The Other Oregon

by Steve Anderson

  “There’s another thing,” Greg said. “I went back to the spot.”

  Donny’s head whipped around. Greg paused so Donny could comment, but he got nothing.

  “The first time I came here, I stopped there on the way and I dug it up,” Greg added.

  Torres had told him the house wasn’t bugged. To be double sure, Greg would only let himself say this outside on the porch.

  They glared at each other, their hands grasping at the chair arms. Greg felt all tight and numb inside, a clash of sadness and defiance.

  “Then I covered it back up again,” he said.

  Donny nodded. He kept grasping at the chair arms as if they had oil on them and he couldn’t get a tight hold. One of his eyelids twitched.

  Greg threw back his whiskey and set down the cup.

  “Why you telling me this?” Donny said.

  “I want you to know. Also, I wanted to see how you would react.”

  Donny stared. He shook his head. He stared at the porch planks a long time. Greg gave him all the time he needed. He picked up his cup and poured another. Donny still had not rebounded. Greg took his cup to the railing and watched Gunnar. Gunnar was staring back at them with his rifle barrel pointed down, good and safe. It was too far for Greg to make out Gunnar’s face, his mood. He held up a hand. Gunnar held up his free hand. Greg sensed Donny. He turned back around.

  Donny was gazing up at him, his eyes sunken. He looked paler and a little shrunken.

  “The Double Cross, they …” he began to say but fell silent, his lips clamped together, his chin a quivering knot.

  The Double Cross, meaning Wayne, Greg guessed. Greg leaned his rear against the railing. He’d give Donny a second.

  “The Double Cross,” Donny said, “they’re looking to show that they won’t back down. That they’re not just a bunch of yayhoos.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Another prank.” Donny shook his head at that as if he’d accidentally made a joke. “I can’t believe it.”

  “You say it like they’re going egging.”

  “It’s not. It’s suicide,” Donny said.

  “When are they going to do it?”

  “Soon. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “If they get their shit together. Even if they don’t, they’ll still go and do it,” Donny said. He was peering at Greg, studying his face. He added, “Here’s the deal. I’m thinking about going to the authorities, telling them everything I know.”

  Greg kept his face a grim mask. He let his eyebrows raise a little. The trick with Donny and any guy like him was, Greg had to go easy. Donny had to think that what Greg needed him to do was actually his own idea, fully and without doubt. “I’m not going to tell you to go to the authorities,” Greg said. “It has to be your decision. But, I think you should think long and hard before you do it.”

  “This time around,” Donny said.

  “This time around what?”

  “It has to be my decision.”

  Donny had meant this to smart. He might as well have reached over and slapped Greg across the jaw. Greg’s eyeballs had heated up. “I get it, Donny,” he muttered. “I get it.”

  “Do you? The fuck you do. You really don’t know the name Charlie Adler, do you? It was the first fake ID you ever gave me. So I guess the name really stuck with me.”

  “Look, I …” Greg stared at the planks now. His thoughts scrambled and the good Oregon whiskey wasn’t helping. He glanced back at the field. Gunnar had picked up his gear and was trudging over to them. Greg had to act fast. He turned back to Donny, put on half a smile.

  “We really have to get beyond all that, you and me. Why don’t we do something together? Just me and you. A hike or something, go for a float.”

  “Anything but snowboarding. That right?” Donny smiled.

  Greg smiled. “That’s right. Plus, gives you a good alibi in case The Double Cross do something stupid. Who we kidding? It’s Wayne we’re talking about.”

  Donny nodded at that. “Why would I need an alibi? Who’m I telling it to?”

  “Everyone needs one. To anyone who’s listening. There has to be good camping around here.”

  “You fucking hate camping,” Donny said with a grumpy little rumble in his throat.

  Greg held up a finger. “No, see, that’s where you’re wrong. I used to hate camping. But I keep telling you—I’m not that guy you used to know.”

