Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  She left the Chateau to gag, and joined her children on the side of the road for a few moments, taking in the trash-laden highway. Someone had thrown a tampon out a car window, and in seconds, given its proximity to Ana and the way she was eyeing it, Josie knew that while she was in the Chateau, Ana had picked it up and been told, by Paul, to drop it. Ana was eyeing Josie warily, wondering if she was about to see her mother vomit for the first time, but she was also keeping the tampon in her peripheral vision—waiting for the opportunity to examine it more closely, or possibly put her mouth on it in some way.

  “I found the smell,” Josie said.

  But she had not quite found the smell.

  She went back into the Chateau, wondering about a way to tape the bathroom shut, or wrap the toilet in plastic or some material impenetrable to fecal smells. And while making her way back to the bathroom, she saw something she had not seen before. On the wall just next to the stove was a switch, which Stan had not told her about, because Stan was a motherfucker. This switch looked like the kind of small metal switch in abundance in old airplanes, the kind of switch that provides a satisfying click to the user. Above the switch were the words Tank Heater.

  Josie noted that the switch was turned on, meaning that some tank was being heated. She thought first of the gas tank, but knew better than to guess that there was a switch, between the kitchen and bathroom, that heated a tank full of highly flammable gasoline. The only tank, then, she could guess at was the tank of feces and urine that was below the toilet.

  A gasp escaped from her mouth. It began to come together. The Chateau featured a tank-heating mechanism. Why? Josie deduced that in the winter owners would not want their feces being frozen, because frozen, the feces could not be drained through the sky-blue ribbed tube, and so there would be no room for new feces. The feces had to be kept warm and in liquid form, so it could be drained, and new feces could be put in the tank.

  Ana had turned on the feces-heating mechanism. She had done this in August, when the feces didn’t need to be heated. So Josie and her family were driving through lower-central Alaska while not only carrying their feces but heating them. Cooking them. What would that be? Josie searched for the verb. Broiling? When the heat is coming from the interior surfaces of the oven, as opposed to gas or flame? She was sure the word was broiling.

  She turned the switch off, returned to Paul and Ana by the lone spruce, and told them they should not turn any switches on, anywhere in the Chateau. She told them what had happened, about the feces and the broiling of it, and they nodded, very serious now. They believed this story without hesitation, and she marveled at this pure stage of life, when a child is first told about such things, about how to broil feces, why they shouldn’t do so in the summer.

  They got in the Chateau and drove on. It was a great day to be alive.

  XI.

  “ ‘I AM TRYING TO CONTACT Mr. and Mrs. Wright. I have lost their first names,’ ” Paul read aloud. “ ‘There were three boys, L.J., George, and Bud Wright. There were two girls that I knew of, Anna and another whose name I have forgotten. My brother Wheeler and I worked for them in 1928 or 1929 in the wheat harvest. We also threshed some flax, the first and only flax we ever worked in or had ever seen. The Wrights lived in a sod shanty at Chaseley, North Dakota near Bowdon, North Dakota. The last I ever heard of them, George was married and lived near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. We loved those dear ones. Would like to hear from anyone who can give me any information as to their whereabouts.’ ”

  The idea to have Paul read “Trails Grown Dim” to her as they drove was a brilliant one, Josie thought. They had gone about a hundred miles north of the scene of the feces-heating, with the windows open, and the air in the Chateau was reasonably better now, though they wouldn’t be the best judges—they’d been breathing human-waste fumes for so long they wouldn’t know the difference.

  They passed a large parking lot, attached to an abandoned shopping center, where a firefighters’ staging ground had been set up. FUEL TRANSPORT said one sign. FIRE SHIRTS SOLD HERE said another. A half-dozen red and yellow and white fire trucks of various sizes waited for orders.

  “Do another,” she said.

  “Okay,” Paul said, a serious but delighted look on his face. He was sitting up front with her, and Josie was reasonably sure this was against the law, even in this renegade state, having an eight-year-old in the front seat, sitting on a stack of towels. But Josie was enjoying his company too much to let him disappear into the back.

  “Here’s the last one on the page,” he said. “ ‘I am interested in finding the whereabouts of my great-uncle, Melvin H. Lahar (pronounced Liar). He was born in Washington State between 1889 and 1893, son of Charles A. Lahar and Ida Mae Gleason Sharp. He had one full sister, Nancy L. (nicknames Emma and Dottie) Lahar Farris. He was last seen in Washington just prior to World War I. No one in the family has seen or heard of him since. He was raised in Colfax, Washington in the household of his aunt, Mrs. Minnie Longstreet. There is some talk, too, about him having been a bank robber, involved in a shootout in Bend, Oregon. Any clarity or information would be appreciated.’ ”

  “That’s a good one to end on,” Josie said, hoping Ana hadn’t heard the word “robber.” It would provoke a string of questions, if not keep her up all night. “Is she asleep?” she asked Paul.

