The Oregon Experiment (38 page)

He passed by the boarded-up Starbucks, crossed the tracks, and skirted the park. The rain blew back in, and he tugged up his hood against it, muting the distant sound of sirens. The clock in the courthouse tower struck eleven. He had papers to grade for tomorrow—John Locke and the Fourth Amendment. He’d go home, make an espresso, take up his green felt-tip, and try to get halfway through the stack. As he crossed Lewis and Clark, the cops at the corner were dragging their barricade to the curb. It was over.

Naomi and Sammy would be asleep. Geoff would be sipping a drink and watching television in his RV. Scanlon would drive the mile home, and the events of the night—frightening, heart-stirring—would slip into the past, having accomplished absolutely nothing. The ache spread from his elbow to his shoulder to his neck. Worse, he’d learned nothing of any
interest to the
Oregonian
. He needed that article, at the very least. He also, and more importantly, needed to beg Naomi’s forgiveness, and for her to grant it. And of course he needed to get her back to New York. He’d never in his life felt more desperate.

A block from the library he cut across the corner of the park, but shadows moved in the dark bandstand and he veered back toward the sidewalk.

“Yo,” someone called.

He stopped, saying nothing.

“Yo,” came again, and an anarchist stood up on the stage.

“I’m in a rush,” Scanlon said.

“We need a few dollars.”

Scanlon rubbed his elbow. It was stiffening up. “I’m fresh out,” he said, and started to walk away.

“C’mon, brother. We gotta get back to Seattle.”

He stopped again and, when he turned, saw a cell phone light up in the bandstand. The show was leaving town, and he’d gotten nothing. Forget the academic article, the book chapter; he didn’t even have thirty-six hundred words for a newspaper.

He pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got twenty-nine bucks,” he said, walking up. “But first I want to ask you a couple questions. Don’t worry, I’m not a cop.” There were two of them, almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of others. One put his cell phone in his pocket and sat down, and Scanlon held out the cash in his hand.

“Sure, bro,” the standing one said when Scanlon came up to the steps. “What’s on your mind?” His bandanna dangled around his neck.

“In your own words, not some bullshit somebody told you once, why do you think anarchy’s the answer?”

“You should ask him,” the guy said, nodding at his partner sitting on the edge of the stage—and the kick, for a split second, seemed nothing more than a brush against Scanlon’s coat, but the boot hurtled into his ribs like a cinder block dropped from a second-story ledge. His spine caught fire and he was blown flat on his back, his eyes bleary, his molars loose. He was suddenly in a hot sweat and up on his feet in a karate pose, his mind sharp and racing on adrenaline. But the two punks were already halfway across the park, stomping off without even a backward gaze. He sprawled across the stage and gasped for breath, the pain spreading down to his stomach and groin then up into his armpits, and he puked over the rail.

Maybe ten minutes later, he shuffled around the side of the library. At
first he thought his car was gone, which put him on the verge of tears. He just wanted to get home. But then he realized that an SUV had parked beside him, dwarfing his Honda and blocking the view. He stood behind both vehicles. The SUV’s fat rear end had nearly clipped his car. Twenty empty spaces for the asshole to choose from, but he parked a rear wheel and a thousand pounds of fender in Scanlon’s spot. A Nissan Armada. It was huge, but evidently the American family needed an entire fucking fleet to ship the kids to soccer. Plus an American flag bumper sticker, a Christian fish, and California vanity plates reading
BUY-BUY
.

He unlocked his car with the remote and walked around to peer into the Armada’s windows, looking over both shoulders and scanning the light poles for cameras.

Then, rubbing his thumb along the edges of his keys, he selected his office key—chunky and institutional, with sharp pronounced teeth—and gripped it like a switchblade, leaning in with his hip, pressing it through a dozen layers of hard white paint from front fender to back with a dry, satisfying scrape.

H
ammers tapped slender nails into the back of Naomi’s skull. Every time Scanlon moved in bed, he groaned. She laid ice packs on his ribs. He couldn’t sit up on his own, so she hauled him off the mattress every hour to shift his position, until finally at three-thirty she wrapped ice around him with an Ace bandage, gave him a double dose of NyQuil, and he slept. She didn’t. Sammy, whose stuffed-up nose kept him from filling his belly, woke up often and hungry, and she now had throbbing infections in both breasts.

