The Oregon Experiment (11 page)

She knew it would sound petty to anyone else, but it was literally chemistry—the percentage of certain hormones in his sweat, the levels of bacteria in his mouth. She’d known of marriages gone sour for lesser reasons: a friend who couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her husband while he brushed his teeth; another who divorced hers for the flair with which he shined his shoes.

She closed her eyes tight.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Scanlon said.

Tears spilled from under her eyelids.

“Hormones,” Blaine declared.

“Allergies,” Roger offered. “Welcome to the grass-seed capital of the world.”

Scanlon kissed her cheek.

She covered her ears and held her breath. They had no idea.

A
s Sequoia circled her finger around the rim of a cup, it caught on the chip, surprising and rough, like a lick from a friendly cat. In the weeks before opening the café she’d thrown plates, bowls, and mugs on the wheel, most of them wobbly or pouty-lipped, the glazes runny, but all of them warm and skookum. Through the years they broke one by one, and this afternoon County Health ordered her to junk anything chipped, amounting to most of what was left. So now, at closing time, done with payroll and next week’s schedule, finishing up her orders—eighty pounds of white flour, forty pounds of wheat, seven gallons of plain yogurt, dried oats, tofu, vegetable oil, walnuts, and raisins—she scrolled past linens and cutlery and clicked on four cases of dishes from AA Restaurant Supply. Microwavable. Made in Cambodia. Mugs without Sequoia’s thumbprint pinching down the handle, plates without the concentric grooves of her fingertips. A compromise to her vision of Skcubrats.

“So
that’s
who you are,” she heard from the front. “Hey, Sequoia, do you know who this is?”

She submitted her order and logged off. Her landlord, Ron Dexter, still hadn’t left. She’d sent Keiko home half an hour ago, cut the music, and cashed out, but Ron sat scouring the
Union-Gazette
and smacking his lips
whenever he caught sight of her, hinting that he’d take a muffin or cookie not worth saving for day-olds. But tonight she’d packed everything from the bakery case in a canvas bag; all was spoken for.

“This is America Sanchez,” Ron announced, looking at the only other customer, her latte and lemon square long gone, working on her laptop. “You
are
America Sanchez, aren’t you?” He was gushing.

The woman snapped her laptop shut, turning her face toward him and forcing a nod.

Ron tugged his gray beard, then clapped his knees. “Can you believe it?”

Sequoia believed it. Or she didn’t. She didn’t care. Ten o’clock on a Tuesday, and she wanted to go home. She had no idea who America Sanchez was.

“The crack reporter,” Ron said. “Channel nine. Portland’s power source for news.”

She did look exactly like a TV reporter—pumps, pantyhose, bony legs, her hair cut razor straight at her shoulders, rich skin that would look lush in any light. She was heading out.

Ron hobbled after her. “A picture. One picture.” And the woman stopped by the door, then waited as Ron dug in his pocket for his cell phone.

Sequoia locked the windows and flicked off the light in the juice case. Ron had an arm around the woman’s shoulders, working the cell phone with his other hand. “I’ll give you a copy, Sequoia. To hang in the café.”

As if. A photo of a TV reporter named America and her soon-to-have-his-knees-replaced landlord who’d made a career of leering at Sequoia and the girls she hired?

Sequoia tried to let go of her resentment for Ron—it was uncharitable, unloving, and disrespectful—but there was a fucking limit. A, he was fighting to keep the new neighborhood center from going in beside his house for fear it would lower his property value; B, he’d been dicking Sequoia around for over a year about selling her the Skcubrats building. Not that she was surprised. Any day of the week, she’d take a Republican over a baby-boomer hippie when it came to business. The Republican will lie, cheat, and screw you the best he can, but then he’ll close the deal and move on to the next one. Ron, however, felt dirtied by the entire experience, an arena in which he’d always been powerless. Entitlement rushed through him with the knowledge that to settle for anything less than every
last penny and drop of blood was to cave once again to a corrupt society. This was his chance to demonstrate that he wasn’t bending over for capitalism. If, in selling to Sequoia, he could outdo a Rotary Club developer, he felt he’d beat capitalism at its own game, compensating him for dirtying his hands and for failing—through years of Che berets and twenty-dollar checks to the ACLU—to topple the system.

And now, against her nature, Sequoia’s own mercenary mind began working. “Could I ask you something?” she said after turning off the bathroom lights. “Have you ever heard of the PNSM?”

