The Corridor

by Tabaré Alvarez

part 2 of 3

Mrs. Medina’s cell phone rang as she drove, and she motioned for Dutch to pick it up. There was some awkwardness when Dutch said hello and, for a moment, the Mayor made adjustments in his head. Dutch explained about the driving, and the Mayor made a joke about her riding the clutch. Dutch knew his employer wanted a chuckle from him, and normally he would have provided it, but here it would have felt a betrayal.

“Sir,” Dutch said, “we’re almost at the park.” The Mayor told him the fire department was already there, and that the rain seemed to have extinguished most of it; it was no longer spreading, but some of the trees were still smoldering, and he was getting complaints about the smoke. “Asthma and loony conservationists and whatnot.”

Dutch understood the message: hurry up and get this sorted out. The police were on it, too, but that machinery, the Mayor said, is slow to rev up. “Today, Dutch. No sleeping, no moving, no cooking until we a put a bow on this.”

“What did he say?” Mrs. Medina asked. She pulled up at the park. There were fire trucks ahead, as well as police cars, an ambulance, and TV news vans.

“‘Hurry it up’ seemed to be the general gist.” He unbuckled his seatbelt. “You go ahead and start, I’ll find a proper parking spot.”

Sans Souci Park was a rectangle of green in the center of the city. A narrow corridor, part of an ecological push, ran from the top of the rectangle through the business district, through a suburb, and all the way to the woods at the northern outskirts of the city. The idea, Dutch had read in the paper, was to connect the park to the wider woodland ecosystem so that the small fauna in the park would flourish.

Dutch had to say that he worked for the Mayor; despite being his right-hand man, his factotum, his troubleshooter, all he had in his wallet was the Mayor’s card, and luckily, this time, that was enough to be allowed through. Mrs. Medina, despite their divorce, was still recognized as the Mayor’s former wife.

“Look at this,” Mrs. Medina said. There were large gouges in the ground right at the line where the corridor connected with the park. South of that line, in the park proper, the ground and the trees were untouched: no holes, no signs of fire.

Just north of that line, in the corridor, the ground was devoid of trees, pitted, instead, with deep, square-shaped holes, and beyond those stood the charred remains of the trees that had burned, and beyond those again the trees that still smoldered and that threw up steam and white smoke while the firefighters poured on the water.

The sides of the corridor had high hurricane fences; behind these was a wide sidewalk; and, from below, Dutch could hear the sounds of the cars going through the underpass. The wind was blowing the smoke toward the nearby apartment buildings.

It had been raining off and on for the past two weeks, but there hadn’t been any lightning. Mrs. Medina and Dutch walked right up to the mouth of the corridor, which was as far as the firefighters would let them go, and Dutch could still detect the stench of gasoline. This had not been a natural fire; someone had set it on purpose.

With the noise of the water hoses and the steam and the police radios and the nearby traffic zipping through the underpass, it was hard to talk. Mrs. Medina took his hand and led him around so that they stood on the corridor’s sidewalk, looking in through the chain-link fence.

They followed the sidewalk north, toward the undeveloped forestland that the corridor connected to the park. Despite the tall railing, it was unsettling to walk above the series of underpasses, with the cars zipping toward them and beneath them, violently displacing the air and making his ears pop.

It was still difficult to talk; Mrs. Medina touched him on the shoulder, and he lowered his head toward her. She put her mouth to his ear, covering either side with her hands, and she spoke in a quiet voice, not shouting, not whispering, really, and every word seemed to originate inside his head, its meaning instantly clear and requiring no processing. Her breath was warm against his ear, and once her lips brushed against it. She went right on talking.

In contrast to the park proper, she said, where the trees were widely spaced, here along the corridor the trees were packed together densely; it was even perceptibly darker inside the corridor from their shade. Trees grew so close to the edge that they pressed into the chain-link fence, warping it, and even the sidewalk, in places, was cracked and raised from the presence of roots.

