Jefferson Bass - The Devil's Bones

Back when I was a kid in grade school, my teachers and I had learned-learned the hard, messy, humiliating way-that when I started to sweat and salivate like this, I had about thirty seconds before my breakfast or lunch came churning up. I had always hated the sense of impending doom-the sweat and saliva never lied-but I did feel grudging appreciation for the early-warning system. Not everyone had it, I noticed, and those who didn’t sometimes suffered even more humiliation than I. There are few experiences more degrading for an eight-year-old than spending half a day at school in clothes that reek of vomit. Wetting or soiling your britches was about the only thing worse than throwing up on yourself. Any one of the three could haunt you for the rest of the school year-as if the faint aroma of your accident still clung to your hair and clothing, weeks or even months later.

Careening along this snaking backcountry road, I wasn’t worried about shaming myself in front of a bunch of third-graders. But I had no desire to throw up in my truck. I scanned the road for a bit of shoulder, someplace to pull off safely, but the pavement was notched into a narrow ledge. Five feet to the right was solid mountainside; five feet to the left, rocky riverbank. I was caught, as the old saying goes, between a rock and a hard place.

My thirty seconds were ticking down fast. Finally, in a right-hand curve, I let the truck drift all the way into the left lane, the outside of the curve, where I hoped it would be more visible. I hit the brakes, hung two wheels off the pavement as far as I dared, and turned on my emergency flashers. I flung open my door and leaned out just as the heaves began.

I hadn’t eaten anything since a hurried bowl of cereal nine hours earlier, so there wasn’t much coming up-just a little gastric juice, sharp and acrid in my mouth and nostrils. But the force of the dry heaves squeezed tears from my eyes. When the convulsive heaves stopped, I took in a few deep breaths and then was hit by a second round. As I hung out the door of the truck, I heard brakes squeal behind me. I expected to feel a vehicle slam into mine, but the impact never came, and with another, different squealing of tires-sudden acceleration-the unseen vehicle sped on.

Feeling wrung out but also relieved-it had always puzzled me, how much better I tended to feel after throwing up, especially when there was nothing in my stomach causing me distress-I sat up, drew in a few more breaths, and wiped my mouth with my handkerchief. I took mental inventory and was relieved to find that the sense of impending vertigo had largely faded. A bottle of water, half full, lay on the passenger seat beside me, and I took a small, grateful sip to rinse my mouth. Then I put the truck in gear, eased the left wheels back onto the pavement, and continued along River Road, this time at my typically prudent pace.

A few sedate miles farther, I came to the gravel drive marked ALMOST HEAVEN and took a right. Crime-scene tape was still tied to a tree on one side of the driveway, but rather than stretching across the entrance, the tape lay wadded at the base of the tree, splattered with mud from last night’s downpour.

As I splashed up the gravel through a succession of puddles, I noticed that someone else had done the same. Jim O’Conner, I guessed, or maybe an insurance adjuster handling the damage claim for the cabin-rental company. When I reached the clearing, I saw a pickup parked near the crater that had once been the cabin. I called out-“Hello? Hello?”-but got no answer. The clearing was still ringed with blackened tree trunks and vegetation, but already the ravaged look of the place was beginning to soften, thanks to a carpet of new vegetation. Cleared ground with a view of the sky was a rarity in the mountains, and these optimistic, opportunistic botanical pioneers had wasted no time laying claim to this choice patch of sunlit real estate, a sudden and unexpected windfall.

I walked slowly to the edge of the crater and peered down. By now half the basement was in shadow, and I knew I didn’t have much time-thirty minutes or so-before it would get too dark to work. I wasn’t sure what I was seeking here, but I knew there must be something: something small and subtle that we’d overlooked as we focused on the excitement of plucking not one but two incinerated skeletons from the debris.

The day of the search and recovery, we’d had more than a dozen law-enforcement officers and firefighters on hand to assist. We’d also had a ladder planted firmly on the basement’s concrete slab. If I’d planned ahead, I’d have brought a stepladder from home, but I hadn’t planned ahead; I’d leapt up impulsively from the table in the bone lab the moment I solved the puzzle of the frontal sinus. Equipment needs had been the furthest thing from my mind.

The basement slab lay about ten feet below the top of the cinder-block wall on which I stood. It wouldn’t be hard to hang from the wall and drop down into the basement. It was getting back out again that I was concerned about. A drop of several feet was easy; an upward leap of several feet was a whole ’nother matter. I could have done it back in my teens, when I was playing high-school basketball, but my knees and thighs and calves were no longer what they’d been thirty-five years before. I’d need to find or engineer a more reliable way out.

I scanned the floor for any tall objects I might stand on-an empty oil drum would do very nicely, I thought, or even a metal folding chair. Unfortunately, whoever had originally furnished the house seemed to have thought that a wooden cabin deserved wooden furnishings, for there was very little in the basement’s debris field that wasn’t some variation on the theme of charred cellulose. If I piled enough debris in a corner, I could probably jump up and grab the top of the wall, but I wasn’t entirely sure I had the upper-body strength it would take to hoist myself up. As I frowned at one of the corners, my gaze strayed to the massive stone fireplace and chimney, built into the one end wall that was not entirely below grade. Was the stonework rough enough to allow me to climb the rocks? And if so, was my balance good enough to allow me to walk the top of the cinder blocks to the nearest corner, where I could step safely back onto solid ground? As I studied the chimney and the wall, I realized there was an easier way out. On either side of the massive fireplace-set into the four-foot-wide section of cinder blocks flanking the stonework-was a small window opening. The lower sills were about chest-high, and the openings in the block measured a couple of feet square. The windows themselves had been blown out by the explosion, and the wooden frames had burned as flames roared out the openings. I’d get a pretty good coating of soot if I wriggled out through one of them, but soot was a lot less objectionable than substances I encountered on a daily basis in my line of work.

I sat down atop the wall, my feet dangling down into the basement. Twisting my body toward the corner, I leaned across and put my right hand on the end wall, keeping my left hand on the long side wall where I sat. I twisted my hips next, swinging my right leg toward the inner face of the end wall, lifting my butt off the blocks so I could turn and lower my body down into the corner. My toes scrabbled on the blocks, and I felt myself begin to fall, but then my right foot caught the windowsill and I regained my balance. Shifting both hands now to the wall above the window opening, I centered my feet on the sill, then reached down with one hand and gripped the top of the opening. Letting go of the top of the wall, I made a graceless transition from standing in the opening to squatting in the opening, then jumping down onto the concrete floor. If Olympic judges had been scoring my dismount on a scale of 1 to 10, my scores would probably have ranged from 0.1 (from the hostile French judge) to 2.1 (from the friendly U.S. judge). Still, I was down in one piece, and I was confident I could get up and out the window opening.