Heroes of the Frontier (31 page)

Paul was writing feverishly. Josie peeked over his shoulder to see he was naming every instrument and some description of the person playing it:
Old lady, red shirt, dirty hands
.

Josie saw something outside and had an idea. “Can I move that in here?” she asked Cooper, but didn't wait for an answer. She walked out to the back deck, the sky yellowing and wind gusting, took his weight lifting bench and carried it inside. Cooper held up his hands in surrender, and Josie carried the bench past him and set it in the middle of the carpet, between him and Suki. As the musicians warmed up and tuned, Josie lay down on it, her eyes to the ceiling, and it felt right.

“Everyone ready?” Cooper asked. “Start with the same thing?” he asked Josie.

“Actually,” she said, “can we start with the trumpet?”

The trumpeter, a portly man of about fifty, with a buttoned-up shirt and glasses, put on a comical air of self-importance, straightening himself in his chair.

“Your name?” she asked.

“Lionel,” he said.

“Something a little vaudeville, a little tragic, Lionel,” Josie said to the ceiling, and Lionel began, and it was better than Josie could have imagined. It was like so many of those old records they had in that Rosemont house, that sad old trumpet sounding like decay, like adults who let themselves regret and wallow. There was a sound like this in just about every musical she could remember. But why?

“Now the cello?” Josie said, knowing the sadness would be multiplied. It felt so good to hear this, she thought, knowing it was just for them, heard only by the people in this room. She looked around, seeing the musicians nodding, their heads tilted, some with eyes closed.

“A little snare?” Josie said.

Suki began, a slow march, and the three of them, being musicians, unfairly blessed with the power to weave together instantaneously, created what sounded like a real song, a slinky and seductive tune, that might announce the arrival of a femme fatale. Josie closed her eyes, and in a flash remembered a time when her mother appeared at the top of the stairs wearing an antique mink coat—something she'd gotten from her own mother. She'd sashayed down the stairs to some old song, her eyes encircled in heavy eyeliner. Josie had been twelve, maybe, and it had thrilled and confused her to see her mother this way, a sexual being, capable of theatrics and artifice. Josie had been at the bottom of the stairs, with her father. Holding his hand! She remembered this now, how strange it was to hold his hand at age twelve, but she had done that, hadn't she? They had stood at the bottom of the stairs, and at her mother's behest they'd put on a record. What was that record? And they had watched as she vamped down the steps, a nurse wearing furs and makeup, her hair curled and shiny.

“Josie?” It was Cooper. “Anyone else?” he asked.

Josie sat up, finding the faces of the other ten musicians, everyone at the ready. “Sorry,” she said. She looked over to Paul, whose eyes seemed on the verge of worry. “I think we're ready for everyone now.”

“Continue from where we were?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Josie said. “Something different. Let's start with your G. A faster tempo now. Just strum, the G and D and F, but faster.”

Cooper began, and she swirled her arm, telling him faster. He sped up, and the sound overwhelmed the room. She pointed to Suki now, who began a slow rumble, a self-serious rhythm.

“Now you,” Josie said, pointing to Frank. He began to play, and after just one stroke of his bow across the human curves of the instrument, Josie stopped breathing. The cello was a voice. More than any other instrument, the cello was a human's voice. A dying man, a dying woman. Josie's eyes quickly filled, and Frank noticed, and seemed ready to pause, but she gestured to him, insisting he continue. She pointed to Cindy, who began singing, but now at a lower register, responding to the cello in a way Josie didn't expect but felt was correct, or correct enough for now. Suki, unasked, grew louder, and Josie liked that, and Frank grew louder, too, slicing his cello, vacillating between a few notes, Josie had no idea what notes, what chords, but they sounded like every disappointment, speaking for her terrible love of her poisonous past, every bit of it tasting bitter but filling her with a dark intoxicating fluid. The cello was the steady downward pull of lost time.

From behind her a violin leaped in, and she turned to find the older woman, now with her eyes closed, glasses atop her head. She was playing something different, though, a jauntier tune, and Josie nodded vigorously. It was time. She pointed to the violinist and smiled.

“Everyone like that!” she yelled over it all.

And now, one by one, the musicians joined in. The guitars doubled the sound and doubled it again. The trombone gave it the lumbering sound of everyday, the trumpet gave it the sun, the bursts of irrational joy—trumpets were the sound of laughter, Josie knew now—and on top of it all, the oboe and clarinet provided the madness. The woodwinds sounded like the insane, like loons and coyotes, a fighter plane twirling down from the sky to its doom, like a row of Rockettes. Now Ana appeared in the doorway, her antlers at her side.

“Come,” Josie yelled, and extended her arms.

