The Oregon Experiment (49 page)

He stared at the picture, waiting, curled up in the belly of the beast.

They must’ve been watching Clay for some time. Someone who knew about the SUVs might have talked, maybe Panama himself. But now Clay had disappeared, and to find him they’d threatened Scanlon and Naomi with aiding and abetting a terrorist. “Twenty years, maybe thirty,” the female agent had said last night, then looked at Naomi. “You’d need to make arrangements for your son.”

She screamed and charged the agents, but Scanlon jumped in front of her just in time. Her arms were flailing, and he caught her fingernail under his eye, and when he got her settled down on the couch, she started growling, her eyes pinned on the agents still standing inside the front door, apparently unruffled. A trickle of blood dripped from Scanlon’s cheek, dotting his white shirt.

The man was squinting at the blown-up photo of the Yucca Mountain protests. “Is that you in this picture, Mr. Pratt?”

Scanlon considered spilling everything—the SUVs, the wires hooked to the timer, the pipe-bomb comment at the hardware store, even the branch on Fenton’s car, for God’s sake—but held his tongue. The Feds were clearly making no distinctions between the torched SUVs, the Oregon Experiment, anarchists from Seattle, and Clay’s disappearance. It was all the same, and anything he said would heap more trouble on what they already knew about Clay. And with every word he spoke, he saw them working connections back to Sequoia and himself, even to Naomi. How much did they see that morning she was in his apartment?

Scanlon had known. Damnit, he’d known. But there was no chance of talking Clay out of it. His only choice would have been to turn him in.

The agent had waved the copy of the hardware-store receipt.

“Fish tanks,” Scanlon repeated.

“You better hope so.”

Since last night they’d strategized, considering scenarios and various plans to protect themselves. They hadn’t slept or changed clothes or brushed their teeth.

“I could ask my father about a lawyer,” he said in the dark kitchen,
peering out the blinds. Up and down their block the houses were strung with Christmas lights, but Scanlon hadn’t dared go out even for a tree.

“Bad idea.” Naomi was searching through the fridge. “Maybe Sam knows someone in New York?”

When he’d determined there were no strange cars on the street, Scanlon switched on the ceiling light. He picked at the bloodstain on his shirt.

At the counter, Naomi sniffed a chicken carcass that had been in the fridge for a week. She got a good grip on the remaining thigh, cracked it back against the bone, and tore it off. She bit into the meat, barbecue sauce running down her chin, and reached out to Scanlon with what was left.

He woke with the sensation of falling, his heart racing. It was time. Shimmying along the steel rib, he felt like he’d already succeeded. He bounded up the catwalk and leaned his hip into the panic bar on the door, surprised there were so few lights outside. At the far end of the dam, under floodlights, the cement workers were skim-coating a parking area. He stuck the hose back through the doorway, walked down to the truck, and put his hand on the kinepaks through the tarp. Then he drove the hundred yards back to the building without headlights, off-loaded the boxes and stacked them along with his duffel inside the stairwell door, pulled in the hose, and looked up into the dim lights. Rain had started to fall. He breathed in the smell before letting the steel door close.

One at a time, Clay shouldered the boxes and descended the three flights. He stuffed a loaded PVC tube in his jeans and stepped off the catwalk onto the steel shelf. If he dropped one, the game was over, so he moved carefully and wedged the tube tightly into the gap between the concrete and the I-beam. He shuttled back and forth like this, one kinepak at a time, then attached the wire clusters as his father had taught him years ago. He wished again he had the Chandler G-99 det cord, but the grim dude from Portland did not give second chances. He took a lantern battery and a roll of wire from his duffel. Clenching the wire in his teeth, he shimmied out to the third I-beam and twisted the connections.

Just a crack, he reminded himself. Concrete—preferred by governments for their prisons and barriers, for plazas and monoliths to celebrate their power—crumbles when pressure is exerted on a weak point. When he fell into dreams, he sometimes saw his forearms and hands gripping a jackhammer, following a crack that was opening faster and wider, and then
the river rushing through. He’d already dreamed his success tonight. The crack would take him back in time—to Billy, to the river restored. Everything returned to its natural state.

Sequoia awoke suddenly, thinking she’d heard a tap on the glass. Her body ached. She walked straight to the front window and peered through the curtain.

