Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  Josie did not know that. But now her interest in Carl made sense.

  “So you guys are in Alaska!” Carl let out a loud exhalation that admitted his own foibles and forgave Josie’s dramatics. She was still squaring all this: Carl had not gone after her in any way—he was not following her, suing her, nothing. Instead, it was a power company. They’d sent some random server to scare her.

  “From the news, it looks like the whole state is on fire,” Carl said.

  “We actually just fled one,” Josie said. “We’re in a shelter.” She recounted the day, the school she was calling from. She looked around her, remembering she was in a principal’s office. A sign on the wall said I’M A PRINCIPAL. WHAT’S YOUR SUPERPOWER?

  “And you’re okay?” he asked.

  “We’re fine.”

  “Okay. Stay safe. Give a shout when you get back.”

  She hung up and left the office, realizing Carl hadn’t asked to speak to the kids. He hadn’t asked when they were coming home. Even the idea of seeing his children, bringing them to Florida to present them to Teresa and her family, that Goebbelsian photo-op, was a casual notion, not a big deal either way. His interest in them came and went, like his passion for economic equality or triathlons. But he was harmless. This was so crucial and freeing to know.

  —

  “Let’s get out a little,” Josie said. She was standing over the cot where Paul and Ana were playing cards.

  “Go where?” Ana asked.

  Josie shrugged. “The river?”

  This town was about the size of Cooper’s, and they meandered through it, noticing that it was largely empty. Most of the residents were either helping at the high school, Josie figured, or had left the state for less flammable lands. They passed a truck repair operation, a real estate office, a frame shop, all closed, and found themselves at the Yukon, gray and moving slowly. They sat down, Josie suddenly feeling too tired to move. She lay back, staring into the white sky, and could feel the sun beyond it, still oddly warm.

  “This one’s heavy,” Paul said, and a loud thunk followed.

  Her children, stripped of all possessions, were throwing stones into the river. The clicking as they sifted for the right one, an almost imperceptible wind as they threw the stone high, the bass note as each hit the water.

  “You want me to put one on your foot? It’s hot from the sun.” It was Ana, standing above her.

  “Okay,” Josie said, her eyes closed. She felt the hot weight of a large rock placed on her instep. It felt wonderful. She murmured her approval.

  “You want another?” Ana asked, and Josie said she did.

  Ana placed another rock, a lighter one, on Josie’s stomach, and Josie felt the heat of it through her shirt. Choosing to keep her eyes closed, she allowed Ana, and soon Paul, to cover her with stones. There were a dozen on her chest and stomach, and a key few in her lap, feeling very right, and finally a large flat stone on her forehead, smaller, rounder stones covering each cheek. The warmth of these stones! It slowed her breathing. She couldn’t move. Covered like this, minutes were days, and she heard the voices of her children as they tried to find more places to cover their mother, their voices delighted though nervous at the edges. What were they seeing? Their mother covered in stones, so far from home.

  Josie allowed herself a moment of doubt. There was a possibility, she admitted, that she and her children should not have come to this state on fire. But the doubt did not last. Instead, at this moment, she thought she was right about everything.

  That we can leave.

  That we have a right to leave.

  That very often we must leave.

  That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.

  As the sun fingerpainted lurid colors on her eyelids, Josie felt a surge of belonging. She had love for everyone. She knew it wouldn’t last, this outpouring of gratitude and forgiveness, so she named names: She loved Jeremy, and Sam, and Raj, and Deena, and Charlie from the cruise ship, and Grenada Jim, and Carl, of course Sunny, and had something like love for Evelyn, whose dying filled her with rage, and Josie knew rage, and so she loved Evelyn. With a shudder she knew she loved her parents, too, and that she wanted to tell them this, and felt she must tell them this, that it was time to tell them that she knew them to be no better and no worse than herself.

