The Oregon Experiment (3 page)

The first café she saw was an old yellow bungalow with sage trim, S
KCUBRATS
hand-painted in peacock blue over the porch. The place was funky—wooden tables and wobbly mismatched chairs, the blackboard menu covered with swirls and flowers in colored chalk—but smelled wonderfully of coffee, cinnamon, butter, the warm cream of steaming milk. Her hunger stirred. She ordered a decaf latte and a carrot muffin from the girl at the counter and sat at a table in the window.

She rested her cup on the hard rise of her belly. Out the window, through the fog, an old pickup rolled by; the granddad behind the wheel wore a sharp clean cowboy hat, as did his wife across the seat, and between them their hound dog sat up proud.

Then a woman coasted up on an old cruiser bicycle. She was around thirty with dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing Thai fisherman’s pants, a batik top, and the high-tech sandals of this new generation of hippies. A red gas can pocked with rust was bolted to the rack behind her seat, its spout curving back like a civet cat’s tail.
The Revolution Will Not Be Motorized
was painted in purple on its side.

The woman chained her bike to a pole and came into the café, her lovely, big-mouthed smile moving from Naomi’s face to her belly. “Hey,” she said in a voice mellower than any voice anywhere in the Northeast. “Welcome.” She passed by. Her blond ponytail reached to the small of her back; the bottom few inches, as if the tips had been dipped in dye, were chestnut. She stepped behind the counter and disappeared.

Naomi brushed muffin crumbs off her belly, then picked up a flier from a stack on the window seat. The Pacific Northwest Secessionist Movement. She drank back her last milky sip of latte and was about to get up when the woman appeared at her table.

“Come check us out,” she said.

Naomi waved the flier. “This?”

“Next Thursday.” The woman slipped into the chair opposite her. “I’m Sequoia.”

Naomi had expected patchouli, but the sandalwood and jasmine—probably solid perfumes—were a surprise and a good straightforward combination for her. She was overheated from biking, and the scents rose off her skin with the walnut shell, milk, and oat grain smells of her body. She was an earthy beauty—busty and generous in the hips, green eyes, and a tiny green stone piercing the side of her nose.

“Naomi,” she said as they shook hands. “It’s for my husband. He’s a professor at the university. This is his sort of deal. His research.”

“No way.” A small pink scar—thin as a pencil line—stretched up her lip when she smiled. “What’s his name?”

Riding a tricycle out from the kitchen, a little girl, three or four years old, steered toward them. She climbed up onto Sequoia’s lap, then eyed Naomi across the table. “I’m Trinity,” she said.

“I’m Naomi.” She touched her belly where her baby’s head sat. “He’s just starting this fall. Scanlon Pratt.”

The little girl unbuttoned the top of Sequoia’s shirt. She removed a breast with two chubby hands.

“And he studies secessionism?” Sequoia asked.

The girl lifted Sequoia’s breast to her mouth and started to suckle, her eyes darting between Naomi and her mother as she listened to the conversation, her lips and jaw pumping at high speed.

Naomi wasn’t a prude. She believed in nursing at the workplace, in restaurants, government buildings, even Wal-Mart. And she believed in nursing for a long time, giving the baby a fair shot at various antibodies and an intimate mother-child bond. “Secessionism,” she heard herself saying. “Mass movements, radical action.” But this seemed really bizarre. The girl dropped the breast and reached across the table to pluck a napkin from a basket. Maybe it was the girl’s Converse high-tops. Or the skull tattoo—it
had
to be temporary—on her arm. Or maybe that the girl nursing across the table was wearing a watch.

“Urge him to come,” Sequoia said. “I’d be grateful.”

The girl licked her lips and wiped them with the napkin, then said, “That was tasty.”

It had been nearly an hour, and Naomi still wasn’t back. Through a dull caffeine-withdrawal headache pushing at his temples, Scanlon watched his new neighbors back out the driveway, their brake lights glowing red through the fog. The movers were jimmying the couch through the front door.

Following them inside, he showed them where to set the couch, and then fell back onto the cushions. The fireplace with its raised hearth and jagged bricks set a retro tone for the whole house. Frank Lloyd Wright meets Dick Van Dyke. Ceiling lights were frosted glass, spraying out gold stars and zeniths. In the kitchen, curving white steel with chrome pulls formed the ’59 Eldorado of cabinets. But the prize here was an orange Formica built-in table shaped like a teardrop with matching swivel chairs of molded white plastic and orange vinyl padding. Buying a house from old people who’d preserved their last remodel so long had endowed them with a museum piece.

