The Oregon Experiment (44 page)

“Naomi,” Joey pleaded. “Back me up on this.”

Naomi turned to her.

“Do you want Sammy to grow up in America or some asinine province of vegetarians and anarchists?”

“Not exactly how I’d characterize it,” Scanlon said, “but let the question stand.”

“In twenty years,” Joey persisted, “Sammy’s an American college boy or … whatever these experiment lunatics want him to be?”

“I suppose,” Naomi said, “if his choices are a scholarship to Cornell or tossing molotov cocktails, I hope he takes Cornell.”

“Why is it,” Sequoia jumped in, “that no one understands
peaceful
? No violence, no destruction, no rocks at police.” With her fingertips she was brushing imaginary crumbs from her face.

“When the U.S. recognized Kosovo—” Scanlon began, but he suddenly went silent, staring at the end of the table, and Naomi turned toward a hot metal smell, like raising the hood on an overheated engine, as Clay’s head snapped two times, then three, audible cracks sounding from his neck.

Naomi pulled away, clutching Sammy tight.

“Hypocrites!” Clay shouted, dishes jumping when he punched the table. “You’re all
no destruction
till you need something busted up.
Make it look like an accident
, you tell me.” He was pointing at Scanlon. “Sleazy! You don’t even have the conviction for your own fight.”

Scanlon stood up, but didn’t move from the head of the table.

“And you!” He pointed at Sequoia. “Spewing ignorant crap about anarchists. But for a
business,
” he spit the word, “a profit-making business paying minimum wage and taxes to the
government
, and for a
church
for
yuppies
doing
yoga
, you call in the anarchist to smash up somebody’s Porsche.”

Naomi didn’t dare move from her seat, though she cupped her hand over Sammy’s head. Clay’s rage smelled like burnt hair.

He held his finger on Sequoia like a gun. “I never trusted you.”

Then he aimed his stare at Naomi, his anger displaced by loss, the same loss she’d seen on his face when he talked of Billy’s death and his father’s, when he’d learned that Flak was in a coma. His head jerked, the crack from his neck snapping louder.

A distant wail rose from Trinity. “It’s
him
, Momma.”

“Shush,” Sequoia told her.

Clay pounded the table. “You’re
all
guilty.”

“That’s enough!” Scanlon shouted.

Trinity was sobbing. “The broken boy.”

Sequoia jumped to her feet. “Get out of here, you crazy fuck!”

No one moved or spoke, and Naomi felt his eyes piercing her, even as the kitchen door closed behind him and they listened to the scrape of his boots receding down the driveway.

Later, Scanlon watched Sequoia push her bike down the sidewalk, Trinity walking beside her. He drifted through the laundry room to the picture window in front. Halfway down the block, Sequoia stopped. She squatted down and Trinity said something to her. After a moment, the girl touched her mother’s face, then hugged her, and they continued on.

He’d tried to convince Sequoia that Fenton had it coming, listing his various crimes. “If the dean had let him rescind my offer, I would’ve never even come to Douglas,” he’d explained, and both Sequoia and Naomi rolled their eyes like he’d made an argument for the other team. Geoff had thrown in with him, calling the branch the perfect touch. And Joey, her hands still shaking from Clay’s outburst, was fixated on whether she’d been driven to a college dance in a ’57 Porsche Speedster or a ’62 Triumph Spitfire the night after Kennedy was shot.

Sequoia left without a hug, and much remained unresolved. He couldn’t blame Naomi for being pleased, although it hadn’t yet occurred to her that both of his sources had just evaporated, so now the
Oregonian
piece could not be written, and Fenton still held the strings.

Nor did she realize he and Sequoia weren’t the real objects of Clay’s rage, that it was her line about Cornell and molotov cocktails. When she
said it, Scanlon had seen his neck spasm, his whole body clench, his eyeballs go berserk. She was in his head, all right. She knew Clay far better than she was letting on.

He should wait till dark, but fuck it: precautions could be as stifling as doing nothing at all. Time wasted. He pounded down the strip—a new Starbucks, Domino’s, the Dress Barn. He walked straight through the lot of Timber Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, weaving between rows of pickups and SUVs, green and red Christmas lights sparkling on wires overhead, plastic candy canes as big as a man. He cut by the old railroad yard and passed Sequoia’s house. He didn’t like her. More personal than just that she wanted to replace one system with another. For all her big-titted, self-satisfied generosity, she seemed too sure of herself, like a rich girl with her eye on something she knew she could buy. She seemed reckless. He felt sorry for her daughter.

