The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  Kay was going to be credited as the director and co-writer with Ed, but she did a dozen other jobs besides. And when she wasn’t helping Julia paint the set or making costumes or wiping noses or generally threatening, cajoling or encouraging the cast, she taught history and English by all accounts with the same gusto and good humor that she had brought to the show. Ed had met her a few times at school social events and she and her girlfriend had once come for a barbecue with some of the other younger staff when Julia was working part-time before Amy was born. But he hadn’t really gotten to know her until they started rehearsals a few weeks ago.

  She was a plain-speaking dynamo of a woman from Chicago. From Julia’s description of her, Ed knew that she was in her midthirties, had laugh lines, cropped silvery hair and a penchant for dungarees and baggy striped sweaters. Ed knew her more for her booming voice and her smell, which reminded him of those New Age stores where they burned incense all day and where you went to buy cheap Indonesian gifts for people you hoped didn’t go there too.

  ‘All right,’ she was calling out now. ‘Let’s do that one more time. And this time, Mr Gloop, more menace. Know what I mean? Show that Orca what you’re made of. Yeah! Just like that. Here we go now. Positions, please. Julia, are you ready back there?’

  Julia was assistant stage manager and somewhere behind the partially painted scenery was marshaling the troops. She shouted that she was as ready as she ever would be. Ed could detect a note of suppressed desperation.

  ‘Okay, maestro,’ Kay called.

  Ed was sitting ready at the piano which, apart from a few taped sound effects, was all the accompaniment there was. Originally he’d had ambitions of putting together a small orchestra, but he and Kay had soon realized there was enough to drive them crazy without that. As things now stood, with just two weeks until opening night, there seemed at least a chance of avoiding disaster. That was, provided he could stay awake.

  The show had turned out to involve a lot more work than Ed had expected, and nowadays, since he’d been on dialysis, he didn’t seem to have the stamina he’d once had. In fact lately he felt tired more than he didn’t. Maybe he was just getting old. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Okay, one more time,’ he called. ‘Gloop and Loggers, from the top.’ And off they went again.

  Ed had been on dialysis for a little over two years now. His annual diabetes checkup had revealed that he had abnormally high levels of potassium and protein waste products in his blood. His kidneys weren’t doing a good enough job cleaning it. So now, three mornings a week, he had to go into Missoula and get hooked up to a damn machine to do it instead. He’d been there this morning, four long hours which he could have usefully filled a thousand better ways.

  The dialysis unit was in a ground floor room at St. Patrick Hospital. There were thirteen chairs in a circle, each with its own dialysis machine and a TV set with headphones. Daytime soaps had never been Ed’s favorite entertainment, even when he’d been able to see the pictures, so he always took along some work or a tape to listen to while the machine sucked his blood. The nurses who ran the place were great and he knew them all well enough by now to tease them. He called them The Brides of Dracula. This morning he had even had them singing one of the songs from the show. Despite the fun, Ed hated the whole process with a vengeance.

  He had never been one of those diabetics who spent their lives worrying and monitoring themselves. Indeed, his attitude had occasionally bordered on the reckless, especially since he’d been living with Julia. She did enough worrying about it for both of them, always checking up to see that he’d had his insulin shots, always ready with a candy bar at the first sign of a hypo. And as she grew older, Amy was getting to be the same, so now he had the two of them nagging at him. Of course, it was great that they did. But sometimes it bugged him and he could get a little snappy about it. Lately, because of the pressures of the show, it had been happening quite a lot. Julia had warned that it might be too much for him and though he tried to hide the toll it was taking, she was probably right.

  All in all, the rehearsal went well. Urged on by Kay Neumark, Mr Gloop revealed hitherto concealed star potential and everyone went away in high spirits. Well, almost everyone. On the way home, Amy told him about a backstage drama involving one of the elves who had apparently peed his pants. The chief chipmunk had said something cruel and the two of them had ended up kicking and biting each other.

