The Smoke Jumper (8 page)

‘Okay, sorry, Skye, but I’m coming in there!’

‘Fuck you,’ Skye muttered. ‘Seven!’ she shouted.

‘Thanks, Skye. Keep it going.’

Skye angrily hauled up her pants and fastened them.

‘Keep calling it, Skye.’

‘Seven! Seven! Seven! Seven!’

She stomped out from behind the bushes and kept shouting her number all the way back to the others, until she was standing right in front of Julia and shouting it a foot away from her nose.

‘Seven! Seven! Seven! Okay? Is that okay now?’

‘Yes, Skye. That’s fine. Thank you.’

Mitch, the self-appointed bigmouth of the group, made some smart remark about how pissed Skye was and she wheeled around and told him to shut the fuck up or she’d kick his fucking face in.

‘Okay, okay, everybody,’ Julia said, raising her hands. ‘Let’s circle up, right now.’

There were groans, but the other staff - Scott, Katie and Laura - started marshaling everyone and soon, for the umpteenth time that day, they were all standing in a circle looking at each other in silence. Skye just stared at the ground.

‘Okay,’ Julia said calmly. ‘We all know by now what happens when someone uses abusive or inappropriate language. So, Skye, when you’re ready, we’d like to hear twenty alternatives to what you just said.’

‘What? I just said my number. What do you want? Six? Five? What?’

‘No, you said the F word twice to Mitch and threatened him with violence.’

‘Like, oh my, I was
so
scared,’ Mitch said.

‘And we’ll have twenty alternatives from Mitch when Skye’s done.’

Mitch gawped with offended innocence and there was a ripple of laughter. At seventeen he was the oldest in the group. He was tall and dark and muscular and knew exactly how smart and good-looking he was. Skye couldn’t stand him. They all fell silent again. Everyone was staring at Skye and she was still staring at the ground. They waited a long time and as far as she was concerned they could wait for ever.

‘Well, Skye,’ Julia said. ‘You know, there are no deadlines here. We haven’t got a plane to catch or anything. We’ve got all the time in the world, so all we’re going to be late for is getting supper.’

Skye sighed and threw her head back. She didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone. That goddamn eagle was still flying around up there, squawking away like an idiot.

‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘Like, I could have said: “Oh please, dear Mitch, please don’t make jokes about poor little me”’

‘Good. That’s one. Let’s try and steer clear of sarcasm, though.’

‘Or. I could have said, you know, it’s kind of hard if you’re the only female on this gig, taking a leak in front of all these . . . boys. It’s, like, totally embarrassing, okay?’

‘Yes, I think we all understand that. Good, that’s two.’

It took another half hour for her to come up with the other eighteen. And then almost as long again for Mitch to do his twenty. And at last, after they’d all taken a drink from their water bottles and several more had been into the bushes to pee, hollering their allotted numbers like a stuck stereo, they shouldered their packs and set off again up the trail.

When the judge had told her he was going to send her on this program Skye hadn’t had any idea what it might involve. All she knew was that it sure sounded better than being sent to jail like that maniac Sean. And for the first month it had been a breeze.

They’d lived in a disused barracks just outside Helena and although it was a pain being the only girl in the group and you had to get up at the crack of dawn and do all kinds of dumb things like jogging twice a day and doing P.T. and hoisting the flag every morning, the rest of the time all you had to do was sit around and be ‘evaluated,’ which meant answering the same boring questions she had been asked a million times before by probation officers and case managers and social workers and so many different kinds of shrink she’d lost count. Sometimes she just made things up to confuse them or to fool them into thinking they were onto something, but mostly she just trotted out the same old answers. About her home, her childhood, her parents and, of course, her feelings.

They always wanted to know how you
felt
about everyone and everything and they asked you so goddamn often it made you want to scream. It was like it was the only thing they’d ever been taught at shrink school or wherever it was they sent these jerks. ‘And how did that make you
feel
, Skye?’ Like, when you’d just told them how you had to listen every night while your stepfather came home drunk and beat and raped your mom and then came looking for you. ‘And how did that make you
FEEL
?’ ‘Oh, terrific, I just loved it, you know?’ And they always asked it with that same look of care and concern, like they really, really understood how it must have been, like they shared the pain, like it had happened to them too, which was of course total bullshit because they were all a bunch of spoon-fed do-gooders and not one of them had lived in the real world or had the faintest fucking clue what it was like.

