The Oregon Experiment (39 page)

“Fuck you!” Clay shouted, thrusting his face at him as the rear tire rolled onto the pavement and he swung the wheel, already wishing for his mother’s sake that he’d held his tongue.

The headlights out Billy’s side window were a faint white illumination, like the Yaquina Head lighthouse seeping through curtains of fog, so distant
and faint that his first thought—no, his
last
thought—was to keep rolling and back all the way into the far lane.

But in an instant the lights filled the windows on both sides of Billy’s face, the headlights widening, the grille of a Cadillac Escalade framing his shoulders and head. Clay thrust his hand out, reaching to Billy’s window to hold off the SUV, his fingers spread across the glass, his cheek touching his brother’s. He remembered the cold moisture on his palm and the first nudge of impact. He pushed against it, his face butting Billy’s, their cheeks grazing, Billy’s nose poking against his ear. The grille pushed against the car, and Clay pushed back. He’d stopped it. The Cadillac had rocked the car sideways on its springs, but when the grille tapped against the window Clay stopped the vehicle cold and saved his brother, who flung his arms around him and kissed his cheek, his breath smelling of milk and Cheerios. Clay turned to see his mother, arms open wide, exuberant joy in her face, hurling herself toward her boys, thrilled that they’d reconciled and proud that Clay had protected them. He’d stepped into the man’s shoes, holding the family—the three of them—together.

The music had stopped, silence except for the buzz of a short circuit under the dash. Billy’s toothy kiss bit into Clay’s cheek. The noise grew louder, insistent …

Light. It had been dark and now it was light. He’d slept. It was the buzzer downstairs, which could only be bad. Cops or worse. He’d seen Flak get taken down, but the sound was what he remembered. The club glancing off his own elbow had been a pop. The clubs on Flak had crunched.

The buzzer didn’t quit. He got up, holding his sore arm, and peered out the window. No cop cars, no crew, just the front wheels of a baby stroller.

Down the stairs he let himself imagine—still sloshing in the dip into sleep—that he’d find Daria and Ruby Christine waiting in the alley. But when he saw Naomi’s relief that his skull wasn’t wrapped in a cast, that he wasn’t in jail, the fact that she cared that much made him glad to see her standing there. Her baby was screaming, powerfully.

“Sammy can’t nurse,” she said, then kachunked the stroller a step at a time up to Clay’s room. “He’s too stuffed up.”

Clay coaxed Sammy from his mother, lay back on his mattress, and held him up on a straight arm, his good arm, airplane style, the baby’s tummy on his palm. Sammy choked and screamed in protest, but quickly
calmed down. Clay rotated his face toward his mother, and his red eyes brightened.

“It’s something about compressing their diaphragm,” Clay said. “I don’t know. Or that they tighten their backs.”

“A miracle.” She eyed the photo of herself.

“When it works.”

She took Sammy back in her arms, and he stayed quiet. “Did you see the paper?”

He rolled his eyes. The
paper
. Don’t get him started about mind control.

“You were there last night,” she said. “You’re hurt.”

“Not bad,” he said, touching his elbow hidden under his sleeve. He hadn’t looked at it this morning, and he didn’t look now.

“Your friend, the one you talk about. Flak.”

Flak’s name on Naomi’s lips made him smile.

“I’m sorry, Clay. He’s unconscious. Maybe a coma.”

Time. His last eight hours were now different from what they’d been. Last night he’d run cold water over his elbow, eaten aspirin, looked at Naomi’s photo, dropped into sleep, woken to her and Sammy. But now that time had changed into the hours after Flak’s skull got smashed by the cops.

He went to the window. Government workers in DayGlo vests and polished white hard hats rose up the side of the courthouse on boom trucks, power-washing the splatters of red paint, while below them street cleaners, yellow lights twirling from their tops, were scrubbing the square. He’d dreamed about the accident again last night, as doctors picked skull fragments from Flak’s uncommon brain.

Flak had Billy’s same build but was older than Clay; it was a relief to be the young one. He leaned into the fridge and flipped open a can of beer. He should swallow some more aspirin, he thought, back at the window, guzzling from the can.

“Can I do anything?” she asked, and when he didn’t respond, she said, “I’m relieved you’re okay.”

He wasn’t okay. If you lived a true life—no, back up. (That’s what Flak liked to say before amending an argument.) If you strive to minimize your own hypocrisy, some government somewhere will eventually kill you for it. Clay didn’t believe that a North Korean furniture mover, an Iranian
fisherman, a Sunni whose little brother died, or a Shiite separated from his baby were any different from him.

