Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

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.

2 / It Never Rains in California

IN 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