Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  Jim rolled his eyes and poured himself another drink. They argued this way for the better part of an hour, as the night darkened around them, neither of them ceding ground, neither of them sure whether or not their country was still at war in Afghanistan. There were moments when Jim seemed almost wavering, almost believing that Josie could be right, that perhaps there were some combat troops still in the country…But then he dug in, disbelieving.

  And so in the morning she’d left Jim’s RV park and watched the bottle break against her face, and mile after mile as she drove away, she thought how interesting, humorous even, someone from that part of the world might find it, that an American man who had fought in a conflict no one remembered didn’t know that his country was still fighting a different, larger war, still, had been since 2001. How funny! Coast to coast, most Americans would not be sure that war was still on, that we were still there, that men and women like Jeremy were still fighting and dying, that Afghans were still fighting and dying, too. Wouldn’t an Afghan, and countless future generations, find that very funny in some way?

  XVII.

  WHAT CAN WE DO to erase a terrible sight from the minds of our children? We can show them other things, brighter things. It so happened that ten miles from the site of Josie-on-Jim, they came across what appeared, from a distance, to be the Batmobile.

  “Look,” Josie said, wanting to point it out to Ana especially, but knowing if she wasn’t right there would be trouble. So she waited until they got closer, careening along the highway toward it, and when they arrived, and she was sure that some lunatic had placed an actual full-size Batmobile approximation on the side of the road, in a parking lot attached to a fireworks outlet, with the sole purpose of luring in people like herself and her children, she finally told them.

  “Do you see what I see?” In the wake of what she’d allowed Paul to witness the day before, this sounded more lewd than intended. She amended quickly: “Ana, you see a certain vehicle outside?”

  When she did see it, there was pandemonium, and they stopped, and Ana jumped out of the Chateau and ran to it, running her hands across it. Its rough surface appeared to have been painted with black housepaint.

  “Dis isn’t da real one,” Ana said, but she seemed to want to be disproved.

  “It’s one of the real ones,” Paul said. “It’s a backup car. The main one is still in Batman’s cave.”

  This satisfied Ana’s sense of balance, because surely Batman would have backup cars, and it was logical that he would keep at least one in an Alaskan parking lot, so she took to the car anew, her eyes allowing all the vehicle’s glaring discrepancies and anomalies, including the fact that it had no interior gauges, lights or even a stick shift. It did have a steering wheel, and Ana was reaching for it, looking back at Josie, waiting to be told no.

  But while Ana had been inspecting the car, and Paul had been explaining away all its flaws, Josie had noticed that the fireworks outlet, the one using the Batman car as bait, was closed, boarded up hastily. Of course it would be closed, during a summer of wildfires, a few of them no doubt blamed on bottle rockets and M-80s.

  “You can get in,” Josie said to Paul and Ana, feeling hopeful that this would eclipse forever the image of her grinding atop the RV park proprietor who drew elephant penises.

  Paul climbed over the door (welded shut), and Josie lifted Ana in. They sat side by side, Paul in the driver’s seat. Ana looked to her brother as if fervently believing that because he was sitting in Batman’s seat, he was Batman. Josie watched the two of them, forgetting for a moment how badly she needed this to erase yesterday’s indiscretion. I know what you’re doing, his eyes told her.

  There will be other mistakes, she said in return.

  Josie took their picture, Ana looking straight through the windshield, as if scanning for evildoers, and Paul looking at Ana. And for the first time Josie felt the crushing tragedy of their aloneness, that they were only three, and had no one else, and were more or less on the lam, and that she had slept with Jim, and had no destination in mind—that they would leave the Batmobile and have nowhere else to go, that this would be the closest thing to purpose they would know today. “Ready?” she asked them. “We should go,” she said. But where? Why? They stayed.

  When, an hour later, they finished with the Batmobile and were back in the Chateau, slowly pulling away, Ana unbuckled herself and came to Josie and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I love you, Mom,” she said.

