Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  The body lay face-down below, where the canyon side had been bulldozed to subsoil and rock when the bridge was built and still nothing grew. There was a scuff on the soil just uphill of the corpse where the man had hit and bounced. He had come to rest with one of his legs twisted underneath him. There was a rent in his blue chambray work shirt at the middle of his back through which his intestines had exploded. They were splayed out on the ground around him.

  The coroner's deputies arrived to collect him. They hiked down the steep rock and soil to the dead man, opened a body bag, and went to work. One of them took photographs. Another, a young woman, put on her rubber gloves and began daintily picking up bits of the man's internal organs and putting them into a plastic bag. She stopped for a moment and went over behind a rock to retch. Then she returned to work.

  A television minicam operator showed up in a white van and walked onto the bridge to where I stood.

  "Can you tell me who he is?" he asked me.

  "Not at this time, sir," I answered.

  "When did it happen?"

  "About forty-five minutes ago."

  "Did he leave a note?"

  "Not that we're aware of."

  "Oh."

  The cameraman steadied himself on the railing and started filming a slow pan from the bridge deck down over the edge to where the deputies were working.

  "You're not going to show him in that condition, are you?" I asked him.

  "No ... but I guess they would somewhere. I deal with Channel Ninety and Forty-seven, and they are mostly pretty tasteful about this kind of stuff. But it's a salable commodity, just showing the death scene, and I'm a freelancer."

  I looked back at the deputies and the body. A log truck passed, and the bridge clanked and vibrated with the weight of the bones of some forest up the Foresthill Divide, headed for the mill in Rocklin. From under the bridge, startled pigeons burst over the gorge again, their black-pearl wings catching the morning sun.

  Below, the deputies gingerly lifted the corpse into the body bag. Before they zipped it up, the woman collecting the organs put the plastic bag she'd been carrying inside it.

  At the end of the day I was doing paperwork at the kitchen table in the old mess hall. Bell's patrol truck rattled into the yard, and he shuffled into the ranger station with his shotgun over his shoulder.

  "Fuck this place," he muttered as he passed me.

  He walked over to the gun cabinet and unlocked it with a large ring of keys clipped to his gun belt. Then, as he always did, he held the shotgun in front of him and with lightning precision racked six rounds of buckshot through the chamber and out the ejection port. The shells tumbled neatly through the air and landed in a small cardboard box full of loose shells in the gun cabinet, from which we all loaded at the beginning of our shifts and into which we all unloaded at the end of them. None of us did it like this, however. They didn't teach this at the academy, and for good reason. But it was Bell's trademark. He never missed the box, and although each shell passed the firing pin on its way through the chamber, he retired after twenty years without ever having blown a hole in the ceiling.

  Bell gently stood the 12-gauge up next to the others and relocked the cabinet. A Vietnam-era veteran and expert shotgunner, he had a lot more respect for a Remington or a hunting dog than for a patrol truck or the government that owned it. On his way back past me, he glanced down at the report I was filling out in pencil.

  "Your guy from the big bridge?" he asked.

  "Yup," I answered, and sighed.

  "A mess?" he inquired, walking over to his locker.

  "The usual," I responded without looking up.

  "Fuck this place," he said again. He opened his locker, took off his gun belt and uniform, put them away, and left to go home.

  Before that, when I'd finished at the bridge, I'd gotten back into my Jeep and run up Foresthill Road. I turned around at Lake Clementine Road and drove back down to the bridge, more slowly than usual, with the window open. I didn't do it because this investigation required it. This one was simple: witnesses see man jump; no associates present; man very DOA; end of case. Instead, I did it because I always did. For a while now it had been my habit to construct a mental approximation of the events leading up to the matter I was investigating.

  At the tip of the Foresthill Divide just before the dead man descended the last grade onto the bridge, there is a place where the new road to the bridge had been blasted through a hill of greenstone. Since the cuts were exposed in the seventies, tufts of apricot monkey flower, Mimulus bifidus, had grown all over them, in pockets of soil carried down from above by rain and gravity. In the late spring these incredibly tough plants were covered with thousands of azalealike yellow-orange blooms, and in recent years this unlikely spot had become one of the best places on the Bureau's land to see them.

