Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  She was standing in the doorway, her mass of red hair matted on one side, misshapen and a faded shade of orange, like the last pumpkin chosen from the patch. Her hands were stuck to either side of the doorframe, as if she were holding the two sides at bay.

  “Are we staying here tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I think so. Maybe for a few days,” Josie said.

  “Really?” Ana said, and her face and shoulders dropped in one beautifully coordinated collapse.

  Ana had similar sentiments last winter, when they were headed back to school after holiday break.

  “Do I go to school this week?” she had asked.

  “Yes,” Josie had said.

  “And the week after that?”

  “Of course.”

  Ana had been astonished. Winter break had brought something different each day, and now, going back to school, where things did not vary so much day to day, offended her. The repetitive nature of the system assaulted her sense of the heroic possibilities of a day.

  “Go to bed,” Josie said, but instead Ana came and crawled on her lap and pretended to suck her thumb.

  “Don’t worry, Josie,” Ana said. “I won’t tell Paul.” Now she gave Josie one of her looks, a conspiratorial look that said they could drop all the formalities and role-playing, the silly game of parent and child.

  “I don’t like you calling me Josie,” Josie said.

  “Okay, Mom,” Ana said, making the word sound absurd.

  “Go to bed,” Josie said, pushing Ana off her lap. Ana fell to the rough porch in a heavy theatrical heap. She crawled back into the house, and though Josie expected to hear from her again, after ten minutes there was no sign that Ana was awake, which meant, for Ana—who usually fell asleep in seconds and stayed that way till morning—that she was actually asleep.

  As if in protest at losing Ana for the dark hours, the howl of a coyote spiraled through the night.

  —

  The ringing again. Josie opened her eyes, saw that her children were already awake, huddled around Follow as she ate beef jerky, her tiny jaws snapping.

  “Who’s calling, Mom?” Paul asked.

  “Wrong number,” she said.

  Josie realized that the presence of a dog did not help their situation. They wanted to be invisible, but wasn’t there a chance Follow’s owners would return for her? She had the thought that perhaps Follow belonged to someone else nearby, and that like many a puppy, she had simply been exploring when she encountered Paul and Ana and followed them to the cabin door. There was a chance the owners knew the ranger, that the dog had come here before, and they were calling to check if he’d seen her. Or there was the possibility that it was simply a telephone, that people made calls, that it rang, and none of it had anything to do with Josie and her children. She could unplug the phone, but what if the ranger called, found out it had been disconnected? She had to leave it be.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, not telling Paul and Ana that she thought there was at least some chance that Follow would lead them to her actual owner and real home. And so Josie packed a backpack with crackers and water from the bubbler, they tied a rope to Follow’s flea collar and made their way up through the mine and into the woods beyond. The animal was tentative still, walking ahead, then circling back to the children, then running ahead for a spell before coming back again. She was either a deeply troubled dog or not very bright.

  When they reached a stand of birch trees, though, some sense of purpose seized the dog, and she led them down a steady slope until they heard the sound of rushing water. Follow brought them to a narrow stream cut through a tight valley, and drank deeply from the rushing water.

  “Mom?” Paul said. “Where do languages come from?”

  He wanted to know why there was Italian and Hindi and Swahili, and not just English, and why they spoke English, and was English the best language? Josie made a brief stab at the origin of languages, the vicissitudes of distance and isolation in the formation of foreign tongues. People living far from anyone else, she explained, as they were, might be the sorts of people who created their own tongue. They could, she said, create their own words for anything, and to demonstrate, she held up a rock in the shape of a man’s head. “I could call this kind of rock tapatok, for example,” she said. “And from then on all the people who came after us would call it tapatok.”

  Ana picked up a rounder rock. “I call this Dad.”

  “Dad is already a word,” Paul said. “And why would you call that Dad?” His mood darkened, and Ana took note. Paul went down to the water to pet Follow, taking her into his tiny lap. Ana followed, then was distracted by something else, her head tilted. She took a few steps forward, stepping into a grassy bouquet of wildflowers, dropped the rock and pointed up.

  “Waterfall.”

  There, cut through the cliffside above them, was a narrow white plume falling from fifty feet above. They all wordlessly agreed to walk to the waterfall. When they got close, the volume was far greater than it had seemed from the path. For a moment the falling water seemed utterly sentient, falling with joyous aggression to the earth, spitefully suicidal. The spray reached them first, and they stopped, sat, and watched the waterfall’s ghostly white fingers. In the wall of mist, rainbows shot off like birds taking flight. Follow kept her distance.

  Josie strode to the waterfall, stepping on the wet stones, trying to find a way not to soak herself, and when she was close enough, she put her hand under the flow, feeling its strength and its numbing cold.

  “Can we drink it?” Paul asked.

  Josie’s instinct was to say no, of course not, but already the woods had calmed her, opened her, so she did something that she wanted to do but normally would not have done. She took their thermos out of the backpack, emptied it, and then held it under the rush. Immediately her hand was soaked, her arm was wet to the shoulder, and the bottle was full.