  “We’re taking them off now,” Paul said. There was a tone of finality in his voice, hinting at his growing discomfort with his mother covered in stones. When Josie’s chest was free from the weight, she sat up and her children looked at her quizzically, as if they expected her to have become someone else. But she was only their mother, sitting up in the bright sun. They continued to remove the stones from her lap and legs.

  “How heavy do you think this is?” Paul asked. He put one of the rocks in her hand. It was warm.

  “Was that on my chest?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Maybe a pound?” she said.

  Paul made a disappointed sound.

  “Maybe two, three pounds?” she tried. His face brightened slightly, but then soured again as he stared at the rock.

  “Ten pounds, easily,” she said.

  “Ten pounds!” Paul said to Ana, who was duly impressed.

  Ana removed a rock from Josie’s thigh and put it in her hand. “How much is this?”

  This one was lighter than Paul’s, and Paul knew this, but he and Josie exchanged a look. “This one’s about the same,” she said. “Ten pounds. Maybe more.”

  Ana’s eyes sparkled, and Josie assumed Ana would keep the rock in some coveted place, but instead Ana turned and threw it into the river in a reckless diagonal. “See ya, sucker!” she roared.

  They continued to remove the stones, and each time, they asked Josie how much she thought each weighed, before dispatching that stone into the river. Ana threw hers with cruel send-offs, usually repeating Josie’s measurements before casting them at violent trajectories. Each time a stone was removed, Josie felt closer to levitation. They were just stones, and she was only sitting by a lake shushing the jagged shore, but each time her children lifted one she let out a tiny gasp, and her body felt closer to release.

  —

  “Look, Mom,” Ana said, and finally Josie stood up. Ana was pointing to a spot in the woods behind them. It seemed to be a simple trailhead sign, a standing map, but on it were colorful sagging orbs.

  “Balloons!” Ana said, and ran to the sign.

  “Trailhead,” Paul said, following her.

  The sign, decades-old, depicted a path that wound through a valley, along a narrow river, on a steady upward trajectory until it reached a mountain lake. If there had ever been any indication of distance or scale on the map, it had been worn away by weather, but Josie figured it couldn’t be more than a mile or two, and the elevation no more than three thousand feet.

  “I’ve always wanted to see a mountain lake,” she said.

  “Me too,” Paul said, staring with great seriousness at the map.

  Paul had never said anything to Josie about a mountain lake, about knowing what one was, or wanting to see one. But Paul did not, could not, lie, and Josie had no choice but to believe that this, along with his knowing he could marry a girl named Helena, was a secret and real desire, and that from him there would be far more unspoken wants and needs in the future, and that she would be privy to so few of them, and she would have to accept this.

  “So should we go?” he asked.

  “What’s a mountain lake?” Ana asked.

  XXIII.

  THEY HAD ONE APPLE, a bag of unpeeled carrots, a bottle of orange Gatorade, a bag of crackers, half a pack of Starburst candy and a bottle of water, two-thirds full. The kids were wearing jeans and T-shirts. The temperature was in the sixties. Josie felt
good about their chances to make it to the lake and back to town in time for lunch.

  “Paul,” she said, knowing she was about to delight him, “can you make a copy of that map?” His eyes took on the spark of duty as she handed him a pen and, from her wallet, the back of a grocery store receipt. His rendering was clear enough, and included most of the information on the sign’s map, which is to say not a great deal. There was a long winding trail, and an oval lake, and next to it a tiny rectangle, which Josie assumed was some kind of picnic area, maybe a shelter of some kind. It looked less like a modern Forest Service map and more like the sort of thing an illiterate bandit would have drawn while drunk on hard cider.

  But when they got to the trail Josie saw that it was wide and well marked, and for all she knew there were souvenirs and snack shops along the way. They began. They walked into a copse of birches spaced in an orderly fashion, the light on the forest floor dappled and the air cool. Ahead they saw a yellow stripe, the size of a hand, on the trunk of a tree, and Josie laughed, knowing this trail would be easy; someone had marked it every hundred yards. They looked at Paul’s map and it told them nothing new. The lake was up ahead—still seeming no more than an hour’s walk.

