The Oregon Experiment (34 page)

“But this is why I’m here.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a nice downtown. Ample parking. A good steakhouse.”

Why the hell did Scanlon want to impress his father? With his stature in his field, or for that matter the parks, the coast, the mountains? With the
hippie and anarchy scene? Why had he shown him the old quad, that small deception? There were times he thought he’d completely written off his parents, but if that were the case, if he’d lost all respect for them, he wouldn’t give a damn what they thought.

Then, simultaneously, a smoke bomb and tear-gas container were flying in opposite directions. A ribbon of smoke twisted up behind the police line, a cloud of tear gas engulfed the demonstration. The mayhem was immediate and complete. Protesters were running every which way—out of the square and toward it. Faces disappeared behind bandannas and gas masks. The tear-gas canister was lobbed back at the police, and a second kachunked into the air and clattered amid the crowd, spewing noxious smoke.

Although he and his father were standing half a block away with the wind at their backs, traces of tear gas reminded Scanlon of the thrill of Seattle. He pulled his shirt up over his nose and gestured to Geoff to do it too, but at the same time he flared his nostrils for another taste. Rocks flew and batons swung. An anarchist was down, pounced on and handcuffed. Another picked up a fuming canister and as he hurled it, he was flattened from behind by two men dressed in the same garb, but cuffs came out from under their torn black sweatshirts, a knee driving between shoulder blades. The protesters didn’t have a chance. A couple hundred of them against fifty battle cops. In Seattle the numbers had been a surprise, the first arrests had juiced up the anger, fires of protest flared up all over the city with law enforcement spread too thin.

Scanlon’s heart was racing. He looked over at his father, who was holding the sleeve of his raincoat ineffectually to his face, tears streaming from his red eyes. He was huddling closer to the bus shelter, his head sinking deeper into his hood. “Check it out,” Scanlon said, more to himself than to Geoff, as a bottle of red paint exploded on the face of the courthouse. While his father cowered beside him, paralyzed with fear, he felt wildly alive.

The authorities were corrupt, even the best of them. The power they held was often by default. Isn’t that what these clashes proved? They had as much power as we gave them, and when we wanted to take some back we could. Yes, they might jail us in the end, but only because we held ourselves back. Fear and respect flowed in our blood, and despite all the rage and disgust, we were afraid of what might happen if the system collapsed. Even
Flak had said as much. We’ll need the water and power and sewers. When push came to shove, we deferred to our fathers. These flare-ups—nothing more than tantrums in the big picture—were our noble and confused expressions of independence.

Suddenly Scanlon was knocked down to the sidewalk. A protester, sprinting away from the cops, spun around and kept going. “Clear the area!” came over a bullhorn, the sirens now wailing, a busload of battle cops appearing from nowhere.

His father was crouching in the corner of the bus shelter. “Good God, son.” His face was white. “Get us out of here!”

Scanlon stepped in beside him, shielded by the Plexiglas etched with a historic photograph of downtown, spray-painted over with a Circle-A. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Don’t be an idiot!”

“I’m telling you we’re fine. The cops aren’t going to bother with us, and the protesters need us on their side. Demonstrations are a great coming-together. It’s very simple.”

Geoff looked completely terrified, and when Scanlon looked away for a moment—the new contingent of battle cops hut-hutting in formation to clear the square—Geoff lowered his head and ran. Scanlon watched him go, his short clumsy legs moving as fast as they could. Sort of a lard-ass, he couldn’t help thinking. All dignity cast aside as he ran for his life.

The gas was thicker now and Scanlon pulled his shirt up over his nose again. Anarchists were spread thin, taunting the police, running away and sneaking back. Five or six had been arrested. A small group with a drum was chanting, “Panama,” a news camera moving in on them. And then he saw the big white Channel 9 satellite truck inching down the street, America Sanchez sitting in the cab. She looked frightened but determined when the truck stopped near the chanters and she jumped out. At this distance Scanlon couldn’t hear her, but she turned her back valiantly on the chaos and talked into her microphone for the camera, steeling her shoulders and wiping her eyes.

