The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  Sometime during the seventies, a bulldozer had cut a narrow swath a mile or so into the back country, where a sustained logging operation had commenced to level a couple hundred acres of second-growth Douglas fir; from the air, it had resembled a scabbed-over, giant bedsore enclosed by a sea of greenery. In the years since, the coffee-brown patch of upturned tree stumps, bulldozed earth, and scattered, skimpy clumps of salal and huckleberry bush had been replaced by a dense growth of seedlings that, at fifteen feet, had reached young adulthood. The element of undisturbed, pristine wilderness that once prevailed had never been completely restored, but the insect-humming silence of a languid, high summer afternoon could evoke a genuine sense of remoteness.

  The road itself had ceased to be a passage for the coming and going of logging trucks and was now little more than a rutted lane overgrown by knee-high grass down its center and along its sides. Used mainly by hikers eager for an authentic wilderness experience, with diffused sunlight filtering through tall stands of evergreen timber on either side, it allowed easy access to anyone who didn’t mind a little bumpiness, driving his vehicle at a cautious five miles an hour, or risking the swish of grass and the occasional small sapling scraping against the undercarriage.

  Mobley’s reason for turning onto it had nothing to do with wanting to partake of the curative powers of a genuine wilderness experience. He was there for another reason altogether, and its genesis sprang from a motive as far removed from recreational sublimity as possible.

  The first time it had happened he had dismissed it as a coincidence. A hand-painted wooden sign had been stuck in the soft mud near a roadside creek where he sometimes ditched one or two bags of effluvious leftovers. The sign had read: NO DUMPING. It had not been there previously, and he did not ascribe its appearance to himself and his actions. Someone had simply come along, seen the bags of garbage, and had taken it upon himself to post a notice. Mobley had left the bags there when no one else was around, and he had no cause to think it was meant for him personally. After all, if he had not been seen, how could anyone know the bags were his? It didn’t make sense. The sites he sometimes used were always several miles from his house, down dirt roads or in areas blocked from the view of anyone passing by. The probability that he had been observed just didn’t register, and he decided he had nothing to worry about.

  Coincidence or not, he made his next run out to a boarded-up farm-stead he hadn’t been to for a few months. It was far enough away from the prying eyes of any nosy neighbors to make it a prime spot for his purpose. The farmhouse itself sat under a canopy of oak and maples trees, and the barn out back offered a perfect place to ditch the bags of garbage. With its sagging roof, murky interior, collapsed hay-loft, and a dirt floor littered with rusty, broken pieces of farm machinery, it was unlikely that anyone who did happen along would risk venturing very far inside. It had about as much attraction as a rickety building perched atop an abandoned seaside pier with a danger sign posted nearby, and Mobley felt confident that he had outfoxed whatever busybody had set himself the task of policing the environment.

  The day he had driven out there, he had pulled up to the barn doorway and partway into the gloomy interior. He had taken two bags out of the back of his truck and carried them around to the side, where he chucked them onto piles of bags from earlier trips. Turning to go back to the truck for more bags, he had seen it: another hand-painted, wooden sign nailed to the back of the barn door, where it couldn’t be missed. Its message could not have been more explicit: MOBLEY, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR GARBAGE HERE. TAKE IT TO THE DUMP.

  In trying to divine responsibility, his mind had veered off in different directions. For two or three days, baffled and alarmed, he sat with a shotgun across his lap in the darkness of his living room, with doors and windows locked and the shades pulled down. He didn’t even go out for his mail, except at night and only then carrying his shotgun, cocked and ready. Every passing car conjured the possibility of someone out there, in the darkness, spying on him. It even occurred to him that someone had put a tracking device on his truck so that he was virtually followed wherever he went, or that his property might have hidden cameras recording his every move. He suspected no one and everyone. He even hesitated to go into town for groceries, thinking that, surely, his stealthy attempts to dispose of his garbage had by now become a matter of widespread public knowledge. Instead of going into town, he drove all the way to Salem, some thirty miles out of his way.

