The Oregon Experiment (37 page)

“Right.” And as he walked quickly away, Scanlon was sure he felt his bowels loosen. Could it really be true?

There were, of course, plenty of other explanations: stress, pinto beans, Naomi’s attack. She’d gotten up from the couch and gone into the bathroom, returning with a wet washcloth and Band-Aids. She’d cleaned and dressed his wounds, the whole time sucking at the blood in her teeth. Then, without a word, she’d gone into the bedroom and closed the door.

A cop on a Harley roared past. Scanlon sneaked along Fifth Street, crossed the railroad tracks, and came out by city hall. The Starbucks was closed, still boarded up with plywood, and when he rounded the corner, he saw cops and kids lit up with floodlights in front of the courthouse. From this distance—three or four blocks—it looked like a raucous street fair, as if a Ferris wheel might rise up from the chaos.

But as he got closer the tone changed—no cotton candy or corn dogs here. Three battle cops picked off a protester from the edge of the crowd, their batons thudding across his back until his face slapped the sidewalk, a knee in the spine pinned him down, his wrists were bound, and he was flung into a paddy wagon.

Scanlon stepped back into a doorway, thinking twice about thrusting himself into the mayhem. In Seattle there’d been safety in the masses of marchers who weren’t there to make trouble, a buffer between him and the cops and the anarchists. But this looked like a Revolutionary War battle—the spiffily outfitted cops and the ragtag militia meeting head to head.

So he hung back in the doorway of the Toy Maker. In the window a kid-sized school chair was brightly painted with coyotes, geckos, and snakes. Sirens were howling everywhere, and the glow of at least two fires reflected off low clouds in the starless sky.

He decided to go down past the Rainy Day Café and the bookstore to the Green & Black. The streets were eerily deserted, shiny black with the rain. He heard a motor roar and looked back over his shoulder: a police car screamed by him at highway speed, lights flashing but no siren, going the wrong direction on the one-way street. He continued past the music store—trumpets, violins, and guitars propped up in the window—and when he glanced down an alley, he was blindsided—knocked down on the sidewalk with someone on top of him.

“You fuck!” the guy spat, getting up and rubbing his elbow, trying to limp off a pain in his hip. All in black, he made two fists—blotchy tattoos on the backs of his hands and forearms. A second guy caught up with him, sprinting out of the dark alley. Thick black eyebrows, a scar on his face, a scowl.

“Sorry about that.” Scanlon touched the blood at his nose, worked his sore jaw, then pushed up on his hands and knees. “I didn’t—”

Blue lights twirled at the far end of the alley, and the two anarchists ran off.

A patrol car idled in front of the Green & Black. He pulled back his shoulders to stand upright and wove through the subdued crowd. In the same spot where he’d seen them last night, Clay and Flak were huddled in tight, elbows on the table, heads hanging between their shoulders. Clay nodded when he saw him. Then Flak looked up and smiled. “Citizen,” he said, “you’re bleeding.”

Scanlon shrugged. The worst of it was that Naomi’s bite had reopened when he hit the sidewalk, blood seeping out from under the Band-Aids and trickling down his wrist.

Clay flung him a paper napkin.

“Are you okay?” It was Entropy, leaning over from the next table.

Scanlon wiped his nose, then wrapped up his finger. He nodded.

“Some bad-ass motherfuckers have come to town,” Flak said, kicking a chair out for Scanlon. “On both sides of the law.”

“Crazy shit,” Entropy said.

Flak nodded solemnly. “I just hope they don’t burn down the town. These guys are looking for a fight. They give anarchy a bad name.”

“A kid from Boise I was talking to,” Clay said, his head twitching, “said they’re
getting
themselves arrested. To bust Panama out from the inside.”

“They’ll move him,” Flak said. “Probably already have. The Feds maintain holding tanks all over the place.”

As they talked, Scanlon listened. They trusted him now, at least enough to ignore him. They discussed conspiracies, infiltrators, getting free refills on pop at Subway with someone else’s cup, pouring gravel into bulldozer manifolds. They told stories of past protests and corrupt cops. Flak wondered aloud about selling rain ponchos, and Clay asked about Sammy’s jaundice. And as Scanlon spit on the napkin and wiped dried blood from his nose, he felt himself sinking into the sort of dark hole he’d watched Naomi spiral down into over the years. She knew about Sequoia; she might leave him. And all he had up his sleeve for holding on to her was sitting around this table: his research. But he began to doubt they were the real thing. Flak cared too much about money and his godlike status with the kids, who were naive and uncommitted. To his credit, Clay had torched the SUVs, but ultimately he just wanted to set up housekeeping with wife and child. Scanlon felt so desperate that he wished the PVC pipe he’d bought for Clay really was for pipe bombs.

