The Smoke Jumper (33 page)

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.

But in his heart there was also a hollowing sense of loss which, try as he might, he couldn’t dispel. And sometimes it seemed that the giving of his seed had left him spent and purposeless and more starkly alone than ever.

As he walked back past the soldiers’ camp he saw a figure emerge from between the trucks and come toward him. It was the young soldier he had seen being sick outside the church. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he held it out and Connor took it.

‘They say he ran away to Goma with all the others,’ the soldier said. ‘If you go there, maybe this helps you find him.’

Connor wanted to ask what he meant but the soldier turned and quickly disappeared again between the trucks. Connor got out his pocket flashlight and in its beam saw that he had been given a torn piece of newspaper. It was a photograph of a man in a white shirt who seemed to be presenting a prize to a strikingly beautiful schoolgirl. He was smiling benignly. The caption below said he was the
bourgmestre
of Bysenguye, Emmanuel Kabugi.

 

Julia lay dead-still, watching in wonder as the dome of her belly shifted shape and moved from one side of the bathtub to the other. Of course, she had heard about babies kicking, but she’d always thought this must be an exaggeration and that actually it would be like a little tickle, something you really had to concentrate on to feel. Not like this. Oomph. There it was again. The little rascal just wouldn’t keep still, she was swimming widths, making ripples in the water, for heaven’s sake.

‘Whoa there!’

Ed was standing naked at the basin beside her, shaving. He had gone back to wet shaving and, curiously, although he did it entirely by feel - and perfectly safely - he still stared at himself in the mirror. The spring sunshine was angling in on his butt through the open bathroom window.

‘On the move again?’

‘Bigtime. We’re training for the Olympics here this morning.’

He put down his razor and knelt beside the tub. Half his face was still covered in foam. He put his hands on her belly and they waited for another movement. The birds outside were at full throttle.

‘He’s gone all shy,’ Ed said.

‘No she hasn’t.’

‘Come on, tadpole. One more time for Daddy.’

At her last scan they’d shown her a picture of the fetus and asked her if she wanted to know what it was going to be and she said it was okay, thanks, she already knew - it was going to be a baby. They all laughed and left it at that but actually, even though she didn’t want to be told, she did know. She’d never had any doubt. It was going to be a girl.

Quite how she knew, Julia wasn’t sure, except that it had something to do with Skye. She didn’t think about her so much anymore. For about a year after the fire Skye had been there all the time in the corner of her mind, not threatening her or accusing her or even looking sad, just sitting there quietly. But with time, the image had faded and now appeared only when summoned in Julia’s prayers or darkly magnified in those treacherous, sleepless recesses of the night.

Sometimes, of course, it could be summoned by chance, such as when she came across someone who looked like Skye. One of her third-grade pupils had an older sister who collected him after school and who looked so like Skye that the first time Julia saw her, she almost fainted. Mostly, however, she believed that she now had the issue under control.

It wasn’t that the guilt had diminished. She had come to the conclusion that guilt was made of some utterly imperishable matter upon which time and happiness had not the slightest corrosive effect. She had read an article in a magazine (one of the many she now bought, to look for Connor’s pictures) about a policeman who had been shot in the head with a bullet that was made out of titanium or something similarly exotic. The guy was alive and alert and seemed to be functioning fine and so rather than risk the damage of surgery, the doctors had decided to leave it there. Apart from the odd headache and some minor distortion of his vision, he apparently now led a normal life.

Reading the piece, Julia had decided that this was how it was with her. Except, of course, she had two titanium bullets - one for Ed and one for Skye. They were there constantly lodged in her head and they changed the way she viewed the world and caused her pain. But it was a pain to which she had grown accustomed.

Guilt could be as simple as that. There didn’t have to be anything maudlin or self-pitying about it. It was a fact and you lived with it and dealt with the consequences, a kind of contract under which your actions led to inevitable obligations. Those to Ed, she was already fulfilling, by devoting her life to him. Now it was Skye’s turn. Julia was responsible for the loss to the world of a young female life and therefore she must restore one. And although she knew it wasn’t remotely rational, this was why she had convinced herself that the baby, now seven months grown in her womb, was a girl.

Ed, of course, had different ideas. The Montana wing of the Tully dynasty, he grandly declared, needed - and would have, damn it - a male heir. He even had a name ready. In honor of his father’s grasscutting empire, the boy would be called Mower. In the event of her being wrong, Julia hoped to God that this was only a joke. Tadpole was bad enough.

He still had his hands on her belly.

