Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  “How do you feel?” Sam finally asked.

  “Like a champ. I feel like a champ,” Josie said.

  “You want any of the Vicodin?”

  Josie declined. “You keep it,” she said, feeling stoic and superior. She wanted badly for Sam to keep the Vicodin, which would imply that Sam would use it sometime in the future, and when she did, Josie would archive some small and meaningless victory.

  Now Sam sat down on the coffee table in front her.

  “Listen, I forgot to tell you last night. They called Carl.”

  Josie stopped breathing. She held a finger up, and sharpened her eyes, wordlessly telling Sam to shut the fuck up. She grabbed Sam’s elbow and led her outside, to the back porch, and there, Sam explained that when Josie was unconscious, she’d told the nurses that she, Sam, had to get back to Paul and Ana, the patient’s kids, and then the nurse asked about the father, and Sam had maybe fucked up—her words, maybe fucked up—a little bit by explaining some rough outline of the situation, that the father was back in Florida, and that the nurse very nicely suggested they could call the father, and maybe, Sam said, she got flustered, said No!, and the nurses got suspicious and then it turned into a real thing, with everyone, including Dr. Blachblah, insisting on calling Carl, and then it got a bit weird for about an hour.

  “You couldn’t just tell the nurses you had called Carl?”

  “My job isn’t to lie for you, Joze.”

  “You’re right,” Josie said, already knowing she and her children would be on the road within an hour of Sam leaving for work. “You’re right. Thanks for all you’ve done.”

  Sam was taken aback, and grew gentle and idiotic. “Maybe this is good. Relieves the pressure.” Again she put her hand on Josie’s arm.

  Having the father know not just that Josie had kidnapped the children, but exactly where she’d kidnapped them to, was not likely to relieve any pressure. “You’re right again,” Josie said, holding back a laugh. “You better get ready. Don’t want you being late for work.”

  —

  When Sam had gone to her boat and the twins to school, Josie packed her kids’ things, choosing not to tell Paul and Ana they were leaving for good.

  Josie found Sam’s perfect reminder pad.

  We’re heading out, she wrote.

  “What’re you writing?” Paul asked.

  “A note for Aunt Sam.”

  “What’s it say?”

  Ana came to look.

  “That’s a short note,” she said.

  X.

  THE SHAVED SQUARE ON THE side of Josie’s head was fascinating to Paul. This is why he wanted to sit in the passenger seat. They’d left Homer and were approaching the confluence of many highways, going east and west and north.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Does it look good?”

  Paul shook his head slowly. His eyes conveyed how scared he was by this square cut into his mother’s scalp. It was not motherly. It would shake him, just as Josie had been shaken by seeing her own mother return from the hospital with her head wrapped in gauze. She’d fallen on the back deck, clumsy on mixed meds. This was when she started taking the drugs they were giving the soldiers, before the scandal, before Sunny. Josie turned her head to look at the shaved square, the lines so clean. She did not want to scar her son this way, with the knowledge of her frailty, her aptitude to be abandoned by her pseudo-sister and to get hit by Homeric delivery trucks, sent into a ditch. But the introduction of frailty in a parent—is this so terrible? It should, perhaps, be introduced right away, so the shock is not so great later. We are better when we expect tragedy, calamity, chaos.

  “Budget!” Raj had said to her in one of his wild revelatory rants. “You just need to budget!” he said, or exclaimed. He was the only human she’d ever known who actually spoke in a way that could warrant that verb, to exclaim. The word was a strange one, so common in the picture books she read to her children. There, in the fifties and sixties, everyone was exclaiming, but in real life she’d never known the verb to be true. But then there was Raj, with his wide eyes and loud voice, exclaiming all the time. “You need to make a life budget!” he exclaimed. “You ever make a household budget?”

  Josie said she had not. Not really, no. She had chosen instead to guess her savings, more or less know her checking balance, to over-report her earnings and underestimate her expenses.

