The Oregon Experiment (21 page)

“The ninety-pounder isn’t helping any,” Naomi said.

Joey had put on a blue cocktail dress and too much jewelry for Douglas. Scanlon had told her she didn’t need to bring anything so fancy, that jeans, a few shirts, and fleece for the evening would serve her well, but she’d gone out with glass beads clicking on the fringe of her shawl, wafting perfume she’d nicked from Naomi.

“She’ll be surprised,” Naomi had said, “when the jazz combo turns out to be a couple of hillbillies playing the spoons and a saw.”

Scanlon couldn’t help thinking that Naomi herself was missing the point of Douglas, missing the real character of the town. With her nose back—the thing she’d wanted so desperately for nine years—it bewildered him that she could still be so negative.

“Rachel called while you were in the shower,” she said now. “They were in a cab heading down to the Blue Note for Jimmy Scott.” Her lips were inches from Scanlon’s, but her voice was faint. “A midnight set in New York seems about as far from our lives as a can-can show in Paris with F. Scott and Zelda.”

They’d only been here two months. She was sabotaging their lives; she wouldn’t give the place a chance.

He spoke to the ceiling. “I wish you hadn’t told my mother about getting the down payment money from your parents.” Joey had expressed her profound shock at Douglas real estate values, confounded that anyone would shell out East Hartford prices
here
, and that’s when Naomi had
mentioned the money. “I really didn’t want anyone to know,” Scanlon said. “No one needs to know.” It was a point of pride, and hearing Naomi toss it off so casually felt like a betrayal.

“Fine,” she said. “Sorry.”

They lay in silence for a few minutes, then Scanlon asked, “How’re the boobs?”

“Oh, man. Thank God. They feel better.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“I’ll still call the docs again on Monday. And your girlfriend, too.”

“Which girlfriend?”

“The one with the big—” she raised an eyebrow “—heart. I might try acupuncture.”

“Let ’em give it a stab?”

“Well, I can see their point.”

“They can be very sharp.”

“Anyhow,” Naomi said, “I’ll see what else Sequoia suggests. Obviously she’s a veteran nursemaid.” She smirked. “I hear she’s been suckling soldiers since the
first
Gulf War.”

Scanlon saw nothing wrong with Sequoia still nursing Trinity. “I bet she’ll help. She’s so … well, she’s really generous.”

“So you said.”

Sammy was already snoring, and Scanlon rolled onto his side. He touched his nose to Naomi’s, then he kissed her. He kissed her neck, her ear. As the air between them warmed, the smell of her milk—now
her
smell—became heady, intoxicating, and he unbuttoned her pajamas and kissed her breasts. He drew her nipple into his mouth, lolling it with his tongue. When he sucked, she flinched, and he backed off. Slowly he reached with his lips again, closed his mouth around her nipple, and tasted a drop of her milk.

But she put her hand to his cheek and gently pushed him back. “They’re kind of sore.”

“You said you were okay.”

“The sharp pain’s gone, but they’re sore from nursing. Normal sore.”

He kissed the swell of her breast. “I’ll go easy,” he promised. “I want to try—”

“But—” she shifted away, back into herself “—that’s for Sammy.”

Neither of them moved for a time, then she buttoned her pajama top and he rolled onto his back.

“With my nose today,” she said, “it’s my canary in the coal mine. I need to start taking better care of myself. For Sammy’s sake.”

“What more—” he began, then changed course. “What would help you take better care of yourself?”

“More sleep, less stress. Your mother isn’t helping.”

“I know she’s not.”

“I need to find the right balance—to be a great mother
and
to be creative. Those are my two priorities. All the books say you can’t do one without the other.”

Scanlon waited to hear how
he
fit into the balance.

“It’s taken me a lot of years to let go of my first.” Her voice had dropped to the damaged and contrite monotone reserved for the baby she gave up. “I’d thought that when I had another baby, I’d be able to step away from the decision I made. But when I look at Sammy—so innocent and tiny and perfect—when I hold him and nurse him, I’m … horrified.” She spoke now through tears. “I don’t know that person who gave her baby away. I’m scared of her. That she could
do
something like that.”

“No,” he said. “You did what was best for him.”

“How can you say that? We have no idea what his life is like.”

“It was best for him, even if it wasn’t what was best for you.”

