The Oregon Experiment (30 page)

“Daria
knew,
” Rebecca said.

“She was
paranoid
,” Flak said. “Maybe Rotor was a Fed, maybe not. He sure bought a lot of beers.”

“Daria stopped being paranoid when Clay got her clean,” Rebecca insisted.

“She got
more
paranoid
after
she was clean,” Flak snapped. “If she hadn’t got pregnant, they’d still be hanging out and Clay wouldn’t be such a brooding motherfucker.” He turned to Scanlon. “Do you think he’s a brooding motherfucker?”

“He’s not chipper,” Scanlon said.

Rebecca, staring into her coffee, looked thoughtful. “He’s been happier these last few weeks.”

“But nothing like when Daria was pregnant. Especially at the end. He sold out, getting a regular job and whatnot, but he was doing the right
thing. Preparing for the next generation. Getting more patient. Then her freaked-out Christian parents swoop down from Idaho, and Clay starts reliving shit. We’ve all had a tough run of it, but he for sure deserves a little something. I was much wilder until my son was born.”

It became clear to Scanlon that the girls had heard Flak’s riffs before. They listened closely, knowing the next line, anticipating the turn the story would take. More kids, and some in their twenties, edged closer to the table. One of them asked Flak if brown noise was for real. “Realer than
shit
,” Flak answered, then sparred with Scanlon about the whole dubious history.

But Scanlon could tell he was earning an ounce of respect from the anarchists, which wouldn’t have happened if Clay hadn’t vouched for him in the first place, which was why he’d let Clay’s taunts about his friendship with Naomi pass. Clay’s m.o. was to poke things with a stick.

“The last day of WTO in Seattle,” Flak was saying, “I had to shit real bad from the brown noise, so I’m heading to the toilets in the park. But this cop’s coming in my direction, so instead I veer into the woods, down into this big gully they’ve got all over Seattle, and under a towering Pacific yew I see blue plastic sticking out of the dirt. I jab it with my boot, then dig it up, and inside the plastic bag there’s a literal cigar box all taped shut, so I cut it open and, holy shit, the box is packed tight with hundred-dollar bills. I’m looking over my shoulders thinking this is a setup, but nobody’s in sight. Just me and the Pacific yew and scrappy eucalyptus trees and sword ferns. I shove the box under my coat and run out of there, no idea which direction, and come up out of the gully in some neighborhood with fancy lawns and curving porches. This is
not
the sort of neighborhood they like anarchists tromping around hiding stuff under their jackets, and by now I gotta shit so bad my molars are aching, and after four blocks, maybe five, I get to a street with little shops and a goddamn Starbucks, so I barge right in.

“And now, sitting on the shitter with the cigar box on my knees, I count one hundred and one Ben Franklins: ten thousand one hundred dollars. And why the extra hundred? But then I know. I put three or four in my pocket, then kick off my boots and stack the rest inside. Then I take the oddball hundred off the edge of the sink, look Mr. In God We Trust Franklin in the eye, and reach back with the hundred-dollar bill and wipe my ass.

“ ‘How’s your day going so far?’ the dollface at the counter says when I
come out. ‘Busy,’ I say. ‘Keeping my workers in line. Counting my profits.’ Then I reach in my pocket and slap a crisp hundred on the counter. ‘I’m running for public office, and I’d be honored to have your vote.’ Then I walk outside, understanding now what people mean about having a little cushion, a little cash in reserve. Soft in the boots, fresh feeling. It makes you taller.

“But I also know I’ve gotta get out of this city before I get arrested and lose the money. So I abandon my bedroll in the park and hop into a taxi and tell him to take me to the bus depot, and as I’m looking out at the people on the sidewalk, I realize I like how the world looks from inside a taxi. And right then, squishing my toes against all those bills, I know the money’s already corrupted me.

“On the Greyhound I climb over this babe who’s got
mass murderer
scrawled with a black marker on her face, and she starts telling me a mile a minute that she was at the Gap when the glass came down. She’d pulled a little sneaker off a mannequin at Gap Kids and flung it at a cop, and it binged off his helmet. And in the park a different cop grabbed her tit. And such a nice tit, I’m thinking, but she reads my mind and says, ‘My boyfriend’s gonna be so pissed. I’m glad he wasn’t there. He would’ve stomped the fucker.’