Ana didn't walk to her, but instead began sneaking over, the antlers held on her head, as if she were a deer trying to enter the room unnoticed. The musicians smiled, their eyes crinkling, and Ana fed on it. Josie was sure she was on the verge of exploding.

She was right. Ana dropped the antlers and raised her arms, as if drawing more power from every corner of the room. Now she sprinted in place. She turned on one foot, then the other. She danced with shocking rhythm and funk, shaking and twisting and periodically kicking one foot toward a musician—giving each of them, Frank and Lionel and everyone else, a kick of salute, never actually touching—a theatrical kick of fraternity and communal insanity. A kick for
you
! she was saying, and then would turn to kick another. A kick for
you,
too!

The musicians could barely keep it together. She was a star, a natural being of the theater, meant to exaggerate and eviscerate the attempted dignities of being human. Animals! her body was saying.
You are animals. I am an animal. It is good to be an animal!
She kicked high in Paul's direction, then kicked again, this time knocking the legal pad from his hands. Delighted, she pulled him to the carpet, to dance with her. Not knowing how to keep up, first he simply lifted her into the air, and she went with it, raising her hands to the sky like a figure skater raised high by her partner. But she wanted down, and Paul lowered her, and now she circled him, and he followed suit, and they circled each other, growling and pawing, and finally just leaping straight up, again and again, urging each other higher. All the while the music grew louder, Cooper strumming with what seemed to be double the volume and depth. The pace was growing quicker, more urgent and frenetic, and Josie looked around to find that the musicians had left their own moorings. They were all on their feet, dancing, high-stepping, kicking, following Ana's lead. Two were on the ground, their legs pedaling upward. The trumpeter was in the kitchen, playing into the fridge, and it sounded marvelous. It was all a maniacal wall of cross-cutting sounds, all of it separately desperate and tragic underneath but on top of it all, there was a lunatic spiraling, all of it sounding exactly like but completely different from any of the sounds she'd heard in her head for so many years, when she thought she had some music in her. She lay back down, luxuriating in the sounds, thinking she could stay here, not just at Cooper's, but in this town, too. She could be a dentist again, as Cooper suggested, and every week could come to Cooper's house like this, could further articulate this chaos inside her, could clean their teeth, and in exchange there would be this kind of release.

But now there was a new sound. Josie sat up, annoyed. It was an artificial sound, a man-made sound of panic. Sirens. They wove slowly into the music. And one by one the musicians stopped to listen, and phones began to ring, and it was all over.

JOSIE STEPPED THROUGH
the front door, feeling dazed and sated, the light an assault to all senses, and saw a pair of fire trucks speed by, sirens screaming. She turned around to find Cooper on his cellphone. Frank hustled by, squeezing past her and out the door. “Fire's coming this way. They're evacuating. Told you.”

The rest of the musicians followed, and spread all over the lawn, going in all directions, carrying their horns and guitars. Paul and Ana appeared in the doorway.

“We have to go,” Josie said.

But she didn't know where. She didn't know where the fire was coming from. She assumed from the south, where the closest fire had been, but what did that mean for the cabin, the Chateau?

A woman in an orange vest was running down the street. “Mandatory evacuation,” she called out. She was out of breath.

Suki emerged from the house and breezed past her. “Bye Josie,” she said. Cindy followed her, going the opposite way. “Bye Joze,” she said. Josie said goodbye and turned to the woman in orange.

“Where's it coming from?” Josie asked her.

“South,” the woman heaved, and pointed.

Josie followed her finger to the mountains. The sky was white, choked with smoke. “How close is it?” she asked.

“Close. You have to go north. There are buses if you need them. They're headed to Morristown. Leaving in twenty minutes.”

“Do you know if it's already at the silver mine?” Josie asked, but the woman waved her off, and continued down the street. She was some kind of volunteer, knocking on doors.

“Where's the fire, Mom?” Paul asked.

Sirens vandalized the air.

“Let me think,” Josie said.

The fire trucks were heading out of town, going south, while families with cars were already speeding north.

“Come inside,” Josie said, and hustled her kids into Cooper's house. He was on the phone again. He turned to Josie. “Half hour, tops. I'd take you but I don't have room.”

“What do you know about the silver mine?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “What silver mine?”

She took him aside, out of the kids' earshot. She told him about staying at the Peterssen Mine, over the hills, that they had all their belongings there, all their money and an RV, that it was their only way out of town. “You think we can get there in time?” she asked.

He looked at her like she'd lost her mind.

“Just get on a bus,” he said.

“What about our stuff?” Paul whispered to Josie. Cooper had packed two backpacks for them, full of food and water, flashlights and batteries, and sent them down the road to the elementary school parking lot, where the buses were assembled. Most were empty—most of the people in town had their own cars and trucks.

