Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

His frayed way of saying, “Is this what you wanted? Is this what you want? Is it? Sit?”

Before Elle was born, her father had worked as a smoke jumper for the U.S. Forest Service in Okanogan County, Washington. Elle and her younger brother Wallace grew up hearing lots of stories about their father’s former life. It was almost too much to imagine. Even so, each night the stories would begin in a vivid burst, their father young again, beaming as he described the rush of being aloft and drifting down through billowy tents of smoke.

During such stories, Wallace would be busy giggling. Elle, on the other hand, would almost always drift off into sleep, already thinking of what lay underneath those dark sheets of smoke pulled taut by gusts: dancing horses, bejewelled and riderless, spinning in brilliant circles, and those horses turning easily into spun shadows. Images, for Elle, sweet as cotton candy. Sometimes her brother’s giggling broke the dream.

Until their father had met his wife, Marsha, and settled down in nearby Winthrop, Samuel Lufkin had spent his life looking for an opportunity to make an impact. He had just missed serving in the war, and everywhere he went, banners in storefronts stretching jubilant phrases, newspapers in succession printing the same victorious stories, he was reminded how he hadn’t been needed at all. He could just as easily have vanished into the surrounding wilderness and the country would have continued on in its history of having won the war without him.

This was Samuel Lufkin’s dilemma, the kind of thing that kept him up nights in his own parents’ house thinking of how it was he wanted to be remembered. When he first learned there was a training facility nearby, he knew what he had to do. He signed up to become a smoke jumper. Five years he jumped out of planes, risking his life to put out the flames of mindless fires.

Fire, the head of the Lufkin family preached each night, does not know it is evil.

For this reason, it seemed worse to Elle. It was no different from the monsters in the stories she had already read as a girl. The many heads of the Hydra. The way cutting off one side caused the flames to split into two directions. In the scenes her father described, she sometimes pictured the flames rejoining to flicker like a large forked tongue.

Years in this line of work had given Samuel Lufkin an appreciation for the mere fact of being alive. He realized that who he had been before was a child caught in his own yearning. And he was surprised that he didn’t care how, after a few years of marriage, his life took on a routine, his days consisting mostly of pumping gas and running a cash register at the service station, or the occasional minor challenge of setting points for a tune-up in the adjoining garage.

Samuel and Marsha were pleased with the quiet, consistent life they had given their daughter and son. Their routine afforded them a certain kind of stability that suited the people they had naturally become. Bills were paid on time. Meals were always on the table. Sundays after church had, out of a joyful habit, become outings at Pearrygin Lake. Bodies cradled in huge inner tubes Samuel had saved from the garage spun aimlessly across the lake’s surface. Here clouds drifted just as slowly among the reflected images of willows and ash of the Methow Valley.

During these tuck-in stories, though, what Samuel Lufkin had failed each night to explain to his children was the reason he had given up on being a smoke jumper in the first place. In the woven fabric of their family lore, it was known, by Elle especially, how their mother Marsha had spotted him, the young Sam, dashing in his uniform. He had been stepping off a Greyhound bus. Marsha and her best friend in high school, a girl named Esther whom the children had grown up never meeting, had flipped a coin over who was going to talk to the boy with the bright eyes. Who was going to ask him for his name?

Elle always remembered thinking how uncharacteristically brave her mother seemed for approaching this stranger from elsewhere. Elle, as a young girl, could never imagine doing such a thing. Not then at least.

“He must have been so handsome,” Elle would often offer as a prompt, and her mother would laugh in disbelief and respond, “Yes, yes, oh yes.” She would clap her hands together, as if trying to catch the elusive image. She could have been a girl herself, cupping the air to trap the first lightning bug aglow in the evening.

“Oh, Elle, you should have seen him then,” her mother would say, walking into the room with freshly folded clothes and setting them down next to each child’s dresser, then kissing her husband on the cheek. She would leave so that he could finish his story before Wallace asked for another glass of water, or Elle tried to get them to begin an impromptu waltz, something they would claim they had danced at their wedding. Of course their daughter knew then that there had been no celebration, only the visit to a justice of the peace and a stiff handshake from her grandfather Roy, her mother’s father.

“Here’s the thing,” Samuel Lufkin started out once. “You never know how much sky you can hold inside you. Until you try, I mean. Go ahead, Elle. Take a breath.” He wanted to bring his children always to that moment of drifting, the parachute a translucent dome overhead.

For Elle, sometimes the parachute was a fading hand collecting the wind.

When Elle went away to college and briefly studied art history, what she felt seemed to her more than a simple affinity for spaces held in the ceilings of basilicas. It was the sculpted infinity within each apse that lifted