The Oregon Experiment (26 page)

When he launched a dart, his wing bone protruded and receded through his T-shirt, the tight muscles in his arm and shoulder flexed and extended like springs. The scent of his body was crushed dried tomato seeds. Sharply boyish. Naomi’s dart hit a light switch and fell to the floor.

“Excuse me,” she said, and went through the door marked
Ladies ONLY
. She peed, and as she pulled out her cell, her eyes filled with tears—she missed Sammy. “How is he?” she said when Scanlon picked up.

“Excellent. Are you coming home?”

Again her eyes rushed with tears, and her milk ducts were suddenly brimming. “So he settled down?”

“Sleeping. He drank two bottles of what you pumped last night.”

“That’s good,” she said. “There’s one more in the freezer.”

“You’ll be home before he wakes up, won’t you?”

“Randall has gingivitis.”

“What?”

“That’s what it says here. Graffiti in the stall.”

“You’re on the toilet?”

How did she get here? She studied at Givaudan-Roure. She’d shown promise at Dior and Shiseido. She’d fallen in love and married a wonderful man. And now, from a toilet stall with an empty roll of paper at the end of a gravel road, she was lying to him. “Like a café,” she said. “I won’t be much longer.” She hung up and switched the phone to silent.

The beer was magic: she stood at the sink and, with only the slightest prick of discomfort, expressed enough milk into the drain to take the pressure off.

She was forever in the restroom. He drummed his thumb on his boot, then the door slapped open and he watched her weave between empty tables.

“Oh, I think I’ve had enough,” she said when she spotted the full glass of beer waiting for her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Do you need to leave?”

She sat down, shaking her head.

“We can go if you need to,” he said. “It must be hard to be away from Sammy.”

She didn’t say anything—just a gaze that reminded him of the photograph. He preferred to think of her pregnant.

“I miss Ruby Christine every minute,” he said.

“At least you could get in a car and see her,” she said. “Why don’t you?” She sipped her beer.

He wasn’t sure what he expected from her. He wished she’d brought the baby.

“So how did you end up being an anarchist?”

“I always was.”

“Come on.” She drank again, and he noticed the wrinkles at her eyes. “What’s your history? You weren’t born with tattoos and a pierced eyebrow. When did
that
start? All the anarchist adornments?”

He didn’t like this part of her, thinking she’s a step ahead of him, not so different from her husband. This was not the pregnant woman in the photo. He gripped one hand tight around his glass, becoming aware of his tic, and with the other he held his neck, covering the
Billy
tattoo, and he looked at her as hard as steel.

The color left her face. He’d scared her. It was that easy.

He expected her to get up and leave, but she didn’t. She downed a gulp and held the edge of the table. He’d only ever told Daria, and it wasn’t until
he did that he realized he wasn’t sure how much of the story he’d made up. At night as he lay in bed ready to embrace sleep, if sleep happened to slip under the door and beneath his blanket, the story worked in and out of him. He remembered, he imagined, he re-imagined. The story was his.

Naomi didn’t back off. She met him across the table like a challenge, like the government therapist he’d been forced to talk to nine years ago.

“Billy was the smart one,” he began. “My brother. Everybody said it.” Though Clay was two years older, he told Naomi, he’d grown up in Billy’s shadow. As far back as he could remember, Billy was the dominant one. Physically, Clay took after his mom, a slender, timid woman always apologizing and fidgeting with her hair. But she’d been a beauty back in the day, as he knew from photos and from what people in Yaquina said. The high-school prom queen, escorted by his dad, a varsity slugger who lived up to his given name, King. Clay knew lots from talk over in Yaquina—the notion of coastal townsfolk being tight-lipped and never minding other people’s business was just another myth. Over fish gutting and net mending, tree felling and road blasting, in the cafés and bars, the gossip went around like at a knitting circle.

