The Oregon Experiment (25 page)

Despite the recurring infections, she was reclaiming her body. She and Sammy were in sync. She made as much milk as he needed, and he kept coming back. When he was on the healthy breast, she’d gaze down at his tiny head, at the metronome rhythm of his jaw, and feel more connected to him than she ever would’ve expected.
My own flesh and blood
. She felt it. Understood it. She would look down at her son and know a sort of love that was far more profound than anything she’d experienced before. Closing her eyes, wrapping her arms around him, releasing herself to the tug-tug-tug of his desire, she felt a physical intimacy that moved her to tears. Tears because his suckling pulled on a thread of passion deep inside her body, and because for all of Scanlon’s good intentions—offers of foot rubs in front of a fire, genuine expressions of his desire to make love to her—compared to what she and Sammy were experiencing, any physical intimacy with her husband seemed crass, a hump and a grunt on the floor.

Sequoia worked on the movement during lulls at the café and at home late into the night. The
Douglas Union-Gazette
ran her press release (albeit trimmed down to only a few lines) announcing Scanlon as their new director, and included the new name. This won them some publicity but lost them Hank. The mayor had objected to his fire chief, a public employee, leading a secessionist group, so Hank took a step back, but Scanlon had picked up the slack. There’d be no more mulling, processing, whining. He had everyone focused on a specific task. José handled polling. Natalie looked into investors. There were questions about boundaries, about Native American land and their casinos, about property rights. Scanlon took a conference call with a Mormon splinter group who’d inquired about openly practicing polygamy. Taylor was building a website.

Scanlon set up groups to study the holdings of timber companies and the concerns of fishermen and environmentalists, and to find common ground. They looked toward the Pacific Rim. They discussed the irrelevancy of Washington, D.C. José asked four hundred random Oregonians whether they’d support a hypothetical secession if their overall tax bill were reduced by a quarter; twenty percent said yes. Cut their taxes in half? Forty-three percent. They were on the way toward Scanlon’s benchmark of eighty percent support.

“We need something that defines us,” he had said. “Typically, ninety percent of a seceding populace will share religion or ethnicity, and we don’t have anything like that.” She took notes on her laptop, bookmarked websites, created spreadsheets. Scanlon had no idea how much he knew. It was almost too much—in too many directions. He talked, she took it all in.

“More tea?” she whispered. Trinity was asleep in the bedroom.

He nodded.

As she poured, he said, “Another nice cup.”

“It’s yours,” she said.

“I can’t keep taking your mugs.”

But she told him about the health department, that all her café mugs were now restaurant supply and her cupboards here at home were overflowing. She sat down beside him on the couch and they sipped in silence. “That’s the least of it,” she said, and explained that County Health was demanding new exhaust hoods, drains, and food-prep surfaces. She couldn’t invest that sort of money in a rental. “I made Ron Dexter another offer yesterday. More than it’s worth. I’m paying a realtor, for God’s sake.”

“And what did Ron say?”

“Same as always—he’ll ‘sleep on it.’ And he winks.”

Scanlon clenched a fist and punched his knee. His outrage was genuine, which made her trust his principles all the more. She believed he would fire Ron if he could. Or kick his ass. She’d been so distraught about the café that she’d even considered calling her father for help, for money. But she’d resisted; she wouldn’t succumb. Scanlon would know what to do.

Then she told him about the church. Despite Judge Browning’s ruling, the building inspector, a hunting buddy of Hazelton’s, had cited Ron’s many complaints to justify denying permits allowing work to begin. There was still no roof. The tarps blew off in the last storm, and rain had damaged the floors.

“Let me talk to Dexter,” Scanlon said. “See what he wants to back off.”

She tipped her cup to her lips, held it there even after it was empty, then put it on the table beside his and refilled them both from the yellow teapot she’d painted with a hummingbird, its bill reaching up the spout. “I know what he wants,” she said.

Scanlon understood, and his eyes went wide.

“I’m tempted,” she said, “just to hold my nose and give it to him.”

“No.” His face turned red. “No fucking way. I’ll think of something.”