‘He’s gone to sleep.’

‘No . . . Here we go again.’

‘Wow! Look at him go. That’s my boy! What does that feel like? That must feel so weird. Is it like, all kind of squirmy?’

‘No, not really. More kind of . . . fluttery.’

‘Fluttery.’

‘Yeah. Kind of swimmy-fluttery.’

‘But not squirmy.’

‘No.’

‘Here he goes again!’

She watched Ed grinning, his eyes flickering a little as they did nowadays. She wondered sometimes, when he had his hands upon her like this and felt the baby stir, whether the joy it so clearly gave him was tinged in any way by the fact that the child wasn’t truly his. Of course, it was his, in almost every other way imaginable. And Julia did all she could to make him feel it was. Nevertheless, she thought there must still be some faint residue, not of doubt and certainly not of jealousy, but perhaps of some mild variant of regret.

It was something that they had never discussed. Almost from the start, Ed had been incredible. After Connor called to give them his decision and while they were waiting for the first insemination, which had to be done at the optimum hour of the optimum day of the month, Ed had seemed troubled and restless and she had half expected him to change his mind. But when she asked him if he was still sure about going through with it, he told her not to be stupid, of course he was, so she never asked again.

The day she told him she was pregnant hadn’t started well. She’d left a tube of hair removal cream on the bathroom shelf where they kept their toothbrushes and Ed brushed his teeth with it, which didn’t put him in the best of moods. He got dressed and stomped off downstairs for his breakfast and while she carried out the pregnancy test in the bathroom she could hear him grumbling on about how he couldn’t even taste his goddamn granola.

She stood there by the toilet, watching the strip change color, though it was only confirming what she already knew, and she didn’t say a word. She went downstairs in her bathrobe to the kitchen and found some of the little adhesive dots that they used for labeling things and she wrote ‘baby’ with them on her belly. Ed asked her in a grouchy voice what she was doing.

‘Nothing. Just labeling something.’

‘Bit late, isn’t it? Write napalm, that’s what the damn stuff tastes like.’

She applied the last dot and then walked over to the table where he sat hunched grumpily over his granola. She perched her backside on the table and took hold of his hand.

‘Aw, come on Julia, give me a break, will you?’

‘Put your spoon down.’

‘Listen, it really isn’t funny, okay? My mouth feels like it’s been nuked.’

‘Poor darling.’

She opened her robe and guided his hand toward her belly.

‘Honey, I’m really not in the mood, okay . . . what the hell’s going on here?’

He had found the dots.

‘Just so you know what it is,’ she said.

She watched his face change as he traced the dots with his fingertips.

‘Oh boy,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh girl. And yes, I am.’

He got up and put his arms around her and they hugged each other for a long time and when at last he let go she saw there were tears on his cheeks.

‘Sorry about the toothpaste,’ she said.

He slipped his arms inside her robe and held her by the hips and kissed her and then he bent his head and kissed her breasts and with the dots still stuck to her belly he opened her legs and made love to her right there on the kitchen table. And possibly she was mistaken, but that day - and many more since - she had the impression that as well as raw desire there was some deeper impulse at work, some unconscious need perhaps to assert his presence within her too alongside Connor.

They spoke of Connor often, wondering where he might be and what he might be doing. At Ed’s insistence, a photograph of the three of them - the one taken by timer on the climb last fall - had been blown up and now hung framed on the living room wall. Ed said he wanted it to be there for Tadpole/Mower to see, right from the start, so he would know the setup: Mom, Dad and Bio-Dad. He said that Connor had the better title; Bio-Dad sounded like a superhero. Julia said she thought it sounded more like a detergent.

There was a network of friends and family (Fords, Tullys and Bishops) who kept their eyes skinned for Connor’s photographs and whenever somebody saw one in a newspaper or a magazine there would be an instant round of phone calls. Connor’s mother had phoned only the other day to tell them to buy
Newsweek
, but warning, at the same time, that it wasn’t a pretty sight. Julia went out and bought a copy.

Mrs Ford was right. It was another of his pictures from Rwanda, a church floor carpeted with butchered women and children, sunlight pouring in on them through a broken window. Julia took one glance and that was enough. She couldn’t even bear to read about it. A million people murdered in a month. One TV anchorman, clearly out to prove he was smart enough to work a calculator, said this meant that a hundred and fifty-five people had been killed every minute, almost a thousand every hour of every day. While UN troops stood powerless and watched and men in suits in Washington debated the finer points of whether or not such killing amounted to genocide.