Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  Then Finch thought, No, not a beach ball. It was something pink, with limbs that moved as it flew through the air. It's a baby that man just threw at that car. For the love of God, it's a baby, he thought. Meanwhile the man continued to yell and shake his fist, running after the car, which still sped toward Finch.

  Finch was not the only one whose attention was drawn to the commotion. As the baby sailed through the air, a low moan of horror and disbelief rose from the crowd on the beach, changing into a chorus of angry yells. As soon as they saw what he had done, several of the men and women down by the water rose to their feet and, unified by their hatred, began running toward the baby-thrower. As if in slow motion, Finch was spinning the Jeep around to position himself for a traffic stop and reaching for the controls of the light bar and siren and the radio microphone from its clip on the dash. The man saw the mob coming at him. Finch unfastened his seat belt. The car, passing by Finch's Jeep, braked to a stop. The driver's door flew open and a woman got out, screaming and waving her arms at Finch. Then she was reaching back into the car.

  "Hey!" shouted Finch.

  On the beach the mob descended upon the baby-thrower. Their aggregate intention now obvious to him, the man turned and ran at top speed down the beach along the lakeshore, disappearing into a thicket of the willow and giant rush. The woman had pulled the baby from the car and was holding it up in front of her, then hugging it, then holding it up again, screaming, weeping, red-faced, screaming something at Finch, pointing in the direction of the man who had run away. Finch could not tell what she was saying. He had the radio mike now, and in his other hand he gripped the aluminum club he carried in his Jeep.

  "Hey!" he yelled again at the woman without knowing exactly what he wanted her to do, except to stop screaming so he could talk on the radio. Thumbing the microphone, he said into it, "Northern, four six nine, I need code three backup at Upper Lake Clementine."

  There was a short crackle of static from the speaker in the car and then nothing. Finch keyed the mike again. "Northern, four six nine, code three traffic."

  "Four six nine, Northern," the dispatcher replied, sounding almost bored. "Please repeat your traffic."

  "Northern, four six nine. I need additional units to a four-fifteen at Upper Lake Clementine."

  "Additional units, Lake Clementine..."

  Finch imagined his backup roaring to the wrong end of the lake. "Negative, Northern—Upper Lake, Upper Lake!"

  There was another burst of static. Then silence.

  Finch: "Did you copy, Northern?"

  Deafening static, then the dispatcher: "Copy, Upper Clementine, units available, please respond."

  "One seven nine," I said into my microphone, several miles away. "Code three from the Confluence."

  If the world exists in a perpetual state of uncertainty, if things are half-assed and watered-down and most things fall into a gray area, when you respond to a call like that you are bathed for a few minutes in superhuman certainty. You put away whatever squabbles you and your partners have had, ready to wade into the fray, to sacrifice yourself for any one of them. You hit the lights and siren and drive better than you normally do, think sharper than you normally do. The people in other cars look at you as you pass them on a mountain road and at intersections the cars part for you like the Red Sea for Moses. It is an acceptable substitute for reality; it's fleeting, but it keeps you believing in what you do.

  One after another, three other four-wheel-drive patrol trucks converged on the road and roared down it, arriving at the bottom with the brakes stinking and spongy under the pedal. I was a couple of minutes ahead of the others. I jerked my baton from where I kept it jammed between the seat back and the cushion and rolled out of the car, sliding the club into the ring on my gun belt as I strode through the crowd now milling around Finch—fifty, perhaps seventy-five people.

  Finch, poker-faced and sturdy in his green jeans, khaki shirt, gun belt, and green baseball cap with a badge insignia above the bill, stood by the open door of his car with the woman. Her car was still parked where she had stopped it, the driver's door still open. Finch was asking her questions and taking notes on a clipboard. As I walked up to them he glanced at me and, without acknowledgment or greeting, began to speak with no trace of excitement other than the elevated volume of his voice and the pace of his delivery.

