Nature Noir (10 page)

The shelter's frame was fashioned from peeled fir poles and a few incongruously expensive redwood four-by-fours, and it was sheathed in clear plastic and small pieces of good plywood that seemed to have been salvaged from another building. A roof consisting of a canvas tarpaulin stretched over a row of sapling poles sloped back to meet the cut in the canyon wall that formed the interior wall on the uphill side. The interior was heated by a woodstove made out of an oil drum and furnished with a kitchen counter, two bed platforms, and a couple of rude tables.

Bell was peering at the four-by-fours and at the odd-sized pieces of plywood with a curious expression. He walked back outside and I followed. At the far end of the ledge the miners had dug a pit toilet, a hole in the earth covered with a sheet of plywood, at the center of which stood a semi-conical fiberglass outhouse pedestal with a white enameled-steel toilet seat.

"Hey—this place is made out of our outhouses!" Bell chuckled.

"No!"

"No question about it. Look!" he said, pointing to the nice redwood four-by-fours, the plywood, and the fiberglass outhouse pedestal. All state issue.

Back inside, we inspected the shack's contents. On each of the bed platforms was a grubby foam mattress over which was laid a sleeping bag. Lifting one, I discovered a sheathed machete, and under the other, a loaded 16-gauge shotgun. I unloaded it. Nearby I found a box of .30-.30 rifle shells, but no rifle. Two deerskins with the hair on—no doubt poached with the .30-.30, an ideal deer gun in such country—were rolled up under one of the beds.

Bell was going through a pile of mail and papers.

"Look at this," he exclaimed with a slight grin, handing me a sheaf of dog-eared yellow forms. "They left us their jail booking sheets so we can ID them."

"How considerate," I answered. I accepted the papers and began leafing through them.

The first booking sheet recorded the arrest of one Jerry Ralph Prentice, age thirty, on charges of public intoxication and disturbing the peace at a Colfax bar called the Station House. There was another booking sheet, for a man named Richard Samuel Marks, on similar charges. I went over to the table where Bell had found the papers and examined the rest of a pile of items on it. They included a bottle of pills from a Colfax pharmacy—tetracycline, an antibiotic; the patient's name was Richard Marks. Later, I would frequently find antibiotics in miners' camps. The cuts and scrapes and the ear infections they got from working long hours underwater didn't heal well in the damp canyon bottoms where they lived.

Underneath the pill bottle was a small ledger book. I opened it. It was a diary. Leafing through it, I read the most recent entries aloud to Bell as he continued looking around the shack.

"... Jerry and I got seven pennyweight in dust and flakes and a nice little nugget today. Went to town and got drunk. Bought some stuff. Saw Kenny and a girl."

The last entry was dated July 24, four days before: "Partied at the Stationhouse Saloon. Don't know why, but Charlie got mad and knocked me down. Might have broken my shoulder."

"That may explain their absence," observed Bell.

When we had finished going through the miners' meager belongings, we closed the door. I fixed a warning notice to the outside for multiple violations of park law. I wasn't planning on getting shot with that shotgun next time I visited, so I seized it as evidence, leaving a receipt. Then Bell and I hiked back down the canyon, maintaining a wary silence in case we should meet the miners and their .30-.30. coming back in. But the hike passed uneventfully.

***

For another month we rangers were kept busy with what I gathered were the usual summer disturbances: loud parties at midnight in the campgrounds, car wrecks, random gunfire, petty theft, the occasional swimmer swept away in the river. The wooly sunflowers that had covered the road banks in May and June were gone now, as were the
Brodiaea
lilies that had gone off like violet fireworks above our meadows just as the grass turned from green to brown. By August the meadows bleached pale blond in the overwhelming brightness of the summer sun. Nashville warblers, Pacific Slope flycatchers, Bewick's wrens, black-headed grosbeaks, and the other birds whose exuberance filled the forests of early summer raised their fledglings and flew away.

After Labor Day the park settled down. At ten o'clock in the evening on the Thursday after the holiday, Finch and I were bumping down Yankee Jims Road on patrol. Our headlights swept the dark cliffs, and the cloud of dust behind us was lit by the lurid glow of our brake lights. Just inside our boundary I saw something sparkle in the woods below the road. We stopped and got out to have a look.

