The Other Oregon

by Steve Anderson

  Armed Double Cross militia, led by Wayne, hoist the two Xs Double Cross flag atop Pineburg dam.

  Donny rides a horse across vast green ranch land that surrounds all the town. All cattle are stamped with the two Xs.

  Donny marches out of Pineburg City Hall and into a convertible limo. Gunnar sits in the limo, smiling.

  The limo travels Callum Street and people line it to cheer. The limo turns a corner into, suddenly: Downtown Portland. The big city.

  The limo rolls down Broadway. Greg Simmons rides with Donny now.

  In a palace, Greg and Donny dine on lavish meals. They party with hot models. Fat cats and suck-ups offer them stacks of money.

  And in an opulent marble courtroom, Donny watches as Greg, now a judge, pronounces a verdict: Guilty! The defendant: Also Greg.

  “It’s about time, oh, you bet it is. It’s about damn time we thought about taking this all back!” Wayne was shouting now. “State Capital can have its green valley! Portland, keep your Socialist People’s Republic! Go on! Go on git! We’ll be just fine here without ya!”

  Hearing this last part, Donny felt his surge getting sucked away …

  Wayne was taking it too far. Sure, any talk of secession was protected by free speech, but it had to remain idle talk. Donny jerked back to reality in fits and starts, like he’d slipped on a carpeted stairway in socks and was plummeting down. Wayne’s harsh, provoking proclamations blurred as one with the roaring crowd. Donny couldn’t stop any of it. He had helped to create this, and now he was going to have to ride it out. He might have to fend for himself after all. Scenarios flashed in his head. One involved calling that man at the FBI. Another involved Greg Simmons.

  People were clapping again. Donny made himself clap. He looked out across the hollering crowd.

  Casey and Damon were moving through the crowd bearing flags—flags with two Xs on them. That was no good either. That was no good at all.

  Donny looked to Greg. He just had to.

  Greg only stared back, slack-jawed, his mouth stuck open.

  19

  After the rally, Greg drove back to the Callum house. He took his time, sticking to the speed limit as if his life depended on it—like a man who’d narrowly missed getting in a horrific accident and was still in shock. He wrestled with his anger. He told himself not to take what he’d just seen personally. The biases he had witnessed out in that field reached far beyond him and Donny and had been a long time coming. Before he had left for the rally, Tam had made sure he understood: It was no accident that some in rural Oregon had turned so bitter, so repelled. The logging downturn of the 1970s had blackened hearts and minds by sending rural economies into a decline from which they never recovered. The 1980s brought a recession to urban areas, while rural communities that only knew logging got a full-blown depression. People in Portland and the valley had no idea. Neither the timber industry nor the government had seen it coming—or planned for it. As the remaining lumber and paper mills shut down, tens of thousands of high-paying union jobs vanished, small businesses went under, and once shiny main streets faded out. The prosperous small town had become a term of nostalgia. Those hit hardest never got a good explanation of what was happening to their world. All they knew was, they’d trusted the man they never should’ve trusted and that goddamn man turned out to be the last man they ever should have trusted. People needed someone to blame. To out-of-work loggers and mill workers, the easy scapegoats were the environmentalists and their lawsuits that halted old growth logging to protect the last ancient forests and defend endangered species like the spotted owl. A coalition of timber corporations, chambers of commerce, conservative politicians, and unions did their manipulative best to incite people, organizing log truck convoys and rallies to protest Federal Court rulings on the spotted owl and the environmentalists’ efforts. All the while, any outsiders with green tendencies, who were henceforth known as city-loving, latte-drinking elitists—a caricature that became the enemy when the bitter truth was that corporate forces beyond local control had destroyed the good old order. Meanwhile, to soothe the hard-hit, the angry, and the lost, large new non-denominational churches and right-wing movements stepped in, wrapping the cross in the flag. Pineburg had one of these churches, Tam said, on the clean side of town and indiscreet, like a small Costco and bearing a modest cross on its corrugated roof. Somehow, a seemingly caring church complemented a paranoid political worldview, whether it meant to or not. Feminism, gays, “liberalism” and silly threats of socialism were to blame for all. People passed the good word: Society had to return to a simpler, better time with values that matched those in the small town. And with that groundwork set, in stepped the national political machinery with sophisticated campaigns that delivered the wackos to the center and gave even a militia movement credibility among those who had never known anything but an unjust world that only wanted to destroy them and only them. Now it was their time to fight back.

