Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  It was not novel for Josie to be apart and stare. As a teen, during the worst years of Candyland, she’d been through a very long few years of aloneness, a brutal and wonderful and terrible time of luxuriating in her tortured mind, her suddenly heavy thighs, her growing nose, the rumors about her parents, the word Rosemont on everyone’s tongues, always implicating her parents, her feeling of being horrified at being alone on weekend nights but not wanting to be among people, either. She railed against the injustice of her always being alone, but she loved being alone. As some sort of compromise, she’d taken to long walks at night, and that led her into the woods behind homes all over town, and when she walked behind these homes, keeping herself deep in the trees, often there were bright lights, and the people inside were illuminated as well as aquarium fish.

  So on these long walks she would often sit and watch the families sit, or cook, or undress, and she found it reassuring and necessary. At a time when she doubted her place, doubted she was doing anything right, doubted her skin was really hers, doubted that she walked correctly or dressed correctly and at a time when she covered her mouth any time it was open, watching the quiet tedium of everyone else’s lives gave her renewed confidence. Her family was considered strange and unholy, a twisted family awash in VA drugs, but these other families were no better. All were deeply boring and sedentary. They barely moved. She would sit in the patchy woods, watching a house for an hour and scarcely see anyone move from room to room. She watched classmates and they were dull. She watched a classmate’s mother walk around in a bra, watched another classmate, a burly athlete, shockingly kind to all at school, come home and immediately get thrown across the room by his father. She saw certain things, scenes of violence loud and simmering. Being deep in the surrounding woods, she was never close enough to hear a word. And so in those dark woods, in the blue light of these sad homes, she realized she was no less normal than any of these sorry souls.

  “I’m tired,” Josie said, and by that she meant she was tired of being apart from the world. They had been alone and on the road for many days, and those days had seemed like weeks, weeks where she had only her children to talk to, and there was nowhere they knew to be home, and now they were watching again, or Josie was watching again, people who belonged in the world, who were rooted and reveling in their place, who were dancing triumphantly inside. It was never good to think about Carl, his then-disdain for weddings. She didn’t want to be with Carl. What if they’d been married? Good god.

  But a wedding would have been nice. She’d never had everyone in one place, the people she loved. Could you have a wedding like this at forty, forty-one? A raucous thing like this, the women barefoot in their tight dresses, dancing naughtily? You could, she could. Or perhaps she had made too many mistakes. Two children from one eel-like man, a fractured past, no family. Was she a drifter? Josie had a heavy warm child in her lap, Ana’s red hair smelling like lemons, and she had another child standing next to her, above her, leaning against her, and he was a noble human and always would be. And yet her life was that of a drifter. Where are you from? Here and there. Where are your parents? Doesn’t matter. Why aren’t your kids in school? We’re doing an independent study. Where are you going?

  And then a door opened in the meeting house, a bright white sliver that enlarged into a yellow rectangle. Light poured out from the building, and down the lawn all the way to Josie and Paul and Ana, caught in the light. A man was in the door, and seemed to be relieving himself. It couldn’t be. There had to be bathrooms in the building. But no. He stood, one hand on the wall of the building, the other holding his fly open, a man pissing dramatically, and even from their distance, Josie could hear the spatter of urine against the clapboard wall. When he was finished, he turned, as if to take in the night air and bask in good work well done, but he seemed to freeze, as if he’d seen Josie and her children and was appalled by them.

  And now he was walking toward her. Shame came over her at once. She knew he would scold her for sitting there and watching their sacred event. It had been a vulgar thing to do, to just sit there like it was all some show for their amusement. She would tell him she was nearsighted and couldn’t possibly see that far. That she was blind and was just listening to the music.

  Now the father of the groom was upon her.

  “You and your beautiful children have to join us,” he said.

  He was standing over her, his face round and kindly and bright with drink and sweat. His hand was outstretched as if asking her to dance.

  “No, no,” she said, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

  “Oh no,” he said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  Josie apologized. “No, no. It’s very nice of you.” Why was she crying? Her face was soaked and she was choking. “No. I didn’t mean to,” she managed to say, but couldn’t complete the thought.

  But he understood. He understood that she’d spent the day wondering why she hadn’t had happiness like this, Jesus Christ why had she made all the wrong decisions, these stupid teenagers getting married knew how to have a beautiful and humble wedding by this Alaskan river, goddamnit, why did she make it all so difficult when it could be so simple? And now the father of the groom was taking her hand and leading her to the lights of the party. She choked desperately on her tears but the father only held her hand tighter. She turned around and took Paul’s hand and he took Ana’s hand and like a string of construction paper people they walked to the white tables and the lights and music and when they arrived Josie was still crying, and expected to be deposited at some far table and given cake.

  But the father pulled her and her children deep into the dance floor, and they were suddenly in the wild heart of it all, with the groom and bride making their fluid thrashing movements, everyone jumping and no one questioning for a second why Josie was there. And now Ana was on the groom’s shoulders. But how? And now a bridesmaid had lifted Paul to her level and was dancing with him, cheek to cheek. Everyone was turning, turning, and somehow Josie managed to dance, too, finding the rhythm and drying her face and smiling as much as she could, to tell everyone she was okay and knew how to dance, too.

