Read Heroes of the Frontier Online
Authors: Dave Eggers
But wait, Josie thought. Maybe they could could live here. Maybe there was destiny and symmetry in her coming here to live near Sam, her fellow feral. But who could live here? It's beautiful now, yes, but the winters were surely a holy fucking horror. The clouds continued to move above her like troops in formation.
She would leave Homer tomorrow, she decided, but she didn't know where to go. This town, because it had people like Robert in it, was an unlivable place, no better than the town she'd left, and that town had been overtaken. What had happened in her little town? “I really have to get out,” Deena said one day. “I can't hack this place anymore.” She'd grown up there. Once it had been an actual place, a smallish town with an actual cobblestone square where children rode their scooters and were chased by tiny lamentable dogs, perversions of selective breeding, off leash and barking. Now the place was crowded, there was no parking, women in ponytails drove at dangerous speeds on their way to yoga and pilates, tailgating other drivers, honking, cheating at four-way stop signs. It had become an unhappy place.
The crime of the ponytail ladies was that they were always in a hurry, in a hurry to exercise, in a hurry to pick up their children from capoeira, in a hurry to examine the scores from the school's Mandarin-immersion program, in a hurry to buy micro-greens at the new ivy-covered organic grocery, one of a newly dominant national chain begun by a libertarian megalomaniac, a store where the food had been curated, in which the women in their ponytails rushed quickly through, smiling viciously when their carts' paths were momentarily waylaid. In its radical evolution toward better food and health and education, the town had become a miserable place, and the organic grocery was the unhappiest place in that miserable town. The checkout people were not happy being there, and the people bagging groceries were apoplectic. The butchers seemed content, the cheese people seemed content, but everyone else was murderous. The same terrible women (and men) who drove aggressively to yoga now drove aggressively to the organic grocery store and parked angrilyâthey stole the last parking spot from some elderly citizens hoping to use the nearby pharmacy, got out and rushed from their cars, half-livid, to buy havarti and prosecco and veggie burgers. These people were now all over Josie's small town, endangering her children with their predatory driving and barely contained fury.
The town, green and hilly and with streams running through it, though not far from an abandoned steelmill, had been discovered by these hordes and their anger, and all their new money and new anger had culminated in the incident, the Bike Pump Maimingâonly Josie called it this, but stillâin the middle of town. The incident involved a man in a pickup truck and a man on a bicycle, and the result had been a fight that left one man half-dead. But it had not been the pickup man who had beaten the bicycle man, not at this moment, in this townâno, this was the contemporary inversion, the version where the bike-riding man, wearing spandex and riding a five-thousand-dollar machine, triumphs over the kindly lawn-cutter in his rusted truck. The bicycle man had apparently taken umbrage at the pickup driver, who scraped out a living trimming grass and doing one-man landscaping gigs, who apparently had not given the bicyclist wide enough berth while passing. They were both on the road, traveling along the tiny pond that an environmental group had preserved for migrating ducks and stationary herons. So at the stop sign, the bicyclist pulled up, yelled his choice words, at which point the pickup driver stepped out and was promptly struck in the head with a bicycle pump. The driver went down and was struck again and again until the bicyclist, in his spandex and tiny special shoes, had fractured the lawn-cutter's skull and blood covered his face and spattered on the rhododendron that had recently been planted on the median by the Retired Gardeners' Club (RGC), which had supplanted the Association of Green Retirees. It was inside out, utterly backwards but perfectly emblematic of these new angry people rushing to and fro, always rushing to angrily go jogging, to angrily explain, to angrily expound, to explode when interrupted or slowed down, ready to be disappointed. These were the people! Josie made a mental note. The bicycle man, the maimer, would be in her
Disappointed
musical. Could there be some nod to
Mame
? Would that be too much?
Josie had known the man, the bicycle man. He'd been a patient. When he'd first come in, a few years earlier, he'd had an agenda, saying,
Can we skip the cleaning?