  Although thousands of people drove that road, I had never seen anyone stop and admire these gardens, and I doubted that the dead man did either. We are all so caught up in the struggles we get into on the way to the lives we dream of, and the dead man was probably just a little farther down that road than the rest of us. Maybe he had lost a good woman, a good job, or a good friend, or maybe he'd never had them. Or maybe it was bad chemicals, of internal or external origin, that pushed him over the edge.

  But maybe he was just suffering from the same regret we've all known at one time or another, when life hasn't lived up to our expectations. Only his was worse, and perhaps his life lacked the sweet little mitigations that get most of us through our days: bandy-legged fawns on the lawn, a soft song you hum looking out on a parking lot with a cigarette in your hand, peach-colored flowers against gray-green rock, the company of friends, children, and animals, and the terse exclamations of your fellows, which let you know you are not the only one who suffers. Everything suffers. Everything has joy. In purgatory you still have a chance; the final judgment on you and everything else has not yet been rendered. So if people are doing something wrong, refuse to cooperate; if the music's too sad, for God's sake change the station or turn the radio off. Stop before the bridge. Get out. Walk down the road. Sniff the air, and if it smells good, breathe deep.

  I idled down the road to the bridge. Here he got out and stepped over the kneewall between the roadway and the pedestrian walkway, then up onto the railing. For a brief instant he balanced between life and death. Far below him, the river was a set of whispering curves, its rapids seemingly motionless at this distance, like white paint on green glass. There were bright tufts of willow along its banks, and then the rocks and pines of the canyon walls higher up. But then it was too late because he'd already stepped into the lake of air, and there was the irrevocable quickness with which the wind increased in his ears and the battered earth came up to embrace him.

  7 / A Natural Death

  THERE IS A SORT of memory that does not refer to a particular day, yet it is not without precision, and accumulates from just being in a place for a period of years. Each time the American River floods big and brown with snowmelt and rain, I remember better the way huge drift logs turn ponderous circles in eddies, and where the river is carrying away land at the outside of turns, and where it builds beaches at the inside of them. Later, on warm spring days after the rains are past, I remember how little pink trumpets of bilobed clarkia and yellow daisies of eriophyllum float, as if mounted on some transparent medium, a certain number of inches, according to their species, above the steep hillsides; and how for 10 or 12 feet above that colorful surface there is a layer of air that hums and sparkles in the sun, composed substantially of insects seeking nectar.

  I know where a tiny patch of a St. John's wort, called gold-wire for the shine of its filamentous stamens, grows tucked up under the chemise brush at the top of a red clay bank on a turn in the old Doc Gordon Road above Lake Clementine; it took me ten years to find it. Sometimes in summer one of the thunderstorms that boil up against the Sierra Nevada every afternoon reaches out as far as the foothills to the west, an
d a sweet damp smell rises from the dust just before the first drops of rain. The novelty of rain is one of the few things I liked about hot summers in the canyons, a season I mostly detested when I worked as a ranger in them. To be fair, however, the things I disliked about that time—the merciless sun that old forests would have shaded me from; the dust on my face, my uniform, and rescue equipment; the spiny star thistle that gets to flesh through thick jeans, wild oats that lodged in my socks, and the other disagreeable European annuals that overwhelmed the perennial meadows of the low Sierra—I eventually came to see as the marks of 140 years of bad treatment of this land. So over time I learned to forgive this place for its bad manners and prickliness, for these are the inevitable outcomes of servitude, in land as in people.

  Aside from memorizing these natural phenomena that repeat themselves annually until the idle gaze comprehends them, I was content to let hours of work steal by without straining to save the details for posterity. I was a poor keeper of our required patrol logs. The quieter days were as seamless and unaccountable as water slipping by in the river, until time was apprehended by the duty to record something, such as the report, late in the day on April 23, 1994, that a woman named Barbara Schoener was missing up the Middle Fork.

