The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I mean no disrespect, but my focus right now is on the well-being of the planet. That’s something we all have to concern ourselves with, before it’s too late. At the rate the atmosphere is heating up, none of us will have to worry about the fires of hell.”

  The quip brought forth rosy-cheeked laughter that sounded the right note of tolerance for lighthearted irreverence.

  As the laughter subsided, Father Mallory said, “You’re forgiven, my dear, but for your penance, you have to buy us all another round of beer.”

  “I think we’re all at least in agreement on the need for that,” Jody said.

  “Hear, hear!” Father Mallory said. And they all laughed again.

  19

  Mike and Tony had chosen to pair black jeans with scuffed black combat boots and black shirts, which they wore buttoned up to the neck. For warmth, Tony had donned a black, three-quarter-length leather car coat from Macy’s and a seaman’s watch cap. His partner wore a matching cap, but had opted for a navy pea-coat he had purchased from a boutique specializing in Gothic duds. His own leather jacket was much too expensive for an operation that required the freedom to move about, unencumbered by the thought of ruining a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar garment.

  For the same operation, the others had adopted similar attire, though with less of a self-conscious need to glamorize the occasion. Their own choices had been more along the lines of a practical consideration, rather than to make a stylistic statement: work boots, old sweaters, hooded sweatshirts, baseball caps.

  Still, Jody had put on the customary black turtleneck she had bought from a Navy surplus store, as well as the same black beret and belted waist jacket she had worn in Cleveland. The image of herself, as she stood in front of her mirror at home, had captured the edgy, daring quality of a group of mod rockers posing in front of a high-powered sports car in a magazine ad. Her sense of herself had been not so much about fashion as a sense of empowerment derived from the emulated iconic image of black-clad young men and women staring boldly out at the camera. Intended or not, they seemed to embody the essence of defiance in the same way that an after-shave lotion might promise the essence of virility.

  Lisa was the only other member of the group who might be accused of flaunting a taste for a deliberate mode of dress. Her ensemble had all the earmarks of smartness and chic, though, to be fair, the intent was inadvertent, reflecting more than anything a sense of style imbued with a privileged upbringing. Quite unselfconsciously, with her pearl black Yves St. Laurent turtleneck sweater, a tailored anorak from Nordstrom’s that flared out from the hips, and a pair of handmade Italian hiking boots (probably more suitable for the comfort and fireplace warmth of a ski lodge than the rocky surface of a hiking trail), she had managed to give herself sort of a female James Bond look. In her mind, despite what anyone else might have thought, she had dressed entirely appropriately for the occasion, and all without much conscious effort.

  By the time everyone rendezvoused at the parking area below Heidi’s house, the lights in a corner grocery store a mile up the way had been turned off and a nearby street lamp had come on. The number of passing cars on the forested two-lane road had dwindled to three or four an hour. And the porch light at a nearby visitors’ center for the Audubon Society cast a muted glow in the surrounding darkness; the last employee to leave the building had locked the door hours ago and had gone home for the night.

  “This is it,” Heidi said. She had spread a road map out on the hood of her car; using a flashlight to supplement the dim light of a pole lamp at the edge of the parking area, she indicated a spot on Skyline Boulevard she had marked with a grease pencil. “We’ll leave my car and Jody’s car right here, behind the gas station. There’s a trail from there that goes through the woods and comes out at the construction site. Years ago, it used to go to an overlook, but it’s still passable, and it’s only about a hundred yards long. Anyway, Lisa and Mitch will drive a few hundred yards more, to the entrance. Does everyone have a flashlight?”

  Taking their collective murmured response for confirmation, she folded up the map.

  “Before we start, I want to take just a moment to welcome Whit aboard. He’s helped us out before—some of you have already met him—with deliveries and pick-ups, but this is the first time he’s actually really gotten involved. Needless to say, the more people we can count on to participate, the stronger we’ll be as an organization. Not to put too fine a point on it, his being here tonight should be a real morale booster for the rest of us. So, again, we’re glad you’re here, Whit.”

