The Smoke Jumper Read online

  ‘Please don’t become abusive,’ the ape said.

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘You just said “damn it.”’

  ‘Jesus—’

  ‘Nuh-uh, please.’

  He held up his hands, palms out, in warning. Then suddenly he smiled and frowned and looked maddeningly sympathetic.

  ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry. But listen, life’s a jungle. In a few thousand years the only drivers will be those whose ancestors first learned how to nip into other people’s parking spaces. It’s called survival of the fittest. It’s tough but that’s evolution. Now, please excuse us or we’ll be late for the movie.’

  And with another smile, he took the woman’s arm and steered her off across the street, leaving Ed standing there, drenched and tonguetied and totally futile.

  ‘You inconsiderate pair of—’

  A car whooshed past, drenching his legs with spray. Another car was honking at him.

  ‘Hey, man, move your car. You’re blocking the road here.’

  ‘Oh . . . get lost.’

  Ed trudged back to his car and got in and dried his glasses. He had to cruise the area for twenty minutes to find another place to park and during all that time thoughts of revenge swirled darkly in his head. Eventually, he found a space just a few cars along the street from the woman’s VW and as he walked back past it he had the idea. It would be a perfect reciprocal act.

  He went into Ralff’s and apologized to Bryan, the manager, for being late. He’d had a bad day, he said. Bryan shrugged and said who hadn’t? The place was almost empty so Ed didn’t feel too bad. He went quickly behind the bar and by the cash register found a piece of paper and a pen.

  ‘Hey, come on,’ Bryan called. ‘Let’s have some music!’

  ‘I’ll be two minutes.’

  He scrawled something on the paper then found some wrap and carefully sealed it so the rain wouldn’t get to it. He headed for the door, calling to Bryan that he’d be right back.

  Outside, the movie theater crowds had disappeared. Apart from the occasional car swooshing by in the rain the street was deserted. Ed went straight to the VW and leaning over the hood carefully disengaged the wipers. They came off easily. He inserted his wrapped note under one of the arms. He stood back with a satisfied smile. Vengeance, he concluded, sticking the wipers into his coat pocket, was a dish best eaten wet. He turned and headed back to the bar.

  ‘In a few thousand years,’ the note said, ‘the only drivers will be those who learned how to steal the wipers of the parking space thieves. It’s called survival of the fittest.’

  Despite the dampness of his clothes and the miserable day he’d had, he played well that night. Around ten, the place started to fill. One of the tables applauded every number and it caught on with the others. He racked his brain for songs about rain and they went down well. ‘Stormy Weather’ even got calls for an encore. He didn’t have a great voice but tonight he seemed to be getting a cold so it sounded deeper and, in his opinion anyway, kind of sexy. Leanne, one of the waitresses on whom he’d always had something of a crush, kept bringing him drinks and, maybe it was just his imagination, but she seemed to be looking at him in a totally different way.

  Every time the door opened he was gratified to see that it was still raining. It was pathetic, he knew, but he kept imagining the woman coming back to her car and finding the note and he only wished he could be there to see her face. The movie must have finished by now and he wondered if she might show up and what he’d do if she did. But Ralff’s was a drinkers’ place, all low lighting and red velvet banquettes, and though all he knew about her was that she stole parking spaces, he imagined she was more the healthy type, yogurt and yoga classes, and probably wouldn’t be seen dead in a dump like Ralff’s.

  But he was wrong.

  He had just taken a fifteen-minute break before his last set. He’d gone to the restroom and on the way back been cornered - willingly, enthusiastically cornered - by Leanne, who told him how much she’d enjoyed his playing tonight, especially his new sexy voice. So when he settled back at the piano, Ed was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He sat down and was just taking a drink, when he saw her. It was the red ski jacket he noticed and had he looked a moment later he might not have recognized her, for she was just taking it off. Under it she was wearing a cream-colored sweater. Her boyfriend (who, to be fair, didn’t much resemble an ape after all) was ordering drinks and while he was busy doing that she sat upright on her stool, stretching her back and long neck and looking around the room. Ed watched her.

  She stretched her neck and dragged her hands back through her hair in a gesture that presumably had some practical purpose, such as untangling it perhaps, and another woman might have made it look like preening. But with her it seemed entirely without vanity. And one of the sexiest things Ed had ever seen.

  Suddenly he realized that she was staring right back at him and a slow smile of recognition spread across her face. And, in what he would later call a moment of pure genius, Ed started to play a number from his last (never performed and doubly rejected) musical. It was a smoochy, late-night love song that ‘owed perhaps a tad too much’ to Tom Waits. It was called ‘Your Place or Mine.’ The chorus went:

  We’ve finished the whiskey,

  Let’s finish the wine.

  I feel kinda frisky,

  Is it your place or mine?

  He kept his eyes on her while he sang. Her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind. He was enjoying the joke too and when Ed had finished the guy raised his glass in a toast and sent Leanne over with a drink. Ed went on with the set, playing any song he could think of that was vaguely relevant, changing a lyric here and there to make her laugh. He played ‘We’ve Gotta Get (You) Out of This Place’ and ‘Somewhere There’s a Place for (You)’ from West Side Story. He felt inspired, empowered. The audience was great, joining in a joke they didn’t even understand. He was playing only for her, the woman whose wipers he still had in his coat pocket. So he was more than a little disappointed when he was just halfway through ‘Lovely Rita, Meter Maid,’ to see her stand up and start putting on her ski jacket. Then he saw they were coming toward him.

