Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  After breakfast they explored the property, Josie ready at any moment for the arrival of the owners or caretakers. They removed the note from the door, deciding that if anyone came, she would pretend she and the kids had just arrived.

  They found a path through the woods, leading to the bluff. But before the edge it bent and took them to a small white gazebo standing a few yards from the edge of the cliff, and she took this to be some sort of wedding location. Maybe the whole place was rented out for ceremonies, where five or ten families could gather and watch the vows and stay the night. Ana began running in circles in the gazebo and after the third lap was dizzy and holding on to the railing, panting. They could think of nothing else to do.

  They returned to the main lawn and soon Ana had a soccer ball she’d found, and was kicking it, then running after it, attacking it as a cat would a giant ball of string. Paul thought this was very funny, and the lawn was wide and flat, and the sun bright and sky clear, so Josie saw no harm in sitting in one of the plastic lawn chairs and letting the kids run around while she did nothing. Could I live here? Josie wondered. Miles from anything. The road inaudible from your yard. The occasional moose. The possibility of bears and wolves. This spectacular view. The inability of your neighbors to complain about your leaving broken machinery in your yard. She thought of staying here indefinitely, but staying would mean waiting to get caught, and then there would be a negotiation, and she would have to contend with the look of distrust from whoever found them. If only, from now on, she could avoid judging eyes, she could survive. But all eyes were judging eyes, so better to move, and see without being seen.

  But then again, this home, this property, was evidence of the glory of the land, this country. There was so much. There was so much space, so much land, so much to spare. It invited the weary and homeless like herself, her worthy children. She had the blurry thought that all the world’s searching and persecuted could find a home up here. Alaska’s climate was warming, was it not? It would soon be a forgiving place, with milder winters and uncountable millions of unpopulated acres, and so many empty homes like this, waiting to take in the desperate travelers of the world. It was a wonderful thought, a numbing notion. Josie closed her eyes, not expecting sleep.

  —

  When she opened her eyes, the air had chilled and her children were nowhere to be found. She startled to her feet, called for them, her mind popping with images of the two of them jumping over the cliff—of Ana jumping first, Paul trying to save her, the two of them tumbling downward, wondering where their mother was in all this. She’d been asleep in a plastic chair.

  She found them in the barn, sitting on an antique tractor. It was not entirely safe, but not dangerous, either. Paul was up on the old metal driver’s seat, and Ana was on his lap, her little hands on the steering wheel. She turned to Josie, grinning.

  “Look Mom!” she said.

  The garage was full of mounted animal heads. Which seemed odd, to go through the trouble of killing and stuffing them all only to hang them in this dark unvisited place. Think of that! To kill animals, and care so much for them, or be so interested in celebrating the kills, that you would pay hundreds of dollars to mount them, only to warehouse them in this unseen room. It spoke of the endless bounty of the animal world, legions of replaceable mammals, more than enough to stuff and hide away some great percentage of them.

  Josie thought of her own basement, the things she kept there even while knowing she would feel freer without them. She knew she felt liberated outside that house, and felt freer without her job, freer away from those hot dirty mouths. She felt freer here than at home, freer here alone than surrounded by her purported friends, and she felt sure she would be far freer without her bones weighing her down and her flesh draping over her bones, all this ugly aging skin needing food and water and moisturizer. To be a ghost! To see all, to see anything, but never to be seen—this might be bliss.

  “We should go,” she said to them.

  Paul was outraged. “You mean leave?”

  She had just been struck by a strange feeling. The heads on the wall had done it. The sinister nature of their deaths had gotten to her. She’d been lucky the night before, and that luck could, would, fade or, more likely, change abruptly.

  “No Mom,” Paul said. He then laid out an entirely rational argument. That they had been there one night already. That no one had come. That they had left the note on the door. That he could leave more notes—on the windows, on the door to the Chateau, to the cottage. That the worst that could happen would be that they would pay for two nights. The towering tragedy of a single parent is that your eldest child becomes not just confidant but valued counsel.

