The Smoke Jumper (2 page)

The air hung hot and humid and she could feel the tears running on her cheeks and it made her almost choke with anger that she should be so weak as to let that bastard make her cry. A freight train was going by and she ran alongside, watching the lights beyond it strobe between the wagons. There were lights on her side of the rails too, strung on a wire above her, each with its own frenzied aura of insects. The train seemed many miles long and from afar, already out of town, she heard the mournful wail of the engine like a verdict on the sorry place through which it had passed. Had it been traveling more slowly she would have climbed on board and let it bear her wherever in the world it was headed.

She ran and ran like she always ran. And it didn’t matter where because wherever it was couldn’t be worse than where she was and where she had been. She’d run away first when she was five and done it many times since. And it always got her into trouble but, what the hell, what kind of trouble was there that she hadn’t seen already?

She ran now until her smoke-seared lungs could take no more, and as she stopped, the train’s last wagon went by and she stood slumped with her hands on her knees, gasping and watching its taillights grow smaller and smaller until the night swallowed them as if they never had been. Somewhere way off in the darkness a dog was barking and a man yelled for it to cease but it paid no heed.

‘Never mind. You can catch the next one.’

The voice startled her. It was male and close at hand. Skye scanned the darkness around her. She was in what appeared to be an abandoned lumberyard. She couldn’t see him.

‘Over here.’

He was sitting on the ground, leaning against a stack of rotting fence posts overgrown with weeds and he looked as if he might almost have melted out of it for his hair was long and tangled and so was his beard. He was a white boy, older than Skye. Eighteen or nineteen maybe and very thin. He was wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a roaring Chinese dragon. A dust-covered duffel bag lay on the ground beside him. He was rolling a joint.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I’m not. What the fuck is it to you anyhow?’

He shrugged. For a while neither of them spoke. Skye turned away as if she had other things to do or think about. She wiped the wet off her cheeks, trying not to let him see. She knew she should probably walk away. All kinds of freaks and psychos hung out down here by the railroad. But something within her, some hapless craving for comfort or company, made her stay. She looked at him again. He licked the cigarette paper and sealed the joint, then lit it and took a long draw. He held it out to her.

‘Here.’

‘I don’t do drugs.’

‘Sure.’

 

The car they stole belonged to somebody with small kids. There were little seats fitted in the back and the floor was littered with toys and picture books and candy wrappers. The boy knew what he was doing, for it took him only a couple of minutes to pop the door lock and get the engine going. They stopped after a few miles so he could switch the plates with another car.

He said his name was Sean and she told him hers and that was all they knew about each other except for some common hurt or longing that didn’t need uttering. Nothing else seemed to matter, not where they were going nor why.

They drove north until they hit the interstate then headed west with a river to one side and the dawn rearing in a widening red scar over the endless plains behind them. Neither of them spoke for a long time and Skye sat turned in her seat looking back and waiting for the sun to show itself and when finally it did it set the land aflame with crimson and purple and gold and flung long shadows from the cottonwoods and rocks and from the black cattle that grazed beside the river and Skye thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her whole life.

On the floor she found a picture book that she remembered from elementary school. It was about a little boy called Bernard whose parents always ignore him. One day a monster appears in the backyard and Bernard runs inside to tell them but still they just ignore him. The monster eats him and goes into the house and roars at the parents but they think it’s Bernard fooling around and ignore him. And because they’re not scared, the monster loses all his confidence. Skye turned to the last page which always used to make her feel sad. The poor old monster has been sent to bed and is sitting all alone and forlorn in the dark, feeling a total failure.

They pulled off the interstate to get gas. There was a diner there that was just opening and they bought coffee and muffins and settled themselves to eat at a table by the window while an old woman mopped the floor around them. While they ate he asked her how old she was and she lied and told him she was seventeen. She said she’d been born in South Dakota and was half Oglala Sioux, on her mother’s side, and he said that was cool but she told him that she didn’t think it was and anyhow she didn’t know anything about that people or their history except that it was full of pain and misery and she already had enough of both to be getting along with, thanks very much.

