The Oregon Experiment (46 page)

Scanlon reheated pesto and brought it back to bed in one big bowl along with two glasses of wine. “You know,” he said, twirling spaghetti on his fork. “There’s a good reason we haven’t heard back from my mother, and it’s because she snagged the pictures. It’s exactly the sort of thing she’d do. Since we didn’t give her copies, she just took them without asking.”

“But there were people in our house.”

“They came in to poke around, but I think there’s a limit to how low they’d go.”

He believed it, she could tell, and in the warm bed surrounded by good food and wine, her husband and son, she let herself believe it too. The strength of a family, the sacred bond, was its own protection. Sammy was
safe with them. After they’d eaten—nearly six-thirty—he called the editor and caught him at his office. For over an hour, they discussed the article while she sipped her wine and hummed softly to the baby.

During the long afternoon she’d found herself saying the sort of things that Scanlon might say: “The loss of his daughter prevents him from trusting the institution that enables it, compounding his distrust of
all
institutions …” They were both aware she was filling a need, not so different from when he was her nose.

She heard herself comparing Clay’s contempt for the system to what she assumed was Scanlon’s justification for his infidelity: that he was not bound by middle-class values. “Such bullshit,” she said, and he wrote it down. She told him she didn’t yet understand why she’d done what she did with Clay. “But,” she added, “I’m sorry.” At that, he stopped writing and looked her in the eyes.

Through Clay—his image on the screen all afternoon—she and her husband had stumbled back together.

He was still on the phone as she tickled Sammy’s belly then kissed him under his arms—and there it was again. In the last few days new smells had emerged from his growing body, younger and fresher versions of his father’s, poking out like day-old shoots of grass: dried figs, crushed dandelions, pickle brine; first the almonds and now the rest. Her reaction to Scanlon and his body had already shifted.

And a slower transformation was already underway, one she believed had started on the day Joey splashed the frog-juice concoction on her wrists and the aroma had crashed, turning to urine. The fragrance was another in a long, predictable series that led her back to Vermont, to Joshua. When it turned to piss on Joey, just as Clay’s toe had risen to her instep beneath the table, she began to pry loose the eighteen-year grip of guilt and regret. Clay and the fragrance were only two of the many dangerous, unnavigable roads that would never take her back to Joshua. This understanding had taken time—like forgiveness, it had to happen in her nose, and olfactory demons are not easily dislodged, olfactory connections not easily rewired.

It wasn’t until right now that she realized she was precisely where she wanted to be—in an unmade bed with Scanlon, nursing their baby. She knew she
could’ve
cared for Joshua on her own, but that if she had, she would’ve embarked on a life other than the one she was living. Those primal impulses of motherhood, rising so fiercely in her these last months,
were focused on
this
life—hers and Scanlon’s and Sammy’s. She’d kill for her family.

“He loves it,” Scanlon said when he finally hung up. “If I can get it to him tomorrow, they might run it this Sunday.” He rolled toward her, leaning over Sammy at her breast, but before he could kiss her the phone rang and he grabbed it. “Yes,” he said, instead of “Hello,” and then his voice dropped. He put the phone down, looking hollowed out. “Joey doesn’t have the pictures.”

In the thick silence Sammy jerked away from her nipple and turned toward the middle of the room, staring.

T
hree days had passed since Scanlon had said he was quitting, and Sequoia was determined to move ahead without him. But the cavernous Eagles Hall in Parsons was nearly empty, even though Rico had promised that interest here was high, and when she wrapped up the presentation and asked for questions, the fifteen people slumping in metal chairs looked at her blankly. Several had already left, and the two who’d come in late, a couple standing in the back, were too spiffy for locals. A question finally came from a white-haired woman wearing a USS
Maryland
cap: “When you say Pacific Rim, sweetheart, are you saying Parsons should join up with the Japanese?”

Sequoia didn’t even distribute the questionnaires. She loaded the boxes of fact sheets into her car, then the poster-board charts depicting how the Pacific Northwest’s resources were being handed over to the rest of the nation. “Buckle up,” she said to Trinity, who was climbing into her booster seat.