  Ed listened in a distracted way, tuning in and out. Ever alert to his moods, Julia asked him if he was feeling okay and he told her not to fuss, he was just a little tired, that was all. He closed his eyes and propped his head back against the headrest, thinking about the show, the music still drifting in his mind.

  How ironic it was, he thought, that this was where all his grand ambitions had led. Ten years ago it had all been so clear. Without the slightest doubt about his talent, he’d had his entire career mapped out. He remembered outlining it to Connor one summer’s night when they were resting out on a fire somewhere. First there would be the little off-Broadway gem that got rave reviews, then Broadway itself, then Hollywood - not just movie scores but something much more ambitious: he was going to reinvent the Hollywood musical for a whole new generation. And now here he was, nearly thirty-six years old, a blind piano teacher in a little western town, busting his ass over his daughter’s elementary school show.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t feel one little bit cheated or bitter about it. The worst he ever got was an occasional twinge of regret. When he scanned himself for self-pity, as he regularly made a point of doing, he honestly found none. Everyone - well, maybe not everyone, but plenty of people anyhow - had these grand ideas of fame or fortune when they were young. And then as they got older they got real and settled for less. Or maybe they simply discovered that there were other things that were more important in life. And from what Ed gathered, those who did make it to the top - in the music and entertainment business anyway - generally didn’t end up happier. Richer for sure, but not happier.

  What was particularly ironic was that of the two of them, it should be Connor who’d ended up famous. Only the other day Julia read that he had just been awarded some major photojournalism prize. He even had an exhibition coming up at a fancy New York gallery. Yet he had never once struck Ed as even slightly ambitious. It was always Ed who banged on about all the great goals he was going to achieve while Connor just sat there and smiled and supported him. Perhaps, under that sly cowboy reticence, he had been ambitious all along and had simply had the sense to hide it. In any case, Ed didn’t feel envious. Just a little, well, embarrassed.

  He still missed Connor badly. He’d never had a friend so close, nor probably ever would again. And if he chose, he could easily make himself feel wretched thinking about it. But what with Julia and Amy and so much else to be grateful for, to do that seemed self-indulgent, so he rarely did.

  At first he had felt angry, until three years ago, when Julia told him what she believed to be the reason for Connor’s estrangement. Ed had written him a long letter via the photo agency, apologizing for his behavior at the christening.

  Connor never replied. For a while Ed worried that the letter had gone astray and wondered if he should write again.

  But he never did. And as time went by he began to think that maybe it was all for the best anyway. Ed hadn’t exactly admitted his jealousy in the letter, but the more he thought about it the more certain he became that Connor knew about it. Ed hated himself for feeling jealous. It was unreasonable and ungrateful and, above all - assuming Connor did know - so goddamn demeaning. But he couldn’t help it. Once the green weed took root, rational thought just withered and died. The harsh truth was that Ed feared that Connor was more of a father to Amy than he was or ever would be and that maybe - God, this was the really sick stuff - maybe Julia felt that way too. If Connor had been constantly around these past years, the paranoia would no doubt have festered, making Ed ever more twisted and resentful. It was sad to admit it, but es
trangement had probably been the only course.

  It was all a mess and a muddle, as Grandma Tully used to say. But then, so was life. It was a bitch and then you died. Wow, he mused sleepily, listen to the great philosopher. Dreamily, he could still hear Julia and Amy chattering away but he was too tired to concentrate on what they were saying. His mind was floating like a butterfly from one thought to another.

  Poor old Connor. Had success made him happy? Ed somehow doubted it. How could anyone do that kind of work and be happy? Maybe they should all fly to New York and show up unannounced at the opening of his exhibition? Give the great photographer a surprise. Give him a blind man’s verdict on his pictures. Just love the texture there. And, wow, can’t you just smell those dead bodies? And by the way, here’s your god-daughter. Hasn’t she grown?

