The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  ‘There’s only four hundred smoke jumpers in the whole country,’ Connor said.

  ‘There’s that many idiots, huh?’ she said. ‘Let me get this straight. You get to go way up high in a little airplane, you find a fire and then you jump out and land in it. Is that the idea?’

  ‘Ma, they do give you a parachute,’ Connor said.

  ‘Oh, well. That’s okay then. You boys must be out of your minds.’

  Ed frowned. ‘Mrs Ford? I forgot. How many years was it you rode rodeo?’

  ‘That’s totally different.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Connor said. ‘In rodeo you don’t get a parachute.’

  As it turned out, Ed had something of a struggle persuading those in charge of selection at the Missoula base that his diabetes wasn’t going to be a problem. But he excelled himself in training and with the help of a compliant doctor (a close family friend who didn’t quite lie but didn’t quite tell the truth either), managed to persuade them that his condition would in no way interfere with his ability to do the job. By now they were more than glad to have him.

  Back in February, Ed had called to tell Connor about this new girlfriend he’d started dating. The guy clearly had it bad. Over the years there had been a number of girlfriends (mostly Ed’s) and one or two had even lasted more than one summer. Last year Connor had been heavily involved with a six-foot-tall hockey champ from Seattle by the name of Gloria McGrath whom Ed had nicknamed Darth. When these affairs happened, the two men happily gave each other space. Ed was a congenital romantic, forever falling in love and declaring every time that this, hand on heart, was the one. Nevertheless, listening to him going on and on about her over the phone, Connor had gotten the distinct impression that this Julia woman actually might be the one.

  ‘You remember Natalie Wood in West Side Story?’

  ‘No.’>

  ‘Connor, really, sometimes, man, I despair of you. It’s a classic. You must have seen it on TV - you know, that little square thing that stands in the corner of the room?’

  ‘So, she’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know how some beautiful women know how beautiful they are? Well, Julia doesn’t. She’s totally natural. And you know what? She likes to climb, she can ski like a dream. She’s smart, funny, artistic—’

  ‘Doesn’t the halo get in the way?’

  ‘No, the wings do a little but they’re kind of sexy. I tell you, man. This is it. I want to have her babies.’

  ‘I don’t think it works that way around.’

  It was quite a buildup. Connor was looking forward to meeting her.

  Both of the rolls of film that he was processing now were black and white. He often shot color too, especially when he’d been commissioned, but when he was shooting for himself he usually preferred black and white. The shots he’d taken of the old man teaching the girl to cast were a washout. There were one or two others on the contact sheet that were perhaps worth printing but he wasn’t going to bother now. He was too interested in the other roll, the one he’d shot on Iron Mountain. In truth he was really interested in only one frame of it.

  His heart had beaten a little faster as soon as he held the negative up to the light and saw that it was there. He didn’t even look at the other shots. The moment the negative was dry enough he had gone straight for a ten-by-eight print. It was in the tray now and as he rocked it, letting the developer swill slowly to and fro across the paper, he could see the elk starting to appear, as if through a haze of smoke, just as it had on the mountain.

  In that fraction of a moment when he had taken the picture, the animal had lifted its head and turned it to a three-quarter profile and in so doing had sent the flames leaping from its antlers in a furious jagged swirl.

  But it wasn’t this, nor the ripple of flames along its charred black back, that made Connor shiver again. It was the look in the animal’s eye. There was a rim of white along its lower lid and the message it conveyed was not of fear itself but rather of some fearful admonition.

  4

  One of the many things that she admired about Ed - and perhaps the only thing she envied - was the effortless way he fell asleep. No matter where he was, no matter how much noise or motion or fully-fledged chaos was going on around him, he could just close his eyes and rest his head and before you could count to twenty he was away. On this occasion, the resting place was Julia’s shoulder. He had taken off his glasses, kissed her neck and nestled there shortly after the flight attendant took away their barely touched meal trays and even though she was now finding it a little uncomfortable, she didn’t want to wake him. She liked the feel of his breath on her neck, rhythmic and warm and shallow as a child’s.

  Ed had insisted she take the window seat so she would have the better view of Montana when they flew over. They were on the north side of the plane and for the past hour she had been watching its shadow glide across mile after mile of dun-colored prairie and across badlands riven with the ragged scars of waterless creeks.

  It was more than four months now since Ed had called to claim his wipers. And although she would happily have consigned the whole saga of theft, reprisal and counter-reprisal to deepest history, never to be mentioned again (for she was still mortified over what she’d done), the story of how they met had already become legendary. Ed had told all of his friends about it and all of hers too - at least, all those she’d allowed him to meet. And during the telling, if she was present, Julia would dutifully grin and hang her head in comic yet heartfelt shame.

  If she was shocked at herself for stealing Ed’s parking space, she was almost equally shocked at how quickly the two of them had become what her mother, with a somehow disparaging tone, called ‘an item.’ Since breaking off her engagement to Michael the previous spring, Julia hadn’t dated anyone and was enjoying a life free from any whiff of romantic complication. She had devoted herself to her work at the institute, gotten many early nights, read more novels than she had in years, even done some painting. If she went out, it was only ever with girlfriends. And on the sole occasion she’d broken that rule and gone to see that godawful movie with her cousin, wham-bang, there she was, back in the tangled land of love.

