The Oregon Experiment (23 page)

He’d been to her house before. Last Thursday, he’d dropped her at the curb after the meeting where she’d taken a vote on the new name. Though there was some objection, and nearly an hour of discussion, in the end “The Oregon Experiment” was adopted. Sequoia had sent a press release to the
Union-Gazette
announcing the change, but the paper hadn’t run it.

For the rest of the meeting Scanlon had held the floor, laying out the basic arguments for secession with a clarity and simplicity that left many in the room suspicious. Groups loved to complicate, whereas action required streamlining. He organized a committee for polling, another for PR, and a third to raise money. In under an hour he’d whipped them into shape.

Passing Franklin Park, he slowed. Streetlights shone off the wet blue tarps stretched over the roof of the old church that Sequoia and her neighborhood guerrillas had hijacked. Wound with yellow police tape and papered with official warnings and orders, on the verge of collapsing under its own weight, it seemed to him an apt metaphor for the United States government.

Lights were burning in her bungalow, so he came up on the porch and tapped the knocker.

The door cracked, and Sequoia smiled, buttoning her shirt, her hair mussed. “I was just laying with Trinity,” she whispered.

“Oh, I’ll go.”

“No, no. She’s asleep. I was about to get up and do some work.”

The walls were bright yellow. Dark, Craftsman-style woodwork surrounded the windows and the fireplace, and propped in a corner among a collection of musical instruments he spotted a Gibson acoustic guitar. He sat on a low and squishy loveseat draped with an Indian tapestry and piled with pillows, and she went to the kitchen. A pedestal table in a nook was stacked with papers, a printer, and a glowing laptop. Trinity’s artwork was framed and hanging on the walls, along with several brightly colored amateur paintings, a Matisse cutout, and an anti-draft poster he hadn’t seen in years: Joan Baez and her two sisters sitting primly on a parlor couch wearing miniskirts, knees together, with the caption
Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No
.

Sequoia returned with two mugs of tea and a bowl of cherries. “Welcome,” she said.

“I drove by the church,” he decided to tell her.

“I have to go to court tomorrow. To face charges. I’m so pissed.”

“This chief of police, Hazelton, seems like a prick.”

“Even worse is Ron Dexter. If not for him, all this would’ve passed.”

“Ron Dexter?”

“From your department.”

“I can’t stand that guy. He wastes my time. He stands in my office doorway telling jokes about snake charmers and virgins. I have to sneak in and out when he’s not there.”

“Same in my own café. He’s a worm.” Then she recited his various offenses, from opposing the neighborhood center to jerking her around on the Skcubrats sale and refusing Douglas Dollars.

“God, I’m sorry,” Scanlon said. “I wish I could fire him or something. Or kick his ass.”

They were silent for a moment. Sequoia sipped her tea and stretched out her legs, her bare feet crossed at her ankles on the coffee table. Her little toes were pinched, he noticed, as if they’d spent some time crammed into fancy shoes.

He sipped his tea. “This is a great mug. The handle’s right, balance is good, the lip’s comfortable. Perfect.”

“Take it,” she said without a thought. “It’s yours.”

“No, but thanks.”

“I’d like you to have something I made with my hands.”

He sipped again and the tea, steeped from roots and barks, flowed over the rim of a mug that seemed form-fitted to his lips.

“For all you’ve done,” she said, “you deserve more than a
cup
. You’ve energized the whole movement.”

“I haven’t really—”

“You don’t know how much you’ve done,” she insisted. “There’s a new excitement. Mo
men
tum.”

“All I did—”

“The name’s huge. You’ve gotten us on track in a way we’d never have done on our own. But the biggest thing is your sense of credibility. It makes everybody feel like they’d better take the movement seriously. They take
you
seriously.”

“I’m flattered, but—”

“Things would
really
take off if you were elected director.”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he said, though she gazed into his face with her imploring green eyes. “I really can’t. I’m so busy with the university. My teaching. Research.”

“But isn’t secessionism your research? Couldn’t you study us better from the inside?”

“A critical eye requires distance.”

“So you’re going to be critical?”

“I just mean objective analysis.”