  But the thought that kept finding its way through the cluster of lurid imaginings was the thought that inadvertently he had thrown away a letter with his name and address on it. Unless he accepted the notion of being surveilled by unseen eyes, nothing else made sense. Accordingly, he vowed to exercise more care than ever before when bagging up his garbage. Like a man who repeatedly washes his hands or takes showers throughout the day, he became obsessed with searching through mounds of empty peanut butter jars, eggshells, apple cores, lettuce leaves, orange peels, soup cans, spoiled tomatoes, used coffee filters, and so on, all the while looking for anything that could implicate him. Sometimes he even went through a single bag two or three times, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Only after a couple of months of such activity did he chance another run.

  That had been six months before; so far, nothing more had popped up. The runs had all been made to distant places, some out of the area altogether, up around McMinnville, over to Keiser, and even as far away as Stayton. And they had all taken place at different times of the day, different times of the week, and even late at night or early in the morning. Not only had he become excessively meticulous in sorting through his rubbish, rooting out whatever little clue might accidentally find its way in amongst banana peels and cantaloupe rinds, but he resolved to flummox his pursuers with diversionary tactics. This meant, of course, that he also gave special attention to other cars on the road, especially those behind him, or to the occasional patrol car out and about in the countryside. Like a man who suspects he’s being followed by a private investigator, he felt he could not be too circumspect.

  He continued on for a mile or more through a corridor flanked on both sides by old-growth timber, with its dense understory of sword ferns, salal, huckleberry bushes, and Oregon grape. High overhead, above the treetops, the sky shone with a cerulean vastness that stretched into infinity. Rays of afternoon sunlight cut a diagonal swath across the road, leaving the trees on one side in deep shadows and those on the other in the full brightness of a brilliant September day.

  The corridor ended where the new growth of alfalfa-green Douglas fir began. A two-acre parcel of bare earth just beyond that point had once been employed as a staging area for the massive logging equipment that had been brought in to level several hundred acres of trees. Consequently, the constant coming and going, the incessant rumble and pounding of logging trucks, bulldozers, loaders, and skidders that had been used for varying periods of time, had denuded the two-acre parcel of vegetation beyond its ability to quickly restore itself. Now, with only a heaped-up jumble of brown stumps and splintered pieces of timber as a reminder that trees had actually once grown there, the compacted earth served as a parking lot for hunters, hikers, and other recreationists. On weekends, and especially during the summer months, a dozen or so cars might be parked randomly along its perimeter, where the bare dirt surface ended and the close-packed new growth began. Today, there were no other vehicles about.

  Mobley drove across the clearing and parked next to the pile of debris that had been left behind. Shutting off the motor, he got out and looked around.

  A faint buzzing, which he attributed to insects, interrupted the stillness of the forest. A crow swept in from overhead and landed on the upper branch of a tree. It sat momentarily, as though to size up Mobley’s intention, then cawed twice and flew off. Watching its flight path for a second or two, Mobley had the odd feeling that it had somehow been there to bear witness. Or maybe it just knew that, once the bags were unloaded and shoved out of sight beh
ind the pile of debris, it could feast undisturbed on any of the leavings it could get to.

  Shrugging, Mobley withdrew his can of Copenhagen from the breast pocket of his overalls and fingered out a nugget of chewing tobacco, which he planted down alongside a rear molar. Then he closed the can, slipped it back into his pocket, and unlatched the back window of the truck canopy.

  13

  Apart from anything the group hoped to accomplish by blitzing Mobley’s farm with a hundred pounds of kitchen garbage, the helicopter ride had its own rewards. En route to the farmhouse, they passed over verdant fields resplendent in the glory of an early September afternoon. Patchwork fields, in shades of green and brown, stretched from one farmstead to another. Here and there, from high up, a farmer’s tractor could be seen plowing the brown earth after a season of abundant growth. From high over, along with dairy cows browsing on lush grass, they caught a glimpse of a foal and its mother racing across a green meadow. A woman, pinning freshly washed bed sheets to a clothesline, looked up and waved. Sunlight glinted off the metal roofs of barns, and a threadlike, silver stream of water, flowing through a green pasture, glimmered in the distance.