Josie raised her hands in the air, with a magician's flair, and stepped onto the bus. Paul and Ana followed, and aboard they found only five seats taken, by two elderly couples and one teenager traveling alone. They sat down, Josie looked into the hills, where there was a wall of green and grey smoke, wondering if the fire had already taken the cabin, or would ever take it. She'd asked everyone she knew, and no one had any idea.

“Mom, really,” Paul whispered. He needed clarity.

Josie knew she should be reassuring her children about their prospects, but she was too stunned to put on a front. She pictured the cabin on fire, all their drawings on fire, all the games on fire, Candyland on fire, the children's swords and bows and arrows, all the food they'd just bought. She thought of the Chateau. They had not left much there, a few items of clothing, and would not miss any of it. But it would surely be gone—if the fire came to that valley it would burn quickly and hot. There were too many trees, everything so dry, and no one there to fight off the flames.

And then she saw it. A bright yellow glow from behind the hills, as if an oblong sun was quickly rising. But it was no sun, it was the fire, and she knew it meant it had overtaken the valley of the mine. Black smoke billowed upward, and she guessed one of the machines had been engulfed, the sudden burning of some kind of fuel. The Chateau. It had to be, its tank full of gas. She thought of Stan, and how she would tell Stan, standing on his white carpet, that the Chateau was no more. Knowing Stan, he'd make a profit on it.

Then she thought of the velvet bag. All the money they had left. She had about eighty dollars with her.

“Good thing we were here,” Paul said, and Josie realized the truth of it. If they hadn't come to town, if she hadn't made her attempts at music in Cooper's home, they would have been at the mine that day. Alone, without a soul knowing they were there.

“Everyone ready?” the driver asked.

The bus sputtered awake and pointed itself north.

“Are you done with that?” Paul asked.

Josie looked over to him. He'd moved himself to the next seat over, like some independent fellow traveler. Ana was lying on the floor, gnawing on Josie's leg, waiting to be told to stop.

“With the music?” Josie asked, and Paul closed his eyes.
Of course the music,
his placid face said.

Wasn't she on the verge of some great discovery—if not one meant for the world at least a private revelation, bringing forth the music within her? Josie watched the scenery pass, the fire trucks heading the other way, toward the trouble, and she realized, with some surprise, that the music she needed to hear, that she'd just heard, that she had brought forth, had swum in, she needed no more of it. Not right now at least. Cooper would not understand this. You're onto something, he might say. Or would he say that? She was probably not onto something. She was more likely a woman, temporarily insane, who had been conjuring dissonant madness from a group of pliable musicians wanting free dental care. But what about staying in that town, Cooper's town, and weaving herself into it, becoming their new dentist, their resident eccentric, amateur composer, part of the musicians' world, raising her children there? No. Or not yet. She was free of it. She was free of so many things, the fear of Carl, the ghost of Evelyn. She would not ever feel free of Jeremy, but two out of three was a start. She was no longer fleeing anything. But that didn't mean she wanted to be kept, handled, cared for.

“I don't know,” she told Paul.

She could not promise that she would not do it again. She had no idea. She needed no more music, but needed to do something else, and to see something else, and she needed to make her children braver and stronger by moving. She could make no promises about what she would want to do or see in the future, and she hoped her children would forgive her for this lack of certainty, this never-settled question in their lives, a limitless sky that had the power to make them fearless, utterly indomitable, or cripple them with fear.

They drove for hours, over streams and through wide expanses of taiga, the sky ahead a velvet blue. Cooper had said he would meet Josie and her kids, and as the scenery passed, she became unsure this was something she wanted. She was not sure she could trust her state of mind, but after twenty minutes of riding away, she felt a familiar exhilaration, the breathless freedom of having left trouble behind. It was not unlike the feeling she'd had when she left Ohio, and when they'd landed in Alaska. Now the Chateau was gone, the cabin was gone, they were free from everything again. They knew no one on the bus, and were headed to a place where they knew not a soul.

By the time they pulled into a wide parking lot loud with police lights and emergency vehicles, Ana was asleep on Josie's lap and Paul had moved to another seat, two rows up. This was new: until even just a few weeks ago, he never would have ceded the position of human pillow; he certainly wouldn't be so far away from the sleeping Ana, when at any moment she might need his help. Now, though, he was looking out the window, taking in the bright parking lot scene, the police lights, the dozens of volunteers in orange and yellow rushing to and fro.

“Inside the school there,” the driver said.

Josie woke up Ana, and she led her and Paul off the bus. Paul was carrying one of the backpacks and Josie had the other.

The school was a low-slung brick building, the front double doors opened wide, a woman sitting at a folding table inside.

“Hi there,” the woman said, her voice quiet and kind, as if she knew of the sleeping horror inside of them and didn't want to wake it.

