The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day Page 34

  He took a few last drags on the cigarette, then flicked it through the open doorway and out onto the road. Hunching forward, he continued. “Listen here, man, what you oughta do right now is go inside and talk to that Navy dude. Tell him what’s really happening here. Tell him they got you by the balls, but you’re one step ahead of ’em. Tell him you got a letter that Bernie wrote for us. He wrote it up all nice ’n legal like, using the best shyster skills that money can buy, and that it’s now locked up in his safe, where it’ll stay as long as the motherfuckers play straight…”

  “Bernie the Pudge, huh?” Rick had to chuckle at an image they all knew so well: a short, chunky little guy with a polka dot bow-tie and pork-pie hat. His clientele mostly came from the ranks of outlaw bikers facing, among other things, murder and rape charges. And his reputation was such that, for a lunch bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, he could practically guarantee an acquittal, at least a reduced sentence.

  “Yeah, good ol’ Bernie…You might even give him a call and have him do it.”

  Rick chuckled again. “It might work,” he said. “They try to fuck me, they fuck themselves.”

  “Right…They don’t live up to their end of the bargain, the letter gets published.”

  Rick sat down in the open doorway and looked off into the darkness.

  The chance of getting in touch with Bernie this late in the game seemed too much of a long shot even to make the effort. His office was always open for business, in that Rick had his cell number, but getting a letter composed and faxed to Livingston before sometime the next day would cut too close to the wire. As it was now, the plan called for Punch to meet everyone in the morning and then lead them to the backside of Art Jimson’s ranch. From that point, once they had been oriented, the group would be on its own. The actual “attack” wouldn’t take place until late that evening, but even that would hardly allow enough time.

  He turned back to Peewee. “I don’t know, man, I think I’d better go with a bluff. Even if I did get hold of Bernie, I’d have to explain it all, and he’d have all kinds of questions. And I’m not sure about the FBI…he might not want to get mixed up in their business.”

  “What you could do, though, is point out to this Navy dude that they’re just as much of a threat to him. I mean, who’s to say they might not want to tie up loose ends? Why would they want to leave him out there, where he might talk about it? Look what happened after Kennedy got shot—a bunch of fuckers died, some of them mysteriously.”

  “Shit, Peewee, hardly the same thing.”

  “Maybe not. But you see what I’m sayin’? You can’t trust those fuckers. That’s the bottom line, Rick.”

  “Well, unless I got a better plan, it looks like I might have to.”

  “Try the bluff, anyway. Tell the Navy dude there’s a letter. He’ll probably pass it on.”

  “Why would he do that, though, when you stop and think about it? Why would he want to complicate things for himself? I mean, he probably doesn’t want to be involved any more than he already is. After all, he’s working for them…that means he’s on their side. Why would he want to seem like he’s suddenly taking a position on behalf of the opposition? No, I don’t think so, Peewee. I think this guy’ll probably wanna stay right where he’s at. He‘s safe enough now—he won’t want to jeopardize that.”

  “That only leaves one option, Rick—you gotta go through with it.”

  Rick worked a cigarette out of the package he had in his shirt pocket and lit it with his lighter. He took a hard pull, then let the smoke out as though to release a build-up of tension. “Either that, or I just split,” he said quietly.

  Peewee looked at him for a long moment without saying anything. He seemed to be considering how serious his friend might be.

  “I got friends in LA,” he said. “They could hook us up. We could run a little dope for a while. But we’d have to leave everything behind, Rick. We’d have to leave right from here…tonight.”

  “How far do you think we’d get before the motherfuckers found out?”

  “We drive all night…head due south…be in Utah or Nevada sometime tomorrow morning. Keep driving all day tomorrow…probably get to LA the following day. If we’re lucky, the feds’ll figure we’re headed back to Portland. That’s where they’ll go to wait for us.”

  “What about these guys?”

  “What about ’em? They’re here…They got what they want…They don’t need us, not really. They got a couple of rifles between ’em…They’ll probably just take a vote…And they’ll figure as long as they’re here, they may as well go through with it.”

  “You sound pretty certain of that, Peewee.”

  “Well, even if they abort and go back to Portland, so what? We’re gone.”

  Rick took a long, contemplative draw on his cigarette. He liked the idea of cutting out. He had thought about it ever since the two agents had contacted him and put him in the bind he was now in. He had nothing to keep him in Portland—no family—and the friends he had there would always be his friends. The drawback had more to do with leaving behind the congeniality of the familiar and the known for a city whose sheer size made the prospect of starting over daunting; that, in itself, was formidable. But the real kicker had to do with his income: most of it came from a monthly VA check, and the feds could use it to track him down. No matter where he went—whether Mexico, Arizona, or LA—either through a forwarding address or a bank account, they could find him. And if they really wanted to play hard-ball, they could disrupt the source: simply stop payments.

  “I don’t know, Peewee. On second thought, there’s a lot at stake. And disappearing wouldn’t be all that easy, anyway…for either of us. I mean, we both get checks from the VA, right? Even if we managed to stay under the radar, they could fuck us good.”

  Pewee had taken another cigarette from his pack and was about to light it. He paused long enough to say, “I didn’t think of that. I guess it’s back to the drawing board, huh.”

