The Oregon Experiment (14 page)

“No anarchists are likely to show up in the maternity ward in the middle of the night,” Scanlon said, taking Naomi’s arm.

“You said emergency room.”

“That’s the entrance we use.”

“It’s not uncommon for a fair number of my friends to visit the ER in the early-morning hours.”

Naomi laughed before she realized he wasn’t joking. “I appreciate your helping out,” she said to Clay, “but we better go. Remember the baby.” This was all practice for dealing with toddlers.

Scanlon eased her into the car, helped her with the seat belt, then slid into the backseat with her bag. Clay got behind the wheel, small compared to Scanlon in the driver’s seat. As he backed out, Scanlon said, “Careful.”

In the street Clay shifted the Honda into drive and hit the gas. “A mean machine,” he muttered, smirking into the rearview mirror.

“Eyes on the road,” Scanlon said. “And watch out for cops.” Sure enough, just then a police car with lights flashing shot down the cross street.

Clay turned at the Stop sign. “I truly was kidding about huffing gas,” he said to Naomi. “Anyways, gasoline sucks for huffing.”

She gripped her shoulder strap. “That’s a comfort,” she said, and although she really wasn’t worried—it was only a five-minute drive, and Clay seemed perfectly competent—she felt herself suppressing a mother-wolf instinct that fed hormones to her brain compelling her to rip these men apart if anything went wrong. Not knowing whether her first baby was living a life of love and joy and fulfillment was the greatest burden Naomi carried; what she
did
know, the promise she’d made to the baby she was about to meet, was that
he
would be mothered lovingly, exquisitely, and given every chance to flourish.

On the four-lane strip they passed the birdseed store, Goodwill, the credit union, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. She looked over at Clay: both hands on the wheel, his gaze fixed on the road. As impossible as it seemed, his gentle voice, his confidence, and even his nervy intensity put her at ease.

Then his face lit up. Ahead, in a snarl of police and fire truck lights, black smoke rose under the lampposts shining down on Timber Ford-Lincoln-Mercury. Clay slowed as they passed, and they all three looked: water spilled over the curb and foam collected on the blacktop around the charred smoking skeletons of three SUVs.

·   ·   ·

Scanlon no longer felt stoned; the excitement of the birthing room and the reality of their coming baby cleared away any residual fog. Monitors were attached to Naomi’s belly and a fingertip while Clay helped her through a contraction; she finally got an epidural and everything settled down a notch. Many notches. Her face relaxed. Clay sank back in a vinyl La-Z-Boy, and Naomi called Scanlon over, pulled his head down, and kissed him on the lips. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said, scratching his beard.

The nurse came in and checked the monitors. “It could be a while,” she said. “You should all get some rest.” Then she pointed at Clay, reclined; he knew the drill, knew it was time to relax. “This one’s good,” she said.

Scanlon sat on the edge of the bed and held Naomi’s hand; both he and Clay had visitor’s badges stuck to their shirts. His resentment toward Clay for creating a near disaster—husband and wife would have been peacefully resting when her water broke if not for the intruding anarchist—was diminished by his overwhelming relief that it had all turned out okay.
Partially
diminished. “So, Clay,” he said, “you’re an anarchist furniture mover
and
a Lamaze instructor?”

“He has a baby,” Naomi said.

Scanlon looked at her. How did she know? What had he missed?

“I have a little girl. Ruby Christine. She’s thirteen months.” The room felt suddenly quieter. Tranquil.

Scanlon was about to ask if he saw his daughter much, but he was pretty sure he knew the answer. He squeezed Naomi’s hand again, knowing she was thinking about her teenage son, wondering if he had a girlfriend, if he laughed easily, if he had a good nose, if he was loved.

For a time they sat silently in the dimly lit room. Clay and Naomi let their eyes close. Scanlon slouched on the edge of the bed, listening to the monitors. When he laid his hand on Naomi’s belly, she opened her eyes a crack, smiled, then closed them again. She’d thanked him. Unbelievable. What an idiot he’d been. He’d known the baby could come two weeks early, and he shouldn’t have been smoking in the house anyway. Well, he was done with that. From now on he was a parent, always on call, ready to take charge. His devotion to Naomi and the baby would be complete, tending to their family’s every need.