The whole day had gone wrong. This morning she’d discovered that despite budgeting the down payment for the café, after closing costs she was coming up short for the hoods, drains, sprinklers, and other upgrades that County Health demanded. (She’d considered, and immediately ruled
out, calling her father for the money.) And rafters from a teardown were supposed to be delivered to the community center, but if she understood correctly, a boom truck was stuck on a job in Sweet Home, or a crane needed a flywheel in Brownsville, or maybe both; and the bottom line was that months later, the church was still propped on railroad ties, surrounded by yellow tape and warning signs, more degraded since the move to Franklin Park than in the entire previous century. She slammed down the hatchback.

The ragged firs on the ridge—half of them logged, the other half sick—stood high above the rising steam and smoke pouring from the vast pulp mill that occupied all three sides of the dredged inner reaches of Yaquina Bay. The town rose up from the mill, steep streets intersecting at sharp angles, zigzagging up the hills, with cafés, pawnshops, western and marine suppliers, schools, clinics, churches, and cemeteries. They’re born here, they live here, they die here …

And then she spotted them. Half a block down the hill, the couple who’d come into the meeting late
—not
a couple, she realized now. The woman was standing behind the open passenger door of a big brown car, and the man was leaning on the hood, arms crossed over his chest.
Watching
. So she offered a tentative wave, and they didn’t respond at all.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Trinity asked when she got in the car.

“Nothing.” She turned the key and revved the engine too high before releasing the clutch, lurching away from the curb. Her view out the mirror was partially blocked by the poster boards, but as she wound up and out of town it didn’t seem that anyone was following them.

“You’re not being truthful,” Trinity said.

“You’re right. I was disappointed by the meeting,” she told her daughter. “It’s put me off balance.”

They got on the Douglas-Yaquina highway and headed east for home. After a few minutes she heard a whine that was getting louder fast, like she might have a flat tire, but she was afraid of stopping to check and instead looked in the mirror, trying to get a clear line of sight, and the whine became a pounding rumble as she looked overhead for a helicopter, and suddenly light glared through the back window, the noise overtaking them, and then, as she began to panic, three motorcycles raced by doing a hundred miles an hour, their little red taillights disappearing ahead like fireflies. Insane, she thought.

“Crazies,” Trinity said.

Those two at the Eagles Hall had set her off. They’d scared her and probably that was their purpose. But they’d come. They’d noticed. Let them monitor, she thought. Let them infiltrate. The group had no secrets, no illegal tactics, nothing to hide.

They banged through a construction zone—patched-together sections of pavement around Siuslaw Butte where a new route was being blasted through the rock—and reached the summit of the coast range at Stillman Pass, then dropped into the thick cover of firs. In a matter of minutes it was dark, fully night. A totally wasted evening.

Twenty miles outside Douglas, a car appeared behind her and drew so close that she had to twist the rearview away to keep from being blinded. She accelerated, but so did the other car, tailgating them, its high beams eerily lighting up her interior. Finally she came to a passing lane and eased off the gas, but the car stayed tight to her bumper, so at a gravel turnout, she pulled over to let it pass. But instead it pulled up right behind her, headlights still glaring.

In her booster seat Trinity strained to look over her shoulder. “Who is it, Mommy?”

“Quiet,” Sequoia said, and reached back to lock the doors. If it was police, there’d be blue lights and a loudspeaker. She waited, trying to see something through the glare in her mirrors. Her engine was running, her foot was on the clutch, the car in gear.

“I’m scared,” Trinity said.

“I know, sweetheart.” There was no movement she could see, nothing but the flood of light.

“Who is it?”

How long had they been stopped? Two minutes. Maybe three. Still nothing. A car sped by in the opposite direction, heading toward the coast.

Fuck this, she decided, and floored it. Her tires spun in the gravel and squealed when she hit the pavement. Picking up speed fast, she eyed the mirrors, but all she saw was black. She shifted to third, looking back over her shoulder. They’d switched off their lights—nothing but darkness. As if they were never there.

For four days, except to dash out for the mail and the papers, he and Naomi didn’t leave the house or even unlock the doors. Every voice outside,
every light after midnight behind a neighbor’s curtains, provoked suspicions. When a bunch of boys rumbled down the street on longboards, Naomi hid in a closet clutching their baby.