  Whit had been standing at the back of the group, slightly off to the side. As everyone acknowledged Heidi’s comments and turned to look at him, he gave them a self-effacing smile. He seemed reluctant to take credit for the decision, as though it had been made perforce of something larger than himself.

  “It’s the instinct, the instinct of survival,” he said. “I mean, after a while it just kicks in on its own. It’s like it just says, I’ve had enough…this has gone on too long. I better do something about it before it’s too late. It’s Mother Earth calling—calling to each of us to let us know that we don’t have time to waste. It’s sort of like the call of the wild—we don’t understand it, we don’t know it’s there, but we have to respond to it anyway, because it’s so powerful. It’s inside us, and we feel it, and when we do we just know it’s time to act. We just know it’s time to get our shit together on this. We don’t even have to think about it. It rises up, like when Mother Nature tells the goose it’s time to reproduce or the birds to fly south for the winter or the bears to get ready for hibernation. It’s almost like a spell, you know what I mean? We don’t really have any control over it; it just happens. And that’s why I’m here tonight—from now on!—because I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Like all of us, I just succumbed to an overpowering urge, and that urge motivated me to act. It made me get out of my comfort zone and realize that I’m a part of the main, too—that we’re all a part of the main—and I better get moving. I’m moving right now…I’m moving right along with all of ya.”

  His words had all the conviction of a slightly off-kilter but spontaneous testimonial; and, despite some mild astonishment, everyone clapped dutifully and swapped high-fives with him. The metaphors he used had been credibly appropriate and did lend plausibility to his reputation as a bona fide practitioner of the sacred art of poetry. The one or two skeptics in the group kept silent, and everyone again turned to Heidi.

  “Let’s do it!” she said. “Let’s make it happen!”

  Skyline Boulevard, the main crossroad above Heidi’s house, meandered for twenty miles along a spine-like, heavily forested ridge before finally ending at Rocky Point Road. Thirty or more years ago, the woodsy, leafy scenery along the way had a decidedly rustic flavor, much more so than now. Back then, perhaps wanting to escape the heat and closeness of the city, a family out for a Sunday drive might have come upon a small hillside farm carved out of the timber, with maybe an apple or a pear orchard back of the house and a few dairy cows munching contentedly in a sun-washed field of lush grass. Commerce was pretty much limited to an occasional wayside café that offered home cooking, or a one-room grocery store with a set of 1940s gasoline pumps out front and a mechanic’s shed next to it. The local high school, a redbrick, two-story building with a white flagpole at the bottom of the front steps and a gravel parking lot off to the side, had a farming community feel to it. Indeed, in those days it would not have been unusual to come upon a farmer and his tractor pulling a load of milk cans or several bushels of apples. But not anymore.

  Nowadays, commuter traffic had become the rule. And the Sunday tourist was more apt to see homes of the secluded, mini-mansion variety, with attached three-car garages and a wrought-iron gate at the entrance to the driveway. Also, a cream-colored, modernistic structure, having a flat roof and a paved parking lot with speed bumps, had replaced the quaint redbrick school building. A smartly efficient
Mobile station, complete with food mart and uniformed attendants, sat across from an Ace Hardware and a real estate office. The occasional roadside sign might offer anything from fresh herbs, raw milk, organic produce, scented candles, aromatherapy, acupuncture, or custom jewelry. And the county grange building, a wooden structure put up during the thirties and looking like an unpretentious church without a steeple, had been converted into a dance studio.