“Shit,” Rebecca said, holding up her ringing cell phone. “I gotta go. My dad thinks I’m at the bowling alley.” She turned away from the others and said brightly, “Hi, Daddy.”

These
were his sources? Hopeless. His finger throbbed.

“They’ll bust Panama out,” Entropy said, “and trounce the cops.”

“Not gonna happen,” Flak said. “That’s a fight the cops want, because they know we can’t win it. They have camps where they’re
trained
to beat the crap out of anarchists. That’s their job. Helmets, shields, tear gas,
sticks. And if those don’t work they’ll just bring out the guns. You can’t beat ’em in the street. You just get your ribs cracked. Yes, we must end the last, worst empire, but don’t think that throwing a rock at those fuckers is gonna do that.”

Armchair anarchists, Scanlon thought. This was the best he’d done.

Rebecca was standing beside the table, waiting for Flak to finish his speech. “I told him I was working on two strikes in the third frame, but he’s picking me up at Starlite Lanes in half an hour.”

“Oh my God,” Entropy said. “You better run. You’ll never make it in time.”

“He’s gonna kick my ass,” Rebecca said.

Scanlon took a slow breath and dabbed at his nose; the bleeding had stopped. “Do you want a ride?” he asked.

“Thank you!” The relief of a high-school girl.

They all left together, Flak and Clay a few paces ahead, Scanlon following with the girls. At the corner they stopped, looking down the five or six blocks to the bedlam at the courthouse. That was where Scanlon needed to be—street level.

“What do you think?” he said to no one in particular. “Get a closer look?”

“Bad-ass motherfuckers,” Flak repeated. “No doubt.”

“I gotta kinda hurry up to the bowling alley,” Rebecca said.

“I’m parked at the library,” Scanlon told her. “It’s on the way.”

“He bought you the coffee,” Clay said. “You owe him. That’s how it works. Professor wants to see his lab animals in their native habitat.”

They all stared at Clay, then he shot ahead, striding down Jefferson toward the courthouse, and the rest of them followed.

At the edge of the square, somebody bumped into Scanlon, and he realized he’d hurt his elbow in that collision. His thumb and finger throbbed. Bottles and rhetoric and strategies flew through the air. He and the girls stood on the periphery as Flak and Clay talked with a couple protesters. The word was that the cops weren’t arresting anybody else—the jail was full, and so were the paddy wagons—but the Feds had infiltrated the crowd, choppers of U.S. Marines were hovering downriver with shoot-to-kill orders, Douglas was sealed off, and the only possible retreat was on the logging roads through the coastal range. There was pointing, down alleys and up at rooftops, where claims were made about snipers. They waded in a little deeper, where rumors about meth and Ecstasy rattled through the
crowd, and that violence had flared up in Portland, Seattle, and Sacramento, and that somebody had torched the house belonging to Panama’s judge.

Scanlon got looks. He thought he saw the punk who’d run into him. Flak was right about bad motherfuckers. Narrow eyes and slanted mouths. Four-day stubble on shaved skulls. Scarred, oversized hands and huge, misshapen knuckles. He was as close to the real thing as he’d ever been.

His mind sharpened and dialed in on the energy of rebellion, the beat in the air. Wet pavement, sirens near and far, shattering glass, the double blast of fire-truck horns, protesters’ outraged screams, the stern monotone commands issued through a bullhorn. Debris was flying overhead—plastic bottles filled with dirt from street planters, an orange traffic cone, the head of a parking meter and, suddenly, hundreds of DVDs in Blockbuster cases.

A white news van was parked at the end of Third Street, a camera poked out the half-open passenger window. The driver had both hands on the wheel, ready to bolt. If Sanchez was still on the scene, she was tucked safely in back.

“Choke holds,” Flak said. “A guy just told me. The cops are getting rough.”

“A girl in Portland showed me how to break a choke hold,” Rebecca said, her eyes electric. “They’d never get me.”

Flak looked at her dubiously. “We should get out of here.”

