The Oregon Experiment (5 page)

“There’s no sheep in Nova Scotia,” Sam had told him (actually there were), “but more to the point, you’re right. It’s all hopeless. I’ll speak for myself here. I discovered long ago that if I wanted to be an academic with any sort of heart and soul, I needed to admit that ideals, hopelessness, and cynicism all exist in me at once.”

Now, as Scanlon watched Edmund sitting in the cab of the truck and flipping through pink and yellow inventories of their possessions, Sam recounted his trip to Wounded Knee in the seventies. “I’d always wished the Native Americans could’ve organized a viable secession. By now they’ve missed their moment.”

Sam’s voice was losing its strength. They’d talked too long. “Maybe see somebody else about that hip,” Scanlon said.

Sam turned the phone away to cough, then came back on the line. “Listen, Scanlon,” his voice full of gravel. “Don’t get too giddy about the anarchist next door. You know your tendencies.”

“You take care of that hip, Sam. No need to worry about me.” Then he signed off, wishing as he always did with Sam that he could have done more to breathe life back into this man he owed so much.

At the back of the truck, the ramp was still down. Scanlon set the flier on top of the cookbooks and looked in his wallet: forty-three bucks. He took the two twenties out to the street. At the top of the ramp, Clay was folding the quilted pads and stacking them neatly. Scanlon walked halfway up the ramp. “Short day,” he said.

Clay didn’t respond.

“Maybe I’ll see you around town.”

Clay yanked a strap tight on a tower of pads, then started another stack. On the floor of the van he’d swept up torn bits of cardboard and twists of tape.

“I don’t teach till September,” Scanlon said. “I could buy you a beer.”

“Must be nice—” Clay’s head twitched “—jerking off all summer.”

Scanlon looked at the sky—a deeper blue than he’d ever seen. Matisse blue. The fog had completely lifted. Sun-heated steam rose from the grass and leaves and the black roof of his house. He stepped to the top of the ramp and lowered his voice. “Could you get me a little of that pot?”

Clay snapped dust from a pad.

“Just a small amount.” Scanlon reached toward him with the cash.

He folded the pad and set it on the stack. Scanlon took one step closer, and Clay’s head twitched again. Then he snatched the bills and thumbed them into the front pocket of his jeans.

“As much as you can get me for forty bucks,” Scanlon said, then pounded down the ramp to the sidewalk.

“Yo, bitch,” Clay called. “You’re supposed to tip us.”

Scanlon turned back. “That was the windowpane.”

In the bedroom, sunlight swathed Naomi as she lay curled on her side in her great-grandmother’s four-poster bed, beams so bright she seemed to Scanlon to be floating. Her maternity shirt was unbuttoned up to her breasts, and her bare round belly seemed to buoy her. Long kinky hair spilled out in a tangle over the white sheet. Her heavenly rump and back waited to be spooned. He pinched off his shoes and slid in behind her. She started awake and scooched back into him, both of them making minute adjustments until they found the familiar fit. “Sorry about before,” she said. “I’m just anxious. I …” He waited for more, but she’d fallen back asleep.

Though not wanting to wake her, he buried his face in Naomi’s hair and laid his hand on the warm skin of her belly. He imagined slipping down between her legs, where she’d changed not only to the touch but also to the tongue and nose. “Describe it for me,” she’d said in the first weeks of her pregnancy. But he’d failed her. Less girl, more woman, was the best he could do. Less French kissing and bikinis, more toast crumbs and coffee in a rumpled bed.

He spread his fingers. From inside his wife’s belly a tiny foot, or an elbow or knee, pressed into his palm.

At least he was trying. In the last few weeks he’d flushed sponges down toilets at Burger King, squeezed superglue into locks at Blockbuster, poured rice in the oil fills of bulldozers clearing Wakonda Hill for another swath of McMansions. Doing his part.

His back was sore. After offloading the professor and his pregnant wife this morning, he loaded a two-story to La Grande and didn’t clock out until six. Now, just after dark, he hoofed it past Staples, T.G.I. Friday’s, KFC, Bed, Bath and Beyond. A long walk—a mile up the strip, then back downtown—but he’d seen the heap of bricks where three old bungalows were leveled to expand the SUV inventory of Timber Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, and a brick from back in the day, encrusted with mortar mixed by the hands of the early Douglas settlers—a brick like that seemed right.

Headlights glared from the Burger King drive-thru. Only two blocks away was the Uptown Cafe, owned and operated for fifty years by old man Jorgen. Famous omelets, burgers, biscuits and gravy. But they poisoned themselves with Burger King instead.