  "This was a male-female fight. The guy—he's gone—ran downstream. They were arguing. She says when they decided to separate, one was going to leave with the car and the other would stay. Then there was more arguing about who got to take the car and who had to stay with the baby. She jumps in the car and tries to leave, and he runs after her. That's when I saw him throw the baby at her in the car. I thought it was a beach ball. Then I thought, Shit—it's a baby. Luckily it passed right in through the window."

  "Where's the baby now?" I asked him.

  He pointed to the shade of the willow trees next to us. "Those two women in the crowd offered to hold it."

  I looked over at the trees. The baby was naked but for a paper diaper, face flushed, in the arms of a woman forty feet from where we were standing. She and another woman were making worried-looking ministrations over it.

  "Is it okay? You wanna call an ambulance?" I asked.

  "Seems okay. I've called Child Protective Services to pick the little guy up and have him checked at the hospital. Anyway—then the crowd turned on the man and I thought they were going to kill him. The guy saw what was about to happen to him and ran into the brush down there." Finch gestured toward the thickets by the beach. "That was a good twenty minutes ago, and I have no idea where he is by now."

  As Finch finished his account, the other rangers arrived, rumbling along the road in clouds of dust. Finch went back to questioning the woman. I walked over to where the others were getting out of their rigs. They were surrounded by bystanders who wanted to tell them what had happened and demand that something be done about it. When I told them what Finch had told me, the rangers were only too happy to leave their petitioners and search for the missing suspect.

  The way it worked with us, as soon as the adrenal part was over, someone would have to pay for all the fun. You paid by having to write the whole thing up, a process that could take an hour of note-taking in the field and several hours to a couple of days back at the ranger station. As a rule, the first ranger on the scene was the one who paid. You labored over your account of the incident, all the while knowing that the DA would flush most of the nefarious acts you described down the drain and deal the guy out on a felony specified as a misdemeanor. At sentencing, the judge would impose a suspended sentence because the jail was full, or maybe once he was out on bail the guy wouldn't bother to show up for his arraignment. A bench warrant would be issued and when he got picked up a year and a half later on that and the seven other warrants he'd accumulated by then, expediency dictated that all his cases be bound up and sold at a discount, and your charges might not even make the cut. So in the end he'd do a little jail time on some unrelated beef and no one would ever know what a beautiful job you'd done on the investigation. Year after year you wrote up these stories, and they'd wind up archived in a pile of cardboard boxes in the warehouse, flattening and drying like pressed flowers under the weight of all the stories above them—the unknown stratigraphy of your career.

  In this case it was Finch who got to cut paper. To assist him while he continued taking the woman's statement, I began circulating to talk to the witnesses. The sweat ran down my face and fell in big brown dusty drops from my nose, staining my notes. My ballpoint refused to write on the wet spots. Our radios crackled with inarticulate static from Folsom Lake. The bystanders began to drift away, back down to the cool water.

  It went on like this for a while. The whole affair had the usual combination of gripping danger and utter senselessness. Then I heard Finch on the little speaker-mike from the radio on my gun belt, clipped to the epaulet of my shirt: "One seven nine ... that's the guy—long hair, no shirt�
�coming toward us."

  I looked at Finch. He was pointing to a lanky man with unkempt hair walking up the sandy track from the willow thickets. The remaining spectators around us began to yell: "That's him! Aren't you going to do anything? That's the guy who tried to kill her baby!" I took a few steps toward the man, placing myself between him and the angry bystanders. He wore only dirty athletic shoes and a pair of cut-off jeans. He looked dazed.

  "Put your hands up," I commanded him, pulling my baton from its ring. I didn't brandish it. Instead, cocking my wrist, I aligned it along the back of my forearm, where it wasn't threatening but was instantly ready.

  "Turn around. Interlace your fingers and put your hands behind your head. Spread your legs. Don't move." I stepped around behind the man and patted the pockets of his shorts for weapons. Then I handcuffed him and, leading him over to my Jeep, put him in the back seat behind the expanded-metal prisoner cage. His sweaty back made a muddy smear across the dusty vinyl of the seat back. He looked weary. He said nothing and avoided my eyes. I didn't question him. He wasn't going anywhere, and now that he was captive, he had to be read his rights. I was more eager to question the witnesses on the beach before they disappeared, so I left him in the Jeep with the air conditioner on full blast and we went back to work on our notes and interviews. A breeze off the river stirred the leaves on the willow trees and momentarily cooled me, blowing through the sweat-soaked shirt on my belly, below my bulletproof vest. This thing was pretty well over.

