Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  When she sees me for the first time, Puzzle's expression is skeptical. I am another in a series of strangers bending over the x-pen. She considers and quickly rejects me, immediately gives me up for better things. A tug toy is more interesting. The open-bottomed bucket on its side, more interesting still. Our meeting is not a Hallmark moment between us. Mama Spirit welcomes me with soft generosity, but her blond, dark-eyed daughter with the fuzzy bottom turns away.

  I sneak glances at her as Kim and I go through her puppy book and discuss her diet, vaccinations, and pending training. Puzzle isn't the biggest pup of the litter, nor the smallest. She moves through the x-pen with a bit of swagger, boxing toys, taunting her siblings until they wrestle. I see her swipe a stuffed duck from her sister and shoot a glance my direction. Puzzle drops the toy her sister wants and sits on it.

  Somewhere in all of that, I think, is my partner.

  Kim lifts her from the x-pen and puts her on the floor. "She knows 'Sit,' 'Stand,' and 'Come,'" Kim says. "And she should be pretty much housebroken."

  "Sit," I say to Puzzle, who waits a molasses half-beat and then sits. And yawns.

  "Good girl," I praise her.

  Yada yada, her expression suggests.

  I have never seen so intractable a puppy. My previous pups had cuddled at first meeting, but this one looks like she could spit at me like a llama. And might.

  You have other dogs, I reassure myself. This isn't all that new. I want this ten-week-old Golden to be impressed with me, somehow—because I find her beautiful and full of possibility, and my heart is tight with months of waiting for her.

  "Come," I say to Puzzle. She glances at Kim, then stands with elaborate slowness and saunters over. When she reaches me and I pick her up to praise and cuddle her, Puzzle doesn't yield. She leans back with stiff paws against my chest and gives me a long, level gaze.

  I love her immediately. She hasn't learned to love me. But in her willingness to come I sense an ethic, and in her scrutiny I see intelligence. I think of the hard places we will go that need both: the disaster sites and gang-riddled neighborhoods, the lakes, the crime scenes and small town with a single missing girl whose case is ongoing, whose fate remains unknown.

  I return the puppy's gaze. What began as a late-night conversation in a bar has emerged as a Golden Retriever braced in the bend of my arms. She feels solid and capable. She feels right.

  "Hi, sweetheart," I say to Puzzle. "Are you ready to go to work?"

  3. INTO THE WIND

  I CAME TO GROUND search-and-rescue from the air. The route was not direct. While I was working as a flight instructor in the early 1990s, an experienced student once asked me to fly with him to an area where he'd had a problem on a runway a few days before. A police officer and a talented pilot working on an advanced rating, he had been carrying other law enforcement personnel on a clear autumn day in his single-engine aircraft when, on landing, his plane shot off the end of the short, lakeside runway and down a small embankment before coming to a stop.

  No one was hurt, the plane wasn't damaged, but he was an experienced pilot and the event concerned him. He wanted to discuss that landing with me and revisit the runway for touch-and-go practice. From his description of the plane's performance on final approach and the long, long streaks from his tires still visible on the asphalt when we got there, I suspected wind shear was responsible, and that his headwind had shifted to a tailwind at an unfortunate point in the landing sequence.

  We had different conditions the day we revisited that airstrip, but we worked his touch-and-goes anyway. After a handful of successful, unassisted landings proved to him that the runway itself and his technique for landing on it were not an ongoing problem, he asked if I'd mind a flight around the lake before coming back to the runway to shoot more landings. The request surprised me a little—flight time is expensive—but I agreed.

  A cold front had passed the day before. This afternoon was beautifully crisp and clear; low pressure had swept the air clean. From a plane flying low in this kind of weather, you can see the herringbone of wind on water, the definition of individual leaves, the colors on a bobber at the end of a fisherman's line. We made a circle of the lake's long shoreline, my student flying at the regulation altitude. I noticed, however, that his scan of instruments, sky, and ground included a lot of glances straight down, and having flown with him so long, I knew also it wasn't part of his standard procedure.

  "What are we looking for, David?" I finally asked.

  He didn't answer for a moment. Then he said, "We don't know what he did with her."

  Without further comment, we circled the lake into evening, alternating who flew the airplane and who looked for the body of a woman along the lake's ragged shore.

  That's how I began working search. In later months, through some grapevine I never completely understood, I gained a clientele who hired me to fly the press or personnel from other law enforcement agencies over variously troubled locations. For some clients, it was a matter of budget. My fixed-wing aircraft was less expensive than a helicopter. For others, it was an attempt to be nondescript: small planes in high-traffic areas attract less attention than rotorcraft. A few said they'd heard I was confident with the airplane; when asked to fly low and slow and stable, within regulations I could do it.

  We flew over crime scenes and followed off-road trails suspected as body dumps. We traced the trajectory of downed aircraft in deep wood. As altitude restrictions expired, I flew with photographers over what remained of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Koresh Compound in Waco, Texas. We plotted the paths of tornadoes. We circled livestock stranded on high ground by flood. From the vantage of a high-winged Cessna, my passengers—often press or insurance photographers—documented public and personal catastrophe. They unscrewed the window bracket for an unobstructed view and leaned outward as the slipstream held the window up. "Again," they'd gesture with a little twirl of the index finger, and around we'd go another time.

