The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  ‘As I recall, you’re the capsize king.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to go. You have fun, you hear? And take good care of my girl, okay?’

  Connor promised he would.

  They were on the river within half an hour. He gave Julia the choice of which canoe they would take and she chose the red one. They put the green one back on the truck along with some of the gear they now wouldn’t need. The woman at the Mercantile said she would keep an eye on it until they came back on the bus on Sunday night. They bought a bag of cherries and the last of her cookies and thanked her and headed for the river.

  They were almost there when they heard the woman calling after them. Connor went back. She was holding something out to him.

  ‘Your girlfriend left her sunglasses.’

  Connor nearly corrected her but didn’t. He took them and thanked her again.

  They put on their life vests and took off their shoes and stowed the two black duffel bags between the two seats. Then Julia climbed in and took the forward seat and when she was settled Connor pointed the canoe out into the stream and pushed off and stepped aboard. And they slipped slowly out into the body of the river and let the current take them.

  The water was clear and cool and swifter than it had looked from the bank. Dark fronds of weed undulated like mermaid’s hair and darker shapes of fish darted and skewed away in panic as the canoe and its shadow upon the riverbed slid by. The sun had lost its brazen heat and as it angled lower it lit the back edges of the grass and flowers along the western bank and turned to gold the clouds of newly hatched flies that pirouetted above the moving glass of the water. Along the bank cattle lifted their heads from their drinking to watch them pass, the water falling in sunlit drops from their glistening pink noses.

  They had talked for many hours and it was good now to be silent and to listen to the swoosh of the paddles and the sounds of the wilderness around them. Julia paddled in smooth, strong strokes and he could tell she was no novice. She had tied up her hair again with the bandanna, and no matter where Connor looked his eyes kept coming back to the nape of her neck and the little brown smudge of a birthmark that showed above the sunbleached red of her life vest.

  They left the lushness of the valley pastureland and the river narrowed and ran faster and the banks grew steeper until soon they were passing through a winding canyon of stone crested with serried ranks of Douglas and alpine fir and the fading blue of the sky above. Only when the river twisted west did they see the sun and when they did, the water before them was turned to molten gold.

  They watched an osprey hanging high in the gorge and saw it tuck its wings and fall like a rock to the river and scoop a fish writhing fat and silver in its talons then fly away downstream. Once, rounding a bend, they came across a family of river otters tumbling in the shallows and when the cubs saw them they splashed for safety to their mother who didn’t move, just lifted her chin and showed the paler fur of her neck and watched the canoe go by. Julia turned around and smiled at him and Connor smiled back and neither of them spoke.

  They came to a place where the river spread and ran in a long curve of breaks and pools. There was a bench of rock that ran along the southern bank some ten or twelve feet above the water and Connor recognized it as a place he and Ed had camped before. They dragged the canoe from the water and hauled the bags up to the bench and while Julia gathered wood and made a fire Connor took his fishing rod and a couple of flies and waded into the shallows.

  There were flies skitting over the water and fish rising all around him and on only his second cast he hooked one and Julia, watching from above, let out a whoop and he looked up at her and grinned and the fish jumped and shook its head and he almost lost it. It was a fine west-slope trout of around two pounds and they cooked it on a spit of wood over the fire and its flesh was as pink as the gathering night sky and tasted pure as the river itself.

  They ate the rest of the cookies and some cherries and Julia challenged him to a pit-spitting contest, claiming she was the world champion pit-spitter. She bet him a dollar that he couldn’t hit a particular rock down by the river in three goes and he took her on and missed every time. Then she bet him another dollar that she could hit it three out of three and she did. So Connor took her on again, with a different target this time, and twice more she beat him. By now he was laughing so much that he couldn’t arrange his mouth to spit properly but even so he challenged her again, double-or-quits, to a long distance pit-spit which he was sure he’d win. But even though she was laughing as much as he was, she beat him again and at eight dollars down Connor called it a day.

  After that they sat by the fire, not saying much, just watching the light fade on the river and the sky go from pink to blue to star-washed black. Connor had worried over how they would sleep and had brought both tents and he offered now to put one up for her. But Julia said to hell with tents, if anyone was used to sleeping in the open she was and on a night like this, in a place like this, that was the only way to go. So they spread their sleeping bags by the fire and Connor bearbagged the food and went off to hang it in the trees so she wouldn’t be embarrassed if she needed to undress.

  The fire burned low and they lay looking at the stars and Julia asked him if he knew their names and was surprised that he knew almost all of them. He told her about his father and his star stories.

  ‘Sounds like your dad would have made a great teacher.’

  ‘He would have. I imagine you’re pretty good too.’

  ‘No. I get too involved. Like I have with Skye.’

  ‘That can’t be a bad thing.’

  ‘Yes it is. It can be.’

  ‘Way I see it, she wouldn’t have turned around if you hadn’t cared so.’

  ‘Caring is different. Oh, I don’t know.’

  There were two falling stars in quick succession and Julia said they must both make secret wishes and Connor didn’t make the one he truly wanted but instead simply wished that the three of them would all be happy, whatever might befall them. They were silent awhile. Then Julia spoke again.