  Poor old Connor. How he missed him. What a mess it all was. What a goddamn mess, muddle and fuckup.

  22

  Connor asked the cabdriver to pull up across the street from the gallery and handed him a twenty-dollar bill through the gap in the security screen. The driver was a Nigerian and muffled like a mummy with a long scarf and gloves and a big woolen hat with flaps like the ears of a spaniel. On the trip down to SoHo, through the cold and the fog and the acid gray slush, he had been going on about how great it was to live in New York. Connor had been to Lagos only once and hadn’t much liked it but on a night like this he knew which of the two cities he’d choose. He told the guy to keep the change and wished him luck and then climbed out into the freezing night air.

  The street was narrow and the buildings on both sides were tall and grim and seemed to lean in like the walls of a black crevasse, though maybe that was just his mood. He stood in the shadows and shivered and turned his coat collar up against the cold and looked across at the big plate-glass window of the gallery spilling light out onto the grimed snow heaped along the sidewalk. There were maybe twenty or thirty people in there, sipping champagne and chatting. One or two were even looking at his photographs.

  He was an hour late and almost hadn’t come at all. Why he had ever let himself be talked into it, he couldn’t imagine. Eloise, the gallery owner, was a friend of his editor, dear old Harry Turney, and it was hard to figure out who was doing whom a favor. Probably all three of them. Eloise had lots of fancy media connections and some of them were going to be there tonight. There was even supposed to be a TV crew from a cable channel arts show that Connor had never heard of. He was glad that there didn’t seem to be any sign of them.

  He’d already had an idea of what lay in store. Eloise had fixed up an interview with a new glossy magazine which, she said, was passionate about photography. The editor was a good friend.

  ‘Believe me, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be like Life, only with an edge. They see you as the new Robert Capa. You’re probably going to be on the cover.’

  The young woman who came to interview him looked about seventeen years old and had never heard of either Robert Capa or Life magazine. She asked him if he ever took pictures of famous people and seemed to lose interest once he’d said he didn’t. The magazine had hit the newsstands this morning. Connor wasn’t on the cover. There, instead, was a young man with a black shirt, a smug grin and a bunch of Canons around his neck. The headline said: Shooting in the War Zone with Dino Tornari.

  Connor was intrigued. He knew most war photographers but had never heard of this one before. He turned inside to discover that the war zone in question was outside various chic Manhattan clubs and restaurants where Dino, ‘undisputed King of the Paparazzi,’ lurked to snatch indiscreet pictures of the rich and famous and for his pains regularly got beaten up.

  The piece about Connor was tucked away at the back and distilled down to six paragraphs, every one containing an error. They’d somehow managed to find an old picture of him in a cowboy hat and talked about his ‘Marlboro man looks’ and his ‘harrowing pictures from the heart of darkness.’ The only shot they had used was one he had taken of a Dayak tribesman in Borneo. The caption called the man a Rwandan headhunter. It didn’t really matter. The picture was so small and poorly reproduced, even the man’s own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  It was Connor’s first taste of being on the other end of media attention. Now, against all his better instincts, he was about to get his second. He took a deep breath and headed across the street.

  Eloise Martin was one of those black-garbed New York women, so thin and chic and sharp, you felt you could almost cut yourself looking at her. Harry Turney had it on good authority that she was pushing sixty, but without inside information you would never have guessed. Her eyes were made up like a fifties jazz fan and she had an immaculate bob of black hair which she liked to toss a lot when she laughed. Harry said she was in a state of constant overhaul, a work in progress, and disappeared every spring to Rio to have some new nip or tuck. Her bond-dealing billionaire husband had once been heard to joke that when he went to pick her up at the airport he was never able to recognize her and had to hold up a sign with her name on it. Eloise divided the rest of her time, according to Harry, between art and philanthropy.

