Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  “You parking overnight?” the waitress asked. Dimples.

  “Can I?” Josie asked.

  Now the waitress was confused. Finally Josie put it together: the waitress had assumed that was why she’d pointed to the Chateau.

  “Yes,” Josie said, more assuredly now. “Do I pay here or…”

  Dimples. “I can add it to the bill. I’ll bring the registry over.”

  And now Josie was in a new kind of bliss, and felt sure she would get a little drunk.

  The carafe arrived, and she finished her first glass greedily. She was thirsty, and followed the wine with water, and was still thirsty. She couldn’t remember if she’d eaten since breakfast. She settled on the fact that she’d eaten half of a sandwich sometime in the afternoon, so she should eat now, should have a feast soaked in wine, and ran her eyes down the menu, ordered a chicken salad and started on the bread.

  The diner was in full swing. Josie was in her flannel shirt, so she was invisible and enjoying a second glass of chardonnay. She looked around. There were two women who had come there, Josie was sure, to get laid; they were dressed like rock groupies. There were pairs of tired truckers, and a group of college-age kids who seemed to have spent the day rafting. One was still wearing a life vest. And then there was a man in front of her. Sitting in the next booth, facing her, as if the two of them had come with invisible companions and were stuck looking at each other.

  He had one of those fat, round ageless faces that could be thirty or fifty. Lucky, Josie thought, to have all that fat in his face. He’ll be set forever. He’ll always look happy. And because he seemed so harmless and alone, she invited him to join her.

  “You can come over here if you want,” she said. She noticed he had ordered nothing but a cookie and a glass of water. “Bring your water and cookie.”

  The man reacted strangely. Josie thought it was not unreasonable to assume he would be glad to be asked by a woman to join her. Men did not often receive such invitations. But a long moment passed, during which his face took on looks of surprise, and suspicion, and assessment. Finally he tilted his head and said, “Okay.”

  He carried his plate and cookie over, and placed them on Josie’s table, and she saw that he was a softly built man in loose jeans and a plaid button-down, even more harmless now that she saw him up close. He sat and looked at his cookie, as if gathering the courage to look up at Josie. She found him vulnerable, shy, unassuming, safe.

  “I’m surprised you would invite me over,” he said, still looking at his cookie.

  “Well,” Josie said, “we were both eating alone, and that seemed unnecessary. How’s your water?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, and as if to prove it, he lifted the glass and took a sip, finally peering over the ridge to look at Josie. There was something in his eyes, she thought. Something suspecting, as if he was still questioning her motives for inviting him over. She flattered herself, guessing he thought she was out of his league.

  “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she said.

  He shook his head, looking down at his cookie, and as if knowing how long he’d been staring at it, he broke it in half.

  Josie took a sip of her wine, knowing this wasn’t going well. The longer he sat there, the more his strangeness was amplified. Every second of his tense posture, his inability to meet her eyes, seemed to increase the likelihood that he was not quite normal. “What’s your name?”

  He smiled to himself. “I don’t know if that matters,” he said, and looked up at Josie. Now there was something conspiratorial in his eyes, as if the two of them were engaged in some wonderful game.

  “This yours?” a voice said. Josie looked up to see that the waitress was standing at their table, holding out a short stack of papers to the man. There were a few pages of printed maps, some pages with handwritten notes, and under those pages, an open-sided manila file folder and below that, a large closed envelope. The label featured a series of names separated by ampersands, all of it in a font both elegant and combative.

  “Oh, thanks,” he said to the waitress, and laughed a little laugh, looking quickly at the waitress and then to Josie. “Would have defeated the whole purpose, right? Coming all the way up here and forgetting the envelope.” He said this to Josie, and finally it came together. He was serving her legal papers. She was being sued by someone, thousands of miles away, and this shy man was an envoy delivering this aggression.

