The Smoke Jumper (11 page)

Connor shook his head. ‘I’m the photographer around here.’

He had never liked having his picture taken. But Ed insisted so he reluctantly handed over the camera and took his place beside Julia. He felt shy and awkward and didn’t know whether to put his arm around her but she calmly made the decision for him and circled hers around his waist and so he put his around her shoulder and felt her move closer to him so that their hips pressed together. He could feel the warmth and sleekness of her skin all along the inside of his forearm and on the palm of his hand that cupped her shoulder and the air he breathed was laced with the hot sweet smell of her.

‘Come on, man, lighten up,’ Ed called. ‘You look like somebody died.’

Julia looked up at him and smiled and he smiled down at her and at that moment Ed clicked the button.

‘Okay, another one,’ he said. This time they looked at the camera. ‘That’s more like it.’

Connor felt something relax inside him. He told himself it was all right to feel the way he did. She was a beautiful woman and any man would feel the same. It was in no way a betrayal of Ed. He was simply aware of her, that was all. Ed took another picture and Julia let go of Connor and stepped away toward Ed, saying that now it was her turn. She had her own little camera and took a picture of the two men goofing around, striking a comic macho pose.

The camera had a timing device and she told them to stay put while she set it. They teased her for taking so long about it but at last she had the camera positioned on a pile of rocks and ran to join them and she was laughing so much she almost fell over. Connor and Ed moved apart to make space for her between them and she put her arms around them both and the camera flashed.

They settled themselves on the rock shelf and ate the rest of the sandwiches and some apples and nuts and a bar of expensive Swiss chocolate that had gone soft and sticky in the sun. Like a conjurer, Ed brought out a bottle of merlot and three plastic glasses that he’d secretly stowed in his pack and he opened it and poured the wine and made a solemn toast to friendship, which they all repeated.

After they’d eaten they lay on their backs on the baked rock and stared at the sky. Small sculpted white clouds were drifting from the west and Ed got them playing a game in which the three of them took turns naming what the shapes reminded them of. They fell silent and a little later Connor sat up and saw the two of them were asleep. Ed had taken off his T-shirt and apart from his sunburned neck and forearms his skin was pale. He had turned upon his side and was curled like a child in the shelter of Julia’s arm.

For a long time Connor studied them. The rise and fall of their breathing was in rhythm and their faces, slackened by sleep, had an innocence that touched him and somehow saddened him though he didn’t know why it should. A butterfly appeared over the rim of the rock and fluttered around them for a few moments before settling on Ed’s shoulder. The undersides of its wings were a powdery buff but then it opened them and the tops were such a vivid red that it looked like an open wound. Suddenly it was lifted by the breeze and borne away and Connor watched it go and as it grew smaller and smaller the thought struck him that what a man allowed into his heart was a matter of choice.

And long after the butterfly had vanished he stayed staring out over the many miles of forest and mountain hazing in the heat and stretching with the bend of the earth to the horizon and to others beyond. And he banished the sadness that he’d felt and told himself that the world before him was brimming with hope and promise and that the way things were on this most golden of summer days was how life truly was and how it always would be.

7

T
he 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 which 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.