The reporter looked at her blankly.

“The Pacific Northwest Secessionist Movement,” Sequoia said hopefully.

“What are they? Like survivalists?” Her clear, steady voice sounded exactly like TV.

“No, no. We’re a diverse group of Oregonians who think the region can do better economically, environmentally, and morally than the federal government—”

Ron’s cell phone finally flashed, and the reporter dislodged herself from him and leaned back into the door.

“If I send you a picture,” he was quick to ask, “would you sign it?”

“Sure,” America said.

She was already on the porch when Sequoia called to her. “Would you consider covering a PNSM meeting?”

“What’s the group done? What’s it doing now?”

“Interestingly,” Sequoia said, “we’re formulating some proposals that promise to—”

America cut her off. “You have to
do
something to be on the news. It has to be
news.
” And the door slapped shut behind her.

It was another ten minutes before Sequoia got rid of Ron, took the last of the trash out to the dumpster, and turned off the lights. She knew the TV gal was right. She turned off the lights. The professor—Scanlon Pratt—had inspired everyone at the meeting last month, but they needed more than a pep talk. They needed
him
.

The babysitter, Chezzi Trueblood, was in bed with Trinity, both of them asleep, when Sequoia slipped out at midnight with her thick gardening gloves and the canvas bag bulging with muffins, cookies, and scones. As
she moved down the sidewalk, Ruth’s motion light blinked on. Sharky barked. But mostly the houses of her friends and neighbors were darkened and, she knew, empty.

Tonight, in this corner of the universe, a hushed excitement and urgency juddered through the air. She went left at the end of the block, spotting John and Alice coming down their front steps, tipping their heads at her, moonlight shining off their white hair. With oversized canvas gloves John made a muffled clap. Alice hugged a stockpot to her belly. They joined her wordlessly, heading toward the railroad tracks. Ahead Sequoia could see Jenna—her broad back and long frizzy hair—stomping across the park with her sturdy legs and heavy boots. She played
djembe
in an African drumming group, and her body always carried that earthy, soulful beat.

Dark silhouettes emerged from shadows at a hundred yards—Karen, Todd, and the other John, all of them instantly recognizable to Sequoia from a high-stepped stride, a favorite poncho or hat, a bounce in the shoulders. Jasmine, Paul and Sue, Deana and Kenny, then Cocoa, Amy, Kathy, and Phil. They carried buckets of tools, coils of rope, thermoses, and baskets of food with a big-hearted sense of purpose. Tonight they were
doing
something—
news
—as she’d wanted to tell the TV reporter; she’d wanted to throw it in her face. But this wasn’t for the PNSM and had to remain a secret until they were done. As Sequoia stepped over the tracks, she heard the bulldozer fire up in the darkness.

“It’s loud,” Alice said. They could barely hear their boots scraping on the gravel and stone of the old switching yard.

“Then we’ll be quick,” Cocoa said. “No worries.”

Sequoia could now see the bulldozer in the moonlight. Across the barren ground—nothing but rusty train parts and beer cans—Jim Furdy was positioning the machine in front of the long-abandoned church. In Douglas you always knew somebody (or knew somebody who knew somebody) who had access on short notice to an acetylene torch, a cider press, a marimba band willing to travel, a portable sawmill, a chakra healer, a bulldozer. As it happened, Jim Furdy lived in the neighborhood, and his business—wells and excavations—backed up to the railroad yard.

Jim shut the engine down, and they gathered around as the hot, diesely metal creaked itself cool and he stood on the dozer’s tracks. Alice offered Sequoia a cup of her three-bean stew. “It takes ten or twelve people to lift a phone pole,” Jim said.

“Out of curiosity, how many to lift an elephant?” Hank Trueblood asked.

“The question,” Carly said, “is how many Republicans does it take to
screw
an elephant?”

“Laugh it up, pranksters,” Jim said, “but no hernias tonight. Especially you graybeards.” He hopped down to the ground. “Somebody help me hook up the cables.”

Alice organized the food on one side of the church. Sequoia and Hank and the first ten people who ambled over rolled a phone pole away from the weeds that had grown up around it.