  “Never?” Raj exclaimed. “Well, it can give you great peace when things are tight, or when things feel chaotic. A dozen bills can feel like an assault, but within the framework of a budget, of expectations, they’re reasonable, powerless even. You expect them, and have means to dispose of them.”

  Josie had looked around, hoping for escape.

  “So think about it the same way with your life, with the country or world. Any given year you should expect certain things. You can expect to see some horrifying act of terror, for example. A new beheading of a man in orange is a shock and will make you want to never leave the house, but not if you have budgeted for it. A new mass shooting in a mall or school can cripple you for a day but not if you’ve budgeted for it. That’s this month’s shooting, you can say. And if there isn’t a shooting that month, all the better. You’ve come out ahead on the ledger. You have a surplus. A refund.”

  Raj was one of the reasons she thought all her colleagues in the medical or semi-medical world were one synapse away from real madness. “Budget for your children incurring some injury before they’re ten,” he continued. “Half of your friends will get divorced. One of your parents will die younger than they should. Two of your straight friends are actually gay. And at some point someone, some stranger, some patient, will wake up one day and decide to try to destroy you and take your business!” he said. He exclaimed.

  Josie had dismissed this conversation and Raj’s theory until every aspect of it came to pass—the beheadings, the shootings and then Evelyn—all within weeks. The man was a prophet.

  “Where are we going?” Paul asked.

  “I’m thinking north,” Josie said. She harbored the hope that she could make her children think that this was the plan all along, that they had planned to stay at Sam’s for only two nights, and then leave, without saying goodbye and with no destination in mind. She made a mental note to buy a hat.

  “We’ll come back,” she said.

  Now Ana became aware that something was happening. “Where we going?” she asked.

  “We left Aunt Sam’s house and we’re not coming back,” Paul told her, and Ana began to cry.

  “I think we should go back,” Paul said. He meant it as a threat. He’d demonstrated his power to make Ana weep, and seemed to imply he could and would do it again.

  “There’s no point,” Josie said. “Sam’s working and the kids are in school. And after school, the girls play lacrosse. We’d just be sitting around all day.”

  A long silence gave Josie the mistaken impression she’d scored a knockout blow. Why indeed stay at someone’s house when they were gone all day and tired at night? She’d just convinced herself that it made no sense. The trip to Homer, which she’d left open-ended, was more rightfully brief. Josie looked in the rearview mirror and caught Paul squinting.

  “Why aren’t we in school?” he asked.

  Josie looked at the road.

  Ana stopped crying. “Is it time for school?” she asked the two of them.

  “No, sweetie,” Josie said.

  “Yes it is,” Paul said to her, but loudly, legally, announcing it to the Chateau’s speeding hall of justice. “It’s September. We should have started school Monday. Everyone’s in school without us.”

  Now Ana was crying again, though she had no idea why. She didn’t care at all about school, but Paul was creating the impression that all order had fallen away, that there was no past, no future.

  “Why’d we come here right when school started?” Paul asked.

  “I want to be in school!” Ana wailed.


  Josie wanted to explain it all to them. She yearned to. At least to Paul. He’d actually understand her point of view; he harbored no great loyalty to Carl. Not since Carl had signed up to lead his adventurer’s club. He and Paul had conceived it together, but then he’d simply not done it. Paul had gotten four other boys to sign up to hike into the woods every Saturday evening, Carl at the lead, but when it came time to do it, Carl had not shown up, had pretended that no such plans had been made, and if they had been made, they weren’t firm, c’mon. The four boys stayed all night at Josie’s house, indoors, reading inappropriate comics.

  But Paul was too young to hear all this.

  “No more discussion. Five minutes of quiet,” Josie said, and then thought of a nice coda. “And this trip is educational. I checked it all out with your school. This is independent study.”

  “That’s not true,” Paul said.