As the sky lightened, she held Sammy sitting upright on the kitchen table, trying to get him to take a bottle. Famished, he snapped at the rubber nipple like a wolf, sucking out what he could before his breath caught in his nose and he snorted down snot, choked and spit out the milk, and wailed. If only he could eat enough, they’d sleep anywhere, even on the floor, and then maybe something other than misery and the wan hope of survival could come of the day.

All the years she’d believed that one day she no longer would feel tormented by the loss of Joshua, she had imagined a future in which she’d magically matured into a newly formed woman. She’d gotten glimpses of that woman—in the weeks when it looked like Marc Jacobs was going to
produce her fragrance, or the two short months in the sunny sublet with a courtyard on Bank Street, or the year she deeply loved an Indian painter named Sameer. She would simply step into this woman, inhabit her, and everything that came before would dissolve. It wouldn’t matter that she’d stupidly convinced herself in the first months of her pregnancy that Clair would call, and she’d explain, and she wouldn’t have to decide about an abortion alone. It wouldn’t matter that she could have told Clair in a letter, or that denial and apprehension, maybe fear, subdued all reason until she scheduled the appointment knowing what they’d say: she was too late. It wouldn’t matter that she never told Scanlon that the news her father delivered before rear-ending the taxi was that Clair’s wife had given birth to twins; she hadn’t told him, or anyone, to evade the silent accusation that her anosmia might have been more about the news than the accident.

But she now knew it all mattered and always would, and she no longer carried the bright certainty that her
real
life was ahead of her. Then she looked at Sammy and hated herself—loathed herself—for feeling this way.

One of her rich New York friends, Louise, had a husband, James, who was a struggling writer. Waiting on line for movie tickets one day, she’d made Naomi laugh. “New York was too distracting for James,” Louise said, “so we moved out to the suburbs. ‘I can’t write in Connecticut,’ he says after six months. ‘
No one
can write in Connecticut.’ So I buy the town-house on West 11th, but he can’t write there because of the kids and the nanny. So I rent him a studio.” She grinned.
“Where he can’t write.”

But she stuck by James, and Naomi understood his struggle. Yes, she’d been inspired by Oregon, but to develop a fragrance, to immerse herself in a creative zone, she needed to be surrounded by other noses, by the industry itself. She needed to be in New York.

Then there was her marriage. She supposed they’d talk. But talking required language and analysis, systems of logic much more evolved than her instinctual olfactory sinews where the smells of Scanlon and Sequoia fucking were firmly lodged. Our most primitive sense, smell was the first to come and the last to go. Babies, born essentially blind, followed their noses to survival; except for humans, mammals born without the sense of smell faced certain death. And for now, her reaction to their fucking was holed up in a primitive lair.

With enough milk in his belly that he was sick of the effort, Sammy clamped his lips closed and twisted away. She opened the shade and
bounced him by the window. Seven-thirty and the fog was so thick that the streetlights were still glowing. Sammy burped, and she opened the kitchen door for the newspapers. The rain was enlivening, and she took a deep breath before stepping back inside. Scanlon would wake up, bleary from NyQuil, and he’d need her. She had to get out.

She would let Sammy fall asleep, then put him in the stroller and escape for a latte. She moved Scanlon’s keys and briefcase off the table, resolving not to be his nurse today. Geoff could do it. She spread out the Douglas paper and, as she read the front page, a slow bubble rose in her heart, her hands forming fists. “Oh my God,” she said aloud. “Clay.”

“It’s a certainty of physics,” Flak had once told him, “that the day after tomorrow could be yesterday.”

On the mattress Clay curled to his side. Streetlight barely illuminated the quarter-moon curve of Naomi’s belly in the photo inches from his face. For him, time funneled into two points: Billy’s death and the birth of Ruby Christine. Although he couldn’t shake the assumption that time was moving forward—proof, Flak would say, that he’d been brainwashed by the system—he sensed that everything in his life was moving backward to those two moments, time reversing so he could return to the hospital and hold tight on to Daria and their baby, refusing to let them go.

Last spring he’d spent a week busting up driveways for a contractor. He’d start jack-hammering near the edge until a crack opened up, then pound away with the chisel until the slab lost its hold on itself and crumbled. This was how he followed the cracks back to the places where wrong things had solidified and hardened in his life, demolishing the hold they had on him.

He’d been backing up the car. Late at night, sleepless on his mattress, he thought with deceptive clarity of how easy it should be to return to the moment and make the car go forward, and if it’s going forward then they’re pulling into the driveway rather than backing onto the road. Through the long night, such thoughts took the place of sleep.