He told her he came from Detroit and that his parents and his older brother were all in jail though he didn’t say for what and Skye didn’t ask. When he was fourteen he had taken off and for the last three years had been traveling all over. He said he had been down to Mexico and Nicaragua and Salvador and said he’d seen things he never could have imagined or believed.

‘Like what?’

‘Magic. Shamans. People walking through fire and not even being marked by it. People dying on account of being cursed. I saw a dead woman brought back to life.’

Skye asked him about it but he didn’t want to tell her. She asked why he had come to Montana and he said it was because he wanted to meet a grizzly bear in the wild. He said he had learned in Mexico that it was his spirit animal and that he had been a bear in another life. She laughed because this skinny kid was about as unlike a bear as a person could get. A stick insect maybe or a giraffe or something, but a grizzly bear? No way. He looked hurt and went all quiet on her and so she apologized and, finding it hard to keep a straight face, asked him how he planned to go about finding a grizzly. He conceded that it wasn’t going to be easy but figured they should head for Glacier Park, which he’d been told was a good place to start looking.

Skye nodded, trying to look serious.

‘Right,’ she said.

‘You got a better idea?’

She could think of about a hundred.

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a shit.’

They drove the rest of the day while the sun swung over them, heading like them for the snow-capped mountains that loomed ever larger before them. In the afternoon it got so hot they pulled off the interstate and meandered along narrow roads through a forest humming with insects. They found a creek with a swirling pool and swam naked and unashamed in the cold clear water then lay in a meadow full of wildflowers and dried themselves in the sun while butterflies danced around them. He said she looked pretty and she thought he might want to touch her and half wanted him to but he only stared at the sky and smoked another joint and seemed hardly to know she was there.

By the time they got back on the interstate the western sky was filling with great gray thunderheads among which the sun crazed fitfully, pale and cold and metallic, while lightning flickered from their roiled bellies to the mountain mass below.

She saw the police car before he did. Something made her look back and as she did so the cop turned on his flashing red and blue lights. Sean looked in the rearview mirror and said nothing. He didn’t look scared or even worried, just stoned. He slowed and pulled onto the shoulder and the police car behind did the same. The cop sat there awhile, no doubt checking them out on his radio.

‘What do we say?’

Sean shrugged.

The cop got out of his car and walked slowly toward them. Sean lowered the window, watching him in the side mirror all the way. As he came alongside, the cop bent so that he could get a look at Skye. He was young, in his mid-twenties maybe, with a neatly trimmed ginger mustache and blue eyes that were wide-set and friendly. He touched his hat and Skye gave him her best smile.

‘Howdy. Where you folks headed?’

‘Glacier,’ Sean said, not looking at him.

‘Great. On vacation?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This your vehicle?’

‘Belongs to a friend.’

‘Uh-huh. Okay. Well, I’d like to see your driver’s license, registration and insurance, please.’

Sean turned to reach for his bag. Skye suddenly had a bad feeling that he had a gun in there and that he was going to do something dumb and dreadful. But he seemed to change his mind and turned back to the cop.

‘I forgot. All that stuff got stolen.’

Something shifted and hardened in the cop’s eyes.

‘Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle please, sir?’

He straightened up and reached for the door handle and in the same moment Sean gunned the engine. The cop yanked the door open and tried to grab Sean’s shoulder but the car was already moving and he lost his balance and fell and in the fall his arm went down behind Sean’s seat and twisted and got trapped. He cried out.

‘Stop!’ Skye shouted. ‘Stop!’

There was a loud crack and Skye knew from the man’s scream that it was the sound of his arm breaking. But Sean either didn’t hear or care. He just hit the gas pedal harder so that the tires squealed and smoked and the car snaked its way back onto the highway dragging the cop beside it yelling and shrieking. Skye screamed.

‘Are you crazy? Stop the car! For godsake, stop!’