  Twenty minutes later I had my part of the statement-taking done. I returned to my Jeep to drop off a page full of notes and get a drink of water. Glancing at the prisoner in the back, I saw him slumped over sideways. I took off my sunglasses and studied his face. It was blue, ashen blue, like a dead man's. He was absolutely motionless.

  "Finch! Look at this!"

  Finch walked over and peered at the man through the side window of the car.

  "He's faking it," he said.

  "The hell he is."

  "He's faking it."

  "I don't know how he could fake that color. Take a look."

  I opened the door, leaned into the back seat, and put my hand on the man's clammy chest, feeling for movement. Holding my face cautiously close to his, I listened for breathing. "Nothing," I told Finch over my shoulder. "He's not breathing."

  "Shit," said Finch.

  I reached for the latch on the man's seat belt. Grabbing his feet, I dragged them up off the floor. He was dead weight. I pulled on his legs. Finch shoved in next to me and grabbed one foot. The man tumbled out of the car onto his back on the rocky beach.

  Kneeling on the rocks next to the still body, I rolled the tips of the index and middle fingers of my right hand down from the prominence of the man's Adam's apple to the carotid artery, feeling for a pulse. Finch was on the radio calling for an ambulance.

  "His heart is still beating," I told Finch.

  I jumped up and ran around to the back of the Jeep, opened the tailgate, opened the equipment box inside, and jerked out the medic's pack and oxygen kit. I ran back around the Jeep, put them down, ripped open their cases, and cranked open the oxygen supply valve. The regulator made a reassuring hiss as the gauge spiked up. I pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. I reached into the medic's kit for an airway, sized it against the man's clammy jaw, discarded it for another, opened his mouth gingerly with a finger and thumb, and threaded the curved plastic tube over his blue tongue and down his throat. Finch was uncoiling the shiny green supply line for the demand valve and handed the valve to me. I hit the button once: It made a satisfying shush. I picked up a mask from the kit and press-fitted it onto the valve, pushed it over the man's mouth and nose, and began to breathe him. Dispatch called; our ambulance was en route. I reached for the speaker-mike and acknowledged their transmission.

  For maybe half an hour, maybe forty minutes, I watched his chest rise and fall in response to the oxygen I forced into it with the button under my thumb. Periodically I'd stop to check for a pulse. His heart was still beating. Weak, but beating. With Finch and the other rangers to keep an eye on the crowd, my world got very small and simple, just the sshhush of the demand valve, the still body, and the rounded river rocks beneath it.

  Around the body were cobbles of greenstone the color of jade, and granite ones with sparkling salt-and-pepper crystals. There were river-rounded schists, the alternating layers of black and white minerals across their flanks like stripes on a zebra. There were charcoal-gray gabbros. There were tan quartzites in which more wear-resistant veins of quartz stood out in bas-relief, branching like the blue veins on the still man's pale arms. There were eggs of porphyry the color of dried blood and orbs of milky quartz blasted by nineteenth-century gold miners from fossil riverbeds high on the canyon walls upstream, where they'd lain entombed for fifty million years since those rivers had been buried by volcanic eruptions. Back in the living world now, these stones were orphans, because the mountains from which those ancient rivers had plucked them had long ago been washed down to the sea. Each rock and its texture, each lungful of oxygen, each moment, and then each next moment—these are all life is made of when nothing else can be counted on. And for this reason there is a strange peacefulness at the center of catastrophe.