He hadn’t seen Fenton since the Mr. Douglas contest, but when he finally did, the chair pulled him into his office to look at a tattered old black-and-white photo framed on the wall: eight loggers standing across a huge stump with their two-man saw, come-alongs, and axes displayed like elephant guns atop their trophy game. Three of them wore bowler hats.

“You’re right,” Scanlon offered, and couldn’t help grinning when he added, “You were robbed.” Fenton’s eyes hardened as Scanlon backed toward the door saying, “Well, there’s always next—”

But Fenton interrupted him, rattling off that Scanlon would sit on two more committees, he’d judge the department essay contests, and he’d cover Dexter’s classes while Ron was out for knee surgery.

“You’re joking,” Scanlon said with a hopeful smile.

“And don’t forget: the first year of any appointment is officially probationary.”

Back in his office—shocked, nauseated, irate—he phoned Naomi at home, then on her cell, and left messages for her to call as gusts of wind pelted rain against the windowpanes. He stared out at the bouncing branch suspended over Fenton’s Porsche.

Then he knocked on Ron’s door, trying to calm himself before going in. Dexter was standing at the window with one eye on a newspaper and the other on each sway and twitch of the branch. “I’ve thought about getting up there one night and sawing partway through. But what about the blade marks? Wouldn’t somebody notice?”

“Let me ask you this,” Scanlon said. “I seem to be getting punished by the chair.”

“You mean over the Mr. Douglas thing?”

Scanlon was astonished.

“Everybody knows,” Ron said. “Some of us thought it was pretty ballsy of you to go up against him.”

“I wasn’t going up against him,” he protested. “I just thought it would be a kick.”

A crack sounded outside. They both jerked their heads and gawked at the tree like two men, bored by their own desultory chat at a baseball game, suddenly riveted by the smack of a bat. But the branch disappointingly hung on.

“Ten years back,” Ron said, “we hired a guy from Duke. Top-notch. Nineteenth-century Europe. Turns out his wife was a big gardener, and in their second year they placed number six in the June garden walk. Fenton and his wife are gardeners too, and they
didn’t
place. The next year the guy taught five days a week at eight a.m. Word is Fenton blocked his tenure. Poor sot teaches in North Dakota, last I heard. These days it’s harder for him to get away with that sort of shit, what with every color-blind, transgender gimp suing over the height of urinals. Which is lucky for you, my friend. You wouldn’t be here if the dean had let Fenton withdraw your offer.”

Scanlon’s face betrayed his shock.

“This is news to you? Sorry, pal. When you got publicly ass-fucked in
Domestic Policy
, Fenton looked like such a moron for giving you the offer that he tried everything to rescind it. But the dean was afraid you’d sue.”

Scanlon stared at the dead limb doing its little dance in the wind, a flirtation, a tease above Fenton’s red car, gleaming in the rain like a candy apple, good enough to lick.

“Cocksucker,” Ron said. “Am I right?”

It had happened again: Scanlon falling in with the wrong crowd. “Let’s talk about that branch, Ron.”

Skirting the campus, Naomi walked through blocks of old bungalows with couches out front soaking up rain, kegs on the roof, towels and centerfolds and busted shades in the windows, the trashiest houses marked by the orange front doors and
$CASH$ FOR YOUR HOUSE
signs that a local landlord littered the town with. A jacked-up pickup rolled past, giant tires humming, then turned onto a muddy front yard, and two college kids, their caps turned backward, pounded up on the porch and kicked the orange door. Standing there, they looked too big, as if this were a playhouse. Then the door opened and they went inside.

Scanlon had come back from campus in a rage about his department
chair, and Sammy, too, had been in a bit of a rage. She’d considered canceling with Clay, but she didn’t know how to contact him and needed to get out of the house. Angel was right: she needed short breaks to sustain her vibrancy and energy as a mother. So she handed her baby off to Scanlon, said she was going out for a while, and left the two of them to deal with their troubles together. She missed Sammy already.

