The Smoke Jumper Page 2

  They pulled off the interstate to get gas. There was a diner there that was just opening and they bought coffee and muffins and settled themselves to eat at a table by the window while an old woman mopped the floor around them. While they ate he asked her how old she was and she lied and told him she was seventeen. She said she’d been born in South Dakota and was half Oglala Sioux, on her mother’s side, and he said that was cool but she told him that she didn’t think it was and anyhow she didn’t know anything about that people or their history except that it was full of pain and misery and she already had enough of both to be getting along with, thanks very much.

  He told her he came from Detroit and that his parents and his older brother were all in jail though he didn’t say for what and Skye didn’t ask. When he was fourteen he had taken off and for the last three years had been traveling all over. He said he had been down to Mexico and Nicaragua and Salvador and said he’d seen things he never could have imagined or believed.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Magic. Shamans. People walking through fire and not even being marked by it. People dying on account of being cursed. I saw a dead woman brought back to life.’

  Skye asked him about it but he didn’t want to tell her. She asked why he had come to Montana and he said it was because he wanted to meet a grizzly bear in the wild. He said he had learned in Mexico that it was his spirit animal and that he had been a bear in another life. She laughed because this skinny kid was about as unlike a bear as a person could get. A stick insect maybe or a giraffe or something, but a grizzly bear? No way. He looked hurt and went all quiet on her and so she apologized and, finding it hard to keep a straight face, asked him how he planned to go about finding a grizzly. He conceded that it wasn’t going to be easy but figured they should head for Glacier Park, which he’d been told was a good place to start looking.

  Skye nodded, trying to look serious.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘You got a better idea?’

  She could think of about a hundred.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a shit.’

  They drove the rest of the day while the sun swung over them, heading like them for the snow-capped mountains that loomed ever larger before them. In the afternoon it got so hot they pulled off the interstate and meandered along narrow roads through a forest humming with insects. They found a creek with a swirling pool and swam naked and unashamed in the cold clear water then lay in a meadow full of wildflowers and dried themselves in the sun while butterflies danced around them. He said she looked pretty and she thought he might want to touch her and half wanted him to but he only stared at the sky and smoked another joint and seemed hardly to know she was there.

  By the time they got back on the interstate the western sky was filling with great gray thunderheads among which the sun crazed fitfully, pale and cold and metallic, while lightning flickered from their roiled bellies to the mountain mass below.

  She saw the police car before he did. Something made her look back and as she did so the cop turned on his flashing red and blue lights. Sean looked in the rearview mirror and said nothing. He didn’t look scared or even worried, just stoned. He slowed and pulled onto the shoulder and the police car behind did the same. The cop sat there awhile, no doubt checking them out on his radio.

  ‘What do we say?’

  Sean shrugged.

  The cop got out of his car and walked slowly toward them. Sean lowered the window, watching him in the side mirror all the way. As he came alongside, the cop bent so that he could get a look at Skye. He was young, in his mid-twenties maybe, with a neatly trimmed ginger mustache and blue eyes that were wide-set and friendly. He touched his hat and Skye gave him her best smile.

  ‘Howdy. Where you folks headed?’

  ‘Glacier,’ Sean said, not looking at him.

  ‘Great. On vacation?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This your vehicle?’

  ‘Belongs to a friend.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Okay. Well, I’d like to see your driver’s license, registration and insurance, please.’

  Sean turned to reach for his bag. Skye suddenly had a bad feeling that he had a gun in there and that he was going to do something dumb and dreadful. But he seemed to change his mind and turned back to the cop.

  ‘I forgot. All that stuff got stolen.’

  Something shifted and hardened in the cop’s eyes.

  ‘Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle please, sir?’

  He straightened up and reached for the door handle and in the same moment Sean gunned the engine. The cop yanked the door open and tried to grab Sean’s shoulder but the car was already moving and he lost his balance and fell and in the fall his arm went down behind Sean’s seat and twisted and got trapped. He cried out.

