The Other Oregon

by Steve Anderson

  It was nearly six in the evening. He didn’t want to drive into Pineburg when it was getting dark. Best to start fresh in the morning. At a remote highway turnoff, he passed a roadside motel standing alone. He turned around to stay the night there. The motel had little bungalows, each with a parking spot for a car, chipped pink tiles in the tiny bathroom, barely five channels on TV. Once it was dark out, he walked outside to the edge of the parking lot and stepped onto the dry, flat, and barren red earth that was so unlike the Willamette Valley. He shined his phone flashlight on it. It really was a Mars-scape compared to what he knew. It was colder out here at night than he expected. He looked up and could see that all the stars were back. Emily was right, of course. And he was keeping things sensible—by doing just what she had told him to do on the phone—he had one less thing to ever have to lie about. He looked down. Something was crawling past his feet, long legs, fat body, maybe a spider or a beetle or even a cockroach. He jumped back. It turned for him, came at him. He jumped on the thing with both feet, smashing it with a squirt and leaving an ooze, and headed back to his bungalow shaking his head. That was what he got for looking up.

  9

  Out in a brown field, a homemade billboard read Defend Our Water! It had an image of a trapper bearing a musket but distorted as if someone had tried to reproduce a sketch from a napkin.

  Greg had no clue what that was supposed to be about. It was the next morning. He had driven the two-lane highway heading east, eyeing the vast land around him of scrubby pale grass and knotty shrubs with defiant woods here and there. Highway signs had told him he was in Oregon, but he might as well have been in New Mexico or even Australia. It looked like a set from a western. He had checked his phone: No Coverage. He had tried the radio but got static mostly. The traffic was so sparse that he had hauled ass, not worrying as much about his bike coming loose or a random truck-trailer clipping his protruding, spinning wheels. Here, closer to Pineburg, the highway was running along a dry riverbed. This barren trench was once the Redpine River.

  Defend what water exactly, and whose? Torres was right. He should have had more of a clue. He hadn’t bothered to write about this part of Oregon, of Cascadia possibly, and the truth was it hadn’t even occurred to him. When most people thought of Oregon, they thought of rain and moss and rust, not their opposites. Out here any strike of lightning could cause a wildfire, he did know that much. He also realized that out here most conflicts were contaminated by a critical wound that had been gaping and festering for so long in Oregon—the downturn in the logging industry. He had read up on this quickly before leaving. The loss afflicted everyone, even here. Despite the look of the land around him, there had been logging on the green stretches and mountains of Pineburg’s county. Many Oregon counties were practically founded on timber sales. The decline wasn’t overnight, though, and it had a safety net. For decades, federal timber purchases from within county lands had helped pay for police, prosecutors, health clinics, roads, and other services—they had cut a deal in which the Feds got to share in harvest revenue. But the end of logging in federal forests did come eventually, and it was a slow bloodletting. Congress had approved payments to replace the money and extended it twice, but the bandage could only stop so much hemorrhaging. The later do-nothing, corrupt, partisan Congresses of the 2000s could never agree on a solution, which left many counties facing hundreds of millions in lost revenue and up to fifty percent reductions in budgets and funds. Not to be outdone, many local citizens, feeling particularly maverick and self-destructive, militantly voted down any new taxes that could help and heal the situation while blaming only those outside the region for their troubles. So, Greg figured, the death of logging must have stored up reservoirs full of bad blood for any coming plight such as water. Lines had been drawn, sides taken, feuds fixed. And to certain locals, any outsider from an urban region would always be a living and reviled specter of those Feds and state administrators who had stabbed them—and their ways—in the back, between the ribs, twisting ever deeper to puncture more vital organs, unleashing more and more bloody hatred. Greg could understand their grievances. Some of these people had been in logging for generations. It was all they knew. If someone from outside could have explained it all more clearly, maybe they would have seen what was coming. It was all about education, about learning together. And the chance had been lost.

  A low, old fence lined the road. Dusty cows stood here and there watching Greg’s car whiz by. He honked at a group of them and could have sworn he heard them moo back. Was this their grazing land? It didn’t look very green to him. But, what did he know about cows? They probably knew more about him.

