Smokejumpers

Andi Smith

We live in a burning town. It’s all dirt dust and scratchy yellow pines that snap and spit in the fires, and every night the sunset glows red. We can see the bright spots of the fires, like so many stars in the sky, on all the other mountains and in the valleys, and we like to think we’re untouchable because we’re so high up. But the hot air rises, and so does the ash. It collects in the grout between tiles, empty cups on windowsills, our hair, the thin lines on our palms. The couches and beds are covered in a fine gray powder that flies up when we sit down, no matter how much we clean. Not even screens can keep it out.

Most people call it autumn. We call it fire season.

The radio warns us to move south. We clear away the dead brush and dig trenches around our homes. We keep the car full of gas and the family photos in the glove compartment, just in case. If someone has a bathtub, it’s filled with water.

Our town comes from a long line of cinders. The first houses here were wood and thatch, built by gold hunters whose campfires tossed sparks across the hedge, the burning Joshua trees and deergrass making the valleys smell acrid. Back then they didn’t know the land would only dry out faster, that the fire would come every year. Now we can look out and see the blackened bones of trees marching across the dying land.

“Ain’t been a fire could make me move and ain’t ever gone be one,” our across-thestreet neighbor Warren says. He sits in a scrappy rocking chair and lights cigarette after cigarette. The butts collect at his feet like he’s shelling peas. I watch the smoking ends carefully; all it takes is a spark.

When I was little, I used to go over to his house all the time after school. Now I go to the county high school, and by the time the bus comes around Mom’s back from work, but it used to be that I had two hours to myself. She’d send me over to Warren’s house to keep me out of trouble, and to ask if Warren needed anything, and he never did, and still doesn’t. He’s been the same my whole life—same liver-spotted skin and hunched back, gummy smile—and no one’s exactly sure how old he is. When I have the time I’ll go over, and he’s always sitting in the same place, smoking the same cigarettes.

“The tallest trees around here, the Suh-koy-yas, they love the fire. Their bark is thick. Even their pinecones, they don’t open until it gets hot enough.” He takes a deep breath of smoke and blows it to the sky. “You and me, we are those trees. The fire don’t hurt us.”

He makes a gesture over to the old stunted sequoia growing in his front yard. Every time I look out my bedroom window I can see it, the knotted branches twisting up to the sky. He’s named it “Muninn,” and somehow it survives fire after fire.

Our town is dry. You can taste it, feel it, smell it. Everything starts to feel the same; the grit coagulates on our flesh. Even the fire has a distinct smell of heat.

The dust kicks up from the frantic wheels of cars leaving. I sit on the porch with Warren and we drink ice water and watch the fire burn through the valley. The main front is far enough away, but the wall of fire we’ve been hearing about is sending out smaller brush fires in advance.

In the distance, a plane buzzes. They’ve been sending in the smokejumpers all week, and if we go out to where the road curves over the shoulder of the mountain you can see the whole valley. It’s all filled up with firetrucks and firemen, but they want to hit it harder, so some of them come in by parachute and try to fight that way.

“Crazy folks,” Warren calls them. “Jumping straight inta the flames.” “That’s the way most of them go,” I say.

The first time I asked him if he needed anything he said “friends.” I thought that was funny, so I stayed, and after three hours he began to work on building me my own rocking chair. Mom had questions when I returned, wringing her hands, asking if he seemed a little off, saying he had “PTSD” from a time before anyone knew what that meant.

He always has lemons, in all months of the year, in a glazed ceramic bowl on his counter. They are perfectly yellow and we stand in the kitchen, squeezing two for me and two for him, adding three tablespoons of sugar to each.

“Weatherman says this one’s gonna be real bad,” I say. “Weatherman says that errytime,” Warren replies.

Today the north wind blows in our faces. No one expects it, the breeze, but it’s cold up here. The wind can steal your breath almost as fast as a wave of smoke can.

Warren coughs. “So, where’s the fire at?” “Burning through Knoxville. They’re hoping the freeway’ll stop it.”

We started smelling smoke a few days back. Some people can tell how bad the fire’s going to get just based on the smell. I’m not one of those people. I know what we learn in school, that dry wood burns faster and that fire needs oxygen and that I should never forget Stop Drop And Roll. The schools around here teach us to run, smoked out like rabbits from their dens.

From inside the living room I hear the song playing on the radio cut off and a scratchy message take over, the same kind of sorry tale we hear every week now. “Fire warning to those in the Greater Knoxville Area. Traveling at twenty miles an hour and expected to pick up. We suggest moving-”

Warren has already begun moving in that direction, and he quickly shuts it off. He laughs while doing it. That same message has been playing all my life, and maybe even all his life. The only thing certain about all this mess is that the fire will come. If not today, then tomorrow.