  ‘Stop!’ Skye shouted. ‘Stop!’

  There was a loud crack and Skye knew from the man’s scream that it was the sound of his arm breaking. But Sean either didn’t hear or care. He just hit the gas pedal harder so that the tires squealed and smoked and the car snaked its way back onto the highway dragging the cop beside it yelling and shrieking. Skye screamed.

  ‘Are you crazy? Stop the car! For godsake, stop!’

  But he didn’t. She reached over to try to knock the shift out of drive but he shoved her violently back across the car and her head cracked against the passenger’s side window. With his left hand, he was trying to unhitch the cop’s arm from behind his seat but it wouldn’t come free. The door kept swinging open and slamming shut again on the poor man’s arm and when it opened Skye could see his face above the sill. There was a bloody gash all down one side of it and his eyes were glazed with fear.

  The car was swerving across the lanes of the highway and Skye became aware of the blast of horns from other vehicles. They were passing a pickup truck and there was a big brown dog standing in the back and the driver was hooting and yelling at them and the dog was barking, trying to keep his balance as the truck lurched away to avoid them.

  ‘You idiot!’ Skye shouted.

  ‘Shut up!’

  Suddenly there was the tearing sound and then a loud thud and Skye looked back to see the cop’s body bounce and twist and tumble across the road behind them.

  ‘You stupid fucking idiot! What are you doing?’

  The cop’s severed arm was still jammed behind the boy’s seat and he wrenched it free and threw it clear and slammed the door. Skye screamed and started to hit him and he struck her hard in the mouth. She felt a tooth break and blood start to flow and that made her want to hit him all the more and with all her strength and anger she lashed at him and tore at his face and hair until finally he punched her so hard she felt something give in her head as if she were being swallowed from inside and she slumped in her seat watching the world twirl away from her in a red benumbing mist.

  2

  The day that Edward Tully met the love of his life began badly. Snow had been falling all week and he had been looking forward to some good weekend skiing. But in the early hours of Friday morning the snow turned to rain and by daybreak (if one could so call such a minimal transition) Boston was knee-deep in gray sludge. As if to make doubly sure, it was raining indoors too. Around midmorning the heating and water for the whole apartment building went off. When Ed went to investigate he found the elevators were out of action, water cascading down the stairwell and the lobby full of wet-legged people yelling at each other.

  The building was being remodeled and for the past two months the construction crew had proved daily more adept at upsetting the residents. This morning, it emerged, a carpenter had severed a power cable and a water pipe in one surgical flourish of his power drill. Mr Solomon, the lugubrious old widower who had the apartment next to Ed’s, said an ambulance had just taken the guy away. How badly injured, Mr Solomon didn’t know, but he trusted it was nothing trivial.

  Ed had been working most of the night on the second act of his new musical, the one (he allowed himself no
doubt on this matter) that was going to make him famous. It was going well though he was increasingly aware of how the construction work was infusing both music and lyrics with a darker, more menacing tone than he had intended. When he squelched in his soaked shoes back into his apartment he found there had been a more literal infusion. The ceiling had sprung a leak directly above the piano. The piano itself, an old upright of uncertain parentage that needed tuning so often it wasn’t worth the effort, seemed undamaged. But the stack of music sheets that lay upon it, Ed’s entire night’s work, was sodden. There was another leak in the closet where he kept his climbing and skiing and fly-fishing gear and he had to clear out the entire contents and pile it on his bed. He sat down in a huff on the couch, right on top of his trendy new Calvin Klein spectacles that he’d gotten only last week and cost a fortune. They were totaled. There was plainly some sort of cosmic conspiracy going on.

  Then the mail arrived, returning to him, with thanks, not one but two rejected scripts and demo tapes of his last musical, the one that clearly wasn’t going to make him famous. One of the accompanying letters, from a big Broadway producer, penned, no doubt, by a minion, damned him with faint praise then said the work ‘owed perhaps a tad too much to Sondheim,’ which sent Ed into a whirlpool of brooding self-criticism for several hours.

