The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  “You can be anywhere you want, Heidi,” he said. “Just remember, we gotta clear outta here right afterwards. There’s not gonna be time to stand around and congratulate ourselves. And I would suggest you leave the vehicles running so we can split without delay. If fact, you might wanna sit in your cars…”

  “Good idea.”

  Tony took up a position behind his camera.

  Proclaiming that he wanted to experience the explosion “up front and personal,” Carlos stepped a few feet away from Rick.

  The others moved off to the cars.

  Setting the detonator between his knees, Rick unscrewed the plunger. He looked off at the tower. Against a band of pale blue, early-morning light stretched across the horizon, it soared two hundred feet into the air and looked like a tapered cannon barrel pointing straight up at the sky. He held his breath the same way a rifleman might the instant before pulling the trigger; then, as though willing the surge of power to come deep from within himself, he set the plunger in motion.

  A second later a muffled boom rippled into the early-morning darkness, and a flash of light burst from the open portal. A concussive wave of air passed overhead, and a cloud of dust mushroomed out from the base of the tower. For an instant the tower trembled and remained erect; then slowly at first, almost gracefully, with its two halves folding into each other, its upper half toppled one way and its lower half the other. The dust cloud, billowing outward and upward, sending out tentacles of smoke and debris, increased in magnitude until, drifting off into the morning darkness, it began a final suspiration.

  “Jesuschristo!” Carlos whispered, gazing at the spectacle as though at the birth of a distant star. “That was some explosion, hombre!”

  Tony, who had clicked off a series of camera shots throughout the explosion, stepped back from the camera and said, “My God, Rick, the way it fell—it was just so…perfect! Just absolutely perfect!”

  “You really did it, Rick!” Heidi called from inside the van. “That was marvelous! A real classic!”

  “Yeah, hombre, estuve una explosion muy grande,” Carlos repeated in Spanish and slapped Rick on the back. “You got it done just right, man.”

  Rick suddenly stood up. “I’m not so sure…”

  “Eh?”

  Rick pointed to a stretch of roadway visible beyond the far end of the foundry building, four hundred yards away and to the left of the open field.

  Carlos looked.

  A car, its headlights on, had come into view from the opposite side of the foundry; it had stopped down the road leading to the coking plant and the tower. Heidi and the others wouldn’t have seen it at that moment because the group’s cars were parked too far from the end of the warehouse and out of view of the stretch of road Rick could see from where he stood. Tony and Carlos wouldn’t have seen it just then, either, because they were both looking at Rick. And Rick only saw it when he did because, even as the other two talked, he continued looking at where the tower had stood.

  “Who the fuck is that, hombre?” Carlos let out.

  “It’s not a brass band, that’s for sure!”

  “What’s he doin’?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  Heidi got out of the van and walked over. “What’s the matter?”

  Rick pointed.

  Heidi looked. “Oh, shit! Who do you think it is?”

  “Does it matter? Whoever it is, they’re here, and they probably saw everything.”

  “How could they not have?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Get the fuck outta here, that’s what! What do you think?”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice, hombre—I just left!” Carlos said. He rushed over to his car. “I’ll meet y’all back at the motel!”

  “Don’t leave without me!” Tony called out.

  “Get your fat ass in gear or I will!”

  Tony grabbed the tripod and camera and hurried over to the car.

  Mike, sitting on the passenger side, reached back and opened the door for him. Tossing camera and tripod onto the seat, Tony climbed in.

  Slamming the car in reverse, Carlos looked over his shoulder and spun back into a sharp turn. He executed a hard clutch, shoved the stick into gear, and accelerated around the corner of the building and out of sight.

  Carlos and Tony’s precipitate reaction spurred a like reaction in Heidi. Yelling for the other three, all sitting in Jody’s car, to leave and go back to the motel, she seized Rick by the arm and started pulling him to the van. “We have to get out of here, Rick!” she cried. “Right now!”

  “No shit, Heidi!”

  Rick had already cut the wires loose from the two dynamo screws; depressing the plunger and giving it a final twist to lock it in place, he picked the detonator box up and followed along behind her, over to the van. “Here, hang onto this—I’ll drive,” he said.

  She took the detonator box and climbed into the passenger side; Rick hustled around to the driver’s side.

  Jody had gotten out of her car; looking over the rooftop, she asked, “What’s going on?”

  Ralph stuck his head out the passenger window.

  “Yeah, what happened?”

  “We got company,” Rick told them both. “What the hell do you think happened?”

  “Where?”

  “Where? Does it matter? Just go on back to the motel!” Rick’s peremptory tone was enough.

  Without another word, Jody got in the car, backed around, changed gears, and drove off.

  Rick got in the van, lit a cigarette, and disregarding a few bumps and loose gravel, with both hands on the wheel, followed close behind.

