The Oregon Experiment (17 page)

But then Geoff quit his job to handle the class-action suit against Virtual-Kombat for user time lost before the units were replaced. It was never clear to Scanlon whether his father had swiped mailing lists of customers from the company or what other shenanigans might have gone on, but several countersuits were filed. In the end, the class action demanded twelve bucks for each of the 800,000 customers—a total of nearly ten million dollars. The company settled out of court for six million. The army of litigants got checks for three dollars each while Geoff took the customary thirty-three percent. He then told Joey he was divorcing her immediately, and her own lawyer got her a million-dollar settlement. Scanlon’s father bought a Winnebago and had been traveling the country ever since. His mother redecorated their East Hartford split-level in a Pottery-Barn-meets-Danish-castle motif. They each had a cool million: the American Dream come true. Scanlon remembered Geoff raising his hands at the wonder of it all. “Everyone wins,” he proclaimed without a trace of irony.

Scanlon’s relationship with Sam Belknap, Sammy’s namesake, provided him with the antidote to his parents. Sam could be crotchety and irreverent, even a scold, but Scanlon was always good to him and he was grateful and showed goodness in return. Naomi had actually wept when she realized it had never occurred to Scanlon to expect any such thing from his parents.

As Scanlon was getting ready to drive to the airport in Portland, Sammy wouldn’t stop crying. They’d paced him back and forth in the living room, taken him out to the yard to distract him with leaves and berries, forced a pacifier into his mouth (producing the deafeningly opposite effect), nursed, patted, played Mozart, bounced. “Why don’t you two come with me?” Scanlon finally suggested. “The car ride might settle him down.”

He called the airline, hoping Joey’s plane might be late, and discovered it was running half an hour early. So with dishes she’d planned to wash piled in the sink, a full Diaper Genie she’d planned to empty standing by the door, Naomi buckled her screaming baby into the carrier and snapped the carrier into the hot car—unshowered, hungry, exhausted.

Five minutes out of town, Sammy was snoozing. Naomi was in the
backseat, behind Scanlon, and she looked over his shoulder into the rearview mirror, raking her fingers through her hair, wishing she’d thought to grab a brush. Or lipstick. And a shirt. Anything besides her flip-flops, sweatpants, and baggy, faded pink T-shirt with cakey yellowish splatters on both shoulders.

“The teaching was good,” Scanlon whispered over the car noise. “Really sharp comments. Very eager. Nice kids, I thought. Polite and deferential.”

She rested her head back. Sammy was completely at peace, a tiny nut strapped into the seat. No sign of the hour-long crying fit. She could imagine what he’d look like as a young man—or a boy, anyway. Handsome and bright eyed, a gentle, surprised face. Like his father’s. Sammy had the same fierce appetites for food, comfort, sleep. An immediacy to his living, an urgency to his needs. And she loved the tiny birthmark dabbed at the corner of his mouth like a downy pink feather on the face of an exceedingly innocent-looking cat.

“After my second class, Intro to World Politics, a huge lecture class, this eastern Oregon girl, a freshman, tells me she felt lost.
Literally
lost, it turns out: there’s more people in the class than her hometown.” But he was confident he could make the class work, and his enthusiasm reminded her of those first months with him, how she’d admired his belief in teaching, exposing students to radically new ideas, teaching them to think, making them better—all of this at a time when Naomi felt she’d never accomplish anything again.

“One of the seniors—he’s double majoring in poli sci and viticulture—makes pinot noir in his garage. He’s going to bring me a few bottles. And not to be outdone, this other guy pipes up, says he’s bringing me smoked Chinook.” The hum of the road worked into Naomi like a massage. “I didn’t think anyone would make the connection to Hume,” Scanlon was saying, “but sure enough a hand goes up in the back …”

With a jolt, the freeway momentum of her sleep stopped short. The engine was off, creaking as it cooled, and Scanlon’s face was close to hers in the parking garage. Sammy snoozed beside her. She’d slept for over an hour. Wiping drool from her chin, she focused her eyes on her husband, then down her shirt where a dark saliva trail wormed around Sammy’s creamy spit-up stains. “Do you want to wait here?” Scanlon was saying.

She did. She wanted to sink back to sleep beside her baby. But her bladder was stretched so full she could only take shallow breaths. She
peered out the door past Scanlon, wondering if she could relieve herself in the garage. At times like these the clichéd war metaphor for parenting was spot-on: just as spit-polished soldiers train for precisely executed campaigns but end up hungry and stubbly faced, sticking scraps of torn underwear in their ears to keep out the blowing desert sand, mothers dream of walks with the stroller and naps in the sun but find themselves squatting between cars to piss on the grimy cement floor of a parking garage.

