The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

On top of that, they’d run off the one decent employee Bingham had landed that summer, a polite, obedient kid who went to Casady, the city’s best private high school.

O’Malley understood that there was a world outside Oklahoma City, which in the 1980s could feel—for someone like Wyatt, from a family like Wyatt’s—like a closed fist.

It was a nice moment, a moment of simple, stupid human happiness, the best kind. And yet even as Wyatt sat in the middle of the scene, he remained outside it, apart, as if partitioned off behind special glass that let in light but not heat. He’d experienced this sensation before. It was like looking at a photo of a family gathered around a roaring fire. The fire warmed the people in the photo but not the person holding the photo. You’d have to be crazy to think it ever would.

Crowley was standing out past the plaza, at the very edge of the park, where the red-dirt bank crumbled into the water. It was dark and very quiet. No wind. In Oklahoma you never noticed the wind, did you? You only noticed that one day

“Correct,” Brett Williams said. Placidly. Wyatt realized he was leaning forward across the table. He was coming off as the kind of crackpot who fluttered around the edges of every high-profile crime, a species dreaded by cops.

One hundred and sixty-eight chairs. Wyatt knew that the toll was much higher than that. Oklahoma City was a small town at heart, and everyone knew someone who had been killed or maimed in the blast or someone who’d descended into hell to help with the rescue.

And yet a minute after the explosion, at 9:03, the city had begun to pull itself back together, to become something new. The gate at the opposite end of the reflecting pool didn’t mark the end of something. It marked a beginning.

Julianna ended the call. She sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, then went out to the garage. A rope dangled from the trapdoor in the ceiling. The previous owner of the house had used a piece of string to attach a tennis ball to the rope. The string had been carefully measured: the tennis ball hung four feet off the floor, at the height of a car windshield. When the previous owner pulled in to the garage, the tennis ball told him or her exactly where to stop the car.

Julianna hadn’t been to the Oklahoma City Zoo since she was a child, a school trip. She was old enough to remember the concrete pit that used to be just past the main entrance. Inside the pit was a replica of a sunken pirate ship, teeming with small monkeys. The monkeys climbed the mast and swung from the rigging. They took public poops that made the kids laugh.