  “Get in back,” Josie hissed. She’d had enough insolence. He was eight. “And it is true.” It was true. She’d actually told the assistant principal, a mischievous older woman who dressed like a sexy mortician, all about Carl, and the assistant principal had given Josie permission to enter the school year sometime later in the fall. “No one should have to put up with that,” she’d said, and every time doubt crept into her, Josie thought of Ms. Gonzalez and the delicious way she rolled her eyes at every one of Carl’s misdeeds.

  The misdeeds were many, and he was known by all who knew him to be a ridiculous man, but this new plan was too much, was Caligulian, Roveian, and she had no obligation to cooperate. Like so much about Carl, his request—his near-demand—defied all propriety, was so unprecedented in its depravity that it took one’s breath away. How to explain it? He was getting married, to someone else, to a woman named Teresa, of course it was Teresa, she had no choice but to be named Teresa. She was from some kind of established family, and there were those in the family who had their doubts about Carl. Doubts about Carl! When Josie had heard this, through an intermediary, she cackled, loving those words. Doubts about Carl. Doubts about Carl. His name could not be uttered without doubts. His name necessitated punctuation: Carl? It wasn’t right without the question mark.

  “Mama?” Ana called from behind her. “Been five minutes.”

  Josie looked in the rearview mirror, saw Ana, then looked in the side-view, seven or eight cars backed up behind them. She pulled over to let them pass, cursing the devil Stan. After the caravan moved on, glaring at Josie, she pulled back onto the road.

  “Five minutes more,” Josie said.

  Carl had called one day, had explained it in his way. “I’d love to have the kids out here for a week or so,” he’d said, as if they did this regularly, split time like this, as if every month they catapulted the kids across the country for visits with their wonderful quick-shitting father. “Teresa’s family wants to spend time with ’em,” he’d said, adopting some kind of folksy Floridian diphthong he’d invented completely (he was from Ohio), “and a’course I’d like to show ’em off.”

  Speechless. She was often speechless. How could a few sentences contain so many crimes of language and ethics? But since their cleaving, any time she interacted with him, she was agog, stunned, breathless, aghast. It was worth answering the phone when Carl called because always there was something so toweringly craven, so doubtless important to anthropologists and students of deviant psychiatry. There was the time he’d watched some news segment about soy and called at ten thirty at night to talk about it. “I hope you’re monitoring the soy intake with the kids. Especially Ana. They say it accelerates a girl’s entry into puberty.” He really said this. He really said and did so many things, so precious few of them within the boundaries of predictable human behavior. Now this visit to Punta del Rey. “They’ll love it,” he’d said. “They can swim, get to know their new grandparents. Play golf. Maybe Jarts.” Jarts, he said. Jarts, which had been banned in the eighties. It was wonderful, it was perverse, it was Carl. Carl?

  Finally, through some intermediaries—well, the same intermediary, Carl’s mom, who liked Josie more than Carl—finally Josie got the full picture: The wedding was in the fall, but there were those among Teresa’s family opposed to the union, thinking or knowing Carl for what he was—a deadbeat father, an abdicator, a man born without a spine—so Carl (and Teresa? It was unclear how much she knew) had concocted this plan to show them he was close to his progeny, that he was part of their lives. And Josie thought, you know what, goddamn you to hell. You’re in Florida? I’ll be in Alaska.

  But she did not tell him this.

  “Are we going back to the red house?” Ana asked from the depths of the Chateau. She’d unbuckled her seatbelt and was standing near the bathroom.

  “Sit down and put your seatbelt on,” Josie said.

  “Paulie said I didn’t have to,” Ana said.

  “Paul, you’re on probation,” Josie said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  What the hell was happening? Paul now knew sarcasm. Ana sat down again and buckled herself in.

  “Of course we are,” she said, answering Ana’s question. Their house was not red, it was grey, but the trim was maroon, so Ana had taken to calling it the red house, and Paul and Josie had never corrected her.

