The Oregon Experiment (48 page)

The two figures in the car looked over their shoulders, squirming, as the wave rolled toward them, half on the sidewalk, half in the street. Her friends encircled the brown car, peering in the windows, surrounding them. Alice waved. Everyone was talking all the while, and Sequoia listened to their voices. Deana had put elephant garlic in her winter beds, more than she could ever use. Ruth’s first batch of pinot noir was “young, but very bad.” Karen was forging a series of poppies from copper and glass.
Susan’s watercolors were showing all month at the Rainy Day Café. Paul offered Robbie his old iMac. Oliver smacked the pavement with his skateboard, still trying to flip it midair.

The brown car’s engine started, then its headlights came on. Her neighbors stepped back, and the agents slowly skulked away.

When Sequoia opened the front door, they all turned to her. Alice held up a yogurt tub. She’d brought her some three-bean stew.

A
t seven a.m. Clay left the motor running outside the Burnt Woods Café and bought two pieces of Oregon cherry pie and a Mountain Dew to go. By seven-thirty he was glancing down on Douglas from the bypass, then rolling across the valley toward the Cascades and the snowy peaks of Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters.

At nine he rose up past the reservoir and entered Lincoln, slowing to twenty-five as he passed the chainsaw carving of a logger, his ax raised in welcome. Napa, McDonald’s, DQ, a vacant Rexall, the Chat ’n’ Chew. In the next block he passed a strip mall where six cars were lined up for drive-thru espresso.

Then there was a sudden flash, and blue light cut through his windshield, a police car speeding in front of him from the side street. He hit the brakes hard and the kinepaks slammed against the back of the cab. The cruiser stopped in the intersection, blocking the street, lights still flashing, and gave one quick wail of the siren. His heart missed a beat; he could feel the sweat on his forehead. The cop glared out his side window as Clay’s truck screeched to a stop ten feet back. With more momentum he could’ve T-boned the cop’s car with this solid old pickup. Push it aside and speed out of town.

He jammed it into reverse, but there was a car behind him and two more behind that. The cop played it cool, picking up his radio and calling in. Clay would have to slip away, but where? It was thirty miles to the next town. He didn’t have a chance.

Goddamnit, why hadn’t he changed clothes this morning? Then at least he could’ve tried to talk his way out of this.

The cop got out and took two steps toward the pickup. If he was going to run, it had to be now. If he could make it down to Eugene, he knew some anarchists there who could hide him. But on the mountain roads they’d pick him up in five minutes. He’d have to hide out in Lincoln long enough to gank another truck.

The cop looked at him over the hood, and Clay grabbed the door lever. He’d go on three. But then the cop abruptly turned—his gun belt, cuffs, and pouch of latex gloves a foot from the truck’s headlight—and crossed his arms over his chest, rocking on his feet. More blue lights came flashing up the side street, and then he heard the National Anthem, a police motorcycle inching into the intersection in front of the Lincoln High marching band. Clay loosened his grip on the door handle, his throat tight and dry. A hearse came next, draped with American flags, then half a dozen National Guard soldiers. Freshly washed cars with their headlights on rolled past for a good ten or fifteen minutes—it must’ve been the whole town—and Clay slowly relaxed as the cop rested an elbow on the hood of the pickup, its door marked
State of Oregon—For Official Use Only
.

Just past noon, he parked at the Meriwether Lewis Scenic Overlook and walked through the exhaust of idling RVs as the tourists yakked about what an awesome fucking sight this was. Like a mile-wide bulldozer blade, taller than Portland’s tallest skyscraper, a million yards of concrete that had buried two men alive, the Silver Point Dam was shouldering back twenty million tons of water. Clay had never seen it in person. He’d never imagined the scale. From above it looked like a prison: lights and fences, squat buildings, a street, and a parking lot. All to make electricity cheap enough to light cities so bright they can be seen from the moon, and so Banana Republic can prop their doors wide open and air-condition the sidewalk. An old man whose sweatshirt boasted that he was spending his kids’ inheritance turned to him and said, “You see something that glorious, you understand that man can do anything he sets his mind to.”