Out the window, a dark wall of fog had tumbled over the coast range from Yaquina and was bearing down on them a mile a minute.

The apartment smelled of blood. Reckless, Naomi thought, bringing Sammy here. They should leave, but despite his gaspy, snotty breaths the baby was finally sleeping, and the beer was helping Clay relax. He stretched his arms wide across the window, looking west. “Brother Flak,” he muttered. “Brother Billy.” Then he thrust his fist at the windowpane and held his palm to the glass.

After a moment he turned and sat on the windowsill, the sky darkening behind him. Naomi saw surrender in the slump of his shoulders and back. He held one arm close to his side as he tipped back his beer, sucking at the rim of the can. Fog pushed against the cracked panes as if the room were submerging.

“I was backing out the driveway,” he said, “and I put out my hand to stop it, to protect him. The impact snapped my wrist and Billy flew into me, knocking out his teeth on my cheek.” He touched the half-smile scar beneath his eye that she knew but couldn’t see on his shadowed face. “And when everything was quiet, the shouting over, the radio and engines dead, the glass done shattering and metal done groaning, our tires plowed sideways so hard that the rubber was stripped from the rims”—he paused, as if remembering this for the first time—“Billy was lying in my arms. I didn’t feel my broken wrist or contusions or cuts. My mother was unconscious for a minute or two, and except for a bloody mouth and two missing teeth up front, Billy was resting peacefully in my arms. I’d saved him, but I couldn’t move. He was pressed on top of me, and hanging over his head, just a foot or so from my face, there was a license plate bolted to a bumper, an oil pan, and the underside of an engine. The radiator was dripping on Billy’s pants, and I remember thinking he’d have to go back inside and change before the ceremony. ‘Clay?’ It was my mother. ‘We’re fine, Mom,’ I said. ‘Billy?’ ‘He’s good, Mom. Resting.’ And I talked Billy through the hour it took for the firemen to rip the car open. ‘I’m sorry I yelled,’ I told him. ‘I know I’m not the father. You’re too smart for me to father anyway. I just want us to be a family. Like Mom and Dad used to dream of, before he went away. And it’s up to you and me to take care of—Mom? Are you still
back there?’ ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, her voice soft and close. We felt the closest we ever had. ‘Remember all Dad’s business scams for the three of us?’ I said to Billy. ‘Restoring muscle cars of the sixties, buying an old diesel locomotive and some track and charging people to drive it, building fancy tree houses for rich newcomers. You and I can still do any of it. It’d be in Dad’s honor … Are you cold, Billy? It won’t be long now. Hold on to me tight, and I’ll keep you warm. Mom?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Won’t be long.’ I’d never, in my entire life, felt more at peace.”

Sammy choked on his phlegm and woke up, but magically he didn’t start bawling. He focused his dark watery eyes on his mother and grinned, then remembered he was hungry and gave a tiny, plaintive cry. She draped a fleece baby blanket over her shoulder and, still sitting cross-legged on the mattress, unbuttoned the top of her shirt and lifted Sammy up.

She winced against the merciless pinch inside her breast, and he cried when she pulled him off. She took a deep breath and brought him to her again, grinding her teeth against the pain, then Clay was standing over her, tapping a cold can against her shoulder. She shook her head, Sammy lost his hold, screaming in protest, and Clay said, “I’ve seen this before.”

Good God. She took the beer. Keystone. She’d never heard of it. Sammy wailed and she chugged. Whether it would help with the mastitis or not, the beer tasted damn good. She drank more, then stood up and bounced Sammy, though his crying didn’t let up. She had a bottle in the diaper bag, but her breasts were bulging full—beyond capacity—and she needed relief.

Clay cracked open a second beer for himself and waggled another at her. She shook her head, and he set it on the edge of the sink. For the first time she noticed a toy soldier beside his hotplate, not much bigger than her thumb, and posed like a javelin thrower, one hand tossed back, clutching a grenade, the other pointing toward the enemy line. Clay lowered himself onto the mattress, his face twisting in pain, and bit the cap off an aspirin bottle. He shook a few pills straight into his mouth. She finished off her beer, set down the can, and picked up the soldier, surprised by its weight in her palm.