  —

  They decided to stay, with Josie reserving the right to change her mind at any time that day. The sky stayed blue all through the morning and they had an extravagant lunch of hot dogs and rice and pastrami, using the cottage stove and microwave and eating on real plates and with glasses made of glass, sitting on stools by the kitchen counter, and afterward Paul and Ana returned to the lawn, where they set up and played their own version of croquet. They found a tiny frog and Ana somehow caught it without fuss and carried it around in her little fat hands for an hour. And Josie watched from her chair, and finished her “Trails Grown Dim.”

  A good one: “My great-grandfather James A. Layman, a Confederate veteran, Pvt., Co. D, Cavalry, Co. A, received an honorable discharge May 10, 1865, and entered Confederate Soldiers’ Home at Higginsville, Missouri, October 19, 1900, from Pulaski County, Missouri. He was listed as a resident there as late as 1902. He left to enter the home at Pewee Valley, Kentucky, and was there January 31, 1905, in Room 31 in the south wing. Here my record stops—no death date or place and no burial place. Will appreciate any help.”

  The day was overtaken by dusk, Josie was exhausted, and there was very little food left. But she managed to make omelets and a bizarre salad containing lettuce and watermelon and bacon bits and pieces of sausage. The kids devoured it and by eight they were all ready for sleep.

  “Can we?” Paul asked.

  “By all means,” Josie said, and Ana climbed the ladder to the loft, and Paul followed. He reached down for Yachts and Yachting, which he planned to read to Ana, and Josie handed it up to him, looking around the cottage for anything left to do. There was nothing. The simplicity was complete. Maybe, she thought, they all needed one long rest—a twelve-hour binge to feel right again. She turned out the main light, leaving the cottage with only the porch light and the bedside lamp next to the kids, who she could hear under the covers, Paul reading in low murmurs to Ana.

  The door opened so quietly that Josie assumed it was one of her children. But her children were in the bunk above her. Then it must be the wind, she thought. She hadn’t closed it tightly enough, and the wind had pushed it open.

  “What’s happening here?” a man’s voice said. Josie jumped at the first word. She turned to find a young man in camouflage pants, a sleeveless shirt and baseball hat. His eyes were small, blue, his goatee black. In the single second that lingered between them, Josie had time to hope that he was a gentle man, a proprietor who found the note and understood, had found Paul’s child handwriting endearing. There was the possibility, in that second, that this man only wanted to know what was happening, and that Josie could easily explain it, that he’d accept their money and welcome them to stay.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said instead.

  Josie didn’t breathe. His small blue eyes, his hunter’s outfit—anything could happen.

  “We left a note,” she managed to say.

  “Is that your RV? Are you a squatter? Who are you with?” he asked. He hadn’t seen the children yet. He stood in the open doorway, Josie standing five feet away, his feet ready to move, as if unsure he wanted to be with her in the closed room, as if he’d encountered a bat in the cottage and wanted to allow passage for it to fly away.

  Josie looked up, to see where Paul and Ana were, and saw
nothing. They were hiding in the loft. She couldn’t imagine how they knew to hide, how Paul was keeping Ana quiet, but she had a split-second moment of admiration for them. She thought of Anne Frank.

  “You just let yourself in?” he asked.

  Josie had already decided she wouldn’t mention the night before. She would tell him they’d just arrived, had written the note, had money, would settle all this. “We saw the sign,” she said, hearing her voice so thin and scared. “No one answered the door. There was nowhere else to stay.”

  “So you broke in?” Now his volume spiked. Something had turned. He could be on drugs. His hands were fists. Josie looked for a weapon. Then looked up to the loft again. No sign of the kids.

  “Who’s up there?” he asked, still yelling. “Who the fuck is up there?”

  “Please. Take it easy. We’ll leave.”

  “No, we’ll call the police. That’s what we’re doing. You stay here.”

