Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  It was awkward. Josie and Samantha were put in the same room, meaning Samantha’s room had been instantly halved and her personal space evaporated. “What have those two sluts done now?” she muttered to herself while loudly moving her belongings around the room to make way for Josie’s. She cooperated, seething, competitive one month, then aloof, prone to occasional eruptions. Josie stayed in her school, and they had different friends, so their contact was incidental, and avoidable. Sam treated Josie like a freeloading drifter who had come in from the rain to share a room she’d paid for.

  Eventually there was detente, and they revealed each other’s weaknesses, only to have them exploited later. They were smart and angry girls who were not properly grateful to Sunny or Helen, who argued with their teachers, who flirted with each other’s boyfriends, who stole or broke each other’s things.

  But their home was sane and calm, and Josie’s own emancipation was accomplished without resistance. “I laid out the pros and cons for your mom,” Helen said one day, and Sunny smiled—the implication was that they’d utterly overpowered Josie’s mother; it gave Josie a twinge of guilt. Josie visited her mother every month for the next year, and their meetings, always at a highway Denny’s situated between their two towns, were cordial and tense, and they talked mostly about how good it would be in a few years, when all was settled, when whatever resentment had burned off between them and they could return to each other as adults and equals. Ha.

  There were some whispers about Sunny and Helen, just what they were up to—building some kind of cult, one lost teenager at a time? Were they lesbians? Were they lesbians starting a lesbian cult? But after Josie there were no more strays, not that year at least. Eventually Sunny’s home became a known haven for young women fleeing calamity, and the power of Sunny’s interest in Josie was diluted by all the girls who followed. Sunny knew it, and worried Josie and Sam would feel neglected. Don’t worry, Josie told her. Never worry.

  VI.

  IN A FLURRY JOSIE WOKE THE KIDS, got them in their seatbelts and drove up the Spit and back to the Cliffside RV park, to meet Sam. They were late, stupidly late. In twenty minutes Josie was putting on their shoes in the parking lot, Ana’s like little rubber bricks, and then they were all standing atop the bluff, looking down at Sam, who was with about twenty others, a barbecue in full swing on the beach below, all to welcome Josie and her children.

  “Sorry!” Josie yelled down, as they made their way down the steep path, trying to smile, trying to laugh, as if they were all in this together, the Alaskan way, a life without schedules and set times for beach barbecues. “We fell asleep!” Josie said brightly, trying to make it sound adorable, as Paul and Ana dragged groggily behind her, so she kept a smile frozen on her face as they jumped the last feet from the path to the beach. Sam was quickly upon her, swallowing her in a wooly embrace, her hair and sweater smelling of woodsmoke. She was wearing shorts, boots with the laces open, and a handknit black sweater. Her hair was windblown and unwashed.

  “Don’t worry, you’re only an hour late to your own party,” she said, releasing Josie and grabbing Ana and lifting her high. “You’ve never met me but I plan to eat you,” she said, and Ana’s eyes went electric, as if alerted to another of her wild breed. Sam kissed Ana roughly on the ear while eyeing Paul more cautiously. “Is this Paulie?” she said, and put Ana down. Paul faced her, and seemed to be accepting the possibility that Sam would lift him, too. But she didn’t. She squatted in front of him and held his face with two red hands. “I always remember those eyes of yours,” she said, and then stood up.

  The barbecue was being held close to the bluff, on a vast beach at low tide, the beach striped in orphaned strands of ocean water, silver in the low light. Across the water were the Kenai Mountains, but no one paid them any attention. The rest of the guests were accustomed to all this rugged beauty, all this driftwood and all these round grey stones, the vast tree trunks hollowed by the sea and bleached in the sun. There were introductions to everyone assembled—a mix of scruffy people who worked for Sam, scruffy people who had worked for her in the past, parents of her twins’ friends, and neighbors, most of whom wore down vests or wool sweaters, all of them in old boots. All along, one man seemed to be standing very close to Sam, and Josie guessed this was some kind of boyfriend. Josie tried to remember Sam’s approach to marriage. She’d been at Sam’s wedding, to a commercial fisherman named JJ, but hadn’t seen him since. Was it an open marriage? Something like that.