After a month at the barracks, suddenly, one night last week, they were given this big spaghetti meal, handed a sleeping bag and a few other things, bundled onto a bus and, four hours later, dumped in the middle of nowhere. On the journey Skye had tried to work out where they were heading but it was too dark. For two days, with barely a bite to eat, they had hiked thirty miles through the mountains which Skye figured was supposed to shock them or break them or something and because of that she just kept her head down and did it. Sometimes her lungs felt like they were going to explode and her feet got all bruised and blistered and hurt like hell but she was damned if she was going to show it.

On the third night they arrived at a clearing and there was Glen, the program director, to meet them and some other staff, all smiling and joking and slapping everyone on the back and saying how well they’d all done. The staff had buried some cans of peaches in a circle and the whole group had to find them, like it was a game you’d really want to play when you’d been busting your ass hiking for forty-eight hours. The peaches sure tasted good though.

Ever since, the food had been boring as hell, granola and nuts and raisins and oatmeal and rice, that kind of healthy shit. On that first evening, as they sat around the campfire, Glen told them that they were going to have to learn how to make fires with a bow drill, like Indians did (only he said Native Americans like people did nowadays so as not to cause offense or to try and make you feel proud or something). Glen looked like some old hippie. He had long blond hair tied back in a ponytail and this wispy beard that he kept stroking and a gentle voice that went up at the end of each sentence as if everything he said was a question. When he mentioned this bow-drill thing, he looked at Skye as if, being half Indian, she might already know how to light fires this way. Yeah, right. As if.

All of the group, he went on, would have to master the bow-drill technique. Each night it would be somebody’s turn to make the fire and if he or she couldn’t do it, then that night no one would get hot food. Which was fine for him because the next morning he got in his truck and went home, leaving Julia in charge.

They all had to make their own little bow-drill set after combing the forest for the right bits of dead wood and in the five days that had since passed, all but two of the group had learned how to use them. The only two who hadn’t were Skye and a kid from Billings called Lester whose head was so cooked from all the crack he’d done, he’d probably have had trouble lighting a pool of gasoline with a blowtorch. Skye figured she could make a bow-drill fire easily enough, but she was damned if she was going to try. Last night it had been her turn and everyone had to eat cold food. She wasn’t popular, but who gave a shit?

The hiking since that first forced march had been easier. They’d done maybe ten miles a day but with lots of stops to form circles whenever anyone cussed or did something wrong. No one told them where they were or where they were headed and whenever anyone asked, Julia just smiled that annoying, cute little smile of hers and said it was the journey that mattered, not the destination. Which was about as dumb a remark as Skye had ever heard, because who in their right mind doesn’t care where they’re going?

Skye was one of Julia’s ‘primaries,’ which meant they were supposed to have, like, this special relationship. Skye was supposed to go to her for help, cry on her shoulder and confide her innermost secrets. Yeah, right. Julia was walking behind her now as they made their way up the canyon. In front was Byron, a boy from Great Falls who’d stabbed someone in a robbery.

He had straggly red hair and a tattoo of a tiger on his left shoulder which was supposed to look scary but somehow only looked sad. Skye couldn’t stop staring at it. Beneath the layer of smeared dirt, Byron’s skin was as pale as an albino’s. There was a ring of pink at the back of his neck where the sunblock had been rubbed off by his pack. Skye liked him. He tried to act tough like the others but, just as you could see his pale baby skin under the grime, you sometimes got a glimpse of the sweet kid he really was. He was the only boy in the group who was at all friendly toward her. The others spoke to her only when they had to, except Mitch, who never missed a chance to taunt her, mostly when the staff couldn’t hear.

The light in the canyon was fading, as if it were being siphoned out by the pale salmon sky. For half a mile the trail grew steep and treacherous with rocks that slipped beneath their boots to roll and clatter through the dry brush below. Then, as they rounded a ridge, the land fell away before them and opened into a meadow with a lake at its center. Far beyond it, the mountains they had glimpsed throughout the day were still catching the last rays of the sun and their reflection shone pink and unruffled on the surface of the lake. As if on some tacit command, the group stopped and stood in silence, gathering their breath and taking in the view. Skye was beside Byron.