  Greg had let Tam lecture him. People like him deserved it. They all did, for dismissing what had been coming for so long. Federal crackdowns after the Waco siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, and then 9/11 especially had kept the Oregon militias low-key, but episodes like the Klamath River controversy of 2002 started showing them new paradigms, prototypes, role models. That year had brought a severe drought, and yet the Feds went ahead and shut off dam water that fed the quarter-million acres of farmland in the Klamath basin, so that what was left of the suckerfish and the Coho salmon runs could survive. It was all to the letter, all according to the Endangered Species Act. Longtime farmers were enraged, confused, feeling like their futures had been stolen from them. They formed a symbolic 10,000-person bucket brigade. They took saws and blowtorches to dam gates and fought with US marshals. The water was turned on and off, on and off, as various national interests found a way to make this serve them; and the whole process fell into vicious litigation involving farmers and ranchers, environmental concerns, Native American groups. At the same time, the farmers’ rallies and protests became a recruiting ground for those believing themselves the true patriots. Anyone else became the enemy, if not the devil. Anyone else never should have been trusted in the first place. The sentiment trickled north to Pineburg. Ranching and farming had become tougher than ever, and water issues weren’t helping. Water meant everything. Water would be the new logging. In Pineburg, water came from a complicated network of wells, irrigation canals, reservoirs. It was all about water rights. About who controlled the water. That crucial person ran not just the economy but determined survival itself.

  “There is some salmon here,” Tam had told Greg. “Just bones found mostly. We’ve never had much of it, but the rumor now is that the Feds are looking at calling it endangered here. It makes relicensing a lot tougher for the Callums.”

  “Pineburg is a different deal though,” Greg had countered. “These people want a private dam to remain as is, never demolished, want it protected like Fort Knox and think it’s entitled to relicensing no matter what—even though letting it flood out would give everyone far more water than the irrigation flow from the dam ever would.”

  “True. The problem is, it would flood some of the Callum land.”

  “But, it would bring way more to those wells and canals on the other side of town. Wouldn’t it? Am I missing something here?”

  “No, you’re not. Probably, yes.” Tam had shaken her head. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is power. The ones in power got people here thinking they’re allies, always had been. Power flows faster and stronger than any water. Every land’s different, but the result’s always the same.”

  “It’s against their best interests,” Greg muttered.

  “And yet they fight all the harder for it.”

  And the upshot was sickening, Greg thought. All of it—the logging troubles, the bad blood, the Feds’ missteps, other groups’ stubbornness, the water issue, and the militia—in the end it led straight to that meth that sucked out kids’ brains.

 
Greg was glad he’d seen that rally. He was grateful he had to witness Wayne up there. He knew better now why he was here. It wasn’t just about getting Donny not to talk. It wasn’t even about keeping Donny and his disciple Wayne from doing something stupid. It was about keeping a dark past from persisting forever. Greg was partly to blame. Years ago, the juvenile version of himself had been the one egging on Donny, pushing Donny to become the ultimate expression of himself, acting like some Nietzschean Dr. Frankenstein looking to put the superman principle into practice in real life. He hadn’t ever put it to Donny this way, but that was what it was. It had started with one stupid twenty-five cent paperback Greg had read when he was fourteen, Mastering the Will to Power or some such bullshit, basically 1970s self-help on acid but gone rancid, tainted neofascist. One’s raw ego could be unleashed with no compassion for the weak. Greg had attempted to create something unstoppable out of the unformed clay that had been Donny Wilkie, his very own Golem. Their Übermensch ways could rise above all the shit that kept others down, simply because normal human nature was so fallible. Then Greg gave it up, and early, like a brooding college sophomore chucks his sudden contrarian devotion to Ayn Rand, so much mental masturbation and callousness preached to others only making life worse. The incident at the lake had made him give it up. He had come to see that all he was doing was just being an asshole, a juvenile one at that. So, he had grown up. This was really the whole point of Cascadia. Stop being an asshole. Look after one another as equals. Learn to adapt to the world and your place in it.

