The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  “It also says you were trained in demolitions. That right?”

  “Two outta two so far.”

  Bill replaced the paper and leafed through the packet to another section. He pulled out two sheets of paper stapled together at the corners and, scanning the first sheet, flipped it over and scanned the second.

  “You’ve also been arrested three times since your discharge, twice for assault and once for disorderly conduct?”

  “You guys are amazing. You already know everything about me there is to know. It makes me feel like my being here is somehow redundant.”

  “We just wanna make sure we’re all on the same wavelength here, Rick,” Tom said. “And you’re right, we know quite a bit about you already, but we need you to bring us up to date. So tell us what you’ve been doing with your time lately, starting about, oh, three or four months back?”

  “You mean it’s not in there?” Rick grinned.

  The two agents glanced at each other.

  Bill took a contemplative sip of the coffee, then set the cup on the table.

  “We’re trying real hard to restrain ourselves here, Rick. But this nice guy routine doesn’t really suit either one of us. So why don’t you just keep us happy? Oblige us. Answer our questions so we can all go home.”

  “Yeah, Rick, pretend like we’re your father-confessors, and you need to unburden your soul. If we feel you’re being honest and up front with us, we’ll grant you absolution. On the other hand, if we feel you’re lying to us—well, to make a long story short, we’re underpaid and overworked, and that’s a bad combination when it comes to dealing with a crap artist. We need you to cooperate…you can make it easy on us and on yourself if you do. Understand?”

  Rick shrugged. His shoulder and neck muscles had tensed up, and he wanted to get up and move around. He wondered if anyone else might be listening—looking on and recording everything while he sat there nervously trying to decide what they could charge him with. Destruction of private property and illegal possession of explosives seemed the two most likely offenses. Domestic terrorism loomed as a possibility, but only if he talked about the group and its goals. If he kept his mouth shut, claimed he had been hired as a private contractor (and he had once worked in that capacity for a private company), he could sanitize his own involvement. He could claim neutrality. On the other hand, if they didn’t buy that (and he didn’t expect them to), he supposed he could tell them whatever they wanted to know, and hope for the best.

  “I’ve mostly been hangin’ out. Civilian life’s a little dull, you know.”

  “Right. So who ya been hangin’ out with?”

  “Unsavory types,” Rick answered, unable to suppress a grin.

  Bill ignored the grin: “Like, for example…?”

  “Biker buddies, mostly. That kinda thing. You know, cocktails in the evening, charity runs for muscular dystrophy, bake sales for the homeless…”

  “Yeah, well, apart from all that shit, anybody else you wanna talk about?”

  “Uh…my girlfriend and my dog.”

  “We didn’t notice a dog, Rick. We usually look for that kind of thing when we go out to someone’s house, especially if we have reason to distrust him to begin with.”

  “He’s there. He just sleeps a lot.”

  “No shit? A real sound sleeper, huh? Not much of a watchdog, is he?”

  “He sleeps near the door. Anybody that comes in that shouldn’t be comin’ in, they trip over him. That wakes him up, and he starts barking.”

  Bill folded his hands together and leaned forward on the table. He looked at Rick for a long second, then said: “Right from the start, you’ve kept up a steady patter of being a smart ass, Rick. By doing so, you’ve managed to hang on to your dignity. And you’ve let us know you can take the heat. We appreciate all that, and we’ve also been entertained. We’re even willing to give you some grudging respect. But your attitude is starting to wear. Like we tried to make it clear to you earlier, we usually don’t have a lot of patience for fun and games. We deal with bullshit artists all the time, and we’re not big on tolerance. So let’s cut to the chase…

  “We got all the evidence we need to put you in a shower stall for a long time to come, with a lotta of nice fellas who, on a daily basis, are gonna be checkin’ your butt for access. On the other hand, you tell us what we want to know, and we’ll cut you a deal. And who knows? After it’s all over, you might have some new stories to tell your biker buddies.”

  “And you won’t have to worry every time you drop the soap and bend over to pick it up,” Tom added.

  Bill chuckled.

