The Smoke Jumper

  ‘Pictures!’ Ed said. ‘We gotta take pictures!’

  He made a joke about how honored they were to have such a bigshot photographer on hand and Connor played the role and lined them up, bossing them around like a prima donna and making pretentious observations about the light. Then, just as last time, Julia took some pictures with her camera, then propped it on some rocks and set the timer and ran to get into the picture. She stood next to Ed so that he was in the middle but Ed said that was wrong, she had to be in the middle and they changed places just in time before the camera flashed.

  ‘Now I have to take one of you two,’ Ed said.

  Connor handed him the Leica and helped him position himself. Julia watched him walking back toward her and there was some messsge in her smile that he wished he could decipher but couldn’t. As he came near she reached out and put her arm around his waist, drew him close and he put his around her shoulders and she looked up at him with that same look in her eyes.

  ‘Am I pointing the right way?’ Ed called.

  ‘Down a little,’ Connor said. ‘And a little to your right.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Man, you’re going to be mad when my picture’s better than yours. Okay, big smiles now ...’

  Just as before, they sat in the sun and ate their picnic and afterward Ed made Julia describe the view to him in all its detail, the precise colors of the fall, which mountains had snow on them and which didn’t, the exact location of the sun and the angle of the shadows. And when she had finished he sat in silence, picturing it all in his mind’s eye and Connor watched him and wondered how true the picture was. And then he looked away and stared out across the land and thought of the last time that the three of them had sat here and how full of hope the world had been.

  ‘Connor?’ Ed said.

  Connor turned and saw they were both staring at him. Ed had his arm around Julia’s shoulders.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Julia and I have something to ask you.’

  He could see in their faces that it was something that mattered and he told him to go ahead. Ed swallowed. He was all darty-eyed and nervous and started talking in a rambling way so unlike him that Connor started to feel anxious himself. Ed said how fond he and Julia were of him, how he was - hell, he knew he was - their best friend. More than that, how he’d been best man at the wedding and all, and how much, well, how much they’d all shared.

  And the more he rambled, the more Connor grew confused, wondering what on earth could be coming. He looked at Julia and she seemed as nervous as Ed. She couldn’t even look him in the eye.

  And now Ed was going on about how they’d been trying to have kids and how they’d just discovered that this wasn’t going to be possible and how they’d been talking about adoption - which was probably, in the end, what they were going to do - except . . . Except there was this other possibility they’d discussed, well, not really a possibility, really just a kind of crazy idea . . .

  And Connor suddenly got it. A full twenty seconds before Ed actually found the words. And while he waited for him to utter them it was like hearing a train coming toward him through a tunnel, the rush of air getting louder and louder in his head.

  ‘And we just wondered if you . . . I mean, we feel kind of embarrassed asking, more than embarrassed. I mean, if you think it’s a terrible idea, all you have to do is say no. Because we treasure your friendship more than anything. You know that. But we wondered if you would be . . . I mean, if you would consider being, the father - the biological father - of our child.’

  The train hit him and for several long moments Ed’s words floated like slow-motion debris in the air between them. From somewhere far below them in the forest came a strange sound which he then dimly recognized as the bugling call of an elk.

  Connor took a deep breath. ‘Well. I don’t—’

  ‘Really, man. It’s okay, honestly. It’s a hell of a thing to ask and the chances are you won’t want to. And that’s absolutely okay by us. Isn’t that right, honey?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Ed kissed her cheek and she gave an embarrassed smile. Connor had been staring at her. She was still avoiding his eyes. At last she seemed to find the courage to look at him and the connection set something reeling inside him.

  ‘I mean, listen, man,’ Ed went on. ‘It was just an idea, you know?’

  ‘Ed,’ Connor said. ‘Will you just stop talking a moment?’

  When he started to speak, Connor had no clear idea of what he was going to say. He was too stunned to think straight. He found himself saying that Ed sure knew how to shock the hell out of a man and they all laughed in a kind of nervous release. Then he told them he was moved and honored that they should ask this of him and that they were the two people in all the world that he cared for most, all of which was true. But bringing a child into the world, he said, was no small matter and he asked if he could take a while to think about it. They said in unison that he should take as long as he liked.

  Coming down the mountain took almost as long as going up. They had to concentrate hard on the rappels, guiding Ed precisely so that he didn’t injure himself. Connor was grateful that there was no time for small talk, which would have seemed phony after what had been said at the summit. Even on the hike back to the Jeep, they hardly spoke. On the journey back to the house, with the night closing in, Ed did his best to lift the atmosphere but, for the first time Connor could recall, things between the three of them seemed a little forced. He wished he could give them an answer right away but there were too many things racing around in his mind and in his heart and he just couldn’t.

  They asked him to stay over but he made a lame excuse about having to get back to his mother’s. He put his gear in the back of the Chevy and the three of them stood there awhile, looking at the sky, their breath making clouds on the chill air.

  ‘Looks like it’s going to freeze,’ he said.

  Julia kissed him goodbye and went into the house and he knew she was doing it so that he and Ed could be alone for a moment. He got into the truck and rolled down the window. Ed put his hands on the sill.