  The only thing I recall about that day before the call came in is an observation I made of the weather. At midmorning I steered my green Jeep into the entrance of the gravel road up the Middle Fork to the old limestone quarry. Turning off the engine, I looked east up the canyon where Barbara Schoener was at that moment, although I didn't know it. The sky was deep blue around harmless-looking puffy white clouds, the air was clear and cool, and the sun warmed my left elbow, out the open window. The riffles in the river whispered and sparkled in the eastern light.

  Weather will be a deciding factor in any search, in the survival of the lost or injured, or if there is nothing left to do for them, in the difficulty and discomfort of recovering their remains. In this case, morning made a false promise. By nightfall the clouds gathered into a dark sheet and set upon the searchers, soaking them to the skin with a cold, steady rain.

  What you do to investigate a death is a little like being a theater director. Unavoidably detained on the way to rehearsals, you arrive to find the final scene already played out and the actors and props spread around the stage in disordered repose. In your mind's eye, you send them back to their starting positions, marked in the theater with pieces of tape on the stage and in the woods by footprints, the victim's personal effects, and an unclaimed automobile at the trailhead. Then you set them in motion on the stage of your imagination, over and over, until you get it right. Later, when the report is written and the usefulness of thinking about it is long over, it's hard to forget this omniscient vision you've made of the victim's fated progress toward a bad end you know about, and she doesn't.

  So it is that I see Barbara Schoener driving north from her home in Placerville. California poppies unfurl their glossy orange petals in the morning light between clumps of blue lupine along State Route 49, two lanes of winding asphalt connecting the string of little white-painted wood and red brick Gold Rush mining towns down the front of the Sierra. After half an hour she comes to the town of Cool, a county fire station and a group of plywood false fronts like a western movie set placed in an expanse of rolling pasture punctuated by stately blue oaks. She turns east onto State 193 at the only intersection in town, past the dirt turnout where scruffy men from the hills sell firewood out of beat-up trucks, advertising their loads with spray-painted signs on scraps of plywood.

  Just east of there, Barbara Schoener passes the main gate of a residential development along the south rim of the Middle Fork canyon, expectantly named Auburn Lake Trails. Auburn Lake Trails is one of those gated communities that have turned old cattle ranches into recreational landscapes, with remnants of barbed-wire fences on split cedar posts going to rust and rot between big plywood houses on an aimless network of roads.

  There are two more gates into Auburn Lake Trails in the next few miles east on 193, electric ones that can be opened only by magnetic security cards the residents carry. Barbara Schoener parks her car outside the second of these, across a perfectly paved road from the development's water treatment plant.

  The woman who gets out of the car is forty years old, athletic, the mother of two children, with shoulder-length reddish brown hair. She wears a pair of blue nylon shorts, a cranberry sleeveless T-shirt, running shoes, a hat, and cotton gloves against the morning chill. She locks the car and puts the key in a little pouch attached to one of her shoes. Carrying an apple and a water bottle, she leaves the road, running down the trail into the neighboring state park.

  At first she follows an old dirt road, grown over on either side by Scotch broom and narrowed to a single track. Horses and rain have worn a rut into the center of the remaining path; she places her feet with care. The road descends quickly into a Douglas fir forest, so that only a few feet from her car she is quite alone. Then the trail abandons the road, traversing the canyon side on contour, in and out of the folds of creeks. The trail emerges from the forest onto an open ridge. Far below, the river is spread out in a slow bend, silver against its gray gravel bed. She pauses to look and takes a bite of her apple, breathing deep of the air in which something bright—dust, a bit of pollen—catches the light out over the void. Ahead, entering the forest again, the path bends left into the manzanita.

  At five o'clock in the evening, as I drove north on Highway 49 toward the ranger station to go home, the radio dispatcher called me and sent me back across the river into El Dorado County to meet with sheriff's deputies about a search in progress.