“In Portland I buy us some pizza and beers, and while we’re eating she wraps a slice in a napkin and slips it in her pocket. Outside it’s cold and I’m thinking about a coffee, but she says, ‘I know a place to crash,’ so we walk along the old Willamette Highway till we get to a gas station, and inside there’s this fucking kid with his boots up on the counter. I’m squinting from the bright lights, and this guy’s head’s twitching, very weird. He looks at her, then at me. ‘Where the fuck you been, Daria?’ he says. ‘Seattle,’ she says. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘It was cool,’ she says, then points at me. ‘That’s Flak.’ She pulls the pizza slice from her pocket and peels off the napkin, then sits on his lap and holds it in front of his mouth so he can take a bite. Then she looks back at me. ‘This is Clay.’

“Our Clay, friends and neighbors. Pumping gas in Portland.

“At eleven-fifteen Daria and I have to hide out because the owner’s coming by for the day’s profits. So we’re sitting out back in the trees when I ask where this crash house is, and she says, ‘You’re here,’ and I’m like, ‘Where?’ She nods at the station and says, ‘In the bathroom.’ And I look over my shoulder at the men’s-room door and say, ‘In there?’ She shakes her head. ‘The other one. You know,’ she says, ‘girls don’t piss on the floor.’

“The Mobil sign goes dark, then the lot lights. After another ten minutes Clay comes around back. ‘It’s cold,’ he says, and gives Daria a hand and pulls her to her feet. He gets a bedroll and a duffel from inside a plastic drum, then unlocks the women’s bathroom and turns on the heater. He throws a T-shirt over the light—it’s kind of weird, we’re all three just standing there, face-to-face—and he spreads out a sleeping bag and a blanket, then asks me if I have a bedroll. I tell him it got swiped in Seattle, so he offers me the blanket, and I say, ‘No, man. No problem. I’ll just curl up here by the heater,’ but he tosses it to me. He insists. When we all get comfortable he torches up a fat joint, and the heater’s cranking it out real good. Then he tosses me a bag of cheese doodles and opens a bag for him and Daria. We enjoy the heat and silence, the tip of the joint all yellow from cheese doodles.

“Every time I wake up in the night to roll over when my hip goes numb, Daria’s sleeping with her head on Clay’s lap. And he’s sitting up against the wall, his head tipped slightly to the side, eyes open, staring at Daria’s heap of hair, his hand on her shoulder, then staring at her boots beside the garbage can, then at the wall.

“I wake up to a rush of cold air. Clay steps over me and sits back down beside Daria. He hands me a hot-dog burrito and a Mountain Dew. He’s got the same for the two of them. ‘Let me give you some cash,’ I say, and he says, ‘Don’t worry.’

“Hot-dog fucking burrito. Daria’s chowing hers down, and when I ask Clay what time it is he says it’s six-fifteen. I practically drop my Mountain Dew. ‘In the fucking morning?’ Then he tells me the owner’ll be here at six-thirty to open up, that his own shift starts at seven. And he says he works all day every day and they’ve been doing this for two months, and Daria’s getting bored hanging out in the park all day long. He owes money to someone, but when he’s got it paid off they’ll have a lot more fun. And I tell him, ‘Fuck that. What? A lawyer? Whoever you owe it to has way more than you.’ But if he doesn’t pay it, he says his mother’ll need to. I ask him how much, and it’s twenty-seven hundred.

“Where will you go when you’ve paid it off? I ask him. No idea. How long will it take? A lot longer. Does he know any anarchists down in Douglas? A couple. Does he know something he could teach in the Free Skool? It turns out Daria knows quilting, but Clay shakes his head. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Everybody knows something that other people don’t,’ I tell him. He thinks about that, and his head snaps with a little click. ‘Explosives,’ he
says. ‘TNT, ammonium nitrate, nitromethane.’ I smile big. ‘Hard core,’ I say, then go out and around the corner to the men’s and take a piss. Then I pull off a boot and pick out twenty-seven hundred-dollar bills. When I walk back in, I drop the money in his lap and say, ‘Let’s go to Douglas.’ ”

By now a dozen kids were gathered around listening. “Cool,” said a boy with green hair.

“I love that story,” said Rebecca.

“You delivered him to us,” Scanlon said. Whatever he ended up publishing, it would hum with the unassailable bona fides of Clay.

Flak nodded at him. “A thousand bucks if you want to use that story,” he said, but then smiled and tapped his chest twice. Respect.

Scanlon was certain he hadn’t actually
found
the money, and he hoped he’d learn someday how Flak actually got it.