  This man in front of her, leaning into Sam with obvious familiarity, could have been ten, fifteen years younger, but a thick rust-colored beard made it hard to tell. Sam introduced him last.

  “This is Doug,” she said, and held his hand up, high over her head, as if he’d just been declared the winner.

  No. It wasn’t an open marriage. Now she remembered. JJ was away for months at a time, and they’d made an arrangement: whatever happened while he was away on these trips didn’t count. No questions could be asked, and he had only one request: No one she fooled around with could be anyone he knew. But here they were, among all of their mutual friends, and there was this man, Doug, who to all seeing humans was sleeping with her.

  “Do you still have kids?” Josie asked. “Or do they already have jobs at a cannery or something?”

  Sam raised her chin toward the shore. A few hundred yards toward the water two silhouettes were standing before a large boulder. On the boulder was a giant bird, and Josie laughed to herself, figuring that any second she would be told that it was a bald eagle.

  “Bald eagle,” said a man’s voice, and she turned to find Doug, holding a brown bottle of local beer out to her.

  “You guys want to go see Zoe and Becca?” Josie said, and gave Paul an imploring look. “Go say hi and come back to eat.” Paul took Ana by the hand and walked toward the water.

  Josie had a surging feeling that Sam had made a good life for herself here—she had many friends, friends willing to come out to the beach on a weeknight to greet Josie and her children.

  “You get lost?” Sam asked. “We got here at four, set everything up and everyone showed up at five. We said five, right?”

  Josie tried to flare her nostrils.

  “We knocked on the doors of a bunch of the RVs up there,” Sam continued, “but no one had seen you guys.”

  It was fascinating, Josie thought, how little she knew what to expect from Sam. Five years was a long time, and Sam, a shape-shifter to begin with, might have changed into some entirely new entity by now. But she was still a keeper of grudges.

  Josie explained that they had been driving all day, and that they were off schedule, napping at odd times, that she didn’t have a phone, and thus didn’t have an alarm clock, and anyway so what, it’s summer and Sam was among friends anyway, so who cares if she was late, does anyone really care anyway, ha ha.

  At the end of her soliloquy, Josie saw that Sam was looking at her in a certain way, her eyes searching and her mouth amused, and she remembered that Sam had often done this, had presumed she had a direct line into Josie’s elemental soul, could get messages no one else could receive or decipher.

  “Don’t do that,” Josie said. “Don’t act like you know me so well. I haven’t seen you in five years.”

  This delighted Sam even more. Her eyes opened like cartoon headlights. “You left your practice and fled Carl. Or fled your practice and left Carl. That’s what I heard.”

  The only person she could have heard any of this from would have been Sunny, who was anguished over the loss of Josie’s practice and who would never have put it in such terms. But Sam had always been flippant about any loss, any tragedy. She felt it her right, as a survivor of a broken personal world.

  “Well,” Josie said, and couldn’t conjure a way to finish the thought. She hoped the one word would suffice.

  In the stretch of Josie’s silence, Sam only grew more delighted. “Well indeed!” she said, as if they were engaged in some cute verbal dance they both kn
ew and loved.

  “My kids should eat,” Josie said, hoping to focus herself and Sam on practical matters.

  “Doug’s on it,” Sam said, nodding toward a bonfire, which Josie realized was also the barbecue. This was a barbarian arrangement—a vast open fire being fed with giant logs, and over it a grill held high by a complicated latticework of sticks.

  “They like bratwurst?” Doug asked.

  Josie said they did, knowing she would have to cut them into tiny pieces and tell her children they were hot dogs.

  Paul and Ana returned with the twins, thirteen years old, identical, willowy and athletic, taller than their mother or Josie. Their hair was strawberry blond and thick, and with their light freckles and their eyes dark and bright and intense and laughing, they had the look of medieval warrior-women just back from joyous plundering and man-beating and whale-riding. They strode to Josie and hugged her as if they really knew and loved her. Josie, overcome, told them they were beautiful, that she couldn’t believe it, and they each looked directly at her, actually listening. They were not quite of this world.