  Wide expanses of the Tualatin Valley were still visible between high stands of Douglas fir and at those sites recently logged off for further development with the intent of erecting gated communities. But the country flavor of mossy, hillside apple trees in the late-autumn sunshine had definitely disappeared, along with the sight of farmers in overalls pulling up to the local feed store in flatbed trucks or battered pickups (the feed store itself had been turned into an espresso shop that, besides coffee and bottled water, sold spinach quiche and chocolate croissants). Adding further insult to the injury of those possessed of a nostalgic desire for the “good ol’ days,” a plain white clapboard house once belonging to an elderly widow who, in her spare time, knitted socks and gloves for her grandchildren, had been taken over by a gaggle of hard rockers who, in a pot-induced spasm of inspiration, had painted the windows black and now spent several days a week practicing with steel guitars, alto saxophones, and drums.

  It was one thing to pine for the good ol’ days; it was another to decry the changes as destructive of the environment.

  Heidi, just old enough to remember some of the earlier scenes, fit the latter category.

  To her, it wasn’t that an older way of life, redolent of time-tested values, was vanishing. To her, it all meant one thing—further evidence of reckless encroachment. And it wasn’t so much the little innovations here and there: a remodeled house, a converted store-front, or even a pasture that had become part of a hobby farm. Her opposition took on a more futuristic mode. She foresaw what could happen once development gathered momentum. Like a prophet of old, she had an apocalyptic vision of what was to come: townhouses and condominiums clustered together where once lovely, majestic trees had stood strong and tall in defiance of time and the relentless vagaries of weather. Even large tracts of forest cleared for shopping malls was not inconceivable. It had happened in North Plains, Cedar Mill, and out around Hillsboro, land all once prime farming country. Inexorably, like the slow, insidious spread of cancer, progress of a kind that portended an utter disregard for preservation seemed to have taken hold. A mentality that viewed nature through the lens of dollar signs had triumphed. The old “dominion over all the earth” nonsense, promulgated three thousand years ago by ignorant sheepherders and nomads who, with their primitive knowledge and insights, externalized their own impulses and thought processes as the spoken word of God, seemed to have run amok. To her way of thinking, the situation called for another…statement.

  Forty minutes later they all met at an abandoned and boarded-up two-pump garage and filling station scheduled to be demolished. It sat in an excavated, circular clearing by itself, on a lonely stretch of the road, with the nearest house a mile away.

  Leaving her own car running, Heidi got out and walked back to Jody’s car. “You and I can park around behind the building,” she said. “That way, we’re out of sight of the road, in case anyone comes by. Besides, the trail starts back there.”

  Jody pulled around back, and Heidi went up to Lisa’s Porsche; Lisa rolled down the window. “The entrance to the site is another quarter-mile down the road. You can’t miss it.”

  “How far after that, Heidi?”

  “Not far, maybe a hundred yards in.”

  “And the guard’ll be there?”

  “Sound asleep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He’s been there every night for the past three nights, and he’s always been asleep in his car.”

  “How big is he?”

  “Not that big, Mitch, really. He shouldn’t be hard to handle.”

  “Never underestimate an opponent who suddenly finds himself in dire straits—that’s what I always say.”

  “An extra strong dose should do it, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose, depending on how quickly it takes effect. I’ve never used it myself, so I don’t know.”

  “My pharmacist assures me that it’s very potent,” Lisa said.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Lisa turned to Mitch and patted him on the leg. “Don’t be so pessimistic,” she said. “You’ll have us jinxed before we even start.”

  “Yeah, Mitch, buck up. Everything’ll work out—you’ll see.”

  “You don’t suppose the guy has to check in every once in a while, do you? I mean, if he’s out cold, so that he can’t call in when he’s supposed to, someone might come out to check on him.”

  “Like I said, Mitch, we spent three nights observing the guy. He made his rounds at twelve o’clock, called in, and then went back to his car and went to sleep. There’s no reason to believe his routine will be any different tonight.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “You worry too much, Mitch,” Lisa said and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You better get started.”

  “Right.”

  “Good luck.”

  Lisa rolled up the window, put her car in gear, and sped off.