But he didn’t. She reached over to try to knock the shift out of drive but he shoved her violently back across the car and her head cracked against the passenger’s side window. With his left hand, he was trying to unhitch the cop’s arm from behind his seat but it wouldn’t come free. The door kept swinging open and slamming shut again on the poor man’s arm and when it opened Skye could see his face above the sill. There was a bloody gash all down one side of it and his eyes were glazed with fear.

The car was swerving across the lanes of the highway and Skye became aware of the blast of horns from other vehicles. They were passing a pickup truck and there was a big brown dog standing in the back and the driver was hooting and yelling at them and the dog was barking, trying to keep his balance as the truck lurched away to avoid them.

‘You idiot!’ Skye shouted.

‘Shut up!’

Suddenly there was the tearing sound and then a loud thud and Skye looked back to see the cop’s body bounce and twist and tumble across the road behind them.

‘You stupid fucking idiot! What are you
doing
?’

The cop’s severed arm was still jammed behind the boy’s seat and he wrenched it free and threw it clear and slammed the door. Skye screamed and started to hit him and he struck her hard in the mouth. She felt a tooth break and blood start to flow and that made her want to hit him all the more and with all her strength and anger she lashed at him and tore at his face and hair until finally he punched her so hard she felt something give in her head as if she were being swallowed from inside and she slumped in her seat watching the world twirl away from her in a red benumbing mist.

2

T
he day that Edward Tully met the love of his life began badly. Snow had been falling all week and he had been looking forward to some good weekend skiing. But in the early hours of Friday morning the snow turned to rain and by daybreak (if one could so call such a minimal transition) Boston was knee-deep in gray sludge. As if to make doubly sure, it was raining indoors too. Around midmorning the heating and water for the whole apartment building went off. When Ed went to investigate he found the elevators were out of action, water cascading down the stairwell and the lobby full of wet-legged people yelling at each other.

The building was being remodeled and for the past two months the construction crew had proved daily more adept at upsetting the residents. This morning, it emerged, a carpenter had severed a power cable and a water pipe in one surgical flourish of his power drill. Mr Solomon, the lugubrious old widower who had the apartment next to Ed’s, said an ambulance had just taken the guy away. How badly injured, Mr Solomon didn’t know, but he trusted it was nothing trivial.

Ed had been working most of the night on the second act of his new musical, the one (he allowed himself no doubt on this matter) that was going to make him famous. It was going well though he was increasingly aware of how the construction work was infusing both music and lyrics with a darker, more menacing tone than he had intended. When he squelched in his soaked shoes back into his apartment he found there had been a more literal infusion. The ceiling had sprung a leak directly above the piano. The piano itself, an old upright of uncertain parentage that needed tuning so often it wasn’t worth the effort, seemed undamaged. But the stack of music sheets that lay upon it, Ed’s entire night’s work, was sodden. There was another leak in the closet where he kept his climbing and skiing and fly-fishing gear and he had to clear out the entire contents and pile it on his bed. He sat down in a huff on the couch, right on top of his trendy new Calvin Klein spectacles that he’d gotten only last week and cost a fortune. They were totaled. There was plainly some sort of cosmic conspiracy going on.

Then the mail arrived, returning to him, with thanks, not one but two rejected scripts and demo tapes of his last musical, the one that clearly wasn’t going to make him famous. One of the accompanying letters, from a big Broadway producer, penned, no doubt, by a minion, damned him with faint praise then said the work ‘owed perhaps a tad too much to Sondheim,’ which sent Ed into a whirlpool of brooding self-criticism for several hours.

Now it was late afternoon and he was sitting at another piano, much grander and sleeker and more tuneful than his own, listening while his least favorite pupil slaughtered an innocuous and none too taxing piece of Chopin. The kid, a deeply unprepossessing ten-year-old who went by the name of Dexter Rothwell Jr was dressed entirely in black except for his sneakers which were silver and gold and probably cost enough to feed an average family for several weeks.