The Oregon Experiment (47 page)

The slow beat began.

·   ·   ·

Sundays were busy, and it was mid-afternoon before Sequoia took a break. With an iced tea and a muffin, she sat at the table up front and collected a discarded newspaper from the window seat. She flipped over the front section and gasped at the image: his haunted face, his bruised and broken body, reached inside her chest.

When she turned her gaze from the picture to the article, she was shocked again: it was written by Scanlon. She read about this sad and misguided life, shut out of real opportunity, cheated by institutions. She read it a second time, more closely, taking in the futility of his actions, his failure to cope with loss, his longing for his daughter, for family, for his mother. The article took up most of the front page, then most of another section, with color photos of Clay that made her tremble. “Much of his destructive anger,” Scanlon had written, “resides in the blame he places on himself for his brother’s death.”

“What is it?” Journey asked, her fingertips on Sequoia’s arm, and she looked up from the paper.

She was crying, surging with her own guilt over destroying a life, a family. And she was crying for Clay. Trinity had known, had tried to tell her, but instead of listening to her daughter, she’d screamed at him in Scanlon’s house when he needed comfort. Clay bore a crippling burden. Everyone did. Ron Dexter, the police chief, the building inspector, Scanlon, Naomi—they were all bearing something, maybe something unspeakable.

“Trinity, come,” she called behind the counter. “Get your coat.”

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“On the bike,” she said.

If she could release Clay from even a little of his burden, the world would be lighter. And if she could
heal
him, she might free Trinity from the trauma she’d perceived and internalized. Sequoia could no longer deny that she’d passed it on to her daughter.

“You remember Clay?” she asked, pedaling downtown.

Trinity didn’t reply.

“Well, he’s hurting—”

“I know,” she chirped.

“—and I want to try and make him feel better. We’ll find him. He lives right over the bus station.”

She pedaled through heavy traffic along the main route through downtown, pushed sideways by gusts from passing logging trucks and
RVs, then cut toward the river. The powwow was going on—a teepee erected by the longhouse, a fire blazing in the parking lot.

“There he is!” Trinity announced, and she was right. Clay was sitting on the curb in front of the Greyhound station, eating a burrito. Sequoia welled up with tears. She was shaking.

Across the street from the bus station, she leaned her bike against the rack and Trinity climbed down. She tried to catch Clay’s eye through traffic, but two buses pulled out of the station and blocked her view.

She locked up her bike and reached for Trinity’s hand to cross the street, but she was gone. Sequoia looked up and down the sidewalk. She scanned the street and the group around the fire. The light had turned green, cars were rolling. The two buses angled into traffic, lurching forward before halting abruptly. An office party spilled from Filbert’s, spreading out across the sidewalk. Douglas was a safe town, no need to panic, she told herself, but her pool of anxiety was already brimming. “Trinity!” she called over the traffic noise, the flutes and drums and chants. She looked again in the street, then back toward the music shop, up on her toes trying to see behind parked cars. In an adjoining lot, kids were stringing chokers under a tent, and she quick-stepped, then started to run. In front of the longhouse, dozens of people were watching the dance. “Trinity!” she called. Streetlights had come on with dusk, but it was harder to see by the minute. “Damnit!” she shouted, running toward some kids on skateboards in the alley. “Did you see a girl?” she asked. “A little girl with dreads?” but they gave her blank shrugs. She ran out to the sidewalk and glanced in the music shop, then turned back toward the bus station. She dodged a pickup pulling out of the parking lot, then a pack of college kids, and finally she saw her under the streetlight on the corner, squatting down, talking with a boy. “Trinity!” she called, and her daughter waved. Sequoia was dripping with sweat.

A few steps away, she heard her say, “What’s her name?”

The boy was Native American, maybe twelve years old, squatting with a pet rat. “Caramel,” he said.

Sequoia laid her hand on top of Trinity’s head, and she looked up. “Hi, Mommy.”

“They’re very sentient creatures,” the boy said. “Most people aren’t aware.”

“Don’t do that again,” Sequoia said. “You can’t run off like that.”

“I was right here,” she said.

Sequoia looked across the street, but he wasn’t on the curb. “We’ll have to find Clay’s apartment.”

“He’s gone,” Trinity said.

“I know.”

“He said he’d speak with you later.”

“Who did?”

“Clay.”

“You talked to him?”