The geezer hadn’t given him a second look. It was that easy. He’d changed into Scanlon’s clothes—the white pants and green shirt—and removed his piercings, tied a bandanna around his neck to hide the tattoos, and topped it off with the red Gap hat. And that’s all it took for this old fuck to chat him up like he was his uncle.

But the rest wouldn’t be so easy. Seeing the dam now, he knew his plan was naive. He drove down the switchbacks for a closer look, and as he emerged from the trees, the dam looked even bigger. He had no reference for its size and remembered what people said about standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. He rolled slowly by the entrance. Vehicles driving onto the dam were routed through concrete barriers and stopped at a guard booth this side of the concrete runway. Shit. He drove on into town.

He found a café, and from a phone booth in the parking lot dialed the number from the website.

“Silver Point Emergencies,” the voice said.

“Wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

Inside, he ordered oatmeal with a dish of marionberries, and when he asked the waitress for milk, she pointed to the little steel pitcher on the table. “Duh,” she said, flirty. Under the dopey uniform she had a solid body, like the girl from Duluth. Big, pretty lips with piercings—no metal, just the holes. He squeezed in three packets of honey and poured in extra milk. He took his time. When she came back, he ordered a Mountain Dew.

“Could I,” she said, clicking a pen and then holding it out, “do you think you could sign this for me?” and she slapped a newspaper down on the table.

He thought he was asleep, that he’d fallen seamlessly into a dream and the clicking was a random noise his dream had fit into its story. But the longer he looked at the front page—the broken image of himself, the professor’s name—he realized that even his own twisted demons couldn’t have created this.

“If it’s a problem …” the girl said, a tremble of fear in her voice.

He took the pen and wrote his name across his ghostly bare chest.

“Cool,” she said, reaching for the paper.

But he pulled it back. “Lemme just—”

“Yeah,” she said, and went back behind the counter.

Looking at the picture made his elbow hurt. It was him but it wasn’t him, just like the King Knudson who the government destroyed wasn’t the real King Knudson, and Flak was no longer Flak. Clay wasn’t as
alone
as the
kid in this picture, he wasn’t weak or busted up. He wasn’t so easily betrayed. But when Naomi took the photos that morning, were they for this? When she offered him her tits? He looked at the injury and the isolation, and didn’t see himself at all. He saw her.

Flipping the pages, seeing more pictures, he read that Clay Knudson believed his brother was alive when he held his corpse, pinned in the mangled car; he read that he felt a connection to Daria’s father when he recognized Ruby Christine in his meaty face; that he felt shut out of the world, disconnected, as if he lacked one of his senses; that he had an odd, unhealthy obsession with pregnancy and young mothers. None of this was true.

What was true was that when he was with Naomi, the ceaseless shouting inside him quieted and he could believe in something other than destruction. Though they never got below the belt, never did the deed, she knew, as he did, that they’d made love. Despite this betrayal, he still loved her. And whether she’d ever admit it to herself, he knew she loved him back.

He smacked the table when it dawned on him: she’d stolen these pictures for her husband, for ambition, for money, to write off her guilt. And he’d swiped the picture of her to remember Daria and Ruby Christine, believing his daughter would save him if he could just get her back. But we save ourselves. That much was clear.

He tipped the girl big, leaving the cash on top of the autographed paper, cash he’d been given by Scanlon. Outside, he checked the tarp, twisted the screwdriver in the ignition, and rolled back toward the river. As he passed the dam’s entrance, two army guards in full gear right up to their camouflaged helmets directed traffic through the suicide-bomber-proof maze of barriers.

Vehicles waiting to enter were lined up on the shoulder. A Pepsi truck, a couple cars, FedEx, an Army Corps of Engineers panel truck, a Baronne Brothers cement mixer, and two State of Oregon pickups loaded with tools for cement work, half-covered with blue tarps. The doors of the construction vehicles hung open, and the crew was huddled together in their rain gear, smoking and drinking from thermos cups. He made a U-turn and parked behind the last pickup. He lowered his window and spit on the ground, fairly certain his head wasn’t twitching.

A National Guard Humvee pulled in behind him. Ahead, the driver of the Pepsi truck rolled up his doors. A soldier inspected. Clay had twice the
brains and ten times more principles than this kid with the machine gun slung over his shoulder and a cigarette dangling off his lip.