  ‘That book of yours, about the war photographer?’

  ‘Larry Burrows.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Is that the kind of work you want to do?’

  He wondered how she knew what he had scarcely admitted to himself.

  ‘Maybe part of me does, yeah.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Connor?’

  Something earnest in her tone made him turn to look at her and in the dying glow of the fire he saw her dark eyes were fixed on him.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t. Please don’t.’

  10

  The fire on Snake Mountain which was to change so many lives so utterly started with a single shaft of lightning. It struck on a still and moonless night, high on a ridge of pale rock and paler grass, where a dead lodgepole pine, long stripped of bark and bleached by several summers, tilted like a bowsprit over fathoms of forest. In the fractured moment of the flash the tree stood frozen in a negative of neon bone against the black of the night. A trail of tiny tongues of flame licked and flickered along its stem and the ground around it shook and small rocks broke from the earth and rolled and clattered down into the forest.

  There were witnesses no doubt to this sudden splintering of air and wood, but none that was human. Perhaps, below among the trees, the elk jerked sideways from their feeding or an owl swerved in its flight and missed its prey or a passing wolf froze in the shadowed huckleberry and angled a yellow, unreflecting eye at the sky. But the rocks soon came to rest and silence settled once more. And the only hint of what had taken place and what was yet to come was the curl of smoke that issued but briefly from the charred cleft of the pine.

  The sun rose on a world that seemed unchanged. It climbed vast and red from behind the mountain and as the light crept across the land a pair of ravens flew in from the north and settled like spectators on the old lodgepole.

  The mountain earned its name n
ot for its rattlesnakes, of which there were indeed many, but for the zigzag pattern of ridges and gullies seismically etched upon its western flank a hundred million years before. Its higher and lower slopes were thick with lodgepole and Douglas fir and its middle was girthed with runs of sliprock and wide patches of sunbaked grass bestrewn with boulders. The ridges ran down and across the mountainside in spines of pale limestone and the gullies between them were tangled with scrub like the wire-filled trenches of some long-abandoned war. As they made their descent, both ridges and gullies converged into a single steep-sided scoop of a valley which funneled, some four thousand feet below, into the north fork of the Hope River.

  This was what the ravens sat surveying, and when the sun had revealed every part of it and the show was over, they opened their wings and in a few languid flaps crested the ridge, their raucous calls carrying far in the still of the morning. They banked right and flew south and then east again over another ridge and then down and around into a long winding canyon.

  Skye heard their croaking and looked up and watched them pass overhead and go swerving away along the canyon.

  ‘That’s what I’m going to come back as.’

  Julia was standing beside her, watching them too.

  ‘As a raven?’

  ‘Yeah. Wouldn’t it be cool to fly like that? Next time around, that’s me.’

  Julia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what I was last time. The flying’s good but the food’s terrible. All that rotten meat. Yuck.’

  Skye laughed and looked at her. ‘You’re funny.’

  ‘Well, thanks, pal.’

  ‘No, funny’s good.’

  The weather had reverted to the remorseless dry heat of the early summer, and Julia had changed their routine to allow for it. The group rose early now and hiked while there was still a trace of cool in the air. By eleven when it was too hot to go on they would find a sheltered spot and stay there until around four when the heat began to subside a little. They spent the time productively, reading and writing in their journals or doing construction or art projects that involved the whole group. Yesterday they had painted each other’s faces.

  It had been Skye’s idea and had anyone made the same suggestion a couple of weeks ago, she would have sneered and dismissed it as kindergarten bullshit. Which had been more or less Mitch’s reaction yesterday. Instead of getting into a fight, Skye patiently sold the idea.

  ‘I don’t mean paint your face like a chipmunk or some nerdy clown or something,’ she said. ‘You have to paint it in two halves, one side what you used to be and the other what you are now or what you want to be.’

  Lester said he didn’t get it and so Skye went through it again more slowly and simply until the penny dropped and he grinned and said cool, let’s do it. They had only one mirror, so they did it in pairs, telling each other what they wanted. Skye had Byron paint the left side of her face dark blue with tears of blood dripping from one eye and the corners of her eye and mouth turned down. The right side was yellow with stars of red and orange and green on her forehead and cheeks and the other corner of her mouth lifted in a great beaming smile. Only when they were all finished did they get to look in the mirror. Skye told Byron he’d done a good job.

  Today they had settled in the shade of some old cottonwoods that grew along the banks of a dried-out creek and they ate a late breakfast, then wrote in their journals for half an hour. The creek bed was lined with rocks of strange shapes and colors and the banks were littered with dead wood and Julia suggested they use both the rocks and the wood and anything else they could find to make a sculpture. They sat for another half hour discussing what it would be and nobody seemed able to come up with an acceptable idea.

  Skye had read John Standing Bird’s book three times over and her head was full of Black Elk’s accounts of her people, so she said why didn’t they make a statue of Crazy Horse? She told them a little about him and they all seemed to think it was a good idea and off they went to work, scouring the creek and its banks for materials.

