The Smoke Jumper

‘Mitch.’

  As he said it, she recognized him and she tried to look pleased to see him.

  ‘Hey, Mitch! I’m sorry. Your hair’s different. Longer.’

  ‘Yours sure isn’t.’

  ‘Oh. No. So how’ve you been?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘Yeah. It sucks. I’m getting a band together.’

  Somehow it didn’t surprise her. They chatted while Julia went through checkout and she remembered how much she disliked him. Until the band got famous, he was working in a garage where he was supposed to be learning how to be a mechanic. All the people there were apparently either dead-beats or assholes. Julia toyed with the idea of asking him for twenty alternatives to that. He walked with her across the parking lot and stood watching while she loaded the groceries into the back of the Jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  ‘So, did you have to go to jail or anything?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She wondered if she’d heard him right.

  ‘You know, for what happened with Skye and all.’

  ‘Go to jail?’

  ‘Well, you were the one supposed to be in charge.’

  Julia looked away across the parking lot for a moment and took a breath.

  ‘No, Mitch. No one went to jail. I’ll see you around.’

  She started the engine and shut the door. As she drove away she saw he was grinning.

  Sometimes the silence was good.

  Such as now, when he was alone and calm and the morning sun was slanting warmly in on his face through the glass doors and he could just sit there, dead still, at the piano and picture the particles of dust hanging and glinting in the beam.

  Of course, it was never truly silence. The house was always talking to itself, the creaking of wood and pipework as they swelled or shrank, the click of the kitchen clock, the periodic jump-start judder and whir of the refrigerator. Outside, he could hear the drip, drip, drip of snowmelt from the roof and every now and then, out on the road, the whoosh of a passing car or the rumble of a logging truck.

  Then there were those times when the silence wasn’t so good.

  When it seemed to close in on him like a murderer with a pillow come to smother him and he’d have to do something quick before it got to him, sing or yell or scream or clang the keyboard like a mad organist in a horror movie. Oddly, it happened less when he was alone than when there were people around.

  Early on, when he was recovering at Grassland, it had been fairly frequent. He and his parents and Julia, and sometimes his brothers too and their wives, might all be sitting at the dinner table and there would be a lull in the conversation. And in those few brief moments of silence Ed would suddenly feel the panic rising in his chest like a tide of black and he would start jabbering like an idiot, talking utter nonsense or cracking terrible, self-flagellating jokes, comparing himself with Job or Jude the Obscure. Even though they laughed politely, nobody - not even he - thought it remotely funny, but he had to do it just to save himself from drowning.

  He knew it had worried the hell out of his parents and Julia too. They probably all thought he was going crazy, but he couldn’t help it. He’d tried once to explain it to Julia, but the closest analogy he could find was that it was a little like claustrophobia.

  These moments were rare now. In fact, he hadn’t had a serious one since they moved to Montana. He was aware, however, that his constant babble and banter with Julia was a precautionary defense against them. He had always talked too much, but now he sometimes caught himself, heard himself, going into overdrive. Julia always seemed to sense it. And if she were near she would reach out and lay a hand on him or come across the room to him and hold him and say hush, I’m here, it’s okay.

  It wasn’t just to do with staving off those black, life-denying silences. Ed was aware of how ‘wonderfully’ everyone thought he had ‘coped’ with what had happened to him. Of how impressed they were with his ‘bravery’ and constant ‘high spirits.’ Of course, he could have simply collapsed in a heap and sobbed all day long or shot himself. And, heaven knew, there had been many times when he had felt like doing all of those things. But the truth was, he didn’t really see the point. He knew that his greatest enemy wasn’t blindness. After all, he’d discovered at an early age, with his diabetes, that his body could let him down. No. Despite the grim jokes about Job and Jude, he knew that his greatest enemy by far was self-pity.

  Let one ounce of it into your head and wham, before you knew it, your whole system would be taken over. It was like heroin or some shocking virus that multiplied in your veins and left you withered and crippled and wishing you were dead. Or like a malign goblin, squatting in the corner of the room, watching you with cold eyes and waiting. And the only thing you could do to keep him at bay was to act the whole time as if you were happy, as if being blind were merely an inconvenience and - you know what, guys? - what with all these new toys to play with and all these new things to learn, hell, it was actually fun! If you could make him believe that and believe that no matter how long he hung around he hadn’t the slightest chance of climbing into your head, then maybe, just maybe, the little bastard might get bored and go away.

  It was this same creature who, in Ed’s lowest moments, whispered to him that Julia didn’t really love him, that she had married him only out of guilt or out of some warped sense of duty or even - most absurd of all - for the money he might one day inherit. Luckily, however, Ed wasn’t blind enough or dumb enough to take such taunts to heart. He’d lost his sight but not his insight. Nor, miraculously, his self-esteem.

  Whether he would have found the strength to be like this without Julia he wasn’t sure, but it was doubtful. Perhaps some slighter version of himself might have slithered through and scraped together something sad and shadowy that passed for a life. As it was, Julia had taken him by the hand and led him ever toward the light. And though all he could see of it was the faintest amber glow, which was probably only an odd, vestigial memory of sight, he could feel its warmth on his face and the power of its healing. Not only was she his eyes, she was the source of his inspiration, of his courage and of his will to survive. In the seamless dark of his days and his nights there was no end of him and no beginning of her. They were one and the same and indivisible.