“There’s no such thing,” she said, with such certainty and finality that he couldn’t respond. She put her hand over her heart. “Your passion is genuine. I feel it.” She touched his knee. “Don’t say anything now. Let’s not even discuss it. It’s too much happening at once. Your semester just started. You’re just getting to know the group. Don’t even think about it.” Then she raised her foot over the bowl on the table, and with her toes picked up two cherries by their stems. With yogic flexibility she brought her foot to her fingers, broke the stems apart, passed one cherry to him and popped the other between her lips.

“Nice guitar,” he said.

She chewed the cherry, pushing the pit around her mouth with her tongue. “Do you play?”

“Not in a long time,” he said, then Sequoia jumped up and brought him the Gibson.

He strummed a few chords and tuned it up—it hadn’t been played in a while—then held the pick between his lips and began plucking out “Blackbird,” his fingers squeaking on the heavy strings. He was so rusty that the chirping notes thumped out like a dirge, so he changed course, took the pick and hit the power chords of “Sweet Jane,” looking up from the neck to see Sequoia smile, thinking of Jane Swallows and a sunny patch of grass in front of his high school where a bunch of them would sit around in the afternoons of his senior year, and when the refrain came back around he sang. His gritty, sometimes off-key voice was suited to Lou Reed, and this was one of the few songs in the Imelda’s Shoes list on which Scanlon sang lead. On the next chorus, Sequoia sang with him, a little tentatively—the first time he’d seen her do anything without unrestrained vigor.

“Holy cow!” she said when he put the guitar down. “You’re amazing. Play some more. Start a band. Why aren’t you a rock star?”

He laughed it off.

“Why aren’t you out there performing? Get a record contract. I’m serious.”

Of course she
wasn’t
serious. “It’s just something I left behind. Another life, I guess.”

This caught Sequoia, like a pinprick to her skin. They were quiet for a time, and he watched her mood deflate.

“Can you really leave a life behind?” she finally said.

“Probably not.” He hadn’t meant it so literally.

“I’d like to believe somebody could. But look at you. The music’s
in there
. I watched you sort of become that other person while you were playing. I could tell it was another life, another you stepping up from your past.” She paused, looking away from him then back. “In
my
past, I devastated a boy’s life, his whole family’s, and when I tried to make amends, they wouldn’t let me. They’ve never forgiven me, and maybe they shouldn’t. If my father’s pal hadn’t been the state deputy attorney general, who knows where I’d be now? I’ve tried to leave all that behind—that other me—but like you and the music, it keeps showing up. Even Trinity can see through me. From the time she was a baby, she’s had a strange sixth sense for damaged people. I can tell she senses it in your wife. She knows Naomi has suffered.”

She ate another cherry, spit the pit into her hand, and squeezed his knee. Naomi had suffered through anosmia, but his bigger fear at the
moment was the haunting intrusion of her first baby and the nineteen-year-old girl who’d given him up.

“Thanks for playing,” Sequoia said. She smiled and rose up on the couch, and with a deep breath she shook off the funk that had seized her. “I should get to sleep.”

He reached for the coffee table with the mug.

“That’s for you,” she said.

He held it as he stood.

“I was jonesing for a soak before bed.” She yawned. “You want to come with?”

He clasped both hands around the cup, not sure what she was offering.

“Hot tub,” she said. She took the mug from him and set it down, then took his hand and led him out into a cool, misting rain.

Under the awning, she released his hand and turned her back to him. In a few smooth motions her shirt fell from her shoulders and her fleece pants dropped down her hips. She flipped up the hot tub cover, releasing a plume of steam, and slipped into the water to her chin with a moan.

Scanlon was not as quick or graceful about undressing. He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, unbuckled his belt, and pulled his legs out of his pants one at a time, careful not to spill his change or keys between the boards of the deck, then hung his clothes on pegs. Sequoia’s eyes were closed as he submerged tentatively into the scalding tub. “That’s good,” he said.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him across the black water and the length of her naked body, then closed them again. They listened to the night: the sudden rap on the deck when a breeze flicked drops off the ends of thousands of redwood needles over their heads, a car engine gunning toward campus, a train whistle downriver. Every few minutes she took a long breath, as if preparing to speak, then slowly and deliberately let it go.

