Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  “Yeah.”

  “The stars are really nice. And I forgot to tell you that between the sky and the stars there’s a whole layer of birds. And the birds guard everyone below.”

  “Are they big?” Ana asked.

  “The birds? Not so big. But there are millions of them. And they see everything.”

  “What color are they?”

  The boy’s patience was astounding. “Blue. Light blue,” he said, and after a pause during which Paul must have had a realization that impressed even himself: “That’s why you can’t see them. They blend into the sky.”

  Josie loved her children, but had heard this kind of thing from Paul before, and so put a pillow over her head to drown out their voices, and soon felt Paul climbing around her, and then down to the kitchenette, and then sensed him returning. He crawled over her and she heard him turning the pages of a book, whispering words to Ana, and Josie could picture their faces, their heads joined, and soon knew from her silence that Ana was asleep, so finally she found it, too.

  III.

  BUT THIS WAS NOT YET a land of mountains and light. What they’d seen so far was just a place. There were mountains, some, but the air was jaundiced and the light plain. The little oval window that faced forward presented the real Alaska to her: a parking lot, a wigwam, a sign telling passersby that the wifi was free. It was seven a.m. She looked down to find her children awake and exploring the cabinets.

  “Let’s have some breakfast,” she said, and they dressed and walked across the gravel parking lot to the diner. Inside there were a pair of firefighters, a man and a woman, both seeming managerial in age and demeanor. Their shirts said they were from Oregon.

  “Thank you for your help up here,” the waitress said to them, refilling their coffee. Periodically Josie would catch other diners nodding to the firefighter table, closing their eyes in gratitude.

  Paul and Ana ate eggs and bacon, Ana sitting on her foot, vibrating. Josie had told her that there was no plan for the day and this, to Ana, seemed to unleash all possibility of mayhem.

  “How’s the food?” Josie asked Paul.

  “Fine,” he said, and blinked his long-lashed eyes. His lashes were spectacular, and no matter what happened in his life he would have them, and these lashes would imply to all he was gentle and kind and, framed by his ice-blue eyes, that he was intelligent and wise and perhaps saw the future. Paul was an extraordinary-looking person, his face a long oval of polished stone, his eyes startling from forty feet.

  It was hard to see Ana, though, because she existed as a blur. She did not stop moving, even while eating. She’d been born four months premature, had entered the world weighing just over three pounds, was beset by a series of gothic afflictions—sleep apnea (being the occasional twenty-second delay between breaths), necrotizing enterocolitis (intestinal problem causing swollen belly and diarrhea), a bout with sepsis, then a blood infection, a half-dozen other full attacks on a creature the size of a shoe. But she got stronger daily, was a beast now, still underweight, still having something in the eyes that said Holy hell what happened? But aha! I’m here! You couldn’t kill me! but somehow her head had grown huge and heavy, and every day she seemed possessed by the need to prove she belonged here and would use her days fully, recklessly. She woke up ecstatic and went to bed reluctantly. In between she took five steps for everyone else’s one, sang loudly songs she created and which made no sense, and also attempted at every opportunity to cause herself harm. From a distance she resembled a perpetually drunk adult—bumping into things, yelling randomly, making up words. She could not be trusted in parking lots, near electrical outlets, near stoves or glass or metal or stairs, cliffs, bodies of water, vehicles of any kind, or pets. At the moment she was swaying back and forth like a buoy, doing a sitting dance to music only she could hear. In her left hand was a piece of toast, and surrounding her mouth like a messy new galaxy was syrup, eggs, grains of sugar and a film of milk. Now she stopped moving, and took in her surroundings in a rare moment of what could be construed as contemplation.

  “Do they speak English here?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Paul said to Ana, then gently said, “We’re still in America.” And then he patted her arm. The boy was freakish in his devotion to her. When Ana was one, two, three, Paul insisted on helping put her to bed, and every night created some new song for her to lull her to sleep. “Ana is sleepy now, Ana is sleepy, all the Anas in the world are so sleepy now, they hold hands and drop away…” He was a startling lyricist, really, at four, five, six, and Ana would lie there staring at him, her eyes unblinking, sucking on her bottle, listening to every word. And his artwork! It showed a different level of devotion: he signed everything he created Paul and Ana.

