The Oregon Experiment (40 page)

She glanced at Sammy, still snoozing in the stroller, and when she turned back Clay’s shoulders were quivering, his knees squeezed closer to his chest, and he was choking back tears. She thought he might be embarrassed, thought she should leave, but instead she put her hand on his calf and held it there, and through the black jeans, his skin and muscle seemed to rise to her. “You should eat if you can,” she said. “I’ll get you one of those burritos you like.”

He rolled over to face her. He touched his forehead to her knee and stretched his arm around her side. She stiffened. One breath later, he slid his hand down her thigh. “No!” she snapped, and darted a look at Sammy, still asleep.

Clay was shivering, so she spread the yellow fleece baby blanket over his shoulder. After a time her head dropped, jolting her awake. She was painfully tired. Fog pressed as thick as gray curtains at the window, and she imagined it blanketing the building, the whole town as she watched Sammy sleep, her own exhaustion growing heavier, and then she wiggled away from Clay, curled up on her side in a ball, and drifted off.

And then, dreaming the recurring dream, she’s reaching for Joshua as beads of sweat from her labor worm down her face, her weak arms clutching empty air to her chest until she’s tugged back to consciousness by her milk letting down, Clay’s scalp bristling her chin, his face nuzzling her chest. Deep within her, warmth trickled and then cascaded as he released one button at a time on her shirt and closed his scratchy lips on her breast. She touched the back of his head, like teaching a baby, and guided her nipple to his mouth.

Naomi’s milk ran hot in his throat, instantly warming him right down to his toes. He was visited by Daria’s lips and her grizzled laugh, by Ruby Christine’s nuzzle and cry, and wide-mouthed yawn. And then he was with them. He followed the crack back through time to pulverize the moment she took their baby to Idaho, and then he was an infant again with his mother, with his father’s brain put straight, and they lived together in the
old house on Onsland Point, where he and Billy played horseshoes overlooking the sea. And after a time, when Naomi pushed his cheek to switch him to her other breast, he was sitting in their kitchen in Yaquina during his middle-school years, when every single morning his mother made oatmeal for breakfast. Not the one-minute kind. She paid extra for slow-cooking Irish oats. From the table he watched her standing over the stove, stirring in a dash of cinnamon with a wooden spoon, then slicing in a banana and tossing in a handful of toasted walnuts. She prepared the oatmeal like a meditation, like something that might save them.

After spooning it into bowls, she added honey and milk. Lots of milk, so when Clay finished up there was always a gray puddle at the bottom. Every morning with both hands he’d pick up the bowl and tip it to his lips—the white porcelain filling his face—and eye his mother over the rim as he drank those last swallows. Creamy and warm, a husky grain flavor of oats and nuts, a hint of cooked banana, sweetened with honey: the taste of Naomi’s milk.

T
wo weeks after the protests, waiting for a phone call, Scanlon stood at the window eating organic chicken salad from the tub and watching Clay, suspended in a harness thirty feet up the tree in their backyard, prune branches with his good arm. The moving company didn’t want him back until his elbow healed, so Scanlon was giving him extra hours. A branch dropped to the ground and Clay belayed lower, a wave rippling through the rope that hung between his legs.

Naomi was lying back with her eyes closed on the couch, Sammy asleep on her chest, his little body wrapped in the yellow fleece blanket. She hadn’t mentioned New York since the bite, but relations had been tense. He was still squirting Neosporin on his thumb and wrapping it in a Band-Aid; she still eyed him warily. It didn’t help that Joey had been visiting for a week.

The call came in, and Scanlon took the phone into the nursery. “It’s fine,” the
Oregonian
editor said, “but shift the focus. I want it more personal, more up close. Focus on the anarchist who saved you that night, the injured one. What’s his name?”

“I didn’t want to use names,” Scanlon said.

“So we’ll run it with pseudonyms. At any rate, your analysis of the
whole thing is great—really smart stuff—but I want to be inside that anarchist’s head.”

Scanlon closed the door, told the editor he’d have it done in a few days, and hung up, a slow panic clutching him. He held his ribs—not broken, it turned out, just bruised. Clay passed by the window, rope coiled over his shoulder, and saw him but didn’t meet his eye. Shit. He’d never let Scanlon inside his head.