He reached the tracks and followed them to the river. Rain had come up, and the wind got under his jacket. Beneath the bridge, he slid down the riverbank, holding his elbow tight to his side, and came around the piling slowly, never knowing who might be huddled down there, jumpy transients or kids, drunk or asleep. But there was nobody.

He slipped in the mud and had to scrabble back up the embankment to the little cave where he’d stashed the garbage bag, knotted up tight. Slick with mud he crawled inside, reaching blindly in the dark.

T
wo days later, at airport security, Scanlon hugged his mother, and then watched her walk away between the ropes, as steady as a runway model in her high strappy heels, pegged black jeans, black sweater, and red stringy shawl. She tapped a TSA guard on the elbow and pointed to her bag, and without waiting to see if he’d put it onto the conveyer belt, without removing her shoes or glancing back over her shoulder, she strode through the metal detector to the other side.

Naomi wiped Sammy’s nose. Scanlon read the departures monitor: Albuquerque, Anchorage, Atlanta. Geoff and Kitty, in the pink RV, were halfway to Vegas by now. Naomi unzipped the diaper bag, counted the diapers, and zipped it back up. They’d planned a date, but neither of them knew how to go about it. “Let’s get a tea here,” he said, “before we head downtown.”

They were seated at a small square table in a dark corner of the restaurant, Sammy sound asleep in his carrier on the chair beside them. Scanlon smelled bacon, tuna melts, and the bar, and he wondered what Naomi was smelling, what her experience of this moment was. When they were falling in love, they did what all couples did: they recounted past loves, childhood fears, unrealized hopes, secret dreams and vulnerabilities, all in the glow of
endless months of making love, of walking in the park as a prelude to making love, of going out to eat after making love. Food tasted better then. Completely spent, they’d fall into the love seat at the back of San Padre’s with too many tapas and sangrias and the understanding that they shared not only a nose but all of their senses, even their skin.

The roar of a jet came muffled through the wall—an old photo of barges dredging the Columbia—and the waitress clanked down a lavender teapot for Naomi and a cup of coffee for him. He tipped in some milk, stirred.

And then she started talking. She told him of the profound disconnection she’d felt when they met. She wandered through her days in a world she couldn’t perceive. “It wasn’t just that I couldn’t smell or taste,” she said. “I couldn’t read people. I’d hear their words, see their expressions, but fail to understand them. God, I couldn’t even carry on a conversation with Rachel walking around the reservoir.”

Scanlon shook his head; he didn’t get it.

“I had to concentrate so hard to look for mud or ice—to
see
it, because I couldn’t smell it. And all summer long I couldn’t smell that soupy New York humidity so I thought I had a fever.

“And you were so charming and attractive and intelligent.” Spontaneously, she smiled. “I could slip under your arm and you’d lead me through dinner parties and weekends with our friends. But I relied too much on you,
deferred
to you, to tell me how to act, even how to feel.” She stared into her tea, taking a deep breath. “I’ve resented you for being a reminder of what a wreck I was. For seeing me so low.”

He took her hand in his on the table.

“But I love you,” she insisted. “Not just because you saved me. I’m less fragile, less desperate for your love, than I was nine years ago, but everything I fell in love with then, I love now.”

Their knees touched under the table, and Scanlon felt the delirious rush he remembered from those early months, transported from the Portland airport to a sidewalk table at Tartine. “I love you,” he said.

She sipped her tea. “It was nice last night,” she whispered. He’d stayed up late reading, trying to find in scholarly theory what he’d failed to grasp on the ground. Naomi was asleep when he got in bed, but she turned to him and they made love silently in the dark.

On the table she rubbed her fingertip in the dip of the spoon. “I think sometimes the body has to forgive before the heart can.”

