The Smoke Jumper (4 page)

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.

‘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.

 

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

I
t 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.

His father had to reach around him to hold the reins and Connor felt warm and safe yet full of adventure and could even now, all these years later, almost summon the smell of the man, of leather and hay and cows and sweat and tobacco, in a blend that was all his own. They rode to the crest of the butte where you could look down on the little ranch house and there they left the horse to graze while they lay side by side on their backs and studied the stars with the smell of fresh sage wafting sweet and smoky around them and an owl calling somewhere below in the trees.

Connor was fourteen when his father died, leaving him and his mother greatly in debt. But there wasn’t a day since gone by that he hadn’t thought of him and felt the loss of him nor a night such as this when he hadn’t traced the stars and recalled their stories with the echo of his father’s voice to guide him.

The image of the burning elk had haunted him all night. He had fallen asleep thinking of it and now it came to him again, imposing itself upon the stars. It bothered him that the animal’s antlers had been so big, for by this time of year it should have shed them and any new growth would be much smaller. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but still he couldn’t stop wondering what the apparition might mean and why he should think it had meaning at all. His father had never had much truck with superstition and Connor himself had never felt the need of it either. The here, the now and the visible seemed sufficient. His mother, on the other hand, was a walking almanac of omens. She said it came from her Irish ancestry and that her parents and grandparents before them had been worse with it than she was.

In her day she had been a minor celebrity on the women’s rodeo circuit and before every ride invoked a litany of ritual and incantation to keep bad luck at bay. Even now the sight of a lone magpie sent her into an elaborate mutter of exorcism which involved asking after the creature’s health as well as that of its absent partner and offspring. She always burned a sprig of sage the night before Connor left for his summer of firefighting and once he had overheard her quietly reciting some kind of prayer over it. She pretended it wasn’t serious, but he knew it was. So it bothered him that he felt the way he did about the elk. Perhaps some ancient Celtic gene had woken in his veins and he would forever, like his mother, be its slave.