  They waited on the far side of the piano until he’d finished. She looked sheepish. Ed finished the song and while the applause rippled around them he nodded at her.

  ‘That was funny,’ she said. ‘You’re good.’

  ‘It’s true, I admit it. Thank you.’

  ‘Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never done anything like that before in my life.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ the boyfriend cut in. ‘I made her do it. It’s just, you know, we were late for the movie and, well, anyhow, we’re . . . sorry.’

  Ed nodded without looking at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. God, she was gorgeous. Then he realized they were waiting for him to reply.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ he said. ‘I mean, hey, look at it this way. I got a free biology lesson.’

  His coat was hanging on the back of his chair and he reached into the damp pocket, found the wipers and held them out to her.

  ‘Here.’

  She frowned.

  ‘You haven’t been back to your car yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I think you’ll find you need these.’

  She gave him a wry smile and took them. The boyfriend laughed.

  ‘Quits?’ Ed said.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that.’

  ‘I tell you if you didn’t have such a big boyfriend, you’d have really been in trouble.’

  ‘This is my cousin David.’

  They were the sweetest words Ed had heard all day. He held out his hand.

  ‘Edward Tully. Pleased to meet you.’

  David said he was pleased to meet him too. The guy had a handshake like a steam press. Ed turned to the woman with whom he was already in love and offered his hand and she took it in hers.
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  ‘Rita,’ she said.

  Ed hesitated, holding onto her hand. It felt cool and delicious. Rita? Was it possible? She laughed.

  ‘Okay, Julia. Julia Bishop.’

  ‘Hey, Ed!’ Bryan was calling from the bar. ‘If music be the food of love, get the hell on with it.’

  ‘He’s such a romantic,’ Ed said.

  She smiled and said sorry again and then they all said goodbye and she and her cousin headed for the door. Ed started to play a John Lennon song he hadn’t played in years. But if she knew it, as surely she must have, for it was named for her, Julia showed no sign of recognition. She simply walked out into the night with her cousin and didn’t once look back.

  Half of what I say is meaningless,

  But I say it just to reach you, Julia.

  When Ed got to his car half an hour later, still cursing himself that he hadn’t had the sense to get her phone number or at least ask where she lived or worked, he found his wipers had been removed and a note tucked under one of the arms. ‘I learned,’ it said on one side. Ed turned the note over. On the other side was a phone number.

  It had stopped raining.

  3

  It was nigh on noon when the smoke jumpers came. They plummeted in pairs on each pass of the plane, their bodies jolting as the parachutes cracked open and filled and left them floating like medusas in an ocean of sky. Now and then the chutes masked the sun that flared harsh and white and unforgiving behind them, making shadows of their downward drift on the veil of smoke that shrouded the mountainside.

  They were a crew of six men and two women and every one of them landed safely in the jump spot, a narrow clearing not forty yards wide. They shed their parachutes and jumpsuits and stowed them, then unpacked their chainsaws and pulaskis and shovels from bags that were dropped separately and soon they were ready to start cutting a fire line.

  The peak that watched over them while they worked was called Iron Mountain. Its western shoulder was thickly forested and had no ready access by road. The fire had been spotted by a ranger that morning and, fanned by a strengthening westerly, had already taken out more than a hundred acres. If it continued to head east or switched to the north there was little risk. But to the south and west there were ranches and cabins and if the wind shifted they would be in grave danger, which was why the call had come for the smoke jumpers.

  They cut their line along a limestone ridge that ran along its southern flank. The line was a yard wide and half a mile long. They worked in waves, keeping a good ten feet apart, sawyers first, then the swampers to clear the felled trees and branches, then the diggers. They sawed and hacked and scraped and dug until the ground was cleared to the mineral earth so that when the fire arrived it would be starved of fuel. By the time it was done, they were soaked in sweat and their yellow flame-proof shirts and green pants were blotched like camouflage with earth and ash and debris.

  Now they were resting, each in his or her own space, some squatting, some standing, strung along the ridge like weary infantry. None spoke and but for the rumble of the fire beyond the ridge the only sound was the harsh staccato babble of their shortwave radios.

  Last in line, some twenty feet below the others, stood a young man with straw-colored hair that was matted and tangled with sweat. He was tall and lean and his ash-covered face was striped black like an animal’s where the sweat had run. Even his pale blue eyes looked somehow feral. He had set his pack and hardhat beside him on a slab of rock and was carefully wiping clean the steel head of his pulaski. When he had it gleaming he leaned the shaft against the pack and took off his fire gloves and laid them on the rock too, then dragged his hands through his hair and wiped his brow and unhitched his canteen.

