The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  But in his heart there was also a hollowing sense of loss which, try as he might, he couldn’t dispel. And sometimes it seemed that the giving of his seed had left him spent and purposeless and more starkly alone than ever.

  As he walked back past the soldiers’ camp he saw a figure emerge from between the trucks and come toward him. It was the young soldier he had seen being sick outside the church. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he held it out and Connor took it.

  ‘They say he ran away to Goma with all the others,’ the soldier said. ‘If you go there, maybe this helps you find him.’

  Connor wanted to ask what he meant but the soldier turned and quickly disappeared again between the trucks. Connor got out his pocket flashlight and in its beam saw that he had been given a torn piece of newspaper. It was a photograph of a man in a white shirt who seemed to be presenting a prize to a strikingly beautiful schoolgirl. He was smiling benignly. The caption below said he was the bourgmestre of Bysenguye, Emmanuel Kabugi.

  Julia lay dead-still, watching in wonder as the dome of her belly shifted shape and moved from one side of the bathtub to the other. Of course, she had heard about babies kicking, but she’d always thought this must be an exaggeration and that actually it would be like a little tickle, something you really had to concentrate on to feel. Not like this. Oomph. There it was again. The little rascal just wouldn’t keep still, she was swimming widths, making ripples in the water, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘Whoa there!’

  Ed was standing naked at the basin beside her, shaving. He had gone back to wet shaving and, curiously, although he did it entirely by feel - and perfectly safely - he still stared at himself in the mirror. The spring sunshine was angling in on his butt through the open bathroom window.

  ‘On the move again?’

  ‘Bigtime. We’re training for the Olympics here this morning.’

  He put down his razor and knelt beside the tub. Half his face was still covered in foam. He put his hands on her belly and they waited for another movement. The birds outside were at full throttle.

  ‘He’s gone all shy,’ Ed said.

  ‘No she hasn’t.’

  ‘Come on, tadpole. One more time for Daddy.’

  At her last scan they’d shown her a picture of the fetus and asked her if she wanted to know what it was going to be and she said it was okay, thanks, she already knew - it was going to be a baby. They all laughed and left it at that but actually, even though she didn’t want to be told, she did know. She’d never had any doubt. It was going to be a girl.

  Quite how she knew, Julia wasn’t sure, except that it had something to do with Skye. She didn’t think about her so much anymore. For about a year after the fire Skye had been there all the time in the corner of her mind, not threatening her or accusing her or even looking sad, just sitting there quietly. But with time, the image had faded and now appeared only when summoned in Julia’s prayers or darkly magnified in those treacherous, sleepless recesses of the night.

  Sometimes, of course, it could be summoned by chance, such as when she came across someone who looked like Skye. One of her third-grade pupils had an older sister who collected him after school and who looked so like Skye that the first time Julia saw her, she almost fainted. Mostly, however, she believed that she now had the issue under control.

  It wasn’t that the guilt had diminished. She had come to the conclusion that guilt was made of some utterly imperishable matter upon which time and happiness had not the slightest corrosive effect. She had read an article in a magazine (one of the many she now bought, to look for Connor’s pictures) about a policeman who had been shot in the head with a bullet that was made out of titanium or something similarly exotic. The guy was alive and alert and seemed to be functioning fine and so rather than risk the damage of surgery, the doctors had decided to leave it there. Apart from the odd headache and some minor distortion of his vision, he apparently now led a normal life.

  Reading the piece, Julia had decided that this was how it was with her. Except, of course, she had two titanium bullets - one for Ed and one for Skye. They were there constantly lodged in her head and they changed the way she viewed the world and caused her pain. But it was a pain to which she had grown accustomed.

  Guilt could be as simple as that. There didn’t have to be anything maudlin or self-pitying about it. It was a fact and you lived with it and dealt with the consequences, a kind of contract under which your actions led to inevitable obligations. Those to Ed, she was already fulfilling, by devoting her life to him. Now it was Skye’s turn. Julia was responsible for the loss to the world of a young female life and therefore she must restore one. And although she knew it wasn’t remotely rational, this was why she had convinced herself that the baby, now seven months grown in her womb, was a girl.

  Ed, of course, had different ideas. The Montana wing of the Tully dynasty, he grandly declared, needed - and would have, damn it - a male heir. He even had a name ready. In honor of his father’s grasscutting empire, the boy would be called Mower. In the event of her being wrong, Julia hoped to God that this was only a joke. Tadpole was bad enough.

  He still had his hands on her belly.

  ‘He’s gone to sleep.’

  ‘No . . . Here we go again.’

  ‘Wow! Look at him go. That’s my boy! What does that feel like? That must feel so weird. Is it like, all kind of squirmy?’

  ‘No, not really. More kind of . . . fluttery.’

  ‘Fluttery.’

  ‘Yeah. Kind of swimmy-fluttery.’

  ‘But not squirmy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Here he goes again!’

