by Dave Eggers
Paul and Ana emerged from the bathroom. They filled the cart with bread, canned juice, regular milk, powdered milk, cereal, granola, vegetables, an array of meats, and brought it all to the woman who had barred Follow’s entry.
“Can we go see her?” Paul asked.
“Stay on the sidewalk,” Josie said.
Before she was finished paying, though—$188, a crime, a travesty—they were back. “There’s a lady there,” Paul said.
“Mean one,” Ana said.
Josie paid, left the bags inside and followed the kids outside. Standing over Follow, holding the dog’s leash, was a large woman with black hair streaked in blue. “This is my dog,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Josie said.
“Where’d you take her from? Do I need to call the police?” The woman was wearing a puffy vest and jeans, and had already taken out her phone. Paul’s eyes were wet. Seeing his state, Ana began to cry, the tears like tiny plastic jewels tumbling down her face.
Josie explained that Follow had been all the way over the ridge, in the mine, at least two miles from town, that the dog had been scared and desperate. “Your dog followed my children home,” she said. “We fed her and took care of her.”
“No one lives there,” the woman said, meaning the mine. “I think I need to call the sheriff.”
“We’re house-sitting,” Josie said, already feeling the need to leave this conversation, this woman, her posture aggressive, her eyes wild with indignation. Paul and Ana were standing behind Josie now, hiding. Josie knew the dog was lost—the woman was clearly the owner—and the town was small, and this woman likely knew everyone in it. “We saved this dog,” Josie said. “My kids rescued her.”
The woman leaned back and crossed her arms, nodding and smiling, as if she’d heard this hustle before. It was all Josie could do not to say You don’t deserve this dog or Go to hell but she knew they needed to get away, to evaporate. “Let’s go,” she said, and hustled her weeping children back into the store, where they gathered their bags and went out the rear exit.
—
“It’s okay,” Josie said as they walked to the trailhead, knowing it was not okay. Paul shuffled behind Josie and Ana, sighing, his shoulders collapsed. “She’s got a good home,” Josie said over her shoulder, knowing that was not true, either. In an effort to cheer up her brother, Ana was walking with her hands down her pants.
“Hands in my pants!” she roared, and Paul rolled his eyes.
They were almost at the trailhead when Josie realized they couldn’t go there, either. Not in the light of day. The chances were remote, but the woman who owned Follow might have reported that a woman with two children had found her dog there, might be squatting out there, were likely to steal other animals and care for them.
“Hold on,” she said, and looked around her. There was the RV park ahead, a woman working on a satellite dish installed on her roof. There was a seaplane flying low over a row of pines. And beyond the trees, there was the Yukon. “Let’s go there. Picnic.”
They settled at the bend of the river, Ana finding a sharp stick and wetting its tip in the water. She brought the point to her nose.
“Smells clean,” she said.
They ate sullenly and watched an unmanned dinghy pass, taken downstream by the current. Josie thought of Evelyn, wanting to conjure some sadness for her death, but felt only the waste of it all, the misplaced rage, the inevitability of victims begetting victims.
“Getting darker,” Paul said, pointing to the leaking light.
“Let’s hustle,” Josie said. She was carrying the groceries in six plastic bags, three dangling from each hand. Paul and Ana had pleaded to carry their share, but she knew they would relinquish them in minutes, so she balanced the weight and they walked swiftly.
“Too dark,” Ana said.
By the time they arrived, night had come on, and the RVs in the park were bathed in moonlight. It was a quarter-moon, tinged with orange and pink, and not bright enough to guide them.
“Sorry,” Josie said.
There was one store open nearby, a gas station they’d passed that looked to have a convenience store attached, so she brought the kids along the frontage road and under the bright lights and into the store. She had eight dollars left with her, and held out hope that the store would have some smaller model of light, the kind of thing attached to a keychain.
They had no such thing. She sent Paul all over the store to no avail. They had one flashlight for sale, a forty-five-dollar machine that seemed capable of signaling planes and ships.
“You have just a regular flashlight?” she asked the woman behind the counter.
“Sorry,” she said. “We have candles, though. You lose power?”
Apparently there had been some power outages related to the wildfires, and the store had had to stock up on candles. They’d sold out three times in the last month, the clerk explained. And so Josie left the gas station with a twelve-pack of candles, each with a tin rim to catch the wax, and a pack of matches. With these they would make their way through the forest and over the ridge and back to their cabin.
“We get our own?” Paul asked.
Josie was sure that the only way she could manage to get her children aboard for this task, walking through a black forest at nine o’clock with only candles to guide their way, would be to allow each of them to hold their own.
“Yes,” she said, as if it had been the plan all along. Then, realizing that with her hands full of grocery bags she wouldn’t be able to hold a candle at all, she delivered the coup de grace. “You two will have to light our path. I can’t do it.”
It sounded more dramatic than she’d intended, but they took the bait. They made their way down the road and at the RV park they ducked across the frontage road and into the darkness. The candles gave them a circle of light that allowed them to see one another, their shirts ghostly white. But the short reach of the candlelight meant that all around them was still darker. All along the walk, trees arrived in front of Josie’s view with alarming suddenness. She could only keep faith that they were on the right path, that the path did not split or detour, and that because it was inclining slightly all the way, they were making their way up the hillside and over the ridge.