  “We got no choice—we gotta go through with it.”

  Peewee lit the cigarette and tossed the match out the doorway. He inhaled deeply, as if to assuage his disappointment, then said, “Maybe it’s something we could do after all this is over, huh?”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to think on it…I could use a change of scenery.”

  “Me, too.”

  For a short while, the two men sat in silence. They had grappled with the inevitable, the inevitable had won, and now they had to resign themselves. The following day, despite a reluctance to believe the two agents would honor their assurance of immunity, both Rick and Peewee had to lead Heidi’s little band of domestic terrorists on a raid (Peewee had likened it to “a farmstead raid, right out of the Old West, as part of an ongoing struggle between settlers and Indians”). In the here and now, with the issue of their own willingness to participate put to rest by a circumstance beyond their control, they may as well have been two soldiers on the eve before a battle: no amount of griping about the situation would change the morrow.

  “So, ya gonna come in, or stay out here?”

  Peewee shook his head.

  “It’s too late, anyway. They’ll probably go back to town pretty soon. I’ll turn out the light and sack out on the bunk. Just make up something…tell ’em I got a stomach bug acting up, something I caught overseas—‘jungle fever’—but that I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

  Rick stood up, took one last drag off his cigarette, and snapped it off into the darkness.

  “I’ll tell you what—I’ll just tell them you’re not feeling well, so we’re gonna leave now. But you gotta be on your game tomorrow, Peewee. Okay? For your ol’ amigo?”

  “You can count on me, ol’ amigo. As long as we gotta do this, I’ll try to make it memorable.”

  “I bet you will,” Rick said.

  Smiling, he crossed the road and went back to the cabin.

  43

  Peewee’s alleged sudden attack of a bladder problem earlier that day
had left everyone thinking there might be something wrong. His deliberately vague description of the symptoms had done nothing to lessen their curiosity, but when Rick came in and announced the condition was something called “jungle fever,” and that it was simply a persistent and chronic ailment liable to flare up without warning, everyone accepted it. They also accepted that, out of necessity, Peewee should probably go back to the motel and go to bed. Heidi even expressed concern over whether he would be all right.

  “It’s nothing really serious, then?” she wondered. “He just has to sleep it off?”

  “That usually does it,” Rick said. “He takes medicine for it. It’s something he picked up in Honduras.”

  “It isn’t curable, then?”

  “Not so far. But he gets disability for it.”

  “Well, tell him to get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll all see him in the morning. Hopefully, he’ll be okay then.”

  “Oh, yeah—he’s been through it before. He usually wakes up and feels fine. He has to drink a lot of water, though—that’s the bladder part of the problem.”

  “Well, drive careful, going back.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Telling Punch they could talk more tomorrow, Rick said his goodbyes, and went out.

  For a moment no one said anything. The news that Peewee, who had seemed upbeat and energetic the day before, when they had met him in the parking lot at The Dalles, had some kind of tropical, fungal disease that could strike unpredictably created a somber and reflective mood. In the lives most of them had led, that such things could happen had always been a distant and remote reality. Like malaria, elephantiasis, schistosomiasis, or some other affliction characteristic of the hotter climes, jungle fever (whatever it was!) connoted something equally disgusting and repellent. Not exactly leprosy they supposed, it still brought to the surface a natural, elemental caution.

  “It’s not contagious, is it?” Misty wondered aloud, voicing the concern shared by most of the others in the group.

  Punch, who had been several times around the world and seen more than most, scoffed at the idea: “Listen,” he said, “if you spend time in the tropics, you’re bound to pick up some little bug that always takes awhile to clear out of your system. I wouldn’t let it worry ya…had a friend once who got a skin infection that took a couple of years to go away. It looked like hell, and the poor bastard suffered periodically, but nobody else ever got it from him. Best thing to do is not talk about it…act like you don’t even know he has it. If it was contagious, they’d probably have him in quarantine somewhere, anyway.”

  “Has anyone ever read anything by Laurie Garrett?” Ralph asked. After first making sure that no one objected, he had filled his pipe with a blended Cavendish tobacco. With Misty sitting next to him at the breakfast bar, he had looked on contentedly, with his usual air of someone making observations but withholding comment or judgment. But the talk concerning a tropical disease (before deciding on the field of ornithology, he had considered medicine) had caught his attention.

  “Betrayal of Trust,” Mitch said. “I read it not too long ago.”

  “An excellent book, but the one even more relevant is The Coming Plague. It’s a book about the emergence and re-emergence of many diseases around the world and how we’ve made ourselves susceptible to them by complacency and the freedom of movement from one country and continent to another. She uses numerous examples to support her thesis, and indeed she does makes a very compelling case. But the thing that struck me about it is that the phenomenon she writes about is exacerbated by global warming. Her book was published before global warming got to be such a big topic, but it could very well be an integral part of today’s debate—global warming is only going to make these diseases much more prevalent and hard to deal with…”

  “All the more reason why people have to be jolted into thinking more about what actions contribute to what I call the ‘ostrich effect,’” Heidi brought out, pleased at having an opening for a meaningful dialog. “You only have to look around to see what that’s all about. Too many people just want to ignore the obvious. The untrammeled development taking place throughout society, the steady loss of wetlands, farmland being converted into strip malls as paeans of materialistic consumption, housing tracts usurping animal habitats, and on and on—it’s all right there in front of us. And the consequences are starting to mount—we’re changing the world as we know it. And where are we heading? What’s going to be the ultimate effect of our carelessness? But you see what I’m talking about…I don’t have to elaborate, right?”

