desired effect—but torching SUVs was little more than an adolescent prank. He wanted to understand if Clay really believed that stuff could change the world, but there’d been no word from him for two weeks, not since taking his parting shot at Scanlon’s beard as he left the birthing room.

With Naomi and Sammy still zonked, Scanlon slipped out of the house with his leather satchel—empty except for his newspaper, a tuna-fish sandwich, and a single page of speaking notes for his first class—and walked the fifteen blocks to campus. Although it was still early, Douglas had undergone an overnight transformation, the lazy summer streets suddenly coming alive with bikes, cars, pickups, and pedestrians, all heading in the same direction as Scanlon.

On Lewis and Clark Boulevard, which ran along the edge of campus, Scanlon passed a funky row of shops selling pizza, smoothies, ice cream, tarot readings, travel, and tattoos. Skcubrats was bustling so he waited in
line, peering back toward the ovens, but he didn’t see Sequoia. He and Hank hadn’t yet rescheduled their meeting, nor had Scanlon’s article on micro-secession advanced beyond the initial conception. His entire academic production this summer amounted to ideas floating around his head about a secessionist movement in name only and an anarchist on the lam. Time was slipping away.

The woman behind the counter—a familiar surge of midlife panic pumped up his blood pressure when he realized she was half his age—wore a tapestry skirt tied low around her full hips, revealing a tattoo of a goddess whose wings were spread across the small of her back. He’d heard it said that you knew you were getting old when cops were younger than you. But counter service girls—ice cream, coffee, sandwiches—came first. It had seemed like forever to Scanlon that the girls scooping his ice cream were always a few years older—sixteen or seventeen, with the bodies and secrets of women. When asking for a double scoop he’d try to deepen his voice, and then hand over a crumpled single knowing that to these girls he was a mere child. But after what felt like a century of summers, he rose to their age, flirted over the counter, lingered there, made dates. The girls were as intrigued and shy and playful as he was. And did that period last even a summer? Could he have held court across that glass case of brightly lit ice-cream tubs for more than a season? Half a dozen cones later he was already older than the girls, who looked through him—their eyes flitting to someone just over his shoulder—just as they had when he was a boy. In an instant they grouped him in with their teachers, their fathers, strangers on the bus. Naomi had kindly informed Scanlon that around his fortieth birthday sweat glands throughout his body, inactive until that age, would power up—she swore this was true—and begin producing “old-man smell.”

He ordered a coffee and a scone. The tables were full, but he found a spot to stand and sip the strong coffee, still glancing into the kitchen for Sequoia. He filled his mouth with the buttery scone studded with chocolate chips, macadamia nuts, and white raisins. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had a real Scottish scone, though he felt certain they were a more sober experience, more austere, something closer to Civil War hardtack, something you might have to bust apart with the stock of your musket before eating. Finally, with no sign of Sequoia, he left.