We know this is how we will die. The smoke slithering down our throats, garroting us with blackened tissue. That’s another thing no one expects. It’s not the flames that kill you, it’s the smoke, and the years of living with it. People like Warren play chicken with it, drinking it in and leaving bare matches offhandedly on counters and in trash cans. He hasn’t yet cleaned his yard and the dead brush is still piled up alongside the wooden walls.

“Think it’ll stop there?” he continues. Small talk—a gift to me. He knows my mom worries.

“Nope.”

I toss the watery dregs of my lemonade onto the dust. We don’t have dirt up here, just dust. Everything is dust and the ground laps up the ice like a beast. I say the practiced words: “You coming down south?”

Again Warren laughs. “Old Muninn’ll see another fire.”

Warren’s wooden home is a mystery—it’s the oldest building in town, and filled with so many flammable objects. Nowadays we build our homes with stone and asbestos. He refuses to do the same, saying his home has survived as long as him like this and that it’ll survive longer than him like this. He doesn’t have fire insurance.

Our town is built on the paper backs of insurance contracts. If you want job security you go into insurance. Something is always on the verge of destruction.

That night my walls glow red with reflected light and Mom comes in to wake me up. We know the drill. We wet clothes in the bathtub and tie them around our necks like bandits. We jump in the car and drive south, through a column of smoke into the valley. The firemen have a firebreak down past Lost Flats. We keep driving until we reach Coalgate and there we sleep in our car. After these sorts of things they always send in all kinds of help for us poor refugees. Years earlier, when the fires were smaller and less frequent they only gave us toothpaste and individually wrapped sanitizing napkins to keep the dust at bay. Now they hand out blankets and toothbrushes and canned ravioli, but we still have all of that stuff from last time rattling around in the backseat. They won’t let us heat it up over a fire, obviously, so we eat it cold, slurping down the wet noodles and watching our town spark up like fireworks at a Fourth of July celebration. We can’t have fireworks anymore. It’s a fire hazard.

We sit in a ring of cars like a wagon train bedding down for the night. Someone pulls out a harmonica and hums a crooked tune. The whole scene is a perfect desert night, the kind the Eagles would sing about: the vast emptiness, the luster of robust stars, the roaring fire to keep us warm. We share room-temperature water and cookies, and the little kids are scared and everybody else pretends not to be.

“When I was a kid we didn’t have a fire department. And as soon as we saw smoke we skedaddled.”

“Second time I’ll call up the insurance company on that home. And I just put in that new screen door, too.” This with only a hint of annoyance.

“Y’know, I wish I’d brought some marshmallows. Coulda dangled ‘em out the back windows and had us some s’mores.”

“Is old Warren still up there?” We’re quiet.

“Y’know, old folks like that can just decide when they die. All they’ve gots to do is say it’s time. Doesn’t hurt ‘em a bit. They get on down to sleeping and don’t wake up again.”

I’m quiet.

Someone sings a cheerful song about dancing in the rain. Sometimes it’s better to be distracted, but I can’t be. I think about Warren, how he’s sitting smoking a cigarette on his porch and drinking whiskey now that I’m not there. He let me try some, once, and it burned my throat, and he laughed, but not in a mean way, when I couldn’t stop coughing. I imagine him laughing now, talking to Muninn. He doesn’t think I know about that, the conversations with the tree, but I do. Old Muninn. Old Warren in his warren, his den, his burrow, whittling away the hours and ferreting away his treasures. The first time I met him he still smoked Cuban cigars, before they got too expensive to ship up here. Then he learned how to roll his own cigarettes.

We don’t wait long before we go home. By the time the night is through, the flames retreat, pushed back by the firebreak. They’ll come back soon, but for now, we’re safe. Our bones are weary as we trundle up the mountain, through the smoky freeway and to our cooked town. We can never stay away for long, even though we still have to stamp out some of the smaller fires.

The ash hangs in the air and we cough, looping the surgical masks over our ears.

We touch the torched stone stoops of our homes. Main street is mostly untouched, but the houses on the outskirts of town are cooked dry like a Thanksgiving turkey. I feel like a medic in an ambulance, or someone who is the first to come to the scene of an accident. The twisted metal and charred ruins.

Our house was on the north side, and survived better than most—the roof ’s held up, and if we sweep a bit we might manage to get some of the ash out the door. I walk around inside, touching all the things I thought I’d never see again. Unimportant things, like mugs and books and blankets. I take my quilt from the bed and shake as much of the dirt off as I can. Even though there’s a sort of heat to the air, like the fire isn’t quite gone yet, I wrap myself in that quilt and stare out the window.

