The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  7

  The clouds at which they had laughed that afternoon soon had revenge. They gathered and darkened and opened and for three days there was rain without pause. The ground had been baked hard by the hot, dry days of May and June and so most of the water ran right off into the creeks and rivers before the forests had a chance to drink it. But it moistened both land and air enough to give the Missoula smoke jumpers a few days’ calm.

  Not that calm was ever too welcome. Rain meant fewer fires and fewer fires meant less overtime, less hazard pay and, although they had to be careful who they said this to, a lot less fun. A smoke jumper’s definition of what constituted a ‘good’ summer bore little resemblance to anyone else’s, especially those for whom forest fires could spell ruin or disaster. During a ‘normal’ summer, the Missoula base got five or six fire calls a week. A ‘good’ summer could bring that many each day.

  Until the heavens opened, ten days ago, this summer had been looking good. The rain had dampened the jumpers’ spirits a little. Since it stopped there had only been four calls, all to minor fires that were quickly put out. But things were looking up. The skies had cleared, humidity was falling and the new heat wave looked set to stay. And as the barometer and fire risk rose, so did the jumpers’ mood.

  The smoke jumper base lay in a long and shallow valley just south of Missoula airport. It was a cluster of mundane white buildings landscaped a little half-heartedly with a few token trees and shrubs. Beyond the buildings was the airstrip where planes of different makes and sizes stood ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Looming to one side, like a sinister circus of torture, were the towers and platforms and high-wire rigging of the training units, where many a young rookie had stood with a pounding heart, quaking knees and a face drained of all but fear, staring down at the ground and wondering if smoke jumping was after all quite as romantic as once it had seemed.

  The epicenter of the base was known as ‘the loft,’ a warren of interconnecting rooms where the jumpers worked when they weren’t on a fire. At its hub was the lounge, a long room with a linoleum floor and low armchairs set against whitewashed walls. There was a coffee machine and a microwave where jumpers could cook their own food. It was here every morning that the jumpers gathered for roll call. Leading off it were the operations room where there were wall maps on which every fire in the region was flagged, the loadmaster’s where the firefighting gear and supplies were sorted and the ready room where every jumper had a bin. Then there was the manufacturing room, where parachutes and jumpsuits were made and repaired. And, finally, the tower, where parachutes were hoisted for inspection after every jump and hung from on high like the sails of some ghostly galleon.

  In another building, a short walk away, was the visitor center. Here there was an exhibition where people could learn about smoke jumping and watch a video of some jumpers in action. There were life-size models, one in full jumping gear and another in firefighting gear and because the Forest Service was eager to convey the politically correct message that smoke jumping was open to both sexes, the firefighter model was a woman. The problem was, it seemed as if they’d lifted a mannequin straight out of a department store window. She was wearing lip gloss and mascara and in her spotless, neatly pressed shirt and pants, she couldn’t have looked less convincing. Ed had christened her Barbie Goes Jumping and a visitor had once been heard to mutter that she’d have trouble putting out the candles on a birthday cake.

  There were indeed women smoke jumpers, but not many. Of some four hundred jumpers across America, only twenty-five were women. What deterred more from applying - apart, perhaps, from a more highly developed survival instinct or plain common sense - was a matter of conjecture. But it probably had something to do with the impression, not entirely without foundation, that smoke jumping was an occupation copiously fueled by beer and testosterone. Firefighters of all kinds, from the Bronx to Bora Bora, tended toward the macho end of the job spectrum. Smoke jumpers had parachuted into an adjoining spectrum all of their own.

  Not that this could have been deduced from the evidence on display inside the manufacturing room on this particular July morning. Beneath the baleful gaze of three enormous elk heads mounted somewhat surreally on the wall of the manufacturing room, as if they had crashed through the masonry and weren’t too impressed at what they’d found, five Missoula smoke jumpers, all of them male, were sitting demurely at sewing machines. Ed was between Connor and Hank Thomas. Next to Hank was a rookie called Phil Wheatley, whom Hank had already nicknamed Pee-Wee, and Chuck Hamer, a snookie who’d done three years as a hotshot in Idaho and looked like a bear with a crew cut.

