The Smoke Jumper Read Free Page A

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.
    What Ed found most irritating of all was the baseball cap the boy always wore. It was also black and, of course, worn back-to-front and had DEATH ZONE - CREW MEMBER on it as if written by a hemorrhaging spider. Ed was not by nature a violent person, quite the opposite. But sometimes the urge to remove this cap and with it whack young Dexter Rothwell around the ears was almost overpowering.
    Since finishing college three years ago, teaching piano was how Ed made enough money to keep on composing. During the winter his only other source of income was from playing every Friday night in a downtown bar, which despite being paid little money and less attention, he still enjoyed. With his teaching, quite unintentionally, he seemed to have cornered the market in the spoiled offspring of the city’s most graceless high-achievers. He had been