But Scanlon would make something work, as he’d made so much work in the last two weeks. News reports of the police violence produced tremendous antipathy for the government and a surge of local support for the Oregon Experiment. When Baxter Hazelton tried to exploit the “riot” to pump life into his languishing SWAT team bond measure—defeated twice since he first introduced it after 9-11—a backlash resulted in even more support for secession as checks, pledges, and inquiries poured in. Sequoia was gushing with appreciation, though he was careful to stay away from her house in the evening.

Flak was still in a coma, and surprisingly the media had portrayed him sympathetically. He was by all accounts a loving father to his four-year-old son, Ryan. He worked odd jobs, or for Labor Ready, or not at all, and he’d founded Free Skool to teach self-sufficient, low-impact living.

Panama, too, had his sympathizers. Although no one publicly condoned the violence and vandalism that surrounded the protests, many agreed that his sentence was unjustly harsh. Panama had been a senior-citizen organizer, a Sierra Club canvasser, a tree planter, and he’d built wheelchair ramps for a volunteer group, but he finally decided the system was so entrenched that only radical action could effect real change. He also contended that his first priority when torching the SUVs was that no one be injured. The contrast between that and the police brutality was obvious to everyone.

Three days after Flak was put in a coma, when the news cycle had played out, Scanlon saw his opening. First, he wrote a short piece—a treatise, really—on micro-secession for the region. The empire had gotten too big, he began, and as the last days demonstrated, it had lost its moral compass. Only with a return to life on a more human scale could past injustices be righted. He argued that secession would allow economic and environmental sustainability, and that it should begin with the sacred land of the university longhouse downtown and radiate out from there. He e-mailed the article to the
Douglas Union-Gazette
, and they ran it the next morning.

Second, he called America Sanchez at the station and invited her to cover a meeting of the Oregon Experiment. When she declined, he invited her to go online and read the hundreds of letters to the editor sent to the
Union-Gazette
. Those in support of Scanlon’s argument were predictable, but the vitriol and fury of those in opposition were combustible enough to attract her interest. He also promised her an injured anarchist at the meeting, someone from Flak’s crew.

Sanchez arrived with lights, camera, and sound. But as hard as Scanlon begged, Clay told him, “I don’t do movements,” and he didn’t show. Still, Channel Nine aired a ten-second clip, most of it a close-up shot of a stoner in dreadlocks, somebody Scanlon had never seen before, eating a cookie. No matter: the movement was suddenly on everyone’s radar across the state. And Clay seemed to genuinely feel bad about his refusal to attend and promised to help out with something else. One way or another, Scanlon was making things happen.

He was still sitting in the nursery, paint swatches still taped to the walls, surrounded by unpacked boxes and Naomi’s organ, clutching the phone and listening to his mother in the living room—her voice lubricated with mudslides—give Naomi advice about Sammy’s first Christmas. He dialed Sam Belknap’s number, and while it rang he looked at the notes he’d jotted down. “We’ll keep most of what’s here,” the editor had told him. “But let’s double the length and devote the rest to the kid who saved your ass that night.
He’s
the story.” It rang a dozen times before an unrecognizable voice answered.

“Is Sam there?”

“Scanlon. Good to hear from you.”

“What’s wrong, Sam?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You don’t sound like yourself. What’s going on with the hip?”

“A touch of a chest cold,” he said. “Rotten weather in New York.” He held the phone away as he coughed. “But you? How’s the book coming?”

Scanlon told him a little of what was going on—there’d been a backlash to the backlash, and cars all over town had American flags flapping from their roofs. But mostly he was worried about Sam. “I could make a quick trip during break,” he offered. “Stay with you for a few days.”

“You’ve got a wife and a baby. Priorities, man.”

Scanlon loved how Sam’s “man” sounded like Kerouac reading his poems in the Village.

“Take care of my namesake, and don’t worry so much about me.”

“I’d be happy to come if it would help.” The line was silent for a moment; through the window Scanlon watched the mailman come up their walk and put a bundle of envelopes and fliers in their box. “You still there, Sam?”