  Donny now stood on the wrong side, the doomed side. Greg had a duty, he realized. He had to try to persuade Donny to come around and help impede what Donny had conjured from his very own golem, Wayne Carver. He knew Donny wasn’t idealistic, probably never would have even bought some bullshit self-help paperback. He didn’t get his methods from Nietzsche or Golem lore but simply from the need to survive. To cut deals. Donny was more pragmatic.

  Greg hoped. He wasn’t stupid. If he couldn’t convince Donny to control Wayne, then the real threat could become Wayne. Greg might even have to deal with Wayne in a way that Wayne incited, asked for, deserved. There were no empirical rules for this. There were morals and then there was survival. No one could know about the lake, Wayne especially. Greg would do anything. He didn’t want to think about the Nietzschean implications of that. Screw that. An unformed, unreal version of him had done that deed at the lake a long time ago—an altogether different person really, so why should his real self suffer now?

  The sun was going down, leaving the Callum house in purple twilight. Donny’s king cab was parked out front. Greg didn’t know if Karen was there; he realized he had never seen her car, she was gone so much. He parked along the side of the driveway, hoping he wasn’t blocking her way, and went inside without knocking.

  He found Donny in the study, sitting in a cowhide chair. Donny cradled a whiskey in his lap and had one poured out for Greg on the desk, having heard Greg coming no doubt. Greg ignored the offering. He could already see this was going to be harder than he thought. Donny sat slumped and even showed Greg a pout. As if he could be penitent. Greg considered just strolling right back out and leaving.

  Donny held up one hand flat as if to testify in court. “Okay, call me guilty,” he said. “It’s true. Charlie Adler supports the idea of secession.”

  An incredulous grunt escaped from Greg. Not the way he wanted to sound right now, but Donny had fired the first shot. “Secession from what?” Greg said. “Tell me that.”

  “From the state. From the Feds. You know.”

  “As put forth by Wayne Carver.”

  Donny sat up. “And how’s that so different from your pie-in-the-sky Cascadia deal?”

  “Where should I start? It’s not a militia. We don’t condone violence. We, it—”

  “Who says it has to get violent?” Donny stared a beat, holding Greg’s gaze. “Who? Who?” Donny repeated the words, jabbing at air with his index finger.

  Greg sighed. “I just want to know one thing. Did they give Charlie Adler support first? Or did Charlie Adler bring them the idea?”

  “I guess I don’t know what you mean there, Greg.”

  “When you first got here. I’m just thinking of the whole chicken or egg scenario. That was some years ago, right?”

  “Boy, come on. They’re just letting off steam. Like they’re reenactors, you know? In any case, I talked to Wayne about your car and bike and he admits it. Says he’ll leave you alone.”

  “Whatever. I heard better bullshit at that rally today.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Greg grabbed his waiting whiskey and gulped, his lips stinging, wet. He wiped his mouth and Donny watched him, a sick, snickering smile growing on his face.

  The smile made Greg realize something. He blurted: “You were the one. You recruited those two guys from the woods.”

  “Hey, hold on. ‘They’ recruited Casey and Damon, not me,” Donny said.

  “‘They’ meaning Wayne?”

  “If you want to put a face on it, yes.”

  “So, were ‘they’ the ones who played your little trick on the Feds or whoever?”

  Donny didn’t answer. He looked cold, his shoulders drawn in.

  “Were you with them? No? You weren’t with them?”

  “No. Hell, no.”

  “And Gunnar?”