“Smell’s getting worse,” Paul said. He was right. The wildfire’s acrid air seemed to be stronger, denser.
Tomorrow she would return to work with Cooper. She smiled to herself, disbelieving that she’d made a proposal like that to a stranger. He had agreed, and now her head was full of ideas, elaborations and reversals. The show about Grenada? Would that be the first thing to explore? Or Disappointed: The Musical? Or something encompassing all of Alaska. Alaska! No, without the exclamation point, because this was not a demonstrative place, no, it was a place of tension, of uncertainty, a state on fire. Alaska with a colon. Alaska: Yes. The show would start with Stan. Stan and his wife, awash in white carpet, closing the door on Josie and her children, the Chateau in motion. Josie thought briefly of Starlight Express, the actors on roller skates—that kind of debacle could be avoided. There would be Norwegians, and naked showering nymphs, magicians from Luxembourg. The zip code guy? He’d tip the show, obliterate all else, as he did on the cruise ship. You could get Jim in there, Grenada. You’d have to have Kyle and Angie. Guns everywhere.
“Mom?” Paul asked. “Has anyone ever done this before?”
Paul asked this question every so often, when they were in new situations, when something seemed wrong. He’d asked it once when he peed in his pants at school. Has anyone ever done that before? he wanted to know. There was comfort in precedent. Happens every day, Josie had said then. Now she said, “Walk in the dark? Every night, Paul, someone is walking in the dark.”
For a moment it seemed Josie’s wording had made it worse, conjuring an army of stealthy night strollers, but Paul seemed satisfied, and Josie returned to her show. Could it be that there would be periodic shots in the theater? The actors would sing, the orchestr
a would play, but every few minutes a rifle shot, the pop of a handgun, would break open the air, and there would be little to no attention paid to it. Who was shot? Was it real? The play would go on. Josie thought she would try that the next day with Cooper’s group—some kind of arrhythmic interruption that might mean death but would not stop the music. The crazed music—for it had to sound like organized lunacy—would always go on, loud and ceaseless.
“Champagne on my shoulders!” Ana yelled.
Then: “Stab stab stab!”
And: “PBS kids dot com!”
Josie laughed, and Paul laughed, and they both knew that by her getting a laugh, Ana would not stop until forced to. Encouraged, she sang louder. “Champagne! On my shoulders!” Where could she have heard these things? But then again, Ana was tuned to a different galactic frequency, and there was no telling what signals she was picking up. Josie had no choice but to allow Ana’s babbling nonsense; she needed both kids to be happily distracted from the fact that they were walking without the dog they had in the morning, over a mountain in the dark holding disintegrating candles.
“Mine’s almost done,” Paul said, and they stopped so Josie could transfer the flames from the gnarled and spent candles to the pristine new ones, and the kids seemed similarly re-energized with the new candles. Josie chose not to think about the possibility that they would be attacked by bears, wolves or coyotes. She had seen signs warning of the presence of all of these animals nearby, but she guessed, without any evidence to support her thesis, that the candles would ward them off.
So there would be periodic gunshots. Mortar fire. Thunder but no rain. There would be horns, and strings, but the woodwinds would dominate. The clarinets—and flutes! They sound innocent but always signal deviance. They would underline the madness. The air would be full of smoke. At times the audience would barely be able to see the action, and everyone, especially the Alaskans, would wonder why Alaska, the last frontier, pure and undiminished, ragged and filthy, endless, independent but then wholly dependent, which had sent billions of gallons of oil through a pipeline to be burned and sent into the atmosphere, was now on fire. And so there would be tragedy, too.
“There it is!” Paul yelled. On the opposite side of the ridge, the rusted roof of the mine was visible, just a slant of black against the sky, and Josie had the strange sensation of being home. The abandoned mining town was now their home. The path was illuminated by the partial moon and the kids could find their way.
“Wait,” Josie said, and scanned the area for cars. She half-expected a police car to be waiting. But there was no one. They were still alone, and her heart swelled.
“Can we run?” Paul asked.
Ana looked to him, as if unsure if she could support this suggestion. Then she nodded vigorously, kicking herself for doubting any radical act, especially one involving running.
“Just to the cabin,” Josie said, and enjoyed saying that. The kids ran ahead, down a dark path, toward the amber light.
Could you have animals in the show? she wondered. Wolves and bears. A bighorn sheep. An eagle dropping it a thousand feet to a silent death. Cruel logical murder in the wild. More gunshots. Someone would die but no one would care. The fires would burn. That could be part of the soundtrack—the slow hushing crackle of the fires. Sirens. She couldn’t help picturing the curtain call: cops, prisoners, firefighters. Evaders and crusaders. The fires, on stage, would rage behind them, pushing them to the edge. Finally the actors would leap into the audience, flee for the doors. More gunshots, real or unreal, no one would know, as everyone left the theater and ran into the night. When they left the theater, they’d forget where they’d come from.