By Saturday night, Scanlon’s article was supposed to be up on the
Oregonian
website. He’d drafted the whole piece in a day, believing he was getting his mind off the threat, but in the two revisions that followed, he recognized that, far from distracting himself, he’d written his own sudden and acute sense of fear into Clay’s life.

In e-mails to his editor, Scanlon repeatedly said he wanted Clay’s name changed and his face obscured. But after the final rewrite the editor had called him: “It’s no different from
Newsweek
going into villages in Darfur and photographing babies with distended bellies. And don’t you think papers should be allowed to run photos of military caskets? Or publish the names of dead marines? How about reporting that it was friendly fire, or that an Afghan orphanage got bombed by mistake? This is no different, my friend. Self-censorship’s still censorship. It’s the public’s right to know, and from the anarchists’ point of view, I gotta say it’s the most sympathetic goddamn story they’re ever gonna get.”

Scanlon heard him out, conceding many of his points, but also thinking about Clay in his stocking feet stretched out in their backyard, chewing on a blade of grass, lightly stroking his belly while Naomi folded his laundry and Sammy slept. He remembered the smell of Naomi’s amniotic fluid on Clay’s hands, the windowpane still busted in their garage. And, as he had a thousand times, he fought
not
to imagine the suckling that conjured itself in his mind whenever he let down his guard. “You’re saying I really have no choice,” he finally said.

“Basically,” the editor told him, which Scanlon knew wasn’t true.

When the
Oregonian
site had loaded, he saw his own name and clicked on it: a stark picture of Clay resolved on the screen. It was page one. They’d exaggerated the black-and-white contrast, the raven-black stubble on his skull, the deathly gray skin. He scrolled through the rest of the photos. They’d manipulated the elbow, now so swollen and discolored it looked like it would never heal. They’d amplified the turmoil in the clouds out the window, sharpened the detail and color in the Greyhound sign. And in all seven pictures, Clay’s face was traumatized, full of pain and frustrated anger.

But there was more: a hunger, soft and eager, that Scanlon had never
noticed. He clicked through the pictures again. He’d never seen that look on Clay’s face because his gaze was for the photographer, for Naomi, and it was suddenly obvious that he was in love with her.

On Sunday, sitting in the hospital by Flak’s side, Clay remembered his mother’s long vigils by his father’s bed. Both Flak and his father wards of a government that destroyed their lives but kept their hearts pumping. Flak’s eyelids flickered. His nose twitched. Today marked three weeks. Clay almost envied the poor fucker. Sleep.

As he did each time he visited, he palmed a disposable razor, a tiny bottle of baby shampoo, and two paper-wrapped bars of soap from the glass shelf above the sink, slipping them into his pocket and wondering who’d visit
his
bedside should the time come. And then Flak’s kid and his ex walked down the row of beds. Their words were meaningless, but the voices breaking the silence were a relief, like the howls of drunkards when the bars closed at two. He hoisted Ryan up to the edge of the bed saying, “Touch him here,” laying the boy’s hand on his father’s broad chest. “Scratch him a little, and he’ll know it’s you.” Scared and confused—like a wounded animal—Ryan scratched. “See that? See his eyelids move?” Clay said. “He’s saying, ‘Hey, Ryan. Hey, son. Keep up the fight.’ ”

He mussed Ryan’s hair and reached in his pocket. “Here you go,” he said, and gave him the baby shampoo and the blue-haired troll, then clasped hands with the ex and left them.

At his apartment he washed. He shaved his face and his head. He put on clean socks and laced new strings in his boots. What he needed was already packed. He didn’t believe in talismans or luck, but nevertheless pocketed Billy’s lead soldier and the photo of Naomi.

Downstairs, he sat on the curb—hot-dog burrito and Mountain Dew—as men from the Siletz tribe in traditional feathers, beads, and bones spread filleted Chinook on wet cedar planks and laid them over a fire raging in the middle of the parking lot. Kids watched an elder begin to shape a bow, pulling long shavings from a branch squeezed tight in a stump-mounted vise.

Tobacco was scattered over the skin of a drum.