Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

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