As the soldier approached the cement workers, he said something that made everyone laugh. They opened their doors and lifted their tarps while he pushed his chin to his chest, speaking into a radio attached to his vest. He looked down the row of vehicles at Clay’s pickup as the Pepsi and FedEx trucks pulled ahead, carefully navigating the barricades.

Clay opened his door so the kid would see the state markings as he approached. The pickups ahead were a decade newer, and the soldier glanced in their beds at the cement-encrusted wheelbarrows and trowels. Talking again into his radio, he waved them on.

Clay slid off the seat, standing behind the open door, and said, “Hey.” The soldier looked at him blankly, and Clay pulled his visor low and adjusted the bandanna around his neck. The soldier reached into the bed to pull back the tarp, but Clay said, “You know what’s fucked up?”

The soldier stared at him.

“You swallow your spit a thousand times a day, but if you spit in a cup and look at it, swallowing it just once is revolting.” He’d channeled Flak.

The kid’s face screwed up—like what the fuck?—and he dropped his ear to the radio to hear the scratches coming through, sneering at Clay, squinting against the cigarette smoke. He’d recognized him from the newspaper, and Clay felt his guts turn to water, the soldier’s hand still resting on the tarp. “Frig that!” he barked into the radio. “You tell the lieutenant that me and Pudge is due to be off the guard booth eighteen minutes ago.” He glanced back at the Hummer and nodded to the soldiers blaring death metal in the cab, then dropped the corner of the tarp and moved down the line.

Clay jumped in his truck and hit the gas too hard, throwing up gravel, but caught up with the others and stayed tight to them through the barriers, past the second soldier in the guard booth, and out onto the acres of concrete.

When the trucks ahead sped across the dam, he eased off the gas and slipped in beside two maintenance vehicles and shut off the engine. Goddamn. He’d done it.

But now what? It was maybe three o’clock—light for another couple hours. He couldn’t sit here in the truck all that time. He got out and tucked in the tarp.

The day felt too warm for December. No surprise that rising river temperatures
were killing fish before they could spawn. Anything he would accomplish tonight was too little, too late, but by hitting back hard he’d demonstrate the absurdity of the Feds’ position: that since the dams had been on the rivers so long, they’d become part of the landscape and were therefore entitled to environmental protection. That bullshit would collapse along with their dam.

He walked purposefully toward a squat building near the center that looked like the bathrooms on interstates. Battleship gray, windowless. He tried the knobs on two steel doors—both locked—and walked around to the other side, where a garden hose attached to a spigot was snaked through a door, propping it open. He slipped inside onto a catwalk at the top of a stairwell, and below his feet an abyss of steel and concrete descended for what seemed like miles into darkness. He dropped down a flight of stairs to a landing, then another. Thirty or forty feet beneath him a man was power-washing the catwalk. Water dripped on the back of Clay’s neck, then the power washer suddenly cut off. He froze. Through the grating between his feet, he could see the guy climbing the stairs toward him.

On the other side of the rail, a steel shelf stretched the width of the dam, one of a hundred, stacked from bottom to top like ribs. The guy was getting closer, his boots ringing the steel grating with each step, so Clay hopped over the rail and crawled along a narrow ledge barely wider than his shoulders until he came to a vertical I-beam. Wrapping his fingers around its lip, he swung to the far side, and curled up to hide as the worker clanged by and rose up above. He heard the hose get disconnected and thrown inside, then the door slam shut.

And now he waited, pressing an ear to the concrete. He didn’t know how thick it was, but he could feel the river pressing on the other side. Water that had traveled from glaciers, from springs surging deep within the earth, upwelled through fissures in the bedrock. The water jabbed and shoved and pushed, but most importantly it kept up the pressure to get where it needed to go. He slipped his hand in the space between the concrete and the steel ribs. Just one crack would be enough. The water, rightly, would finish the job.

He took out the photo of Naomi and held it on his knees, inches from his face, squinting to transform her into Daria when she was filled up with Ruby Christine. To him, Naomi had always been pregnant, always the woman who’d covered his arms with the water cascading from her womb;
he hadn’t washed until the smell of iron faded, days later. In the article, she’d been right about his mother. He missed her with a pain that cops and their clubs couldn’t ever match.