The Oregon Experiment (36 page)

“Nice afternoon for it,” Clay said, “but I’ve got other plans today.”

The cop’s helmet was cocked back roguishly, and his fleshy chin was red from the dangling strap, all protocol abandoned in battle. “Move it,” he said, and prodded him between the shoulder blades with his stick.

Clay’s head twitched. His back tensed, then he took a bite of his burrito in a forced display of cool. But the cop wasn’t budging and Clay’s anger expanded—his head snapping, his ears going red.

“He lives here,” Naomi blurted. “Right here.” She pointed. “I was coming to visit him. We were just going up.”

The cop didn’t like it—he knew her type—but he backed off, watching until Clay produced a key and the two of them stepped inside, the heavy glass door springing shut.

“Never do that,” Clay muttered. They were standing on wet Domino’s fliers and color photos of pot roast and Huggies on special at Fred Meyer. “Never give in to them.”

She followed him up the stairs. “I just thought it might defuse—”

“Never concede their authority. Just—” He turned at his apartment door, glaring down at her from two steps above. His head twitched. “Don’t.”

It was a single room. Gold carpet, decades old, a bare mattress on the floor, a sink and counter, a hotplate and a small fridge, three cardboard boxes half-full of clothes. Clay sat cross-legged on the corner of the mattress and ate his burrito without pleasure, or even interest. Naomi stood at the tall window. She could see the bridge into town, the Bank of America, and the signboard in front of the Church of the Savior:
In all you do His blood’s for you
. A bus pulled out from under her feet, a black cloud shooting from the tailpipe. Diesel fumes seeped around the loose window sashes.

Over the auto-body shop belonging to Clair’s parents there’d been a studio apartment—usually vacant, since few tenants could endure the smell of body putty for long—and from the window she could look out at
the heating-oil depot across the street, two blue-black tanks propped up on timber trestles. As grease and spices from Clay’s burrito mixed with diesel exhaust, she remembered parting the curtains (a kitcheny pattern of garlic heads, oregano, chili peppers, and thyme, each identified in loopy script by its Latin name) and seeing the oil tanks in the bright sun as Clair, behind her, zipped into his coveralls only minutes after Joshua was conceived.

He felt funny with her standing two feet from the bathroom door, but he had to piss, pretty bad. Daria was the last woman in here, the only woman. Every hour, all night, when she was pregnant, her surge and tinkle would fill the night’s empty silence.

The light through his window haloed Naomi’s hair. You didn’t see much kinky hair like that in Oregon. After a long time she turned from the window, her hand on her belly, saying, “How was the burrito?”

He shook his head. He had no patience for meaningless talk or the garbage that filled the airwaves. His struggle was keeping it from worming into him, like brown noise. “We’re better than that,” he said. And then he asked, “Why didn’t you bring Sammy?”

She looked away for a moment, then back. “He must remind you of Ruby Christine.”

His daughter was fitting triangular blocks through triangular holes. She was finger-painting and eating peeled grapes. She took naps curled up next to Daria. “I like babies,” he said.

“And single moms.” She smiled.

“I do,” he said. “It’s what my mom pretty much was. Three reckless boys, my father worst of all.” He envied single moms because they were released from meaninglessness.

And in the way it was with Naomi, he now felt at ease, and after a while, he picked up with the story from Crazy Eights about his father, how King’s
instability
, the doctor called it, turned more frightening, more violent, as Billy and Clay became teenagers. He swiped explosives off the highway job and blew craters in the backyard with his boys, teaching them how to make their own electronic detonators.

In the blue suit that Clay’s mother had bought King for his father’s funeral, he got drunk and punched out his brother-in-law, who’d moved
with King’s sister to Walla Walla for a factory job where he had to wear a hairnet and a paper gown. They could only spare an afternoon back in Yaquina. When they said their goodbyes fifteen minutes into the reception, wolfing down smoked salmon on the way out the door, King hit him. Most of Clay’s parents’ large families had moved away as fishing, crabbing, and timber dried up.