  Enthralled by the view, Heidi shouted over the noise of the rotors: “We should all get up here once in a while, where we can take a good look at what Mother Earth has to offer, and to see what we’re in danger of losing.”

  “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Uncle Sullivan agreed, shouting back at her over his shoulder. “You should take a ride over the Cascades sometime. Now there’s a sight to behold.”

  “We’ll have to do that, won’t we?” Heidi said to the others.

  Tony, who had been sitting stiffly the whole time, holding his bag of garbage like a war refugee clutching a travel bag containing the few belongings he’s managed to salvage, nodded.

  “Yeah…it’s really great. We oughta do it more often.”

  Carlos, sitting next to him, grinned. “Why don’t you take a few pictures while we’re up here, Tony? Something to put in your portfolio for future references?”

  “That’s all right. I’ll wait till we get there.”

  “Aerial photography’s a big business, you know. You could make some real money at it.”

  “I’ll wait till we get there.”

  “Be a shame to miss out…”

  Saying nothing more, Tony continued to look straight ahead.

  “How much longer?” Mitch asked.

  “We’re almost there, aren’t we?” Heidi answered, leaning forward.

  “Two stories, with a green roof and a white flagpole out front, right?”

  Lisa, who had driven down from Portland with Heidi to scout the area and pinpoint the location of the farmhouse, added that the property was littered with two or three junked automobiles and a discarded camper trailer, all sitting in high grass between the backyard and the barn. “And the barn itself has patches of moss on it.”

  “Be hard to miss,” Uncle Sullivan hollered back. “But I think we’re coming up on it now, just ahead.”

  Heidi craned forward in her seat to look through the windshield. “Yeah, that’s it. But he forgot to put his flag up.”

  “He’ll have more to think about than that. Pull the door handle open and slide the door back. I’m gonna stand over.”

  The hovering maneuver required small but smoothly coordinated manipulations of the controls. It meant bringing the aircraft in over the backyard and holding a ground position for the duration of the operation. From a hundred feet up, with a two-story house on one side and a couple of trees on the other, a balance of factors had to be achieved; rpms, elevation, and a proper heading all had to be maintained. The pilot had to be keenly alert to everything happening. The operation was off the record in any case, and, for that reason, a careless mishap was certainly all the more out of the question. Two tours in Vietnam and numerous mountain rescue missions since then constituted a body of expertise, but predictability, or the likelihood of nothing going wrong, could never be taken as a given. It didn’t pay to be overconfident.

  Skillfully feathering the controls, Uncle Sullivan eased in over the large trees in the backyard until the craft hung directly over thirty feet of lawn between the back porch and a ragged field of high grass and abandoned autos.

  “Let’s do it!” he called out. “And don’t waste time!”

  Mitch and Carlos sat in the two rearmost seats; they were the designated handlers because of their position.

  Mitch tossed out his own bag first. Holding it in his hands, as one might hand off a baby, he turned sidewise in his seat and pitched it outward.

  Caught in the downdraft of the spinning blades, it fell a hundred feet through the air and flumped onto the grassy surface below. Already weakened by a couple of knife slits administered earlier, prior to being loaded onto the flatbed, it burst apart. Like a piñata spewing forth toys and candies of various colors and sizes, out plopped eggshells, banana and orange peels, tomatoes, heads of lettuce and cabbage, watermelon and honeydew melon rinds, potato peels, empty fruit containers, glass jars, a few tin cans, and even a couple of gnawed dog bones.

  “Wow! Look at that!” Tony exclaimed, peering down and for the moment forgetting any anxiety he had felt previously. “I gotta get a picture of that, for sure!”

  Hastily, he flung his own bag into the air and brought his camera up to his eye. With a rapid adjustment of the focus, he leaned over the edge of the open hatch and clicked off a succession of shots.

  Turning to look at everyone, he grinned.

  “This’ll for sure get someone’s attention.” He laughed, rubbing his hands together. “I can hardly wait to get these developed.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Heidi said with a grin.

  “Yeah, let’s do it!” Carlos whooped and handed his bag to Mitch, who took it and heaved it out the hatch, where it plummeted to the ground. “Heidi, yours is next!” Carlos shouted.