—
Josie unlocked the front door, let the kids in and turned the light switch on. Nothing happened. She tried again, nothing. They entered the cabin by candlelight, trying anything electric, and found that something had happened: the power was out. She opened the fridge, feeling its fleeting cold, threw their groceries in, and closed it, wondering what among the things they’d just bought would go bad by morning.
“Is this okay?” Ana asked.
Josie turned to find her face, orange in the candlelight, her eyes shining. What Ana meant was: Should the lights really be on? Did someone turn off the lights because we shouldn’t be here? Should we be in Alaska, in an abandoned mine, alone, in this home that isn’t ours? What does it mean that it’s dark here, and we have only candles, and we just crossed a mountain to get here, and were not harmed by beast or man? How is this all allowed?
“It’s fine,” Josie said.
They lit more candles and brushed their teeth, and Josie read them C. S. Lewis from a copy they found in a bathroom drawer, and in the flickering candlelight, while reading Prince Caspian, Josie felt that they were living a life that had kinship with the heroes of these books. They had only walked two miles through the dark, through a forest and over a ridge to their home in a twice-abandoned mining town, but she felt there was not so great a difference between what she and her children were capable of and what these other protagonists had done. Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.
XXI.
COOPER LIVED IN A REAL HOUSE, a red-brick ranch with a black roof, which was surprising, though Josie didn’t know why. He’d told her he lived there in town, and he’d been wearing clean clothes when she’d met him, so did she really think he lived in a tent? Something about the hootenanny had her thinking of hoboes.
Josie and the kids had walked over the mountain trail and into town, and Cooper opened the door before she rang the bell. “Right on time,” he said. He’d told her to come at eleven, with the rest of the players trickling in after noon.
The kids entered the house reluctantly, but then Ana ran to the back porch, where she’d spotted an ancient hobby horse on wheels. Paul walked in slowly, looking around as if this might be his future home.
“I made some lemonade,” Cooper said. “The kids can drink it out there if they want,” he said, indicating the backyard, where Ana was already testing the horse for weak points. There were a handful of other playthings strewn about the porch, all of them weather-worn and missing key parts. “Or they could stay and watch.”
Ana was already outside and couldn’t hear him. But Paul stayed by Josie’s side as Cooper led them into a wide living room, most of it dark but for a cone of light in the center, coming from a bright round skylight. There were Persian rugs overlapping each other, a pair of drama masks, happy and sad, over the fireplace. Josie complimented the house, which was cave-like and clean. Cooper sat on a leather ottoman and gathered his guitar on his thigh.
“I figured we could start alone,” he said. “Just to get your bearings. Or for me to get mine.”
“And the rest of them? They’re all okay with a checkup?” Josie tried to conjure what tools she’d be able to muster and sterilize. She’d have to bend a paperclip. “And these guys are professionals or…?” She wasn’t quite sure why she asked. She knew they weren’t a band of professional musicians, playing parades and parks in Alaska.
No, no, Cooper said. They all had full-time jobs, or as close to full-time as anyone had in the town. A couple were seasonal oil workers, one was in commercial fishing, another had retired as a lumberjack. “Suki’s the drummer. She waits tables at Spinelli’s. And Cindy’s the new mailperson around here. She’s the singer,” Cooper said, and it was clear that there was something about Cindy—was she beautiful? Were she and Cooper involved? “We just found out a few weeks ago she could sing. She wasn’t at the parade.”
Josie didn’t know what to do with herself. Stand? Sit? She sat on the arm of the couch.
“So guitar?” he asked. “I play piano, trumpet…”
“Guitar is fine,” Josie said.
“You have in mind a song, or—” he asked. “I assume you have lyrics already.”
Josie didn’t have any words at all
in mind. She had only the thousand notions from the night before.
“Maybe you could start with some lower chords,” Josie said. “It was when you were strumming yesterday, at the end of that last song, that I started thinking about this.”
Cooper tried a few chords, and then strummed one that sounded right.
“What’s that?” Josie asked.
“G.”
“Just G? Not flat or sharp or anything?”
“Just G. You want me to keep going?”
“I should be writing this down,” Josie said.
“I’ll remember,” Cooper said, then went to the kitchen and came back with a legal pad and a pencil. Paul was sitting close to Josie, silent and seeming to understand what was happening. She knew the important thing, now, was to act normal, in command—to avoid this being some pivotal moment where he realized his mother had left the rational world.
“Can you write for me?” she asked Paul.
He took the pad eagerly.
“Write down G,” she said, but he already had. He underlined it for her, and looked up at her, now involved, no longer concerned.
Josie asked Cooper for other chords that were low like G. He played two more, named them A and C, and Paul wrote them down.
“You have a piano here?” Josie asked.
Cooper smiled, and Paul reached across her lap to point at a small piano in the corner. Josie glanced out the back window, and saw no sign of Ana.
“Can you go check on her?” she asked Paul.
“No,” he said. Josie was stunned into silence. “I want to stay,” he said, his tone softening. “I want to hear.”
Ana reappeared from the side of the house, carrying the disembodied antlers of a deer. She seemed to be speaking to them, or to herself, animated but stern.