  Jody had parked in close to the rear of the building, with enough space left over to allow Heidi to pull in directly behind her and still manage to keep both cars well hidden from view. The two groups now joined each other.

  “It’s about a hundred yards from the top of the embankment,” Heidi told them. “You’ll have to watch out for low-lying branches, and the trail’s almost overgrown in places, but just follow me. Has everyone got a flashlight?”

  The dirt embankment curved around behind the back of the building, giving that part of the property a roughly concave shape. Probably ten feet high, with an overhang of grass and tree roots along the crest, it inclined a few measures below twenty degrees. Where it folded in toward the middle, rainwater coming over the edge had scoured a channel that, when dry, served as a convenient footpath. A small amount of moisture earlier that evening made for a certain amount of slipperiness, but falling in behind Heidi, moving in single file, everyone managed to clamber to the top. The only misstep occurred when Whit, wearing his cowboy boots, hit a slick spot and fell to one knee. After picking himself up, he scrambled to rejoin the others.

  20

  Lisa eased the Porsche a few yards up the graveled road to the construction site. Turning off the lights and shutting off the engine, she looked over at Mitch.

  “This is it, Mitch,” she said. “Can you handle it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  He couldn’t quite believe he was on the threshold of committing a crime. Whether vandalism, malicious mischief, willful destruction of property with the intent to commit a terrorist act, or whatever name it went by, he didn’t suppose the legal term mattered. If they got caught, ignorance of the correct terminology, as defined by criminal statutes, would not constitute a defense. Pure and simple, regardless of whatever he or anyone else chose to call it, what they were about to do could land every single one of them in jail—big time!

  Lisa leaned over and gave him a warm, prolonged kiss on the mouth.

  “You’re going to do just fine,” she said. And, reassuringly, she began rubbing the inside of his thigh. “And afterwards, you and I are going to spend a quiet weekend at Daddy’s cabin at the lake. We’ll hike in the woods, drink wine in front of the fireplace in the evening, and even swim naked in the moonlight.”

  “My God, how can I resist? Do you suppose seduction would work as a legal defense?”

  “Do you feel like you’re being seduced, Mitch?”

  “From the very beginning.”

  She had taken a blonde wig from her handbag and, with the interior light on, was busy tucking her own hair up under it.

  “How bad is it? Do you want
me to stop?”

  “I didn’t say it was bad. It’s actually rather nice. It’s just that I have this disconcerting habit of considering the consequences.”

  “What do you think?” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror. “Does it work?”

  “Voila!…Wonder Woman!”

  She turned to him.

  “We all have to consider consequences, Mitch,” she said “then get on with life.”

  He gave her a quick look. Her comment constituted the kind of aphoristic dictum that could be tossed off with flippant nonchalance only by someone for whom consequences could be negotiated. The attitude arose from an awareness of rank and privilege, and its validity had more to do with the habitual and conditioned indulgence of lesser mortals who were sometimes inclined by a mixture of admiration and envy to go easy. If Lisa felt that way, her station in life allowed her to.

  Giving him another kiss, she opened the glove compartment.

  “Do you have a handkerchief?”

  “I do. It’s one of the few things consistently consistent about me. I never go anywhere without one.”

  “Good. Because you’ll need it for this.” And she held up a bottle the size of a cough medicine container.

  “One drop of this’ll do it, huh?”

  “I would use considerably more than a drop. You want it to act quickly, without involving a struggle.”

  Mitch took the bottle and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  She handed him a fresh roll of duct tape.

  “And you know what this is for?”

  “It’s a great item to have in your backpack. You never know when you’ll need a quick fix.”

  “Well, tonight you’re going to use it for something else.”

  “Bind him hand and foot, right?”

  “Immobilize him for the duration. We don’t want him getting loose and causing a commotion. We can notify someone later, after it’s over.”

  “The poor guy’s gonna suffer a lot of discomfort. But, just out of curiosity, what if he turns out to be a really big guy, with a really big set of lungs?”