Read The Smoke Jumper for Free Online Page A

was entirely painted black. When Connor arrived the previous week, the only residents of the monster antique refrigerator had been an onion in its seventh stage of growth and a tub of apricot yogurt with enough green fur on it to upholster a small sofa.
    He opened his eyes just past noon and found himself again under the scowling scrutiny of his least favorite rock group. They were on a poster he kept forgetting to take down. He’d never heard of them but they were clearly exponents of some dark and esoteric zone of metal. They were all half naked and pierced in so many peculiar places with rings and chains and studs and bolts that it made you wince even to look at them. They didn’t look too happy about it either.
    Connor got up and walked to the window. It was another hot and cloudless day but at least there was a breeze ruffling the cottonwoods along the Clark Fork. Through a gap in the flutter of leaves he could see an old man in the shallows teaching a young girl to cast a fly. The sun was bouncing off the water behind them and it looked pretty enough to send Connor off to get his new Nikon. He changed the lens to a 200mm zoom and finished the last few frames on the roll. It reminded him that the roll of film he’d shot with the Leica on the mountain was still in his pocket. Maybe he’d have time to go to the studio and process both rolls before Ed and Julia flew in.
    He took off his smoke-scented clothes, showered, shaved and dressed again in some old but clean blue jeans and a white T-shirt. And after he’d made himself some coffee and then cooked a death-defying brunch of ham and eggs and fried potatoes, it was getting on for two o’clock.
    Outside the heat was shimmering off the sidewalks. He dropped a bundle of dirty clothes at the Laundromat by the gas station. Mrs Tyler, the old woman who ran it, had a collie-cross that Connor always made a fuss of and he spent a few minutes hunkered down, stroking the dog’s stomach and telling the woman about the fire on Iron Mountain.
    ‘They say it’s going to be another big year for fires,’ she said.
    ‘It’s getting pretty dry out there.’
    ‘Where’s Ed? Isn’t he jumping with you all?’
    ‘He gets in later today.’
    ‘I thought it’d been a tad too peaceful. You tell him hi from me.’
    ‘I’ll do that.’
    He walked along Front Street toward North Higgins, hugging the shade where he could find it. It felt good to be back in Missoula. It was an easygoing place where you could be what you were without others rushing to judge you. Much of the laid-back atmosphere flowed from the university across the river. The town was always full of students, even now, with the summer vacation already under way. And sometimes this made Connor feel like an outsider, reviving in him a twinge, more of regret than of envy, that he’d never gone to college himself.
    In recent years the town had become a magnet for those who were tired of city life but weren’t yet ready for the log cabin and hauling water from the creek. In Missoula they found the perfect balance. They could be in the mountains in minutes and still have at hand all those truly crucial things in life - like shopping malls, the latest Hollywood movies and a good cappuccino. Living alongside them were the environmentalists: from full-blooded eco-warriors who ate loggers for breakfast to more mild-mannered bunnyhuggers, hippies and assorted hangers-on who, at the drop of a recycled paper hat, would hug almost anything and anyone. Then there were the culture-vultures and counterculture-vultures, musicians, painters, sculptors and writers of every description. Ed, always a fountain of useless but often intriguing information, claimed there were more writers per acre in Missoula than in any other place on the planet.
    The darkroom Connor used was tucked among some garages in a backstreet off North Higgins. It was one narrow room with a studio at one end and the darkroom area boxed off at the other. There were