The Oregon Experiment (45 page)

“Then go look through the house,” she said. “I think they’re gone, but be careful.” It was a man and a woman—middle aged. “Go!”

He passed her Sammy, still asleep, and opened the front hall closet. Then she heard him in the bedroom and the nursery, doors opening and clicking shut, the scrape of metal rings on the shower rod, and he returned to the kitchen shaking his head.

“Is anything missing?”

“Not that I noticed,” he said. “No broken windows. The computer’s here.” They both looked at the TV. “What else do we have?”

“They were in the house for a while,” she said, and walked tentatively across the living room to the couch, bending down to sniff the cushion. “The man sat here.” She placed the car seat on the coffee table and put a hand on Sammy’s stomach.

“You’re sure?” Scanlon locked the kitchen door, then stood by the fireplace.

She was positive, the smell as sharp as if they were all packed into an elevator. “I’m scared, Scanlon. We should go to a hotel. Or back to Portland.”

“Someone probably broke in and didn’t find any—”

“But they didn’t break in. They
came
in.”

“Has to be Clay,” he said. “And some of his friends.”

“Anarchist girls don’t wear Obsession.”

He leaned on the mantel and rubbed his chin with his shoulder.

There was something he wasn’t telling her. “Listen,” she said sharply. “After today. After our day today, you need to tell me if there’s something you know.”

His face flushed, and his eyes filled with tears as he told her about a letter. She demanded to see it, and he dug it out of his sock drawer. She read it slowly, then looked up at him, sitting on the raised hearth with his head in his hands. “So you fucked Sequoia, and you’re being investigated for treason by the FBI. Is there anything else you haven’t mentioned?”

“It’s not the FBI. Just some government lawyer at this point.”

“At
this point
? So you’re going to keep at it?”

“No, I’m done with the secessionists. Sequoia basically knows that already.”

“I’ll bet she’s crushed.”

He didn’t respond.

“How many times did you fuck her, anyway?”

“Just once. Twice. But just, you know, one night.”

The good feelings from the afternoon evaporated. “Any other secrets you’re keeping from me?”

He stuttered and hemmed and hawed, then finally spit out that he believed Fenton’s threat to fire him—from the job they’d transplanted themselves for—was very serious. And that the
Oregonian
editor wasn’t interested in a piece that didn’t lay Clay’s consciousness bare. “It’s like they want a goddamn
New Yorker
profile. Of an
anarchist
! Well, why not a roundtable discussion? Political wife Laura Bush, actress Angelina Jolie, and anarchist Clay Knudson talk about the importance of social engagement!”

And as he ranted, her eyes drifted over his head to the fireplace, her heart pounding so hard she no longer heard his voice as she moved across the carpet to the photos framed on the mantel, one of her and Scanlon at Devil’s Tower, and beside it two brightly colored wooden frames with pictures of Sammy bathing in the kitchen sink and lying in the sunny grass of their backyard. Except both of these frames were empty.

Scanlon got his father on the phone right away, and neither he nor Kitty had snatched the photos. Over and over throughout the night he called his mother. Her cell phone was turned off; she didn’t answer at home. He
called the airline to confirm that her plane had landed, then called his aunt Jill, who might have picked her up at the airport, but hour after hour he got her voicemail. Deep into the night, hearing his mother’s phone ring unanswered in her East Hartford condo, he feared Naomi was right: that Joey hadn’t taken the pictures, that it was a shot over the bow by the FBI, viciously cruel, extremely effective, and easy to deny.

So effective that by six the next morning he was pacing the kitchen, counting the minutes until he could go to Sequoia’s and then Clay’s to warn them. By now he’d realized that since Clay had nothing to do with the secessionists, it could only mean that the Feds had been watching
him
, maybe listening to his phone calls and monitoring his e-mail. They’d stumbled across his connection to Clay and made some wrong assumptions.

At six-fifteen he left Naomi with the phone in her hands, locked up the house, and drove to Sequoia’s. He parked in front and dialed his mother again—nothing—then knocked softly on her door.

She didn’t greet him with her usual ebullience, but once she saw his distress, her rigid face and shoulders went soft, and she held out her arms.

“That’s weird,” she said, the two of them still standing in the doorway. “There’s not another explanation?”