  When I arrived, the missing woman's sedan was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene ribbon. Sheriff's search and rescue volunteers in orange shirts hustled around a mobile communications van. The wind was picking up. I got my jacket out of the back of the Jeep and shook hands with the officer in charge.

  He said that when Barbara Schoener had failed to return as expected from a run, her husband had reported the matter to the sheriff. Her husband knew that she liked to run on this trail, and her car was soon found at the trailhead. She was probably equipped only with light clothing. The deputy and I agreed that I would drive up Quarry Road at the bottom of the canyon. There was a chance I would find her down along the river; when people get lost, they often head downhill until they get to something they can't cross.

  It was dusk by the time I got back down to the rusty gate into Quarry Road. I let myself in and idled slowly east with the river on my left, watching the road shoulder on my right—we say "cutting it for sign"—for the lost woman's footprints. It started to drizzle, and I turned on the wipers. About two miles farther on, at Brown's Bar, the road became narrow and bad. The tires began to slip and throw bits of red clay up onto the hood. It grew dark.

  This was the reassuringly familiar landscape of my nights—the interior of a Jeep, an exoskeleton of green humming steel, where I was surrounded by heated air and safe from most things, animals and weather, and, compared to a foot traveler, freed from the tyranny of distance. All businesslike: the tan upholstery of my seat, the lower right of its back torn from the constant abrasion of my pistol grips; the flashlight wedged between my right thigh and the radio console between the seats; and from the radio the cheerful blinking lights and a low chorus of calm voices from the rural counties around me, the men and women—police officers, rangers, paramedics, firefighters, pilots of medical evacuation helicopters—who come and go all night cleaning up scenes of chaos and imposing upon them the appearance of order that society requires in order to sleep well.

  I turned on the rotating emergency lights on the Jeep's roof, so that if Barbara Schoener could move and was somewhere above me, she would see me coming from a long way off and have time to get to the road. Spokes of red and blue light circled around me, across the slopes of the canyon and the raindrops. I turned on all the spotlights, training them in different directions so I could watch
for her, as I imagined it, waving urgently in the darkness. I reached down, punched up the loudspeaker, and pulled the mike off the dashboard.

  "If you can walk, come down to my lights here on the road! Come to my lights!" I called over and over.

  As I did so, it dawned on me that Barbara Schoener was gone. It was just a feeling, after all those years of searches, that I was talking to myself, that there was no one to hear me when I called to her. But still I called again and again, sending my amplified voice washing out over the cold boiling surface of the river, surrounding the dark trees and thickets of manzanita, filling up secret hollows.

  Beyond Maine Bar, Quarry Road becomes two Jeep tracks across the sand and round gray cobbles of the gravel bars. I stopped to put the Jeep in low range and got out into the rain to listen and have a look around. Across the side of the canyon, several hundred feet above me, I saw the twinkling flashlights of other searchers through the mist of rain. I got back in the Jeep and bounced and scraped upstream across the boulders to the end of the road, watching the pools of my spotlights move across the feathery limbs of fir trees up the side of the canyon and straining to listen, through the roar of the rapids and the whine of the gearbox, for a cry in the darkness.

  When MacGaff, O'Leary, Finch, and their fellow park rangers arrived in the American River canyons in January 1977, a team of park planners from State Parks' Sacramento headquarters was already there; their assignment, to prepare a plan for the development of recreational facilities on the Bureau's land. Finished in 1978, the General Plan for Auburn State Recreation Area featured a visitors' center, a lakeside snack bar, campgrounds for boaters, and a huge boat-launching ramp. The launch ramp was actually constructed, a steep cut in the canyon wall the size of a freeway that ended abruptly in thin air, hundreds of feet above the river. But the rest of the park's facilities were on hold until the dam's seismic problems were worked out. They wouldn't have done the rangers much good anyway, because like the launch ramp, these facilities were all about a reservoir that didn't exist.