Heroes of the Frontier (9 page)

“We're hungry,” he said.

They ate in the camp cafeteria, the eggs and sausage excellent and costing only fifty-five dollars before gratuity. The Norwegians ate nearby, waving again.

There was a television hanging from the ceiling, showing a loop of the park's services—iceberg tours, glacier tours, whale watching, each excursion costing somewhere in the thousands per person—and every so often there was a public service announcement featuring Smokey the Bear. Josie had forgotten about his very existence, hadn't seen him since her Girl Scout days, and between then and now something had happened: he'd been working out. The cuddly and round-bellied old Smokey was now a burly bear with a flat stomach and arms like bent steel. In the animated message, his friends were trying to give him a birthday party, and they carried out a cake full of lighted candles. Smokey didn't like this. He gave them a disapproving posture, his huge arms on his waist, and Josie felt a stirring within her. Did she have a crush on this new Smokey?

Her table shook. Someone had bumped it. An older man turned to apologize but his wife spoke first.

“Nimble as a cat,” the woman said, her voice a patrician purr. Josie looked up to her, laughed and took in the woman's face: it was beautiful, with an upturned nose, a delicate chin. She had to be seventy.

Hearing Josie's laugh, the woman turned again to her. “I'm sorry. He's just lost a step lately. He was a very debonair man—even last month.” The woman smiled, turned away, evidently embarrassed. She'd said too much.

“Who are those people?” Ana asked.

Josie shrugged. Her daughter's face was streaked with dirt and dried snot. Josie had seen a sign for showers available at the campground, somewhere in a vast log cabin in the woods, so after breakfast they put on flip-flops, bought the necessary tokens and brought their shampoo and soap and towels.

They undressed, leaving their clothes high in a cubby, and stepped across the plywood floor to the women's shower area, where there were two young women, each of them facing out, unabashed and vigorously shampooing their hair. They were ravishing creatures, taut and tanned with tiny breasts alive and alert, and their teeth were white, their asses high and shiny and pubic hair artistically groomed. Josie stared at them as she would a pair of unicorns. What are you doing here? she wanted to ask, though she had no better idea of where they should be. Where does young beauty belong? Maybe stepping through fountains in Rome calling
Marcello! Marcello!
Or on a plane. Piloting a plane. Josie pictured the two of them flying a plane through pillowy clouds, each wearing white, their legs uncovered and so smooth.

One of the young women now was looking back at Josie, who in her reverie was caught staring, and now she was telling her friend they were being watched, and soon they were hustling out of the shower and into towels. Josie thought of her parents, both nurses at a veterans' hospital, how they taught her how to dry herself after a shower. Her mother and father mimed the brushing of all excess water from their arms and legs, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, saving the towel for whatever was left. Josie thought of their demonstration—they'd done it in the living room when she was eight—every time she showered; many days it was the only time she thought of them. What did that say about her? About the limits of memory, the threshold for the tolerance of pain?

Seeing they had the showers to themselves, Ana ran naked into the mist. Would she break into song? Josie got up and Paul followed, they hung their cheap rough towels on rough hooks and the three of them formed a tight circle, facing one another, the warm water falling between them. Ana looked between Paul's legs and said “Hello penis.” It was not the first time she'd greeted Paul's machinery. He'd gotten used to it, and took some pride in being the only member of the household so equipped. Josie soaped their bodies and shampooed their hair, Ana making underwater sounds and stamping her feet. We gravitate toward comfort, Josie thought, but it must be rationed. Give us one-third comfort and two-thirds chaos—that is balance.

Their hair wet and bodies clean, they stepped out of the hygiene cabin and into the dappled sunlight and Josie felt they were in the right place. The last few days, their many trials, were only adjustments. Now she knew what she was doing. She had the hang of it and all was possible. They rested awhile in the Chateau, during which time Paul brought Josie a card, dictated by Ana and written by Paul, which said “I love you Mom. I am a robot.”

That settled, they walked back into town.

“Mom?” Paul said. “Was that show good?”

“The magic show? Yeah,” she said. “Did you think so?”

He nodded, utterly unsure.

Where the town met the onslaught of the rough black bay, there was a monument to Seward with a long accounting of why the town had been named after Lincoln's trusted advisor. Josie tried to explain it all to her children but they needed context.

“Okay, who freed the slaves?” she finally asked. Paul knew the answer, so Josie raised her finger to allow a moment for Ana to try.