  They took their leave, throwing sticks that the many large dogs could chase, and Josie gave her children plates piled with fragments of bratwurst and corn grilled in foil. Her kids sat on an enormous log, next to a line of boys, all of whom were nine or ten years old, and each of whom was holding his own carving knife. As Paul and Ana ate, the boys whittled, their fists white, their long hair covering their eyes. Paul was watching passively, but Ana was enthralled. Josie knew she would want a knife and would talk about nothing but knives for days.

  “You look tired,” Sam said.

  “You’re sunburned,” Josie said. “That your boyfriend?” She indicated Doug, who was dodging the changing direction of the bonfire’s smoke. Sam shrugged and went to Doug, rubbing his back and then ducking from the smoke as it enveloped her.

  Josie glanced over to see that Ana had repositioned herself. She was now sitting on the sand in front of the child-carvers, her eyes at blade level. The boys were laughing, thinking Ana was a trip, that this girl was the craziest thing they’d ever seen. Then Ana’s eyes lit on an idea, and she lifted her sweater, the Bolivian one, all that heavy wool woven loosely, pulled it over her head with great effort to reveal a Green Lantern shirt underneath. She was showing the boys that she was no girl, no simple girl—that she was like them, that she liked Green Lantern, that she appreciated fighting evil with great supernatural force, appreciated the cutting of wood with big knives. The boys didn’t care enough, though: they glanced, chuckled, but said nothing. Ana was not dissuaded. Shivering in her Green Lantern shirt—the temperature was dropping into the fifties—she squeezed in next to them on the log, every so often putting her hand on one boy’s forearm, as if to participate somehow in the carving. As if, through this human transference, she could be carving, too. Josie served her a second brat on a paper plate and Ana devoured it, never taking her eyes off the boys and their knives.

  Paul, meanwhile, took his plate and walked to the twins near the eagle and the boulder on the beach. Josie watched as he made his way directly to them, and then stopped short. The girls turned toward him and seemed to acknowledge his presence in some satisfactory way. He squatted on the beach and ate his food and the three of them looked at the eagle, and a pair of horseback riders trotted slowly across the horizon in the shallow water, until one of the girls threw a rock close to the bird, and it lifted off, its shoulders seeming tired, the movement of its wings far too slow and labored to create flight, but then it was up, rising like it was nothing, flight was nothing, the planet was nothing, nothing at all, just another place to leave.

  VII.

  AFTER THE BARBECUE THE KIDS CLIMBED into the back of Sam’s pickup, with Sam and Josie in front, and they drove back to Sam’s house, passing young pines all the way, about a mile up a hill of tidy homes. The house, with a rolling lawn and orderly rows of shrubs surrounding it, had a clear view of the rest of Homer below. This was not some deep-country log cabin. This was a respectable and modern house, newly painted and sturdy and clean.

  To be a bird-watching guide in Homer, wow. Sam had it right. She had gone up to Alaska and opened her bird-watching operation, no fuss, didn’t ask anyone’s permission. She had the run of the forest, some island off of Homer, and she had it figured out. Had she left society, as Josie wanted to? Yes and no. She ran a business, she had kids, the kids went to school, she paid taxes, she sent emails. She was as trapped as Josie was, but she had a boat, and wore boots, and her daughters were these holy outdoor creatures with long-flowing sweet-corn hair. She’d figured out a few things. She’d simplified.

  Paul and Ana got changed and went upstairs, following the twins, and the twins said they would put them to bed. Ana was thrilled, Paul cautiously ecstatic. Josie had planned to tell Paul about Sam being his actual godmother, or announce this to Sam, but now she wasn’t sure. She hoped Paul had forgotten.

  “I have a surprise,” Sam said.

  She’d been making her own whiskey and wanted Josie to try it. Josie had never developed an appreciation for brown liquor, and was fairly sure Sam’s would not be good.

  Sam brought out a medieval bottle and poured anyway, and poured too much, and worse, she poured it into a coffee cup. Josie smelled it, and the stench was stronger than regular whiskey—it was wicked and fathomless, a predatory smell. Josie feigned sipping it, pretended to grimace, pretended to swallow and enjoy it in the brave rugged way Sam expected.

  “Damn,” Josie said.

  Sam was pleased. The purpose of the whiskey maker, it seemed, was to make the drinker gag.