  An old gas station stood at a junction. Long closed, the station had rusting pumps and fading, chipping paint and the usual broken windows, straight out of some clichéd roadside thriller. A newer sedan was parked at an odd angle, all four tires flat, gathering dust, waiting for a tow that might never come. It had government plates. Strange. Greg could only image that predicament.

  After the gas station, the road winded through low hills and straightened out, heading for what looked like the cliff edge of a massive, horizon-wide butte. This revealed itself to be multiple, interconnected buttes forming a rim, and the road descended between two of them. He slowed to take in what he saw before him below. The town of Pineburg was tucked in a canyon. The side closest to Greg was browner like the country he’d just passed through while the other side, beyond the town, was more lush, green, and certainly farmland. The riverbed Greg’s route had followed passed one edge of town along some woods, and Greg saw it reappear on the other side of town as a line of sparkles—over there it had enough water to live on as a stream if not a river. In the middle of town, grand old trees stood in clusters, most near a main street of brick and stone buildings and, standing nearby, a few Victorian houses. This place had probably hit its peak about 1910, Greg thought. Somewhere in town, old iron rails could certainly be found—half-buried and leading nowhere—from the railroad that made this town and left it stranded. Current population: 1,900.

  The road delivered Greg into town. A street sign read Callum Street. This was the main drag. Greg had his pick of so many parking spots that it was hard to choose. He first rolled up in front of a mid-last century storefront with a 1950s brick facade, plate glass, and a fading For Lease sign in the window—surely once a Woolworth’s or J.C. Penney. The spot was in full sunlight though, so he rolled ahead a few spaces under the shade of an oak tree, before a used bookstore with paperbacks out front for a quarter. They were even selling used magazines. How quaint, Greg thought and imagined he already sounded like a pretentious prick-nerd from Portland.

  He checked his phone coverage: barely a bar. He stayed seated in the car to eye this scene, focusing and refocusing as if he had just set down a landing craft on some untraveled planet. The pavement carried little drifts of brown-red dust that exploded into the air as the tiniest funnel clouds. On the other side of the street, he saw an elderly man shuffle along and felt a little disappointed the man wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat.

  Greg mulled over what little he’d learned from his last blur of a phone call with Torres in which the FBI agent had hoped to change his mind. Torres had reported: Ten years ago, before supposedly heading off to Mexico, Donny had arrived in Pineburg with a couple losers he’d known from prison. The two had militia ties from Idaho and had since moved on (one now dead, the other back in jail). But Donny had stuck around. Mexico being some kind of ruse. Donny had become something of a recluse. Meanwhile, the local militia types had come to respect him.

  “Why?” Greg had muttered to Torres.

  “You tell me,” Torres had said, adding before Greg could guess, “He’s recreating himself, that’s what I think. Wouldn’t you if you were him? It’s not about the respect, but what you do with it. For guys like this, it’s all about seeing if you can get people to do what you want.”

  Torres had not told Greg why they believed Donny could still be near Pineb
urg ten years later, which was just as well. Greg would find that out himself. He could act on it himself, in his own way.

  The longer he sat here in his car, the harder it was to get out. He was nervous, he realized. He took a deep breath, gathered his notepad and voice recorder, pulled on a thin blazer that he hoped made him look more professional or at least more reputable since the rest of his outfit showed a sense of irony that might be lost on some here. He had on skinny jeans, green-and-yellow soccer shoes, and a faux-vintage fitted western shirt like a flashy rodeo rider might have worn thirty plus years ago. Underneath his unbuttoned western shirt was a tee shirt that read People’s Republic of Portland, which he had thought could provide a jokey conversation piece, but now he decided could also get him sucker-punched. Plus, attracting too much attention could shut mouths. He buttoned up his shirt under his blazer, then the blazer. He thought about riding his bike, but left it locked to his rack. Pedaling the strip would make him a one-man main-street parade.