  Punch, who realized she was addressing him, sat up uncomfortably in his chair. “Oh, you bet!” he said. “And I see it all the time out here, with more and more land being gobbled up by outsiders coming into the state. And the locals talk about it, too. Believe me, we’re up on all this.”

  “Is there any movement to curtail growth, to preserve open range land or the forested areas? Any local groups involved in that?”

  Again, Punch shifted in his chair.

  “Oh, yeah—I know of several people who’re doing what they can. But ya can’t keep folks from wanting to move into an area and carve out a little space for themselves, ya know what I mean? It’s almost unnatural to expect anything like that.”

  “Which is part of the problem, of course…”

  “Ah, how’s that?”

  “The mind-set—it has to be changed. We live in an era not only of diminishing resources but also one of diminishing land availability. It’s not like the Old West anymore, where people could just up and move across the next mountain range and start over.”

  “You mean, like sprawl?”

  “Yes, exactly. Look at your own Missoula…it’s spread out in all directions.”

  “I agree with ya there…exactly why I chose Livingston—livable and manageable.”

  “What we’re basically talking about is too many people,” Mitch said, a slight impatience in his voice. He occupied one of the stools at the breakfast bar and had been listening with the repressed attitude of one who regards the proceedings from the jaded viewpoint of having heard it all before and yet knowing that it doesn’t begin to address the real problem. “There’s just too many of us running around. We’ve jammed up the system, so to speak, and it doesn’t function the way it should anymore. We breed uncontrollably, without regard for carrying capacity or even our own ability to accommodate growth in a prudent, rational way. Stupidly and shortsightedly, we outlaw abortion, condoms, even family counseling, and some of us reproduce ourselves like rabbits on Viagra—ten, twelve, fifteen or more kids. We let doctrinaire religiosity or a blinkered politician’s decision take precedence over common sense, and then we scratch our heads in wonderment at the devastation we’ve wrought. We’re on an unsustainable path, and, yes, it involves the use and misuse of resources, but it wouldn’t be nearly the problem it is if we just exercised self-restraint and were a little more cognizant of what we’ve chosen to call ourselves—homo sapiens.”

  “Damn, you said a mouthful.” Punch chuckled. “But I gotta agree with ya. I been to Mexico City, Cairo, and a half-dozen other world-class megalopolises, and, I gotta tell ya, they’re as thick as ants. They’re all over the place. Hell, you take a look at Bangladesh—country no bigger than Wisconsin an’ they got a hundred million people running around in various degrees of desperation, an’ all trying to stay alive and keep their heads above water. You’re absolutely right—crazier ’an hell!”

  While the others had chosen to seat themselves on the couch, in a chair, or on a bar stool, Jody had opted to sit at one end of the rug and close to the fire. With her legs drawn up and her arms encircling her knees, her contribution thus far, like a congregant at the back of a church responding to a minister’s exhortations, had been confined to murmurs of assent or simple head nodding. Everything Heidi had said about the environment fell in line with her own thinking and attitudes, and with a certain missionary zeal she had looked on approvingly at Heidi’s a
ttempts to bring Punch into the fold. But something about Mitch’s critique rankled.

  “You know, Mitch, you may be right. But it’s all after the fact. The hordes that you’re talking about are already with us and among us. What would you have us do? Let some of them die? Not go to their assistance whenever a tsunami or a tornado strikes or a drought cripples their ability to feed themselves? Just how would you handle it? If I remember correctly, to cite one of your Jack London short stories, when the elderly members of an Eskimo society could no longer care for themselves and had become a burden, they were left in the wilderness to die. Are you advocating something like that?”

  “Are we still friends, Jody?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are we still friends? I mean, is this an ad hominem attack? Or is it something I said?”

  “You’re advocating population control, Mitch. I just wonder how you would do that. Go off and leave people?”

  “I’m not advocating anything, Jody. I’m stating the problem. And I think it’s a rather obvious one. But it never seems to be part of the solution.”

  “How can it be? Are you going to tell people they can’t have babies?”

  “Well, the Catholic Church, and many individuals of a religious persuasion, don’t mind telling people that they have to have a baby. Some people are even willing to make not having your baby a crime. I believe it’s called abortion. And, if you can criminalize it, why can’t you likewise compel people in the other direction? The Chinese have done it…admittedly, it’s repugnant to a Westerner’s sensibilities, but the Chinese at least recognize the need for it.”

  “Dissension within the ranks!” Carlos suddenly cried out. “Every time you two guys are together, it just gets better an’ better.”

  “We try to provide quality entertainment for everyone, Carlos.” Mitch laughed. “We want this to be a fun-filled evening for you. We don’t want you to demand your money back.”