“Just a minute ago. I said you wanted to help him.”

“Where did he go?”

She pointed toward campus, and Sequoia looked but he wasn’t there. “He’s going on a trip for a few days. He had a big bag.” Sequoia looked down the street again. “He gave me this.” Trinity opened her hand: an old toy soldier.

“Why did he give it to you?” Sequoia asked.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘See you later.’ ”

“And what did you say?”

“I said, ‘Thank you for the gift.’ ”

“And then what?”

“I didn’t say the thing you don’t want me to. I didn’t.” Trinity was smiling, though tears spilled down her cheeks. “I told him it wasn’t safe.”

“That what wasn’t safe?”

“He said he really had to go, so I told him, ‘You’re your own squirrel,’ and he laughed.”

“
What
wasn’t safe?”

“I promise I didn’t say the thing that makes you mad.” The front of her jacket was soaked with her tears. “I just said goodbye.”

It was dark when he got to the edge of campus. He kept to the unlighted pathways until he came up through a line of firs behind the oceanography building, the gravel lot where they kept their vehicles. Boats, vans, and three Ford pickups from the early seventies, their Cal-star ignitions almost easier to start with a quarter-inch slotted screwdriver than with the key. The breeze blew up from downtown, and he could hear the muffled beat of drums from the powwow. He cut a blue tarp off a boat and threw it in a
pickup, then he ganked the truck and headed into the coast range. The cab smelled like Yaquina—damp salt and sand, fish and fog. He wished he were going that far tonight, but it was too risky—someone he knew might see him.

When he’d driven for half an hour, an orange construction sign flashed in his headlights. He slowed down passing the site, taking stock, then turned off the road. The trailers were lined up same as they’d been ten years ago: one for engineers, another for foremen, and two more for tools. Ammonium nitrate would be stacked up in one, nitromethane in the other.

There’d be no security, he knew. Take a hike on public land near a clear-cut and you’re all but attacked by armed timber company guards and vicious dogs, protecting the earth-raping machinery. But the highway department lacked the timber companies’ cash, so they relied on floodlights and the accepting nature of Oregonians.

Clay intended to be quick. He pounded the pickup over the rutted dirt road and skidded to a stop behind a grader. He popped the kill switch on the generator that illuminated the trailers and withdrew the hacksaw from his duffel. In the time it took him to break a sweat he’d cut through both padlock shanks. Two minutes more and he’d loaded the truck with three cases each of the two chemicals, completely inert until they were mixed. Without headlights he banged back up to the highway and pulled them on when he hit the pavement, lighting the road back to Douglas.

The sudden knock at the door startled them both. Naomi’s heart dropped, and Scanlon clicked off the TV. In stocking feet she ran silently to the bedroom, where Sammy was sound asleep in the bassinet. When she returned to the living room, Scanlon was at the front door. She hung back by the hallway, with one eye on him and the other on the bedroom.

He pulled the door open. From the darkness behind the screen—they’d kept the porch light turned off—a man asked, “Mr. Pratt?” and a woman said, “FBI,” and pulled the screen door open, holding up her ID. “May we come in?”

“We’re looking for an individual,” the man said once they were both inside, wiping their wet shoes on the mat.

“An associate of yours,” the woman said. “Clay Knudson.”

“Would you call him a friend?”

“It’s urgent that we find him,” she said.

“We believe he might be a danger to himself and others.”

And at that moment a breeze blew in the front door, carrying their smells, and Naomi screamed, “Get out!”

All three gaped at her.

“Get out of our house!” His same sour coat, Right Guard, and cinnamon gum. Her Obsession and drugstore mousse. Their greasy diets and middle age. The stench of too much sitting.

“It’s okay,” Scanlon said, reaching toward her.

“Mrs. Greenburg?” the woman said.

“Get out!”

The woman took a step forward.

“Stop!” Naomi shrieked. They wouldn’t get any closer to her baby.

“Do you know, Mrs. Greenburg, where Clay Knudson is?”

Naomi pointed her finger at the two of them. They acted cool, but she could smell that she’d put them on edge.

“We don’t know where he is,” Scanlon said.

“When was the last time you saw him?” the man asked.

Scanlon was rubbing his chin on his shoulder, stalling. “About four days ago,” he said. “At his apartment. Last-minute fact checking for a newspaper article.”

The female looked steadily at Naomi. “How would you describe
your
relationship with Clay?”