  He locked the car and walked the strip. He hit a hardware store and asked the only salesperson, who told Greg he’d never heard of a man named Donny Wilkie. He entered a dress shop, and the kind woman stared at him with his question as if he had four heads. He tried an antique shop where the frail old couple running things from behind a heavy wooden desk only shrugged, no, though they added that they had voted for Wendell Wilkie. That made Greg smile and reconsider the word “quaint” until he noticed that they turned their sign to Closed right after he left. Economy aside, he could see why the older ones in town would be wary of outsiders. North of Pineburg, about thirty years ago, that international New Agey cult called the Rajneeshees had set up shop on harsh land bordering the near-ghost town of Antelope and tried to take over the county for their own. When influence got them nowhere, they attempted to spread salmonella to poison officials and voters so they couldn’t vote against them. Few Americans knew this was the largest biological terror attack in US history. Yet Greg still hadn’t bothered to put it in his book. His Cascadia could never plunge into such an abyss.

  He found a coffee shop. A couple suburban-looking woman were in there and a group of boys with soft faces. The teenage girl holding the fort was eager to help but knew nothing, adding a sorry and a sigh. She was pretty new here herself. He got a coffee, which was better than he expected, which made him feel that twinge of prick-nerdishness again. Why shouldn’t it be good? Outside the wind had picked up, clogging his nostrils with the aroma of the trees and that grit of the brown earth edging the town. But his spirit was winning. So much for getting his ass kicked, he thought as he walked along, feeling looser now, the last of the fall heat helping to relax his muscles. Then again, he would need to get more ballsy and try a bar.

  As he walked along Callum Street, he noticed a pickup truck that wasn’t parked there before. It had two rifles in the cab window. Two rifles! He slowed his pace to stare, wondering if they might just be heavy fishing poles. Nope, rifles. Fighting a nervous grin of awe, he pushed on, making a mental note that the words Carver Farm Supply were painted on the pickup’s door.

  At the next corner stood a chunky sandstone building that looked like a bank from the robber-baron era. A street window sign read Office Space for Lease—Callum Properties, and etched in a cornerstone: Callum Building. City hall was in the building on the second floor. Greg jotted the Callum connections down in his notebook.

  He moved on. At the end of the street, he could see where the town more or less ended, giving way to that rugged and dry brown earth. He sensed something, out of the corner of his eye, and turned to face the brick wall of a building. The bricks had been sprayed over with white primer, to cover something. Under the dull white, Greg could make out, in black: X X.

  Two Xs. Just as Torres had said. Look out for the two Xs. Greg took one step back, unknowingly. Was this just a coincidence? Some sort of random graffiti or even construction markings? In any case, he shouldn’t be seen writing it down. He slid his notepad into his pocket and pretended to rock on his heels, just looking around, checking things out.

  He started back toward the central strip of Callum Street to hit the other end beyond his car. As he passed a vacant lot, he saw a man strutting toward him, a large figure but not tall. Greg kept going. This man was surely just aiming to cross the street. But as the man strutted closer, his hands as squared fists, he corrected his path to track alongside Greg’s. Greg picked up his pace but subtly, hoping it didn’t show. He pretended to gaze around so he could steal a look. The man’s body depicted an epic battle between stout and chubby. He wore tan work wear, but the shirt and pants were too clean, like a uniform. The man stared, his small mouth a hard line. He was maybe ten yards away and strutting parallel with Greg now, like a dog behind a chain-link fence stalking a passerby. Like this the man resembled an overgrown fifth grader looking for someone to beat up on recess, but that stare was showing something far darker. His heavy brow looked like an armor plate, those eyes like dark stones shoved into dough.

  Greg chuckled to himself. This was silly. His imagination was just playing tricks. The man might even be mentally challenged. Greg slowed down. Let the guy come at him if he wanted. They could talk.

  Then Greg noticed: The man had a semi-automatic rifle slung on his shoulder.

  Greg jumped back a step, squinted. It was so surreal to him, he hadn’t even noticed.

  “You looking for something?” said a voice—a female voice.