“I want to see the far end,” she said, and it was too long a walk by far, so they turned around, back to the truck, and drove to the outskirts of town. Here, at the edge of the suburbs, the backyards blended into the woods, and the sidewalks on either side of the corridor stopped abruptly, while the chain-link fence widened out for a few yards in a funnel shape and then came to an end as well.

Mrs. Medina pulled alongside the last bit of fence. She wanted to keep walking north, into the woods; she still had her beach sandals on, so Dutch crouched down, and she climbed onto his back. Dutch was wearing jeans and boots, and all sorts of burrs began sticking to him, and the hem of his jeans kept getting caught on low, thorny bushes.

“A quick experiment first,” she said. On Mrs. Medina’s instructions, he made his way to the mouth of the corridor. It was cool here, and dim. He took a few steps into the corridor, and immediately the path grew difficult, obstructed by thick, tall trees at every step, so that he kept having to go around, only to run into another tree, until he was at the fence and sometimes had to turn around.

Here, though, his jeans did not snag on any undergrowth; in fact, the ground between tree trunks was surprisingly clear, compared to the forest proper just a few feet north.

“Okay,” Mrs. Medina said. She had an elbow on his shoulder, the free hand pointing the way, her chest occasionally pressing against his back. She had him turn around, north again, and he crashed his way through the undergrowth until he could hear water: the rushing of the Sans Souci river.

“This river,” she said, “serves the same purpose as the holes in the ground at the other end of the corridor.” She asked to be lowered, and she made her way to the river’s edge, removed her sandals, and stepped into the water. She kept going further in; Dutch went to her, extending his hand, and she accepted it.

He stood on dry land, his hand outstretched, and she went as far in as she could without letting go. The hem of her sundress had touched the water. It was warm for the end of October, but in this shade, and wet, one could easily grow cold.

She came back out. Dutch took off his shirt — he had a white T underneath — and gave it to her as a towel.

She thanked him and dried the soles of her feet, leaning on Dutch for balance.

On the way back, she let him drive.

Her theory was this: Someone had tried to set a fire inside the corridor. The river, on this end, and the space without trees, on the park end, would prevent the fire from spreading into the woods or into the park, respectively. This person had dug out those trees with the express purpose of building a firebreak.

The rains must have put out the fire before it took proper hold, and then the smoke had drawn out the inhabitants of the park-side apartment buildings, who had called the authorities, and the fire starter had had to leave the job unfinished.

“It was meant to be a controlled burn,” she said. She folded his shirt and placed it between them, behind the gearshift. “Even though he started the fire, the person is fond of trees. He took the trouble — and it was a lot of trouble — to transplant them when he could have more easily chopped them up and burned them.” She said that it was someone who knew about these things — transplanting trees, controlled fires. “A park-ranger type. An arborist. A forester.”

“I’d assumed it was some sort of pyro,” Dutch said. He adjusted his rearview mirror, which Mrs. Medina had moved when she took the wheel. “But I’ve seen documentaries about swaling. They burn back the dead timber and such so that, if a forest fire breaks out, there’s less fuel to stoke it.”

He took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her.

She nodded. “It makes sense to do it in the middle of these rains. Less chance of it getting out of hand.” It had begun to rain again. The windshield wipers were going, and from the corner of his eye he caught her leaning against her window, perhaps lulled by their rhythm or perhaps to feel the cool glass against her temple. “But why undertake it in the form of a crime?” she said. “National parks do this all the time. It’s an accepted technique.”

That was certainly the question. Dutch, who had intended to question some of his fellow movers, the ones whose trucks had been temporarily stolen for the transplanting, took out his cell phone instead and handed it to Mrs. Medina. He asked her to call the Mayor and ask him who was in charge of the park. “It’s the Parks Department,” she answered herself, right away. During her marriage, Dutch knew, she had been de facto co-mayor of Sans Souci.