  Now it was late afternoon and he was sitting at another piano, much grander and sleeker and more tuneful than his own, listening while his least favorite pupil slaughtered an innocuous and none too taxing piece of Chopin. The kid, a deeply unprepossessing ten-year-old who went by the name of Dexter Rothwell Jr was dressed entirely in black except for his sneakers which were silver and gold and probably cost enough to feed an average family for several weeks.

  What Ed found most irritating of all was the baseball cap the boy always wore. It was also black and, of course, worn back-to-front and had DEATH ZONE - CREW MEMBER on it as if written by a hemorrhaging spider. Ed was not by nature a violent person, quite the opposite. But sometimes the urge to remove this cap and with it whack young Dexter Rothwell around the ears was almost overpowering.

  Since finishing college three years ago, teaching piano was how Ed made enough money to keep on composing. During the winter his only other source of income was from playing every Friday night in a downtown bar, which despite being paid little money and less attention, he still enjoyed. With his teaching, quite unintentionally, he seemed to have cornered the market in the spoiled offspring of the city’s most graceless high-achievers. He had been teaching this particular brat for six months now and not once had the kid smiled or even looked him in the eye.

  Ed stared out of the window, trying to detect a trace of Chopin amid the faltering cacophony that filled the Rothwells’ manicured drawing room. The January darkness that had barely lifted a corner all day was closing in again and the rain was still coming down. He watched it making rivulets on the waxed finish of Mrs Rothwell’s black Mercedes convertible that basked in the driveway beside Ed’s rusting Nissan. The boy’s streak-blond, spandex-clad mother was, as usual, working out in the gym across the hallway, wearing one of those headphone radios, presumably to drown the horrors of Dexter Jr at the keyboard. She was a thin, small-boned woman with a pointed face and whenever he caught a glimpse of her through the doorway, pounding away on the jogging machine, Ed was reminded of a demented mouse trapped in a treadmill.

  Dexter Rothwell Jr finished and slumped back from the keys.

  ‘Chopin sucks,’ he said.

  ‘You think so? Really?’ Ed tried to sound light, amused even.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve obviously been too busy to practice since last week.’

  The boy grunted and began to pick his nose. They sat for a moment listening to the muted thump-thump-thump of Mrs Mouse clocking up the miles across the hallway. Ed took off his glasses, the old ones with the Scotch-taped hinge, and gave them a polish. It reminded him that he couldn’t afford, literally, to be impulsive here. He took a deep breath and put them back on.

  ‘Okay. What shall we play, then? Want to try some more Led Zeppelin?’

  He wasn’t kidding. In a desperate effort to engage the boy’s interest two weeks ago he’d had him play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and a couple of Rolling Stones numbers. There had been the faintest flicker of interest.

  ‘That sucks too.’

  ‘Wow, they all seem to suck. Chopin, Mozart, Led Zeppelin.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Ed let the silence hang for a moment. The boy was glowering out at the rain, still picking his nose. Ed studied the sullen, slack-jawed profile and made a few rapid calculations about the damage he was about to inflict on his already parlous finances. Well, so be it. He stood up, plucked the music from in front of Dexter’s nose and stuffed it into his briefcase. The boy looked up at him.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing, Dexter. And that’s the problem.’

  ‘We only just started.’

  ‘Yep and I’m through. I’m out of here.’

  He opened the door and came out into the hallway just as the boy’s mother emerged from the gym, toweling her face with care so as not to mess up her lipstick. She frowned.

  ‘You two done already?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Done and dusted.’

  He picked up his coat from the chair by the front door. Dexter stood shiftily in the drawing room doorway, shrugging and mugging at his mother as if the world had gone crazy. Mrs Rothwell looked at her watch.