Clay touched his knee. “You can have the chair. I’ll hit the lounge till the buses start up.”

“Don’t let your friends see you looking like a Gap model.”

“I’ll stop at your house for my clothes.”

Scanlon smiled. “I appreciate all your help tonight, but I’m not giving you a key to my house.”

“Don’t worry,” Clay said. “I unlocked the back door before we left.”

Super. The baby would come home to a clean kitchen, only there’d be a meth lab in the nursery. “Don’t fuck anything up, okay?”

Clay leaned into the bed, looking silently at Naomi, then touching her belly. He’d stepped in as surrogate, as intermediary—the role that Scanlon had cherished. But given the intimacy of the last few hours—the fact that Clay’s hands smelled of Naomi’s amniotic fluid—Scanlon let the touch pass. He understood he’d been unmanned by Clay this evening, and it wouldn’t happen again. He would rise up to meet fatherhood. Just as Naomi hoped the baby would lift her from the loss of her first child, Scanlon would take their baby in his arms and rise above ambition, self-involvement, and ego. Fatherhood would make him a better man.

At the door, Clay turned back. “Lose the beard,” he said over his shoulder. And he was gone.

He was the real thing, for sure. A bad attitude and a hooligan. Christ, he’d torched those SUVs. But he was also a father. Although Scanlon didn’t yet know the specifics, he’d learned tonight that Clay lived by a code. He’d learned that Clay cared. Scanlon would maintain a critical distance from him, observing, studying, and when he found the right argument, Clay would be his proof.

And then he remembered the fire chief. “Damn,” he said. “I’ll have to call and cancel.”

Naomi raised her eyelids. “What are you talking about? Anyway, it’s so late.”

“But someone’ll answer. It’s a fire station. I’ll leave a message.” And to his surprise, the chief was there. “Our first baby,” Scanlon told him, his eyes filling with tears. He remembered the first times he’d heard himself saying, “My wife.” The thrill of it.

“Congratulations!” the chief said. “How close is she?”

“I think it’ll be a while.”

The chief told Scanlon that several of the men who were training to be EMTs hadn’t yet observed a birth. Would his wife consider it?

Scanlon held the phone to his chest as he asked.

“Observe?” Naomi said.

“Just some paramedics, I think. It’s part of their training. Seems like it’d really help them out.”

He almost never slept. Not since he was seventeen. It was one of the things Clay never told anyone, even Daria. He’d lie with her in the dark, anticipating the airy whistle in her nose, off-key and wavery, like everything about her. Watching her sleep night after night, he fell in love because it was then, when she was at peace, that he could see through her skin: fearless principles fueled by anger and sublime vision. All night, while she slept, he talked to her, just as he sang to Ruby Christine when she was still in Daria’s womb. If he could talk to Daria like that again, she and their baby would come back to him.

On a couch beside an aquarium, he stared at a muted hospital television—a smoldering Humvee lay on its roof in a roadside ditch near Baghdad—and he drifted off, like a soldier sleeping on his feet, finger on the trigger, and with a gasp he surfaced in an explosion of glass and a rush of air.

Since the night Clay took care of the anarchist from Sacramento, he and Daria were tight. He was living in the park in Portland—he’d kicked around with Daria and her friend Giselle for a few days—and one night he found them in the men’s bathroom at Firestone. Giselle was beat up bad. J.J. had done this to other girls—everybody knew he’d put a suburban girl, a weekend anarchist, in the hospital where they wired her jaw shut—so Clay took off and found him with the crowd that hung out by Chinatown. “Bitch should think about who she tells no,” was what J.J. said, “or she’ll get it again. Her loudmouth friend, too.”

Clay went down the alley and saw a porcelain sink next to a dumpster. He grabbed it by the corroded galvanized trap still snaking from the drain, and when he got back to the corner, he broke the sink in two over J.J.’s back. Later, he realized he must have hit him in the neck, because from what he heard, J.J. was living with his parents in Sacramento and shitting into a plastic bag.

On the TV, Iraqi children scavenged sunglasses and a CD from the wreckage.

Naomi and Scanlon. Middle-aged people having their first kid. Twenty years to prepare and they still weren’t ready. Clay had gotten Daria off
drugs, everything, as soon as the pee stick turned pink, and
he’d
quit, too. And he’d gotten the mover job, selling out for the baby’s sake, but what had that accomplished? Ruby Christine was being raised by the same Christian fanatics Daria had fled at age fourteen.