Ana thought about it for some time, and then a light entered her eyes. “Was it Dad?”

Josie laughed, snorting, and Paul rolled his eyes.

Ana knew she had said something funny, so continued saying it.

“Dad freed the slaves! Dad freed the slaves!”

Near the monument there was a rocky beach decorated with wild debris and driftwood. They walked amid great rough-hewn beams, big as truck axles and thrown ashore like pencils. Paul picked up a steering wheel and Ana found the remains of a buoy, smashed into the shape of a child's torso. Josie sat on a round rock and felt the salt air rush at her. Happiness swelled inside her with equal force, and she wanted to stay there all day, all night, wanted to live in that moment for as long as was allowed. She was right when she thought, every hour, that children, or at least her children, needed to be outside, amid rough things, and all she needed, beyond feeding them, was to sit on rounded rocks watching them lift things and occasionally throw them back to the sea. The sand was damp, a deep brown dusted by lighter clouds of dry sand. Soon Paul and Ana sat on either side of her.

“What's that smell?” Paul asked, though Josie smelled nothing.

“It's really bad,” he said, and then Josie saw something. There was a large stone in front of them, the size of a shoe, and it looked like it had recently been dislodged and replaced. Josie lifted it and the smell flew upward and filled the air. She replaced the stone but had seen, in a glance, a terrible thing. It was feces, and there might have been some sort of diaper there, too. She thought about it, examining the memory of what she'd seen. No, that wasn't it. The answer came to her: it was a maxi pad. It was a maxi pad covered in caramel-colored feces. “Let's move,” she said, and hustled Paul and Ana up from the beach, past the monument to the great man, and through town.

There could be no doubt that humans were the planet's most loathsome creatures. No other animal could have done something so wretched. Someone, an outdoors someone, came to this shore, knowing it was beautiful and rough. Then they had shat here, even though there was a bathroom two hundred yards away. They had shat in such a way that most of the feces was attached to the maxi pad—the physics of it Josie couldn't conjure. And then, instead of bringing the shit-covered maxi pad to a garbage receptacle, one only fifty yards away, they had left it under a rock. Which showed some strange mixture of shame and aesthetics. They knew no one would want to see the shit-covered maxi pad, so they hid it, under a rock, where, they surely knew, it would never decompose.

So they walked into downtown Seward and Josie, feeling magnanimous to compensate for the depravity of the rest of humankind, allowed Ana and Paul to explore the souvenir shops, and bought them each horrifying talking-moose T-shirts and snow globes. They walked along the waterfront and after half a mile found a vast green park with an elaborate play structure full of blond and black-haired children.

“Can we go?” Paul asked, but Ana had already run ahead, crossing a parking lot where she narrowly missed being crushed by a truck backing out. For all her young life Josie had had to envision the tiny coffin, the words she would say, life without this girl. Ana was doing everything she could to bring herself to an early end and the force and focus she brought to the endeavor could not be overcome. Oblivious, she ran through the woodchips and would remain among the living for at least another hour.

Josie found a bench, set the bags of horrible souvenirs down, and watched Ana tear through the play structure. Next to her, Paul was standing still, hands at his sides, carefully examining the playground, seeing its many features, judiciously deciding which would be best to experience first. Josie opened the free newspaper she'd been handed outside one of the stores, while keeping an eye on Ana, who she knew at some point would throw herself from the slide or find some new way to land on her head. Soon Ana stopped, had spotted a small skate park nearby, and was mesmerized by the teenagers in their gear. For no reason Josie remembered something Carl had written in a folded note, slipped under the pillow:
I will never tire of your sweet ass
. Was that sexy? His handwriting was a murderer's scrawl. Otherwise Carl didn't take sex seriously. He liked to make jokes during and after. “Well done,” he'd say afterward, immediately afterward, obliterating any mood, extinguishing any afterglow. When Josie told him she'd rather do without the jokes, he was so sad. He loved his jokes. After that, whenever he'd finish, she could see him staring up at the ceiling, wanting to say “Good work,” or “I think that worked out pretty well” but unable to. She'd squashed this crucial avenue of self-expression.