  It was the first time Ana had ever said these words unprovoked, and though Josie knew what Ana meant was I love Batman. I love Batman’s car. And I love you for showing me Batman’s car, she was nonetheless moved.

  —

  They drove on, their path random, the sights bizarre. There was the strange geodesic dome, once part of a gas station, three stories tall and abandoned. They parked the Chateau behind it and stayed for a few hours, exploring within—they found a half-dead old kickball and played soccer briefly inside, and Ana collected an array of tool fragments and what seemed to be gears. They stopped at a garage sale, where the only other customers were firefighters from Wyoming. Josie bought Paul a book about heraldry and Ana a silver miner’s helmet. For herself she bought a guitar with a bullet hole in it. I couldn’t learn, so I got mad, the seller said.

  They saw a moose, and pulled over to watch it lope without destination along the side of the road. But every car that passed their parked vehicle honked angrily, as if stopping for moose was not acceptable, or in bad taste, or endangered the moose in some way—Josie never knew. But she knew that seeing that moose was wildly anticlimactic, in the same way seeing a coyote, so small and weak and like the spawn of a hyena (the hunched back, the servile demeanor) and a housecat (its size, its dull eyes), was anticlimactic. This moose before them, which they were photographing with actuarial thoroughness, was a sorry specimen, thin and clumsy and not much taller than a pony.

  It was important to stay off the main roads, but not to draw too much attention on the minor roads. The more they ventured away from the highways the more they saw evidence of the fires, their proximity coming with ample clues. The red and chartreuse trucks would pass her, going the other way, or would flash their lights from behind, in hopes they could go more than forty-eight miles an hour. Then the handmade or digital signs thanking the firefighters. Then the gusts of acrid smoke, the occasional stripe of haze overtaking the sky. ENTERING BURNED AREA. EXPECT FLOODS, said one sign, and Josie looked quickly to Paul, to see if he’d read it. The natural piling-on the sign promised—first fire, then flood—seemed unnecessarily harsh, and she worried about the nightmares a sign like that could provoke in a sensitive eight-year-old. But he was asleep, his mouth agape, Ana trying to balance her ThunderCats doll in his shirt pocket.

  They were driving through a land of low hills, some of them charred black, when Josie saw a scrum of fire trucks ahead, creating a roadblock, their lights popping like flashbulbs. She slowed down and stopped before the group, ready to turn around, but when she rolled down her window, a police officer, looking not much older than Paul, approached. He had full, delicate lips.

  “You passing through?” he asked.

  “I don’t have to,” Josie said. She didn’t know what to say. She had no destination in mind, but telling him that would seem suspicious. “I mean I can take another road—” She almost said “north” but she wasn’t entirely sure she was heading north. She might have been going east.

  “It’s okay,” the officer said, his lips pillow-soft, his eyes sleepy and amused. “The road just reopened. You’re the first on it, outside of emergency vehicles. It’s safe. Just be careful.”

  Josie thanked him, missing his lips already, his eyes, thinking his parents must be proud of him, hoping they were. She drove slowly around the six or seven vehicles, and then found herself entirely alone on a wide four-lane road that passed through what had been a great battlefield. The hills on the left side of the road were largely green, untouched, covered wi
th small pines and shrubs and stripes of wildflowers. On the right, though, the land had been rendered bald, leaving the occasional black stripe of a tree trunk, a few wisps of branches extended, the ground everywhere a plush grey.

  Along the side of the road, fire vehicles were parked in bunches or alone. Here, a pair of red trucks, four firefighters sitting under a tree eating lunch on the rear bumpers. There, a single chartreuse truck, with a lone firefighter in matching gear walking up the hill, through the plush grey, carrying a shovel.

  The road wound through the valley for miles, the scene serene and beautiful and empty. The valley was quiet, the sky was blue, the fire defeated.