  The band played until two, and when the band left, the guests retrieved instruments from car trunks and drunken music was made until four. Josie couldn’t recall when she’d gone to bed. The kids were asleep on their feet at midnight, and she carried Ana to bed at one, the red-haired groomsman carrying Paul, and for some time Josie lay, trying to sleep in the Chateau, so close to the campfire laughter, and finally she returned to the party, was welcomed to the fire, and one by one the guests passed out as the best man, knowing his duty, kept the fire fed.

  XV.

  WHEN SHE WOKE AGAIN and ventured outside, the park was bright and empty. The guest cars parked near the overpass were gone. The vans and trucks were gone. The flowers were gone, the tent was gone. It was just before noon. The right thing would be to leave. Josie knew this. The park was desolate without the wedding guests, and Josie had already stayed too long. More than a few days in any place was unwise. She knew they should go. But instead of leaving she went to the office and told Jim she was staying another night, and asked if he’d like to eat lunch with them.

  “I just had lunch,” he said.

  “Dinner,” she said.

  “How about I make you some salmon?” he said. “My brother sent me a bunch from Nome and I need to eat it. It won’t keep much longer in the fridge.”

  The kids played in the river with a new group of kids who had arrived that afternoon, and at six they walked to Jim’s cabin, a hundred yards or so through a birch forest, and found him at the grill, wearing ironed jeans and a peach-colored polo shirt.

  “Made you a mojito,” he said, and handed her a glass of cut-crystal. She took a sip. It was cold and far too strong.

  “Got a head start,” he said, indicating his own empty glass, and poured himself a second.

  Josie stared at him, imagining what he would have looked like as a
young man. He looked like he’d gotten everything he wanted.

  “Grenada,” he said.

  “Okay,” Josie said. Nothing surprised her anymore—certainly not a man suddenly saying “Grenada” while holding a spatula.

  “I saw you inspecting the ink,” he said, and pointed to his arm, the military tattoo. He raised his sleeve, to reveal the words obscured before: Operation Urgent Fury. Josie had never heard this moniker. These words, Urgent and Fury, applied to Grenada seemed a wonderful joke.

  “It’s just a joke now,” he said, and Josie relaxed. She was relieved, first of all, that he was not a Vietnam vet, and that they wouldn’t have to talk about that, or about her parents, or Candyland, and she was so grateful that though he’d been part of the invasion of a country the size of the Mall of America, and though he felt, or had felt, some pride in this (the tattoo), he didn’t take it too seriously. In an instant Josie pictured a show, Grenada! No. It would be called Grenada? A dozen soldiers would parachute onto the stage, and ask themselves where they were. “Grenada,” one would say. Another would ask, “Grenada?” This would go on throughout the show. People would die, helicopters would crash, medical students would ostensibly be rescued, a petty dictator would be overthrown, and all the while the U.S. soldiers would keep forgetting where they were. One would knock down the door of a local home, pointing his gun at a family of five. “Where are we?” he would demand. “Grenada,” they would say, their hands in the air, a baby wailing. “Grenada?” the soldier would say, mugging for the audience. You could call it a comedy.

  “Don’t judge,” Jim said. “Grenada made Kuwait possible.”

  Now Josie was confused. What in the hell was he talking about?

  “You don’t remember the national mood in the seventies and early eighties, do you?” he asked. Josie was a child during much of that time, and had not been paying attention to the national mood, no.

  She needed to change the subject. If they went down this road, soon enough they would arrive at her mother and father, Candyland, Jeremy—Jeremy had already stepped into her consciousness and darkened the gauzy happiness of the day.

  “You have a wonderful awkwardness,” Jim said, and for a moment Josie thought the evening was being ground to dust, first by his nonsense about Kuwait and now this, an oblique insult. “You’re beautiful, but you wear it so lightly. This,” and here he touched the small of her back with an open hand, heavy and warm, “this is where the self-satisfied women, the uppity ones, lose their appeal.” Somehow he had known to change the subject, and had effortlessly chosen a very chaste and very erotic place to put his hand. He was so confident, her sense of time shifted, broke down. Hadn’t they just started talking? Now his hand was firmly on her back; they were ready to dance. “The other women, they’re stiff here,” he continued, his voice lower now, a rumble, “they carry all their tension and outrage and impatience right here. It’s a catastrophe. But you, the way you bend, the way you shift hip to hip, it’s fluid, it’s just a breeze through long grass.”

  Shit, Josie thought. Shit shit. To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she’d never noticed. It worked always. Hilariously, though, Carl had no idea. The one original thing, the one time he’d noticed something about her that she could remember—would not forget—he’d said while watching TV one night, a crime show. The detectives had shown up at the coroner’s office, and he’d pulled open a cold steel drawer to reveal the corpse of a young woman. “That looks just like you!” Carl had said, leaning forward on the couch, and Josie had thought, Will this harmless man kill me? “He seems harmless,” his mother, Luisa, once said to Josie, “but he has a terrible resolve.” What did that mean? Josie thought of that often: He has a terrible resolve. That and the comparison to the corpse: It made their last year together somewhat less carefree.