  It was a tradition that jumpers made and repaired much of their own clothing and gear. Ed was making a new red waterproof top and feeling more pleased than he’d probably care to admit with the way it was coming along. As more than one former girlfriend had observed, Ed had always been ‘in touch with his feminine side.’ Few if any, however, knew the price he’d had to pay.

  Ed’s father, Jim Tully, was a self-made multi-millionaire better known to the citizens of Kentucky as Big Jim, the Mower Man. He was a walking definition of what he liked to call ‘good ol’ P.S.G.’ - plain southern grit. The fourth and final son of a stable hand who had deserted his family and drunk himself to death in the Depression, Jim was born with an eye for the main chance and two big hands to grasp it with.

  As a child he’d had to carry his boots to school to save the soles and he vowed that no kid of his was ever going to have to do the same. Boots had straps and the only point of them was to haul yourself up. From the age of eight he mowed lawns after school, giving his mother half the money and saving half. When a mower needed fixing, he’d fix it himself until he knew every nut and bolt and screw and sprocket of every model there was. At seventeen he went to college to study business and quit after a month, concluding he already knew more than they could teach him.

  And he did. By twenty-five he had his own store, Big Jim Mowers - ‘Show us a better deal and we’ll cut it!’ - and by thirty-five there was a whole chain of them all across the state and into Ohio, selling U.S.-made mowers and imports too, including his own range of Big Jim Chompers, assembled in a factory he’d built in Taiwan. His face - handsome, but not so handsome that you wouldn’t trust him - beamed from billboards and TV screens, telling y’all to come along to Big Jim’s ‘where the grass grows greener.’ And they did.

  He built a mansion on a hill with a pillared porch and called it Grassland. There were fountains and peacocks and servants and a thousand rolling acres of pasture, where sleek horses lazily grazed and swished their tails. He bought new homes and cars for his mother and brothers and sisters and then set about finding himself a bride that suited his elevated station.

  As soon as Big Jim laid eyes on Susan Dufort, he knew she fit the bill. She was pure Kentucky thoroughbred. Beautiful, cultured, sensual and witty, she was the only daughter of one of Kentucky’s oldest and most revered families. Her parents, Leonard and Ernestine, were appalled. But Jim wooed them as sedulously as he wooed their daughter and soon all three succumbed. The marriage was front-page news, as were the births of their children, Jim Junior (Little Jim), Charlie, a year later, and Edward, three years after that.

  Sons one and two were clippings off the old lawn. They both had their father’s blond hair, the jutting jaw, the wide, toothy smile. They talked like him, swaggered like him and did all the things Big Jim himself would have done had he had their privileged start in life. Both later captained the college football team, worked hard and played harder. They had little patience and less talent when it came to the things their mother held dear.

  Susan Dufort Tully could play just about any musical instrument you put in front of her, but her greatest love was the piano. She had once harbored ambitions to play professionally but her father said it was too cruel a world and populated by all kinds of predatory and unsuitable people. So instead she played for pleasure, although she still sometimes had dreams in whi
ch she was playing Carnegie Hall in a pool of light, her gown flowing in folds of red velvet on the stage around her. The only one who understood such dreams was Ed.

  One of his earliest memories - he figured he could only have been three years old, maybe younger - was waking in the middle of the night and hearing piano music. His mother was a poor sleeper and had a habit of slipping out of bed and going downstairs to play the giant black Steinway grand that stood in the hall. Ed remembered tottering from his room in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and still half asleep, and out across the cream-colored carpet of the landing and looking down through the balustrade.

  His mother had lit the silver candelabrum that stood on the piano and the lid gleamed and so did the polished maple floor of the hallway. It was late summer or early fall and she was wearing something ivory colored and shiny and her dark hair which she normally wore pinned up lay loose on her shoulders and that shone too. Years later she told Ed that she had been playing Chopin nocturnes and he had always wished he knew precisely which one it was. All he knew that night was that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. He crept halfway down the shadowed side of the staircase to get a better view and perched himself there to watch and it seemed like a very long time before his mother, for no apparent reason and utterly without surprise, as if she had known he was there all along, looked up at him and smiled.