  Fire vehicles and firefighters appeared occasionally, some driving the opposite way, leaving the valley, but most of them parked on one side of the road or another, all of them acting independently, it seemed. It was, that day at that hour, more like a loose assemblage of firefighting freelancers, each allowed to do whatever they saw fit, than some coordinated, military-style attack. Or maybe it was the looser, cleanup fighting done after victory is assured.

  Just then, she came upon a group of six firefighters surrounding a single large pine on fire, three hoses between them, two men on each.

  “Look,” she told her kids, and she slowed the Chateau.

  It looked like some kind of execution. The tree seemed to be alive, defiant, gloriously on fire, wanting to be on fire, while the firefighters were dousing it, killing it.

  Then a sound like a quick loud exhalation. The Chateau veered left, then right, then lurched forward.

  “What is that?” Paul asked.

  Josie pulled over and stopped, but she knew it was a flat. Stan had breezed through the procedure for changing a flat, and she’d seen the spare on the rear of the Chateau a dozen times a day, but now, knowing she would have to actually change it, change a tire on a decomposing vehicle weighing four tons, she briefly lost hope.

  “Let’s get out,” she told her kids, and then the three of them were standing on the roadside, between the hills of green and the hills of grey, under the bright sun, the Chateau tilting rightward.

  Ana found a rock and threw it in the direction of the firefighters at war with the burning tree.

  “Some other guys,” Paul said, and Josie turned to see that coming up behind them was a line of men in orange, ten of them, each of them carrying a shovel over a shoulder.

  “Looks like you’ve got a flat,” the lead man said. “Need help?”

  He was short and stocky, his face striped in soot. The group of them crowded around the flat, a few of them kicking the tire, as if that was in some way useful.

  “You want us to help?” the stocky man asked.

  “Could you?” Josie said, and the group of them began to fan out all over, like some kind of dance team—Josie was suddenly in the middle, and felt as if she should do some freestyle maneuvers while they clapped.

  “You got the jack?” another man in orange asked.

  Josie tried to remember where Stan had said it was, and could only think of the side compartment, where the lawn chairs were stored. She opened it, and three of the men rifled through the space—there were three of them doing any one thing—but found nothing.

  “You want us to look inside?” another man, the tallest of them all, said. “My uncle used to have something like this.” He nodded at the vehicle the way he might have pointed out a tick infestation.

  Josie’s bones told her not to allow ten men to tramp through the Chateau, opening every cabinet, especially given the velvet bag of money hidden under the sink. But a few of them had already seemed to be losing interest in the operation, and were standing a few yards down the road, as if moving on already, so to keep them interested she said sure, they could look through the Chateau, that maybe the tall man in orange had some insight, via his uncle, that she couldn’t access. As the stocky one opened the side door and stepped in, she met Paul’s eyes.

  This is an example of making a bad situation worse, his eyes said.

  But it was too late. Six of them were inside the Chateau, and Josie stood on the roadside, her children next to her, thinking that there was something unusual about this group of men, but unable to put her finger on it. Aside from the stocky one, they were smaller and thinner than the average firefighters, younger as a whole, all of them in their twenties, their arms grey with tattoos. She stepped closer to the Chateau to peek in, but the interior was a blur of orange. She turned around to find one of the men on his knees, obscuring Ana. He seemed to be talking to her.

  “Ana, come over here,” Josie said, her unease growing. Ana reluctantly shuffled to her, hands behind her back.

  Josie scanned the hands of every one of the firefighters, looking for the velvet bag. The tallest man jumped from the Chateau door, a twisted piece of iron over his head, his other hand holding a mechanical device, this one rusted. “Got it,” he said to everyone, and quickly there were orange men under the Chateau, and one was on the back ladder, removing the spare, and soon the vehicle was tilting high and they had removed and replaced the flat.

  Just as they were lowering the jack, a new man, in chartreuse, was among them. “What’s happening here?” he asked. He was an older man wearing goggles over deep-set eyes, canopied with heavy brows. He had a presence at once authoritative and gentle, a small-town judge wanting and expecting civility from all.