Watching Daria sleep had given him a focus in the dark hours of the night. Her breathing, her pursed lips, her body changing through pregnancy—for Clay, they were like mantras.

A world that would tear Daria and Ruby Christine from him was a world that was wrong. Tonight he and Panama had done a little bit toward making the world right, a world where he could have them back. But tonight was only a start—preparation for the big show.

The morning fog had lifted when Sequoia pedaled by the church, perched on temporary timbers. Yellow caution tape wrapped the building, which was papered with
DANGER, KEEP OUT
, and
PER ORDER
signs from every self-important agency in the county. Dilapidated and uninhabitable, it was a genuine eyesore. She glanced at Ron’s house. For the moment, until the building had its roof, doors and windows, and a coat of paint, his paramount property value had tanked. She smiled, meanly.

And it would stay in the tank until the caution tape and stop-work orders were torn away and they could begin restoration. Before the rain started, the center would be buzzing with papier-mâché classes for kids, yoga, art shows, poetry nights.

With her staple hammer she pounded a flier to the phone pole at the end of the narrow street leading down to Crazy Eights, then headed back toward the café. The last few months she’d worried the fliers were nothing but a waste of paper. It was always the same sixty people at the meetings, always on the first Thursday of every other month, always the same disagreements. But Scanlon Pratt had made her understand that a good sales job didn’t compromise ideals but instead spread the word. And America Sanchez made her realize he was right. There was plenty for everyone to agree on: our forests were clear-cut to benefit other regions of the country; the tax structure was skewed for the rich; religious and corporate interests controlled politics and the press; the military served corporate and religious imperialists; our water and air quality, schools and public services were all in decline. For five years the PNSM, while unanimous on what was wrong, had been deadlocked on what to do about it. But the movement’s
own new roof and restoration were underway: this morning Hank Trueblood was wrangling in the professor.

When she got back to Skcubrats, Ron Dexter was planted on the front porch reading the paper. Sequoia stapled a flier to the phone pole in front, then went up the steps. Her building—Ron’s, that is, the one she wanted to buy—was a tiny one-story bungalow with a covered porch and an eyelid window in the low-slung roof. It had battered fir floors, a stone mantel, dark chunky woodwork, six tables inside and two on the porch.

Ron, too, was a professor. When he moved up to Douglas from LA in the sixties, he’d bought the house for twelve thousand dollars. Around fifteen years ago the street went commercial. Ron initially rented to a hair salon, then to a burrito joint, and finally, seven years ago, to Sequoia. He raised her rent annually, twice backing off a few bucks when she threatened to leave.

And that was another thing about Ron. His wife made soap and sold it at the farmers’ market, where she accepted Douglas Dollars, the local currency exchanged for goods and services. Sequoia took them as well at the café, and spent them on massages, her handyman, daycare for Trinity, and the organic farms that supplied her produce. Ron spent his wife’s in Skcubrats,
always
, but months when Sequoia came up long on Douglas Dollars and short on U.S. tender, Ron refused them for even a portion of her rent.

From behind his newspaper, as Sequoia slipped past, he said, “This ain’t over.”

The screen door slapped behind her. Inside, nothing looked right: the tables were pushed too close to the walls, Keiko and Journey hadn’t restocked the cookies or juices, bus bins were full, a child’s sweater was abandoned under a table. Trinity sat cross-legged in the window seat drawing with crayons, and when Sequoia bent down to kiss her, she covered the drawing with her hands. “Hi, Momma,” she said.

Sequoia dropped the fliers beside her daughter and neatened a stack of the
Organic Thymes
. “What’re you working on?” she asked.

“Some stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Trinity held both hands flat over the drawing. “Art stuff.”

Sequoia’s heart was racing. Her skin felt brittle, as it did when things were wrong, as brittle as the fog frozen in spiderwebs outside her kitchen window on the coldest winter mornings. She looked toward the counter
where Journey was steaming milk, the steamer sputtering, O-rings going bad again. Out the window, in the street, a police car came to a stop and double parked. She was pulling Trinity’s hand away from the drawing.

“No, Mommy,” Trinity said, fighting her. “I’m not drawing him. I’m
not.
”