  Not every client was clear about our objectives. Once, a man I took to be an insurance photographer (he came with multiple bags on shoulder straps), turned out to be the son of a rancher who had died. We unscrewed the window bracket so he could photograph the homestead in a long-shadowed sunset, and he did so, but when that was done he opened what I thought was a second camera case, drew out a large velvet bag, and prepared to drop his father's ashes over the family ranch. This kind of flight request is common, but problems are common too. It's a hire that recommends a good briefing. I saw what he was doing, was just about to give him— hey! —a quick word on ashes and slipstream when he, ahead of me, began to pour. Wind carried the ashes back through the window into the airplane, where they whistled around the tiny cabin and ended up all over us.

  "Sorry," he said after an appalled moment. I tried to smile and felt the sheen of grit across my teeth, like I'd been testing pearls.

  Not long afterward, another client had a similar request, but she was more straightforward on the hire and asked to sprinkle her father's ashes outside the small town along the interstate where he'd grown up. We had a good briefing on procedure, and I knew she understood, but when we got to the location she opened the window, took the soft case in her hands to hold it ready, then to extend it and pour—and dropped it entirely. The bag landed like a flour bomb in the middle of a Taco Bell parking lot just off the highway. We could see the astro-shaped burst of ash across the pavement.

  We circled a little while in silence. I was thinking about the incident report I might need to file with the FAA. I don't know what she was thinking.

  "Dad loved their Enchiritos," said my client at last, and she shut the window.

  My own recent transitions were just as clunky. The flight career was still a fledgling; my twelve-year marriage, shot through with its own disasters, failed. And then I was alone. The family worried about my faltering income in "a man's profession," about their daughter newly divorced so young.

  They worried about me in a
irplanes, but flight was perversely my good fortune. Then, as now, it was a mental and physical discipline, a blessed remove. I flew as often for hire as regulations allowed, grateful for the money of course, but I would have flown for free. During the period of divorce, I moved to a seedy, affordable apartment so near a runway that in the middle of the night I could identify individual planes by the grind of their starters, see the alternating flash of the airport beacon—green-white-green-white-green-white—like the lub-dup of a heart across the graceless walls of my bedroom.

  It was a different time for general aviation before 9/11, when civilian pilots were not so readily framed as a threat. I would unlock the flight school on sleepless nights and check out a Cessna 152, file a flight plan, and go up to admire city skylines or make cross-country jaunts in the dark—flights I recall now for the occasional camaraderie over the radio with air traffic controllers and the night-flying freight dogs, but remember most for their exquisite aloneness. Moon and silver ground and the comfort of the Lycoming engine's cat-purr drone. I would set one radio receiver to the navigation facility closest to my home airport and the other receiver to the facility closest to the point of arrival, and I flew with the counterpoint of their Morse code identifiers beeping out of sync in my headset—literally the sound of where I was going and where I had been.

  Though I think my family worried I might be suicidal (which I was not), and I know they would have been frightened to learn I flew in the middle of the night, flight gave me perspective. I think of those flights as private, invisible stitches across Texas in the dark, binding me to a world outside my own grief. Martha Graham once commented that she never thought of a dancer as alone on stage, that he or she was "always partnered by the surrounding space." It was a concept worth borrowing. And what space. On a clear night in still air, the stars were so close they shook up other senses, tempting me to open the window and put out my tongue to the spangle. I would have bet they had a taste, like pop rocks, maybe, or wasabi.

  Other nights a blanket of stratiform cloud stretched wide above the little Cessna, and I flew small and secret, like a child with a flashlight under the blanket, flying beneath an eiderdown beautifully up-lit at its edges by the lights of cities on the horizon. The ground went dark for long passages over rural areas, defined by the deeper black of an occasional lake or edged by an interstate highway stippled with traffic. Small towns lay tidy as a tic-tac-toe grid beneath a handful of streetlights. But the peace and order were flecked occasionally with buildings afire, with the uh-oh-uh-oh-uh-oh twist of lights from emergency vehicles speeding down an unlit road. I could see them thirty miles away.

  It wasn't in me to imagine my own catastrophe. Though there was one late night on an approach to the home airport's north runway that I felt a distinct unease at three hundred feet above the ground in the landing sequence, a sensation I couldn't validate with a crosscheck of the instruments, the sound of the plane, the feel of the air across the wings, or the sight of the windsock on the field. The unease was as profound as a waking shake on the shoulder, an imperative "go around." I followed instinct and aborted the landing, pressing the throttle forward, stabilizing the airplane, and retracting the flaps as airspeed allowed. The second approach was virtually identical to the first, the landing and rollout uneventful. I taxied to the ramp and shut down the airplane, then walked to the edge of the tarmac and gazed out at the runway in the dark, wondering about my little mystery, looking for anything that might have been a problem on the first landing.