  15

  They saw the smoke from a long way off, rising like a tilting black tower from behind the ridge at the head of the valley. The road that was leading them there was narrow and pitted with tank tracks. Sometimes the valley sides would close in on them and the road become winding and steep and shadowed and the river they were following would funnel and drop out of sight and even over the strained engine of the old VW bug they could hear it thundering in falls a hundred feet below. Then the land would flatten and open itself again to the cloudless spring sky and the river would calm and curl away to their right through sunlit meadows of lush new grass with the forest rising beyond, a dozen shades of green.

  They had the windows down and the fraying cloth sunroof rolled right back and the air that gusted in was cool and smelled sweet. Sylvie’s dyed blond hair was blowing crazily over her face, and every so often she would take a hand off the steering wheel and tuck the loose strands back behind her ears, but in a few seconds they escaped again. All the way she had kept asking Connor to light cigarettes for her but only ever smoked them halfway because the last bit, she said, was the bit that killed you. From someone who had risked death on a daily basis for the past twenty years, Connor thought this was interesting. She had several cartons of Marlboros stowed under their camera gear and flak jackets on the backseat so that she could hand them out at roadblocks. Three times in the last hour they had been stopped by hatchet-faced Serb militiamen and she had joked and flirted with them in her husky Parisian voice, then handed out packs of cigarettes and in no time at all they were being waved through.

  Sylvie Guillard was pushing forty and was photographing wars while Connor was still in fourth grade. She was wi
th the famous Magnum agency and her fearlessness was as legendary as her talent. There were stories about her riding into battle on the front of tanks and walking out into the middle of a firefight just to check the light. How many of the stories were true, Connor had no idea. He had been aware of her since he arrived in Bosnia in the fall. She was little and skinny and something of a fantasy figure among the male journalists in Sarajevo, who seemed to find her sexy and terrifying in equal measure. She was known as a loner, which made it all the more surprising that lately she had taken Connor under her wing. He hadn’t so far managed to sell many pictures, but had it not been for Sylvie’s help he wouldn’t have sold any.

  Quite why she should bother remained a mystery. The war photographers he had met in Bosnia were mostly friendly and decent people. But when it came to business they were furtive and fiercely competitive. To share what would otherwise be an exclusive was unheard of, if not downright crass. Yet at three o’clock that morning Sylvie had knocked on his door at the Holiday Inn and told him to get his gear together. She had gotten a call on her satellite phone from one of her many mysterious contacts, telling her that the Red Cobras, one of the most feared Serb paramilitary groups, were moving in on Muslim enclaves in these hills. The informant said she should get out here fast.

  With roadblocks and diversions the trip from Sarajevo had taken nearly five hours and during that time Sylvie had told him about the Cobras. Their leader was a charismatic fascist called Grujo, a meat wholesaler with a penchant for expensive cars and low-tech weaponry. He apparently liked to execute his Muslim enemies with a crossbow and then personally scalp them. The trophies were said to flutter proudly from the aerial of his black armor-plated Range Rover. Connor said the guy sounded like a madman but Sylvie shrugged.

  ‘Such guys are rarely mad. As an explanation, that’s too easy. It is like an excuse for the rest of us.’

  As they neared the end of the valley now, they passed a string of houses that had been burned and deserted but there was no sign among them of either life or death. At the valley’s end the road grew steep, and they started to climb through the shadowed cold of the forest in a slow zigzag of bends, the roar of the engine bouncing off cliffs of wet gray rock and echoing away through the trees.

  They could smell what had happened before they saw it. Even as the road leveled and they emerged from the trees into the sunlight they knew from the sour charnel waft in the air that more had burned here than houses.

  It was - or had been - more a hamlet than a village. Just a cluster of a dozen small dwellings and barns in a shallow bowl of meadow filled with spring flowers that shimmered pink and white and yellow in the sunlight. The smoke they had seen from down in the valley was thinner now and seemed to be coming mostly from the blackened wreck of a tractor lying on its side.

  Sylvie stopped the car a hundred yards short of the first building and switched off the engine and they sat awhile, staring ahead and listening, but all they could hear was the hum of insects among the flowers. A white dog ran across the road on some private mission and it saw them and stopped and gave a single halfhearted bark then disappeared behind a stone wall into a small orchard. There were two dark shapes among the blossom and though they were partly concealed, Connor knew what they were.

  Still without speaking, they reached into the back of the car for their camera bags. The door of the VW creaked as Connor opened it and got out and they walked slowly side by side along the road toward the blackened buildings, taking pictures, their boots scrunching on the gravel.

  There were charred mounds lying in the grass beside the road with flies already busy around them and it took Connor a moment to realize that they were cattle with the remains of torched tires around their necks.

  The first human bodies were a little farther along the road, lying outside what had once been their home. While Sylvie photographed them, Connor walked across the road and into the little orchard.