  “So, are we getting through to you, Mr. Rick?”

  Rick looked at both men, then said, “You told me this was gonna be off the record. How do I know you’re not shittin’ me? I mean, I’m sitting right here in front of this goddamn mirror, and I got no way of knowing whether somebody on the other side is listening or not. For all I know, they could be taking notes and making a tape, too.”

  Bill sat back in his chair and gave the matter a moment of serious thought. He looked inquiringly at his partner. His partner nodded; then Bill said to Rick: “Valid concern. But you’re gonna hafta trust us on this one. Nobody is back there, and anything that’s been said so far, and anything said from here on out, stays between us. As long as you play ball with us, it goes no further than the three of us. It’s our little secret…we’re all in on it, and nobody else. Comprende?”

  Rick nodded.

  “Good. Now listen here…”

  7

  Art Jimson spurred his horse to the crest of a long hill that dipped off into a ravine on the other side. He had been out since dawn, rounding up several strays that had managed to elude him for the past few days. He had less than forty-eight hours before a tractor-trailer was scheduled to arrive at the ranch; between then and now, he wanted to have fifty head of cattle to ship to the railhead. The missing steer was the last of the bunch.

  At the top of the hill, he reined in and sat for a short spell, looking out over a stretch of range-land that began a gradual, leveling-off rise to the other side of the shallow ravine. Feeling a late-afternoon breeze on the back of his neck, he fastened the top button of his sheepskin coat and pulled up the collar. He had a thermos full of hot coffee in one of the saddlebags; he reached for it and, undoing the cap, poured out a cup. Drinking the hot liquid slowly, he savored it for warmth and flavor. When he finished, he screwed the cap onto the thermos and put it back into the saddlebag.

  Flicking the reins, he guided the horse over a small hump of ground and, following a cattle trail, began an unhurried descent down a grassy slope. At the bottom of the slope, near a stream bed that normally ran dry during the late summer and into the fall, he halted the horse and again looked about.

  In one direction, where the ravine opened up into a half-mile-wide expanse of range-land, neither an object nor a movement of any kind caught his eye. He glanced from one end of the grassy expanse to the other and then off into the distance to where the terrain seemed to meet the sky, but again saw nothing.

  He moved on.

  Farther into the ravine, where it narrowed into a tight gully, he again halted the horse. Seventy-five yards ahead, in the shadow of the gully, something did catch his eye. With a prompt from the reins, he trotted the horse up to it and saw right away that it was the steer. Its legs sticking straight out, it lay on its side.

  Art got off the horse and squatted down for a closer look.

  The multiple bite marks on its soft underbelly and on the rear of its haunches showed where the hide had been ripped and torn open. A gap in one of the hind legs revealed where a large chunk of meat had been chewed away. The animal had evidently been weakened by the loss of blood and had fallen where it lay. There was no way of telling whether or not it had died before its flesh had been chewed into. But Art figured it had probably lain there, moaning for a time, before finally succumbing.

  He stood up and looked off in the direction
of where he knew a tree-line began a couple of miles north of where he was now. The bite marks on the steer’s underside and haunches ruled out a bear or, for that matter, a mountain lion. Neither animal chased down prey in that manner, nipping and snapping at its hamstrings and exposed areas. The bear executed a charge and a lunge, knocking its prey to the ground, and the mountain lion sprang onto it and immediately went for the throat. More than likely, the predator had been a large timber wolf.

  Art turned and walked over to his horse. He undid the flap of the saddlebag and took out his thermos again. Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he sipped the liquid with thoughtful, measured slowness.

  This was the third time in the past six months that one of his cattle had been killed and the fifth time in the past year and a half, and all in the same way, by a wolf. As required by law, the government had compensated him, of course, as it did any rancher whose livestock fell victim to a predator. But the required paperwork, and having to meet with an agent who wanted to see the evidence firsthand, had taken too damn much of his time. He had other things to do besides putting up with bureaucrats and their pesky, regulatory ways. Besides, if this kept up, if it happened again, they might insist he hire a range guard, as if six thousand acres of rolling and hilly rangeland could be kept under surveillance. Not only that, but the expense involved could affect his profit margin, always slim in any case. From here on out, he’d deal with the problem in his own way.