When Clay was in high school, his father drove him and Billy along the newly constructed highway to Siuslaw Butte, which he and the ODOT crew had spent the last month blasting away in order to straighten the road through Burnt Woods. King pulled the El Camino off the shoulder and drove through the tall, dry weeds around the backside of the security lamps that bathed light on the giant dump trucks and graders, engineering trailer, and steel lockers. He parked the car in a dark level patch along the river and displayed in his palm a padlock key, his grin devious, dangerous. King told the boys to wait, then set off in the shadows. Billy threw rocks into the river. Clay imagined his father hiding in the shadows of the high school in Baltimore the night he sneaked out. He thought of his parents at Yaquina High, the same age he was now, kissing in the shadows behind the bleachers after King Knudson slugged the varsity team to another victory.

Half an hour passed before he returned with a heavy red box in each hand. “No more sneaking home firecrackers in my Playmate, boys. You need to see what your powder-monkey dad can really shoot. Now, sit tight.”

This was before the period when Clay would not have sat tight. In the next couple of years he began to intervene in these misadventures. But on this night, he was still the child, full of bad feelings and doubts about his father’s judgment but, despite everything, living under the comforting, self-sustaining illusion that King would ultimately know what was best and do the right thing. It was as childish as believing the Easter Bunny hides eggs in your yard even when you see your mother close the shades during breakfast and slip out the back door with a paper bag, but belief was sometimes its own reward, like an Easter basket puffed with colorful nesting and rich with foil-wrapped chocolate eggs.

Until. Until his father scrambled back, dragging a det box and cord, and called Billy up from the riverbank. Before Clay had even gotten out of the El Camino, four booming explosions flashed up in quick succession: a grader, the engineers’ trailer, a utility locker—

Clay cut off the story there, then told Naomi that his father had been fired the previous afternoon, which wasn’t true. King didn’t seem to have a reason for doing it. Nothing beyond
instability
.

By dawn the state police had surrounded the house, and King was hurling pots and pans at them from a second-story window. Hammers and wrenches and aerosol cans. When they took him, he was shirtless, handcuffed, and bleeding from his left shoulder.

Clay told Naomi none of this. He didn’t tell her that the fourth explosion blew up a unit of six Porta-Potties. He didn’t tell her the VA hospital was as worthless in the next three years as it’d been in the previous fourteen. King was medicated, strapped to chairs in windowless rooms with locked and reinforced doors. He was released and repeatedly jailed for disorderly conduct that was provoked by the drugs the VA mandated he take as a condition of his release. Nearly every time he was arrested he put up a fight before they tackled him to the ground and cuffed him.

He didn’t tell Naomi that his father tried to hang himself three times in a jail cell, twice with bedsheets, once with the elastic waistband of county-issue underpants. And he didn’t tell her that finally, at the start of Clay’s junior year in high school, King bought his wife a bouquet of flowers, then walked the seven miles to where he and Roslyn had grown up neighbors on Onsland Point, cutting across parking lots of high-priced condos unimaginable a decade earlier, and when he got to the bluff where they used to watch fishing boats come in, now the fifteenth green of Hadley Point Golf Club, he stood at the edge, where the country ended and the Pacific Ocean began, and he jumped for his life.

Naomi had drifted from the window and was sitting opposite him, cross-legged on a corner of the mattress. He thought she looked maternal and middle-aged, with her arms crossed over her belly and her shiny blue raincoat still zipped. Was it cold in here? It had exhausted him to put this history into words, these memories a dense and formless weight at the back of his neck that he couldn’t move out from under, couldn’t buck off. But the way she leaned toward him to listen made him want to try.

He couldn’t stand it any longer, so he went into the toilet and pissed a wicked stream. The relief was tremendous.

And when he came out she was stretched diagonally across his mattress, reaching for the photo of herself eight months pregnant, sun-bronzed shoulders, covering her breasts. She darted a look at him—her face flushed with confusion, fear, then anger—and he stopped in the bathroom
doorway as a police car howled past. His head wouldn’t stop twitching, so fiercely that he stumbled against the doorjamb. And Naomi came to him. She laid her hand on his neck and guided him back. He fell on his side and curled up in a ball, his head convulsing against the mattress. She sat beside him, her warm hand between his shoulder blades, and gently coached his breathing, leading him through the spasms until his head lay still.