Naomi sharpened her stare and clenched her teeth.

“Specifically, Mrs. Greenburg, can you tell us what you were doing at Clay’s residence on the morning of November nineteenth?”

Her legs began to shake, so she reached out for the wall.

The man took a slip of paper from his pocket and glanced at it. “Can you confirm, Mr. Pratt, that on October eleventh you bought Clay Knudson wire cutters, batteries, and PVC pipe?”

A mile shy of Burnt Woods, he dropped off the pavement through a curtain of Scotch broom and rocked down a pitched dirt road, narrower than it was back in the day, blackberry thorns scraping the sides of the truck. At the river, on a slow bend where salmon and trout used to pull back below
the rocks, Clay stopped the pickup under the white oak and shut her down.

This had been their secret spot—Dad’s, Billy’s, and his. In a pinch they could roll out of bed at five and wet their lines by five-thirty. When Clay was in grade school they’d pull in a couple steelhead each on a good morning. By the time his father died ten years later, they’d be lucky to hook one keeper a season. These days, no one even bothered. The salmon and trout runs up this river had been decimated by clear-cutting along its banks and by the Silver Point Dam.

Clay dropped the tailgate and set the lantern on top of it, then tore open the boxes. One by one, slowly, patiently, he assembled the kinepaks: kneading together the white ammonium-nitrate powder and the pink nitromethane liquid, carefully massaging the high-explosive Play-Doh and tamping it into PVC tubes. He inserted blasting caps, the size of pencil stubs, twisted on his wires, and fished them through the holes he’d drilled in the end caps. He sealed each kinepak with tape and laid it on the tailgate.

When his dad was moonlighting for the electric company, he’d shoot five power holes at a time. If Clay had gotten the det cord that night at the Green & Black, he could’ve had simultaneous explosions, too—safest and most effective—but with blasting caps and wire, the short delay between shots couldn’t be avoided.

With the kinepaks assembled, he loaded them into the empty boxes—more volatile now than TNT—and pushed them up against the back of the cab, then covered it all with the blue tarp.

He walked down the steep slope to the river, taking in the smells and listening to the gurgle. He washed off his hands and face. Back at the truck, he stretched out on the seat and rested his head on the duffel, staring through the windshield and up through the trees at a few stars struggling through cloud breaks, and soon fell into the sometimes dreamy, sometimes tortured state that took the place of sleep.

Trinity was smiling. Ever since she was a baby she smiled in her dreams. Sequoia pushed the hair off her face, her long eyelashes flickering, then slipped out of bed and pulled the covers up to her daughter’s chin. On the bedside table, under the lamp draped with a red scarf, Trinity had stood
the toy soldier—all chipped paint and dull lead—next to her shiny
Bleigiessen
. As the soldier heaved a grenade, the bursting rays of the
Bleigiessen
sun transformed into an explosion. They’d look for Clay again in a few days.

She kissed Trinity’s forehead, turning down the light, then shut the door and buttoned her shirt. It was late; already past ten—too late for Trinity. As she pulled the curtains over the front windows, her breath caught: the car, the brown car, was parked at the curb. In the weak streetlight she could see two silhouettes in the front seat. “Bastards!” she hissed, snapping the curtains closed. She turned off all the lights, then dropped to her knees and parted the curtain enough to peek out. They were sitting in the car, looking straight ahead. She considered going out to confront them, but then thought of Trinity sound asleep; if anything were to happen, if they were waiting for an excuse to arrest her, what would happen to her daughter?

Lying on the floor, cowering in the dark in her own house, she called Jim Furdy.

“Don’t move,” he said. “Give me ten minutes.”

Sequoia sat cross-legged and breathed deeply, letting her energy rise up and hover over her head, expand and fully occupy the space for a time before settling back down through her body. She believed it. They were all one.

Then she heard voices. She rose to her knees and with a single finger parted the curtains. Jim and his son were coming down the block, and behind them were John and Alice, Kenny and Deana. Oliver glided on a skateboard. She opened the curtain and saw the whole pack of them. Ruth, Ellie, and Hannah. Paul and Susan, Todd and Karen, the other John walking on his stilts. Jenna, Emir, and Renaldo. Daren and Aaron. Mike and Michelle. Phil and both Amys. All of her wonderful neighbors were rolling up the street like a slow, powerful wave.