The old folks had planted fruit years ago, too, and now he and Naomi would be harvesting from mature trees and bushes, each one identified on a hand-drawn map passed along by the realtor. Scanlon had immediately set himself on an internet crash course so he could productively prune and cultivate their little city lot of apples, pears, and blueberries. He’d learned about soil amendments for the marionberries and figs, and planned to build a new trellis to encourage pollination between the male and female kiwi vines.

He opened the back door and dropped down the steps to the concrete patio, covered carport-style with green corrugated fiberglass. They’d get a table and chairs, and have grad students over to drink wine from short tumblers. Kids would ride trikes in circles while Scanlon grilled kebobs on the barbecue, another item to add to the list.

He kicked through the long wet grass—he needed a mower, too—and at the edge of the yard he came to the apple trees: overgrown and wild, they hadn’t been pruned in years. He touched an apple, small and tight, no bigger than an apricot. In another couple months they’d have bushels of juicy crisp Galas.

Feeling as if he were in a dream, he took a few steps through the fog and the next bunch of leaves and fruit came into resolve: marionberries, the prickly vines heaped up over a sagging trellis. Standing there, eating plump berries, he wondered what else they’d need to buy. He’d heard that lots of baby stuff simply materialized either as gifts from relatives or from a network of mothers—their instinct smelling a coming birth—who delivered well-worn but clean bundles of receiving blankets, PJs, and onesies. They’d been getting a little supplementary money from Naomi’s parents over the last few years, though mostly Scanlon had tried not to spend it, trying to squirrel it away for times like this. Her parents had put up most of the down payment for the house, too. But now that Scanlon was on a regular salary and they wouldn’t be moving every year, all those extra expenses would settle out. Edmund was right: a couple of young people making it. Well, thirty-six and thirty-nine, but making it.

Scanlon had ended up here by accident—by luck, really. The Pacific Northwest was the true front line of radicalism in America—environmental demonstrators, anarchists, survivalists, anti-globalists. Seattle erupted when the WTO came to town, not Boston or New York or D.C. Scanlon had traveled across the country to Seattle—partly for research and partly to show his solidarity—and he’d felt an excitement in the streets like nothing
he’d known from the tweedy, Volvo radicals back east. In Oregon his research could be more hands-on, in touch with the players, inside their heads. That’s what was missing from radical and mass movement studies in the East—an understanding of what was happening on the ground. Many of his colleagues at Binghamton and Brandeis wrote exclusively about the sixties, or the forties, or the thirties. They did research in response to other research. Scanlon knew an anthropologist who was a leading scholar on Quechua Indians but didn’t speak Quechua. From a hot-springs resort in Ecuador, on a Fulbright, she did her research by interviewing tourists and watching the TV news from Quito. Scanlon had lost a Georgetown appointment to a man who’d written a highly regarded book about American and French farmers’ attempts to shape national policy. Every few years, over crop subsidies or tariffs, all the farmers in France drove tractors to Paris and parked the length of the Champs-Élysées, holding the street hostage until they got what they wanted. The thought of it made Scanlon’s heart race, but this guy—now two years from tenure at Georgetown—had never bothered even to go to France.

Scanlon, on the other hand, was jumping right into the chaos. Primary material would fuel everything he did. Spending eight years working in five departments, learning the various methods of all the scholars in his field, he’d now landed in the middle of every source he’d need. Their baby was a month away, his job was tenure-track, and he’d bought his first house. His life was beginning. A new life.

With a handful of berries he wandered along the back side of the yard toward the blueberry bushes, drawn by an earthy smell like mulch or woodchips but sweeter, more like compost or, he realized with another step, pot. He stopped and, peering ahead through the fog, made out the shapes of two bushes and a standing figure. Suddenly, an ember glowed bright red and Scanlon froze. After a moment, he heard a hissing release of air. The mover.

Clay held out the joint.

“No thanks,” Scanlon said. “Want a berry?”

“I hate fruit.” As Clay put the joint to his lips, Scanlon spotted, on the underside of his forearm, a tattooed Circle-A—an A for anarchy inside an O for order, meaning anarchy
is
order. This was exactly what he’d expected of the Pacific Northwest: the second person he meets is an anarchist. A primary source smoking dope right in his backyard.