T
hat night, they ate like the war-weary, staring into Styrofoam trays of burritos, pinto beans, and brown rice, the whole time listening to sirens in the distance. Scanlon had worked all afternoon on his piece for the
Oregonian
, but goddamnit, he couldn’t find an angle. Neither anarchy theorists nor Proudhon and the Mutualists were suitable for a newspaper feature. He needed on-the-ground research, primary sources, the street-level perspective that colleagues sitting in their offices at Princeton would never have. The kind of details that would impress even Sam Belknap.

When they finished dinner, Geoff took Sammy on his shoulder to the RV to watch Baby Mozart anime on satellite from Japan. Naomi was too exhausted to even put up a fight. She flipped past several channels of live news from downtown Douglas before settling for a rerun of
Friends
. During a commercial, Scanlon snatched the remote from her lap and switched to the demonstrations: two girls with scraggly wet hair and black sweatshirts were being cuffed with plastic zip strips.

“I talked to Rachel,” Naomi said.

The cops gripped the girls’ arms, loading them into a paddy wagon. Scanlon chomped on corn chips from the oily takeout bag.

“A sublet opened up in her building. A studio. It’s cheap.”

Scanlon kept his eyes on the TV, slowly allowing what Naomi was saying to sink in.

“I could freelance, so I wouldn’t be tied to New York. Either that or part-time.”

On the TV he saw a clip of himself in the bus shelter this afternoon, the air milky with tear gas, America Sanchez holding the microphone to his face. His mouth was moving, but a reporter was talking over his voice.

“I need to get back to my career,” Naomi said. “I figure Sammy and I could be back here for two weeks or more every month.”

He turned away from the TV and looked squarely at her. He ate a chip. “But you’re incapable of taking care of yourself,” he said. “You always have been.”

“That’s your fantasy. What you want to believe so—”

“Be patient, please. I swear I’ll get us back to New York. I promise.”

“But
when
?”

“We said a few years. It’s only been five months.”

“But I didn’t have my nose then. I e-mailed Blaine Maxwell. She said I could have all the frog juice I want. This could be so big.”

“So work on it here. You’ve got your organ set up, the house to yourself all day.”

“I …” She shook her head. “There’s nothing for me here.”

“How about your fucking husband?”

“My fucking husband,” she said calmly, “is tied up with his research and his various movements.”

“I’m trying to make a family,” he shouted. “I’ve been working my ass off on an article all day. I’m doing this for you and Sammy. Tapping all the sources I can so I can write—”

“You’re tapping your sources for me and Sammy? My
fucking husband
is tapping Sequoia for us. I bet she’s an amazing resource.”

Scanlon’s heart thumped. Goddamnit, she knew. “You don’t have to leave. I don’t want you to.”

“I’ve got my life and Sammy’s to think about.”

“If you go,” he said, staring at the chip in his fingers, feeling his face darken, “Sammy stays here with me.”

Her breath caught. She shook her head. Her shoulders hunched up and her eyes narrowed. She squeezed his elbow and guided his hand with
the chip toward her. When she opened her mouth, the chip at her lips, a moan, more like a growl, sounded in her throat. She stared into his eyes, the growl deepening.

Then she pounced, biting with the force of a wild animal. He screamed and jumped back, blood spurting from his thumb and finger, blood and Naomi’s saliva edging her clenched teeth.

The police stopped him at a barricade across Lewis and Clark Boulevard, and when they turned him back, he pulled into the lot behind the city library and cut the engine. On a side street, idling in the darkness, was a canvas-backed truck: Oregon National Guard.

He locked the car, pulled up his rain jacket hood, and set off toward the courthouse. Passing by the truck, he studied the various high-tech-looking orbs and cones surrounding a small satellite dish, and heard a smooth, deep hum occasionally interrupted by an electronic bleep or scratch of static. Heat radiated from behind the canvas tarp, green lights flashing dimly, and the whole rig smelled like dust burning on top of a light bulb, like the hot tubes of his father’s old stereo.

“Stand back.” A soldier suddenly appeared at the rear of the truck, cupping a cigarette in his hand against the rain, his face completely shadowed.

Scanlon’s gut dropped.

“And move along.”