Nature Noir (2 page)

I
T WAS MIDSUMMER
, a couple of years into my time in the foothills. A white haze filled the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, flattening its depth and dimensions. The heat was somnolent, the still air scented with the volatile spice of the brush fields.

The sides of the canyon were almost too steep to walk on and covered in thick stands of live oak, bay laurel, buckeye, and brush, the average color of which was gray-green. A sparse overstory of ghostly foothill pines cast patches of partial shade, their scabby gray trunks standing out from the canyon walls at precarious angles. At the bottom of the canyon a ribbon of blue water made its way southwest, bending back and forth across a broad gray bed of cobbles and sand. Half a mile downstream it entered a small, narrow reservoir, which followed the bends in the canyon for a couple more miles to where it spilled uselessly over a small dam. In the other direction, white anvilheads of cloud climbed over the high country, thirty miles east. There was a faint rumble of thunder. A few turkey vultures floated in intersecting circles along the canyon rim, savoring the hot air for the inevitable attrition of heat, drought, and violence.

***

A narrow dirt road descended the eastern wall of the canyon, winding in and out of the tributary ridges and gullies. Down it, a green Jeep station wagon with a police car's bar of red and blue lights and a couple of whip antennas bounced toward the river. A plume of dust boiled up behind the vehicle, then spread and settled into the surrounding woods.

Alone at the wheel of the Jeep was my sometime partner, Dave Finch. Today, as on every other day, the road meted out its daily increment of punishment to the Jeep's suspension and motor mounts and to Finch's lower spine and kidneys. From his right the two-way radio emitted the usual scratchy chorus of rangers and dispatchers outlining the progress of the repetitively mundane and gripping dramas of a summer weekend afternoon all the way down the river into the Central Valley. And as Finch fell deeper into the remove of the canyon, the voices on the radio became unintelligible bursts of static.

Three hundred feet above the river, Finch crossed an invisible line bisecting the canyon wall at a perfect level. It had been two and a half decades since Congress approved a dam that would flood this canyon. For over a decade the partially built project had been at a standstill, stalemated by politics, budgets, and the complexities of the very rocks under its footings. Yet it had never officially been called off. So everything below that line—the gray pines and olive-drab oaks, the wooly sunflowers on the road's cut-bank, the river, and even the little reservoir—could be seen only as temporary.

Finch came to the bottom of the road, and there he stopped and sat looking at the river, tanned elbow out the open window of the idling Jeep. In front of him, on the cobble beach that sloped away to the lake and the river that flowed into it, dozens of cars were parked haphazardly—economy cars, older pickups, works in progress with bald tires, spots of primer, and temporary registration stickers in their windows. Beyond them a small crowd of people lined the water's edge. Children splashed and squealed. Rough, tanned men—sheet-metal workers, drywall installers, meat cutters, heavy-equipment operators, electrician's apprentices, carpenters, unemployed truck drivers, occupants of trailer houses in the hills and cheap apartments in little foothill towns—stood along the beach with beers in their hands. Women—grocery clerks, dental hygienists, auto-part store delivery drivers with little butterflies tattooed on their breasts and little roses on their thighs—stood waist-deep in the water in bright-colored bikini tops and cut-off jeans, or lay on towels smoothing suntan oil on their skin, or hovered over their children, puffing on cigarettes and gesturing animatedly to each other. Big dogs—pit bulls, rottweilers, and retrievers—barked at each other on the beach and made forays into the water for balls and sticks. The rhythmic bass of competing car stereos and the squeals of the children and the barking of the dogs echoed off the far canyon wall.

Somewhere in front of Finch an engine revved. He paid no attention to it. Then there was a clatter of cobbles and the dull clunk of rocks hitting a car's underbody, a flash of sunlight on steel and glass, and his eyes fixed on an older American sedan with dull paint rapidly gathering speed toward him through the parked cars, its rear end fishtailing and its tires smoking and hurling stones.

The car began to straighten out as it accelerated up the cobble strand. From one side a man appeared, running hard toward it. He was wild-haired, stripped to the waist, his face contorted and mouth open in a yell, the big veins and fibers of his neck standing out. He clutched an object in the crook of one arm like a football player running a ball. The other hand was raised in a fist, which he waved angrily as he ran at the car. As the car passed him, he lifted the ball and extended his throwing arm, firing the ball perfectly toward the car. It flew through the open passenger-side window and disappeared inside the speeding vehicle. Except it wasn't a football, Finch thought. Something larger. A beach ball, perhaps.

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.