He watched the ballet from inside the bus shelter. A tight line of cops swept across the square and into the street, two motorcycles cut off protesters sprinting around the end, police cruisers inched up the alleys. An anarchist in a sloppy red do-rag rushed the cops, then backed off with a quick twirl—a butterfly flitting before the barrier of black truncheons, Kevlar vests, military helmets, and faces barely visible behind plastic
shields, a butterfly up against a swarm of dragonflies. The cops steamrolled closer to Scanlon now, and through the plastic shields he thought eyes might have focused on him, but he held his ground, thinking, I’m an ordinary citizen. No crimes. Public property, although it occurred to him that somebody might recognize him as the professor who’d incited violence on the news.

America Sanchez was running up the street with the cameraman, lugging his equipment, struggling to keep up. She was nearly at the curb before Scanlon realized she was coming for him. Whether or not any of the cops recognized him, she had, and now flung herself inside the bus shelter, tears streaming from her eyes, pulling a white handkerchief with blue and yellow lace away from her mouth just long enough to say into her microphone, “Professor Pratt, is this the reaction you were advocating?” then thrusting the mic in his face.

He wasn’t taking the bait. “I never advocated violence.” She was shaking. Even through the tear gas and the rain, he could smell her fear. This sexy little firecracker who had faced down gale-force winds reporting from the coast and uncontained wildfires in the Siskiyou was tethered this side of complete panic by ambition alone. She needed these demonstrations, these out-of-town anarchists and cops, this
drama
, because news that happened on her turf belonged to her, and because the more events she owned, the further she could go. Her pushy style, her skill at sticking to the narrative and raising the easily graspable questions, at finding the conflict that piques the broadest possible viewership, her skinny legs, her sharp pretty face that would be icy if not for her café-au-lait skin, her hard tits riding high on her chest under a silk blouse—all this would propel her to a bigger stage. America Sanchez needed conflict. She needed events. She needed anxiety in the public, and fear was even better.

“I want to talk to you,” Scanlon told her as the Plexiglas bus shelter filled with tear gas, because she needed him. What she didn’t know was that he was no longer her source; he was her competition.

Rain snapping on her plastic poncho, Sequoia pedaled a wide loop around the demonstrations. Trinity, riding behind her, said, “But I’m also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.” Trinity couldn’t read yet, but she’d memorized
The Lorax
word for word, front to back. She’d
turn the page and look at the picture and recite verbatim what was written there.

Sequoia slowed for the tracks, then took a left, swinging around a satellite news truck blocking the bike lane. “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees,” Trinity said from under the poncho, buckled into her seat. The poncho draped back from Sequoia’s shoulders, tenting her daughter, and was hooked to the gas can Jim Furdy had welded to the rear fender.

Over the swish of her tires on the wet pavement, she could hear drumming from downtown, deep chants, bullhorns, sirens. This was not the revolution she dreamed of. Hers didn’t involve tear gas and shattered windows, even at a Starbucks. Her revolution involved consensus and the power of collective will, the inevitability of moral justice. Its symbol would not be a fist but an embrace.

“So I quickly invented my Super-Axe-Hacker which whacked off four Truffula Trees at one smacker.”

She coasted along Franklin Park. It pained her to look at the church. By now it should be warm from kids learning to tap-dance as a kiln fired the clay dinosaurs and turtles massaged to life by children’s tiny fingers. A signboard out front should be announcing tonight’s poetry reading, tomorrow’s quilting class, this weekend’s talks on Vipassana meditation and peace in the Middle East.

But when she got closer to the church she could see that the wind had again blown one of the tarps out of place and rain was running inside. She pedaled up on the sidewalk and got off her bike, then lifted Trinity—warm and dry—out of her seat.

“What now?” Trinity said.

“Quick stop,” Sequoia told her, pointing up at the sagging tarp.

“Not again,” she said.

Sequoia ducked under the yellow caution tape. The building inspector had stapled another warning to the old shiplap clapboards declaring it unlawful to enter, occupy, or perform any work including structural, cosmetic, plumbing, electrical, installation of security systems, greenhouses, watering systems, telephone, cable, or satellite dishes.

“Oh, Mommy,” she heard, far off, and when she looked back, Trinity was squatting in the middle of the street.

“Out of the street!” she shouted, looking for cars and sprinting toward her. “I’ve told you—” but then she saw what Trinity had found. “Oh no,”
she said. A dead squirrel. Blood had trickled out its ears and snout, but it was still bushy and plump. Unflattened. Almost as if it had fallen from a tree.