  They ate their breakfast, Josie sitting across from her children, staring at the heartless landscape of blue sky and white mountains, and remembered Carl once saying, joking but not joking, that their children had their genders confused. Paul was exquisitely sensitive, thoughtful, maternal. He didn’t wear girls’ clothes but he did play with dolls. Ana liked motorcycles and Darth Vader and had hit her giant head on so many things, falling, ramming, that her skull was wildly misshapen and lucky to be covered with her riot of red curls. Paul listened, cared more for people than objects, and was wounded deeply by the thought of any suffering endured by any living soul. On the other hand, Ana really did not care.

  Then there was the matter of honor. Though his father was an invertebrate, Paul was already a great man, a tiny Lincoln. A few months ago, for his after-dinner treat, he chose a tiny packet of peanut M&Ms from the candy left over from Halloween (Josie kept it in the cabinet over the fridge). There were six M&Ms inside the packet, and Josie said he could have four. Josie took Ana to bed, while Paul ate his treat in the kitchen so Ana wouldn’t see or want some of her own. The next morning on the counter, Josie found the packet with the two extras in it. Paul was so honest that he wouldn’t sneak the last two and eat them—something Ana, or Carl, or even Josie, would likely do without a second thought.

  Finished with most of her food, Ana left the booth and ran to a gumball machine, which she yanked on hard enough to bring it down—it would have gone down if it weren’t bolted to the floor. Josie could not remember Ana ever seeing a gumball machine before, so how was it that she knew exactly how to harm one? And what had she imagined would be the results of her efforts—broken machine, a floor of glass and gum, punishment inevitable? What was the appeal? The only explanation was that she was receiving instructions from extraplanetary overlords. That, and Ana’s tendency, once a week, to look at Josie with otherworldly eyes, old eyes, knowing eyes—it was unsettling. Paul was always Paul, self-contained, earth-bound, but Ana, sometimes, would stop being a child and look at Josie, her mother, as if to say, For a second let’s stop pretending.

  “Can you get her and bring her back?” Josie asked Paul.

  Paul slid out of the booth and went after her. Seeing him coming, Ana grinned and ran toward the bathrooms. In seconds there was a loud crash, an odd delay, then Ana’s wail overtook the diner.

  Josie rushed to the bathroom and found Ana inside, on her knees, holding her chin, screaming.

  “She was standing on the toilet and fell,” Paul said.

  Paul always knew. He knew everything—every event, every truth involving Ana. He was her personal coach, her historian, assistant, caretaker, governness, guardian and best friend.

  “I’ll get a first-aid kit,” Paul said. Josie knew her son, only eight, could do this. He could find a waitress, ask for the first-aid kit, bring it back. He could answer the phone, could run into the grocery store to buy milk, could go to the end of the street to pick up the mail. He was so calm and reasonable and composed that Josie considered him, most of the time, her peer in parenting and also, possibly, some shrunken reincarnation of Josie’s own pre-breakdown mother.

  Josie lifted Ana to the bathroom sink, looked under her chin and found a tiny red line. “It’s just a scratch. There i
sn’t really any blood. I don’t think we need a first-aid kit.” She held Ana close, feeling her rabbit heart thrumming as she heaved and choked on tears.

  Then Paul, who had returned with the kit, gave Josie an urgent look, a clenching of his teeth, meant to convey that he knew there was no blood, but that Ana would not stop crying until some remedy was placed on her chin.

  “There’s got to be a good band-aid here,” Paul said, and at this, Ana’s eyes opened and followed his quick long-fingered hands as he opened compartments. Finally he arrived at the right one. “Found some,” he said, and held up a clump of simple, if oversized, bandages. While Ana watched, no longer crying—in fact rapt, holding her breath—he pored through the band-aids like a normal boy would do with Magic cards, baseball cards. “I think this one,” he said, and took a small one from its wrapping. “Maybe we should put some cream on first. What do you think?”