The brown car was back.

Then, with the first panicked thud of her heart, her daughter let out a piercing, primal cry and she rushed to the bedroom. Trinity was sitting up, her naked back heaving. She took her into her arms. “Just a dream,” she said. “Did it scare you?” Trinity shook her head, gasping for air between sobs. She was burning up with fever. Sequoia lifted her shirt, but Trinity refused to nurse, wailing inconsolably into her mother’s chest, pushing her fists into her cheeks, one of them closed white-knuckle-tight around Clay’s lead soldier.

It was midnight, but she dialed the number anyway, holding her sobbing child to her chest. After five rings she heard her father’s groggy voice: “Dr. Beckmann speaking.”

“It’s me.”

“Marcia?”

“I need help.”

The detonators were on a three-hour timer. He would get off the dam and make the phone call immediately, giving them plenty of time to evacuate. As he finished the wiring, a drop of water landed on his wrist. Then another on his shoulder. His detonating system was foolproof except, he realized, for the exposed twists of wire. If he’d had the Chandler G-99s, water wouldn’t be a concern, but with what he’d devised, as soon as he hooked up the battery a drop of water could short-circuit the whole thing—and it would blow. First rule: no one gets hurt. Never cheat it, his father had always warned.

The water was dripping from puddles overhead left by the power washer. He’d packed three concentrations of explosives behind three I-beams, with three connections. He checked the first set. Dry. He covered them with the Gap hat, then shimmied out to the next I-beam. Dry again,
and he unknotted his bandanna, folded it in quarters, and laid it over the wires. Arriving at the farthest load, he looked himself up and down, but he had nothing left. It would draw too much attention to drive off the dam without a shirt—how many people
hadn’t
seen his face in the paper? Too dangerous on this narrow shelf so high above the abyss to take off a boot and get a sock. So he took the photo of Naomi from his pocket, creased it down the middle, and placed it like a little roof over the wires.

On the catwalk he zipped his duffel and hung it over his shoulder, then made the final connections. First the clock. Toggles dangled from the alarm—two quick twists of wire and it was hooked up. Finally the battery—hot, then neutral, and the system was live. He’d done it.

He took a moment to admire his work: the kinepaks neatly situated at twenty-foot intervals. Three explosions, a quarter-second apart. He took a final look over the rail of the catwalk, where concrete and steel faded to infinite blackness in a shaft to hell. But the updraft from the turbines carried the wild, fresh smell of the river he was about to set free. He leaned farther over the rail, looking down, and a birdlike fluttering caught his eye—it was the picture of Naomi, pushed up on the rising air, then fluttering down, then pushed up again in the vast empty space at the heart of the dam.

As he watched the photo’s flight, a drop of water splashed on his cheek, and he jerked his head to the far connection as a dim spark flickered across the wires, and if not for the turbines he would’ve heard an electrical buzz before the first load blew, launching him backward. He heard the railing groan as it bent, then the snap of his spine. He saw the second explosion flash silently just ahead of the smoke from the first, silent because his eardrums were in tatters. Instinct told him to brace for the third, but when he tried to grip the steel grating, his fingers and hands weren’t there. Two explosions so far—one more to come, the closest one—but he wouldn’t see it because his eyes were on fire and couldn’t distinguish darkness from light. He tasted scorched gunpowder and cinders, and then those tastes were overpowered by a bloody surge up his throat, the taste of his stomach, his bowels. And the
smell
! Sulfur, singed hair, burnt flesh, the tissues of his spleen, heart, and lungs—and, yes, the acrid, dry, concrete dust. He’d done it. Just two explosions had busted open the dam. He smelled the river. The final charge blew, and its force lifted Clay up, lifted him on a warm, buffeting wind, then set him down peacefully, at last. Sleep.

S
he blew on the scrambled eggs until they were cool, then tipped them from the plate onto the high-chair tray. Sammy swatted at the eggs and smacked fistfuls into his mouth. Scanlon bit into a piece of toast, leaning over the kitchen sink and holding his tie carefully to his stomach. He was wearing his new suit.