  He finished the coffee, replaced the thermos, and remounted. He supposed the first thing he should do was go back to the ranch, make the phone call, and get the guy out here. Always a damn nuisance, to be sure, but the alternative meant swallowing the loss.

  Goddamn wolves, anyway!

  § § § § § §

  The next evening, with the hilly, knobby expanse of rangeland bathed in the twilight glow of impending darkness, Art pulled up in a battered Jeep pickup and got out.

  From the space behind the driver’s seat he took out a 305 Remington Magnum rifle tucked into a leather scabbard, and a hinged wooden case a bit larger than a shoe box. Carrying both items to the back of the pickup, he dropped the tailgate and withdrew the rifle. He set it and the scabbard to one side and then opened the case. Inside was an infrared scope. Removing it from its velvet bracing, he used a penknife and a screwdriver to attach it to the rifle mount. Taking the lens cap off, he brought the rifle up to his shoulder and sighted it on a small bush fifty yards away.

  Earlier that day, he had made the necessary adjustments for accuracy. He had taken the rifle out to a hillside behind the ranch house and, from a hundred yards off, had fired ten rounds at a white plastic garbage can filled with dirt and gravel. The first three shots had been wide of the mark, but after a fine-tuning of crosshairs, the other seven had been dead-on, producing a shot pattern no bigger than a bread saucer.

  The bush appeared as though seen through a watery green haze, at first indistinct but becoming clearer as he rotated the focusing ring. Once he was satisfied he had the image he wanted, he closed the tailgate and went back to the cab.

  He had brought coffee and a lunch meat sandwich. Munching the sandwich and sipping the coffee, he tuned the radio to a country-western station, lowered the volume to a level just above barely audible, and settled back to wait.

  An hour later, with a sliver of daylight still rimming the western horizon, he turned off the radio, picked up the rifle, and, leaving the door slightly ajar, got out of the pickup.

  With the rifle in hand, he moved quickly across a grassy stretch of open ground. He climbed to the top of the hillside he was on the day before. Reaching a grassy overhang he had selected earlier, he knelt down and opened out the bipod at the end of the rifle. He set the rifle in place and got down on his belly.

  Aiming off into the darkness, he removed the plastic cover from the business end of the scope. As he peered into it, he shifted the rifle a degree or two in either direction until, a hundred and fifty yards out, the steer’s carcass came into view.

  As before, it still lay on its side, its legs standing out from its body and, as though refusing to acknowledge the destruction of its hind-quarters, its head and neck still stretched upward. From what Art could tell, it had not been disturbed since he had discovered it the previous day.

  Pushing back his hat, he waited.

  Sometime later, having dozed off, he woke up with a sharp catch of his breath.

  The phosphorescent dials of his watch read nine-thirty.

  Reflexively, he snuggled the butt of the rifle into his shoulder, laid his cheek against the stock, and squinted into the scope.

  The image of a lanky, high-legged timber wolf came into view. It had its muzzle buried in the carcass’s underbelly. As it tugged and pulled at the flesh, it presented its body a quarter-angle to Art’s line of vision, making the most likely shot its hindquarters.

  Lining up the crosshairs accordingly, Art eased off the safety, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

  By the time the 200-grain shell ripped through the hind spot, it had expanded itself two and half times, knocking the animal flat against the steer’s outstretched forelegs. As it struggled to rise, Art methodically re-cocked the bolt, slipped another round into the chamber, and fired again. The second shot blew the back of its skull away, killing it instantly.