  Greg whipped around to see a woman of about fifty in a black tee shirt, denim skirt, and cowboy boots—her long, pulled-back hair was darker than the shirt, apart from streaks of gray.

  “Said, can I help you?” the woman said, louder now. “You … understand?” She nodded for him like a good actor in a bad play helping an understudy with his lines.

  Greg realized he hadn’t said anything. He had crouched down, one eye on the man, one eye at her. “That man, he has a weapon,” he muttered.

  “Ah, don’t mind him.”

  “Shouldn’t we do something, call someone?”

  “Who? No one to call. He’s just an open carry—just wants the attention.”

  Greg had only seen open-carry advocates in stories on the Internet. He’d always clicked them away in disgust. The man kept staring back at him as if daring Greg to make one of the five snide remarks that had entered his head.

  “Oh. All right, then,” Greg said, facing the woman. “Hi. Yes. I’m okay, but thanks.” He stood up straight. He smiled for her.

  She smiled. “Good, okay, hi. Way you’re dressed, thought maybe you were one of those Euro tourists who come through. They get lost. Usually wanting the ghost towns up north or turquoise this or that. You looking?”

  “Turquoise? No, thanks.” Greg saw her eyes shift back in the direction of his big new shadow. Was she helping him despite her calm? She might be. “But, I do need a good place to eat,” he added.

  “There you go. The tavern’s good. Just go on back that way, way you’re heading. Go on. Only one this side of the street. That way. That’s it.”

  “Thanks.” Greg started walking that way, and she practically shooed him along like a lost cat. He looked over his shoulder to see her march off down a side street. A few steps further on, he dared to look over his other shoulder.

  The man stood tall at the edge of the vacant lot, holding his ground, one of his fists tight around his gun strap, still eyeing him.

  10

  “Hello? Anyone here?” Greg said, just below a shout. He stood in the middle of the bar, sensing the chilled stillness of the dim and empty watering hole. The sign outside read Tam’s Tavern in blue letters hand-painted over bumps that were once mounts for grander neon letters. The walls had real wood paneling and ghost-town decor with wagon wheels and settlers’ tintype photos. The bar had chromium trim and cracking leather stools.

  “Hello? Anyone here?” Greg repeated, but no one came out the swinging door to the right of the bar. He had a wicked thought like the kind he always u
sed to have. No one seemed to be here. He could go behind the bar, make himself a drink, pocket a bottle or two, even open up the register. Who would know? He would go in back first and make sure no one was in the kitchen. It was only too bad some greenhorn like the young Donny wasn’t here so he could talk him into it. That was even better. That was the way he used to operate. Many people entertained such thoughts, but they denied them. They used to rule Greg’s life, not entertain it. He hadn’t felt them so strong for years. Why now? He wondered if it was nerves. The shock to that order he had so carefully created? Maybe it went along with his rejecting Torres’ authority. Seeing that open-carry guy just now hadn’t helped matters; what was more terrorizing than a stranger strutting around in public bearing a rifle? He shut his eyes a moment, fighting it, took a deep breath.

  “Be right there!” someone shouted from beyond the swinging door.

  The door flung open and the woman from the street came out behind the bar. Greg grinned, and she showed him a grin to match. “Hi again. Want a menu?” she said.

  She introduced herself. She was the Tam on the sign. She was Native American, just as Greg had guessed. To him, it was in the way she spoke as much as her looks. It reminded him of Hawaiians, the words rising and falling in subtly different ways. Tam made him a good ham sandwich with a great house-made pickle. She disappeared in back, leaving him alone to eat. At precisely ten o’clock she came out, placed four bottles of beer and two wrapped sandwiches in a sack, and set them on the counter. Then she went in back again. Soon two guys came in, looking like ex-hippies to Greg, grabbed the bag and shouted, “Thanks!” Tam shouted from the back, “Welcome, boys—eat the sandwiches or I’m cutting you off,” and the two giggled and tumbled out the door like teens busted for leaving the toilet seat up. Greg wanted to follow them and buy them more beers, maybe smoke a joint even. Get them talking.