“He’s the guy on TV,” he overheard a kid say at the next table. “The anarchy professor.”

His old childhood flaw was finally his strength. Again he’d gotten in with the bad apples, but this time, instead of dragging him down, maybe they’d launch him.

“Where’s Clay?” Rebecca was scanning the room. “Where the fuck did he go?”

Naomi drank some water, then set the glass in the kitchen sink. She was finally ready. When she got back from the lab this afternoon, she put Sammy in the bouncy seat beneath his hoop of dangling jesters, bumblebees, and squeaky reptiles, then set up shop in the spare room. Her organ table was two-tiered, with collapsible legs and a curve so pleasing that she’d shipped it home with her from France, at nearly the cost of her plane ticket. It held all the basics: three hundred essences and a few of her unusual favorites like zingiber cassumunar and French hay.

Sammy was asleep, Scanlon was at his demonstrations, and she was feeling clearheaded and alert. It was time.

Sitting at the organ, she placed the vial of frog juice beside her base notes and cut open a fresh package of dipsticks. To wake up her receptors, she smelled jasmine, lavender, grapefruit, and, finally, tobacco. She smelled her own skin, deep in the crease inside her elbow. She opened her nostrils wide, massaged her sinuses, took in the air in the room before ignoring it. Then, without ceremony, she fingered the vial of frog juice, eased the rubber
cork out, passed the vial under her nose at twelve inches, and replaced the cork.

The clench of the essence was immediate and profound. Sharper than musk, and cleaner, with a more potent thrust. She reopened the vial and took a closer smell. Heady, disorienting, disturbingly powerful. Blaine was right. It was like snorting adrenaline, coiled-up and explosive, tremendously complex with great rancidity. The gland producing this hormone must be what powered that incredible, inexplicable leap. She sniffed and the sensation rippled through her sinuses, stimulating her lips and the roof of her mouth, quivering in her lungs and intestines. She’d rarely worked with ambergris—whale regurgitation that has soaked up sea and sun for years—but she had used lots of civet cat and plenty of musks, and she was already convinced that the Pacific leaping frog gave her a powerful new base note for a whole grouping of new fragrances. If it existed only in this tiny area of the Pacific Northwest, no one in the industry knew anything about the frog. A breakthrough fragrance was waiting for her. A gift.

She got to work. She dipped the frog juice with jasmine and lavender, citrus and sandalwood. Already she was finding even more complexity: molasses, wet soil, fermented greens, sautéing mushrooms. And something harsher—ammonia or kerosene. She dipped it with an oceanic grouping, with seaweed and an ozone blend, then tobacco. Was it possible?—the suggestion of auto-body putty? She tried several mints. She played with citrus and fig.

She jumped up, paced the room, and guzzled another glass of water. Her mind was reeling, like she’d been blasting music through headphones and lost touch with the here and now. She listened for Sammy—nothing—and looked at the clock.
Nine-thirty
? God, how long had it been since she was so deep in the zone?

Her first task was a prototype. A basic but complete fragrance to work from. She added grassy notes—juniper, dill, lemongrass, sage, eucalyptus, cypress, and fir. She tried sharp herbs and astringents. After dozens of attempts, the sticks were fanning out all around her, each one a nudge toward oceanic, or woodsy, or floral.

She waved a stick under her nose, held it away, waved it again—too much frog, too simple in the top note. A prototype would take weeks or months, but already she’d gotten something in the range of the irresistible smell of Sequoia.

A rap at the kitchen door startled her. She pulled her robe tight and
knotted the belt, moving through the living room, pushing through a creative cloud like she hadn’t known in years. Putting her hand to the knob, she paused to smell each of the two dipsticks pinched between her thumb and forefinger, then opened the door a crack: Clay stood tight to the house to keep out of the rain, his hands thrust down in the front pockets of his jeans.

“It’s late,” she said.

His head twitched. “I was wondering if maybe Scanlon was home.”

“He’s downtown.” She put one of the dipsticks to her nose again—still too much frog, like celery rot in a wet bag at the back of the fridge. “Shouldn’t
you
be down there?” It might need sage, something to clean up the rot.

Clay was asking about work—whether they needed anything done this week. If sage was too dusty, maybe rosemary, but only a hint. It could get too sweet. He asked about Sammy. And then a breeze came up behind Clay, and she moved the sticks away from her nose. His wet, feral smell had another quality tonight: she could smell the street on him. Worlds away from lavender or jasmine or a hint of rosemary. “Do you want a beer?” she said.