  When she’d finished the piece she patted the long piano stool and moved to one side and Ed went down and she hoisted him up and placed him beside her. She played another nocturne and Ed watched her pale long hands fingering the keys, like a pair of graceful animals with some separate will and purpose of their own.

  Although he later had many other teachers, good, bad and indifferent, it was his mother who taught him how to play and who instilled in him the notion that any kind of music could be fun. Her great passion was Mozart but she also knew all the great musicals by heart and by the time he was six or seven so did Ed.

  It was around this time that he was diagnosed as having diabetes, which seemed to bother his parents much more than it bothered him. His mother made such a fuss about having to inject him that Ed soon adopted a kind of studied nonchalance and took over managing it himself. His father’s reaction to both the diabetes and the boy’s burgeoning passion for music was the same: a subtle mix of pity, indulgence and a vague, unspoken disapproval. It seemed that Big Jim considered both music and any kind of physical disorder unsuitable for a boy. At least, for a Tully boy.

  With the music, Ed would later wonder if it was because his father felt baffled or even excluded. Perhaps it represented some last unbreachable barrier on his great social ascent. Or perhaps he was simply jealous of how it bonded further a mother and son already linked so firmly by looks and by temperament. Whatever the cause, his attitude rubbed off on Ed’s brothers, neither of whom had ever shown any interest in music. Their jibes were never uttered in the presence of their mother and were usually good-natured, as were the ones about Ed’s eyesight, which was poor enough to warrant glasses while he was still in primary school. But in a fight one day when Ed was about twelve years old, over something so trivial he couldn’t remember, Charlie told him to get lost and go play one of his ‘faggot’ musicals.

  It might have deterred a less confident or stubborn child. But Ed turned out to have more P.S.G. in him than his father or brothers might have credited. With his mother’s encouragement he pursued his passion, stuck to his practice and became a fine pianist. They both knew, early on, that he didn’t have her technical finesse. His playing was robust and passionate and where such attack was called for, he could soar. But he lacked a certain delicacy of touch with the more subtle pieces and, in any case, his instincts were more pop than classical. More Motown than Mozart, his mother used to say. More Hammerstein than Handel.

  He wrote and staged his first musical in high school at the age of sixteen. It was based shamelessly (and no doubt illegally) on the movie Alien and the music was mostly plundered from Puccini, but it was seen all the same as a triumph. Even his father seemed almost impressed. His brothers were rather more impressed by his other musical creation: a rock band called Redneck Peril for whom Ed wrote the songs and played lead guitar, becoming almost overnight, to his surprise and delight, an object of modest rivalry among the best-looking sophomore girls.

  He had never had any doubts about his sexual orientation and had long ago stopped worrying about his brother’s ‘faggot’ jibe, but he later recognized that it had probably had an effect on how he chose to spend his leisure time. Nothing could induce him to follow his brothers’ example, join the jocks and play football. Instead, he developed a taste for sports that were even more hazardous, where you pitched yourself not against padded and helmeted hunks but against the very elements themselves, against snow and ice and mountain rock.

  In his seventeenth summer, he went on a wilderness survival and leadership course in Montana, fell in love with the place and came home saying that this was where he wanted to go to college. The music program at UM in Missoula perhaps wasn’t the best in the country, but it was good enough. His father was furious. Music might be okay as a hobby, he said. Maybe. But it sure as hell wasn’t a proper college subject (‘for a man,’ he might have added but didn’t). What was more, no son of his was going to some hick, two-bit school for semi-literate cowpokes.