  ‘But it’s only—’

  ‘The thing is, Mrs Rothwell, you’re wasting your money and I’m wasting my time.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t Dexy making progress?’

  Ed looked at the boy. He was standing there, twisting his fists into the belly of his T-shirt and scowling at the floor like a jilted Neanderthal. It was a pathetic sight and for an instant Ed felt an inkling of pity.

  ‘No, ma’am. He isn’t. In fact, frankly, Dexy sucks.’

  The elation lasted only until he got home. The heating was still off and water was still dripping into the garbage bin that he’d placed where the piano used to be. He showered in cold water, singing to keep himself from freezing and from thinking too much about what a reckless fool he had been to give the Rothwells the bullet. Then he made himself some hot chocolate, microwaved half a pizza left over from last night and ate it huddled in his overcoat in front of the TV news which chronicled nothing but doom and disaster and though his own paled by comparison, his mood remained resolutely grim.

  They liked him to show up at the bar at eight even though the place never got crowded until much later, so around seven-thirty he again braved the rain out to his car and set off across town in one long and gloomy crawl of traffic.

  The bar was called Ralff’s, though who Ralff was and why he spelled his name like that, Ed had never been able to discover. It stood near the waterfront on the fringe of a jauntily revamped area that was thronged with tourists in summer but on a winter’s evening such as this seemed like a sad mistake. Apart from Ralff’s the only reason for going there was the movie theater just across the street, which was good for business but bad for parking. Tonight, however, Ed was in luck.

  Through the smear of his windshield as he came around the corner, he could see a Jeep pulling out of a space right outside the bar. He signaled right and stopped to let it leave. The car behind honked though it must have been obvious why Ed had stopped. He looked in his mirror and saw a beaten-up white VW bug. It honked again.

  Ed shook his head. What a moron. The Jeep vacated the space and Ed moved forward so he could reverse into it. He assumed the VW would either pass him or wait for him, but as he shifted into reverse and turned in his seat he saw it nip sharply into his space. He couldn’t believe it. There was no way he was going to take that kind of asshole behavior from anyone. He switched on his hazard lights and got out.

  Two people were getting out of the VW. The driver was a young woman and as Ed stomped toward her, she flashed h
im a smile of such dazzling innocence that he thought for a moment she must be looking at someone behind him. He looked briefly over his shoulder to check but there was no one there. The woman was wearing a red ski jacket with the hood turned up over a mass of thick, dark hair. The passenger was a man, taller and broader than Ed, a fact that perhaps should have struck him as relevant but didn’t. All Ed noticed, through his rainstreaked glasses, was that the guy was grinning. Which didn’t do much to endear him. The rain was now a monsoon.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ed said in as level a voice as possible. ‘That’s my space.’

  The woman looked at her car then looked back at him with that same infuriating butter-wouldn’t-melt smile.

  ‘No. It’s ours.’

  She locked the car and zipped up her jacket. Even with steam coming out of his ears, Ed recognized that he was confronting an extraordinarily good-looking woman. She was olive-skinned, with a wide mouth and perfect teeth. Her eyes were big and dark and flashing now with amusement. And because there was no other likely cause for it but himself, this served only to fuel Ed’s rage.

  ‘Listen, you knew darn well what I was doing. I stopped to let the guy out, I signaled, I pulled forward so I could reverse in and you snuck in behind me. You can’t do that.’

  She shrugged. ‘We can. We did.’

  ‘Damn it, you can’t!’

  He was sounding shrill now and to restore an appropriate posture of manly threat he shot a withering look at the woman’s creep of a boyfriend who was still grinning like an ape as he came ambling around the back of the car toward them. Ed could feel the rain soaking though the back and shoulders of his coat. An icy trickle ran down his neck. He could hardly see a thing through his glasses now, but he thought he caught a first faint look of embarrassment on the woman’s face. She turned to the ape boyfriend for support.