  She turned to Paul and Ana, seeing their astounded faces, and raised the bottle to the sun and sky to see if it was clear. Josie and her children saw the same thing, that the water was perfectly transparent. There were no particles, no sand, no dirt, nothing. Josie brought it to her lips and Paul took a quick intake of breath.

  “Is it good?” Paul asked.

  “It’s good,” she said, and gave it to him.

  He took a sip and smacked his lips. He nodded and handed it to Ana, who drank without caution. After she took her fill, Paul asked, “Are we the first to drink from this?” He meant the waterfall, but Josie took some liberty with her interpretation. This water, flowing at this moment? Yes, they were the first.

  The days were like this, each was miles long and had no aim or no possibility of regret. They ate when they were hungry and slept when they were tired, and they had nowhere to be. Every few days Ana would ask, “Are we living here?” or “Are we going to school here?” but otherwise both children seemed to sense their time in the cabin was a kind of respite, apart from any calendar, that there was no inevitable end. In the mornings, Paul and Ana drew and played board games and cards, and near noon they walked to the waterfall, to splash in the shallow water. They were in the woods now, and the woods were unbreakable. Ana acted nobly, and her face shone with an otherworldly glow. Children, Josie realized, are truly like animals. Give them clean foods and water and fresh air, and their coats will be shiny, their teeth white, their muscles supple and skin bright. But indoors, contained, they will become mangy, yellow-eyed, riddled with self-inflicted wounds.

  In those long days at the Peterssen Mine, Paul and Ana made bows from bent sticks and rubber bands. They created and destroyed dams in the river, they piled rocks to make walls and rock castles. They read by candlelight. Josie taught Paul how to start a fire in the hearth. They napped some afternoons, and other afternoons they explored the buildings of the old mine, the midday sun coming through the porous roofs in white bolts, dozens of tiny spotlights illuminating dust and rust and tools not held for a hundred years.

  T
here were a hundred uncomplicated hours in every day and they didn’t see a soul for weeks. Was it weeks? They no longer had a grasp of the calendar. During the day all was quiet but for the occasional scream of a bird, like a lunatic neighbor; at night, the air was alive with frogs and crickets and coyotes. Paul and Ana slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of hills warmed all day in the sun.

  They were growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash their clothes—and they were immeasurably better now than they were in Ohio. They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and brave. And this was, Josie realized, what she wanted most of all from her children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind. Paul was born that way and he would make sure Ana was kind, but to be brave! Ana was inherently courageous, but Paul was learning this. He was no longer afraid of the dark, would plunge into any woods with or without a light. One day, on her way back from the woods, she caught the two of them on the hillside near the cabin, both barefoot, gently shushing through the shallow leaves with their bows, watching something invisible to her. She turned, scanned the forest, and finally saw it, a ten-point buck, walking through the birches, his back straight and proud. Her children were mirroring it on the other side of the hill, unheard by the deer. They had turned into something else entirely.

  All along she had been looking for courage and purity in the people of Alaska. She had not thought that she could simply—not simply, no, but still—create such people.

  —

  But the food ran out one staple at a time. First they were out of milk, then juice, and were drinking only water, first from the bubbler then from the waterfall. They went through the vegetables, then the apples, and finally the potatoes. They lived on nuts, crackers and water for two days before a trip into town was unavoidable.

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” Josie said.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Ana said.

  The thought of driving the Chateau again, and exposing herself to the road, to the prospect of meeting anyone who might still be pursuing her family, filled her with a crippling dread. To reduce the risk she went out to the garage with a screwdriver, planning to remove the license plates. She was halfway there when she heard Paul calling.

  “A map!” he yelled as he flew down the path to her, Follow running behind.

  “Is this where we are?” Paul asked. He had it spread out on the ground between them. It was a dense thing, showing every foot of elevation, a maze of green lines, numbers and jagged paths, but they found the mine on it, and finally they arrived at the exact location of the cabin. “We’re here,” he said.

  “Okay,” Josie said.

  “There’s a town over here,” Paul noted, pointing to a small grid that looked to be just over a ridge, only a few miles away as the crow flies. There seemed to be a trail that went over the ridge, bringing them to the town via a frontage road. They would appear from the trail like hikers, and then disappear again like hikers, and even if anyone took note of the three of them, remembering Ana’s orange tumbleweed hair, they would be able to say only that they came out of the woods, or returned to the woods.

  “And look,” Paul said, pointing to a wide thread of blue. “A river, I think.”

  “The Yukon,” Josie said. They were at the Yukon River, or within walking distance, and all this time they’d had no idea.

  “Will we bring Follow?” Paul asked.

  They discussed leaving her alone in the cabin, which seemed unwise—she’d tear the place up. They could lock her in the bathroom, but that would be cruel.

  “I think we have to,” Josie said, putting their fiery faces to bed.