Josie gave the woman their names, and the woman directed them into the gym, where enormous lights illuminated, in discrete sections, every service available—first aid, bedding, food. At the window where the high school normally served lunch, a variety of fresh food was being spooned onto plates. Half the gym was a grid of cots that had been neatly arranged, though most were empty. A computer-printed sign advertised the services of a registered nurse. She stood by the sign, a young man lying on a cot next to her with no discernible injuries; he was leaning over the side, reading a comic book.

On the gym's stage, a trio of kids, all under six, chased a fourth child, a yellow-haired girl wearing a cape. “Are you sheltering here tonight?” a voice asked.

Josie turned to find a man in all black, a priest or pastor.

“I don't know. I guess so,” she said.

Josie and Paul and Ana devoured spaghetti and broccoli, watermelon and chocolate cake. They hadn't eaten, she realized, most of the day. “Are we going to school here?” Ana asked, her teeth brown with frosting. Paul smiled and shook his head.

“No, sweetie,” Josie said. “We're just staying here a night or two.” But she had no idea what they would do next.

She listened to snippets of conversations between the volunteers in the gym. Most of the evacuees in the gym were from Morristown or other nearby towns. Only a few outbuildings had burned there so far, she learned. An army of firefighters were working valiantly, aided by a favorable wind that had slowed the progress of the burn.

When she brought their finished plates back to the cafeteria window, Josie noticed that a woman in a black uniform, a kind of fire information officer, had just pinned up a new map of the scope of the burn. Josie scanned it for Morristown and found it, an almost imperceptible rectangle just next to a hulking red mass, the area of the fire, the color and shape of an oversized heart. On the border between the red and the white she found, in tiny type, the words Peterssen Mine, nearly obscured by an X written in red ballpoint.

Josie returned to the trio of cots she and the kids had arranged. They had pushed them together to make one loosely connected mattress. Paul and Ana were playing Go Fish with a new deck of cards.

“Someone gave us these,” Paul explained.

Josie sat on the edge of the bed, then dropped to the pillow. She looked to the ceiling, thirty feet up, a mess of ropes and beams and banners reminding visitors of the school's better seasons.

At nine o'clock most of the gym's lights went off with a loud crack and sigh, leaving one bright cone in each corner. Ana wanted to continue to play cards, but Paul told her they should be quiet and still, so as not to disturb the rest of the people trying to sleep.

“You guys have everything you need?” a voice asked.

Josie looked up and squinted, adjusting her eyes to the dark. It was a man, an older man with a sweep of grey hair across his eyes. He looked familiar. Josie thought of home, someone from Ohio. No. Then she realized it was the firefighter she'd met before—it seemed like months ago—the gentle-eyed man who had come upon her when the inmates had changed her tire.

“We do,” she told him, and realized he didn't recognize her. Why he was here, checking up on evacuees, was unclear. She didn't want to distract him from his work, or get into a conversation about just what she'd been doing then, on that road, or what she was doing now, hundreds of miles north, in this shelter. She wouldn't be able to explain it if she tried.

“Rain's coming.” These were the first words Josie heard in the morning. It was dawn, and already the gym was bustling with volunteers loudly preparing breakfast. “This afternoon,” the voice said. It was coming from outside the gym, this booming voice with this significant news. Ana had woken up with the noise, but Paul slept on. Josie led Ana silently off the mattress and into the lobby, looking for the booming voice, but he had disappeared. Still, throughout the school hallways there was talk that the worst had come and gone, that the weeks ahead would bring more rain, more cold, a wet autumn that would end the fires and purify.

They walked outside to find the sky was still the same, white and yellow and smelling acrid. Josie stepped farther into the parking lot and now saw, coming from the north, a wall of dark clouds. Back inside, Josie peeked into the gym to see if Paul was awake, but he was still splayed on the bed, his mouth open, as if astonished by rest.

When she turned around, Ana was not at her side. Josie looked through the lobby, and heard some small voices coming from another hallway. She turned the corner to find Ana at the drinking fountain with another child, this one smaller. At first glance it looked like Ana was being Ana, pouring water from the fountain onto the head of this other child, a tow-headed boy of about four.

Josie was about to tell Ana to stop when she realized that Ana was feeding water to the child. Ana had directed the child to turn the faucet on, and while the water flowed, Ana reached up, her tiny hands making a tiny bowl, and she was bringing this water to the child, most of it landing on their shirts but enough finding its way to the blond child's mouth.

Josie walked to them, and Ana looked up at her, worried, knowing she would need to explain.

“It's okay,” Josie said.

“He couldn't reach,” Ana said.

“I know. It's fine. Let's clean up, though.”

And so the three of them found paper towels in the bathroom and cleaned the water from the floor. The boy's mother arrived as they were finishing and took the boy back to the gym. Josie and Ana stood in front in the hallway, next to the school's darkened trophy case.