  Heidi passed her bag to Tony.

  His face wrapped in a gleeful expression, as though suddenly released from all feelings of restraint and inhibition, Tony grabbed it and launched it into the air. Hardly waiting for it to hit the ground, he had his camera up to his eye and, just as eagerly, was firing off shots as quickly as a war correspondent intuitively capturing a series of pictures bound to make him famous.

  Undoing his safety belt, Carlos knelt down on his seat. One by one, he handed the remaining bags to Mitch.

  Like a newspaper vendor hustling to unload the back of his truck, Mitch took each one and chucked it outward. Under the downward rush of air, they all tumbled precipitously to the grassy surface below.

  In less than three minutes, the helicopter had been relieved of its cargo. All ten bags had been cast overboard and now littered Mobley Johnson’s backyard. Kitchen garbage had been blown every which way, in all directions. Banana peels, eggshells, and scraps of paper had soared off into the tall grass adjacent to the lawn; lettuce leaves and tomatoes had smacked against the back of the house; fruit rinds and tin cans lay scattered about the driveway; an updraft had even pitched one of the bags against a lone lilac bush so that it resembled an enlarged, bloated eggplant with its innards hanging out. The whole scene looked as though a dozen hungry raccoons had raided several garbage cans, leaving the contents spread all over the yard.

  “Did we do it or did we not!” Carlos hollered, pumping the air with his fist.

  “You bet we did!” Heidi cried triumphantly, exchanging high-fives with everyone.

  “I hope he likes surprises!” Tony laughed.

  “We’ll send him pictures for his family album!” Mitch put in.

  “I’ll have them all framed!”

  Carlos laughed. “And send him the bill.”

  Uncle Sullivan looked over his shoulder.

  “I’m gonna pull away now,” he said. “But I’ll bring ’er around so you can get some panoramics. How’d that be?”

  “Right on!” Tony said, holding his camera up for more shots.

&nb
sp; Uncle Sullivan brought the craft above and away from the house and then allowed it to hover momentarily at an angle conducive to a broad shot of the scene. Making an expert adjustment to the lens, Tony snapped off one picture after another until he had added a dozen more to the roll.

  “That’ll do ’er?” asked Sullivan.

  “You bet!” Tony shouted happily.

  “Close the hatch!”

  “Oh, my God! We forgot these!” Lisa called out, holding up a sheaf of papers.

  “I’ll make one more pass and that’ll have to do it.”

  Lisa handed the papers to Heidi, who gave them to Mitch. As Uncle Sullivan swung the craft around and over the backyard again, Mitch gave the bundle an underhanded toss into the air. Like confetti swirling out of an upper-story window on a blustery day, the downward draft sent individual sheets flying off helter-skelter everywhere.

  “We’re headed for home now, guys! Close the hatch and hang on!”

  Beginning a gradual ascent, Uncle Sullivan circled out and over the housetop and crossed the open field of high grass. Flying off in a northeasterly direction, he left the farmstead rapidly behind.

  14

  It wasn’t so much the odd pieces of paper that initially confounded him as it was the garbage itself. For a split-second, Mobley experienced something akin to déjà vu. The kitchen garbage that lay spread over the length and breadth of his backyard looked very much like the garbage he periodically carted off to the different sites he used as his own private dumping grounds. And the black garbage bags were no less like his own, too. But just how did it all get there? In the short time he had been away, just what the hell had gone on?

  His immediate thought was that someone had transported it back from one or more of those sites. But then, kicking through it with the toe of his boot, he saw otherwise. The labels for a few pickle jars that lay about were for brands other than his own. And he never bought Campbell’s cream of asparagus soup or used Dijon mustard for his hotdogs. Also, Franz white bread had been a staple in his family for two generations; the several empty bags he picked up and examined were of the upper-shelf variety, costing at least four dollars a loaf, more than he would ever spend for bread. And the watermelon rinds and eggplants—what were they doing there? He hadn’t had water-melon in years, and eggplant had never been part of his diet. For certain, wherever the garbage had come from, it wasn’t his.