  3

  “Are you sure you got some good shots?” Jody asked. She was moving about the room, picking up her belongings and packing them into a leather flight bag on the bed. She had taken off her French beret and had traded the black turtleneck sweater she had worn during the “field exercise” for a white blouse and a satin vest embossed with red and gold Oriental designs. The army-surplus combat boots had been exchanged for a pair of powder-blue sneakers she had bought at Nordstrom’s downtown store in Seattle, and her shoulder-length mahogany-brown hair had been shampooed and brushed into a silky gloss. A subtle application of lipstick and eyebrow shadow complemented her green eyes and handsome face, somewhat stricken by a school-marmish severity. Tall, full in the hips, and with a curvaceous breast-line, she carried herself with an athletic confidence born of several years playing high school and college basketball, lacrosse, and water polo. Her background as the only child of a lawyer father and a mother who had taught high school English had endowed her with the potential for any number of careers (her degrees were in geology and physical education), but for now she had chosen to devote herself to an avocation that seemed of paramount importance.

  “I’m a professional, Jody,” Tony replied. “I know what I’m doing. And, yes, you have my promise and my guarantee that they’ll turn out.”

  With one leg crossed over the other, he sat in one of the motel room chairs, wearing a maroon bathrobe with a gold coat-of-arms crest over the pocket and a pair of fur-lined, chamois slippers. He had just removed one of the slippers and was absorbed in clipping his toenails. He, too, had showered not long before, and his raven-black, blow-dried hair had been fluffed out into a tossed-about, spiky look that hung over his ears and down the back of his neck.

  Standing at the dresser with her back to him, Jody gathered up her toilet articles and put them in a leather kit bag.

  “Well, I’m sure I really don’t know enough about the technical aspects to appreciate your professionalism, Tony,” she said, “but I’m sure you know what you are doing.”

  Zipping up the bag of toiletries, she took it over to the flight bag and tucked it down alongside the combat boots. She looked around to see if she had overlooked anything, then closed up the flight bag.

  Tony put the clippers aside and, using a file board, commenced to smooth
the rough edge of his big toe nail.

  “It’s a matter of exposure and the right film speed,” he prattled on. “You just have to make all your adjustments beforehand so that you’re ready to capture that moment as it happens. It’s elementary, really. But, you know, I’ve been doing it for so long now that I do it automatically. It’s just second nature…”

  He cocked his head to see if he had rounded the nail into an attractive curve. Satisfied, he moved on to the next toe.

  “Well, seeing is believing, Tony,” she said, turning to him. “You get them all developed and then we can judge for ourselves your ability. Of course, I don’t doubt…”

  The bathroom door opened and Heidi came into the room. She was wearing a bath towel wrapped around her head and a white terry cloth bathrobe.

  “Yeah, Tony,” she said, “all we’ve seen so far is wedding pictures. We need to see some real action stuff to really appreciate your talent.”

  “Production is your department, Heidi. I just make a visual record of it. You guys need to set it up.”

  Heidi went to the double bed and took off the bathrobe. Turning her back, she slipped into a fresh pair of underpants and, clipping it from behind, donned a bra.

  Turning around, she sat down on the bed and pulled on a pair of jeans she had bought at an annual Macy’s sale for sixty-five dollars.

  “If this morning is any indication of what we can do, you’ll have plenty of action-packed subject matter to shoot, Tony. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  She buttoned a maroon blouse up the middle, did the cuffs, then got up and went over to a chair.

  “Just think of yourself as a sort of Mathew Brady,” she said, putting on a pair of white socks. “That’s a bit of a stretch, of course, but the basic idea is the same. You’re there as a witness for posterity. And not only for posterity but for the contemporary record, as well. In other words, you’re a vital part of what we’re all about, Tony, and any criticism we throw at you is only intended to make you better at what you do.”

  “My God, I feel better already.” Tony laughed, setting the file board aside.

  Jody hefted her flight bag by the handle and carried it over to the door. “See what we can do for your ego,” she said, and set the bag on the luggage rack. “We tear you down with the one hand and build you up with the other. I believe that’s the tactic one of my old coaches used.”

  “Did it work?”

  “We won a fair number of games, so I suppose it did.”

  “There you go, Tony…living proof.”

  “All of a sudden I have this warm, fuzzy sensation that makes me feel sooo secure. Thank you ever so much, both of you. I can’t begin to tell you how much better I feel already.”

  A round of laughter erupted.

  “Where’s Mike?”

  “He went out for cigarettes,” Jody said.

  “That’s a filthy, disgusting habit. I wish you would tell him to give it up, Tony…” Heidi said.

  The door opened and Rick came into the room from the adjoining unit. He had an open can of Budweiser in one hand, a glass ashtray in the other, and an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He set the ashtray on one corner of the dresser, lit the cigarette with his Zippo lighter, and blew out the smoke with the casual indifference of one who intends to make his defiance clear to everyone.

  “If you guys are gonna talk about filthy, disgusting habits, try not to do it when I’m around,” he said. “Cause those are the kinda habits I got. Okay?”

  “Sorry, Rick…We didn’t realize…”

  “Yeah, well, we got more to worry about than that, anyway…”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rick took a sip of beer and another drag off the cigarette. He blew out the smoke as a prelude to a tight-lipped, grim announcement.

  “It oughta be fairly obvious to a bunch of smart people like yourselves,” he said. “I went off and left the goddamn spool there, right in plain sight.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Is that bad? Are you kidding me, Heidi? What do you suppose they can do with something like that?”