Not everyone, though. Clay had to give some credit. A percentage of people in Douglas had an awareness. They bought local, kept the money in the community. They understood there was no point in sending your cash to corporations back east or down in California or, worse yet, Texas. He sneered at the line of vehicles idling at the drive-thru, oblivious inside their climate-controlled biospheres of genetically altered meat fumes.

Downtown at the Green & Black, he set his bag with the brick on the floor between his feet. 13½ was hunched over the counter by the coffee urns, giving away cheese sandwiches on white bread, leftovers from Food Not Bombs. Clay swallowed a couple triangles and poured himself a cup of water.

“That kid Panama’s in town again,” 13½ said. “From Seattle.”

Clay slipped another sandwich into his mouth.

“I told him maybe you’d be around.” He poured a coffee and pushed it toward Clay.

“I’m around,” Clay said, then took the coffee to the window table where Flak was teaching a couple kids. He shook Flak’s hand and sat down.

“You live in a system,” Flak went on, “where people literally fucking die
when their blow dryers and Cuisinarts don’t work. You remember that whole power-grid thing that summer?” The kids nodded dutifully, high schoolers, hair spiked up with gel, new black clothes, freshly tattered. “The best thing we can do is prepare for the day the system collapses. No air conditioning, people freaking out that they have to sleep on the sidewalk. They’re dying. What we do is get ready. When the power goes down across this country for good, when the oil and gas spigots run dry, which
will happen
, my friends,
we’ll
be eating fresh fruits and vegetables.
We’ll
know how to make our own beer and shoes.
We’ll
be organized locally. When the U.S. Treasury collapses, when Visa and American Express and greenback dollars are worthless,
we’ll
be flush in
Douglas
dollars.”

Panama came in and caught Clay’s eye. Flak noticed him too, but kept on talking. “Makes you understand that destruction isn’t enough. Yeah, the order has to crash, but we’re gonna want the water system and the fire stations and the bridges when it does. We’ll take them over locally, but we’ll
need
them. I’d rather teach my son how to make shoes and bread than teach him how to blow up a dam. Still, I know boys will be boys, so when the cops bring him home and say he was busting out store windows, I’ll say, ‘Thank you, occiffer, I’ll take it from here.’ And then I’ll ask him, ‘Son, what was the store?’ and if he says, ‘Office Depot,’ I’ll say, ‘Don’t get caught next time,’ and if he says, ‘Ma and Pa’s Stationery Shop,’ I’ll beat his ass.”

Clay respected Flak, but he was wrong about many things. Clay, for example, would never hit a child.

At the counter, 13½ backed off to the kitchen when Clay shouldered up next to Panama, who said, “I’ve got stuff to do in Arcata, but I’m coming back through next month.” Panama was an upbeat kid, always involved. He’d done some treesitting. He’d burned a Weyerhaeuser mill. He’d freed four hundred wild horses and burros on BLM land in Redmond. He’d been to Hamburg and Amsterdam. Like Flak, he was a lot smarter than most of the anarchists you came across.

Clay passed him his coffee cup. “That sounds good,” he said. “I’ll get it ready.”

Panama drank some coffee, then handed the cup back, and they both listened to Flak for a minute.

“That other thing,” Clay said. “How about it? I’ve done some preparation. Real simple detonators.”

“That’s your own deal,” Panama said.

“I could use a partner,” Clay told him.

Panama took a step toward the door, shaking his head. “That one’s suicide.”

An hour later Clay moved through the shadows beneath the bridge, his black bag pulling heavy on his shoulder, nervy glints of moonlight off the river. A whistle blew as the train rolled into Southtown. His boots crushed through woodchips and mulch, then he squatted low, watching a yellow light go red, watching for cars coming over the bridge and the occasional pedestrian in downtown Douglas after ten p.m. on a Monday.

The whistle blew closer. Crossing gates dropped, lights flashed, bells rang.

Crouching down beside the Bank of America, he could see that the Wells Fargo across the street had already replaced their glass. Tonight was risky, just one night later, but as his plans became more sophisticated, he needed to ratchet up the risk and test his abilities. These local actions, even the operation with Panama, were honing Clay’s skills for devising plans and carrying through under pressure—training for the big one.