“Goddamnit,” she said, her voice rising. “You think this is about me? I’m going to give everything I have to mothering Sammy. I’m sorry if that means there’s not a lot left over for—”

“You don’t like the way I smell, do you?” he blurted. “My breath or something.”

She became very still. Scanlon smelled her milk in the sheets, the warmth from her body, their sandalwood soap, pillowcases damp from their hair.

In a small, disembodied voice, as if through a tiny speaker across the room, she finally replied: “What a thing to say about someone.”

Long after she’d fallen asleep, Scanlon was staring at the ceiling. He heard his mother come in, listening as she watched TV, then used the sink and toilet. He heard her settle into the spare room.

Sometime later, he stood naked at the picture window in the dark living room staring out at the street. The sourness had returned to his stomach.

He opened the front closet and pulled on the stiff Carhartts and logging boots he’d bought for the contest. Then he clomped to the garage,
where his brand-new ax was leaning in the corner. Out back by the blueberry bushes he went at the mossy firewood left behind by the sellers, swinging the ax down hard, splitting every knotty, knock-kneed log in the pile, dripping with sweat for an hour, pounding again and again, eyes and hands stinging, until the entire stack was reduced to kindling.

There was this guy Clay was meeting about detonating cord, a guy who claimed he could supply Chandler G-99 presplit. Clay could fabricate his own from wire and blasting caps—easy—but genuine Chandler hexamine-nitrate slurry, which this guy said he could acquire in quantity, would be more reliable, and safer. The professional route. 13½ indicated he’d kick in the cash. Bricks and superglue and molotov cocktails were essential messages in the struggle, but a soldier finally dials it up a notch. Shit, with real det cord and a good hit on the explosives at Siuslaw Butte, Clay could bring down Mount Rushmore.

The series ran back and forth across his room, starting with the lantern batteries in the corner by the heater, then fifteen-foot lengths of wire zigzagging over his mattress and across the floor—
bam!
in the corner by his box of clothes,
bam!
under the light switch,
bam!
beside the fridge,
bam!
under the window. Last night he wired it into the alarm clock he’d set for five minutes as a test, knowing he could prove to millions that the corporate-federal slavemaster was vulnerable; he’d provide the boost they needed to cut the master down. He waited. The alarm chirped, and the ten mini flashlights he’d used in place of blasting caps lit up the perimeter of his room like a carnival.

The dry run had revealed some problems. When he cut up the PVC pipe, he discovered it was cracked—about what you’d expect for ninety-nine cents from Habitat. The wire cutters would do, but the strippers were so rusted they compromised the precision and speed so essential for lastminute adaptations. And without batteries, he had nothing. He realized he’d have to carry backups.

He propped a boot on the windowsill and laced it tight. Out the window, the clock on the courthouse read ten past eleven. He pissed and ate the rest of a cold and dry hot-dog burrito. Spongy. Sometimes he wished he had a microwave. The guy with the Chandler G-99s said he’d be at the Green & Black around eleven. Afterward, Clay planned to hit the all-night laundry, where college girls in sweats and T-shirts would be marking up
textbooks with squeaky yellow pens. Stepping over the wires, he stuffed his duffel with dirty socks and underwear, his other jeans, his towel. Under the pile of dirty shirts was the professor’s red Gap hat, and he put it on and looked in the bathroom mirror: Citizen Clay. He looked like any asshole in a Range Rover.

The baby was a little jaundiced, he’d noticed this afternoon in the park, and he wondered if Naomi was having trouble nursing. His friend Royce had struggled for weeks, and Maria, too. She’d had infections the whole first year. Daria might still be nursing. Ruby Christine was fourteen and a half months now. She could weigh as much as twenty-five pounds. Walking. Running! At that age Bumblebee, Royce’s girl, loved flowers—“nahnee,” she called them—and dogs and cement trucks.

Ruby Christine. What did she love?

Naomi looked weak today. Like the day she’d fainted. No light in her face. But Clay hadn’t missed how she’d glowed when the professor invited him to their house. At first he’d thought
no way
because he didn’t trust Scanlon or what he wanted—it was obvious he wanted something—but Naomi was different, and there was the baby, too. He sat down on the mattress, moved a wire, and laid his head on the pillow, fixing his eyes on the photograph of Naomi, replaying every moment of her labor until he heard the courthouse bell strike midnight. He’d missed the dude with the G-99s.