From the edge of the road, our flashlight beams fell on a beige Chevrolet compact upside down below us, leaning against a tree. As we picked our way down the embankment, I steeled myself for what we might find inside. But there were no bodies or splashes of blood, just crumbs of safety glass, a scattering of personal items, and a woman's handbag. We climbed back up to the road and went through the handbag. Inside was a clutch purse containing the driver's license of a Mary Elaine Murphy of Colfax. I radioed Roberta at the dispatch office and asked her to check on that name and license and send a tow truck. When the wrecker arrived we had the car winched up the bank and taken to an impound yard for investigation. Then we drove on to the river to look for witnesses.

It was close to midnight when we got to the bridge. The river sounded louder than usual in the darkness below us. On the far side we found an older pickup with a camper on the back, parked along the shoulder. We lit it up with our spotlights and rapped on the quilted aluminum door of the camper. The door opened and a blond man in his late twenties squinted into the glare. I recognized him from another, unrelated incident. He mumbled that sure, he knew all about the wreck up the road. A miner named Ricky Marks had driven the car off the cliff, he had heard. I said the name sounded familiar.

"You oughta know him, Smith—you took his shotgun," the tousled man said, rubbing one crusty eye. "Anyway, like I was saying, Ricky was drunk, and after the wreck he stayed with me and Kenny down here by the bridge insteada going back up to his cabin. Middle of the night there was a bunch of noise and we all woke up. Ricky was lying in his sleeping bag, surrounded by men with guns—serious guns. One of them grabbed him by his hair and shined a flashlight in his face, holding a gun to his forehead. They had some woman with them. 'Is this him? Is this him?' the one who had ahold of Ricky kept yelling. She didn't answer. They kept yelling at her and finally she said yes, it was him. Then they kicked the shit out of Ricky, and when they were finished they told us not to say anything about it or they'd come back and kill us. Then they all got in their trucks and left. I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. Ricky was lying there bleeding and crying. He didn't want to go to the hospital. Anyway, what was I supposed to do? They had guns."

"Is he dead?" Finch asked matter-of-factly.

"Nah. But he was one sore miner in the morning. He looked horrible, face all fucked up," the blond man answered.

We got a name and the usual general-delivery miner's address from our witness, thanked him, and started back up the road. On the way home Roberta called on the radio. Using the address on Mary Murphy's driver's license, she had found the woman's ex-husband in the directory and phoned him. Evidently he hadn't seen Mary for months. To the best of his knowledge she was now living with a man named Ronny Chisholm down some bad road to an abandoned mine up in Dutch Flat.

***

From there, the rest of the story came limping in bit by bit, all torn up. A week later I was filling out reports in our kitchen when our part-time secretary—no one called her by her name; she was referred to only as MacGaff's Girl Friday—called on the intercom from the little front office at the lower end of our compound. A woman had come in wanting to talk with me personally and no one else, she said. I told her I was on my way.

When I opened the door to the little anteroom of the office, MacGaff's Girl Friday was bent over her typewriter and Mary Murphy stood staring wistfully at a framed photograph of a meadow full of poppies and lupines hanging on our office wall. She was a stoop-shouldered woman in her late thirties who looked like this crash wasn't the first bad thing that had ever happened to her. Her clothing was asexual—old jeans and a lumpy brown blouse. She wore no makeup. Her face was weathered and plain, and bore an expression of blank-faced sadness you see in women whose main talent in life is getting mixed up with the wrong men.

At the sound of the screen door closing, she turned to look at me. I introduced myself. She said she knew who I was: I was the one who had taken Ricky's gun. I told her I guessed I was starting to be famous. She said she had come only to get her purse. I told her I would release her purse, but first I wanted to ask her some questions about how her car had come to be upside down against a tree in Bunch Canyon.