  Her mother had doted on Michael. He was at Harvard Law School and was pure WASP - handsome, blond and brilliant, with a smile that came straight out of one of those magazines you found in dentists’ waiting rooms. Crucially, from Julia’s mother’s point of view at any rate, he was also seriously rich, or one day would be, when his inheritance came through. It was an inheritance which, like those of most noble families, had murky origins and as far as Julia could establish, without being unduly nosy, had something to do with diverting rivers and chopping down millions of trees.

  If not dazzled by all this, Julia had, for a while at least, been sufficiently distracted so as not to notice another of Michael’s attributes. He was boring. Not just a little boring, now and again, the way that most men were and for which, by and large, one forgave them, but boring on a colossal, stratospheric scale.

  Her best friend and roommate, Linda Rosner, not known for her mincing of words, had pointed this out the very first time she laid eyes on Michael and broke open the champagne when Julia broke off the engagement. The whole experience probably accounted for why the next man in Julia’s life should turn out to be a passionate musician from the South who in his spare time liked to parachute onto forest fires. Life with Ed, of course, brought the ancillary risk of terminal exhaustion, serious injury and even violent death. But not, she could already attest, of boredom. He could be a little moody sometimes and, occasionally, make some clever quip without realizing it was hurtful. But he had a heart the size of a pumpkin and, most important of all, he made her laugh.

  Until the night they met, the only time she’d ever been serenaded was by one of those balding fiddle-players who hovered in suspect Italian restaurants. Michael had paid him right away just to get rid of him. The effect of Ed playing those songs just for her, even though there had been a good d
eal of irony involved, had been devastating. She was an instant pushover. Well, almost instant. They had gone to bed on their third date, though had he asked - and had Linda not been sitting there all eyes and ears pretending to read the newspaper - Julia would have happily succumbed when he showed up for his wipers.

  Like Julia, Linda was a New Yorker, born and bred, though from a much wealthier family. She rolled her own cigarettes using licorice paper and smoked more than she ate. She was never more than a size eight and only five feet one but a little went a long way. They had met at art college where Linda was a founding member of the Neo-Gothic Radicals, a concept which Julia had never quite grasped but which seemed to involve wearing a lot of black lipstick and dressing up like a distant cousin of the Addams family. After two years as a struggling artist, during which time anything remotely associated with making money was considered ‘moronic capitalist shit,’ she had decided that if she couldn’t beat them then she might as well join them. She’d dumped the weird clothes and black lipstick and gone to law school. The plan was to land a job on Wall Street and buy a black BMW instead.

  The moment Ed stepped into the apartment that night, Julia knew he had Linda’s seal of approval. They opened a bottle of wine and then another and sat talking until two in the morning. Ed spent a long time looking at some of Julia’s recent paintings that were stacked against the wall. They were the result of a two-month trip to Kenya that she had made the previous summer. She had fallen in love with the elemental space and imagery of Africa, but although she’d taken a stack of photographs, when she got home she found that she couldn’t recapture the spirit of the place on canvas. She felt her paintings were clichéd. But Ed kept saying how great they were and singled out as his favorite the only one she liked, a huge close-up of a zebra, its coat so magnified that the picture looked almost like an abstract.

  He had them both helpless with laughter about the flood at his apartment and with his impersonation of the appalling Dexter Rothwell Jr. And when he told them that as well as being a musician and composer he was also a smoke jumper Julia thought Linda was going to swoon. When he left, the two of them stood dazed and grinning at each other like a pair of schoolgirls.

  ‘Well,’ Linda said. ‘There you go. A poet-warrior.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think? Babe, if you don’t stake a claim pretty damn quick, I will.’

  Now, four months later, Ed and Julia were still at that stage where it was hard to keep their hands off each other and the idea of being apart for the summer didn’t appeal to either of them. Ed had therefore suggested that she should try to fix a vacation job in Montana. It took no more than a phone call.

  When Julia was at art college she used to spend June to September working in Colorado with an organization called WAY, Wilderness and Youth. The kids who went there were young offenders, sent by the courts as a last chance. In groups of up to a dozen at a time they were taken out into the backcountry for two whole months. They were given a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, a waterproof poncho and a tarpaulin and that was all. With the support and supervision of four field staff - of which Julia was one - they had to learn how to survive in the wild.

  Until then Julia had always assumed that she was going to try to make a living as a painter. But what she witnessed during those three summers, the stunning transformation of some of those kids from apparent nohopers into confident, social young adults, had such a profound effect on her that she changed her mind. She went on to get a master’s degree in educational psychology and ever since had been working as an art therapist at a school in Boston for children with special needs.

  Two years ago WAY had started a second center, in Helena, Montana. And in one simple phone call Julia managed to get herself hired for the summer. WAY’s Colorado field director, Glen Nielsen, had moved up there to run it. He and Julia had been good friends and, had it not been for Michael back in Boston, they might have been more. When she called him, he said he was thrilled to have her back and that, if she wanted, he could even fix her up with an apartment in Helena to share with two other women on the staff. When she told Ed that she thought this was a good idea, he looked hurt. He wanted her to live with him in Missoula.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You and Connor have got this boys’ thing going there.’