“Did a car drive over it?” Trinity asked.

Sequoia looked overhead. “Probably that’s what happened.”

“Why did somebody do that?”

“They didn’t do it on purpose,” Sequoia reassured her. “They didn’t see him.”

“But why weren’t they watching?”

“It was an accident. A tragic accident.” She tugged on Trinity’s shoulder, but she didn’t budge; there was no traffic in sight, so she crouched beside her daughter. “Nobody would do this on purpose,” she said. “Somebody was driving, and the squirrel ran out where he shouldn’t have gone. He made a poor choice.”

They stared at the stiff corpse on its side, legs sticking out mid-sprint. Finally Trinity said, “He’s his own squirrel.”

Suppressing a smile, Sequoia said, “That’s exactly right, sweetheart.” She stood up. “Let’s fix the tarp, then we’ll go home for the shovel and bury him in the backyard.”

Trinity stood now, nodding, and took her mother’s hand. Sequoia lifted her into the church and hopped up behind her. Under the sagging tarp, the floorboards were soaked. She set up the rickety wooden ladder that Jim had been using and climbed up to where the roof should have been. Popping her head out, she could see a train creeping past the church’s old foundation in the railroad yard and, in the other direction, roof after roof. Then she looked down into Ron’s backyard and her own, at the hot tub where she’d led Scanlon after making love in her kitchen last night and where he’d taken her a second time.

She would make it up to Naomi somehow—help with her nursing trouble seemed to be what she needed most. She liked her. A good vibe on the deck during the chicken pox party. And maybe Naomi’s love reached beyond her husband. The anarchist kid surely had a thing for her. Sequoia got a vibe from him, too. She felt a connection there, as she always did with damaged people. She felt drawn to heal him.

She climbed up another rung to maneuver a shoulder under the heavy sag of water. Her legs were shaking as she clutched the ladder, taking a breath, then another. The boy had been only nine years old, and Sequoia
knew he’d seen her crawling back inside the third-story window of his house. She would sneak out there to smoke pot when she babysat the boy, where a nook in the roof was hidden from the neighbors. She
knew
he’d seen her. With the TV on downstairs, watching tennis, not very stoned, just enough, she heard the rain gutter tear loose, and a quick, muffled thud on the driveway.

She pushed on the belly of the tarp, and rainwater poured out as if through a flume, and when she looked down over the edge Trinity was standing outside, her arms outstretched, under the falling water. “Get back!” she screamed.

“Awesome!” Trinity shouted.

She raced down the ladder, leapt from the church, and ran around the side. “Are you nuts?” she snapped, but when she saw Trinity’s face, soaked and half-delirious, she knew she had a fever. She scooped her up and laid a hand on her forehead—hot as a griddle.

“The broken boy,” Trinity said. “Under the Truffula Tree.”

“No!” But then she modulated her voice. “No, he’s not.”

“He is, Mommy. He
is
.”

And Sequoia bundled her arms around Trinity—chicken pox, finally—and rushed her home.

Except for the tear gas burning in his nose and the back of his throat, two blocks from downtown it seemed like any other rainy day in Douglas. He heard a siren, and another, but then it was quiet again. The streets were wet and black, the lawns lushly green, the gardens of rosemary, flax, and Japanese blood grass thriving alongside cedar fences. He was working through some ideas: the futility of demonstrations, their lack of connection to anarchist theory (exactly the opposite of what he’d floated to Fenton), what the primal motivations might be.

Cutting through a park he veered toward the café. He wanted to see her. This morning before class he’d gone in for coffee. Behind the counter, she was reaching into a bushel-sized stainless steel bowl pressed to her belly, kneading an elastic orb of risen dough. Her arms were dusted white with flour. Scanlon caught her eye, and her face lit up. “Hey,” he said, and she set the bowl aside and reached her arms deliberately around him—a powerful whoosh of soft flesh thinly veiled with smooth cotton. She’d been working with forty-pound bags of flour and the big mixer, and heat
from inside her shimmered at the surface of her skin. Gripping his waist, she leaned back, their hips pressing together. No words came to him, and after a minute or two he went off to class.