  —

  Josie sat outside, listening to the lunatic night, her bullet-hole guitar on her lap. She didn’t want to go to town. She had begun to think they could stay in the woods indefinitely. For the time being, she missed no one and nothing. She tried to conjure a decent chord and failed. She tried to pick a string, any string, to make a pleasing sound, and got nowhere. She put the guitar down, went inside, and found Follow, standing on the futon, as if waiting for her company. She lifted the dog, who weighed no more than a carrot, brought her outside and petted her until her black fur calmed and she returned to sleep. This was about the time the ringing had come before, so Josie’s back was tense. The cabin door squeaked.

  “Mom?” It was Ana.

  “You can’t be awake,” Josie said.

  “But I am,” Ana said.

  Ana came to Josie’s chair and leaned against it. She was wearing her conspiratorial face, the one she wore when she called Josie by her first name. She traced circles on Josie’s arm, her mouth moving, as if practicing something she needed to say.

  “What is it?” Josie asked.

  “Mom, I know Dad’s dead.” She produced an apologetic smile.

  “What?” Josie said.

  A flicker of doubt entered Ana’s eyes. “He is, right?”

  “No.” Josie threw her arm around Ana and pulled her close. “No, sweetie,” she said into Ana’s thicket of hair, smelling of woodsmoke and sun and sweat.

  Ana pulled away. “But then where is he?”

  Josie put Follow gently down, lifted Ana into her lap and gathered her little legs in so she could wrap her arms around her daughter, hold every part of her. She considered how to answer Ana’s question, how to hedge or say that her father was away, or they were away, or on vacation, or people grow apart, or make some half-promise to see him soon. But Josie knew it was time to call him. She felt a sudden tenderness toward Carl, because he had helped to create this child sitting in her lap, who had begun to think that if Jeremy was gone and dead, her father, who was gone, was dead, too. In the morning, in town, she would call Carl, and call Sunny, would tell everyone where she was and why, to let them know they would return.

  XX.

  IT WAS ABSURD TO lock a house where they were squatting, but Josie did lock it, knowing that if they returned and saw any sign of new arrivals—for example the rightful occupants—they could probably make it to the Chateau without being detected. She debated whether or not to take the velvet sack with them, but because the cabin was their home now, she felt it was safer inside than with them. She hid it behind the household cleaners under the sink.

  They took the trail up past the last of the mine’s buildings, a shack now with but one wall standing, stepped over the low fence and continued. The path rose up the hill for a quarter-mile before it turned and wound around another low peak, one they hadn’t been able to see from the cottage.

  “This must be Franklin Hill,” Paul said, and Josie had the thrill of believing that this was possible: that they could set out in unknown territory, with a handmade map, and they would see actual landmarks that bore some topographical resemblance to the map in the cabin. They rounded the hill and passed through a huddle of pines and just like that, they could see the town below, very small, no more than a few hundred residents, most of the buildings standing by the bend in the river. The water was blue and brown, and traveled slowly but shimmered boldly in the midmorning sun. The rest of the walk, about a mile downhill, was giddy, the children galloping down the dusty path, with Follow ahead of them, then behind them, circling, everyone thinking they were doing something extraordinary.

  Separating the trail from the town was a small RV park, a circle of vehicles surrounding a picnic area, white tables arranged in a half-moon. Josie stopped, looked at her kids, hoping they had the appearance of a family returning from a short hike in the hills. Ana was wearing simple sneakers and Paul was wearing his leather boots. Paul was carrying a school backpack and Ana was carrying a stick in the shape of a machi
ne gun—she had assured Josie she would not fire it. They put Follow’s rope leash on her collar, and emerged from the trail. The RV park was empty but for an older couple sitting on folding chairs, staring into the sun from the opposite side of the lot. When they arrived at the town’s main street, they saw that it was not a regular day in town.

  “Mom, is this a holiday?” Paul asked.

  Josie had to think about it for a second. Was it Labor Day? No. Too late for that. But the streets had been blocked off for a parade. It was just ending, but Josie and Paul and Ana found a spot on the curbside and sat down just as a high-school band, small but loud, passed by, playing some seventies soul song Josie couldn’t place and which was suffering greatly. The band was followed by a group of elderly women steering riding lawn mowers. Then a convertible carrying JULIE ZLOZA, TREE FARMER, TEACHER, who was running for state representative. Then a dozen or so kids on bikes, dressed like Revolutionary soldiers. A group from the local ASPCA, hoping to entice onlookers into adopting six or seven parading dogs, two of them missing legs. The local middle school had a float, where all the school’s extracurricular activities seemed to be represented—twin girls in karate outfits, a tall boy in a basketball uniform, a small boy wearing a gold medal, likely some kind of academic decathlete? Walking behind the float was a lone boy in football gear. The final parade float carried a band, ten or twelve adults in close quarters, playing guitars and banjos and fiddles, all acoustic, sending an Americana sound into the air, to the general indifference of the dissipating crowd.

  —

  They followed the few hundred people in town to a park, where a sign gave notice that there would be a birthday party, starting in minutes, for Smokey the Bear.

  “Who’s invited?” Ana wanted to know.

  “It’s not that kind of party,” Paul said.