  And he left. She didn’t know where he’d gone. Maybe he didn’t have a cellphone, or had left it in the main house? But he’d left them alone, so she had a few minutes. She rushed up the ladder and found Paul and Ana under the covers and awake. Their heads were pressed together, Paul’s arms around her, in some kind of death embrace, a Pompeii pact.

  “Let’s go. Now,” she said.

  Josie grabbed Ana and flew down the ladder in two steps. She reached up and took Paul from the first step, pushing them both out the front door. She returned, found their duffel bag, stuffed it with the clothes she’d removed, and met the kids on the porch. She paused, looking and listening for the man. There was no sign of him.

  They needed to get to the Chateau but couldn’t use the path. “Follow me,” she said. She picked up Ana and led Paul by the hand through the woods, toward the bluff, intending to follow the cliff side to the driveway. The man wouldn’t see them until they’d gotten inside the RV.

  “Mom, careful,” Paul said, pointing to the sheer drop, only a few feet to their left.

  “Shh,” she said, moving swiftly toward the driveway.

  Now she saw a man emerge from the main house. He had a phone on his ear, the cordless receiver of a landline, and was looking in the direction of the cottage. She assumed he was calling the police.

  Fine, she thought. Now all she had to do was get to the Chateau and go. The police might chase her, but they couldn’t be anywhere near here. She’d have a twenty-minute head start. Her heart was in her mouth, her ears. She watched the man, standing outside, facing the cottage. He was looking for movement from her, assuming she was still inside. All she needed was for him to return to the main house, or go to the cottage to find them. That would give her time to get to the RV and leave.

  She turned to Paul. “We’re running to the Chateau. Any second. Ready?”

  Paul nodded.

  The man took the phone from his ear, pressed a button, and the orange lights of the receiver went dark. He tucked the receiver into his pocket and strode to the cottage, his white form crosshatched by the thicket.

  “Now?” Paul asked.

  “Wait,” Josie said. When he was just before the cottage, she hissed “Now,” and they sprinted out of the woods and across the lawn and toward the Chateau. They were at the gravel driveway when their footsteps gave them away.

  “Hey! Get the fuck back here!” the man yelled.

  Josie opened the cab door and threw Ana inside. Ana hit something with a thump; Josie knew she would cry but that she was unhurt. Paul stepped in and Josie shoved him over. Before she got in she saw the man hurtling toward her, across the lawn and down the driveway. He was astonishingly fast. She closed the door, threw the key in the ignition and started the engine. She threw it into gear and the Chateau lurched forward just as a loud bang hit the rear bumper. She’d hit him. No. He was banging his hand on the back of the Chateau. Now the side. The back of the Chateau dipped. He’d grabbed the ladder. He was riding on the back. Impossible. No, possible. He was the kind of man who would jump on.

  “Go, go, Mom!” Paul said.

  “I’m going!” she hissed.

  She slammed the pedal down. The engine groaned and the gravel spit. They lurched forward and turned heavily to the right as the driveway wound toward the highway. There’s a man on this car, Josie thought. She imagined him hanging on the back, crawling forward to her. By the time he reached her he would be ready for murder.

  Ahead the driveway rose suddenly to meet the highway and she sped up, thinking the sudden incline might toss him from the ladder. The front bumper slammed into the pavement, and the hood leaped up with a crunch. The Chateau bounced and squealed as she turned and sped onto the highway.

  “Get in the back,” she told her children. Ana was bawling but Josie hadn’t heard her until now. What if the man was on the back and got in? Through the roof. Some other way. “No, stay here,” she told Paul. “Stay here, both of you. Hide down there,” she said, and pointed to the floor of the passenger seat. She wanted them near her, within view. Paul obeyed and huddled with Ana in the dark.