She took a left at the copy shop and crossed over the Northern Pacific tracks that ran down the middle of Mill Street. A beater car splashed through a puddle; its bumper sticker read,
VISUALIZE moving your yuppie ass back to California
. Two blocks down, the street turned into a gravel road that looked like a driveway for Heeber Auto Glass. In any other city she’d call this an area in transition, but sketchiness here seemed enduring. The gravel continued along the tracks past Douglas Radiator Repair
(A great place to take a leak)
, J. B. Welding, and Little Tim’s Transmissions. The oil-blackened cinderblock garages were open to the road. Grimy men swung oversized hammers, clanking and thudding amid torches, sparks, the whine of air tools, rusted heaps of contorted metal, sawed-off oil drums, suspiciously murky puddles. Not a half mile from campus, she was walking through the Middle Ages.

Then she saw the Independent Auto Body sign and the breeze shifted and she smelled it: the acrid, toxic, wonderful smell of body putty. A grinding wheel whirred up dust around a figure in coveralls, goggles, and a mask. She stopped, inhaling, remembering. That morning with Clair was like a hundred others, except it was the day she got pregnant, and while the smell of blood and amniotic fluid was her most direct connection to Joshua, she could also conjure him through the smells infusing his conception—sour milk from her grandparents’ creamery, heating oil, body putty, creosote, mint.

But her heart now belonged to Sammy, and she took one more long smell of the body putty and decided to go home to him. Clay would have to understand. She turned back, then a voice startled her. Clay was rising over the tracks. As their eyes met, his toe caught on the rail and he lunged toward her, nearly falling to the ground.

“Hey,” he said.

“Nice neighborhood.”

“You think so?”

“No.”

His head twitched. “It’s there,” he said, pointing at a cube of cinderblock
that had once been a garage, its sign depicting the eight of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. “Or we could go someplace else.”

“I don’t have a whole lot of time.” She checked her watch—Sammy would still be sleeping.

Looking toward the body shop, Clay lifted his chin, and a figure coated with dust tipped his grinding wheel in response.

She suddenly feared she might be putting herself in danger. “Friend of yours?” she asked.

“Best panel beater in town.” She didn’t reply, so he added, “You got a dent, I
guarantee
he can pull it,” and she was put at ease by his earnest desire to impress her.

Inside, she sat in a vinyl chair and set her wrists on the sticky table. Bringing two glasses of beer from the bar, Clay announced, “Since you’re buying, Randall said we could run a tab.”

She smiled.

“You’re buying, right?”

“I’d be honored,” she said, raising her beer. When he drank, his lip piercing clinked on his glass. She’d barely had a drink once she got pregnant, and only a few sips of wine since Sammy was born. She took three long swallows. Heavenly.

“I thought you’d bring Sammy,” he said.

“To a bar?”

“There’s no smoking or anything.”

“Or anything?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. “Well, another time, maybe.” She saw that his mind had gone off, and she wondered where his own baby was, how long he’d known the mother, and all at once she had the wavery sensation in her eyes and nose from eating french fries doused in white vinegar with Clair at the hot-dog joint a block from the body shop.

“What’s he weigh now?” he asked.

“Twelve pounds, three ounces, a week ago.”

“He must be a good eater.”

She nodded, her eyes on him. His head twitched, and now she felt exposed, brushing up against the topic of breastfeeding in a bar—where she hadn’t told her husband she was coming—with an
anarchist
. Neither spoke for a time, and she wondered if this wasn’t a mistake.

But if she was honest, it was this possibility that brought her here. The potential for risk. From the time she let Scanlon rescue her all those years
ago, she’d been playing it safe. Anosmia had whacked her. She’d lost her self-confidence. But her nose was back now; she could smell life. She’d never been to a dive bar with an anarchist, and Clay lifted her spirits. She would return to Sammy enlivened.

He went to the bar and returned with two more beers. “Do you play darts?” he asked.

“Not professionally.”

He led her to the back. She was lightheaded as she started her second beer, and he put four darts in her hand and pointed at the target: a devilish caricature of Bill Clinton with a thought bubble reading
I’m a gun grabber. Support the NRA
. For all the years that had passed, there weren’t many holes in it.

“Who comes here?” she asked.

“Nobody.”

She pierced Clinton’s left knee.

“That whole area,” he told her, “between here and the highway—”

“The Home Depot?”

He fired a dart into Clinton’s throat. “It used to be the mill. Crazy Eights was the mill bar. People could get their rigs serviced during their shift.” He stuck Clinton in the forehead, then dropped his black jacket over a stool.