I can see Warren’s house from here. That luck he always claimed would save him had finally broken, and I see that the roof has caved in a little at the back. Muninn’s branches almost stretch over that bit, as though it is trying to hold up the old home. The tree’s bark is blackened and peeling away, the trunk nearly cracked in half from the heat. All the needles are brown and drifting off like used-up matches, and I wonder what Warren would have thought, to see his faithful friend so dessicated.

Not that Warren would think anything, now. As we drove in I watched the firefighters carry his body off the porch.

When I was little, I used to go over to his house all the time after school. Now I go to the county high school, and by the time the bus comes around Mom’s back from work, but it used to be that I had two hours to myself. She’d send me over to Warren’s house to keep me out of trouble, and to ask if Warren needed anything, and he never did, and still doesn’t. He’s been the same my whole life—same liver-spotted skin and hunched back, gummy smile—and no one’s exactly sure how old he is. When I have the time I’ll go over, and he’s always sitting in the same place, smoking the same cigarettes.

“The tallest trees around here, the Suh-koy-yas, they love the fire. Their bark is thick.

Even their pinecones, they don’t open until it gets hot enough.” He takes a deep breath of smoke and blows it to the sky. “You and me, we are those trees. The fire don’t hurt us.”

He makes a gesture over to the old stunted sequoia growing in his front yard. Every time I look out my bedroom window I can see it, the knotted branches twisting up to the sky. He’s named it “Muninn,” and somehow it survives fire after fire.

Our town is dry. You can taste it, feel it, smell it. Everything starts to feel the same; the grit coagulates on our flesh. Even the fire has a distinct smell of heat.

The dust kicks up from the frantic wheels of cars leaving. I sit on the porch with Warren and we drink ice water and watch the fire burn through the valley. The main front is far enough away, but the wall of fire we’ve been hearing about is sending out smaller brush fires in advance.

In the distance, a plane buzzes. They’ve been sending in the smokejumpers all week, and if we go out to where the road curves over the shoulder of the mountain you can see the whole valley. It’s all filled up with firetrucks and firemen, but they want to hit it harder, so some of them come in by parachute and try to fight that way.

“Crazy folks,” Warren calls them. “Jumping straight inta the flames.” “That’s the way most of them go,” I say.

The first time I asked him if he needed anything he said “friends.” I thought that was funny, so I stayed, and after three hours he began to work on building me my own rocking chair.

Mom had questions when I returned, wringing her hands, asking if he seemed a little off, saying he had “PTSD” from a time before anyone knew what that meant.

He always has lemons, in all months of the year, in a glazed ceramic bowl on his counter.

They are perfectly yellow and we stand in the kitchen, squeezing two for me and two for him, adding three tablespoons of sugar to each.

“Weatherman says this one’s gonna be real bad,” I say. “Weatherman says that errytime,” Warren replies.

Today the north wind blows in our faces. No one expects it, the breeze, but it’s cold up here. The wind can steal your breath almost as fast as a wave of smoke can.

Warren coughs. “So, where’s the fire at?” “Burning through Knoxville. They’re hoping the freeway’ll stop it.”

We started smelling smoke a few days back. Some people can tell how bad the fire’s going to get just based on the smell. I’m not one of those people. I know what we learn in school, that dry wood burns faster and that fire needs oxygen and that I should never forget Stop Drop And Roll. The schools around here teach us to run, smoked out like rabbits from their dens.

From inside the living room I hear the song playing on the radio cut off and a scratchy message take over, the same kind of sorry tale we hear every week now. “Fire warning to those in the Greater Knoxville Area. Traveling at twenty miles an hour and expected to pick up. We suggest moving-”

Warren has already begun moving in that direction, and he quickly shuts it off. He laughs while doing it. That same message has been playing all my life, and maybe even all his life. The only thing certain about all this mess is that the fire will come. If not today, then tomorrow.

We know this is how we will die. The smoke slithering down our throats, garrot-

ing us with blackened tissue. That’s another thing no one expects. It’s not the flames that kill you, it’s the smoke, and the years of living with it. People like Warren play chicken with it, drinking it in and leaving bare matches offhandedly on counters and in trash cans. He hasn’t yet cleaned his yard and the dead brush is still piled up alongside the wooden walls.

“Think it’ll stop there?” he continues. Small talk—a gift to me. He knows my mom worries.

“Nope.”

