The Oregon Experiment Read Online Free Page B

forward and released a long watery stream of spit onto the grass. “People who come here to lecture Oregon kids on what’s what according to New York.”
    Slowly chewing a berry, Scanlon kept his eyes on Clay, who’d be more intimidating if not for the tender voice. Scanlon’s mentor, Sam Belknap, would pounce on this moment. He’d told Scanlon the only way he’d nailed the book on César Chávez, the
definitive
Chávez book, was to challenge and befriend him until eventually (and with an egomaniac like Chávez it didn’t take long) he started showing off; that’s when the rhetoric fell away and he revealed himself unintentionally. “How about if you come talk to one of my classes this fall?” Scanlon said. “I do a unit on anarchy.”
    The kid snorted, a high-pitched, stalling-engine laugh. “You teach
anarchy
at the
university
?”
    “Or we could do an interview.”
    This, apparently, struck the kid as even more absurd.
    “For my book.”
    The mover laughed again. He brought the joint to his lips, and his head twitched—some sort of tic—but he held his hand steady until he got a hit.
    The smell of pot smoke in the dense fog carried Scanlon back to Sam’s porch in Bronxville in the weeks after his wife had died. The spring Sam retired, Maxine was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and lasted only until November. At the funeral, Sam looked to have aged a decade, and when Scanlon checked in on him after his family had left, he was distracted and forgetful, so Scanlon canceled his classes and stayed in the spare room for a week. He cooked for Sam and got him out to movies, and they spenthours every day talking radical action and mass movements, talking about books Sam wished he’d written and Eastern European cities he’d planned to visit in the coming years with Maxine. Scanlon cleaned out closets and repaired an old gate-leg table in the basement shop—Sam had taught him woodworking over the years. He made drinks for guests and ushered them out when Sam grew tired. And when out of the blue Sam said, “I haven’t toked up in twenty-five years,” he went down to NYU and inquired with some former students until he scored, then he and Sam passed a pipe in an icy fog, and stories of the seventies quickly turned to the sixties before settling into the beatnik years in the Village early in Sam’s marriage. For two days he described Maxine with awe, still mystified by her a half-century later—snaking her hips and shoulders when she danced, playing the flute to Coltrane, dabbing a fleck of tobacco off her tongue with a pinkie and flicking it with a long painted nail, starting
Lolita
one night in the soft chair by the radiator and staying up until breakfast to finish, then doing the same a week later with
The Ugly American
. Without knowing he was doing it, Sam showed Scanlon what it meant to fall in love, then fall deeper, to keep falling.
    Clay blew a plume of smoke into the fog, and Scanlon reached forward until the joint was placed in his fingers. He sucked in a couple quick hits and the smoke expanded in his lungs. Holding back a cough he said, “I just thought I’d give you the opportunity. Express your views. I don’t give a shit.”
    He reached back with the roach, but Clay said, “All yours,” and brushed by him, heading back to the house. Watching him pass between the patio and the garage, Scanlon took another hit, then rolled the roach between his thumb and fingers until it scattered at his feet. Clay paused at the garage window. Paused, or was time getting sluggish? The birds were slurring, the fog seemed thicker, more soupier. And just as Scanlon thought, Shit, I’m very stoned, the kid lifted his elbow like a wing and popped it through the glass.
    Scanlon sprang toward him—“What the fuck!” he shouted—but Clay had vanished through the fog. The gate latch clunked, and he heard feet whisking in the grass. He looked down. He was walking, his shoes were wet. When he looked up, half his face