  “Fuck, no!” Donny slumped down and shrunk, seeming to lose ten pounds in seconds.

  Greg sat on the edge of the desk.

  Donny snorted. He shook his head.

  “It all goes back to Loren Callum,” he said finally. “The man was a big supporter of this. Them. Always had been, going back decades. I promised him that I would stay true to it.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead and from all kinds of shit—so don’t go and think what you’re thinking. He had kidney, blood, heart issues well before I got here.”

  “I wasn’t thinking it, Donny.”

  “Well, that’s all it was. A promise. And, okay, a little survival luck to boot. It’s a damn cliché, but he always wanted a living son no matter what Karen did for him. But it’s not like I’m their damn Führer or something. You saw Wayne up there.”

  “And I saw you back there behind him.” Greg drank up the last of his whiskey, directed it straight down his throat without spill, warm and charging, straight to his belly and heart.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You do want me to help you, somehow, right? That’s what you said.”

  “Did I?” Donny said. “Well, what the fuck do I know?”

  Why should Donny trust him? What could he do for Donny? Greg thought it out. He could go to Torres, hat in hand, and plea for some kind of arrangement for Donny. But would Donny ever consider becoming an informant or some kind of special witness? Greg wondered if Torres would only go after him for doing this his own way.

  He stayed at the Callum house that night. He was in bed when he heard what had to be Karen coming home late so he lay still, listening for any sign of argument, laughter, something. All he heard were the crickets outside. He couldn’t sleep now, again, so he clicked on the nightstand lamp and stared at the old photo of him, Donny and Leeann Holt at seventeen. Studying Leeann’s defiant yet feminine charm. He wondered what Leeann would make of all this. He might have been the one influencing Donny back then, but she had been the one spurring on both him and Donny. Her ability to walk and talk and party like a fully-formed, badass adult had been something every late teen aspired to. So why didn’t he stick with her? Why did he leave her to Donny? He lay in bed going over it, but he never got the answer.

  The next morning Greg slept late, till nine. Donny and Karen had already left, each leaving separately, Greg guessed. He wandered the house, made sure no one was home. Then he went outside, out back. Laying awake, he had realized one thing: Since Donny was connected to the Double Cross, his son Gunnar could be implicated too when they acted up again. Th
at was not fair. It also left Greg with other questions about Gunnar. Gunnar was almost nineteen, which meant he was born not too long after Greg and Donny had gone their own ways—not long after Leeann went running to Donny.

  Greg entered the ranch outbuilding and approached Gunnar’s finished room inside. He knocked. No one home? He tried the door. It opened.

  Gunnar’s room was the usual mess of posters for metal bands Greg had never heard of, paintball equipment, video game setup, computers. Drop this into any house in the Portland suburbs and you’d never know it was in a glorified barn in rural Oregon. Greg turned a lamp on. He looked around for photos but found little indication of Gunnar’s past, of course. He meant to leave the closets and dresser drawers alone—he was only going to snoop a little. But, turning to leave, he spotted something protruding from behind the dresser.

  A narrow black handle and rod. He thought it might be a fireplace poker.

  He tiptoed over to it.

  He grabbed the handle and pulled out the thing, which was iron and heavy.

  A branding iron? It had to be. At the end were the two Xs of Double Cross. He held it up to the light to be sure and set it back in its place behind the dresser.

  Once outside, Greg settled on the back porch in a rocking chair and went over his notes, making sure he still had enough to make it look like he was doing research should anyone come asking. He rocked and rocked in the chair, wondering why Gunnar had a Double Cross branding iron. What the hell were they going to do with that?

  He sensed something, to his right.

  Gunnar stood at the end of the porch watching Greg. For how long, Greg didn’t know. It gave him a jitter, but he fought it with a smile and waved Gunnar on over. Gunnar, his shoulders set, took measured steps to reach Greg. He stopped before Greg and stood so rigidly that Greg felt like he should tell him to stand at ease.

  “Thanks for taking care of that paint on my clothes,” Greg said.