  ‘Listen,’ Ed said. ‘I just want to say again. Whatever you decide is fine. I really mean that. It’s a hell of a thing to lay on you like that.’

  ‘Tell me one thing. Is Julia as sure about this as you are?’

  ‘Completely.’

  Connor didn’t say anything for a moment. Ed reached into the car and put his hand on Connor’s shoulder.

  ‘Take your time, you hear?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  He started the engine and turned the truck around and called goodbye. As he drove away he looked in the mirror and saw Ed through the billowing smoke of the exhaust, standing there and waving, the light on the wall behind him flaring like a halo.

  18

  The first time he’d seen it, he thought it was smoke, but by now he could normally tell the difference. You would see it swirling in a black cloud above the canopy of palm and eucalyptus. And then you would get a little closer and start to hear the cries and that was when you realized that the cloud was a living thing consisting entirely of birds. Vultures and kites and crows mostly, though there were others circling and shrieking around them that Connor couldn’t name, smaller, more timid ones, who no doubt knew their place in the pecking order. But by the time you were that close, you had no need of sight or sound, for the smell alone told you where the bodies were.

  It had been like that this morning. He and the other journalists had followed the soldiers along the strip of rutted red earth that wound toward the village through plantations of banana and avocado. It was early and mist lay laced on the hillside terraces that rose steeply on either side of them. Every so often the officer in the leading vehicle would raise a hand for the convoy to stop while a party went ahead to remove a land mine and Connor and the others would wait in their Land Rovers in the gathering heat and listen to the radio spewing forth its v
itriol, urging on the Hutu killers to leave no grave half full, let not a single Tutsi cockroach stay alive.

  They left the vehicles at the edge of the village and continued on foot. There was a small boy standing alone in the middle of the street wearing only a T-shirt spotted with blood and he stayed still as a statue, watching them walk toward him. The officer squatted beside him and asked him some questions but the child seemed to have been struck dumb and he turned and walked away up the street and they followed. And all the while the smell grew stronger.

  They walked slowly between houses wrecked and pock-marked and empty of all but ghosts and past the scattered remnants of loot outside, a crumpled bicycle, a woman’s shoe, a yellow toy trumpet, toward the church with its whitewashed tower and its living black tower of birds above. And the soldiers and Connor and the other journalists, all except the boy, covered their mouths and noses with bandannas or whatever else they had.

  In the grass and dust yard of the church stood a white cement figure of Jesus with his arms spread in welcome and the boy stopped beside it and would go no farther and Connor photographed him and then photographed the dogs and vultures that came hurtling from the open doors of the church and photographed the soldiers chasing them and yelling and shooting at them but mostly missing.

  Inside the church the air was hot and putrid and humming with flies and Connor tried not to let too much of it into his lungs or too much of what he saw into his head while he photographed the bodies. They were heaped among the pews and up the aisle and along the walls which were painted with blood and fractured by gunfire. There were more women than men although some were so maimed it was hard to tell and there were children and babies and severed limbs tucked among them.

  The sun was streaming in upon those who lay in sacrifice before the altar through a tall stained-glass window which had been strafed with bullets yet somehow held together. Kendrick, the British TV reporter, was asking everyone to stand clear so that he could do a piece to camera before the sunlight shifted but Connor ignored him and finished what he had to do and left.

  Outside, a young soldier was throwing up and Connor stood behind him and held him by the shoulders for a while without saying anything and then walked back down the street. Other villagers had appeared by now and were talking in hushed voices with the soldiers and as he looked he saw others emerging like wide-eyed phantoms from behind the houses and from among the trees.

  Connor photographed them while the soldiers handed out food and water from the trucks parked in the dust yard of the burnt-out school. There was a big baobab tree there, the kind that some said God had mistakenly planted upside down with its roots in the air, though to Connor it seemed no mistake at all in a world turned that way too.

  He sat on a low mud wall and stared at the hills above the village. The mist had burned off the terraces by now and he could see trees sprouting like reaching hands from the hilltops. Behind them the clouds were stacking, ready for the rain that fell without fail every afternoon. It was one of the lushest countries Connor had ever seen and in this part of it almost every available inch seemed to be cultivated. But the bananas and avocados hung rotting on the trees and the only crop being harvested was human.

  For three days now he had been with this same contingent of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, pushing steadily south and west. And although he still photographed the bodies they came across, he had long ago stopped counting. He had seen them bloated and jammed like timber along the banks of the rivers while freer ones twirled slowly past as if in some silent aquatic ballet that only they could hear. He had seen them hacked in their hundreds in ditches and streams and papyrus marshes and around their ransacked homes and seen them stacked in citizenly fashion by the roadside. In Bysenguye, the town through which they had passed yesterday, he had seen garbage trucks collecting them. And he had photographed them all and sent the pictures from his scanner spinning home across the heavens, through God’s own backyard, where maybe some of those same murdered souls stood waiting.