  37

  Leeann Holt was back in the Main Library again. She finally got an Internet terminal after waiting forty minutes. Hers was on the end of a long table of terminals with people passing by and some brushing by her like she was just a chair back. She’d been coming here more. The truth was, being in her parents’ foreclosed home was beginning to freak her the fuck out. That damn house was dim and damp and drafty and cold in the rooms where she wasn’t, like the parts of her half-empty bed when she stretched out, trying to get back to sleep, feeling for someone who wasn’t there.

  Her dad used to tell her he wished she would’ve gone out for sports because she would have been good at them. He also used to tell her she should have played an instrument because she would have been good at that considering how much she listened to music—junk music, he called it, but music just the same. She should have taken more math classes because the world needed more lady scientists, he said, emphasizing the lady part as if that was the real goal. Her mother telling dad she’d become a lady in her own good time. She wasn’t going to become no fucking lady. She was going to become anything they weren’t, she had told herself again and again. They were two half-drunks drinking cheap jug wine from the time they got home till well after she would sneak out. Lounging around in their robes, his stubble graying, her expanding chins drooping over the years as they complained about everything, everyone, like two convicts thrown together in a cell but with no plan to escape. They weren’t good or bad, her dear mom and dad, just trapped in a world they thought was beneath them.

  She was too fucking cool for school. She had showed them.

  She had told the truth to Greg Simmons about going back to school. If the people around her here in this library could do it—your homeless, your general poor, immigrants with no English—then she could do it just the same. She had dreamed about it for so long.

  The room had high ceilings and columns built into the walls and tall windows bringing in golden light from the trees outside even though it was cloudy out. Why hadn’t she come here years ago? She wanted to shout it to everyone, to the librarian lady who was a little too much like her mother with her screwed-up, unsure eyes.

  She needed people, she had finally realized. Independence was overrated, that was for sure. She had always said she was too proud to depend on help; but the truth, she could admit, was that she hadn’t wanted to know if she could live up to the help or not. Do it right. Make them proud.

  The other thing was that she had about twenty dollars left. That was it. The food she’d bought was almost gone in the house, and the house itself was going to the bank in a day or two—the bank wouldn’t say when, just that someone would be showing up so be ready.

  She thought about contacting that FBI agent Torres, but what could he do? She had no more information he needed. Greg had been in contact with the man.

  She hunkered down and peered at the screen, at the web page that read Portland Community College: Admissions and “Welcome back, LnHolt. You’re admitted! To enroll in classes, click here …”

  A heat filled her chest and clogged it right up, and she had to sigh to make it go away. She always got to this point. And stopped. It was becoming automatic like some damn lock.

  How was she going to go to school if she had nowhere to live?

  She clicked over to Facebook and entered the name Gunnar Adler, which brought up Gunnar’s Facebook Profile. There was no info to click on, not even friends or a town—his daddy obviously teaching him a thing or two about privacy. But there was a photo of a some
what serious and thoughtful boy in paintball gear, holding his paint gun downward to be safe and his shoulders straightened—the whole thing like one of those Civil War photos you could recreate in the carnival. She wondered if he had meant it that way, if he was smart and creative like that. His face looked more thoughtful too, a bit longer than Donny’s and more set. He had none of Donny’s dimples, and his eyes were more rich than intense. She could see how Greg Simmons could make that dumbass mistake he made. She probably shouldn’t have slapped him for that. It was only twenty years late. And yet he wanted to help her, didn’t he? So he said.

  Leeann had to take three busses to make it back to her parents’ house. When she got there, she found a letter taped to the front door from some people representing the bank. It had lots of codes and numbers and long sentences in small print, but the gist of it was that she was not at home (no shit) and that they would be back soon to take over the house. She assumed they wanted her signature so they could break in. Well, fuck them. They could go right ahead and break in.