  She watched Ed grinning, his eyes flickering a little as they did nowadays. She wondered sometimes, when he had his hands upon her like this and felt the baby stir, whether the joy it so clearly gave him was tinged in any way by the fact that the child wasn’t truly his. Of course, it was his, in almost every other way imaginable. And Julia did all she could to make him feel it was. Nevertheless, she thought there must still be some faint residue, not of doubt and certainly not of jealousy, but perhaps of some mild variant of regret.

  It was something that they had never discussed. Almost from the start, Ed had been incredible. After Connor called to give them his decision and while they were waiting for the first insemination, which had to be done at the optimum hour of the optimum day of the month, Ed had seemed troubled and restless and she had half expected him to change his mind. But when she asked him if he was still sure about going through with it, he told her not to be stupid, of course he was, so she never asked again.

  The day she told him she was pregnant hadn’t started well. She’d left a tube of hair removal cream on the bathroom shelf where they kept their toothbrushes and Ed brushed his teeth with it, which didn’t put him in the best of moods. He got dressed and stomped off downstairs for his breakfast and while she carried out the pregnancy test in the bathroom she could hear him grumbling on about how he couldn’t even taste his goddamn granola.

  She stood there by the toilet, watching the strip change color, though it was only confirming what she already knew, and she didn’t say a word. She went downstairs in her bathrobe to the kitchen and found some of the little adhesive dots that they used for labeling things and she wrote ‘baby’ with them on her belly. Ed asked her in a grouchy voice what she was doing.

  ‘Nothing. Just labeling something.’

  ‘Bit late, isn’t it? Write napalm, that’s what the damn stuff tastes like.’

  She applied the last dot and then walked over to the table where he sat hunched grumpily over his granola. She perched her backside on the table and took hold of his hand.

  ‘Aw, come on Julia, give me a break, will you?’

  ‘Put your spoon down.’

  ‘Listen, it really isn’t funny, okay? My mouth feels like it’s been nuked.’

  ‘Poor darling.’

  She opened her robe and guided his hand toward her belly.
<
br />   ‘Honey, I’m really not in the mood, okay . . . what the hell’s going on here?’

  He had found the dots.

  ‘Just so you know what it is,’ she said.

  She watched his face change as he traced the dots with his fingertips.

  ‘Oh boy,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh girl. And yes, I am.’

  He got up and put his arms around her and they hugged each other for a long time and when at last he let go she saw there were tears on his cheeks.

  ‘Sorry about the toothpaste,’ she said.

  He slipped his arms inside her robe and held her by the hips and kissed her and then he bent his head and kissed her breasts and with the dots still stuck to her belly he opened her legs and made love to her right there on the kitchen table. And possibly she was mistaken, but that day - and many more since - she had the impression that as well as raw desire there was some deeper impulse at work, some unconscious need perhaps to assert his presence within her too alongside Connor.

  They spoke of Connor often, wondering where he might be and what he might be doing. At Ed’s insistence, a photograph of the three of them - the one taken by timer on the climb last fall - had been blown up and now hung framed on the living room wall. Ed said he wanted it to be there for Tadpole/Mower to see, right from the start, so he would know the setup: Mom, Dad and Bio-Dad. He said that Connor had the better title; Bio-Dad sounded like a superhero. Julia said she thought it sounded more like a detergent.

  There was a network of friends and family (Fords, Tullys and Bishops) who kept their eyes skinned for Connor’s photographs and whenever somebody saw one in a newspaper or a magazine there would be an instant round of phone calls. Connor’s mother had phoned only the other day to tell them to buy Newsweek, but warning, at the same time, that it wasn’t a pretty sight. Julia went out and bought a copy.

  Mrs Ford was right. It was another of his pictures from Rwanda, a church floor carpeted with butchered women and children, sunlight pouring in on them through a broken window. Julia took one glance and that was enough. She couldn’t even bear to read about it. A million people murdered in a month. One TV anchorman, clearly out to prove he was smart enough to work a calculator, said this meant that a hundred and fifty-five people had been killed every minute, almost a thousand every hour of every day. While UN troops stood powerless and watched and men in suits in Washington debated the finer points of whether or not such killing amounted to genocide.

  Julia and Ed hadn’t seen or spoken to Connor’s mother since the previous summer and it was good to hear that gravelly voice again. They talked for a while about Connor and both moaned about how hopeless he was at keeping in touch.

  Then Julia suddenly realized that she had no idea whether or not the woman knew about the baby and, more important, about Connor’s role in it.

  ‘So tell me, honey, how’s it going? You’re what, six months gone now?’

  ‘Seven, good as. And I’m fine, thank you. Since I stopped throwing up the whole time.’

  ‘Yeah, that sucks, I remember. I was sick as a coyote with Connor.’

  There was a little pause. A pregnant one. Julia wondered what to say.

  ‘I should’ve called or wrote you,’ Mrs Ford went on. ‘Guess I didn’t know if I was supposed to know.’

  She still hadn’t said quite enough to indicate if she had the whole story.

  ‘Connor told you then?’

  ‘Sure he did. Tell you the truth, I was against the idea.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. Hell, I’m only just turned fifty. That’s no age to be a grandma. Even a surgate one or whatever the hell it is.’

  ‘Surrogate.’

  ‘That’s it. I mean. What’s that going to do for my image?’