I know what I want
. He wanted to replace his six silver fillings with ceramics. The silver was near-black now and he'd married a young woman who found his mouth in need of improvement, so he scheduled two appointments on successive Friday afternoons, biked to the office in full florid regalia, clicking his way across the stone floor in his special orange shoes and spandex leggings, his racing shirt sweet with sweat. He was a diminutive and tightly wound man who checked his phone as his new ceramic fillings dried, who asked that the music in the officeâit was
Oklahoma!
that dayâbe turned down a notch, thanks. He was an abomination and did no time in jail after the maiming. He was facing some civil charges but no one expected him to suffer much.
Josie had biked to work for a while, hoping her commute would be transformed in some way. For a week or so it was. But then it wasn't. She tried taking a bus, which left her half a mile away, and she had to walk along the highway like some quixotic hitchhiker. But no matter how she traveled she was still passing the same buildings, the same parking lots. How does anyone stand it? After her parents and their atomization, she had always identified with the stayers, the homesteaders. But she knew no one who stayed anywhere. Even in Panama, most of the locals she met would just as soon live somewhere else, and most of them asked her casually or directly about getting visas to come to the U.S. So who stayed? Were you crazy to stay anywhere? The stayers were either of the salt of the earth, the reason there are families and communities and continuity of culture and country, or they were plain idiots. We change! We change! And virtue is not only for the changeless. You can change your mind, or your setting, and still possess integrity. You can move away without becoming a quitter, a ghost.
That Ohio town, then, was in Josie's past. The past could be a delicious thing, to be done with something, with some place. To be finished and able to package it, beginning, middle, end, box it and shelve it. The town had once held hippies, Ohio hippies, all of whom seemed to Josie preternaturally grateful people, who were happy for the trees, happy for the rivers and the streams and birds, and the fact of their lives, and the existence of their weed and ready sex. They built their homes from mud and twigs, here and there a dome, here and there a hot tub. But now they were older, and were moving or dying, being replaced by these bicyclists, these fast-driving women in ponytails who desired everything, who so wanted the world that they would not accept limitations, interruptions, babies at restaurants or scooters on the sidewalks. Ohio, birthplace of most of the country's presidents, was now home to most of its assholes.
IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO
? Another one of those signs. This one was hand-painted, stuck on the embankment. Was there danger of forest fires here, too? Josie could see Sam's house up ahead. It looked like a happy home, and her heart expanded as it grew closer.
IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO
? Josie smiled at the beautiful stupidity of the question. How about you
and
me? Me
and
you? Why the negativity? Why divide us? She was suddenly overcome by the cool wind, the granite sky, the fast-moving clouds, and she felt firmly placed in the world. Sam's world was solid, was new to her but was solid, deeply rooted, logical. Josie's children were inside that solid house, ecstatic with their cousins. They would stay a few days. She could park the Chateau on Sam's block. Her kids and Sam's would eat breakfast together. They could have many contented weeks, months. It was too soon to think of school here, but still. Sam could be her anchor. Tonight was a fluke, was just some thing. More important to remember was their long history together, their common narrative. How many young women are emancipated as they were? She was petty and crazed to give up so easily on Sam, wasn't she? She needed to attach herself to this world, this hardy and rational world Sam had created. She could and would. But what was that rushing sound, that unholy white light?
LEONARD COHEN WAS WATCHING
her children. This seemed to be what Sam was telling her, holding her hand like she was dying. Evidently they were in a hospital.
“Is it cancer?” Josie asked.
“You were in a ditch,” Sam said.
Now Josie remembered. She was run off the road by a truck, and she skidded down the road embankment and thenâ¦Then she didn't know what. Something else must have happened. Her arm was wrapped in gauze and Sam was saying that Robert was at home with the kids. With Josie's children. Who was Robert? Then Leonard Cohen's face appeared before her.
“They've been asleep for hours,” Sam said. “It's four a.m. They don't know you're here. You were asleep or passed out.”