  She thought about going to visit her dad, but since he’d been calling her names like Alan and Maria and Hugo, she just didn’t see the goddamn point. She marched through the house, grabbed her few loose things and whatever food she could carry, and stuffed all that into her bags by the back door. She heaved those into the back of her car and got in and turned the key, the car coughing and barely starting up, the battery hardly juicing, and the electrics whining and dragging everything down. She drove off, thinking, she would have to think carefully about where she was going to park once she stopped. It might be there a while. She might be. She only hoped it was close to the library.

  They called it pride, but it was more like shit when you swallowed it. Your taste buds never got used to it. At the food bank in Old Town, she waited in a line that stretched around the block. She had found it simply by following people who had that look she knew from the people living in the forest—casual but alert at the same time, trying to hide the fear. She had been standing over two hours. Some were like her, heads down, their clothes not too dirty nor smelling while others had been out a long time and probably knew little else anymore. Some were passed out or hawking shit, but the people like Leeann ignored them. Then it started raining, and she still had another hour to go she guessed since the entrance was around the corner, still two sides of the building away. All she had was a chain link fence to lean on.

  Raining. She didn’t even have her old plastic raincoat with her. A rush of shame and sadness had crept up from her cold toes, filling every crevice. She buried her chin in her clavicle as her tears rolled down under her hoodie and down her chest.

  “Aw, it’s all right, honey,” someone said to her. It was a man. “Come on over here, I’ll fix that for ya.”

  She stepped away from the voice, and then she was marching away to somewhere, to anywhere but here. She pulled out the little phone Greg got her—cute little thing, like some Japanese teen tourist would have, they had joked, and at least that made her smile. She ducked into a doorway, but it reeked vinegary like fresh piss so she stomped on through puddles and found another doorway that faced away from the street. She reached in her pocket, unfolded the piece of paper Greg had given her.

  She called the number. Emily was the girl’s name. This Emily answered and asked her where she was in a pleasant little voice, not too flustered or put out. Leeann had crossed the street to a small plaza of grimy red bricks and grotesque shrubs. Some skate kid had told her this was “Paranoid Park,” and that’s what she told Emily.

  “O’Bryant Square,” Emily said. “It might take me a minute, but it won’t be long. Hang tight.”

  “Okay.”

  Leeann stayed on her bench for a good hour, but it was nice just sitting there thinking someone knew she was there. Even if the girl didn’t come. Leeann wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. This crappy square was the kind that the homeless, junkies, and skateboarders flocked to. Something smelled like a giant loogie, spit, or both, and few things made her want to puke like that. Her forest near Oakridge was better; at least the shit had a chance to soak into the ground. Her eyes kept shutting. She let them …

  “Leeann? Are you Leeann Holt?”

  Leeann’s eyes popped open. She saw a petite thing with short hair and she was pulling it off, too. She had on a quarter-length coat that was double-breasted with big buttons.

  “Cute coat, honey,” Leeann said.

  Leeann let this Emily take her to a nearby coffee joint that had more bicycles out front in its own bike spaces than cars parked down the whole street. It was full of trendy people but was the closest place. This impressed Leeann—most girls like Emily would never take someone like Leeann to their own territory.

  “My car might be broke for good, I’m thinking. I got it parked near the library, but it won’t start,” Leeann told Emily.

  They sat in a corner by a window for privacy. Leeann told Emily how she didn’t need anything, not yet. The car could sit a while, fuck it. She just wanted to check in. That old pride again. It always came back just when Leeann needed help most. But Emily rode it out. Checking in was no problem, she said, in a genuine way, like she was talking to her own mother.

  By the end of their coffees, they were laughing and joking.

  “I can’t even get a credit card without a credit card,” Leeann was saying. “I mean, why’s a bank want me to run up their credit card so bad if they’re so concerned I can’t pay it?”

  Emily had laughed at that and asked Leeann how hard it had been. Leeann told her, “Honey, know how many goddamn McJobs I tried to get? It’s like I’m one of those illegals.”