She looked at me and then away, and said in a low, scared voice that she didn't want to talk about it. Her boyfriend would be very mad if she did. I told her as gently as the circumstances allowed that she might be charged with abandoning her vehicle at the scene of an unreported accident if she didn't. I ushered her through the sliding door between the receptionist's anteroom and the small windowed office where the rangers did paperwork. The other rangers were all out on patrol. I offered her a glass of water. She declined. I motioned to an old chair by one of the desks. She sat down. From a drawer I removed a pad of lined notepaper and placed it on the green blotter in front of me. She kept her eyes lowered and her hands in her lap, fiddling with the keys to the borrowed car outside.

I asked her a few unthreatening questions—where she lived, where she worked (she didn't)—and then began to inquire about circumstances of the crash. Again she said that her boyfriend had instructed her not to talk about it. "He's got a temper and you don't cross him," she said. For a while we went around and around, until finally she said that someone named Ricky had raped her, and that's how her car had come to be over a cliff along Yankee Jims Road. I got up and closed the sliding door between us and the tapping of MacGaff's Girl Friday's typewriter.

"Just tell me the whole thing from the beginning," I said, sitting down again.

She sighed, and began in a low monotone. On Wednesday—the day before we found her car—she had been driving onto Interstate 80 headed east at Auburn when she saw two men hitchhiking on the on ramp, Ricky and his partner, Jerry. She normally didn't pick up hitchhikers, but the one with the red beard—Ricky—gave her a really nice smile, so she stopped. They got in—Ricky in front—and on the way up the highway the three of them made small talk. Ricky told her they were miners, living down on the river. They seemed nice, so she offered to drive them home to Yankee Jims Bridge.

When they got there, Ricky asked her to stay and drink some wine. She did. Eventually they ran out, so she drove them up to Colfax to get another bottle. She was a little tipsy by then, so on the way back she gave Jerry the car keys, and he drove them back down to the bridge. It was getting late, they had some more wine, and after a while she realized she was wasted. So she walked alone down to the riverbank beneath the bridge to sober up. After a while Ricky joined her there. They talked for a while and he began to fondle her breasts. She screamed and pushed him away. She wanted to leave, but Jerry had taken the car keys and passed out somewhere; she didn't know where. So she went back up to the road and sat in her car. In a few minutes Ricky showed up with the keys, got in, and began to drive along the road. A ways up he stopped and said he wanted to make love. She didn't refuse.

"Did he have a weapon? Did he threaten you in any way?"

"No. But he was wearing a sheath knife," she said.

"Were you worried he would use it on you?" I asked her.

"No. He never took it out. But I was still afraid of him."

"Go on."

Well, she said, they had sex there in the middle of the road, with her on her back in the gravel. Suddenly a white van appeared around a turn from the Colfax direction. She jumped up and started yelling.

"What did you yell?" I asked her.

"Like, 'Help, he's going to kill me, he's raping me.'"

"Go on."

The man in the van was Rattlesnake Jim, she said. He bought gold from the miners down on the river. He got out and asked her what was going on. She told him she wanted to leave, and then, emboldened by his presence, she grabbed the car keys from Ricky, got into her Chevrolet, started it, and put it in gear. Ricky tried to stop her by putting his foot in the door as she was trying to close it. They struggled, and she stepped on the gas by mistake and drove off the cliff. She was pretty drunk, she guessed.

The car rolled and came to rest against a tree. She was stunned but unhurt, and Rattlesnake Jim climbed down and helped her back up to the road. He said he was worried about her and offered her a ride home to her boyfriend's house. She accepted, and the two of them left in his van, leaving Ricky to walk back down the road to the river.

"What happened when you got home? Did you call the sheriff?" I asked her.

No, she said, her boyfriend didn't have much use for the police. Later that night he drove her back down to the bridge. When they got there they found Ricky. Her boyfriend woke him up and made her tell him if Ricky was the man who had raped her.

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'Yeah, I guess he did,' and they beat him up."

"Were you injured by Ricky during the rape?" I asked her.

"Not really. But my back's pretty sore from lying on the gravel with him on top of me," she answered. Avoiding my eyes, she turned her face away.

I picked up the phone on the desk, called the Women's Shelter in Auburn, and asked them to send a social worker.

"Are you at all sore or injured below the waist?" I asked her, putting down the receiver when I finished the call. "I'd like to have you examined by a doctor. It won't cost you anything, and we've got to do it to prosecute Ricky."