  Josie stood up. “This man just propositioned me,” she said loudly. “He said he wanted to do to me what he’s done to other women around the state.” She backed away from the table, moving toward the front door, and was satisfied to see that most of the customers in the room were hearing her. “I don’t know what that means, but I’m scared.” She said this louder, pointing at him, moving toward the front counter. She pulled two twenties from her pocket and placed them on the cashier’s counter.

  Josie was almost at the front door. The process server was frozen in his seat. “He said horrible things to me!” she said, allowing her voice to peak. “I’m scared!” she wailed, and burst toward the front door.

  Not bad, she thought.

  Outside, she ran to the Chateau and climbed in, finding Paul and Ana still asleep in their seats. She started the engine and looked into the restaurant’s window. Two of the truckers, older men solidly built and awake to the possibility that they would create a justice event, had approached the table, and were hovering over the man, whose hands lay on top of his stack of papers. When Josie hit the gas and the Chateau lurched ahead, the man glanced at her, his face impassive, his eyes registering not defeat or surprise, but something like betrayal.

  She pulled around the parking lot and passed the building again as she left the driveway and met the highway. Now there were three men and the waitress at the booth, the man obscured by the bodies surrounding him. The process server thought I knew who he was, Josie realized. He’d followed her there, and to the diner, and had been biding his time, sitting there, staring at her from the opposite booth. No wonder he was surprised she’d invited him over. He thought she knew.

  —

  The adrenaline sobered her instantly and made the driving easy. Her mind was alive, florid and supercomputing. She took every minor road she could while cycling through her thoughts and plans and questions. She had defeated him, all that he represented. The look on his face—Who sent him? Carl? What would the lawsuit say? Or Evelyn? She hadn’t checked in with her child DA. Maybe there was something new on that front. Maybe Evelyn’s people had found less value than promised. Maybe she was claiming fraud, false dealing—

  Jeremy’s parents. Could they sue? Try to sue?

  No. It was Carl. It had to be Carl. This was the boldest thing he’d ever done. He’d filed some suit, and they’d hired someone to serve her. In Alaska. Holy shit. How much would a man like that be paid? A process server in central Alaska? Was he local? He didn’t seem to be local. Likely from Anchorage. Anywhere you go there are people doing these terrible jobs.

  Inviting him over had actually prevented him from serving her. After an hour of driving she was sure this was true. When she’d called him over, he’d left his papers. He’d been confused, put off balance. If she hadn’t invited him to her booth he would have simply served her when she was sitting there. But she put him off his game, took control of the situation. She congratulated herself. Some extrasensory force had compelled her to suss out his nefarious purpose at the diner.

  Was she invincible? She wondered if she was guided by some higher power. Was her mission, avoiding Carl, leaving civilization, a holy one? There was no other answer.

  —

  Somewhere near dawn, at another gas station lit in white, Josie got out, filled the tank, and felt compelled to check the Chateau for tracking devices. How else could the man have known where she was? He’d had a map, though. Would he have a map if he had some kind of tracking device? She got out of the Chateau and crawled under it.

  “Everything
okay?” a voice said.

  She looked for the source, and saw a pair of boots. She stood and saw that the voice came from a teenager, no more than seventeen, wearing a pristine yellow shirt and skinny jeans. The boots were some incongruous style mistake.

  “You work here?” she asked.

  “Uh huh,” he said. “You need help under there?”

  She thought briefly about telling him she thought she was being followed, that she had been looking for some kind of black box affixed to the undercarriage, but then knew this would only stir interest, and make her more memorable, such that if or when someone asked if he’d seen anyone or anything unusual, he would have a story. Yes, a woman under an RV, looking for a tracking device, very nervous—

  Instead, she had an idea. “You have a clean-out?”

  He directed her to it, a tank buried behind the station. There was a tidy round hole in the cement ready to receive. “I’m supposed to charge you fifteen dollars,” he said. “I mean, if you’re unloading a full tank.” Josie said the load was full, it was all the shit they’d been carrying around from the beginning, and paid the man.

  “I don’t know how to do it, though,” she said.