  There were two of them there, hanging by their wrists from the bough of an apple tree. A mother and her teenage daughter, Connor guessed. The girl was naked and the woman wore only a ripped and bloodstained blouse. Both had been mutilated in ways that, even as he photographed them, Connor wished he hadn’t seen.

  In the past months he had taken pictures of enough corpses to haunt a small gallery and he no longer wanted to be sick when he saw them through the camera’s eye. He still felt both pity and revulsion and hoped that he always would. But as he went about his business, he kept these feelings, if not capped, like a lens, then at least filtered. And what he mostly now felt was a growing sense of wonder that human beings were capable of such casual, even gleeful, atrocity.

  At first, it had bothered him that he could do it. That he could think about the way the light played on a dead man’s skin or glinted in an unseeing eye or on a pool of blood. That he could look upon some child’s father or some mother’s child with the warmth of life still ebbing from them and at the same time scroll through the myriad tiny calculations that would make the image good or bad; the choice of lens, of exposure, of composition. Perhaps some vital part of him was wrongly wired or had been cauterized. But then he concluded, like so many before him, that these were the very distractions that made it possible to document the horror laid before him.

  The sunlight dappling on the blossom around the woman’s head had a terrible beauty to it and Connor took more pictures than perhaps he should have. Sylvie joined him but shot only a few frames and then moved away up the street and he wondered if this was some kind of acknowledgment that the scene belonged to him or a tacit criticism that he was lingering too long.

  They counted fifteen bodies in all, some barely recognizable as such. Five of them had been scalped. There were probably more among the smoldering black tangle of the houses. The last two were sitting side by side, a small boy and an old man, frail and wrinkled, with a wispy gray beard. Their backs were leaning against the outside wall of a whitewashed barn and from a distance it looked as if they might have sat down there to have a chat. Above their heads, in splashed red paint, someone had written BALIJE, an insulting term for Muslims, and a coiled cobra, its head reared and ready to strike.

  They were photographing this when they heard the trucks.

  ‘Give me your film,’ Sylvie said.

  She was unscrewing the cap to the center stem of the telescopic aluminum tripod that she always carried.

  ‘Quick, come on. All of it.’

  He handed her the rolls he’d shot, even the one still in his camera, and she slid them roll by roll along with her own inside the hollow tubing. She capped it again and then quickly fished half a dozen rolls from her bag and handed them to him. They were tail in, as if exposed.

  ‘Put them in your bag.’

  They could see the trucks now, coming toward them across the meadows. They loaded more film into their cameras and started taking pictures of them. There were two Jeeps, an armored car and a big open-backed farm truck. There were twenty, maybe thirty men, bristling with AK-47s and RPGs and shorter, stubby automatic rifles of a kind Connor hadn’t seen before. When the soldiers saw the cameras they began to shout and point.

  The convoy pulled up about twenty yards away from where they stood and the men scrambled out. Most of them were dressed in black fatigues or leather jackets. Some wore forage caps and helmets with the Red Cobra insignia painted on them, others had red bandannas and all had bandoliers of shells slung across them and pistols and knives and grenades at their belts. At least half a dozen were heading toward them.

  ‘Remember,’ Sylvie said quietly. ‘They’re our friends in Jesus.’

  Connor felt his heart quicken and it worried him a little as it had before that it wasn’t fear he felt but something closer to excitement.

  From the way he looked and the way he walked it was clear which one of them was in charge. He was a man of about Connor’s age, thickly muscled and taller than the others. His hair was cropped close and he wore aviator shades and a tight black
T-shirt with NIRVANA emblazoned on it in silver lettering. Whether this was a spiritual state to which he aspired or simply his favorite band, there was no telling. He had a Scorpion machine-pistol holstered on one hip and a long hunting knife on the other. As he came up to them Sylvie greeted him warmly in Serbo-Croat. He stopped close in front of them, looking down at her with contempt and when he spoke it was in English.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

  She answered in Serbo-Croat, getting out her cigarettes and offering him one as she spoke but he declined with a curt shake of his head. He asked her who had given them permission to be here and again he spoke in English, to show, perhaps, that he wasn’t going to be charmed. He had a deep voice and a mobsterlike American accent, as if he’d watched too many Mafia movies. Sylvie stuck to her Serbo-Croat and though she spoke too fast for Connor to understand much, he heard her mention the name Grujo a couple of times, dropping it casually, as if they were friends. The man didn’t seem either impressed or unimpressed.

  ‘Give me your papers.’

  They handed him their passports and Connor got out his UN press card, the only other official-looking document he possessed and about as useful as a ticket to a canceled ball game.

  ‘Good band,’ Connor said as he handed it over.

  The man looked at him sharply. ‘What?’

  Connor nodded at his T-shirt. The man stared at him for a moment but said nothing. Beyond him Connor could see other soldiers loading bodies into the back of the truck.

  ‘You’re American?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What newspaper?’

  Connor knew he should probably pretend to be some bigshot Magnum photographer like Sylvie but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He shrugged.

  ‘Any that’s interested. Mostly none.’

  Sylvie started to say something, but the man cut her off, nodding toward the bodies of the old man and the boy.

  ‘The American people, they are interested in this balije shit?’