“Billy and my father spent hours and hours casting lead soldiers,” Clay said. “Filing the seams, painting them, then they’d melt ’em down and recast. We must’ve had twenty molds. A full home-foundry kit. It’d been my dad’s. Maybe
his
dad’s.” He stared out the window, as if he could see through the fog to the coast. “All that stuff’s gone now.”

Sammy reached for the soldier—anything to please him—but then she realized it was lead—
Jesus!
—and yanked it away. He shot her an accusing look, insulted by this new level of incompetence and disregard, and cranked his howls to the top.

But she felt a letting go in her breasts—again, Clay was right—and grabbed the full beer from the counter and settled back onto the mattress. She held Sammy to her and felt a muted discomfort as he began sucking with abandon.

“I’d forgotten all about the lead soldiers, for years before my dad died, but for some reason, or for
no
reason, that soldier there, after the accident, was deep in Billy’s pants pocket. World War Two commando raider, chucking a grenade.”

After a time, when Sammy had pulled away and was nodding off, she flicked her nipple over his lips to try to rouse him. But it was no use. He was zonked, even more exhausted than she was. He’d drunk the top off one breast and hadn’t touched the other. The beers—she’d now finished two—had eased the tightness and pain, and filled her bladder.

She rose from the mattress—very tipsy, off balance. Clay grinned, which made her laugh. “Shit,” she said. “Two beers before breakfast.” Then she laid Sammy, sound asleep, in his stroller.

“Daria used to call it the triple-B: beers before breakfast. It took some discipline to wean her off those when she got pregnant.”

Naomi squeezed her legs together and stopped outside the bathroom door. “I wish you’d try again with her,” she said. “Find a compromise that won’t freak out her parents. Anything to be with her and the baby. I know how much you want it.”

Clay leaned away, shaking his head.

“Get out of Douglas. Find a new place. A new life together. The three of you.”

He laughed, harshly. “You gotta have money for the little house on the prairie, then you need furniture, and then—”

“Maybe her parents could give you a loan, just to get you started. My parents gave us money for the down payment on our house.”

“They’d get me arrested for asking.”

“It’s in their interest. They don’t want Ruby Christine to grow up without her father. Or for Daria to be a single mom.”

“You don’t get it,” he said.

“I do—” she began, but Clay turned his back on her.

When she closed the bathroom door, the smell of blood was thick, the wastebasket heaped up with blood-soaked toilet paper. He was injured worse than she’d imagined. She should examine it. For all his stoicism and his bevy of single moms, he was an orphan with no one to look after him.

She peed a flood, grateful for the beer that had lightened her spirits and pain, but it had also shaken loose her emotions. She pressed her eyes closed against the tears, smelling Clay’s blood and her own body; she’d soon resume her period and the monthly visitations from Joshua.

She dried her hands on her pants and opened the door. “Let me see where you’re hurt,” she insisted, and after token resistance Clay let her ease his arm out of his shirt.

“Holy shit!” she gasped. His elbow was swollen to the size of his knee, blue and purple and a sickly yellow. “You’ve got to get to the emergency room.”

He shook his head.

“I’ve got the car. Seriously, Clay. It’s bad.”

He smiled. “There’s gonna be cops, and if they get in my shit right now and I start thinking about Flak …” His face went dark.

“Who did this to you?”

“I requested his badge number but—”

“This is brutality,” she said. “It should be reported.”

“Silly lady,” he said.

But she was digging in the diaper bag for the camera. “I want pictures of this,” she said. “Scanlon will know what to do. He’ll know the proper authorities.”

“The authorities are the problem,” Clay said. “
Authority
is the problem.”

But instead of listening she was snapping pictures. “Hold up your elbow,” she told him. “Take off your shirt.” He let her shoot a dozen or more pictures before he sat down on his mattress and curled onto his side, just as he’d done yesterday, staring at the photo of her propped against a soda bottle a foot from his nose.

She folded Sammy’s blanket and held it on her lap. She considered leaving, but to do what? Hang out in a café? Go home to Geoff and Scanlon? How do you nurse a husband who smells of another woman?

“What happened with Billy,” she asked, “when the paramedics arrived?”

Clay rolled over and looked at her, confounded, like he wondered if
she’d been listening at all. “He was dead. Instantly. His spine sliced in two. Don’t you get it? I killed him. It was all my fault. And now—I can’t do this again with Flak. Maybe I should bust into the ER and let the cops put
me
in a coma. Isn’t that like sleep?” He rolled back to the photo, holding his smashed-up elbow.