  Now the teenager’s face hardened. “You don’t know how to do it?” he asked, as if Josie, in her ignorance, had no right to pilot a magnificent craft like the Chateau, had no right to carry feces within. The teenager then drew a horrible and pornographic picture of a long thick tube extending from the side of the RV and snaking into a hole in the ground. “The waste should just shoot down into the tank from here to there,” he said, drawing arrows moving up and down.

  The teenager’s drawing was benign, even beautiful, compared to the reality, which first required Josie to remove a twelve-foot white tube, inexplicably ribbed, from the bumper of the Chateau. It was stored there, tastefully hidden, a long cylinder tucked inside a long rectangle. She held it gingerly, knowing that unknown volumes of the waste of strangers—of Stan and his white-carpet wife!—had passed through. How could she know if there were leaks? Who could vouch for the end-to-end integrity of the shit-cylinder? She pulled it all out from the bumper, as it came and came, like a giant earthworm.

  She attached one end to the right-sized opening on the bottom of the Chateau, just below the feces tank, and then dropped the other end into the hole in the ground, the cleanout. All she had to do now was turn the small and fragile lever that opened the tank and hope, when the human waste went hurtling down the tube, that the tube would stay attached and not fall off, spraying feces everywhere. But that seemed far more likely than it staying somehow fastened amid all that activity, the volume of waste shooting through its thin white membrane.

  She reached under the Chateau, under the tank, turned the lever, and leaped to the side. The tube, though, stayed attached through the horrible business of it—the pumping, jerking, the terrifying rush. The jerking was the most unsettling, as the tube, which she realized was far outweighed by the volume of that which it conveyed, jerked and convulsed as the waste passed through in clumps and squirts. The sound was the haunting song of the feces rushing from its halfway house to its final home, not despairing its fate, but joyful and eager.

  And then it was over, and all that was necessary was to detach both sides without getting the waste, which no doubt still coated the inside of the tube and the ends especially, on her fingers and shoes, and then replace the twelve feet of tubing, containing so much remembrance of things passed, into the bumper again.

  The teenager reappeared. “All gone?”

  “All gone,” Josie said.

  She followed the teenager into the office, washed her hands in the bathroom and, seeing that the store was stocked with food, bought enough for a week or so. Even stopping at RV parks from then on seemed too risky. They would stay in the Chateau, hidden in woods or valleys. She bought all the store’s peanut butter, all its milk and orange juice and fruit and bread.

  She bought a thermos and filled it with coffee, loaded the groceries into the passenger seat, climbed back into the Chateau and started the engine. Standing under the green-white light of the station, the teenager said something to her, but she couldn’t hear it. She cupped her hand to her ear, smiling, hoping that would be the end of it, but instead he jogged around to her window.

  “Enjoy the dawn,” he said. The way he said it sounded like a statement of common inclination—that the two of them were united in preferring these small hours, to be alone and apart.

  “Right,” she said.

  XVIII.

  AT SUNRISE there was a sign. PETERSSEN SILVER MINE, 2 MI. They’d been driving for five and a half hours, going north and northwest, and staying off the main roads. A dozen times she’d hit dead ends and closed roads and had turned around, the state seeming determined not to allow her to travel in any direct path. The night finally eased, giving way to grey light. Josie was determined to find an obscure place to park, to hide the Chateau and herself. What she was looking for, really, was a cave, but knew this was too much to ask. A mine seemed a close approximation.

  “You guys interested in an old silver mine?” she yelled back to the kids. They’d been asleep all night, and only now were making noises implying they were waking up.

  Neither said anything.

  “You still asleep?” she asked.

  “No,” Ana said.

  “Let’s go to a silver mine,” Josie said. She was slap-happy, jittery from the coffee she’d bought from the last gas station and had drunk hot, then warm, then cool, then cold. A vague memory came to her, of her parents taking her to a mine in Oregon. All day she’d caught them kissing in the dark tunnels.