Months ago they’d jacked the church off its stone foundation and slipped timbers underneath. The windows had been removed. The few pews that hadn’t been looted through the years were stowed under a tarp on Jim’s lot. Sections of the roof—where moss had led to rot—were cut away. By spring the old church, purchased from the city by the neighborhood association for one dollar, was ready to travel the three hundred yards across the tracks and be transformed into their new community center. The city agreed to a dollar-a-year lease for a corner of the park; the association signed a contract promising to maintain the church for a century. They’d had two months to move it, at which point the chunk of barren land it occupied would be transferred from the city to Northern Pacific Railroad, who planned to tear the church down. The paperwork had all been very easy. But then, to everyone’s surprise, nobody knew a house mover.

The first bid, from an outfit in Eugene, came in at $38,000. Carly announced this at the next meeting, admitting that while she wasn’t really a numbers person, it was a big increase over the $2 they’d already budgeted. A company in Portland was willing to do it for fifty-one-five.

That was when Jim Furdy suggested they move it themselves: his bulldozer could pull, his backhoe could push, and a score of neighborhood minions could carry phone poles from back to front to use as rollers. He had a reliable source for decommissioned phone poles.

He applied for all the necessary permits and permissions. Six weeks, two public hearings, and countless written proposals later, replies started coming back. Northern Pacific refused to let the church cross its tracks (even though this was a public right of way) because of likely “damage to rails, ties, connections, bed, etc.; risk to engines, cars, cargo, etc.; risk of accident, incident, slow down, stoppage, etc.; risk to railroad personnel
(and non-personnel) of bodily injury, death, etc.” Northwest Power—whose motto was “Your local electric company” but who acted less neighborly since they’d been ingested, digested, and spit out by Enron—would pull aside the power line for $6,381. The city refused to allow a vehicle with non-pneumatic tires along this half block of their precious pavement. Furthermore, a neighbor who lived next to the park opposed the community center, arguing it would harm his property value. He was vocal at the hearings and even threatened to sue. This was Ron Dexter, Sequoia’s landlord at the café.

A week later, Jim called a clandestine meeting of the association, inviting select members by word of mouth instead of the listserv. “I took some measurements,” he said. “If we cut the roof off, we can sneak it under the power lines.”

“But what about driving the bulldozer on the pavement?” Sequoia asked. “What about Ron?”

“We can keep trying to do this by the book,” Jim said, “and watch Northern Pacific tear the church down in a week, or we can just take it. Quietly. At night.”

The tingle of delight and mischief was immediate. Plans were made, secrecy was sworn. And if not for that secrecy America Sanchez and a camera crew would have been here right now with Sequoia making a plug for secession.

It was after one o’clock before she heard another big engine come to life in the distance. The backhoe, piloted by Jim’s son, Pete, came at them out of the darkness. Jim started the bulldozer, the first four phone poles were rolled into place, and as the engines revved, everyone stepped back, fearful that the church might explode into splinters.

But it didn’t. It slipped off the timbers and started to roll. Quiet cheers went up, Hank hugged Sequoia, Carly ate a scone. And then the real work began. Jim wanted rollers every six feet. Under the rumble of the machines, they whispered instructions to one another, dragged, lifted, lugged. The whispering was absurd, given the diesel engines, and as they labored, Sequoia kept an eye on a particular spot at the backs of the houses. Sure enough, before long a light went on. Ron’s house. Five minutes later, with blue lights rolling lazily, a police cruiser crept through the oil drums and rusted train parts in the yard. The plan was to keep working, which everyone did, while Sequoia showed the cops their title to the
church and explained that for another three days this was public land, and that until they crossed the tracks they weren’t in violation of anything.

“Noise ordinance,” Ron shouted. He’d followed the police out with his flashlight, and was now snapping photos with his cell phone.

The police put in a call to Northern Pacific, and in the hour and a half it took for two of their inspectors to arrive they’d shined their headlights out in front of the bulldozer, written $90 noise violations to the Furdys, and were on their second mug of three-bean stew. They’d also ordered, after the first hour, a hysterical Ron Dexter to keep back at least thirty feet. The railroad inspectors examined the plank ramp that Jim had fabricated and laid over the tracks to protect them, then consulted with the police, then gestured for Jim to shut her down. But at a few feet per minute, Jim’s bulldozer pulling, Pete’s backhoe pushing, the rest of them hauling phone poles even faster now with their adrenaline surging, the old church kept bumping ahead with an unstoppable combination of physical and moral momentum.