  Now it was night and the village was throbbing with its new population of relief agency workers, journalists, human rights monitors and assorted bureaucrats, all here to document the demise of the old one. They had been arriving all afternoon and in the rain their trucks had churned the street to a river of red mud. Some busied themselves with the survivors while others huddled in groups, smoking and talking in low voices as if scared that they might somehow wake the dead. It was cooler now and the smell of death had been drowned by the fumes of the generators and of some of the trucks that kept their engines running. A group of investigators had gone up to the church and dressed themselves in white overalls and hooded masks and rubber gloves and boots and gone inside. They were still in there, working by floodlight and from where he now stood, beneath the baobab tree, Connor could see their shadows through the windows looming like monsters on the blooded walls while they catalogued the dead.

  He and some of the other journalists were gathered around the young RPF lieutenant who had been assigned to brief them about what had taken place, though by now most of them knew.

  The lieutenant said they had so far counted two hundred and nine bodies, all Tutsis. Many of them were from Bysenguye, the nearby town where Connor had seen the garbage trucks. When the interahamwe, the Hutu death squads, started work there, these people had sought the protection of the mayor, Emmanuel Kabugi, a cultured and respected man, a Hutu, but one whom all Tutsis had always considered their friend.

  On his advice they had evacuated their families and fled here for sanctuary. One of the young priests, he assured them, was a personal friend and would see that they came to no harm. On the following day, when they were all safely gathered inside the church, Emmanuel Kabugi arrived with the interahamwe, some armed with guns but most with machetes. Both he and the priest, who on command had unbolted the doors, personally took part in the massacre.

  That night most of the journalists went back to a hotel in Bysenguye but Connor and the other half dozen who had been traveling with the RPF stayed in the village. They set up camp in a couple of the gutted houses that still had roofs and before they turned in Kendrick produced a bottle of brandy and some metal tots. Someone lit a gas lamp and they all sat around it on the bare cement floor, drinking. Kendrick was plump and florid and in his late forties, with thinning gingery hair and he seemed to assume that being the oldest ‘Africa hand’ among them gave him the right to lecture them. His producer and crew were younger and quieter and Connor got along well with them, as he did with the two others, Anna and Reiner, who were both news agency reporters.

  In the short time he had spent around journalists, Connor had met some he liked and many he didn’t, but it was always the pompous ones he disliked most, the ones who’d seen it all and done it all and couldn’t stop telling you. He had learned to keep his own counsel and listen and he was aware that he was usually seen as a loner. Most of the journalists - at least, most of those who were writers, rather than photographers - had been to college. And at first Connor wondered if it was this that set him apart. But then he came to realize that it was simply in his nature to be that way and concluded that when his mother had called him The Watcher, she was probably right.

  He sat now watching Kendrick. The sweat on his pink cheeks glistened in the cold light of the gas lamp. He was ranting on about how democracy didn’t work in Africa and how dumb it was for western governments ever to have thought it would. To ‘your average African,’ he said, democracy was just an alien abstraction. All the money for famine relief and other aid simply went into the pockets of ministers and officials who all had vast Swiss bank accounts. He’d seen it happen all over Africa. He’d even talked about it with Nelson Mandela, whom he had interviewed many times and talked about as if he were a personal friend, which was more than a little hard to credit. Connor couldn’t bear to listen anymore. He quietly got up and headed for the door.

  ‘So our American cousin disagrees?’

  Connor stopped in
the doorway and looked back at him.

  ‘Hell, what do I know?’ he said. ‘Maybe you should go ask those average Africans lying around in the church up there.’

  He strolled out of the village past where the soldiers were camped. Some of them had lit fires and were sitting around them singing and tapping out rhythms. One of the sentries told him not to wander too far and he said he wouldn’t. He just wanted to get away from the lights and the fumes and the din of the generators.

  He followed a dirt trail that led away from the road and meandered through the banana groves until it broadened into a grassy clearing. There were some rocks there and he sat down on one of them and listened to the pulsing clamor of the insects and frogs all around him and filled his lungs with the rich damp smell of the red earth. The clouds had cleared and there was no moon and he spent a long time trying to figure his way around the stars of this strange new hemisphere but couldn’t. He needed a map, like the one he had drawn on Ed’s back last fall. And then he thought, as he did every day and every night, of Julia and of his child that was in her womb.

  He hadn’t spoken to them since Christmas. He’d phoned them from Nairobi where he had gone after things became too dangerous in Somalia. Ed told him that Julia was two months pregnant. She had conceived after the first insemination from the deposit Connor had left at the clinic before he flew out to Africa.

  ‘It’s like it was meant to be,’ Ed said.

  They had written him a letter via his agency telling him but, like much of the mail they forwarded to him, Connor had never received it. Then Julia came on the line and wished him a merry Christmas and he could tell from her voice, from both their voices, how full of joy they were. And he tried to sound that way too and to say all the right things and only hoped that it sounded more convincing to them than it did to him. The truth was that he didn’t know what he felt. Even now, after months of thinking about it, he still didn’t know.

  He was happy, genuinely happy, that his gift had brought them such joy. And there were times when he drew strength from it. Walking among the dead, as he had today in the church, as he had almost every day, he would force himself to think of this new life convolving so many thousand miles away, this flame of future amid all the dark denial and it gave him hope and courage.