·   ·   ·

They had a late lunch in the Pearl, and afterward, tipsy from pinot gris, bought her a too-expensive lime-green skirt. They went to the museum, nursed Sammy, changed him, made him giggle. They said little more to each other, but with Sammy riding in the Baby Bjorn they walked arm in arm, holding hands. And in the back of a café with lattes and truffles, they kissed on the slumpy couch, as he napped beside them.

They tired quickly and decided not to stay in Portland for dinner so they sped back down I-5 for home. When they crossed the bridge into Douglas and stopped at the light, with Bank of America and Church of the Savior on opposite corners, he laid his hand over hers and nodded at the church signboard:
Prayer is love on your knees
.

The light turned green, and Naomi said, “I thought that was a blow job.”

The Oregon Experiment had signed a lease on a little office in the Odd Fellows Hall, but Sequoia was afraid to leave Trinity with a sitter and was working at home. Checks had been coming in since the protests, mostly twenty-five- and fifty-dollar contributions—more than enough for the rent and another computer. Rico was adapting the website to accept credit cards and foreign currency; he suggested they invest in short-term bonds.

From timber companies, environmental groups, and Indian casinos, the promise of money came with strings attached. A splinter group of Mormon polygamists—some of them already living south of Portland, others who’d come from Utah—had pledged thousands, even millions, if their “religious imperative” could be accommodated by the new nation.

Against her better judgment, she agreed to have coffee with a golf developer who drove over from Bend. “We’d build twenty to thirty courses on a dozen resorts,” he said, opening a color brochure on the table. “In ten years—”

Golf
, she thought. Except for strip mining and genocide, nothing violated their principles more.

“The courses and facilities are inviting to the Japanese and Koreans,” he yammered on. “But the real money drops when a billion Chinese can
afford a world-class tee time. We’d contract a spokesman, a Tiger Woods or a Michelle Wie.” He reminded Sequoia of her father’s friends.

Chemical herbicides and fertilizers, forests leveled, whole rivers redirected. Ghastly outfits and polo shirts. She wanted to outlaw golf, not turn their new nation into a preeminent destination resort.

When the developer left the café, she ducked into the pantry and cried. Were these the compromises she’d have to make?

And now, nearly midnight, she shut down her laptop and went out back for a soak. Trinity’s fever had been up and down for a week, and she’d been torn from sleep by bad dreams, shaken during the day by hallucinations. Sequoia had stopped taking her to daycare; she’d play at Skcubrats and ride with her on errands. But two days ago Sequoia was closer to phoning her father than she’d ever been. In the café Trinity wouldn’t stop screaming about the broken boy, and when Sequoia tried to nurse her—a blazing fever—she hurled a cocoa mug at the pastry case, shattering the huge sheet of glass.

Sequoia had barely spoken with her parents since the fall and its aftermath, four or five times in nine years. She’d dreamed that when she finally did call them, it would be as the admired, idealistic founder of a world-changing revolution—like Václav Havel magnanimously checking in with the folks—because then she wouldn’t need them. She toweled off and closed up the tub.

If she called her father for advice … No, she’d never do it. Even the thought of letting a child psychiatrist have a go at her daughter turned her stomach sour.

She touched Trinity’s forehead. Cool and dry. Getting better already. She crawled behind her in bed, slipped under the comforter, and spooned her little girl back into her body.

The trip back from Portland always felt long, and when Scanlon turned off the engine, she was reminded of the first time they’d pulled into this driveway and he’d carried her over the threshold, Sammy nesting in her belly no bigger than a robin, as her nose sputtered back to life. Now, she craned around to see their chunky baby asleep in the back and gave Scanlon a long kiss, lingering to smell his neck, the almonds more apparent every day.

Scanlon lifted out the car seat, and she carried the bags with diapers
and her new skirt into the kitchen, and she smelled them immediately. “Stop!” she yelled. “Don’t move.” She took two slow steps into the living room and flipped on the light.

“What is it?” Scanlon said, standing in the doorway with a firm grasp on the car seat.

“Someone’s been in the house.”

“Who?”

She detected perspiration and a coat that needed cleaning, deodorants, aftershave, mousse. Their
bodies
. They’d had burgers and fries for lunch, sat too close to the grill.

“Is it Clay?” Scanlon whispered.

She shook her head. “Call the police.”

“And say that my wife smells somebody in the living room? Couldn’t it be Joey? Or Geoff?”