  After a while, the man's face began to pink up. His limbs twitched. The airway I'd put down his throat began to bob and click against the interior of the clear plastic oxygen mask. He was coming to, and as he did, his gag reflex was coming back. Quickly I lifted the mask and pulled the airway out of him so it wouldn't cause him to vomit and inhale his stomach contents, which could lead to pneumonia that might kill him slowly later, if he didn't die before the ambulance got there. His eyes fluttered. He took a couple of ragged breaths, and then another. Then there was nothing. Then another breath. Then nothing.

  He had stopped breathing again. Again I inserted the airway and began moving his air for him. It went on like this two, then three times.

  One of the other rangers stood over us, watching. The mob had gathered in a circle around us. "Is he dead?" a woman asked. "I hope so," some guy answered.

  There were needle tracks on his arms. When he had run away, he must have gone in the bushes and fixed himself up with a speedball—a heroin and methamphetamine cocktail.

  "Where's the damn ambulance?" I asked Finch, watching the man's chest deflate for the umpteenth time and glancing at the declining pressure gauge on my O2 tank. It'll be harder to keep him alive if I run out of oxygen, I thought. I heard Finch calling dispatch for a status on the ambulance.

  Eventually the ambulance got there. The other rangers moved the crowd of bystanders out of the way. A man and a woman in dark blue jumpsuits took over my patient, placing him on a gurney while I continued breathing him. Then, when they were ready, I pulled my mask off him and they replaced it with theirs. We exchanged paperwork rapidly, and they loaded and went up the road, their amber and red lights blinking through the trail of dust behind them.

  I stood with my hands on my aching lower back, arched backward to stretch. My knees were sore from the rocks, a thing I hadn't noticed until now. I looked over at Finch and grinned, shaking my head. "Faking it, huh?"

  "Yeah, well..."He shrugged his shoulders, grinned. I shrugged, grinned back.

  With the adrenaline wearing off came the weariness, the dry mouth, the hunger. I drank a quart of water from the Jeep. I picked up my medical kit, equipment, bits of gauze, and green rubber surgical gloves off the rocks, tried to dust off my green jeans, found a bandanna and wiped the muddy sweat from my face. In a few minutes I heard the ambulance hit the Foresthill Road, where its siren came on. The wail echoed off the canyon walls above us for a period of minutes, then grew fainter and trailed away down the Foresthill Divide.

  Back at our ranger station fifty feet below the waterline of the Auburn Dam in the lower North Fork canyon, I let myself into the front room that had once been the kitchen of the firefighters' mess and now functioned as our combination locker room,
lunchroom, and secondary office. I flicked on the switch by the door. The cool fluorescents blinked and buzzed to life. I slumped into one of the old oak chairs around the big table in the center of the room, kicked my feet up on the table, reached for the phone, and dialed the number for the ER at the little hospital in Auburn. The line rang and I flipped open my lunchbox, unwrapped a sandwich, and took a bite. A nurse answered the phone. I told her I wanted to check on a patient we had sent in and I gave her the man's name.

  "I'll let you talk to the doctor about that. He's right here," she said. She put the phone on hold.

  I took another bite of the sandwich, leafing distractedly through a stack of wanted-fugitive bulletins and be-on-the-lookouts on the table.

  The doctor came on: a guy I knew. I told him I was calling to see if my man made it.

  "Yeah, he's fine. It was an overdose. We're running bloods, but I'd say from the agitated behavior followed by the loss of interest in breathing it's probably some mixture of heroin and a stimulant like cocaine or crank. Anyway, from what the medics said, you guys did a great job—"

  "Oh—"

  "—and I got a little from them about what our guy had done before he coded, you know? So it looks like you've saved his miserable life. I guess that should make you happy."

  I thanked him and hung up, took another bite of the sandwich, leaned back in the chair, and stared up at the pale yellow paint on the pine planks of the ceiling.

  "There are no innocent victims in this place," Finch always said as we watched the same people appear in alternating roles over the years. One day your guy was a perpetrator; a week or a year later he was a victim. Five years and a couple more tattoos later, you arrested him again as a perpetrator. Eventually he might wind up dead, drowned in the river or killed in a car crash or shot by one of his peers, and you listed him in the blank on the report where it said "victim."