  Josie was about to answer but realized Paul was talking to Ana, not to her. Ana nodded gravely to him and insisted that he, not Josie, put on the cream. In seconds he had some kind of lotion in his hands, and was rubbing it between his palms.

  “Let’s make it warm first,” he said. After it was whatever temperature he deemed right, he applied it to her chin with the utmost delicacy, and Ana’s eyes registered a pleasure so great they had to close. After the cream was spread evenly, he blew on it, “so it dries quicker,” he told Ana, ignoring Josie utterly, and then carefully attached the band-aid to her chin, pressing it lightly on both adhesive ends. Then he stepped back and assessed his work. He was satisfied, and now Ana was calm enough to speak.

  She asked for a meal.

  “You want a meal?” Josie asked. “You haven’t finished your breakfast.”

  “No!” Ana roared. “I want a meal.”

  “A meal?” Josie was lost.

  “No, a meal!”

  Paul tilted his head, as if he was on the verge of understanding.

  “Are you hungry or not?” Josie asked.

  “No!” Ana yelled, now about to cry again.

  Paul looked to Ana, his eyes probing. “Is there another way you could say it?”

  “I want to see it!” Ana wailed, and immediately Paul understood.

  “She wants a mirror, not a meal,” he told his mother, a flash of delight in his ice-priest eyes. Ana nodded vigorously, and a smile overtook Paul’s face. This was treasure to him, this was joy. All he wanted was to know his sister better than anyone else.

  Josie lifted her so she could face the small mirror hung high over the sink. She showed Ana the wound, fearing she’d wail again, shocked by the bandage overtaking her chin. But Ana only grinned, touching it lovingly, her eyes alight.

  —

  They got back on the road, heading south toward the Kenai Peninsula, with an eye toward Seward, about which Josie knew nothing. The kids sat at the banquette in back, Josie unsure exactly how that was safe, given the walls of the Chateau were dangerously thin and the benches of the banquette had seatbelts as old as herself. But the kids were loving it. Ana couldn’t believe she didn’t have to be in a car seat. She felt like she was getting away with some fantastic heist.

  Ana yelled something from the back. It sounded like a question, but Josie couldn’t hear anything. “What’s that?” Josie yelled.

  “She asked if you ever lived here,” Paul yelled.

  “In Alaska? No,” Josie yelled over her shoulder.

  Ana thought her mother had lived everywhere. It was Josie’s fault; she’d made the mistake of mentioning her travels before their births, her many addresses. Her kids were too young for this, both of them were, but she found on too many occasions that she couldn’t help it. When they’d heard mention of Panama in a documentary about the canal, she told them she’d lived there for two years, explaining the Peace Corps, the village on a hill where she and two others with no particular training in mountainside irrigation tried to help the residents with mountainside irrigation. She couldn’t help herself, and assumed her kids would forget it all. Ana forgot most things, but Paul forgot nothing, and as if to thwart her efforts to write the past in disappearing ink, he made his own copy, like some tiny deranged monk. They knew that after the Peace Corps and before dentistry school she’d gone to school, briefly, to train seeing-eye dogs (she dropped out after a month but the prospect held great fascination for them). They knew about Walla Walla and Iron Mountain, two of the four places she’d lived as a child. She thought it too soon to tell them about how she’d emancipated herself at seventeen, about Sunny, the woman who supported that insurgency and took her in. They occasionally wondered about Josie’s parents, where they were, why they didn’t have biological grandparents, why they only had Luisa, Carl’s mother, living in Key West. They knew something about London, the four months in Spain—that period of whiplash moves, driven by whim and calamity. Why was it important to her that they know she’d been somewhere, had done more than dentistry? Was it wonderful to have changed so many times? She suspected it was not wonderful.

  Now Paul was talking, but he was quieter than Ana, and Josie heard little more than wisps of consonants and vowels.

  “I can’t hear you!” Josie yelled.

  “What?” Paul yelled back to her.