But then a roar went up, as if for a breakaway run in a football game, and the crowd suddenly rushed in every direction at once. Scanlon was spun around, flipped by a crashing wave, sucked under, then hit by the next breaker, and he lost sight of the others as every face was suddenly covered by a bandanna. He jumped up on a bench and saw two cruisers roar up a basement ramp under the jail. The protesters pushed at the police line as the first car screeched around the corner. The second car flew off the ramp too hard and bottomed out, and under the floodlights Scanlon could see Panama’s face in the backseat. The newsman hopped from the van and up on the running board with his shoulder cam for a better shot. A line of batons drummed on the surge of protesters as the cruiser accelerated into the turn, the rear tires slipping on the wet pavement, and a uniformed, helmeted cop bounced off the hood with a gut-wrenching thump, spun through the air like a rodeo clown, and landed on the roof, where he
was snagged by the blue lights until the car fishtailed around the corner and he shot over the trunk and tumbled to the street.

For a moment there was total silence, while rules changed and power shifted, so quiet that Scanlon could hear the scratch of police radios. The protesters took a step back, and the police ranks grew. He looked for Rebecca, for any of them, but then tear-gas canisters hit the pavement and spewed all around him. A black bus with cages on the windows lurched out from behind the jail and battle cops charged out the doors.

Protesters scattered, running, sprinting, stumbling. Scanlon held his ground on the bench, but as he watched the cops—the precision, efficiency, and indiscriminate violence of their attack—he knew Flak was right and joined the stampede, racing for the river. But after two strides he was tripped up and hit the pavement. When he scrambled to his feet, a kid in black shoved him down again and shouted, “Cop!”

“I’m not!” he yelled back. Standing over him, the kid pulled a leg back to kick him, so Scanlon stayed down, backing into an ATM niche in the wall of a bank as chaos engulfed them. The kid lunged forward—jittery and sweating, a poster boy for meth—and Scanlon cocked his fist, but suddenly someone grabbed the kid from behind and threw him aside. It was Clay. The kid swung at him wildly, but Clay ducked and head-butted him, cracking the kid’s nose with his forehead. The kid went down, blood gushing over his face, and two cops were closing in as Scanlon sprinted away with Clay on his heels.

He covered four blocks and got to the river before looking back, but Clay wasn’t there. Clusters of three or four were catching their breath and regrouping in the park, pointing back at the courthouse and talking about another charge. But the cops were methodically marching toward them, and it was clear this moment was over, so they disappeared down steep trails through the brush along the riverbank.

Scanlon collapsed on a park bench beside a bronzed, larger-than-life beaver, wetness seeping through the seat of his jeans. At least the rain had stopped. Four blocks down, by the courthouse, he could see the red flashing lights of a fire truck. No doubt Hank Trueblood was on the scene, helping the paramedics tend to the police. Things had turned bad here tonight. The poor cop who’d flipped up and over the cruiser—a father, a husband—probably had some broken bones, maybe wouldn’t walk right again. A total disaster.

A loose line of cops reached the river walk. “Clear the area,” one ordered through a bullhorn. Scanlon looked up and down the park. He was the only person here. Most of the police fanned out along the river, but three others approached him, shining a flashlight in his face. They stopped directly in front of him, and when he tried to shade his eyes, they shined the beam around his hand in what became an absurd little game.

“Where do you live?” one of them asked.

“Douglas,” Scanlon said, then felt compelled to lie. “Born and raised.”

“What’s your address?”

He recited it.

“Go home, sir.”

He rocked to his feet. “I was supposed to give someone a ride.”

“That way.” The cop pointed upriver with his flashlight. “And don’t return to the area of the courthouse.”

Scanlon strutted off, aware that he’d fallen into the snarl and wise-ass posture of a juvenile delinquent, refusing to snap to or surrender.

Down Washington Avenue he could see a paramedic van hit the siren and speed off. Another ambulance raced up the street, then a third. Scanlon walked two blocks to Jefferson and headed west, making a wide loop back to his car. Cops shined their lights on him and kept going. He was frankly a little resentful that he so obviously posed no threat. They were indiscriminately beating anyone who crossed them, yet they called him “sir” and sent him home in his cream-colored Gore-Tex jacket and his “dry as a duck” Bass shoes. Even with one of their comrades fallen, they couldn’t work up a little brutality when it came to him.