  Now, though, there was this man, with his Grenada tattoo, his POW/MIA flag, and he was so gentle. She knew a mistake with this man was inevitable. The only hope was to contain the damage somehow, release the lust, complete the seduction without too much mess.

  —

  After dinner, Jim brought a set of markers and a stack of printer paper from his cabin, and Josie assumed he planned to suggest the kids occupy themselves this way while he made a move on her. But instead he sat down and asked Ana what her favorite animal was.

  Josie knew Ana’s answer changed depending on the day and what show she’d last seen, so was curious to hear the answer.

  “Winnie the Pooh,” Ana said, and Jim repeated the word as Ana had said it, “Windy da Pooh,” imitating her but somehow in a respectful way that seemed to confirm to Ana that her pronunciation was correct.

  He cracked his knuckles theatrically and began to draw. Quickly the kids realized he knew what he was doing, he could draw, and they floated closer to him, one on either side, rapt. Ana soon had her hand on his arm, again demonstrating her belief in the transference of magic. It was a heartwarming scene until Josie came around to see the progress of Jim’s drawing and found an anatomically correct elephant, standing upright like a human, and holding a beer, a flaccid penis pointing to the earth between its legs.

  “You guys run to the vending machines for a second,” Josie said, giving them a dollar each—only the second time in their lives they had held a dollar of their own. The kids ran through the birch woods and Jim sighed and sat back in his chair.

  “Elephants have penises,” he said in his defense. “Paul has one. Have you seen a whale’s?”

  “Your elephant even has pubic hair, you jackass,” Josie said.

  “It was flaccid.” Jim grinned at her, thinking she was kidding.

  She took the picture and crumpled it. “No more penises,” she said.

  The children returned from the store, Jim drew for them again, everyone having a blast. For half an hour he drew whatever they asked, and they colored his pictures—but why did Ana grunt while coloring?—and then laid them out on the grass around his house, holding them down with stones. The evening had arrived at a place of perfect serenity, and Josie and her children, and this stranger named Jim, were a perfectly functioning little family. Jim couldn’t have been happier. He was not the least bit bored.

  Ana put a blank piece of paper before him. “Can you do a giant, but a nice giant?” she asked.

  Jim threw himself into that one, moving his mouth as he drew. Josie watched him, and a truth revealed itself to her: Older men are not confused. They aren’t going in seven directions. A retired man knows what he doesn’t want—and to those of us who have been ground into dust once or twice or more, and have somehow found a way to carry on, knowing what you don’t want was far more important than knowing what you did want. Maybe a retired man is the real prize. An older man like this (or Sam’s Leonard Cohen!) no longer worried about money; his ambitions had been satisfied or ignored, and he could now afford to draw pictures for children for hours at a time, had nowhere else to be, could take his time.

  “Who wants to play air hockey?” he asked. Josie didn’t want to play air hockey, or watch anyone play air hockey, but her children had jumped and danced at the idea, so off they went. They walked back through the birch forest and to the office. Jim plugged in the air-hockey table and turned to Josie.

  “Why don’t you go somewhere?” he said. “They’re fine here.”

  “Go where?”

  “Didn’t you ask about the bikes the other day? Take a bike. Any one you see in the shed.”

  Josie dismissed the idea, because she had expected this air-hockey idea to be a ruse to get her alone in the back office—she’d glimpsed a couch there, and pictured herself sloppily on it—but Jim was soon playing with her children, and barely giving her a thought. So Josie found herself considering the bike ride, then wanting it, then calculated the probability that riding the bike in her drunken state would end in her crashing and drowning in the river. But then she thought of the Mennonites, and their bicycle joy, and wondered what lay on the
other side of the underpass that had made them so happy.

  “You kids keep going and I’ll come back to keep score,” Jim said, and led Josie to the shed, where a motley array of bicycles stood entangled. He was behind her, and she could smell his fermented male smell, and for the third time that afternoon she assumed he would take her, press himself into her.

  “Try this one,” he said, and pulled from the chrome thicket a blue women’s bicycle with a wide white seat. He checked the tires and found them functional.

  “Whose is it?” she asked.

  “Someone’s. I don’t know. They might have left it. Or else it’s someone’s who works here. I don’t know. It’s yours.”

  By drawing vaguely in the dirt, Jim mapped the bike path as it ran along the river, across a wooden bridge, through what used to be a lumber forest and then back, along the river’s far shore and across another crossing, this one a pedestrian footbridge made of steel.

  She held the bicycle, and threw her leg around it, feeling the sensation that it was crooked. The handlebars were pointed decidedly leftward. She did not think it was a good idea to ride this bicycle. Her children were with a stranger and it was getting dark, and she was tipsy, and she had two or three miles to ride on a bicycle with handlebars that pointed due left.

  “See you in an hour or so,” Jim said, and turned himself toward her children, whose silhouettes she could make out, through the window, hunched over the air-hockey table, pushing some hovering disc at each other with great urgency. They were fine. And so she pushed off, and immediately ran into the side of the bicycle shed.