She couldn’t do it.

“We’ll come,” she said. “Grab the sling.” And with hovercraft smoothness, Scanlon unclipped the baby carrier and hoisted it up without disturbing Sammy’s hard-fought slumber. He draped the empty sling around his neck and set off across the pedestrian bridge for the terminal, and Naomi followed, a plastic Safeway bag containing four Huggies and a canister of wet wipes crackling against her face as she picked sleep from her eyes.

Naomi was coming out of the bathroom when she heard Sammy’s cry from across the terminal. In a rush her milk let down, two dark, heavy eyes opening wide on the front of her light-pink chest. A statuesque woman—wearing Vera Wang Look and a charcoal-gray suit, a sleek leather bag strapped over one shoulder and colorful bangles chiming as she snapped her cell phone closed—took Naomi’s measure then screwed up her cheeks in a sort of smile that Naomi took to mean,
How sweet. Somebody’s got to do it. Thank God it’s not me
.

Naomi hurried across the expanse of carpet toward Sammy’s cry, her flip-flops snapping and her body jiggling under the loose T-shirt and sweats. When would she have her body back? Her head was stuffed up, her boobs were ready to explode, her nipples were chapped. There were whole regions of her body, geographies of flesh, that she’d been piggybacking for some time but had been too exhausted to explore. She could ignore them until they jostled her, like a sweaty fat man with a good punch line slapping her on the back. When had she last showered?

Scanlon handed off the baby—hysterical, a national emergency—and she sat cross-legged at the base of a column and hiked up her shirt, so Sammy could latch on, his cosmic screams collapsing in on themselves, sucked up into a black hole. He nursed in peace, on the bank of the steady stream of arriving passengers, occasionally tugging on her nipple as he craned toward a tinkling silver-belled anklet, a squeaky-wheeled rolly, twin girls shouting, “Daddy!” Scanlon slid the carrier next to her with his
foot and leaned back against the column, the quilted sling drooping across his torso.

She wished her own parents were coming down the concourse, but they wouldn’t be able to meet Sammy until spring. They were living on an island near Fiji, and getting in and out was a major ordeal involving outrigger canoes, seaplanes, and top-heavy lorries. Her mother, a nurse, helped run a clinic in the village—a two-year job through an NGO, and with rising seas devouring the island, two years might be all the coastal villages had left.

Then she saw Joey, a walking advertisement for outlet malls. Chanel purse, Gucci bag, Yves Saint Laurent scarf—all of it, Naomi was sure, a steal. She thought Joey looked frailer than usual. Thinner, less nimble on her three-inch heels, a dusty cast to her face. But when she saw Scanlon, she brightened and her jeweled hands snapped up to clamp his face. He kissed her on the cheek and she tugged on his beard. “Who can believe the foliage?” she said, meaning the beard, already inspecting Naomi, nursing on the floor with the plastic grocery bag beside her. “Good God,” she said to Scanlon. “You look like immigrants.”

That frailty, Naomi quickly realized, was only wishful thinking.

“I hope Oregon’s not like Israel,” Joey said.

Naomi had already heard enough, but Scanlon endured this stuff, practically expected it.

“You’re Jewish, Naomi. You’ve seen this, I’m sure. Tastefully dressed, college-grad-type Americans who happen to be Jewish go off to live in Israel and sail back to their own country looking like babushkas.”

There was an announcement for a flight to New York. Had Joey stayed long enough?

“Anyhow, hand over my little boy,” Joey said, reaching toward Naomi with both hands, snapping her fingers against her palms like a toddler who wants to be picked up. Or like a crab.

“Even by this age,” Joey said, still resentful she wasn’t seeing Sammy until he’d aged to a grizzled three and a half weeks, “they’re so precious.” She was watching a silver-haired man in a business suit straddling a briefcase and thumbing the
Wall Street Journal
. Her hands kept snapping. “Give,” she said.

“He’s eating,” Naomi said.

The man folded up his newspaper and headed off toward the food court.

“You all must be starving,” Joey announced.

“Not really,” Scanlon said. “Are you, Naomi?”

“No. We should get home.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Joey said. “I’m in no rush. Have a little bite. How far is it?”

“Nearly two hours.”

“Good Lord.
I’ll
say. Timbuktu.”