“Fuck it,” Billy had said. “I’m not going.”

“We
have
to,” Clay told him. “It’s for Mom.”

“It’s for
them
,” Billy said. “The army. The government. So they can say they did the right thing.”

Clay had been wearing his father’s blue suit. Yards too big for him, it would fit Billy if he were alive today, stocky and barrel-chested. The suit their father had gotten for his own father’s funeral.

He unknotted the tie—his fourth or fifth attempt at getting the ends to come out right. At seventeen, he’d worn a tie no more than a few times in his life. Billy, fifteen, was lying on his unmade bed doing PlayStation on the old TV. He was wearing his good pants—already too tight—and nothing else. His smooth chest and muscular arms, his defiance.

“Now!” Clay commanded. “You’re gonna make us late.”

“Then go!” His eyes pinned to the TV, his thumbs flicking buttons. “You and Mom can show them how proud we are.”

Clay pounced on his brother, straddling him and punching his chest and ribs as hard as he could.

“Offa me!” Billy covered up but didn’t fight back. “Offa me, you insane fuck!”

But Clay kept pummeling him until Billy finally kicked him off, swatting him in the mouth and splitting open his lip. “Okay!”

Clay licked at the blood. “Get your clothes on, get in the car, and tell Mom she looks nice.” He touched his lip with the back of his hand. “Two minutes. We’re already late.”

From the driver’s seat—his mother sitting behind him in the back—he watched Billy walking stiffly, tight in the ribs, from the kitchen door to the car. Fat raindrops blanketed the car and the wipers slapped on high speed. Waiting for Billy they’d fogged up inside, and Clay flipped the defroster on full blast, but like most things in the old Toyota it didn’t work and they steamed up worse. Billy slumped in the passenger seat, slammed his door, and belted in. When Clay gave him a look, he glanced over his shoulder and said, “You look nice, Ma.”

Clay peered at her in the rearview mirror. Even that was steamed up, so he wiped it clear with a finger. She
did
look nice. With quiet and resigned grace, she was dealing with the day—a Veterans Day celebration honoring her husband and another local vet who’d died that year. He knew she hated it as much as Billy did. The fierce bitterness that gripped her in 1968 had never let go.

Still, her perfume sweetened the dank smell of sodden floormats, and her hair was swept up beautifully. She adjusted her bright floral scarf and straightened the collar of her pink raincoat. “Thanks, dear,” she said. “You boys look nice, too.”

The routine for backing out onto Highway 101 was ingrained in all of them. Never violated. Even King, whose judgment was compromised by the bullet in his brain, would say, “When you boys drive, don’t ever forget how we do this. Never cheat it.”

You backed out through the row of cypress, a tall and thick barrier from headlights and the rumble of trucks, and swung your rear end onto the wide shoulder of packed dirt where the mailman pulled over to reach their box. It had to be a tight, precise turn to stay off the highway but avoid swiping the mailbox. After a hundred times, it became second nature.

The rain had been heavy for twenty-seven days straight—not a record, but extremely wet—and the pullout was muddy, the edge sliding into the drainage ditch. In the last few days, to avoid it, Clay had been swinging out farther from the mailbox and closer to the highway—a matter of half a foot—rolling the driver’s-side tires up on the pavement for traction.

Billy punched on the radio—the Prodigy’s “Firestarter”—and twisted it loud. Shifting into reverse, Clay glanced at the mirror and saw his mother’s closed eyelids quiver, her crow’s feet radiating like cracks through glass, her patience and understanding for her husband and now her boys slowly shattering her from the inside.

Gunning the Toyota backward—they were late—and looking over his shoulder, he turned down the music, but Billy dialed it back up. His mother pressed her temples, and Clay reached forward and switched the radio off, still rolling, seeing only a fogged-up rear window. Normally he would’ve asked her to wipe the glass clear with the rag, but her hands were on her face, her eyes still closed, and Billy blared the radio again. “Goddamnit!” Clay yelled, punching him hard on the shoulder. “Turn it off!” He brushed his sleeve against the window to try to see the side-view mirror, but Billy was shouting over the music: “You’re not the father now!” Backing through the cypress row, he looked past his brother for the mailbox, old galvanized steel the color of fog, and, inching the steering wheel to the right, beginning a blind swing, he was about to tell him to roll down his window when Billy yelled, “You act like my father, like you’ve got authority, but you don’t!”