“Okay, locals against tourists,” a kid yelled. He was in the playground, standing in an area between Ana and Paul, and seemed to be about twelve, black-haired and handsome, and was organizing all the kids on the playground. He was a leader—if there were ever a true thing it was that some people, some children, some infants, were leaders and some were not—and in seconds he had divided eighteen children into teams and Paul grabbed Ana and all the smaller children were dutifully listening to the boy's instructions. “This is how it works,” the boy-leader announced, shaking his long raven-black hair out of his eyes. “It's like tag, but instead of being tagged it's like you're a zombie and you die if your neck's broken, like this.” Then, as Josie watched, horrified and helpless, he took Paul, put his hands on either side of Paul's head, and twisted, quickly, mimicking the breaking of someone's neck as done in action films. “Now fall,” the boy said, and Paul dutifully crumpled. “That's how it works. You're dead until the game ends then we start over. Everyone got it?”

Ana's eyes were huge, from fear or fascination Josie didn't know. But she did know she was leaving and her kids were leaving. Seeing a twelve-year-old pretend to break her son's neck had left her cold. She waved Paul over, as if she had some casual unrelated news or instruction, then grabbed his arm and didn't let go. “Ana!” she yelled, and they walked off. Ana soon followed.

Seward had been nice but it was time to go. They still had a day to kill before Homer so they packed up the Chateau, Josie filled the tank—$212, an abomination—bought a map and left town.

“Where we going, Mom?” Paul asked.

“Put a seatbelt on,” Josie said.

THIS WAS A DIFFERENT WAY OF MAKING PLANS.
Sam had said that she would meet Josie at five p.m. on Monday, and because Josie had no phone and Sam never picked up hers, that plan would have to suffice and be honored. By Josie's calculations, if they drove straight from Seward to Homer they'd make it by noon, five hours early. There was supposed to be a barbecue on the beach to welcome them, Josie and her kids.

She caught Paul looking at her in the rearview mirror. He was assessing, gauging whether or not his mother knew what she was doing. She looked back at him, projecting competence. Her hands were on the wheel, she had her sunglasses on, she had a map on the passenger seat, and directions to Homer.

I'm dubious
, his eyes said.

Screw off,
her eyes responded.

Josie turned the radio knob left and right, occasionally securing a signal in the middle, and when it was clear, it seemed to be broadcasting a Broadway marathon. Gwen Verdon in
Redhead.
These were obscure songs, songs known only to someone whose formative years were engulfed by the maniacal sounds of musicals known and obscure, failed and world-dominating—most of them sounding tinny now and desperate to please. Her relationship to the music was complicated at best, tied up as it was with her parents' work and devolution.

The musicals had happened when she was nine. She hadn't known her parents to be interested in any music at all. The family owned no stereo. There was a radio in the kitchen, but when it was on, rarely, it was tuned to the news. There were no records, no tapes, no CDs, but then one day there were boxes of records, vinyl black holes spread all over the floor. Her parents were nurses in the psych ward, though they brought little of the work home. As a child Josie heard them mention restraints and Thorazine burps, heard them discuss the man who thought he was a lizard, the man who made imaginary phone calls all day, using a spoon. But now there was homework. They'd been put in charge of bringing music to the ward. Their supervisor had encouraged them to keep the music upbeat and clean and distracting. Everyone had settled on Broadway musicals as the least likely to provoke murder and suicide.

With a borrowed record player and fifty LPs bought at an estate sale—a music teacher in the next town had died—their home was filled, for the next few years, with
Jesus Christ Superstar
(deemed too thought-provoking) and
Anne of Green Gables
(wonderful, foreign, unrelatable) and
On the Town
(perfect, as it described a healthier approach to the home life of enlisted men). They would listen to a new one every night, were required to examine every song, every word, for its appropriateness, its ability to cut through misery and uplift. Patterns emerged: Irving Berlin was fine, Stephen Sondheim too complex, morally problematic.
West Side Story,
including as it did gangs and knives, was out.
My Fair Lady,
being about nothing the veterans recognized as their lives, was in. Older musicals about presumably simpler times prevailed.
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
and
The King and I
quickly made their way into rotation, while
South Pacific
was shelved; they wanted nothing about soldiers still fighting any foreign war. So many well-known shows were tabled in favor of less troubling but forgotten shows that now only Josie could recall. Jackie Gleason in
Take Me Along
—a vehicle for Gleason to be Gleason. Richard Derr and Shirl (Shirl!) Conway in
Plain and Fancy,
about New Yorkers in Amish country.
Pippin
was out, the words circled by her father, then crossed out: “And then the men go marching out into the fray/Conquering the enemy and carrying the day/Hark! The blood is pounding in our ears/Jubilations! We can hear a grateful nation's cheers!” That wouldn't work.