  By then Ed actually enjoyed such battles. Over the years a pattern had developed. He stayed calm and this made his father more abusive and the more abusive his father became, the more his mother took Ed’s side. Secretly she wasn’t too keen on UM either. She wanted Ed to go to Ann Arbor, where she had studied, but she didn’t say a word about that in front of her husband. In the end, Big Jim conceded the battle rather more easily than Ed expected, figuring, no doubt, that two out of three sons following in Daddy’s footsteps was as much as a man had the right to expect. Mollycoddled by his mother and with too much darned Dufort blood in him, Ed was now officially a lost cause.

  It was a relief. And since then, although - or perhaps because - they hadn’t seen so much of each other, he and his father had gotten along better. There seemed at last to be a mutual acceptance of their differences. There were even times when the old alliances shifted, such as when Ed told his parents that he was signing up as a smoke jumper. Predictably, his mother was horrified and his father fascinated and enthusiastic.

  ‘Don’t be such an old fussbudget,’ Big Jim chided her. He slapped Ed on the back. ‘This here’s a grown man now.’

  That was three years ago and neither then nor since had Ed mentioned the sewing machines. He smiled to himself now, as he sat stitching the last seam of his waterproof, imagining what his father might make of such a scene.

  The siren sounded just as he snipped the thread.

  ‘We have a jump request at the Lolo National Forest. The jumpers will be Tully, Ford, Hamer . . .’

  Chuck Hamer let out a whoop and the sound of the loudspeaker was drowned for a moment as everyone leaped from their chairs and headed for the door. They didn’t have to listen for they all knew who was on the jump list.

  ‘. . . Schneider, Lennox, Pfeffer . . .’

  The routine was that those who weren’t scheduled to jump always rushed to the ready room to help those who were. Ed ran after Connor into the lounge which was normally a quiet place but now, with the siren and the loudspeaker blaring and jumpers bursting in from every door, was more like the deck of an aircraft carrier at full scramble.

  ‘. . . Wheatley, Delaguardia . . .’

  Within seconds they were all in the ready room and by the time Ed got to his bin Donna Kiamoto was already there holding out his jumpsuit for him to climb into. Ed’s heart was beating fast. No matter how many times you jumped, that excited twist of nerves in the stomach was always the same. Donna helped him fasten his jumpsuit. The suits were padded and made of Kevlar. They had high collars and zippers all the way up the legs for easy exit.

  ‘There you go, soldier.’
r />   ‘Thanks.’

  It was Donna’s birthday in two days’ time. She was throwing a party at Henry’s, one of the smoke jumpers’ favorite bars in downtown Missoula. Ed and three friends he used to have a band with had promised to play.

  ‘If you’re not back by Friday night, Tully, you’re dead meat.’

  ‘Well, if it goes that long I’ll be in overtime, so at least I’ll be rich dead meat.’

  ‘Hey, if it happens, can I have that guitar of yours?’ Hank Thomas called.

  ‘Can I have your girlfriend?’ Chuck said.

  ‘Sorry, man, she only goes for good-looking guys.’

  Everyone laughed. Donna helped Ed fasten his suit and then he reached into his bin for his boots. Connor was already suited and booted and in his harness. He was bending forward while someone attached his parachute. He was always the first to be ready and was routinely teased for it.

  ‘Hey, Connor, your chute’s upside down.’

  ‘Yeah and you got your boots on the wrong feet.’

  Connor gave a weary smile. He clipped on his reserve chute and personal gear bag and picked up his helmet, ready to roll.

  ‘Come on, you tired-ass bunch of slowpokes, what’s keeping you? We’ve got a plane to catch.’

  From the window of the Twin Otter, the fire looked a halfhearted affair. It was six or seven acres at most, Ed figured. And with little wind, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry. So much for overtime. But then again, you never could tell.

  He looked around at the other jumpers, sitting bulky in their jumpsuits on the cramped bench that ran along the starboard side of the plane. With the door constantly open, it was too noisy for much conversation and anyhow most jumpers liked to prepare themselves in their own space, finding the right frame of mind for the jump. The jumpsuits were thick and hot and Ed could feel a trickle of sweat run down his back. Connor, as always, looked cool and comfortable.