Naomi had planned to set up her organ this morning—it would be good to unpack her essences in the stale-smelling nook off their bedroom—but now she thought she’d lie down with Sammy for his nap instead. There was no hurry on the organ anyway. Blaine Maxwell had promised her all the frog juice she wanted. She’d get back to work when she started sleeping better.

“I’ll drop the car at the shop,” Scanlon said, “and they’ll drive me to the train, but can you pick me up at the station? Probably the 6:51 or the 7:19. I’ll call you from the city.” He pecked Sammy’s forehead, then hers. She wished him luck, and while Sammy finished eating, she listened to him scraping ice off the car.

He had a meeting with a publisher today, “to see if there’s a book in it.” There were issues of rights—the
Oregonian
was making claims to the story
and so was the
Washington Post
. Lawyers were involved. Still, Scanlon was pretty confident there
was
a book in it.

She’d had some meetings of her own in the last month. She didn’t mention the frog juice, but she told them her nose was back and she might be on to something. She needed a good prototype before she said more; she’d have to start over again. The fragrance that was so compelling in Douglas, Oregon, didn’t seem right in Helman, New Jersey. Too much Clay in it.

She’d betrayed Clay to rediscover her love for her husband. She’d betrayed him for Scanlon’s career, and her own, to get them back east where they belonged. She’d betrayed him for her family. This was something he never would’ve done. Although she recognized the bitter selfishness of the sentiment, she missed him. He’d been in love with her. And that one morning she’d loved him as only a woman can, and that love had nurtured her as well, even helped to expel demons that had been gnawing at her for eighteen years. Which wasn’t to suggest he didn’t smell like danger. He did. But he also smelled like life—life when she’d felt dead.

She hoped he never saw the article, never knew the brunt of her betrayal. “We’re better than that,” Scanlon had quoted Clay as saying. She hoped he died still believing it of her.

Scanlon also wrote that Clay had developed a psychosomatic tic out of guilt and loss over his brother and Ruby Christine. Although he stopped short of referencing a “ghost baby,” she knew he was really thinking about her nose.

While she wasn’t sure if he was right about that—or if it mattered—she did know he understood her, believed in her, as no one else ever had. She loved him: his mind, his heart, his instincts as a father and husband, his smell. Their infidelities and rage now seemed as distant as her walks around Douglas, bending down to smell rain-misted rosemary and woolly apple mint, the Pacific breeze lifting salt air and cedar and the sap of young firs over the coastal range and down into the valley.

She picked spilled eggs out of Sammy’s lap and took off his bib. She wiped his hands and face, then put the washcloth to her nose and recoiled: mildew. She parted the curtain and examined each car parked out front. She submerged the washcloth in a glass of water and poured in an ounce of bleach.

·   ·   ·

On the train into New York, Scanlon opened his leather satchel and took out the notebook in which a month ago he’d recorded everything that Naomi had told him about Clay. He started reading from the beginning, but his thoughts quickly turned to the call he’d received from the
Oregonian
editor two days after publication. “Highest bidder,” he’d said. “Bizarre timing. Sometimes you get lucky.” They’d just sold Scanlon’s article to the
Washington Post
, who wanted him to add another thousand words on the dam, and they’d run the rest in their Sunday magazine as is. The editor spoke in a flurry, and Scanlon didn’t ask him to explain the parts he wasn’t grasping—
bizarre timing, tremendous explosion, more than a coda to the story
—because he knew, in the way Naomi knew things with her nose, that something very bad was linked to his own good luck.

But by the end of the conversation he understood exactly what had happened, and in tears, holding Naomi, he said, “He was just a kid.” She was crying so hard she couldn’t get a breath, and that night he woke to the sounds of her sobbing in her sleep.

For days they prowled the house like animals, waiting for the FBI to pound down their door. Despite the fact that no one came, no one called, they were still, always, waiting.

After talking to an editor at the
Post
, he’d phoned Sam Belknap, and an hour later got a call from the poli sci chair at Rutgers. “This is more detail than you need,” the chair said, “but our new hire was banging a freshman in his office during exam week when the department secretary walked in on them. Very sordid. Budget cuts as they are these days, I don’t want to lose this line, so we’re doing an accelerated search. We’ll want to wait for the article in the
Post
and see whatever else you’re working on, but could you fly in just after the new year? How’s Sam, by the way? He’s a dear friend.”