Sammy was done. Naomi pulled him off and laid him over her shoulder for a burp, and Joey took a few steps back to disassociate herself from the peasants. “The steakhouse,” Joey said. “That’ll do. Come on, Scanlon. We’ll get a table.” And she walked off.

“Is that all right with you?” Scanlon asked.

Naomi nodded.

“You want a smoothie?”

“Not hungry.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

Down the terminal, they watched Joey veer into the steakhouse. Sammy released a long burp. Naomi wasn’t sure why, but both she and Scanlon laughed.

Joey waved to them from a table by the bar. She reached for the baby and Naomi laid him in her arms as the waitress appeared with a White Russian. Shifting Sammy to one side, she received the drink, took a generous taste, and said, “Who wants what?” holding the waitress at the table.

Scanlon shook his head.

“Nothing for me either,” Naomi said.

“For God’s sake,” Joey said to the waitress. “An order of french fries for the table.” She took another swallow, then gave her attention to Sammy. “You big bad boy,” she said, waving a finger in front of his face. “Oh yes, I saw this in the pictures.” She flicked a glued-on nail at the birthmark at the corner of Sammy’s mouth. “Well,” she said in a tone of remaining positive despite adversity, “it’ll fade.”

When the fries came, she ordered another drink and pushed the plate across the table. Scanlon ate a few, and after a while, as Joey worked on her drink, Sammy asleep in the crook of his grandmother’s arm, Naomi poured ketchup on her bread plate and twirled a french fry in it. “So,” Joey said as Naomi took a bite, “how’s the weight coming off?”

·   ·   ·

For almost three weeks he’d been keeping clear of Douglas, staying in a squat house in Portland with a guy named Speed, another named X, one chick who didn’t talk, and another from Duluth who never shut up. “I mean you should’ve seen it,” she repeated for days. “A Winnebago with California plates takes a turn right in front of the streetcar, the old-fashioned kind, vintage, all wood. And it rips that Winnebago open like a sardine can. Like opening up a dollhouse. Their precious fucking Winnebago exposed. I mean, is that the perfect metaphor? These old fucks from California burning petroleum and polluting the air and crashing into a vintage street car, a symbol of some glorious past that’s nothing but a myth? I mean, is it fucking perfect?”

Clay nodded, then ate some more tuna out of the dented can.

“There was Miracle Whip, too,” she said. “A huge jar on the pavement. Splat.”

Clay scooped up tuna with a broken Lorna Doone.

Speed didn’t come back to the house for a few nights, and on the third night the girl from Duluth came into the room off the kitchen where Clay was laid out, not sleeping, on the floor between boxes of stolen wire and pipe that turned out not to be copper, old clothes that smelled like the furniture pads stacked at the back of the truck, and a brand-new game of Monopoly. She stood over him with one hand on a coil of the worthless wire, not talking for the first time ever, and pretty soon they were fucking. She had a hard, solid body, and lying on her back she pulled her knees up to her shoulders. Calves and hips with real girth, tits that stayed put, muscular tits, like she spent her life before Portland slinging hay bales onto flatbeds. Afterward, she started to cry. Or maybe she grew up in a city and was just born strong, genetically. He realized he didn’t know where Duluth was. Which state.

The next day Speed reappeared, and Clay thought it best to clear out. He had major shit to take care of. He needed a vehicle to get out to Siuslaw Butte. He needed a better plan. So an hour later he was sitting on the backseat of the Greyhound, his head on the window, a curtain of chilled air moving up the glass. He counted his money—down to nothing. He’d go by Mayflower this afternoon and tell them he wanted to work tomorrow. The dispatcher would be pissed off.
Three jobs I was light a guy. You want work, you make yourself available
. But more than likely they’d have something for him. Nobody wanted Saturdays, and there was always a truck rolling in Friday night that got held up at Grant’s Pass or Shasta or in traffic
through San Francisco or a breakdown. Better tips on a Saturday. They’d give him shit, but they’d hardly mean it. Or they’d mean it and it wouldn’t matter. Clay knew he was one of their better movers. They hired the worst sorts of derelicts and drifters. Old guys, hair slicked back with oil that doesn’t cover the smell of booze. Shoes with no socks, rattling into the lot on sorry bicycles, late, sweating. They don’t eat a thing, just wait to get paid and start sucking down beer. Edmund refused to work with them. Had too many bureaus let go on him halfway up the stairs. Edmund preferred the college kids, hard bodies in Nike T-shirts. But second to them, he usually grabbed Clay.