  He was twenty-six years old and his name was Connor Ford and though he was tired and sweaty and dirty and his lungs were sore from the smoke, there was nowhere in the world he would rather have been. It was his first jump of the season. Squatting in the doorway of the DHC-6 Twin Otter a few hours earlier, watching forest and mountain and canyon tilt as if unhinged from the earth fifteen hundred feet below and seeing the blue and white and yellow canopy tops of those who had jumped before him drifting down and away, he had felt something not far short of ecstasy. And then the slap on his left shoulder from the spotter telling him to go and the leap into blue infinity, tucking himself in and counting to five and then the jolt as the chute snapped open and there he was, suspended in that wondrous arc of silence, neither man nor bird but something of sky snd flesh and earth combined.

  The water in his canteen tasted warm and metallic. It was only the end of May but it felt like high summer and Connor figured the temperature had to be well into the nineties. It had barely rained all year and the air was as dry as tomb dust. If things kept on this way it was going to be one hell of a summer for fires. Back at the base in Missoula, some of the jumpers were already fantasizing about how they were going to spend all the overtime and hazard pay. He’d called Ed in Boston two nights ago and told him to put down a deposit on the new car he’d been promising himself. Ed and that fabulous girlfriend he’d been going on about for months were arriving in Montana the coming weekend. It was the first time ever he’d missed the start of a fire season, which only went to show what a sorry effect a woman could have on a man.

  From above him up the slope now he heard Hank Thomas, the incident commander, give the word to move on. Connor took one last swig from his canteen then fastened and stowed it. He was about to shoulder his pack when he heard a strange sound. It was only faint, like a strangled cry, and it seemed to come from over the ridge where the fire was. He looked and for a moment saw nothing. Then, just as he was about to pick up his pack, he saw what at first he took to be a flaming branch rise above the pale spine of rock. It took him several seconds to recognize that it was no branch.

  It was a large bull elk, but like no elk Connor had ever laid eyes on. Every hair of its coat had been burned and its skin was charred black. Its great rack of antlers flamed like a torch. The animal scrambled up onto the ridge, dislodging a clatter of falling stone, and just as it found its footing it saw him.

  For a long moment the two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Connor felt like a pagan before some ancient demigod or devil summoned from a world beyond. He felt the sweat chill on his neck.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, he reached for the small Leica that he kept in his pocket and at the same time felt the wind around him lift and swirl and he saw the flames on the elk’s antlers dance and fan sideways and he heard the fire beyond it bellow as if in some dread conspiring chorus.

  The animal was in his viewfinder now and it raised its muzzle proudly as if posing for a portrait and suddenly it occurred to Connor that there was a message here, though what it was and for whom he had no idea. He pressed the button and at the sound of the shutter the elk turned and vanished and Connor stood wondering if it had all been but a trick of his imagination. Distantly he heard a voice calling him.

  ‘Hey, Connor! We got a fire to fight here.’

  He looked up the ridge. The other jumpers had gathered their gear and were ready to move off. Nearest to him was Jodie Lennox, a tall, red-haired midwesterner who’d been in the same rookie class as Ed and Connor two years earlier.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Connor asked quietly.

  ‘See what?’

  He paused. It seemed that the message, if that’s what it was, had been for him alone. He picked up his pack and swung it over his shoulder.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Nothing. Let’s go.’

  That night they snatched a couple of hours sleep in a sheltered shoulder of the mountain through which the fire had already passed. They worked shifts, checking for hot spots where the fire still smoldered in roots and stumps and crevices. The beams of their headlamps sent shadows jagging on the blackened earth as they made their slow patrol among the barbed wire tangle of charred scrub, scanning the ground like ghouls and scavengers in a war zone. And all the while
the fire kept up its muffled roar around the corner of the mountain, telling them it was not yet done.

  Connor woke around one o’clock, feeling hungry and cold. Two hours earlier the sky had been choked with orange clouds but while he slept the wind had shifted, carrying the smoke away, and now the universe spread unraveled above him. He pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders and lay on his back, deciphering the constellations in the way his father had taught him.

  He found the Pole Star and traced the spine of the Little Bear. From there it was only a hop to her big sister who Connor always thought looked more like her other names, the Plow or the Big Dipper, but which his father always called the Great Bear. Then in turn he traced her spine to the Northern Crown with her trailing kite and Arcturus at its point burning like a torch. Then he followed the broad river of the Milky Way until he found Scorpius who had stung Orion, the great hunter, which was why you couldn’t see him anymore. Another hunter was there instead, Sagittarius, who was half man and half horse and was standing there in the water, getting ready to shoot his bow and arrow while Aquila the eagle flew away in fear downstream.

  ‘The sky’s full of stories,’ his father used to say. ‘Thousands of them. All you have to do is look up there and read them.’

  Connor remembered that first lesson when he was only four years old. His father had woken him in the middle of the night and told him to get dressed and to be quiet as a mouse so as not to wake his mother. The two of them walked out under the stars in their stocking feet to the corral where his father’s bay mare stood waiting and his father hoisted him up into the saddle and told him to hold on tight to the horn while he swung himself up behind. They rode at a slow walk up through the meadows with the cattle moving away like shadowed ghosts and the cottonwoods along the creek glowing silver in the starlight and stirring not a leaf in the still night air.