  For the space of a half a dozen heartbeats, Art didn’t move, but continued to look through the scope. The kind of kill he had just made didn’t fall into the thrill-of-the-hunt category. There was nothing especially satisfying about it, in that he had not used hunting skills to track an animal in its own territory and kill it. In a sense, it smacked of a turkey shoot or an ambush of an unsuspecting deer or a bear from a tree platform. It warranted little of which to boast. It was a fortuitous circumstance that didn’t require much ability, beyond being able to point a rifle and pull the trigger. To his credit, he had much bigger accomplishments under his belt, a whole slug of kills easily falling into the James Fenimore Cooper category, of the kind that demanded the backwoods hunting skills of an Indian. Still, he was happy enough. He had, after all, anticipated the critter, and that did require a certain cunning.

  He stood up and, using a flashlight, made his way back down the hill. He had considered waiting until morning to get rid of the animal but decided to get it over with now.

  A short while later the Jeep crawled along the floor of the ravine in the lowest gear of its four-wheel drive. Art had tossed the wolf into the back. As he drove over the heavily rutted terrain, his headlights illuminated the ground thirty yards ahead. He had thought of just leaving the carcass out in the open for the scavengers to finish off. But another idea had taken shape.

  Back at his ranch, instead of stopping at the house, he continued on for another eight miles, until coming to the highway. At the highway, he turned and headed down the road to a ranch that belonged to a man who, besides being a liberal, was an animal rights activist. Having moved from Boston to Montana several years before, he claimed to sympathize with ranchers in the area who fretted and groused about the reintroduction of predator species into the wild. But Art suspected his sympathies lay more with the animals than with the ranchers. His ranch—a small spread that Art likened to a hobby farm (the man’s first attempts at raising anything had been a miniature pony operation that had failed, and he now had a few South American llamas scattered over fifty acres)—was five miles up the country road. A mailbox mounted by a sculpture of a galloping horse marked the entrance.

  By the time Art got there it was close to midnight. The house, situated a hundred yards from the highway, except for a porch light, sat dark.

  Art drove up to the mailbox and partway into the driveway. Leaving the engine running, he got out and went to the back of the pickup. With a glance up at the house, he lowered the tailgate and grabbed the wolf carcass by its hind legs. With a jerk, he pulled it off the truck bed and let it fall onto the gravel driveway.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, he
drove off. “That’ll send ’em a message,” he said aloud. “Goddamn wolves, anyway!”

  8

  Mitch did not accept Heidi’s invitation without a kernel of reservation. Heidi and Jody had always shown a tendency to proselytize. Like campus recruiters for a large corporation or an ROTC program, they had gone out to colleges and universities and set up their own table. Their pitch had always been geared toward students who wanted to do something socially meaningful. They were after those who were intrigued by the notion of helping others. They wanted individuals whose idealism drove them to support alternative forms of energy or to advocate for the widespread use of bicycles, motor scooters, and hybrid cars. And most importantly, they sought those willing to make a commitment, a lasting commitment for change.

  At best, their success was spotty. Many students who stopped by the table and took away a handful of literature about homelessness, poverty, prison overcrowding (“Marijuana laws do not prevent its use, but tragically and unnecessarily create more criminals”), misguided and ecologically harmful development projects, unsustainable timber harvesting, and irresponsible fishing practices looked through it, perhaps read it, and even at times expressed a sincere desire to do something. But beyond perhaps attending a meeting or going to a rally, few ever attained true believer status. In too many ways, the rhythms and personal interests of an individual’s life interfered. Only a handful of recruits had ever stuck around long enough to give the organization the tenuous viability it now had.

  Of those who had stuck around, all were at Heidi’s dinner that evening. The roster included everyone who had been to Cleveland, except Rick. As far as any of them knew, he had not returned from being out and about somewhere in Arizona. But if truth be told, his absence did not come as a disappointment to anyone. For all their alleged and professed spirit of egalitarian camaraderie supposed to constitute a group ethos—a spirit meant to ignore class differences—the general distaste he inspired because of his lifestyle—a hardcore smoker (Camels, no less), a beer drinker, his motorcycle buddies, and above all his usual biker appearance—made a dent in their willingness to adhere to principle. In this respect, Heidi and Jody were less persnickety than the others, but even they were only too glad he was not there to be an uncomfortable presence in what was meant to be a convivial, homogenous gathering. The attitude of tolerance had its limits.