After he threw the brick tonight, he could probably just walk the four blocks back to his room, but he would stick with his plan.
Make a plan, stick to it
. First priority,
always:
no one gets injured. Second priority: don’t get caught. Third priority: achieve the objective of destroying property owned by religious bigots, corporations, and the U.S. government. Disrupt the system to hasten its downfall.

He ran through the plan in his mind. In seconds he’d be across the tracks, and a minute later the train would pass by at walking speed. Three engines, a dozen flatbeds stacked with lumber and plywood, then raw logs with mangled bark oozing sap, then open-topped cars heaped with pulp for the cardboard plant downriver—the screech and clank of hundreds of tons of slow rumbling steel—and with an easy hop he’d be sitting in an empty boxcar, his legs hanging out the door.

On the river side of the train, Clay would be invisible. They’d roll past his buddy’s auto-body shop and Crazy Eights, where Randall would no longer run Clay a tab. Behind the bar the tracks hooked left through the old switching yard, a desolate space cut off by the highway. It was one of the oldest parts of Douglas, but over the decades brainless development had left it orphaned. A tiny old church, abandoned for half a century, was all that remained under a sick orange halo from the Home Depot across the highway.

He’d ride the twenty minutes to Fullerton and spend the night at a
friend’s place a block from the tracks. In the morning he’d hop the five-o’clock back to Douglas and get to work an hour later.

The train was two blocks away. The ground shook. Clay rose from his crouch, and for a long moment the world paused to provide him his chance: he tossed the brick back and forth between his hands, the earthy red dust dry in his nose; he cocked his arm as the train whistle blew, and heaved the brick like a catapult, not a quarterback, savoring the heartbeats from action to result. The plate glass buckled, then dropped, along with everything reflected in it. The glowing Bank of America sign, the seven-story riverfront luxury condos, the courthouse, and the Church of the Savior—all of it crashed straight down, and in the seconds before the alarm, the last falling shards tinkled like a baby’s music box.

T
hursday morning, a week after arriving in Douglas, Scanlon took his bowl of Cheerios into the backyard. Plump blueberries came off by the handful, and he kept dropping more in the bowl as he ate. Barefoot, in boxers and a T-shirt, he stood there looking at his house, mostly settled, although a dozen boxes sat unopened in the nursery; they still needed a crib and a changing table, a glider and a mobile. The afternoon before, Naomi had taped paint swatches up on most of the walls. The coffee table was covered with catalogs dog-eared for bassinets, Baby Bjorns, diaper bags, and bureaus.

She was deep in the forest of primal motherhood. She’d said almost nothing to Scanlon during these preparations, and when he’d tried to sneak into that forest yesterday, patting her butt and saying, “Scratching a nest, building up the twig mound,” she emerged slowly, stepping over gullies and branches, pushing aside ferns. A long moment passed as she chewed a mouthful of peach, then reluctantly lowered the fruit from her face, wiped juice off her chin with her free hand, and said, “This may be the best peach I’ve ever tasted.”

Naomi had ventured deep into that forest, he knew, because she secretly hoped their baby would ease the distress she’d carried with her
since she was nineteen; she’d had a baby all those years ago, a baby boy she never held or so much as glimpsed. He was swept from the delivery room too fast for her even to smell him. Hours into their first date, Scanlon felt the weight of her anguish over losing her nose, but it wasn’t until weeks later, when she told him about the baby, that he understood how fully she defined herself by loss.
Their
baby, growing in her belly, embodied her chance of recovery—a risky bargain, and he felt sure she wasn’t aware of its likelihood of failure.

With his cereal and blueberries he moved over to the new chair and sat down. It had turned out well—the angles so key in an Adirondack chair—and Naomi loved it. He’d routed ogees into the edges of the arms and corbels, and sanded the wood as smooth and soft as her skin. He just wished she could smell the cedar.

His bowl empty, he went back to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and unrolled the
Douglas Union-Gazette
. The lead story was about the war: a surge of troops. Below the fold was a photo of a local collector of Pepsi memorabilia standing proudly before his artifacts, an article about the endangered habitat of the snowy plover, and another about how the state prison medical budget was being sapped by meth mouth. At the back of section C, in “News About Grangers and Grange,” he learned that dogs were doing a great job managing cougars; that the red, white, and blue tennis shoe insurance banquet was a success; that the motivational speaker scheduled for the Elks Club “Sunday Best” pork-loin barbecue didn’t show up. On the op-ed page he skimmed “Dawg Declares,” a column from the point of view of a dog, then on the back of the section he saw a full-page ad for Douglas’s sesquicentennial celebration in October.