“How do you like living around here?” Scanlon asked.

The mover rolled his eyes, then took another hit and held it in his lungs.

Scanlon ate a berry. “I mean, what do you do for kicks?”

“You a professor?”

“Yeah,” Scanlon said, apologetically.

“You have a PhD or something?”

Scanlon nodded.

“Where’d you go to college for that?”

“NYU.”

“New York?”

“That’s right.”

“You know what pisses me off?” the mover said. He leaned forward and released a long watery stream of spit onto the grass. “People who come here to lecture Oregon kids on what’s what according to New York.”

Slowly chewing a berry, Scanlon kept his eyes on Clay, who’d be more intimidating if not for the tender voice. Scanlon’s mentor, Sam Belknap, would pounce on this moment. He’d told Scanlon the only way he’d nailed the book on César Chávez, the
definitive
Chávez book, was to challenge and befriend him until eventually (and with an egomaniac like Chávez it didn’t take long) he started showing off; that’s when the rhetoric fell away and he revealed himself unintentionally. “How about if you come talk to one of my classes this fall?” Scanlon said. “I do a unit on anarchy.”

The kid snorted, a high-pitched, stalling-engine laugh. “You teach
anarchy
at the
university
?”

“Or we could do an interview.”

This, apparently, struck the kid as even more absurd.

“For my book.”

The mover laughed again. He brought the joint to his lips, and his head twitched—some sort of tic—but he held his hand steady until he got a hit.

The smell of pot smoke in the dense fog carried Scanlon back to Sam’s porch in Bronxville in the weeks after his wife had died. The spring Sam retired, Maxine was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and lasted only until November. At the funeral, Sam looked to have aged a decade, and when Scanlon checked in on him after his family had left, he was distracted and forgetful, so Scanlon canceled his classes and stayed in the spare room for a week. He cooked for Sam and got him out to movies, and they spent
hours every day talking radical action and mass movements, talking about books Sam wished he’d written and Eastern European cities he’d planned to visit in the coming years with Maxine. Scanlon cleaned out closets and repaired an old gate-leg table in the basement shop—Sam had taught him woodworking over the years. He made drinks for guests and ushered them out when Sam grew tired. And when out of the blue Sam said, “I haven’t toked up in twenty-five years,” he went down to NYU and inquired with some former students until he scored, then he and Sam passed a pipe in an icy fog, and stories of the seventies quickly turned to the sixties before settling into the beatnik years in the Village early in Sam’s marriage. For two days he described Maxine with awe, still mystified by her a half-century later—snaking her hips and shoulders when she danced, playing the flute to Coltrane, dabbing a fleck of tobacco off her tongue with a pinkie and flicking it with a long painted nail, starting
Lolita
one night in the soft chair by the radiator and staying up until breakfast to finish, then doing the same a week later with
The Ugly American
. Without knowing he was doing it, Sam showed Scanlon what it meant to fall in love, then fall deeper, to keep falling.

Clay blew a plume of smoke into the fog, and Scanlon reached forward until the joint was placed in his fingers. He sucked in a couple quick hits and the smoke expanded in his lungs. Holding back a cough he said, “I just thought I’d give you the opportunity. Express your views. I don’t give a shit.”

He reached back with the roach, but Clay said, “All yours,” and brushed by him, heading back to the house. Watching him pass between the patio and the garage, Scanlon took another hit, then rolled the roach between his thumb and fingers until it scattered at his feet. Clay paused at the garage window. Paused, or was time getting sluggish? The birds were slurring, the fog seemed thicker, more soupier. And just as Scanlon thought, Shit, I’m very stoned, the kid lifted his elbow like a wing and popped it through the glass.

Scanlon sprang toward him—“What the fuck!” he shouted—but Clay had vanished through the fog. The gate latch clunked, and he heard feet whisking in the grass. He looked down. He was walking, his shoes were wet. When he looked up, half his face was reflected in the garage window, a line of broken glass running between his eyes, over the bridge of his nose, and across a cheek. He reached through the hole where the other side of
his face should have been. It really
had
happened. Shards lay on the sill and inside on the floor—the tinkling strangely continued to sound in his head. How stoned was he?