This is what he’d heard: King Knudson and Roslyn Stroup had always seemed destined for each other. Both their fathers—Clay’s grandfathers—were crabbers, hauling lines through the years for Yaquina Crab, Pressman, and Central Coast, sometimes working side by side, sometimes for competitors. Neither man ever owned his own boat, content to draw a percentage of the catch and to paint houses or grind hulls for the drydock when boats were in port. The two men owned houses on Onsland Spit, at the southern edge of the harbor, where twenty or thirty rickety bungalows were owned by fishermen, loggers, cannery workers, a school teacher, a truck driver, a foreman at the pulp mill. They were family men who worked hard when they worked and spent time off on sunny summer days grilling and drinking beer in backyards high on rocky bluffs overlooking the sea that guarded so fiercely the fruit of their livelihoods. On foggy and cold days, they sat with their wives and children in their small living rooms, a window cracked to let out some of the heat pouring from the woodstove. They fished and crabbed and raised their families without the government banging on the door and peeking in the windows all day and night.

King and Roslyn, born a month apart, were the youngest of each brood. They grew up like brother and sister, sharing a playpen and the
bath, exchanging hand-me-down rain boots, candy, and stomach bugs. Digging canals in the rain on the beach, crabbing off the docks with homemade rings, searching for starfish in the tide pools around the harbor, the two were inseparable for the first six or seven years of their lives. In elementary school, King got stockier and gravitated toward sports and boyish things while Roslyn became willowy, a solid if not brilliant student, a reader and precise drawer of kittens, sunsets, fishing boats, and flowers. At school they didn’t see much of each other, but in their backyards and front rooms and in the shallows at low tide it was as if nothing had changed: they had developed like one mind, one will, one desire. If Roslyn wanted a Dr. Pepper, so did King. She sat in the bleachers through rain and cold fog at his Little League games; he hung her drawings on the wall above his bed. When he told her he’d been frightened of the ocean the one time he was out on a crabbing boat, she told him that she had too. When she lost a tooth, he knew it was time to yank one of his.

In ninth grade, at the Spring Informal, they had their first real kiss, but each in opposite corners of the high-school gym. Roslyn’s date was the second-chair trumpet player in the band, whose lips, even during the break between sets, were red and inflamed in the circle of his embrouchure. When he puckered, his embrouchure tightened up and spasmed, like instead of kissing Roslyn he was blowing a high C. His lips smelled like valve oil and brass and the dry pellets of spittle that collected in the corners of his mouth when he played.

In his corner, King’s head was pressed against the wall as Sandra Simmons probed the depths of his mouth with her serpentine tongue until he couldn’t breathe and finally pushed her back, taking two deep gasps of air. They both found themselves thinking back to an earlier kiss, in third grade, when they were playing house in Roslyn’s bedroom, pretending they had their own house on Onsland Spit, and she said, “Okay, now I’m in the kitchen making dinner and you come in from the docks and kiss me.” He walked out the door and came back in, and as she wiped her hands on her apron, he touched her cheek and they pressed their lips together. She wasn’t surprised that his lips, always chapped from fishing and playing baseball, were rough. He wasn’t surprised by the pleasant oniony smell of her breath. Pretending to be their parents, they also felt like their grandparents. That kiss must have felt like the one that Roslyn’s father put on her forehead when she was two hours old, and the one Clay gave Daria minutes after Ruby Christine was born.

In 1968, age eighteen, King told Roslyn that patriotic duty and a debt to his father and hers, who’d both served, had made him decide to enlist in the army. She tried desperately to change his mind, and they argued for the first time ever until he finally relented, agreeing to join the National Guard instead. Then, halfway through boot camp, his company got orders for Vietnam. King was given a month of ordnance training; Roslyn wept for weeks. She’d never had such a foreboding feeling, she told her mother, as if he’d already been killed. Five Yaquina boys who’d gone to Vietnam had not come home.

Days before they were set to deploy, the governor of Maryland made a request to the governor of Oregon for one company of guardsmen, and instead of Vietnam, King went straight to Baltimore, where he wasn’t permitted to leave the high-school gymnasium that served as their barracks during the riots that they never helped to quell. By the third week he was stir crazy. He’d caught a glimpse of the Atlantic from the military bus coming in, and when the wind blew from the east he could smell the harbor from an open window, but along with a hundred fellow soldiers he was forced to live on a cot, do PT in shifts at the empty end of the gym, listen to news of the riots on the radio, watch John Wayne and army-issue stag films at night.