The first musical Josie remembered well was
Redhead,
a show built around Gwen Verdon. The first seconds of the record were a revelation: everything was manic. The wall of delirious optimism appealed to her as a child, though her parents studied the words for controversy. They consulted her sometimes, danced with her occasionally—there was a time when their home had something in common with the bizarre happiness of dozens of people singing from a stage to darkened strangers who'd paid for joy and release. She remembered her mother, on her back with her legs in the air, doing some kind of yoga stretch, her father trying to put Josie on his shoulders to dance, finding the ceiling too low, her hitting her head, the two of them laughing, her mother admonishing, and the musical went on. Josie, in those years, pictured her parents' lives at work as a similar sort of nonstop party, the soldiers dancing, too, with their simple and solvable problems—broken arms and legs, a few days in and then out again, her parents serving them jello and fluffing their pillows.

“It smells,” Ana said from the back.

Josie turned down the radio.

“What's that?” she asked.

Paul agreed, something was off. Ana suggested skunk, but it was not skunk. It smelled like something in the engine, but then again it wasn't the smell of oil or gears or gasoline.

Josie opened the windows in the cab and Paul opened the kitchen windows. The smell dissipated but was still present.

“I can really smell it here,” Paul said. Ana said her head hurt, then Paul had a headache, too.

At a rest stop Josie pulled over and crawled back to the kitchenette. Now the smell was much stronger—it was a faintly industrial smell that spoke of great evil.

“Get out,” she said.

Ana thought this was funny, and pretended to be asleep, her head resting on the kitchenette table.

“Now!” Josie yelled, and Paul unbuckled her and pushed her in front of him until the two of them were down the steps.

“Get on the grass,” Josie said. Now she knew what it was. The gas was on. All four knobs had been turned full right. She had the momentary thought that she should jump out, that the whole vehicle might explode if she even touched the stove. But, inexplicably wanting to preserve the Chateau, their new home, she reached over, turned all four knobs hard left and then jumped down from the doorway, pushing Paul and Ana, who were standing on the grass, Paul behind Ana, hands on her shoulders, until they were all fifty yards away and panting. The Chateau stood still, unexploded.

A car passed, heading toward the RV, and Josie ran to the parking lot, directing them to make a wide berth around the Chateau. “What is it?” the man asked. He was a grandfather with three kids in the backseat.

“Gas was turned on. From the stove,” Josie said.

“You should turn it off,” Grandpa said.

“Thank you,” Josie said. “You're very helpful.”

He turned his station wagon around, and Josie crouched in front of Ana, who was holding her ThunderCats figure in front of her in self-defense. How had she grabbed that on her way out? She had found time to grab her ThunderCats figure while fleeing an imminent gas explosion. “Did you know you almost caused a very bad accident?” Josie asked her.

Ana shook her head, her eyes wide but defiant.

“She turned the gas on?” Paul asked Josie. He turned to Ana. “Did you turn all the knobs on the stove?”

Ana looked at her knees.

“Ana, that's really bad,” he said. This was, Josie knew, the worst thing he'd ever said to her. Ana's chin shook, and she began to cry, and Josie stood, satisfied. She wanted Ana to cry for once, to feel remorse for once. Ana's nickname for most of last year was Sorry, given how often she had to say the word, but this had almost no effect on her tendency to put herself and her family in grave danger.

This is a kind of life, Josie thought. She stood, looking around, noticing now that they had parked next to a beautiful round lake, the surface so clean and placid that the sky was reflected in it, in perfect symmetry. Looking at it, Josie felt a certain calm as she cycled through some questions and observations. She wondered how close to death they'd actually been. Could they have all died at midmorning, on a sunny Alaskan day? She wondered, with some seriousness, if Ana was an emissary from another realm, disguised as a child but tasked with the murder of Josie and Paul. She wondered how long they needed before the Chateau was clear of deadly fumes. She wondered what a life was—if this was a life. Was this a life? And she wondered about the gene she possessed, some strangling DNA thread that told her, daily, that she was not where she should be. In college she changed her major every semester—first psychology, then international studies, then art history, then political science, and all the while she was on campus she wanted to be away, away from the pedestrian workaday nonsense of most of her classes and the directionless pathos of most of her peers. She went to Panama, and felt briefly vital, but then tired of shitting in a hole and sleeping under a net, and wanted to be in London. In London she wanted to be in Oregon. In Oregon she wanted to be in Ohio, and in Ohio she was sure she needed to be here, in Alaska, and now, she wanted to be where? Where, for fuck's sake? For starters, somewhere high above all this filth and calamity.