He shook his head.

“This kind of shit …” She scowled, genuinely angry. “This is why people are joining us. I’ll post this to the website.”

“No!” Scanlon said. “That’ll just goad them on. The only thing to do is to shut it all down. Publicly announce that the movement’s finished.”

“Wait a minute,
please.
” She took his hand and led him to the love seat. “This is when we torque it up. To show we’re not intimidated. They won’t hurt your baby, but it’s a great example of their sleazy—”

“Even if you’re right,” he said, “I’ve got to provide for my family. I can’t risk getting arrested.”

“Nothing would stick. Remember everything you told us? Kosovo and East Timor. America’s own separation from Britain.
We’re
the ones with moral principle and history on our side.”

“Even if I’m not prosecuted, just getting arrested could get me fired. I’ve got to think about my family. About tenure.”

“Tenure!”
Her hands were in fists. “The director of a viable secessionist movement, and you’re worried about
tenure
?”

“It’s not!” he shouted. “It’s never going to happen. It never
was
going to happen. It’s just”—he was shaking his head—“an academic, impossible hypothesis. I’m sorry.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Please, Scanlon.” She put her head on his chest, crying, and reached her arms around him—the warmth of her tears, their dampness, the soft pressure of her body weighing on his own. He held her. She had believed in him.

After a time he slipped out from under her. At the door he said, “I’m stepping down as director. You should quit too.” He turned to leave.

“No!”

It was a word he thought he’d never hear her say.

He had to shout up from the street, and when Clay came down to open the door he followed him up the stairs. Pliers stuck out from the back pocket of his jeans, and he wore boots but no shirt; his milky, hairless torso looked raw, like a body under the surface of an icy river.

It was the first time Scanlon had been in here, and it took him a moment to realize that the wires criss-crossing the floor, leading from a clock to mini flashlights, weren’t part of the regular décor. Clay dropped to the mattress, cross-legged, and crimped a wire, using the cutters Scanlon had bought him at the hardware store. The lantern batteries, the PVC, cut into one-foot lengths—it was all here.

“What are you going to do, Clay, blow up a post office?”

He didn’t respond, except to bite the red sheath of insulation off the end of the wire and spit it on the floor. He seemed to be daring Scanlon to react, maybe to turn him in, like when he popped his elbow through the garage window.

“Blowing up buildings doesn’t work, Clay. It doesn’t accomplish anything. At least that much I can tell you for sure.”

Without once looking up, he kept cutting wire into lengths, stripping the ends, then coiling them up one by one and stowing them in a black duffel.

“The reason I’m here,” Scanlon said, “I got a letter from the Department of Justice. It’s full of threats about the Oregon Experiment. It’s aimed at me, but the letter names you too. You should lie low for a while.”

He packed batteries in his duffel with the coils of wire.

“Whatever you’re planning, you’ve got to forget it. It leads to nothing
good. What did torching those SUVs accomplish? An old cop with a broken hip, and Flak in a coma. You and Panama are indirectly responsible. And you don’t know a thing about anarchy, by the way. You’re just … it’s adolescent foolishness.”

He was prepared for an angry outburst, but all Clay did was walk to the window and look out at the clock tower on the courthouse and adjust the time on the travel alarm clock attached to the wires.

“Look,” Scanlon said. “If you won’t talk to me, then talk to Naomi. This is serious. You don’t want to end up in prison. Or worse.”

Clay wound the clock with the wire and stowed it in his bag, and straightening up he finally looked Scanlon in the face. “I sucked your wife’s titties,” he said, then gave a rare smile. “I sucked the pointier one first. And the droopy one was so ripe the spray hit me in the back of the throat as she squeezed it. I was gulping like a madman to swallow it all.”

She heard the car while she was rocking Sammy to sleep for his morning nap, but after several minutes she hadn’t heard Scanlon come in, so she laid him in the bassinet, clicked the bedroom door shut, and with growing trepidation moved across the house to the kitchen window. It was raining, and Scanlon appeared distorted through the wet windshield, sitting behind the wheel, staring straight ahead.

She had to rap on the passenger-side glass, then again, before he turned, startled, and unlocked the door. She got in out of the rain, thinking he might be listening to NPR, but there was only the plunk of raindrops on the car. “What happened?”