“And the woods north of the suburbs?” he said.

“Those are outside city limits,” she said. “Unincorporated. They’re administered by the state, by default.”

“And the corridor?” he said.

He felt her turn toward him. After a moment, she dialed.

“He’s not going to know,” she said, “but he’ll give us a number to call.”

But the Mayor didn’t refer her to anyone. She kept asking him for the name of a department she could call; it seemed he wasn’t providing one; and then she, sensing something, perhaps, changed tack and just asked him about the administration of the corridor.

By this point, Dutch’s antennae were up. This had all the indications of being the Mayor’s fault. His usual way these days, without his wife’s counsel, was to get too excited about a novel project and rush to implement it right away. Whatever he didn’t cover in that initial spurt of enthusiasm, Dutch knew — the supervision, the maintenance, the evaluation of results — had a good chance of getting lost in the shuffle once his attention wandered onto the next thing.

Mr. Medina had been mayor for the past 12 years, four of those post-divorce; the corridor had certainly been built on his watch. It was only recently, with the influx of out-of-state students at Sans Souci College, an institution the Mayor himself blithely called a party school, that the locals had ceded the downtown area to the bar-hopping drinkers and begun to move north. The woods were pushed back, and new suburbs sprung up on the cleared land.

The call ended.

“What did he say?” Dutch asked.

“There were a lot of words,” Mrs. Medina said, “but the answer seems to be no one. No one is in charge of the corridor.” She explained that the Parks Department’s jurisdiction — and budget — technically extended only to the park proper, not the corridor itself. Despite this, traditionally the park staff had tended to the corridor; they were particularly concerned in its upkeep, the Mayor had said, for the sake of the park’s small fauna, which used the corridor to access breeding grounds in the woods to the north. Without this access, the population size and diversity of the park’s species would dwindle.

Dutch asked whether there had been reductions in the budget.

What had changed, she explained, was that expensive apartment buildings were built around the park. Their inhabitants would complain whenever any of the park staff burned trees. Some complained out of a misplaced sense of conservation. Others were afraid the fire would spread to their homes. Others simply didn’t want to put up with the smoke, because it was pollution and because it made their eyes water and made their asthma act up and even obscured visibility enough to cause some car accidents. Dutch could see that happen: two or three complaints from campaign supporters and the Mayor would cave.

So the park staff stopped using prescribed fires, and they suppressed any accidental ones set off by lightning. As for the dead wood, they would remove it and burn it off-site. In the park, the spacing of the trees was carefully controlled.

As for the corridor, Mrs. Medina said, the park employees did their best to remove the dropped branches and dead trees, as part of fire prevention. But there was simply not enough manpower to check the tree population along the corridor, and with the succession to woodier vegetation — as the tall trees took up all the available space, blotting out the sunlight — the smaller trees and the bushes died out, and so did the small fauna for which this undergrowth was their habitat.

“So it stopped functioning as a corridor,” Dutch said. “No animal is going to cross the entire length of the corridor, braving the noise of the underpasses, without a few patches of bushes along the way to serve as intermediate stops.”

He summed it up: “The purpose of the fire wasn’t to burn off fuel: it was to make room for the smaller vegetation, so the small fauna would cross back into the park. We’re looking for a bureaucrat with a quota. It’s the Parks Department after all.”

Mrs. Medina began making some calls, trying to get a list of the Sans Souci Park staff; occasionally she would say something between calls, thinking aloud, searching for ways to narrow it down.

Dutch stayed silent and listened. Sometimes she would put the cell phone on speaker, for his sake. Lacking a concrete destination, he had been circling the park, but now he decided to head toward the cluster of government buildings where Mrs. Medina had said the Parks Department had its offices.

The sun was setting already, but there was a chance they’d find people still there, on account of the fire today, and, at the least, they could access their records more easily on site rather than over the phone.

Proceed to part 3...