  “Just helping this motorist change her tire, sir,” the tall orange man said.

  The men in orange had backed away from Josie and the Chateau, suddenly shy. A few of them had hustled to the roadside to pick up their shovels.

  “Ma’am,” the bearded man said to Josie. His eyes were alarmed. “Have these men harmed or bothered you in any way?”

  “No,” Josie said, confused, but adopting the tone of giving a traffic-accident deposition. “They’ve been very helpful.”

  The gentle-eyed man relaxed, and looked around at the orange men, his eyes registering that he was both disappointed and impressed. “You guys get your gear and keep walking, okay?” he said, and those of the orange men who hadn’t done so already re-formed their single-file line and were tromping down the road. They passed the Chateau, none of them looking at Josie or Paul or Ana. The man in chartreuse watched their progress, his hands on his hips. When they were out of earshot, he turned to Josie.

  “Did those men identify themselves as inmates?” he asked.

  Josie’s stomach seemed to evaporate. She shook her head.

  “You know how we use prisoners in some fires, to cut line and such?” the man said.

  Josie had no idea what that meant.

  “They’re low-level offenders. And happy for the work, it being outside and all,” the man said, chuckling. “Anyway, we’re short-handed, as you can see. Otherwise there’s usually an escort with these guys. And I didn’t know we were letting civilians through here. So a perfect storm, right?”

  Josie was trying to follow. Prisoners are sent to fight fires, and the ten men who had flowed around and through the Chateau were all prisoners, and they had happily fixed her flat, and couldn’t have been more polite, and now they were gone.

  “Wait,” she whispered, and climbed into the Chateau, rushed to the sink, opened the cabinet and found the velvet bag untouched.

  “What was it? Anything gone?” the man asked.

  “No, nothing,” she said. She looked up the road. The line of men had taken an upward path into the charred hills.

  “One of them give you that?” the man asked Ana.

  Josie looked down to find that her daughter was holding a tiny yellow flower.

  —

  She could drive all night, she decided. She could pull over anywhere. It didn’t matter. She was free and her children were safe. She felt powerful, capable, again heroic as she had when they’d left the bed and breakfast. She wanted a drink.

  And here, up ahead, was what she’d been looking for in Alaska, an all-night diner with a neon beer sign in the window. She pulle
d into the parking lot, and saw that the place was oddly bustling for 9:23 p.m. She pulled over. The kids were asleep, but she needed to be around people, under strips of fluorescent light. She saw a pair of empty booths by the side window, and parked the Chateau so she could see it from one of the booths. She intended to sit and drink whatever they had, keep an eye on the RV that held her sleeping children, get some food for them to eat whenever they woke up. She had the feeling she would be talking to some stranger inside, the waitress at the very least. She was in one of those moods, she knew—once a month an ebullience came over her and she found herself small-talking someone at the checkout counter, people walking their dogs, nurses pushing the elderly down the sidewalk. What a day, right?

  Seat yourself, the sign inside said, and Josie thought her heart might burst. She took one of the empty booths and opened the menu, to find not just the beer advertised in neon but two different wines, red and white. The waitress approached, and as she loomed close enough to appraise, Josie saw that she was a stunning woman in her forties, possibly the most beautiful woman she’d seen in Alaska. Her blond hair was streaked with white, which might have been age or might have been a style choice, it didn’t matter. Her eyes were dark, and she had dimples, which announced themselves just after she’d asked Josie how she was and what would she have.

  “White wine,” Josie said.

  Dimples. “Just a glass?” the woman asked, her eyes shining like those of a beloved childhood dog. “We have carafes.”

  “Yes,” Josie said. “The carafe. Thank you. That’s mine,” she added, indicating the Chateau just outside. There was no reason to announce this just after ordering a carafe of white wine—as if she wanted the waitress to know what she’d be driving when she was finished drinking.