“Thinking it all through,” he said.

“What did they say? Did they get any letters?”

“No letters. No concerns. They’re very gung-ho.”

“Why are you so calm? What’s wrong?”

“Thinking it all through,” he repeated.

She folded her arms across her chest. “Can you think it through in the house? It’s cold out here. And I don’t like leaving Sammy alone.” Her anger remained on edge; he’d brought this threat into their home.

He gripped the steering wheel and for a long moment was silent, then he said, “I wish Fenton didn’t hate me so much, but there’s no changing that. If I hadn’t spent all my time on the Oregon Experiment this semester, I might have some allies in the department, but there’s nothing there
either. The only hope I’ve got—and it’s barely a shred—is that I give the
Oregonian
what they want on Clay. It won’t be scholarly, it won’t amount to much, but it’ll buy me some time. And it’ll get Clay’s story out in the world.” He spoke in a monotone, as if she wasn’t even there. “I won’t kid myself. I hope this article can help me, but if there’s something meaningful in how Clay’s living his life, in what he believes, then getting that out in the public is the right thing to do. And maybe it’ll save my job.” For the first time since she got in the car he looked at her. “I gather you and Clay have a special relationship, so I want you to tell me what you know about him, all of it, and I’ll use whatever I can.”

“I can’t betray his confidence.”

Scanlon laughed, neither happily or meanly. It was a consuming laugh that possessed him totally, frighteningly.

“Did you get stoned with one of them?” she said.

“This isn’t stoned. This is brooding detachment. You should be relieved that
my
reaction’s brooding detachment and not animal blood-thirst.”

“Reaction to what?” but as soon as she said it, she knew. “Oh.”

“Oh,” he said, looking at the scabbed-over wound on his thumb.

For the second time in two days, she felt their family crashing down.

“Your honorable concerns about betrayal aside, I want you to tell me everything. The editor already agreed not to use Clay’s name, and although they’d love pictures, if they sent a photographer Clay would probably stomp him and throw his camera under a bus. He hates newspapers and so do his friends. He probably won’t even know when the article runs.”

Nausea rose up in her as she contemplated a betrayal that might save her husband as well as their lives together. “I have pictures,” she blurted before she could change her mind.

“Of what?”

“From when he was injured. They’re on the camera. I was going to show you—it’s police brutality—but then …” She didn’t know how to finish. “Things got weird.”

“ ‘Weird’ is sex with men in donkey costumes.” He opened his door and said, with one leg already outside, “The word you’re looking for is ‘perverse.’ ”

Naomi caught up to him in the laundry room, where he was tearing through the diaper bag. When he got hold of the camera, he switched it on.
She kept her distance, but soon their faces were huddled together over the tiny screen showing pictures of Clay—shirtless, distraught, holding up the yellow and purple grapefruit of his elbow, dark and violent storm clouds looming in the window behind him.

“I’ll tell the editor they have to black out his face,” he said. “Those black bars over the eyes.”

Studying Clay’s eyes in the photos, she remembered his vulnerability, the muted groan of his agony; this was the boy, a short time later, she took to her breast. With their elbows leaning on the washing machine, she turned away from the camera to tell Scanlon what she knew.

She talked all through Sammy’s nap about the bullet in King’s brain and about his blowing up the doghouse and a tricycle and a bulldozer. When Sammy woke up hungry, Scanlon loaded the photos onto his laptop, and with the images filling his screen, she gazed at Clay’s face and nursed Sammy on their rumpled bed while Scanlon took down what she recited in a notebook.

She talked about her belief that Billy’s rage had been passed on to Clay, and about his carelessness when the SUV plowed into them, and about what she imagined to be Roslyn’s persistent dignity. She’d told him about Clay’s loneliness, his feral watchfulness, and described as precisely as she could how he filled her with fear. One truth, though, she didn’t speak, even if it was plainly visible on Clay’s face—obvious to her, maybe to anyone, but not yet, she believed, to her husband. That he loved her.

A boom startled them both—a neighbor dragging his garbage can to the curb—and she was surprised it was already dark outside. For a whole day Clay’s story had distracted them from the threat that had gripped them last night. Oddly, he’d provided them with some relief.