Heroes of the Frontier (26 page)

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.

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 the 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.

“Why don't you guys go back to the Chateau for a second?” she said. “Get something to drink. I want to look around some more.”

Paul and Ana did not seem enthusiastic about moving anywhere, but when Josie presented them the key to the Chateau, they couldn't pass up the opportunity to unlock the door themselves. They would not get drinks or rest, she knew. They would play at locking and unlocking the door until she returned.

When they had run down the path and were out of sight, Josie went back to the cabin. She tried the front door and found it locked. She went to the back and it was shut, too. She had figured this, so then did what she'd planned to do, which was to walk back and forth along the back and side, looking for the smallest window.

The smallest window was in the kitchen, a grid of six panes. Josie took an elephant leaf from a nearby plant, wrapped it around her fist, and punched the glass.

It did not break. Her hand ached with the heat of a hundred suns. She dropped to one knee, cradling her fingers, cursing herself. In a few minutes she had recovered, and searched for a rock. She found a sharp one of about five pounds, and rapped it forcefully against the glass. Again the window did not break. She backed up, threw the rock underhand at the glass and missed, striking the side of the house. Finally she picked the rock up, held it overhead, and rammed it into the window. Now the glass gave way.

She waited, listening for any reaction from her children or anyone who might secretly be dwelling inside the cottage. Hearing nothing, she threw the rock away and went back to find her children.

They were playing with the key and the Chateau lock. Ana had cajoled Paul into being inside the RV while she was outside, trying to make the key fit.

“Knock knock,” Ana said.

“You have the key,” Paul said from within. “Why are you knocking?”

When Ana noticed Josie behind her, she looked momentarily crazy with alarm and guilt.

“Come with me,” Josie said, and Ana relaxed. “I have something interesting to show you.”

A very good thing about her children at this age: Whenever she said she would show them something interesting, they invariably believed her. They always thought she would actually show them something interesting. They dutifully followed her back up the sunlit trail to its end. This time she let them climb the fence, too, and she led them to the back of the cabin.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“Broken window,” Paul said.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked.

The two children stared at her.

“What would happen if this was left open, this window, in a forest like this?” she asked.

“Animals,” Ana said.

“They'd get inside,” Paul added.

Josie had a plan but wanted her children to believe it was theirs.

“Right,” Josie said. “So what should we do?”

“We should tape it shut or something,” Paul said.

“But how?” Josie said. In that moment she observed herself critically, using the Socratic method on her kids in the hopes that they would suggest that Ana crawl through the broken window.

“One of us could crawl through and find a key,” Paul said.

They were wonderful people, her children. Then she thought: Exactly how many misdemeanors would her family commit in this unassuming state?

“Or just open the door from the inside,” Josie suggested with a noncommittal shrug.

Paul and Ana took the bait and set out on the path, seeming very serious about the task before them. After arriving at the broken window and allowing Paul and Ana to inspect it with the authority of glass-repair contractors, Josie relocated the cottage's welcome mat to the window sill and draped it over the broken window's lower ledge. Then she suggested, with all the moral seriousness of the naming of a saint, that Ana was the only human alive that could successfully make it through such a small gap, crawl down to the table below, then to the floor, then to the front door, to open it for her mother and brother.

Ana blinked hard. She couldn't believe it. The old restless soul in her seemed to know exactly what Josie was up to, but the actual five-year-old sharing Ana's corporeal form was alive to the adventure of it all and chose to ignore the voice within her that knew better.

Josie lifted her, Paul's hands ready below, and Ana's stomach shifted back and forth, like a beached shark, across the welcome mat, then, in an electrifying bit of improvisation, Ana did a front somersault—slow motion, never airborne—to get to the kitchen table below the window. Ana stood on the table for a moment, pretending to be assessing but actually just preening, knowing she was being watched and admired. Then, without fanfare, she jumped to the floor and ran to the front door as if she'd lived in that cottage all her life. By the time Josie and Paul arrived at the door, Ana had opened it and was tapping an imaginary watch on her tiny wrist.

Then she relaxed and smiled, like a host who had chosen to forgive tardy guests in the interest of preserving the mood. “Welcome!” she said.

Josie explained to them that they would need to tape the window shut from the inside—only from the inside would it work or hold through the rains and winds. So they went into the cottage, smelling its raw woods, the faint scents of mildew and detergent—of attempted order—and they looked for duct tape and cardboard. Soon they had found both and had repaired the window, or at least made it impenetrable to insects and small mammals.

But Josie's intention was not only to fix the window, but to stay here, at least until she'd decided on a next step. The location could scarcely be better. She rifled through the drawers in the kitchen until she found a key, tried it in the front door. It worked. She had a key to the cabin. “I think we should stay here tonight,” she said casually, “just to make sure the place is safe and our window repair holds.”

Paul and Ana agreed. Or just shrugged. They didn't care. There was no longer any logical pattern to their lives.

“Hold on a sec,” she said. Leaving the kids in the cabin, Josie jogged down to the Chateau and pondered exactly what to do with the vehicle. She couldn't leave it at the gate.

She looked around and saw, inside the gate and across the parking lot, a prefab garage made of corrugated steel, its door open. She expected it to be filled with vehicles or whatever else the park rangers might make use of, but it was largely empty. The shutdown: this was where the ranger had parked his truck, and now he was gone. It looked tall enough to hold the Chateau.

Josie examined the lock at the end of the chain. It was a standard padlock that held together the heavy chain threaded through the gate and post. Her first thought was to attack the lock itself with one of the wrenches she'd seen in the Chateau toolbag. She had a jack there, too, but assumed that the padlock was designed to withstand the blows of simple steel and iron implements.

She stood in the lace-white light of the morning, staring at the gate, and when she thought of the solution, she laughed. It was ridiculous, and it would work, and once she had done it she would laugh about it always, in the years to come, the ease of the gambit, the fact that they had really done it. It was a criminal act, something between breaking and entering and simple vandalism, but it would work beautifully.

In minutes she was back at the cottage and had found the saw hanging over the mantel. And then she was running down the path again, the saw held over her head with two hands. She returned to the gate and began sawing the post. She started very low, so that when she returned the post to its position, the grass growing around its base might hide the fact that she'd cut through it. Working without rest, for she worried that at any moment her kids would be upon her, witnessing this, her most bizarre and criminal act yet, she sawed through. The lock was still attached of course, but it was now attached to a post that was unattached, that swung with the open gate.

She drove the Chateau through the gate and slowly guided it into the prefab garage, expecting the top to scrape any moment. It fit, though, was meant to fit, so she drove it in, and closed the doors to the garage when she was finished. The Chateau was invisible. She took a few hundred dollars from the velvet bag, shoved it deep into the corner of the cabinet, afraid to count what was left, and locked the Chateau door. She returned to the gate for the best part of it all. She replaced the post atop its foundation, balancing it such that it still looked like a functioning, unaltered pillar. If anyone touched it, or if a strong wind came, it would come apart, but for the time being it looked legitimate, unaltered.