  “Ah…figure that it was done by somebody who knew what he was doing?”

  “They’ll know that, anyway, because you don’t bring down a structure like that without knowing how to do it. But that isn’t the worst of it. It’s the fingerprints—that thing is bound to have a set of my prints on it. I don’t know if they’ll show up enough to be worth anything, but it’s a possibility that’s gonna cause me to lose sleep.”

  “You were a quarter-mile away, Rick, and that warehouse has probably been abandoned for years. Why would they even think to look there?” Jody protested.

  Rick took another sip of the beer and allowed a moment or two to pass before answering. Standing there, looking at each of them in turn, he might have been a drill sergeant sizing them up as likely candidates for a platoon of dumbbells.

  “The cord—all they gotta do is follow the cord. Just like a trail of blood in the snow, it’ll lead them right to it. I mean, they’re gonna go out there and snoop around, just like detectives are supposed to do, and bingo!—bigger’n shit, they’re gonna see the cord going across the road and right up into the grass. There’s only one of two ways they’re gonna miss it—one, if rubble got strewn about so much that it’ll be overlooked, or, two, if they send a couple of blind detectives out there. But my guess is that, sooner or later, they’ll find it, regardless. And when they do—well…”

  “If you want, Rick, I’ll drive out and see if I can get it. It’s still early enough…they probably haven’t found it yet.”

  “Be real, Heidi. The whole area is probably swarming with cops right now. If they haven’t found it yet, they will soon. Trust me. They’ll go over everything within a quarter- to a half-mile radius.”

  “I was a cub reporter for the Oregonian for a time, Rick. I’ve still got a press card. If anybody asks, I could just say I’m there out of professional curiosity. I’m sure they wouldn’t suspect me of anything.”

  “No,” Rick said, chuckling, “I’m sure they wouldn’t, Jody. Not by my standards, anyway.”

  “That means we just leave it there, then?”

  “That means we just leave it there, Heidi. There’s really not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  “Well…you know what that means?” Heidi said, turning to the others.

  They waited for her to answer.

  “The whole operation’s a failure. We came all this way for nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Jody said.

  “How would you put it, Jody?”

  “First off, it gets reported in the local newspaper; that’s publicity. Secondly, what about that guy you contacted at the university? He was supposed to be on the overpass to witness it and then wasn’t he going to write up your statement for the school paper?”

  “He was there. I talked to him earlier. And, yes, he will write it up. But we can hardly use the publicity as a launching pad for further activity if Rick gets caught. Because if he gets caught—well, use your imagination…”

  Tony, who had been sitting in his chair the whole time, listening but not saying anything, suddenly stood up.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, the words tumbling out, “but I have been using my imagination, and what I’ve been imagining is the consequences for all of us…I’m not saying Rick would say anything, but they probably have ways of forcing information out of a person. I mean, I’m sure they have techniques to make someone talk…And if someone does talk, where does that leave anyone else who was involved? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to go to jail.”

  Rick stubbed his cigarette out in the glass ashtray and drained the last of his beer. Crushing the can, he dropped it in a wastebasket.

  Looking up, he fixed Tony with a hard stare.

  “Hold on there a minute, chubs,” he said coolly. “At this point, we don’t know anything, so there’s no point in getti
ng hysterical. Even if I did leave prints, which I probably did, they may be smeared beyond recognition. But, secondly, and more importantly, I don’t like the implication. Maybe you oughta try to hold onto yourself before you jump to conclusions about someone. You may wanna think the worst of me, and you probably do, but it’s not always a good idea to tell me about it. Comprende, amigo? Besides, if I’m any judge of character, and I think I am, my impression is that someone like you is more apt to start squealing like a little pig than any of the rest of us.”

  The remarks had all the impact of a challenge being thrown out at a beer party over an insult to another man’s masculinity. An immediate silence fell over the room. Heidi and Jody both held their breath.

  Blinking and swallowing quickly, Tony looked away.

  Another moment passed before the discussion continued. Heidi finally said, “I don’t think this is called for. What we have to do now is, above all, keep our wits about us. Do you really think there’s a chance that your prints would be too obscured to be of much use, Rick?”

  Rick shrugged.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. They got all kinds of modern techniques for lifting fingerprints nowadays. But none of it’s foolproof. They still need a print they can use to identify someone. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “What about in the meantime, Rick?” Jody asked.

  “I don’t know, Jody. I haven’t thought everything through yet. I don’t know whether I should disappear and wait for the outcome, or go on back and hope for the best. Either way, I’m gonna take my time about getting back. I might swing down into Arizona and spend time in the desert. Lay low and off the radar. If they do ID my prints, but I’m not around for immediate questioning, maybe the whole thing’ll fade. They got bigger concerns than rounding up a bunch of vandals.”

  “Eco-terrorists, Rick. Defenders of the environment,” Heidi corrected him.

  “Whatever.”

  “So…you won’t be going back with us, then?” Jody inquired.

  Maybe partway…as far as Wyoming. Anyway, if they can’t get hold of me, there’s no chance they’ll make a connection between us, right?”