The Smoke Jumper (12 page)

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.’

‘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.

The plane made another pass over the fire while the spotter and assistant spotter squatted by the open door, hooked in for safety, trying to figure out a likely jump spot. The spotter’s name was Frank Bird though everyone called him Big Bird or Bigs because he was the smallest man on the base. He was also, at fifty-five, one of the oldest and wisest and had his name on the hundred-jump list back at the base. Ed always found it comforting to have Bigs as spotter.

The pilot dipped a wing and started to circle back and Ed, quietly chewing a power bar to top up his blood sugar level, found himself looking directly down on the fire. It looked like a large arrowhead chasing the slow drift of white smoke up the west flank of the mountain. The terrain was difficult, all steep ravines and jutting crags and barely a space between the trees. Wherever Bigs chose for the jump spot, it was going to be tight.

They were flying at about a hundred and ten miles an hour at fifteen hundred feet and Bigs had to yell to make himself heard over the noise of the engines when he showed them the jump spot. It was a thin clearing that ran down the mountainside in a crooked green scar. At its widest it was no more than thirty feet across and on all sides it was guarded by tall lodgepole pine. They passed over it three more times, dropping a pair of crepe-paper streamers on each pass to measure the wind drift. The streamers were in combinations of pink and blue and yellow and weighted with sand and Ed watched them snake and flutter away below him toward the trees.

‘Looks like we’ve got about three hundred yards of wind drift,’ Bigs shouted. ‘Everybody see the spot? Okay, let’s do it.’

The jumpers were all putting on their gloves and helmets and personal gear bags and going through their final buddy checks. Ed and Connor were jumping first stick, which meant that Ed was going to be the first man out of the plane. Once they’d landed, that made him the incident commander. The last time that he’d gone first, he missed the jump spot and landed in a creek. He could feel the adrenaline begin to course through his veins and he took some long deep breaths to calm himself. There was a flash and he looked around startled and saw Connor grinning as he lowered his camera. Ed raised his middle finger. Connor stepped close so that their helmets touched.

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

‘Want me to go first?’

‘No way. You couldn’t hack it.’

Connor cuffed him on the helmet.

‘Leave some space for me down there, okay?’

Bigs, kneeling by the door, called over to them asking if they were ready.

‘Yessir!’ Ed yelled.

He turned to face Connor and they put their fists to their chests and looked each other in the eye.

‘Hearts of fire!’

They said it together then gave each other a high-five.

‘Go for it, man,’ Connor said.

‘You too.’

‘Okay, fellas,’ Bigs yelled. ‘Hook up!’

Ed hooked his static line to the cable and inserted the locking pin into the clip and asked if he was clear. The assistant spotter confirmed that he was.

‘Okay, we’re going to come around on final now. Get in the door!’

Ed stepped forward and squatted in the door, putting his left foot out onto the step and flexing his right leg and foot behind him. With both hands he took a firm grasp of the sides of the doorway. The rush of the slipstream ripped in around him. He felt its cold blast compressing his face through the lattice of his face guard. He looked down at the toe of his left boot and then looked beyond it to the reeling green blanket of forest below. It was hard not to stare at it but he knew it was wrong to do so and wrenched his eyes away and locked them on the horizon.

Bigs yelled to ask him if he’d seen the streamers and gotten a good look at the jump spot. Ed looked him in the eye and said he had. He felt the plane tilt and watched the forest rotate below him as the plane came around and steadied into its final approach.

‘See that first ravine? Could be a little squirrelly just as you come over there. Watch out for it, okay?’

‘Got you.’

‘Okay, we’re on final!’

Ed was still taking his long, deep breaths. He flexed his knees and the muscles at the back of his neck and he closed his eyes for a moment to center himself and to summon calm and strength and luck. It was crucial to get thrust when the spotter gave you the signal to jump. Unless you made a good, clean, vigorous exit, you could find yourself plunging head-first with your lines tangled around your feet and when your chute opened your whole body would get cracked like a bull-whip and knock every ounce of air from your lungs.

‘Get ready!’

Ed raised himself up on his left leg a little and raised his right knee off the floor to give his foot more spring. The forest seemed to be calling him, tempting him to look down at it, like a siren luring him to the rocks, but he resisted and kept his eyes on the horizon. Then it came. A sharp slap on his left shoulder from Bigs and he launched himself with all his might through the doorway and out into the thin blue air.

‘One-one-thousand . . .’

He didn’t know if he was counting aloud or not for the rush of air seemed to suck the words from his head.

‘Two-one-thousand . . .’

He’d given himself such a thrust from the door that his body had twisted. He was staring up at the roaring white belly of the plane that was swimming away from him like a shark with the sun masked behind it.

‘Three-one-thousand . . .’

And then he saw Connor jump after him and suddenly the sun flared out from the tail and he was blinded and knew nothing but the craving pull of the earth as he plunged at ninety miles per hour toward it.

‘Four-one-thousand . . .’

He braced himself and an instant later he heard a whoosh and a crack and he was jerked like a fish on a line. His body skewed and straightened and he looked up and saw the white and blue and yellow dome of his canopy billowing above him. And there was Connor, higher and to his right, the lines of his chute streaming out and then the chute filling and holding and Connor’s body swinging in a long curve until he was upright and steady and floating. And the plane was gone and its roar was gone and the only sound in the clear vault of air was the whisper and flutter of the two parachutes.