  Emily smiled and then set her big eyes right on Leeann. She placed her little hand on Leeann’s wrist. “You can stay at my place,” she said, and she didn’t add “if you want” or “if you need to” like everyone always did.

  “Damn, that’s sweet of you, honey—Greg was right. But, no. I just wanted someone to talk to.”

  And Emily’s eyes teared right up. She touched at them with her pinky.

  Leeann gave her a second. They sat there with their hands wrapped around their coffees. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “Why? No. My problems aren’t really … problems.”

  “Not like I got. It’s okay. You go right ahead.”

  “Well, I feel bad,” Emily told her. “This guy Judd, he wants to see me all the time. Greg doesn’t even know. Neither of them do.” The tears rolled down.

  Leeann touched Emily’s hand around her coffee mug and held it there a while, a whole lot of warm going on. They didn’t need to say anything, not like guys always did.

  “Hey, I should be the one crying,” Leeann said finally. “I tell ya, that one job, I fuckin’ plucked more fuckin’ chickens.”

  Emily snorted a cute little laugh, and a smile broke out. That a girl.

  “Me too!” she said. “Back in Iowa I did. People don’t know that here, but it’s true. I don’t keep it from them. But they’d just think I was joking if I did.”

  “Well, I know you’re not, girl. I know.”

  38

  That afternoon, Greg holed up in Tam’s Tavern. He nursed an iced tea as Tam eyed him from behind the bar, and he eyed her back while she helped the few customers—a booth of four men who looked retired or at least out of work long enough to appear so. Tam hadn’t talked to Greg much, and he told himself she was just busy. What more could she say? Offer him more iced tea? Especially if she was on to him. Neither of them was supposed to talk about the obvious.

  It was time for him to do the job as Torres had laid out—either get Donny to come in on possibly some kind of witness protection deal or help Torres do his job so well that Donny got the full wrath of the Feds along with the rest of them. But Greg had his own route, his third way—make sure Donny never spoke about what had ended at the lake. He had to be ready, get his duckies in a row. So, camping it was. Donny had said he was up for it. Possibly tomorrow. Greg made hims
elf ready to go any second. Before coming back into town, he had mounted his rack and bike back on the trunk and stowed all his bags in the car. He couldn’t lose his nerve. He should confront Donny once they were alone, see what he did. Then be prepared to do it. For that, he would have to get a weapon, something that he could later say was Donny’s. He thought about Gunnar’s rifle, but he didn’t want to implicate him. When he was back at the Callum house, he would have to find a weapon that was Donny’s and somehow sneak it along.

  The only question was: Should he tell Torres about the Double Cross planning another “prank,” as Donny called it? Either way, it could throw his plans into even more chaos.

  The four men left. Tam disappeared into the back, leaving Greg alone at the bar. Stewing. Afterward, he told himself that he would have to make up the best lie he had ever declared and stick to it, rehearsing it over and over before coming back in from the woods but not waiting too long before the blood dried.

  A grim thought clawed at him, at his gut: In the aftermath, who would look after Gunnar and even Leeann? It wasn’t like this place was going to be much better off. This town had to get its act together.

  When Tam came back out, the words spilled out of his mouth like too much iced tea:

  “Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”

  “Come again?” Tam said.

  “About the dam? About all of it? Why aren’t you?”

  Tam set down her towel, folded it, and lowered it into her bleach bucket. She faced him with arms folded across her chest. “When you say ‘you,’ who do you mean exactly?”

  “You. Native Americans. American Indians. However you say it.”

  “‘American,’ I usually say. What do you expect me, us, to do? Hold some creepy fucking pep rally with guns? Harder to do when you don’t have Callums or Adler as a sponsor.”

  “No. Of course not. Hold a protest, something. Try to get the press here.”

  “Kid, you haven’t been here long. We’ve been doing that for years. Decades. No one gives a shit about fish except the people who give a shit about fish—and live off fish. So, scour the Internet and you’ll find this and that about our efforts here, but you won’t read about the crowds that come out and certainly not about TV cameras.”