“None of this makes up for your real work. You know that, right?” He coughed again. “I know the thrill of shattering glass, Scanlon. I’ve been there. The power of an impassioned mob. But your real job—” he broke off into a coughing fit, and Scanlon heard his phone rattle down on a table, then he coughed into the kitchen and back again. Scanlon felt helpless. “We’ll talk,” Sam choked out. “Later.” And the line went dead.

Damn. Scanlon held the phone to his heart. He’d done what he never wanted to do: he’d disappointed Sam. And what would Sam say about his fucking Sequoia? In the last two weeks he’d edged toward asking for Naomi’s forgiveness, but each time he held back. It seemed to him that forgiveness for cheating could be requested only once in a marriage; the second time around it was a toss-off line stripped of all credibility.

He was keeping away from Sequoia, but Naomi had pulled further back into a burrow of the baby and her organ of essences. Sammy no longer spent time in his bouncy seat or bassinet; he hung from her body in the sling, even as she spent every night mixing and sniffing at her organ. She’d started bathing with him and sleeping with him on her chest. Last Saturday morning she declined Scanlon’s offer of French toast, and when he reached toward her cheek to brush back her hair, she growled, and he yanked his hand away, a moment so suddenly tense that Sammy reared back, a string of milk and saliva stretching from his lips to her nipple. Scanlon couldn’t ask for forgiveness because he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t go to Sequoia again.

He held the phone under one arm as he reached out the front door for the mail. The letter on top, addressed to him, was from the U.S. Department of Justice, District of Oregon. He tore it open and, reading the first paragraph, backed into the nursery and closed the door. His guts and legs felt watery, and he dropped into a chair and read the four-page letter three times, each time more slowly: seventeen bulleted and bold-faced “apparent” violations of federal statutes, “cease and desist” repeated over and over, Sequoia Green, a.k.a. Marcia Beckmann, and Clay Knudson, named co-conspirators in the “apparent” unlawful enterprise: the Oregon Experiment.

·   ·   ·

Clay avoided the circles of swampy light dropping from lampposts, his duffel bag tucked under his arm, the strap cutting down his chest. The paved path wound between a stand of firs—an uprooted stump from the big windstorm last winter—and a dense thicket of rhododendrons, their leaves so shiny with rain they reflected lamplight.

The rain suddenly fell heavier, which was good. It kept people inside and washed out any noise. He glanced at the clock on top of the student union—eight-thirty—then over his shoulder—no one in sight—before ducking into the rhododendrons and crouching low beside a rushing copper downspout at the corner of the old brick building.

The windows were dark, and so were the rest of the buildings nearby, mostly full of classrooms that shut down at five. He’d come out earlier in the week to study the tree in daylight—a red alder with a low-hanging dead branch and a thick healthy branch stretching out ten feet above it. Too easy.

He strapped on the cleats, cinched his duffel tight to his back, and darted out from the bushes, keeping low in the shadows of the trees. At the alder he started climbing, tough going at first, but he worked his fingers into a crevice in the trunk and, after a few false starts, got hold of a branch stump, bit into the wet bark with his cleats, and scurried up, still favoring his left arm. The chip in the bone would float, they told him. Nothing to worry about. And the inflammation would slowly settle down. He’d fully recover. But if he put a big load on it, his mind took over and made him believe the bone was about to snap.

He stood in the first crotch of the tree on a bed of moss at the base of the dead branch. Mushrooms and shoots of sword fern grew from the rot. He grabbed a branch overhead, the thickness of his wrist, and took a few steps out on the dead one, then bounced. Not rotten enough, it didn’t even creak.

So he slowly and carefully scanned the area. Except for the gym and pool, all the buildings within sight were dark. A figure was hurrying up the sidewalk at the end of the parking lot, shoulders hunched, head pulled back deep inside a pink rain hood. In the streetlight, heavy raindrops bounced off the pavement.

He climbed up to the next branch. He picked off surface moss with a finger and stomped into the wood with his cleats. Very solid. Then he
quickly unzipped his duffel and slipped into the harness, fed his line through the carabiner, tied a Munter hitch, tightened his duffel to his back, and shimmied along the branch. Six feet out, it nosed down with his weight—not as stout as he’d thought. But no worries. He wrapped his line, yanked it tight, and flipped a leg off the branch and into the air.