  Connor’s exhibition fell squarely, thank God, into the latter category. Several of the photographs were from his most recent trip to northern Uganda where he had spent two weeks at St. Mary of the Angels, a rehabilitation center for child soldiers. He had been there several times before and regularly sent them money. The proceeds from any pictures sold from the exhibition would be going there too.

  Eloise came to greet him while he was still checking in his coat.

  ‘Connor, darling. You’re such a naughty boy. There are so many people dying to meet you. The TV crew had to go but they said they’d come back.’

  ‘I’m sorry, the traffic was terrible.’

  ‘Of course. Have some champagne. It’ll make you look less miserable. Don’t the pictures look marvelous?’

  ‘Yeah, you did a great job.’

  She summoned one of the waiters and Connor took a glass and drained half of it in one gulp. He was suddenly aware of everyone staring at him and he told himself to go easy. He felt as if he’d just checked in at his own funeral. Eloise went off to find ‘someone important’ whom she wanted him to meet. His heart sank lower. Harry sidled up and put a consoling hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t have to stay long.’

  Eloise came back with a tall young woman, so mesmerizingly beautiful that Connor didn’t concentrate on Eloise’s introduction. All he caught was her first name which was Beatrice and that she worked for Vanity Fair. Eloise led Harry away, leaving the two of them alone, and as she went she gave Connor a look that was no doubt meant to tell him to make a good impression.

  Beatrice seemed no better at small talk than he was and for a while it was awkward. Connor was waiting for her to ask if he ever took pictures of famous people. But instead she asked which photographers he most admired and it turned out that she knew the work of every one he mentioned. He asked her how and she shrugged and said she’d just always been interested. She had met and written about some of Connor’s personal heroes, people like Don McCullin and older ones like Eve Arnold and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

  She asked him if he would give her a guided tour of his photographs and although he didn’t want to, especially now that he knew about her expertise, he agreed.

  It had been hard enough selecting the photographs and printing them, so he had left the hanging to Eloise. This was the first time he had seen them together and in sequence. They covered pretty much his whole career and were hung chronologically, starting with his picture of Ed silhouetted against the Yellowstone fire. He had also included the shot of the elk with its flaming antlers, the one that had struck such chill into Julia. He hadn’t looked at it for many years and out of superstition had never had it published. Beatrice stood silently in front of it for a long time.

  ‘Did it survive?’ she asked at last.

  Connor shrugged
. ‘I don’t know. It was there, then it was gone.’

  ‘So, you were a firefighter.’

  ‘A smoke jumper.’

  She nodded, as if this explained something, and moved on. Sometimes she stopped and asked a question but mostly she just looked and Connor wondered if he ought to be more forthcoming and give her some background on where and how and why the pictures were taken, but he didn’t.

  Walking behind her, studying them in sequence, it was as if he were taking a tour of his life and seeing it with clear eyes for the first time. And as he moved from one image to the next and saw the pain and the loss and the horror in the eyes of those before whom he had stood, he felt a cold sorrow well within him. The women hanging in the blossom; the little girl in Sniper’s Alley, howling over her mother’s body; the Rwandan boy, wide-eyed and skeletal from hiding for two weeks under corpses; a vulture perched on the open-armed statue of Christ; the chilling stare of the murderous mayor, Emmanuel Kabugi, caught in his lair in Goma; a young Liberian rebel kneeling bound before his executioners. One face after another, staring in silence as Connor passed, watching him walk his own private catacomb, the dead and the dying and the cold-eyed killers of all colors and creeds, disposable apostles of faceless men with their gods of hatred and greed.

  At last they reached the final picture. It was of Thomas, one of the children Connor had photographed at St. Mary of the Angels. At the age of ten he and his twin brother had been kidnapped by rebels who called themselves the Warriors for God. To seal the boys’ loyalty, they were forced to take part in the burning of their own village and the massacre of their own people. Many months later Thomas had either escaped or been discarded to die. A government border patrol found him wandering in the bush. He was shriveled and skeletal and had lost the power of speech.