  They were on the highway now, and reached twenty, thirty, forty. She could only assume the man was still on the ladder, but there was a chance he’d jumped off, had fallen off. But she couldn’t stop to be sure. If he was still hanging on, the man was now crazed and desperate, and would harm her. But she couldn’t just drive on, speeding on the highway with a man hanging from the ladder, could she? She had to. So she did, while waiting for the sound of the man climbing, or pounding, or the dip of the back end as the man jumped off.

  In a flash of inspiration she realized she could stop at a gas station and there, under the lights, she could stop and be safe—he wouldn’t try anything. So she drove north another fifteen miles until she saw the blue-white lights of a gas station looming. She slowed, listening closely for any movement—the sounds of a man crawling on the tin box she was driving. When she pulled in, she saw a figure inside the green glass, a woman standing at the counter, watching a tiny television. Josie looked to see if the woman saw anything strange on the Chateau. The woman glanced her way then returned her attention to the screen.

  Josie stopped the Chateau as close to the door to the station as she could and waited. He might choose this moment to attack, to avenge his harrowing ride. But again there was no movement. An idea occurred to her. She honked the horn. The volume was tripled under the canopy and echoed against the glass of the food mart. The woman at the counter startled and looked to Josie, eyes wild.

  Josie waved, said she was sorry through three layers of glass, and frantically beckoned the woman out. The woman shook her head, no. She couldn’t leave her post. What reason could anyone want her to leave? The only possibilities were all dangerous.

  But eventually Josie cajoled her into leaving the counter. The woman opened the front door of the food mart and poked her head through. “I can’t come outside,” she said.

  Josie rolled down the passenger-side window.

  “You see anything on the outside of this RV?” she asked.

  “What’s that again?”

  “Is there anyone on the RV? A man hanging there?”

  “A man on your RV?” The woman had been scanning the Chateau all along, but her eyes had not alighted on anything. “No.”

  “So there’s no one up there? On the back either?”

  Now the woman’s eyes looked scared, confused about Josie and the task she had been assigned. Still, she craned her neck around to look over the back of the vehicle, and shook her head.

  “No.”

  Only then did Josie feel comfortable opening the door. In another ludicrous calculation, she tried to think of the man’s possible point of attack, just outside the door, so she decided to leap from the doorframe, into the open blue-light area of the gas station, creating as much distance as possible between herself and the Chateau. Maybe he would jump, miss, and land on the pavement?

  She opened the door, leaped, and nothing happened. She lunged back to the door to close it
—for hadn’t she just left her cowering children in danger?—and then quickly paced around the station, looking from every vantage point for a man in camouflage pants who might have been clinging for the last hour. She saw no one.

  The woman inside, though, was on the phone. Most likely reporting Josie to the authorities. Josie thought briefly about staying, because she hadn’t done anything that the food-mart woman could claim or any police officer could prove.

  She got back into the Chateau and drove off, picturing a bottle breaking against her face. This hadn’t happened recently, but this vision, a bottle breaking against her face, had been an intermittent part of her life since she was twelve. She could not explain this phenomenon to anyone without provoking grave concern, so she never mentioned it, because it was not problematic or a symptom of some flowering psychosis. It was not related to the numb face. It had predated the numb face by twenty years. She had been in sixth grade, just after Candyland, when it started and it occurred regularly since then, and it was not a big deal. It was just a recurring vision of a bottle breaking against her face. Of the tens of thousands of thoughts she, like anyone else, had in a given day, a couple times a day there was the vivid picture of a bottle, a seventies-era soda bottle with its curves and striations, breaking against her face, and it was not a big deal. Exactly who was holding the bottle was never clear, and their motives were not known, but in any case the bottle would swing into her vision and shatter against her nose and cheek, the shards spreading like rain. It was never painful. It was not troubling. It was just a bottle breaking against her face. It had something to do with punishment, but it was also a little slapstick, too. It was a bit of pie-in-the-face, a bit of corporal punishment at the hands of an angry clown-god.

  It was nothing, really.

  Her children were still hiding on the floor.