  They found a limb of a fallen tree that was shaped like a horse’s body and head and propped it on four stacks of flat rocks for its legs. Julia got out her box of paints and they painted their palms and made prints on the horse’s flanks and on its neck. They found another limb, forked this time, for the warrior’s legs and body and lashed a branch across it to make his arms. While some worked on the construction, others went off to forage for more exotic things to decorate it with.

  Skye wandered along the creek in search of something to make a war bonnet. They weren’t supposed to go out of sight of the staff but as she got to a bend in the creek she spotted something just beyond it, up among the rocks and without thinking made her way toward it. It was the bloody remains of a bird, some kind of grouse, she thought, which must have been killed in the night for the blood was fresh. She plucked its wing and tail feathers and picked some long stems of dried grass and sat on a rock, braiding them to make a band for the feathers.

  ‘Hey, look what you found. Cool.’

  She looked up and saw Mitch grinning down at her.

  ‘Yeah, I just . . . found them.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  She thought of saying no because she couldn’t stand the guy, but since the quest she had resolved to be friendly to everyone. As it turned out, it didn’t make any odds because he just sat down beside her anyway. He picked up some of the grass and made a futile attempt at braiding it.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  She put down her own grass and took his and got the braid started.

  ‘You gotta keep it tight, otherwise the feathers will just fall out.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Here.’

  She handed it back to him and because she didn’t want to lose the tension in the braid, she kept her fingers on it while he took hold of it. As he did so their hands touched and so did the insides of their forearms. Skye’s instinct was to release the braid, but he said not to and that it was slipping open, so she kept her hand there and their flesh continued to touch.

  ‘Your skin feels real good,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  She snatched her hand away. The braid uncoiled in his hands and he stared at it for a short while then slowly looked up at her and smiled and shrugged.

  ‘It does,’ he said. ‘It feels beautiful.’

  Looking her in the eye, he reached up and ran the backs of his fingers down the bare skin of her upper arm. Skye froze. And he seemed to take this as some kind of consent because then he reached up and stroked her cheek. And still she stayed frozen. She could feel her heart pounding. He was looking at her in the same slow-eyed way her stepfather did when he came home late reeking of drink.

  ‘Come on, it’s okay,’ he coaxed, glancing over her shoulder. ‘No one will know, we can go up there behind the rocks.’

  Skye knew they were out of sight of the others. She could hear their laughter and it seemed a long way off. Mitch lowered his hand and touched her breast and something exploded inside her and she swung at him with the back of her hand and hit him hard in the face.

  ‘Jesus!’

  He staggered to his feet, clutching his nose.

  ‘You little bitch!’

  ‘If you ever lay a finger on me again, I’ll kill you.’

  She too was on her feet now and she grabbed the feathers and turned and headed back along the creek. She thought he might come after her and she wanted to run but something told her not to, so she just walked as fast as she could and didn’t once look back.

  ‘You little whore-bitch! I wouldn’t touch your squaw pussy with a ten-foot pole.’

  ‘Lucky you’ve only got a little teeny-weeny one then.’

  It was more than two weeks since the canoe trip and Julia had spent much of that time replaying it in her head and wondering how she could have allowed it so to unsettle her. She had lain awake at night, worrying while everyone around her slept and Lester babbled on in hi
s dreams. She had scrutinized her feelings, trying to apply the dispassionate logic of her years of studying psychology. And when that failed, she tried anger instead and chastised herself as a fickle, shameful creature for allowing such thoughts into her head about her lover’s best friend. But that didn’t work either.

  Not that Connor had done or said anything deliberate to prompt all this. He had behaved impeccably. She had already been aware of his sense of honor and loyalty to his friend and she could imagine how shocked he would be to know that she harbored such feelings for him. But the truth was that ever since she had first laid eyes on him, that evening at the airport, something inside her had turned.

  His mere presence seemed to affect how she behaved and what she said, as if everything were somehow for his benefit. No man had ever had this effect on her before. It was the way her mother was about men, always smitten and wobbly at the knees over some new lover, who inevitably turned out to be as big a scoundrel as the last. Julia had always loftily regarded this as a weakness whose genetic code she was grateful not to have inherited. But now she wasn’t so sure.

  She repeated to herself, again and again like a mantra, that it was Ed she loved - and she did, she really did. But on the river that weekend she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off Connor. She could remember everything he had said, every little thing he had done. There was a kind of quiet centered-ness about him that moved her. She’d watched him fishing that evening, with the golden light shimmering on the water around him, and thought how graceful and beautiful he looked. Worse still, lying next to him by the fire, with their bodies only a few inches apart, she had kept imagining what it would be like to kiss him and to have his hands on her and she’d felt a physical longing for him that shocked her and shamed her.

  Ed had flown back to Missoula on Sunday and was there in the apartment to greet them when they arrived back from Idaho. He had supper waiting for them and gave them both such a warm welcome and it was wonderful to see him again, wonderful. And when they made love that night, she told him again and again how much she’d missed him and how much she loved him and realized that it wasn’t Ed she was trying to convince but herself. And, try as she might, she couldn’t block Connor out of her head and kept picturing him lying there in the next room.