So he slipped out a fire escape one evening in search of oysters and the famous soft-shelled crab he’d never tasted. It was dark, and the streets were empty. He headed toward the salt air but got turned around in hilly streets that curved and dead-ended and lost him all his bearings. Slums. King knew poor. On the Oregon coast he knew all about kids without warm clothes or enough food. But what he was seeing here was hopeless: vacant buildings, windows and doors busted in, empty lots of rubble, cars stripped and burned, then a pocket of men at the end of an alley—and a pop and a sting in his eye. But before his hand could wipe it away, the pain inside his skull exploded. He never felt his tooth break on the sidewalk. Mercifully, he was unconscious.

King Knudson was never the same. The government returned him home without his right eye or much control of his judgment and mood. He’d been gone from Yaquina less than twelve weeks. Standing on the bluff one night, King’s father demanded of the sea, “Why do we let the government take our children?”

Despite his dangerous unpredictability, Roslyn married King six months later, and the Oregon Department of Transportation hired him
for the expertise that the army had given him. He spent the next twelve years blasting through the road from Yaquina to Douglas. For solace he drank, and Roslyn contemplated the boy she’d known like a brother, the teenager she’d fallen in love with, and the man she’d lost forever at eighteen.

“There’s no coming back from something like that,” Clay said. “She tried kids fifteen years later, Billy and me. Every day she reminded my father who he used to be. She thought she could fix him.”

He saw Naomi’s head bob. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes were red. “I want to hear the rest, but … do you think they have coffee?”

While he was at the bar, she went into the restroom. He pushed the beer glasses aside and set the Styrofoam cup on the table.

But she didn’t even try it. Just a sniff, and she shook her head. “I shouldn’t have drunk that last beer.”

While she paid, he chugged the coffee. It tasted fine.

Stepping around puddles and ruts in the gravel road, she resisted the temptation to take his arm, and at the sidewalk she found her centerline. Half a beer too much. So long without a drink, she’d lost her tolerance.

“We can cut over here,” Clay said, not really pointing but raising an arm then letting it fall. “Over to Washington.”

“You don’t need to walk me home,” she said.

“I’ll take you as far as Lewis and Clark.”

They walked a block in silence, passing a condemned old church that looked half torn down. The bungalows on the right backed up to an old railroad yard. Most had beautiful front yard gardens. She was amazed by how good the gardens still looked in November. And how was it that particular aesthetics grouped themselves around town? This whole street tended toward heaped-up wildflower gardens, bamboo chimes, Buddhas and Polynesian masks, Japanese arbors.

“Do you want to finish telling me?” she asked him.

“Another time,” he said. “I should get down to the courthouse. Trial’s heating up.”

“I could use that coffee.”

She thought he was thinking about where they could grab a cup to go, but then his arms went out wide when a little voice called his name from
down the block. A girl, maybe four years old, dropped her mother’s hand and came running. Clay squatted down, arms still spread, saying, “Hi, Bumblebee,” as she hurtled into his embrace.

She rubbed her nose against Clay’s chest. “We have a chicken party!”

“Oh, that’s great,” he said, a rush of enthusiasm in his voice. His face came alive, as it had on the night of her labor and for moments when he talked about his parents. She saw past the tattoos, piercings, and shaved head to his tiny-toothed smile and watery eyes.

“Can you come?” the girl asked. “Please.” And then, when her mother caught up, “Mommy, can Clay come to the chicken party?”

“Hey,” he said to the mother, who was carrying a battered aluminum stockpot on her hip.

“Hey,” she said, eyeing Naomi.

Clay introduced them.

“Come to the party,” said Royce, the mother, tipping her hip. “I made lentils.”

Bumblebee was hugging Clay’s leg. “Please,” she pleaded.

“Where’s it at?” he asked Royce.

“Right here,” Bumblebee said.

Clay looked at the house, shaking his head. “I don’t know who they are.”

“No worries,” Royce said. “She’s cool with anybody coming.”

“And Naomi’s gotta get some coffee,” he said.

“You go ahead,” Naomi told him, and took a step toward home.

Royce put a hand on her arm. “Good coffee right here.”

Bumblebee hung all her weight on Clay’s arm, pulling him toward the house like a fisherman dragging a skiff onto the beach. “Pretty please,” she said.