  He didn’t have to turn around. “No. She’s just looking out the window.” He nodded toward the ATVs. This was a new phenomenon. The main roads were paralleled by narrow dirt paths where men and women and families traveled to and from town, with groceries or anything else, on four-wheeled ATVs. These alternate paths were everywhere now, in this part of Alaska, wherever they were.

  “Why can’t we go like that?” Ana asked from the back. Josie turned to find Ana’s face was pressed against the glass.

  They watched mothers with small children sitting in front of their ATVs, helping steer, as they went up and down the gentle hills of their dirt roads, and Josie, too, thought it seemed a logical way to travel. Finally they caught an eight-year-old piloting his own vehicle, a scale-model ATV, and Josie knew Ana’s imagination would ignite. She mouthed the words just before Ana said them: “I want one.”

  “You can’t have one,” Paul said. “You’re five.” Now he turned to Josie. “Okay, you want me to go through my school day?” He said this as if she’d been bothering him about this for weeks and he’d finally relented in telling her. This was a new Paul: able to dismiss Ana quickly, feeling worthy of dominating the conversation. Had sitting in the front seat emboldened him that much? Josie told him she’d be delighted to hear about his school day.

  Recounting it all took him fully thirty-five minutes. There was a good deal of explanation of the rows. There were four rows in his classroom, he explained, and one of them, the blues, was stacked with the rambunctious kids, and Paul.

  “Were you put in the blue row as a balance against the bad kids?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  He told her about the time when a police officer came to class to talk to the kids about crosswalk safety and stranger danger, and almost immediately four different kids volunteered the information that their fathers were in jail. The officer didn’t know how to handle this, and had to tell the kids to stop raising their hands.

  The Ohio town where they’d lived—it was exhilarating to think of it in the past tense—had a private school, too, where the other half of the children went, and hearing Paul tell this story, thinking it interesting, Josie had the thought that for the parents in her town, a paramount purpose of private school, and its ludicrous cost, was that these private-school children would not be sharing their scissors and glue with children whose fathers were in prison. This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pu
ll these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools—we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether, to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle.

  “Archery,” Paul said. There was a sign up ahead. ARCHERY. LESSONS. TARGETS.

  They had nowhere in particular to be, though Josie hoped to get to Denali the next day.

  “Can we?” Paul asked, and because he so seldom asked for anything, Josie pulled over, descending the highway and onto the long gravel driveway, the Chateau like a tired mule groaning in protest to be led this way.

  They followed the signs half a mile and then saw it, the wide green field, the red and white targets. But they saw no people. Still they got out, and without waking Ana, who was sleeping, soaking in her sweat, they looked around. There was a wooden booth of some kind, painted pine green, where one would usually pay and be given a bow and told where to go. The door to the booth was closed, but a window was open. Josie peered in but saw no one. There were no other cars, so they should have presumed it closed. And it probably was closed.

  “Look,” Paul said, pointing to a tree near the rightmost target. There was a bow leaning against it, an old thing, some ancient model. Josie saw no harm in Paul looking at it, so he ran off across the field, and returned with both the bow and three arrows he’d found in the thicket nearby. One arrow was bent into a parenthesis.

  “Can I try?” he asked.

  Paul never hurt himself, had never risked any injury to himself or anyone around him, so Josie told him he could. He took the bow in one hand and the arrow in another, and it took him some time to figure out how to do it well, but soon Paul was at least sending the arrows forward, though the bent one squirmed like some airborne snake.

  Josie’s eyes wandered, and soon found their way back to the archery booth, and its open window. She leaned in and saw the booth was mostly bare but for a sleeve of styrofoam cups, a bin of broken bows and, hanging from a nail, a green visor with the words STRAIGHT ARROW printed across its horizontal swath. Josie immediately knew she would take the visor, but knew, too, that she would debate taking it for a few minutes as she watched Paul shoot. Finally she reached in, grabbed the visor, tried it on, found it fit, and then arrived at an excuse—it was in the garbage—to use when Paul would see it on her and ask about its provenance.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked, returning from the target with his bow and arrows, looking strangely adept and professional.

  “I saw it on the ground next to the booth,” Josie said, adapting her story slightly, on the fly, feeling this lie becoming whiter and more inconsequential. “It hides the bald spot.”

  Paul peered around the side of her head, and then pulled the visor gently upward, better covering the gap, and then returned to his archery. Eventually, by practicing and by getting ever closer to the target, Paul struck near the middle a few times and then did not want to leave. So they stayed. They had food in the Chateau, and they had nowhere to be, so Josie brought out the lawn chair, sat and watched Paul shoot until Ana woke up. The sun was dropping behind the tree line on the high ridge behind them when Ana came down from the Chateau, briefly stuporous, until she saw the visor on her mother’s head.

  “Like Dad,” she said.