  Had she told Ana that they wouldn’t be going back? Or if they did go back, it would only be to move out? Josie’s feelings about the house were a barbed, snarling thing. She and Carl had thought buying a house a sensible thing, an objective not often debated in the civilized world. They had seen houses, and debated their merits, and finally bought one, a home needing work. Carl said he would do the work, would at least oversee the work, and do some of it himself (he had no idea how to do any such work) and she thought it would keep him busy and focused, even if he were just watching others labor. So they got themselves a loan, and bought the house at its asking price, and it was all very simple, and while they remained in their rental, Carl undertook (oversaw) (occasionally dropped in on) the first basic renovations, three months’ worth, until they could move in. Which they did, they moved in, the kids gleeful, really, they couldn’t get enough of the new bedroom they’d share, their unusually big closet, a strangely small and terrifying basement, and then, after a week of sleeping in this house, which was a fine solid house priced at the average price for the homes in their town, Carl began to lose his mind.

  “This is wrong,” he said. “This is decadent.” He was standing in their bedroom, looking around like they’d entered the Vanderbilts’ Newport spread. “Look at this!”

  Josie looked around the room, and saw only a mattress, an unassembled bed and a small window with a view of a lopsided apple tree. Josie was stunned, but not quite as stunned as she would have been had Carl been someone sane or stable. “What? Why? We just moved in.”

  It turned out Carl was conflicted, torn, shredded, by the juxtaposition—was it a paradox? What was it? he wondered, What is it? he wailed aloud—of having just bought a house, and being in the middle of renovations. He said the word renovations like it was some filthy thing, as if they’d been burning money at the feet of orphans—all while the Occupy movement was trying valiantly to alter the foundations of our financial system. How could they, Carl and Josie, be debating what kind of wood floors to use? History was being made elsewhere, everywhere, and they were choosing paint colors and whether their lamps should have nickel or copper finishes. At the hardware store one day, when they were supposed to choose a cabinet for under their bathroom sink, he couldn’t get out of the car.

  “I can’t do this,” he said.

  “The door handle is just there, below the window. Pull on it,” Josie said. She already knew his state of mind. Carl was mercurial and surprising but he never surprised in his shape-shifting. He was inconsistent in all things but his cowardice. His unreliability could be counted on. Should she point out his impossible hypocrisy? The fact that he was the son of a cattle rancher who’d decimated some untold miles of Central America to feed cows that wo
uld feed Americans and Japanese? And that he’d never had a job? And that to have him judge her, their life, the life she paid for—

  It was impossible. There was nowhere to start, nothing to say.

  “No! No. You go,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”

  Were they really about to spend six hundred dollars on a cabinet? he wanted to know. Did they really spend five hundred and fifty dollars on beds for the kids?

  “Otherwise the kids sleep on what?” she asked. She thought he might really have an alternative.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we need to start asking these questions.”

  She laughed out loud. It was not planned.

  He couldn’t participate in the spending of money like this, he said. Money he had no hand in making anyway. When they’d met, Carl had been fired from a vague position at an ad agency; he’d never held a job more than a year. Had she really allowed him to drift? Was it her fault? Had she actually told him to—had she said the words pursue your passion? Lord. Carl had no conception of how to earn money for his children or himself, had no sense of the steps involved between waking up one day and sometime later being paid for work done. He knew how to wake up, and knew how to cash a check, but everything in between was a muddle. All his bosses had been ogres and psychopaths—chiefly, it seemed, because they’d tried to tell him what to do. That itself was some high crime.

  All those months of Occupy were disastrous. He was paralyzed. She found him in bed, lying on his back, on their capitalist mattress, a towel on his face. She found him on the floor of the children’s room, splayed like he’d fallen in a ditch. He said he had migraines. He said he couldn’t go through with it. He called off the renovations, sent the workers away, leaving the house full of plastic sheeting, billowing loudly from the open windows.