Through the soundless stretch of night he stared at the photo, dipping into sleep and letting his dreams do the work of confusing Naomi with Daria, swirling them into one.

In the morning, on the riverbank downtown, Scanlon stood in a line before the judges with blistered hands and a tweaked muscle in his neck. While Naomi slept, he’d added suspenders to his Carhartts, pulled on a Pendleton shirt, and relaced the logging boots, pondering their incongruously delicate, tapered heel. Down the line he saw a few firemen who’d been at the hospital and, standing between two giants, the very short Fenton wearing a black bowler hat.

The scores came in. Scanlon got a respectable 8.5 on appearance, and he went on, despite the burning blisters, to split his log in one chop. As he shouldered his ax and turned proudly to face the small crowd, Fenton stood there frowning, his arms crossed.

“I could’ve split that with my nine-iron,” Fenton said.

“In my years as a tree feller,” Scanlon began, “I developed—”

“Nobody likes a smart aleck. Did you see the log they gave me?”

Scanlon had—he’d needed four chops—but he shook his head.

“Six knots. Two of them major. What did you score on that ridiculous get-up?”

“Eight-five.”

“That’s BS. Frickin’ BS.”

Away from the department, standing tall in his boots and gripping an ax, Scanlon felt a surge of power, as he had flaunting the Rolex. “Do you think that hat might’ve hurt you? With the salt-and-pepper beard, you sorta look like a riverboat gambler.”

“Damnit,” Fenton spat. “Unlike the rest of you jerk-offs all gussied up for some bogus Disney movie, I’m sesquicentennially accurate. Read your goddamn history.” He spun away, but after a few steps turned back. “And Pratt,” he said. “Don’t get your fingers burnt.” Then he stormed off for real.

Any hubris Scanlon might have felt was quickly squashed. In the slow-chop, two-foot logs were clamped upright on heavy metal stands. He was expected not to split the log but to cut across it, to essentially chop it down in as few strikes as possible. He watched the other so-called amateurs draw chopping templates on the bark-stripped logs with magic markers; they looked like golf pros rehearsing the angles of their swings, their stance, their contact points. Then they polished their blades, as shiny as chrome, cartoonishly oversized, like something a knight would use to hack through armor. Finally, they sprayed the blades with silicone and beheaded their logs in seventeen chops, twenty, twelve. The judges gave Scanlon the hook at forty, and thank God. His hands were bleeding, his forearms quivering. The ax might have slipped from his fingers and shot into the huddle of spectators.

He took a cup of apple cider and a doughnut from the McCulloch trailer. After each slow-chop kill, a few timber fellers from the semipro category surrounded the log. “These chops up here?” they’d say, pointing to clefts in the wood. “All wasted.” There was a lot to learn.

The final event for amateurs was speed-chop—counting seconds instead of chops—and then the semipros moved on to chain saws, ax throwing, pole climbing and, finally, log rolling on the river. Chain saws scared Scanlon, the pole climbing seemed impossible, the log rolling—not a chance. Hard core, was all he could think.

The muscles in his forearms were still quivering as he brought the
shaky Dixie cup of cider to his lips and read a poster on the trailer celebrating the westward expansion: “The cowards never started, the weak died along the way, only the strong survived.” According to McCulloch, he was the descendant of a long line of cowards. In the past Naomi had accused him of being a “classic academic,” in effect a bourgeois dilettante who got his jollies flirting with radicals and mass movements but ultimately retreated to the safety of the middle class. The thumping he suffered in
Domestic Policy
accused him of much the same.

He watched the competition to the end. One of the firefighters at Sammy’s birth won the amateur category. The winning lumberjill was the captain of the university’s logging-sports team, and the man crowned Mr. Douglas in the semipros was officially sponsored by McCulloch. Scanlon shouldered his ax and headed for the car.

He’d left a note for Naomi this morning saying he’d be home around noon, but approaching the car he felt a reluctance, even a mild dread: she’d be exhausted or depleted, or the pain would’ve taken hold again; or Joey would be making her crazy, and he’d be expected to soothe the whole situation. He never imagined himself the sort who stops for a scotch and soda after leaving the office, not for the drink but to postpone getting home. He believed such men existed only in movies from the fifties, but he suddenly realized, as he recognized the impulse in himself, that his father had been one of them.