  “A bridge,” Paul said, and pointed to where a log, halved lengthwise, had been laid across a tiny ravine leading to the river. Covering a narrow creek of shallow water moving slowly, the bridge was rudimentary and slick with moss, but Paul and Ana insisted on walking across it without her help. It was only a few feet down, so even if they fell in they couldn’t possibly be hurt. Josie allowed them to cross, and then they wanted to do it again, so they went back and did it again.

  They walked along the river for a time, an hour or more, the heat of the day peaking, Paul and Ana starting to wilt and then the path turned inward and toward the hills, and they walked in shadow. Ahead, the path seemed to run directly into a boulder the size of an ancient barn. They followed the path all the way to the boulder, which up close looked more like a granite wall. They looked left and right and saw no yellow markers.

  “I think we’re supposed to go through it,” Paul said. He seemed utterly serious, until a tiny smirk overtook the left side of his mouth.

  “Look. Yellow,” Ana said.

  Josie and Paul turned to see that Ana had found a tiny yellow stripe on a tree high on the hill overlooking the river. There was a narrow thread of trail leading up to and around the boulder, and they took it, all three of them, Josie and Paul and Ana, having the distinct sense that without Ana they would not have seen what now seemed like an obvious path upward and over. In half an hour they climbed the path, using tree roots for footing, until they’d reached the top and they could see a clearing ahead.

  “Might be the lake,” Paul said.

  Josie looked at her watch. It was just after noon. If they were indeed at the lake, even if they made it there, turned around and walked quickly, they’d be back in town by two. They reached the top of the ridge, but there was no lake, only remnants of, or the origins of, a shallow stream pooling. Around them was a wide meadow dotted with wildflowers of violet and yellow.

  “Is that the lake?” Ana asked.

  “It’s not the lake,” Paul said, then turned to Josie. “Is it?”

  “No,” Josie said.

  This was the kind of setting, tucked into the curve of a mountain, where she expected to find it, and now they had walked so far and climbed over the ridge, and found something else, some swampy stream—it was a cruel thing.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s think.” And she contemplated the time, and their place on this trail, halfway up a mountain far larger than she’d imagined. It had taken them hours to get this far. There was time to go farther, reach the lake and turn back, she thought, though she had the tangible sensation she was making the wrong decision. She was afraid to look at Paul, for fear his eyes would judge her.

  Ana pointed to the sky. “Look, Mom,” she said. A great dark cloud had come from behind the mountain. The moment they saw it, they heard thunder. It was a loud clearing of the throat that filled the valley, an introduction to calamity.

  “Is that coming toward us?” Paul asked.

  “Will there be lightning?” Ana asked.

  The thunder came again, this time louder. Josie looked up to find that the cloud had moved closer, casting half the mountainside in grim shadow. And they were standing near the shallow stream.

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. Realizing they were standing by a stream, she tried to remember the workings of lightning and water. Was the water a conductor or a deterrent? There seemed to be no good choices around her. Lightning was coming. Likely rain, too. If they stayed out in the open, they would get soaked.

  “Should we go there?” Ana asked, pointing to a forest ahead. It seemed to be about an eighth of a mile across the upward-sloping meadow, a distance not daunting, but then again all distances so far had been warped. Everything that had seemed within reach was in fact twice as far and took three times as long.

  “The lightning goes after the trees, right?” Paul asked.

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. How could she not know? Stay away from water or go toward water? Into the trees or away from the trees?

  Then again, they hadn’t seen lightning yet, so she held out hope that they could make it to the forest before the real storm came, if it came at all. The forest seemed the safest option. They could rest there, stay dry.

  “Let’s run,” Josie said.

  Paul and Ana’s eyes spoke of their exhaustion, but this was quickly replaced by the spark of a necessary task.