“Mom, take my picture.” It was Ana. Her pants were around her ankles, her hands outstretched, as if ready to catch a falling man.

Josie took her picture.

They made it to Homer. It was only one o'clock. Josie pulled into the Cliffside RV park and paid sixty-five dollars for the night, and then they headed out again, down the road, toward the spit. Or the Spit. It was where most of the action in Homer was, Sam had said, so Josie descended from the hills and down the two-lane road onto the narrow promontory jutting into Kachemak Bay. Sure, it was pretty, Josie thought, without being Seward. For Josie nothing had compared to Seward. Maybe the closeness of those mountains. The hard mirror of that bay. The icebergs like lost ships. Charlie.

On the Spit's main drag there were some old buildings that had real or former fishing operations in them, and there was a stretch of stores and restaurants, so, realizing they hadn't eaten, Josie parked the Chateau next to another, far more luxurious recreational vehicle, knowing this would make its owners happy, to know they were better than her, than her children. Josie ducked under the sink, pulled a handful of twenties from the velvet bag, and they left.

She took Paul and Ana by their hands and crossed traffic, heading for a pizza restaurant that looked, from the outside, as though it had been made from broken ships—the exterior was a mess of bent walls and masts and crooked windows, everything blue-grey, like driftwood. The door was covered in stickers denying entry to those without shoes, with dogs, to unaccompanied children, to smokers and Republicans. Under that last admonition were the words “Just Kidding,” and under that, “Not Really.” Inside it was light-filled and warm and staffed exclusively by women. It seemed to be some kind of political pizza place, a pizza restaurant embodying its version of utopia. There was a giant stone oven in the middle of the first floor, and five or so young women buzzed about it, all in white aprons and blue shirts, all with short hair or ponytails. Josie ordered a pizza, afraid to look at the price, and the woman behind the counter, with a pixie cut and exhausted eyes, told her to sit upstairs anywhere.

The second floor was bright, glassed in and overlooking the sound. The sun was so hot there that they all took off their jackets and long-sleeve shirts and were still warm in their short sleeves. Ana asked if she could have a knife and Josie said no. Paul tried to explain to his sister why knives were dangerous but Ana had already gone to the bathroom and in seconds there was the sound of something falling. She returned to the table, saying nothing.

“Can you check the bathroom?” Josie asked Paul, and he leapt up, knowing he was on a mission that combined his dual loves: checking after his sister, and pointing out the wrongness of someone else's behavior.

He returned. “Looks pretty bad,” he said, and turned to Ana. Ana wasn't listening; she had caught sight of a motorboat cutting across the bay.

Josie stepped into the bathroom and found a towel rack on the ground, knowing Ana had made it this way, and knowing that only Ana could have separated the towel rack from the wall this quickly. Hundreds, if not thousands, of customers had no doubt used this bathroom and this rack without breaking it, but Ana had done so in less than ninety seconds.

The political pizza place had had an intoxicating effect on her already, for Josie found herself not caring about the towel rack. In fact she was briefly stunned, undeniably impressed, that this girl had that acute a sense for the weakness of objects. That she could enter any room, any bathroom in Homer, and know the object most likely to be broken, and just how to go about it.

She went down and told one of the women that one of her kids had broken the towel rack.

“How'd he do it?” the woman said. A different woman—with feathered earrings—was pulling something from the oven.

“It was my daughter,” Josie said, and now Josie knew she wouldn't have to pay for the damage. Her leverage was invisible but real.

“Just leave it up there,” the woman said. “We'll get it.”

Josie ordered a glass of chardonnay and two milks.

Upstairs, it was two p.m. but felt like sunrise. The light on the water was tap-dancing wildly, trying too hard, really, and there was some boat out there they were watching—some great yacht with a thousand white sails. Josie finished her chardonnay and when one of the political pizza women, a third, with a sheep's black curls all over her big head, brought the food up, a lumpy pizza served on what appeared to be a piece of bark, Josie ordered another glass.

This was why people linger. Sometimes a place asks you to stay, to not rush anywhere, that it's warm, and there's the tap-dancing water, and the powder-blue sky, and they had the second floor to themselves. Josie felt that if anyone else came up there she would drive them away, she would throw a knife. This was now their home.