  ‘Boys’ thing? Connor wouldn’t mind you living there. He’s cool.’

  ‘I’m sure he is. He sounds like a great guy. But I really think it’s better if I have my own place. Hey, don’t go all mopey on me. You said Helena’s only a couple of hours away.’

  In the end, however, she relented, though how much they were going to be seeing of each other she didn’t know. The WAY staff rotated in shifts. You did eight days with your group and then another team of staff came out and took over while you took a six-day break. Ed would get either Fridays and Saturdays off or Sundays and Mondays.

  She felt his head stir now on her shoulder.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ he said like a drowsy child.

  ‘We’re on our way home. You slept the whole summer.’

  ‘You smell so good.’

  ‘I’m glad. My whole left side is paralyzed. Your head weighs a ton.’

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s all those brains.’

  He kissed her cheek then put on his glasses and leaned over her to look out the window.

  ‘We’re somewhere over the Dakotas,’ he said. ‘In a few minutes we’ll be over Montana. Must be why I woke up. I’m not kidding. It always happens. I wake up just as we fly over Montana. I get this, kind of, vibe or something.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘I promise you. I once met this woman who was into astrology and reincarnation and all that stuff and I told her about this and she said it was because in a previous life I’d been a native Montanan.’

  ‘What, a cowboy?’

  ‘A Blackfeet Indian. Apparently I played the drums.’

  ‘What was your name?’

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘You’re lying. Come on, what?’

  Ed sighed. ‘Bear With No Teeth.’

  Julia laughed loudly. ‘Bear With No Teeth!’

  ‘Go on, mock. I don’t care. It’s only my previous life we’re talking about here.’

  ‘Why with no teeth?’

  ‘How do I know? Maybe I sucked as a drummer.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘That was it. She got angry when I asked who was on lead guitar and wouldn’t tell me any more.’

  They passed the rest of the trip watching the plains below give way to a land of buttes like the backs of great whales and pine-clad ridges and broad river valleys. Ed was her guide, naming the places they passed. The mountain ranges of the Rosebud and the Bighorn and the Pryor and farther to the north the sprawl of Billings and a curve of the Yellowstone River flowing the other way. He made her lean close to the window so that she could see the eastern walls of the Rockies ahead, getting larger and larger, the remnant snow on their highest peaks glowing pink in the late sunshine. And in no time at all those same peaks were dwarfed below them and they were crossing the continental divide and swinging in a slow curve along the western side, with the forest skidding by thick and many shades of green and broken only by lakes that flashed the sky back at them. And then at last the slow descent toward Missoula, with the forest softening into valley and pasture and they could see ranches and houses and horses and cattle and cars and people going about their business. And Ed said that it always felt as if he’d never been away and that the sight of this land opened something within him, a yearning space that was about to be filled.

  Julia stroked his hair.

  ‘My little Bear With No Teeth.’

  When they stepped out of the plane the air was laced with the smell of kerosene and sun-baked asphalt. Even so, Ed filled his lungs with it as if it were the sweetest he’d ever breathed. He put his arm around her and they walked toward the arrivals gate.

  �
�There he is.’

  Ed waved and through the glass of the arrivals lounge Julia saw a tall young man with long blond hair waving a cowboy hat at them. The crowd of passengers moved slowly. There was an old man being pushed in a wheelchair ahead of them so it took a long time to get to the gate. Beyond it Connor had put his hat back on and was standing there smiling and calmly waiting. At last they reached him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ed said. ‘Is this the way to the fire?’

  ‘Too late, man. We already put ’em all out.’

  Connor took off his hat again and Ed opened his arms and they gave each other one of those funny man-to-man hugs that always seemed to involve slapping each other’s backs.

  ‘Hey, old buddy,’ Ed said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Good. Better for seeing you. Hey, new glasses.’

  ‘Yeah. Julia says they make me look sexy.’

  ‘Well, maybe she needs some too.’ He turned to her. ‘So, seeing as ol’ sexy-specs here never introduces anyone to anyone, I guess you must be the famous Julia.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  ‘Welcome to Montana.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  His hand was hard and calloused and he was fixing her with his pale blue eyes in such a direct and steady way that it made her feel almost shy, as if he could somehow see inside her head.

  ‘And I already found a space for my truck out there, so I figure I’m safe.’

  Julia gave Ed a withering look. ‘Will I ever, ever live that down?’

  Ed looked at Connor and they both considered this and shook their heads gravely and said together that they thought it unlikely. Connor grinned.

  ‘Julia, I’m sorry. I’ll never mention it again.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise. Come on. Let’s go get your wipers, I’m sorry, your bags.’

  On the way to the baggage hall and while they waited by the carousel, Ed bombarded Connor with questions. He wanted to know who was jumping this summer, what fires they’d fought so far and where, what the weather had been like, what the forecasters were saying and so on. Connor answered patiently, directing his answers not just to Ed, but to Julia as well.