After a time, she stirred the dark water with her arms and legs and in a single heart-stopping motion she rose up to sit on the edge of the tub. It was Ingres, Scanlon was pretty sure, the Frenchman, who’d painted the Turkish bath scene he knew; Sequoia could have been his model. Her long hips sloped like the arc of dolphins. Her tummy looked pliable, like a place you’d want to lay your head for a better look at her plump, weighty breasts, pouring off steam. One was tattooed with a hummingbird, its slender bill probing her rosebud nipple for nectar.

“The thing is,” she said, almost in a whisper, “if you were director,
you’d have access to every piece of the movement.” She reached up and squeezed the clip from her hair, then rewound her mane and clipped it in place again. Her skin glistened. Water beaded at her chin, at her elbows, at the tips of her nipples.

Twenty-seven of her neighbors crowded in front of Judge Browning’s bench for the nearly thirty-minute reading of their alleged violations of the law. At least two of them had been out of town that night, but feeling they’d helped move the church in spirit they came to face their judgment.

Browning had a reputation as a fair and thoughtful judge. Although Sequoia had never met him, she knew his story. Standing beside the court stenographer, she could see framed snapshots on the wall above a cluttered desk behind his bench. One looked to be him on the reservation—he was Nez Perce—and another was a black-and-white of soldiers in front of a grass shack. Browning had served in Vietnam, and in the late seventies, as a lawyer here in Douglas, he’d put himself on trial for war crimes. Finding himself guilty, he called on federal marshals to arrest him, but they never came and a decade later he was elected to the county bench.

Halfway through the clerk’s reading of their crimes, Browning got up, refilled his coffee, and shuffled through papers, stopping to examine each one, then setting it aside. No doubt these included Ron’s complaint, but she hoped he also knew that despite the railroad inspectors’ minute measurements with calipers and lasers, their X-raying for stress cracks, they could demonstrate no damage. Zero.

The final five minutes of charges seemed painful, Browning slumping lower in his seat with each new violation, his face dropping morosely. When the last and smallest was read—$65 for a dog being off leash in a playground—he asked to see the sale agreement and title to the church, which Jim presented. He then asked for any and all documentation regarding permits to move the church, and one by one the papers were handed to him via the clerk. Finally, he asked if anyone present had thrown a brick, or was an accessory to anyone who had, through the windows of the Bank of America or Wells Fargo.

They all shook their heads.

“Speak,” he ordered.

“No, your honor,” they said in motley unison.

The judge looked more depressed by the minute, and Sequoia was getting
worried. The clerk had announced the tally—$41,510, plus the cost of tearing down the church, with criminal charges pending.

“The citations,” Browning bellowed, “will stand.”

Sequoia’s spirit sank to the floor, along with everyone else’s.

“The fine for each citation will be reduced to one dollar.”

And just as quickly they were elated.

“In addition, each of you is ordered to complete forty hours of community service, which will be performed in the rehabilitation of the former church slated to become the Franklin Park Neighborhood Center. You’ll need to coordinate this with a parole officer whom the clerk will appoint.”

“Your honor?” Jim asked.

Browning stared at him.

“Could we pay the fine with Douglas Dollars?”

A relieved chuckle spread among them, except for Browning, who dropped his gavel one time on the block and disappeared into his chambers.

They hugged and rejoiced, made prison jokes, and decided to go en masse to the parole officer—“the foreman,” Jim called him. And when the jubilation waned, some went off with Jim for beers at Filbert’s, a few went back to work, the rest went home.

Sequoia unlocked her bike from the rack, hugged Paul and Susan once more, and pedaled to the daycare to pick up Trinity. Today was one of those rare November days when a line of blue sky peeks over the coast range and the cloud cover parts for the sun—a bonus day to be celebrated—so they stopped off at the park.

“Higher!” Trinity shouted, and she pushed the swing hard. As well as the court business went today, the whole scene—metal detectors, lawyers, police, accusations, men in dark suits—had put Sequoia on edge. Still feeling queasy, she took a deep breath and gazed at Trinity’s hair riding on the wind.