  Julia laughed with relief.

  ‘Honey, I’m truly happy for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Now go buy that magazine.’

  The bathwater was growing cold now and the baby had finished her workout or maybe just gotten bored. And so had Ed’s hands. They were wandering up toward her breasts, which were now enormous, with nipples the size of small Frisbees. Ed called them Boobs ‘R’ Us and seemed to think their sole purpose was for him to play with. She slapped his hand.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Cut it out. I’ll be late for work.’

  19

  The cargo planes came all day and all night, lowering themselves out of the cloud like vast avenging birds and coming in over the lake to the black shore where a million lost souls had made their camp. At night you could see their lights skewering down toward the airstrip and hear the backroar of their engines and sometimes the clouds would part and give a glimpse of the great volcanic cone of Nyaragongo, ten thousand feet above it all, rumbling and glowing in a red miasma, as if gathering itself for judgment day.

  The planes brought grain for the living and quicklime for the dead. And for the hundreds of thousands who hovered in between they brought clothes and drugs and blankets and tents and trucks and a whole circus of salvation to hand them out. They brought doctors and nurses and aid workers and a thousand other nameless officials from a hundred different agencies. And then there was the other circus, the three-ringed media horde who had hurried here to hustle and haggle and get in the way and then hurl their words and pictures like spears across the ether at the calloused conscience of a world that watched bemused.

  Connor was bemused too. So was almost everyone he had met here in Goma, be they doctor, aid worker or journalist. The million Hutus assembled on this vast plain of sharp black lava were refugees. The name itself prompted pity and most no doubt deserved it. Their wretchedness was etched in their faces as they waited in the food lines or squatted by their paltry, evil-smelling fires, watching their children die from cholera. But among them were those - how many, nobody knew - who deserved no pity, for they had shown none; they were the very same people who had carried out the genocide over the border in Rwanda.

  Everyone knew they were here. Connor had photographed the stacks of machetes and nail-studded clubs that had been confiscated at the crossing point and knew it was only a fraction of what had slipped through. Their owners didn’t bother to hide but instead flaunted themselves and their weapons to bully their way to the best of the spoils. And this was why Connor thought there was a chance, just the faintest one, that somewhere among them he might find the bourgmestre of Bysenguye.

  He had been searching now for the best part of a week. He kept the newspaper picture of Kabugi in the top pocket of his vest, protected in a clear plastic sleeve and he showed it to people everywhere he went. And every time they looked at it and shook their heads and handed it back. Even the name of the town didn’t seem to ring any bells.

  In the eyes of some he asked he saw them pondering what rare kind of fool would set himself such a quest and he had many times wondered the same himself. Why should this man’s murders matter more than the multitude of others? Was it simply that he had a name and a face and that Connor had seen the nameless faces of his victims and photographed his handiwork? What, in any case, would he do if he found him?

  He didn’t know. But he had started looking, so he would finish. There were six camps and he had combed all but one. Now he was on his way to the last.

  It was late afternoon and a breeze was blowing warm and damp off Lake Kivu, flattening the smoke of the campfires into a gray shroud and for a few welcome moments diluting the fetid crepuscular air. Connor was walking along the trail of black lava dust that wove through the camps. He heard the sound of an engine behind him and stepped aside. It was a white Land Cruiser, one of the many that had been flown in to shuttle the aid workers and medics around the camps. He expected it to go past but it pulled up alongside him and the driver, a blond young man with a beard, offered him a lift. Connor thanked him and climbed in the back.

  There was a young woman sitting up front and she turned around in her seat to talk to him. She was Dutch an
d the man was Norwegian. They were both paramedics working for an agency based in Stockholm. They asked him whom he worked for and where he was going and Connor told them that he worked for himself and that he was looking for refugees from a place called Bysenguye. The name meant nothing to them, nor did the name Kabugi. He showed them the picture but neither of them recognized him.

  The woman, whose name was Marijke, was about to hand it back when she frowned and took another look. She pointed at the schoolgirl to whom Kabugi was handing the prize.

  ‘I saw that girl this morning,’ she said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. I remember thinking how lovely she was.’

  She said they had been giving shots to a crowd of children at one of the other camps - one which Connor had already visited - and the girl was among them. The man asked why Connor was looking for Kabugi and he told them. Marijke said that if he could wait half an hour while they delivered some supplies, she would take him to where she had seen the girl.

  He had to wait longer than that, and by the time they had found their way back to the place it was getting dark. They parked by one of the feeding stations and walked over to an improvised tent made of crates covered with plastic sheeting. It was where the refugee leaders for this part of the camp had their headquarters. Connor had been here two days ago and remembered the icy stares of the young men when he had asked about Kabugi. None of them had spoken English and since Connor spoke no French the encounter hadn’t lasted long.

  The faces they saw when they went inside now were different and less hostile. Marijke greeted them brightly in French and got a response that was almost friendly. It seemed they recognized her from that morning. Connor couldn’t understand what she was saying but he heard her mention the name of the town. The one who seemed to be their leader waved an arm as he replied. Marijke translated for Connor.