“Is Leonard Cohen molesting my children?” Josie asked, and Sam assured her no, he wouldn't, he couldn't, that he was a grandfather of six. Josie laughed. It hurt. Sam, who was married, was dating a grandfather.
“Did I break anything?” Josie asked, thinking it must be her ribs. Breathing was painful.
“I don't think so,” Sam said, and now it was obvious she was still drunk. While Josie was being struck by a delivery truck and sent into a ditch, Sam had been at the bar, getting plowed.
Josie looked at Sam's sweet face and wanted to punch it. Sam squeezed her arm, thinking they were having a moment. She hadn't said anything about sorry yet. In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn't that something? Wouldn't that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Even Ana, whose nickname for a year was Sorry, was still never sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century.
“Am I on any drugs?” Josie asked.
“I don't think so,” Sam said.
Josie figured it out. She was next to that
IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO?
sign when the truck swerved too close. She'd turned too quickly, and had slammed her head into the corner of the sign. Thus the laceration on the side of her head.
“Can I leave?”
“I don't know. Let me ask.”
Soon there was a doctor by Josie's side, a bald and bearded man with a worry-free face. He looked like everyone's ideal high-school counselor. He introduced himself, but Josie couldn't decipher the name. Dr. Blahblah. She asked him to repeat it, and he did, and now there seemed to be a hocking sound in the middle. Dr. Blachblah?
He asked her how she felt.
She told him she felt wonderful.
He told her they'd checked her neuros, they were fine, no sign of concussion, no dilated pupils.
“Did your sister tell you about the stitches?”
“No.” Josie looked at Sam, but Sam was looking out the window.
“Eight in your head. Over here,” Dr. Blachblah said, and touched an area above her ear. Now Sam's eyes were back to Josie and were welling. “We were initially worried about a concussion,” he said, “because the EMTs said you were singing when they found you.”
Now Sam's face hardened, as if Josie had dropped from pitiful to something lesser, something untouchable. Singing in a ditchâthat had been the turning point.
“I understand you're a dentist?” Dr. Blachblah asked. “I think your teeth are okay, but that's your field.” He smiled, thinking he'd made a joke.
They got back to Sam's house at five a.m. Leonard Cohen was sitting up on the couch, asleep, like one of those statues they put on public benches to scare children. Hearing the front door close, Sam's grandfatherâsex partner opened his eyes and looked around as if the world, and his limbs, had been replaced with new, unfamiliar versions during his slumber. When he got his bearings he stood up, a scarecrow given the gift of life, and kissed Sam on the cheek.
“They never woke up,” he said, and then realized how morbid that sounded. “They're sleeping like angels,” he said, making it worse.
Josie wanted to know only this: Are my kids dead or what?
She went upstairs to check on them and they were asleep, the four of them, in the twins' room. Her two were on a mattress set on the floor. They would sleep on cut glass if they could sleep next to those two young warrior-women.
Downstairs, in the bathroom mirror, Josie looked at her wound. They'd shaved a tasteful three-inch square from the side of her head. It almost looked intentional, like she'd gone to some 1980s throwback stylist and asked for something that told the world she couldn't be trusted near the office supplies and shouldn't ever have children.
She returned to the basement bed, and, prompted by the hospital, the rubber gloves, she had some unproductive thoughts, starting with Jeremy and Evelyn. Jeremy bleeding out on a dusty hillside. Evelyn's black tongue. No, she thought. Not that, not now. She could write a letter to Jeremy's parents. No. She'd already done that, and had gotten no answer. She thought of the many letters she'd written in the last year, none of them returned. Why wouldn't they answer her letters? An unanswered letter made the sender feel like a fool. Why send letters? Why feel like a fool? Why leave the house? Why pick up a pen? Am I rotting? Josie wondered. She smelled something sour, and realized it was her.
The pain woke her up. It was dawn and her brain was swollen. She was on the couch, and Sam was upstairs with Leonard Cohen, so Josie couldn't ask her for Advil and Sam hadn't thought to leave any out for herâthough she'd assured Dr. Blachblah she had plenty at home.