  The Chateau was rattling and heaving and drowned all voices. By its nature a recreational vehicle carried along all manner of kitchen items—in this case, secondhand castoffs of Stan and his white-carpet wife—and every dish rattled, every glass clinked against every other glass. There were plates, and tea sets, and coffee cups, and silverware. There was a coffeemaker. There was a stove. There were pots and pans. There was a wok. A blender. A mixer in case anyone wanted to make a bundt cake. All of these were contained in cabinets, cheap lightweight cabinets like they had at home, but at home these cabinets were not hurtling through space at forty-eight miles an hour, carried on ancient shocks and tires. And because the vehicle was a dying machine, even the cabinets were poorly assembled and only casually attached to the vehicle. The sound, then, was like one would hear during an earthquake. The silverware shook like the chains of some restless ghost. And the cacophony grew far louder when they slowed down or sped up, or drove over an incline or decline or bump or pothole.

  IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? a lighted sign on the side of the road asked, and Josie felt found and accused until the sign changed to read DON’T PARK ON DRY GRASS and she realized these were messages meant to prevent forest fires.

  After an hour, Josie pulled over. Going from forty-eight to a stop was a task akin to holding back an avalanche. All the weight was carried in the rear, so the front of the car heaved and shuddered, the wheels shaking. They parked in a wide lot by the water, but Josie’s nerves were shot.

  She climbed up from the cab and sat on the couch opposite the banquette. She told Paul and Ana they had the unique opportunity to help with an extraordinary project. They were intrigued.

  “We’re putting the kitchen in the shower,” she said.

  Intuitively they understood.

  Ana opened the cabinet under the sink and found a pot. “Like this?” she asked, heading for the bathroom.

  “Wait,” Josie said, “let’s get towels first.”

  So they lined the shower floor with towels. Then they wrapped plates and glasses and put these on the shower floor. When they were out of towels, they opened their duffel bags and wrapped plates and silverware in clothes they could spare, and they placed each bundle on the shower floor. They emptied the kitchen of plates, pans, cups and glasses, put them all carefully in the shower, and closed the door. When Josie started the Chateau again, and pulled back onto the highway, the sound was wonderfully muffled and she appeared to her children some kind of mastermind.

  “What if we need to cook?” Paul asked.

  “I don’t want to cook,” Josie said.

  She didn’t want to drive, either, the road giving her no peace, only faces. She saw the smooth handsome face of the young soldier in whose death she was complicit. No, she
thought, give me another face. She saw the yellow eyes of the cancer-ridden woman who stole her business. No. Another. Carl, grinning on the toilet. No. The face of the woman’s lawyer, her son-in-law, cruel and mercenary. Josie finally arrived at the onion-skinned face of Sunny, a face she tried to conjure when she sought peace. For a moment her mind rested there, on Sunny’s bright black eyes, imagined Sunny running her bony fingers through her hair—Josie had allowed it even though she was a teenager and furious at the world—and then and now, for a moment, she felt something like calm.

  —

  In the afternoon they made it to Seward, and Seward felt like a real place. It was muscular and clean. It sat at the end of a great fjord, freezing water stampeding in from the Gulf of Alaska. The town’s main strip was lousy with souvenir shops, tinkly glass shelves full of cartoon abomination T-shirts, but on the outskirts, Seward was raw, an actual place of business. Fishing boats came and went, and tankers, and small container ships, and they all passed through the narrow inlet called Resurrection Bay, a name for grizzled explorers and saints.

  They arrived at an RV park outside of town, and parked facing a wide seaweed-covered beach. Across the water, half a mile maybe, there was the Kenai range, a wall of immaculate mountains—sawtoothed, silver and white, monumental and defiant. Along the shore were occasional stumps of trees rising from the sand, petrified in white.

  “Stay here,” she told the kids, and walked to the park office.

  The man at the desk asked for her name and address, and Josie wrote it down, scribbling her name illegibly, giving him a PO Box she’d memorized from a credit card company, and then paid in cash. She had the vague sense that when Carl realized what she’d done he might come to find her and the children, or send someone to find them, but then again the man had never held a real job (this new one in Florida didn’t count)—could he really assemble and carry out a reconnaissance mission? He’d gotten halfway through the triathlon he’d trained for. Maybe he’d get halfway through finding her.