  “We’re going to run to that bunch of trees, okay?” Josie said.

  They nodded. Ana positioned herself in a sprinter’s start.

  “Ready?” Josie asked. “Let’s go.”

  They took off, away from the water and across the flowered meadow, not caring what colors they crushed underfoot.

  “Yes!” Ana roared behind her.

  Josie turned and saw Ana’s tiny feet fly over rocks and bramble, her big orange head leaping like a candle carried by a rabbit. She watched Paul’s face, set with purpose. The trees were only a few hundred yards away now. They would make it. When they were near the first great pines, Josie felt silly, having made this more dramatic than it needed to be. After all, they were simply outside, running in a developing storm. She didn’t want her children to be afraid of the rain, or the thunder, or lightning, even if, given their altitude, the storm might be coming from a perilously close distance. Before the forest there was an array of small jagged boulders, and among them Josie stopped, allowing Paul and Ana to pass her, smiling as she watched them fly by her, pumping their arms, both of them grinning wildly.

  “Good, good!” Josie roared, almost jubilant.

  A screaming crack ripped open the sky above. The world went white and Josie’s back seized as if whipped. In front of her, Paul and Ana were frozen in the white light for a few long seconds, photographed in mid-stride. She had the momentary thought that they had been struck, that this was what it was to be struck by lightning, that her children were being eliminated from the world. But the light turned off, the world returned to color, and her children continued moving, continued living, and the flash was followed by a thunderclap so loud she stopped and threw herself to the ground.

  “Get down!” she yelled to Paul and Ana. “And come here.”

  Paul and Ana crawled to her, and she draped herself over the two of them. They stayed low for a minute as the sky growled and panted, as if impatiently looking for Josie and her children.

  “I’m scared,” Ana said. “Will the lightning hit us?”

  “No,” Paul said firmly. “Not while we’re low like this. Make yourself small,” he said, and Ana shrunk, holding her knees with her arms.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Okay. We’re going to run again,” Josie said. “Just to the trees.” She looked up, seeing they were no more than a hundred yards away from the next forest.


  “Ready?” she asked.

  Paul and Ana nodded, ready to push off and run. Josie paused a moment longer than she had planned, and she had no reason why. For a fleeting moment she looked into the forest, and ran her eyes up the length of the tallest tree, wondering briefly if it was true that the lightning would strike the tallest object in any field.

  “Are we going?” Paul asked.

  And then the world tore open. A sickening light filled the forest and a blue-white bolt split the tree, the one she’d just been contemplating, a quick ax driven down its spine.

  “Shit,” Josie said.

  “Mom, will it get us now?” Ana asked.

  Josie said no, it wouldn’t get them. That last strike was the closest the lightning would come, she told them, though she had no reason to believe this was true. If anything, the lightning was getting closer each time. It seemed to be acting with intent.

  They waited, watching the charred remains of the split tree smolder, a narrow plume of grey smoke spreading upward. The thunder roared again, sounding like a tank moving across the roof of the sky. Josie ran all available options through her mind. They could stay where they were, but they’d get soaked. The rain would come soon, she was sure, and the sun would set, and the dark would be absolute. They would be wet and cold and unable to find their way back. They had to continue, now. She could see the trail winding up the next mile or so, interrupted by small stands of trees. They would have to sprint between them between lightning strikes.

  “We’re going to that next forest,” she told her children. “It’s just a few hundred yards.” But the path there was wide open, unprotected, and while they ran across the expanse they would be easy targets for whatever malevolent force was patrolling their progress.

  “No, Mama,” Ana said. “No, please.”

  Paul explained that the lightning had just struck the trees, so why would they go where the lightning had just struck?

  “It won’t strike there again,” she said, not believing herself. “And it’s going to rain soon, okay? We have to move.” She had some irrational hope that there was something, some human structure, even a discarded tent, at the lake. “One, two, three,” she said, and they ran again, their shoulders hunched, their heads fearing reprisal from above.