  She missed the mine exit the first time, turned around and missed it from the other side. The turnoff was impossibly narrow and the sign was small and painted on wood.

  The Chateau rumbled over the dirt road as it turned and climbed into a deep valley. “No one else here,” Josie noted as they made their way two, three, four miles down the dirt road, seeing no sign of human habitation. She’d spent the night thinking to herself, and muttering to herself, and now, with the children ostensibly awake, she could talk out loud and consider it sane.

  “Look at this,” she said, “a river. Pretty.”

  If the man followed her again, intending to serve her anything, she felt capable of fleeing or doing him harm. If they were alone she was afraid of what she would do to him. She thought of rocks upside his fleshy head, leaving him alone and bleeding in some remote pullout.

  She mused over the word mine. What a funny word for the extraction of precious metals from the earth: mine. She thought she would tell her kids her thoughts on this, the very funny confluence of the meanings of mine and mine, and then found herself whispering the words, mine mine mine, and noticed she was smiling. She was far gone.

  “I need to sleep,” she said aloud.

  The Chateau crossed a narrow steel bridge over a clear shallow river and soon there was another sign, telling them that the mine was three miles ahead. Time and space were bending. They were farther away now than when they left the highway. The landscape was lush with pine and wildflowers and Josie was about to note this by yelling “Pretty” into the back, when she turned to find Paul’s face between the two front seats, alarmingly close to hers.

  “Pretty,” she said to him, whispered to him.

  Finally they saw a series of slapdash buildings of grey wood and rusted roofs climbing the steep hillside. There was a gate ahead, but it was closed and locked. She parked the Chateau and stepped down, heading to the gate, on which there was a handwritten sign.

  CLOSED DUE TO GOVT SHUTDOWN.

  NOT OUR FAULT.

  Josie got back into the Chateau, told the kids the park was closed, and then informed them that they would go in and walk around anyway. An idea was forming in her mind.

  “Can we?” Paul asked.

  “Sure,” Josie said.

  Ana was delighted.

  Josie parked directly in front of th
e gate, so as to announce to any ranger that might appear that she was not trying to hide from authorities. To them, she wanted to appear to be a mother who had stopped momentarily to show her kids around the old silver mine. They walked around the gate and through the parking lot and saw that there was a bathroom, a tidy one with a newly shingled roof. Paul ran to it and found the doors locked. In seconds he was peeing behind the building.

  The mine had been well preserved, in that the park rangers and historians who had been caring for it were allowing it to decompose without much interference. Rusted machinery lay everywhere, as if dropped from a passing plane. There were informative signs along a path that led visitors up to the smelting building, and past the rooming houses and the old offices where the mining company kept their accountants and bookkeepers.

  The kids were not intrigued. Josie often had no clue what would interest them; there had been a seafaring museum somewhere last year that Ana had gone mad for. And Paul was at least politely engaged in anything. But this mining operation held no appeal. One of the signs indicated there was a river somewhere nearby, but Josie couldn’t see it or hear it. They followed the path to its end, to a pair of buildings where the silver had been processed, then just beyond it, off the path and amid a small pocket of dense foliage, she saw a newer, tidier structure.

  “Wait here,” she told the kids, and they sighed elaborately. They were standing in the low sun, and Josie winced while looking at their red and sweating faces. “Just need to look at this house here,” she said.

  She climbed over the low, period-appropriate fence, rough-hewn and grey, and walked along a winding red-dirt path until she reached the cottage. It was a pretty little thing, a log cabin, newly lacquered and with a cherry tint to it. She peered in the windows. It was finished nicely inside, with a fireplace, two rocking chairs, a futon, a small and plain but tidy kitchen. And it was empty. There was no indication anyone had been there for weeks, and whoever lived there last had cleaned it well before leaving. It was probably the caretaker’s house. The ranger’s residence. And the shutdown had apparently sent the ranger home, to some other home. Josie returned to her children. Her idea was now complete.