The Oregon Experiment (50 page)

It wasn’t until the committee lobbed him a softball to open the interview—“How did you get inside that anarchist’s head?”—that he felt the depth of his dishonesty. He obviously couldn’t tell them why the portrait was so revealing, so naked. He didn’t lie, but neither did he divulge that the most compelling research wasn’t his at all.

It was a no-brainer that he’d take the Rutgers job when the offer came two days later; they wanted him to begin immediately. He and Naomi
didn’t even discuss it. They sold the Douglas house in a week and found a rental with a six-month lease in New Jersey. Naomi and Sammy flew back and he made the drive alone; by the time he arrived, she’d already done most of the unpacking.

Neither one of them had yet mentioned that they’d finally gotten what they wanted.

As the train passed the meadowlands, he bit into the pear he’d taken from the bowl on the kitchen counter and almost gagged. Although it was firm and unblemished on the skin, the inside had gone mealy and brown. He spit it out into his hand and wrapped the whole mess in a napkin, then threw it away. He hadn’t had a good piece of fruit since they left Oregon. Although Naomi was being a good sport, their apartment was a problem—busy street, no parks or even a peaceful place to walk Sammy in the stroller, noise from a loading dock around the corner, and nowhere to buy decent food.

After glancing up at the skyline, he pulled out his laptop and skimmed through the article as it had appeared in the
Post
, clicking on Naomi’s photos as the train entered the tunnel beneath the Hudson. With a jerk that slammed his laptop against the back of the seat in front, the train slowed and then stopped. When he clicked on another photo, the train went dark and the heaters quit blowing. Peering through the glass, he could see the tunnel walls and the murky water and muck seeping in from the river bottom.

When he shifted his eyes, his heart thumped at the reflection of his computer screen—Clay’s ghostly face—looming in the train’s greasy window.

The morning was quiet. Just below the clouds, the sun sat like an egg yolk on the ridge of the Cascades. She rose from the hot tub, toweled off her body, slipped into her robe, and sat on her zafu, breathing. When she opened her eyes half an hour later—the rumble of an engine, the voice of a child—the world had come alive. After she coaxed Trinity awake, they had smoothies and walked down the block to Franklin Park.

A head and arms were working inside the engine of the crane. Then, emerging with a ratchet and an engine part, Jim Furdy saw her and raised a hand. Yesterday they’d removed the tarps and unloaded the old barn
rafters from a borrowed flatbed. Standing on the crane’s fender, Jim clipped the engine cover down.

“Mommy!” Trinity called, through a hole in the wall where a window would soon be, and Sequoia waved.

The Feds had refused to release Clay’s body for a month, so the funeral was held up until last week. She’d considered taking Trinity along—when she gently broke the news, Trinity had blurted, “I know”—but in the end she’d left her at Chezzi’s house. Thank God, because after the service at Church of the Sea in Yaquina, the two FBI agents detained her, grilling her about Clay, about other dams and other “targets,” about Scanlon and the movement. But they finally let her go, acting like she’d been as eager to chat as they were. And when she got back to Douglas, their office in the Odd Fellows Hall had been emptied out—files, computers, phone, lamp, even a box of granola bars.

Her laptop and the new computer were FedExed back to her just yesterday, their memories wiped clean. In response to her calls, a credit-union lawyer said he was prevented by law from telling her why the Oregon Experiment bank account no longer existed.

Pete helped her drag a picnic table under a tree in case they got some showers, then she called the café and asked Journey to bring an urn of coffee down to the park first chance she got. Pete helped his father monkey with the hook and pulleys on the end of the crane’s long arm, and Trinity ran to her mother across the damp grass, her lips purple from a berry scone.

At the funeral, Sequoia had recognized some young moms from town, and she’d shaken Roslyn Knudson’s hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss. If there’s anything I can do, anything to help—”

“Thank you, dear,” she said, a far-off cast clouding her eyes.

After the casket was carried out, she sat for a time at the back of the church, unable to let go of the details of the explosion; the news reports were fixated on the fact that it cost more to clean up the splatter of his body than it did to repair the “superficial damage” to the dam. She finally left the church, and at the bottom of the steps, the two Feds were waiting.

Sequoia hugged her daughter, then they stacked scones and muffins on platters. She heard a squeak and looked up to see Paul rolling his compressor into the park in his wheelbarrow. Not far behind him came others,
wearing tool belts and ratty old nail pouches, carrying hammers, pry bars, and ladders, tubes of caulk, gallons of paint. They dragged sawhorses and drop cloths. They rolled insulation and felt paper. They brought salads and salsa, bread and juice. Hank and Chezzi brought hula hoops for the kids. There was no limit to the goodwill of her neighbors.

I’m deeply grateful to Gary Fisketjon, Joe Regal, Michael Strong, Emily Milder, Jennifer Richter, Jason Brown, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Robert Nye, Tracy Daugherty, Yosh Han, Nancy Wogan, Chrissa Kioussi, Brian Bay, Mark Leid, Mark Zabriskie, Shannon Bedford, Tom Barbash, Leila Giovannoni, David Robinson, and the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities.

Keith Scribner is the author of two previous novels,
Miracle Girl
and
The GoodLife
, a
New York Times
Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He is a recipient of Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux fellowships, and is currently a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he lives with his wife, the poet Jennifer Richter, and their children.