Nature Noir (3 page)

"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 O
₂
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."

The exception was an innocent like the Beach Ball Baby, as Finch was to call him from time to time when we would recount the story over the gales of laughter that were always our substitute for ennui. Then again, by now that little boy must be well into high school, and if his life turned out as badly as it began, he may already have qualified for a juvenile offender record, an obituary, or both.

But I like to think not. I like to think he got lucky, got placed with foster parents who loved him and lavished the good things on him. Perhaps he'll be valedictorian of his senior class and grow up to be a teacher, social worker, political reformer—who knows, maybe even a ranger.

I am less sanguine about his father's prospects. By saving him I set him loose again upon the world and, God help me, perhaps upon that little boy, unless of course the courts did their job—and when could that ever be counted on? But you never know. Perhaps there was some purpose served by that man's survival, some good he would do later to redeem himself. By the time of the Beach Ball Baby I was beginning to tell myself things like that. In any case, a park ranger is a protector. You protect the land from the people, the people from the land, the people from each other, and the people from themselves. It's what you are trained to do without even thinking, a reflexive and unconditional act. If you're lucky, you get assigned to people who seem worth saving and land and waters whose situation is not hopeless. If not, you save them anyway. And maybe in time, saving them will make them worth it.

I
N THE LONG SUMMERS
, we were men of dust. We made our wages, our car and mortgage payments, our retirement plans, and our medical and dental benefits in the dust. We started out as young men and slowly went gray in the dust. In their late forties the older rangers began to need reading glasses to count the crumpled dollar bills they collected in our makeshift campgrounds, and the glasses would get dusty too, in their leatherette cases in the breast pockets of the rangers' uniforms.

On hot afternoons the dust mixed with the sweat on your face, and when you looked down to make a note on your clipboard, a drip from your brow streaked the inside of your sunglasses, blurring your vision. So you carried a couple of bandannas and wiped your sunglasses constantly, and soon the glasses were covered with tiny circular scratches that sparkled in the sunlight, for the dust was a competent abrasive.

The dust got into the thumb breaks of our holsters, and pretty soon our guns wouldn't come out. It found its way deep into the works of our pistols, where it combined with gun oil to form a brown deposit on the sear release levers, recoil spring guides, firing-pin springs, and decocking levers. We would fieldstrip and clean our weapons, but the dust went deeper than fieldstripping could reach.

Once a year the department's armorer would show up at our ranger station to inspect our guns. One by one, he'd disassemble them, and you could see him shaking his head and lifting his elbows as he applied himself to cleaning out the brown gunk. After a couple of days of this, still shaking his head, he would depart. And in the aftermath of his visits none of us ever received one of those congratulatory memos from headquarters for exemplary care of our equipment, as rangers did in those tidy little nature parks with neat little campgrounds on paved roads and no bullet holes in the signs.

At the district maintenance shops, mechanics looked up wearily on the approach of one of our squeaky Jeeps or Jimmies. The dust clogged air filters; it made a mockery of seals; it sullied lubricants and wore out bearings. It made our spotlights narcoleptic; alone after midnight on a vehicle stop, you'd twist the interior handle and flick on the switch and the light would remain asleep, face-down on the hood of your car.

The dust conspired with the rough roads to gain entry into the farthest reaches of our vehicles' interiors. After thirty or forty thousand miles, each new patrol wagon began its complaint of rattles and squeaks, and as its tailgate loosened and the dust worked its way past the gaskets, you'd see it rising behind you like smoke in your rear-view mirror and taste the grit on your teeth. Once inside, it made its way through the cracks around the doors of the plywood equipment cabinets behind the back seats and then crept through the zippers of our rescue packs, where it polluted sterile bandages, trauma shears, stethoscopes, oxygen masks, and whole sets of airways.

And so in my first summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills I learned to swathe my rescue gear in clear plastic trash can liners from the park maintenance shop. The wide, flat brim of my ranger hat served admirably to shield my face from the searing sun, but our cowboy-cut uniform jeans bound my sweaty legs so I could barely walk uphill. I learned to buy a kind of green jeans that looked official but were loose in the legs and seat, and to cut the label off the back pocket so my subterfuge was not detected. I began carrying at least two quarts of water and drinking it constantly. I learned to breathe through my nose and acquired an obscure yogic trick of drawing water into my nostrils from my cupped hands several times a day and forcibly expelling it to blow the mud out.