Josie lay on the couch, watching the sky turn gunmetal blue then grey then white. Moving her head was impossible without inducing a hot blade of pain, slicing her head lengthwise, so she closed her eyes and planned exactly how she would leave Sam and Homer. Something had changedâwas it being run off the road? Had that altered the chemistry of her visit?âand now a quick exit, while Sam was at work, held a certain appeal.
Josie tried to conjure the name of the day. Was it Friday? Wednesday? Was it? She could leave. Sam would be going to work soon and they could leave then. Josie could write a note, telling Sam they were heading north and would come back soon. Maybe they really would return. Josie went to the kitchen, and of course found a tidy pad of paper with a pen attached to it. She picked up the pen and began writing, and then, for the first time, Josie had the familiar sense that she was making a choice that was contrary to what would be best for the kids. Her children, she knew, would prefer to stay here, with Zoe and Becca, learn from them, worship their older twinly ways, and to use regular plumbing, to be for a time free of the unknown dangers of the Chateau. Josie's pen hovered over the pad, saying nothing.
Leonard Cohen came downstairs, looking somehow older now, his face not unlike the mummified banana in the fridge, and Josie hid in the pantry. He put on his shoes and exited quietly. Josie went back to the couch, suddenly unsure of her plan, and fell asleep.
Sam thumped loudly down the stairs at seven, making no attempt to be quiet. She made breakfast for all the kids, and Josie allowed herself to be served while still sitting on the couch. All the while, Sam said nothing about Josie having been in the hospital, near-dead, hours before. This seemed uniquely Alaskan, and Josie grudgingly admired itâbeing hit by trucks and found in ditches, it was a valid way to spend a weeknight, nothing to get too excited about.
“How do you feel?” Sam finally asked.
“Like a champ. I feel like a champ,” Josie said.
“You want any of the Vicodin?”
Josie declined. “You keep it,” she said, feeling stoic and superior. She wanted badly for Sam to keep the Vicodin, which would imply that Sam would use it sometime in the future, and when she did, Josie would archive some small and meaningless victory.
Now Sam sat down on the coffee table in front her.
“Listen, I forgot to tell you last night. They called Carl.”
Josie stopped breathing. She held a finger up, and sharpened her eyes, wordlessly telling Sam to shut the fuck up. She grabbed Sam's elbow and led her outside, to the back porch, and there, Sam explained that when Josie was unconscious, she'd told the nurses that she, Sam, had to get back to Paul and Ana, the patient's kids, and then the nurse asked about the father, and Sam had maybe fucked upâher words,
maybe fucked up
âa little bit by explaining some rough outline of the situation, that the father was back in Florida, and that the nurse very nicely suggested they could call the father, and maybe, Sam said, she got flustered, said No!, and the nurses got suspicious and then it turned into a real thing, with everyone, including Dr. Blachblah, insisting on calling Carl, and then it got a bit weird for about an hour.
“You couldn't just tell the nurses
you
had called Carl?”
“My job isn't to lie for you, Joze.”
“You're right,” Josie said, already knowing she and her children would be on the road within an hour of Sam leaving for work. “You're right. Thanks for all you've done.”
Sam was taken aback, and grew gentle and idiotic. “Maybe this is good. Relieves the pressure.” Again she put her hand on Josie's arm.
Having the father know not just that Josie had kidnapped the children, but exactly where she'd kidnapped them to, was not likely to relieve any pressure. “You're right again,” Josie said, holding back a laugh. “You better get ready. Don't want you being late for work.”
When Sam had gone to her boat and the twins to school, Josie packed her kids' things, choosing not to tell Paul and Ana they were leaving for good.
Josie found Sam's perfect reminder pad.
We're heading out
, she wrote.
“What're you writing?” Paul asked.
“A note for Aunt Sam.”
“What's it say?”
Ana came to look.
“That's a short note,” she said.