  Josie told her the story about finding it next to the booth, Ana finding it believable and very much what she would do in the same position—Paul, if he could, would have brought it to the police station to be claimed—but having Ana remind her of Carl, and Carl’s tendency toward visors, sapped Josie’s STRAIGHT ARROW headwear of much of its appeal. She thought about tossing it, and decided she would, as soon as an alternative arrived.

  Josie watched her children shoot their arrows, running and giggling, and realized that a child’s forgetting of joy is the principal crime committed upon a parent. Raj, in one of his rants, had said as much. His daughter was seventeen. Oh god, he said. The seventeen-year-olds, they will rip your heart out. A whole joyous childhood, and they will tell you it was all shit. Every year was a fraud. They will throw it all away. Josie had felt for Raj, and had feared the wrath from her own children, but then remembered: Hadn’t she emancipated herself from her own mother and father?

  But for her own children, Josie was determined to thwart this crime of forgetting. She would remind them of joy. Document joy, tell tales of joy at bedtime, take photos and write diaries. Journals of joy that could never be denied or conveniently forgotten. She began to conceive a new theory of parenting, where the goal was not the achieving of a desired result. The object is not to raise a child for some future outcome, no! Times like these, together in the pines amid the fading light, as the kids run through long grass, her son gravely teaching himself archery while her daughter tries to induce some self-injury, these moments alone were the object. Josie felt, fleetingly, that she could die having achieved such a day. Get to a place like this, get to a moment like this, and that alone is the object. Or it could be the object. A new way of thinking. Stretch some of these days together and that’s all one could want or expect. Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggle for what—your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins. This was the common criminal pursuit of all contemporary humankind. Give my child an Ikea desk and twelve hours a day of sedentary typing. This will mean success for me, them, our family, our lineage. She would not pursue this. She would not subject her children to this. They would not seek these specious things, no. It was only about making them loved in a moment in the sun.

  Ana walked over to her chair and leaned against it. Her bow was around her shoulder in a startlingly professional way.

  “Mom?” Ana said. “Are there robbers here?”

  “No,” Josie said. On cue, a distant siren knifed through the air. “That’s a fire engine,” she said, pre-empting. Paul was nearby, still shooting his arrows.

  “But are there bad guys?”

  “No.”

  “Where are they then?”

  “They’re really far away,” Josie said, and caught Paul’s eye. Why tell her there are bad guys at all? he seemed to be saying.

  “You’ll never see them in your whole life,” Josie said. “And we have army guys fighting them.” Again she caught herself saying unhelpful things.

  “What about the Joker?” Ana asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Is he real?”

  “No. He’s pretend. Someone just drew him, the same as I could draw him. Someone like me made up the Joker.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Yeah. Or someone like your dad. More like your dad.”

  “What about skunks?” Ana asked.

  Josie tried not to laugh. “Skunks?”

  “Are they real?”

  “Sure, but they’re not dangerous. They can’t hurt you.”

  “But are monsters real?”

  “No, there are no real monsters.”

  “How do we know about monsters then?”

  “Well, people made them up. Someone came up with an idea and drew it and made up a name.”

  “So someone can make up a name like Iron Man?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about Randall?”

  “Randall?”

  “Yeah, is that a name?”

  “It is. Did you hear that name somewhere?”

  “I think so. I heard that word.” Ana’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t know if it was a name.”

  “It’s a name,” Josie said.

  Another pair of sirens threaded through the sky. Ana listened, her eyes concentrating on Josie’s arm. She was tapping it with her tiny fingers, as if sending a coded subterranean message.

  “Are the army guys big?” she asked.

  “They are. Much bigger than the bad guys.”
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br />   “Are they monsters?”

  “Who?”

  “The army guys.”

  “No. They’re regular people. They have kids, too. But then they put on a uniform and they fight the bad guys.” And to try to end the discussion, Josie added, “And they always win.”

  “But they killed Jeremy.”

  “What?”

  “Someone killed him, right?”

  Ana had been building up to this, Josie realized. She had heard the entry from “Trails Grown Dim,” the words robber and shot and had been sorting it through ever since.

  “Who told you Jeremy was killed?”

  Now Ana turned to Paul, who had stopped his archery, having heard it all. When Ana turned back to Josie, her eyes had welled. Josie had not told Ana about Jeremy’s death, and had not told Paul, either. She looked to him now, disappointed.

  “Mario told me,” Paul said, petulantly. Mario was another camper, another boy Jeremy had babysat. And then, as if to answer Josie’s next question, he said, “Ana should know. Otherwise she thinks someone’s alive when he’s dead. That’s stupid.”

  A mechanical wheeze sounded behind Josie, and she turned to find an enormous vehicle, slowing to park behind the Chateau. There was dust all around, but when it settled she saw that it was a silver pickup truck with a wooden home, pitch-roofed and painted black, sitting in the bed. The little house had windows, and a tiny tin stovepipe, looking altogether quaint but for the words “Last Chance” painted on the front-facing wall. Below those words, in smaller print, were the words “Beholden to None.”