I toss the watery dregs of my lemonade onto the dust. We don’t have dirt up here, just dust. Everything is dust and the ground laps up the ice like a beast. I say the practiced words:

“You coming down south?” Again Warren laughs. “Old Muninn’ll see another fire.”

Warren’s wooden home is a mystery—it’s the oldest building in town, and filled with so many flammable objects. Nowadays we build our homes with stone and asbestos. He refuses to do the same, saying his home has survived as long as him like this and that it’ll survive longer than him like this. He doesn’t have fire insurance.

Our town is built on the paper backs of insurance contracts. If you want job security you go into insurance. Something is always on the verge of destruction.

That night my walls glow red with reflected light and Mom comes in to wake me up. We know the drill. We wet clothes in the bathtub and tie them around our necks like bandits. We jump in the car and drive south, through a column of smoke into the valley. The firemen have a firebreak down past Lost Flats. We keep driving until we reach Coalgate and there we sleep in our car. After these sorts of things they always send in all kinds of help for us poor refugees.

Years earlier, when the fires were smaller and less frequent they only gave us toothpaste and individually wrapped sanitizing napkins to keep the dust at bay. Now they hand out blankets and toothbrushes and canned ravioli, but we still have all of that stuff from last time rattling around in the backseat. They won’t let us heat it up over a fire, obviously, so we eat it cold, slurping down the wet noodles and watching our town spark up like fireworks at a Fourth of July celebration. We can’t have fireworks anymore. It’s a fire hazard.

We sit in a ring of cars like a wagon train bedding down for the night. Someone pulls out a harmonica and hums a crooked tune. The whole scene is a perfect desert night, the kind the Eagles would sing about: the vast emptiness, the luster of robust stars, the roaring fire to keep us warm. We share room-temperature water and cookies, and the little kids are scared and everybody else pretends not to be.

“When I was a kid we didn’t have a fire department. And as soon as we saw smoke we skedaddled.”

“Second time I’ll call up the insurance company on that home. And I just put in that new screen door, too.” This with only a hint of annoyance.

“Y’know, I wish I’d brought some marshmallows. Coulda dangled ‘em out the back windows and had us some s’mores.”

“Is old Warren still up there?” We’re quiet.

“Y’know, old folks like that can just decide when they die. All they’ve gots to do is say it’s time. Doesn’t hurt ‘em a bit. They get on down to sleeping and don’t wake up again.”

I’m quiet. Someone sings a cheerful song about dancing in the rain. Sometimes it’s better

to be distracted, but I can’t be. I think about Warren, how he’s sitting smoking a cigarette on his porch and drinking whiskey now that I’m not there. He let me try some, once, and it burned my throat, and he laughed, but not in a mean way, when I couldn’t stop coughing. I imagine him laughing now, talking to Muninn. He doesn’t think I know about that, the conversations with the tree, but I do. Old Muninn. Old Warren in his warren, his den, his burrow, whittling away the hours and ferreting away his treasures. The first time I met him he still smoked Cuban cigars, before they got too expensive to ship up here. Then he learned how to roll his own cigarettes.

We don’t wait long before we go home. By the time the night is through, the flames retreat, pushed back by the firebreak. They’ll come back soon, but for now, we’re safe. Our bones are weary as we trundle up the mountain, through the smoky freeway and to our cooked town. We can never stay away for long, even though we still have to stamp out some of the smaller fires.

The ash hangs in the air and we cough, looping the surgical masks over our ears. We touch the torched stone stoops of our homes. Main street is mostly untouched, but the houses on the outskirts of town are cooked dry like a Thanksgiving turkey. I feel like a medic in an ambulance, or someone who is the first to come to the scene of an accident. The twisted metal and charred ruins.

Our house was on the north side, and survived better than most—the roof ’s held up, and if we sweep a bit we might manage to get some of the ash out the door. I walk around inside, touching all the things I thought I’d never see again. Unimportant things, like mugs and books and blankets. I take my quilt from the bed and shake as much of the dirt off as I can. Even though there’s a sort of heat to the air, like the fire isn’t quite gone yet, I wrap myself in that quilt and stare out the window.

I can see Warren’s house from here. That luck he always claimed would save him had finally broken, and I see that the roof has caved in a little at the back. Muninn’s

branches almost stretch over that bit, as though it is trying to hold up the old home. The tree’s bark is blackened and peeling away, the trunk nearly cracked in half from the heat. All the needles are brown and drifting off like used-up matches, and I wonder what Warren would have thought, to see his faithful friend so dessicated.

Not that Warren would think anything, now. As we drove in I watched the firefighters carry his body off the porch.