  “So good,” Josie said. She hadn’t tasted it yet.

  They took their cups out to the back deck. Sam grabbed a heavy blanket and turned on a propane heater and brought it close. The night was cooling and the sky was grey with low cloud cover. They sat with their feet touching, their bodies making a V facing the dark trees.

  Josie assumed deep talking was about to happen, and so took a long pull on the whiskey, wanting its effects without experiencing its taste. But the taste was inescapable and wretched. It burned. She thought of tennis shoes on fire. “This is awful,” she said.

  Sam smiled and refilled her cup.

  “So what the fuck are you doing up here?” Sam asked.

  Josie laughed. Sam laughed. They laughed loudly, so loudly that an upstairs window opened and one of the twins, Josie couldn’t tell which, leaned down and her dark face said, “Quiet out there, missies. It’s bedtime for the little ones.”

  The window closed and Sam turned to Josie.

  “So Carl didn’t want to come?” She was kidding. “Seriously. Are you in touch with him? He in the picture?”

  Josie gave Sam an accounting of his participation in his children’s lives, which took eight or nine seconds.

  “Too bad,” Sam said. “Remember when he nicknamed Ana Oh No and then My Bad? He was funny. Actually pretty good with kids.” Both of these things had been true to some people at some point, but somehow his disappearance made him seem, to Josie at least, both less funny and less child-friendly. Whenever she heard Carl praised, she conjured his comical crimes. He had, more than once, asked Josie to fake an orgasm. She was ready to present this to Sam but Sam was moving on.

  “And did I hear right, that you sold your practice? You’re not a dentist anymore? And wasn’t your face numb for a year or something? You’re not planning on driving that RV off a cliff, are you? Stop me if I’m prying.”

  “No,” Josie said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She thought, You, who fled to Alaska and is somehow married but not married—you’re judging me? But chose not to. There was no point. Josie took another long sip of the sickening whiskey and felt she could just let the night pass over her, an hour until she could claim exhaustion and go to sleep. The night air was warm, and the crickets or frogs were making their noise, and there was a breeze and far off, some road hummed a forgettable tune.

&nbs
p; Sam topped off Josie’s cup. “So you quit? You sold the practice? What did Sunny say about that?” Sam asked, and Josie was glad that Sam had stopped calling Sunny Mom. The last time she’d seen Sam, she was using that word, Mom. Neither she nor Sam had called Sunny by that name when they lived with her, and hearing her use it, twenty years later or whenever it was, was jarring—as if Sam had assessed what Sunny had been to her and had given it a name. Hadn’t she once called her Sunsy? She had! Sam liked names, nicknames. These names did what—they helped Sam define, or redefine, what she and Sunny were to each other. They gave her some control, as if to call her Sunsy put her in her place, as a small and aging woman, whereas Mom had been a holy honorific. But now she was Sunny again. Sunny was just her name. The name as they’d known her. Let’s settle on something and leave it alone, Josie wanted to say.

  She sipped her whiskey, looked into the obsidian sky. This could be the cause of all modern neurosis, she thought, the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. The world is running out of water. No, actually, there is enough water underground to cover the surface of the earth six hundred feet deep. So there’s no water problem? Well, only six percent of that underground water is drinkable. So we’re doomed? Well…The hedging and backtracking never ended. The scientists, the astronomers being the worst offenders. We are matter. No, we are surrounded by matter. There are nine planets. No, eight. We are exceptional, our planet singular in its ability to sustain life. No, there are billions of Earth-like planets, most of them bigger than ours, most of them likely to be far better developed. Sunny. Sunsy. Mom.

  Sam was saying something. Josie focused on the words. “She must have been devastated. Devastated.”

  Oh this. Josie had expected this. When she’d taken up dentistry in college, Sam was cruel. “You don’t have to suck up like that, Joze.” That Josie had gone through with it, and had opened her own practice. Sam had been livid. Paralyzed. Then she’d moved up to Anchorage, then Homer, and there was an unspoken theory among Sunny, Josie, and Helen, that Sam had chosen Alaska as her way of ceding victory and territory to Josie. Josie had won, she’d secured Sunny’s greater love, and thus could have her and have the Lower 48.