‘Cool place, huh?’ said Byron.

Skye nodded but said nothing. She knew it was beautiful and knew that if she weren’t such a freak she should be moved by it, as Byron was. But she felt nothing. It was as if the processes of knowing and feeling had uncoupled within her and a skin grown between them. She was aware that Julia had come to stand beside her.

‘Is this where we camp?’ Byron asked.

‘That’s right,’ Julia said.

‘Cool.’

‘Pretty enough for you, Skye?’

Skye shrugged and fiddled with the strap of her pack though it didn’t need fixing. ‘Why should I care?’

 

They sat in a circle around the fire warming their bare or stocking feet against the flames that rose tall and untroubled into the windless night. The firelight set their faces aglow and flashed in their eyes as they talked and laughed. Across the lake a horned moon slowly hoisted itself above the trees.

This was Lester’s fire, started with his own bow and drill without help. And the pride he felt was plain for all to see. He sat straight, with his head held high and a permanent lopsided smile. Julia watched him across the fire and the sight of him made her feel warm inside. It was what she had always loved most about this job, seeing the self-confidence of these damaged young souls being built brick by brick with such modest acts of achievement.

Lester was fifteen years old and, with both parents shuttling in and out of jail, most of those years had been spent in institutions of one kind or another. Julia had read his case notes. How he’d stolen and wrecked his first car at the age of ten, how he’d started doing drugs then tumbled rapidly and predictably into a spiral of theft and fraud to fund his habit. Two years ago he had overdosed and spent three days in a coma that had left him permanently damaged. He slurred a little when he spoke and sometimes his mind seemed to crash like a computer while he was doing some simple task, like tying a shoelace, and he would stay frozen until someone came to help. There was a naive sweetness to him, though when roused, his temper could be wild and both these traits made him a target for teasing. Mitch, predictably, was the expert. He did it so subtly that Julia sometimes wasn’t aware of it until Lester exploded. But tonight you would never have guessed any of this. Lester Whaley had made fire using just a few bits of wood, and he sat basking in his own reflected glory, beaming at the world, the undisputed King of the Bow Drill.

He was sitting between Mitch and Katie, a bouncy and slightly irritating P.E. student from Billings. She was the least experienced of all the staff but talked more than any of them. She was telling everyone about the night last summer in Yellowstone Park when a group she was with hadn’t hung the bear bags high enough in the trees.

‘One of the kids on this group was really big, you know, two twenty pounds, more maybe. His name was Brett and he was always hungry and forever moaning on about how there was never enough to eat. Anyway, in the middle of the night, I wake up and see there’s someone over by the bear bags, so I think, uh-huh, it’s Brett having a midnight feast. So I get up real quietly and tiptoe over and I’m, like, just a few yards away and about to say ‘Okay, buddy, you’re busted,’ when he makes this grunting noise and turns around and it’s this ginormous grizzly bear, like three times Brett’s size.’

‘So what did you do?’ Byron asked.

‘Well, I just got him in an armlock, wrestled him to the ground and gave him a good talking-to.’

‘You did not!’ Lester said.

Mitch gave a mocking laugh and was about to make some smart remark until he caught the look Julia shot at him.

‘No, I’m just kidding. I yelled. The bear was more scared than I was and took off. He’d trashed the whole bag but it was weird, all he ate was a tube of toothpaste.’

All of them laughed. All except Skye. She was sitting between Byron and Scott and was staring into the fire as if she wished it would consume her. Scott was a philosophy major from Denver and had done three seasons with WAY in Colorado. He had a wise and gentle manner that the kids related to. During supper he had been quietly trying to engage Skye in the conversation. But she was having none of it. In the glow she looked so sad and beautiful that Julia had to fight an urge to get up and go over and hug her. Normally she wore her long black hair in a ponytail but tonight it hung loose and shone in the firelight as did her big black eyes. Since Lester succeeded in making his fire she hadn’t spoken. When it happened, amid the whooping and cheering, Julia had looked around and seen on Skye’s face the realization that she was on her own now: the only obstacle between the group and a hot meal every night.