  Nothing. South end of the field was quiet. I could hear wind tunneling through the windsock across the runway—a keening little song like a pissed-off fairy in a bottle. The beacon's double flash pulsed across the hangars, the planes, the tarmac, and me. Nothing. Nothing. Then movement: a stray dog winding west through the shadows at the end of runway 34. He paused and turned to look my way, caught by the scent or the sound of me. Was the dog what I had sensed earlier? Where had he been the first time I was approaching to land? A gangly, spotted mixed-breed, he blazed red in the glow of the runway end lights, his head lifted in a carrying posture of intelligence. We looked at each other a long moment, in our separate ways making sense of threat and possibility. The dog seemed to make his mind up first. When he turned and loped into the black field beyond, I felt an unreasonable urge to drop my flight case and follow.

  Restless. I'd been feeling restless. The encounter with Runway Dog both provoked an urge for change and informed the relationship with my own dogs at home. In the months after that late-night experience at the airport, I paid even closer attention to dog ways of negotiating the environment. Eyes, ears, tongue, nose, pads—and that magical word vibrissae, the whiskers of the muzzle and eyebrows that can even perceive changes of airflow—I watched my little housedogs and saw them respond intuitively to a concert of sensory perceptions. Many of their skills were similar to stick and rudder skills I'd learned to use as a pilot—moving air is a whole kaleidoscope of changing textures, palpable to the pilot's hands, feet, and seat of her pants—but even the most sheltered dogs of my crew were better at making whole-body sense of their surroundings than I was.

  When a leaf fell into a burning citronella candle and ignited on the back porch, three of the littlest dogs in the house raised their noses simultaneously, nostrils working, before they brought eyes and ears to bear and turned their heads to look in the direction of the fire, separated by a screen door and six yards away. Scent first indicated change; sight and sound were used to make better sense of it. Though all three dogs grew excited, Mr. Sprits'l alone ran to find me one room away, quivering and barking furiously, every hair electric, leading me back to the trouble. (When Sprits'l is excited, he tends to spin rather than travel in a straight line; this made our trip back to the porch rather like following a dreidel.)

  Not a little fire. I extinguished the bucket of flame that had been a candle, thinking all the while about the clarity of Sprits'l's message: Not normal. Not right. Back here. No, back here. Fix this. He had not simply barked at the flame; he'd not run to another dog to telegraph the news. He'd come to me without hesitation, and when I went out the door to take care of it, Sprits did not attempt to follow. I realized that to this dog there were certain givens in our relationship, and that I was not only a bringer of food and a scratcher of chest, but I was also a trusted protector. I knew that, but I didn't know he knew that.

  What else would dogs tell me? What else did dogs know?

  Curiosity led me to consider volunteer opportunities with working dogs—dogs whose job descriptions included making sense of a changing environment and communicating that change to a human. I wanted to try for that kind of connection. And our large urban area presented plenty of opportunities. Depending on level of interest and commitment, I learned I could be a puppy-raiser for guide dogs, a once-a-week socializer of assist dogs, and—most interesting to me—an assistant in the field on a canine search-and-rescue team. They were all time-intensive opportunities, especially SAR. Three to seven training hours a week, plus expected home study, plus emergency calls.

  One friend asked, "Does it pay well?"

  A relative sighed, "You are never going to marry again."

  My oldest friend understood. "Of course," Marina said. "You've got a history of getting out there. It makes sense you'd want to learn to fly a dog."

  ***

  I visited the K9 team I would eventually join after finding a 1995 photograph from the Dallas Morning News that I'd cut out during the aftermath of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building bombing. Skip Fernandez, a canine handler with the Miami-Dade County Fire Rescue team, sits on the ground with his head bowed and eyes closed against the back of his Golden Retriever, Aspen. The caption states that they have worked all night, and they look it. They are dirty. The dog sits rolled over onto one hip, propped up by her front legs. She looks tired. Her expression is subdued.

  I don't know why I originally clipped the photo, but when I found it six years later, I felt convince
d. While some disasters needed air support, almost all of them needed dogs on the ground to locate the living and the dead—and partners beside them to translate. Though the process itself was a mystery to me, I was eager to understand dogs better on their own terms. And perhaps I had something to contribute: As a pilot I had begun to learn the workings of the wind. I could talk on the radio. I wasn't squeamish or afraid of the dark. Surely that was enough to make a start at this. Nothing about the work looked easy, but canine search-and-rescue looked like work I wanted to do.

  4. PUZZLE HAS LANDED

  THE BAGGAGE HANDLER at ticketing doesn't speak much English. He makes a gesture when I bring Puzzle up to the counter—a funny little shoving motion that I can't quite make out, until he does the push gesture and a twist of his fingers, and I realize he's telling me that Puzzle should be in a hard-sided carrier to go in the belly of the airplane.

  "No," I say. "This is a search dog in training, and she's coming home in the cabin with me." I show him the soft-sided, under-the-seat carrier. Puzzle will fit inside it, but I've been told earlier by the airline that because she's a search dog, she will be able to ride in the cabin in my lap or at my feet, as long as she has the appropriate credentials. Our trip home together involves elaborate explanation with some backstory; uncertain, the baggage handler shakes his head and leaves to find the ticket agent, who comes out wiping her hands, a daub of mustard on her nose.