Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  The restaurant they went to was the cheapest one they could find, but the prices in Alaska were science-fictional. Josie looked at the menu as they were waiting to be seated. Every pickle was twenty dollars. This was what she had tried to avoid. Back home Josie was so tired, so bone-weary of spending money. It crushed the spirit. Every day she found herself at the drugstore or grocery store and always the bill was sixty-three dollars. She would go into Walgreen’s for milk and Ana’s nighttime diapers and somehow would end up spending sixty-three dollars. Always sixty-three dollars. Sixty-three dollars, three or four times a day. How could that be sustained?

  But this menu, in the brightly lit hellhole they found themselves in, wanted more than that for dinner. Josie did a rough calculation and knew she would spend eighty dollars for dinner with her two children, neither of whom would care one way or another if they ate here, or ate mud and grubs dug from shallow holes. Ana, always happy to puncture the pretense of any situation, found her opportunity. After the busboy wiped down the table, Ana wiped it again, with her own napkin, saying, “Oooh yeah! Ooooh yeah!” She made it uncomfortably lewd. Josie laughed, so Ana did it three more times.

  Paul, though, was in a contemplative mood. He looked at Josie with his ice-priest eyes.

  “What?” she said.

  He said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “What?” Josie asked again.

  Finally he beckoned her closer, promising a secret. Josie leaned over the table and a plate tilted, knocking against the wood.

  “Where do the stray dogs go at night?” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. Josie didn’t know where Paul was going with this so said, “I don’t know.” Immediately she knew this was the wrong answer. His face crumbled and his eyes, so pale and cold, told her he wouldn’t sleep for weeks.

  She’d forgotten Paul’s thing with strays. Back at home, he’d heard about stray cats—there was some demented socialite in their town who had made the homeless cats’ plight her calling, and the ads were all over the buses and in the local newspaper, offering shelter and the HIGHEST QUALITY MEDICAL CARE! for these strays—and Paul made Josie put milk out every night for any wandering felines who happened to be passing by their home. Josie had also made up a story about how they often dropped by their house on their way home—there was an Underground Railroad for the strays, she’d explained, and they were one of the participating homes. The fiction lasted weeks, and it was Josie’s fault. She’d made up the Railroad, so had to make up the milk-being-available, and had to empty the milk at night, watch Paul check it in the morning, discuss it with him over breakfast, and so how had she forgotten his concern for these wayward animals?

  Later, after she’d paid for dinner—eighty-four dollars, everyone involved going to hell—and while Ana ate an ice-cream sandwich on a bench on the boardwalk, Josie clarified some things for Paul while entertaining herself a bit, too. The stray dogs, she said, all live together in a clubhouse. And this clubhouse was built by Alaskan park rangers because the stray dogs, being pack animals, prefer to live together. They’re fed there, she said, three meals a day, by the rangers—omelets for breakfast, sausage for lunch, steak for dinner.

  Paul smiled shyly. Someone who did not know Paul would assume he knew this was all made up, that his smile acknowledged the absurdity in all this—the silliness of his concern for the strays and the madness of his mother’s explanation—but this was not the meaning of Paul’s smile. No. Paul smiled because something that was wrong in the world had been righted. Paul’s smile confirmed the true north of the moral world: How could he doubt the preeminence of order and justice? His smile confirmed rightness. His smile laughed at his temporary doubt in this rightness.

  Ana was finished with her ice-cream sandwich, and handed the wrapper to Josie on her way to inspect, a few feet down the pier, what seemed to be a bloody fish head. They were near the cleaning station, where the fishermen weighed and gutted their day’s catch. The boardwalk was pink with watery blood and a last fisherman was finishing his day. Ana stood below him and looked up, then down at the head of the fish, its silver skin stained with bright plasma. She picked it up. She picked the head up.

  “This yours?” she asked him.

  Before he could answer, she’d dropped the head, and, in an incredible feat of dexterity and fine-motor skills, kicked the head, on the fly, into the dark water below. She laughed, and the fisherman laughed, and Josie wondered just how this child was hers. “What’s my name?” Ana asked the frothing water where the head had disappeared. Josie had not taught her this expression, and Paul certainly didn’t know it. But Ana had said this before, and had also said “You want this? You want this?” And “What’d you expect?” These confrontational phrases she insisted on yelling to rocks, trees, birds. She often spoke disrespectfully to inanimate objects, and often walked around practicing gestures, facial expressions, like a clown preparing backstage.

  The fact of Ana’s existence, and her will to live and run and break things and conquer, was all attributable to her birth. After living for a month in a plastic box, and spending her first two years looking like a withered old man, she shed her preemie skin like Lady Lazarus and became a world-ender. Carl had long before abdicated any responsibility. When they first brought Ana home from the hospital, Carl thought it a good time to start training for his triathlon—there was suddenly such urgency to it—and Josie soon gleaned he was not likely to be instrumental in Ana’s care. So she deputized Paul. Your sister is very small and not strong, she told him. When she comes home she’ll need your help. They talked about Ana’s homecoming every night and every night Paul seemed to take his impending responsibilities more and more seriously. One night she found him on the floor with a hand vacuum, cleaning the room waiting for Ana. He was three. Another time he’d found an old greeting card, a burst of balloons on the cover, and dropped it into her empty crib. Josie’s intent was to be sure that Paul, a sensitive boy but nevertheless a boy, would be careful not to accidentally smother tiny Ana, or break tiny Ana’s bird bones, but instead she created this boy who came to understand his role as something akin to caretaker of the world’s most delicate orchid. He slept in her room, on a mattress next to, and then under, her crib. By the time Ana was three months old he knew how to feed her and swaddle her. When Josie or Carl did either he sat nearby, adding frequent notes and corrections.

  Ana grew stronger, and by two she was running without fear or limit, though she was still Pinocchio-thin and her eyes were circled in pale blue shadow—temporary evidence, Josie hoped, of her traumatic journey thus far. As she grew in confidence and awareness of her power of ambulation and self-determination, as she became more aware of herself and the world, she became less aware of Paul. He sensed it and felt betrayed. There was a time when she was two and Paul five, when he came to Josie, anguished. “She won’t let me hold her,” he wailed. He was on the verge of tears, while Ana barely knew he lived in the same house. Reaching full strength, she had no interest in anyone, really, least of all him. She wanted to see things, to roam, to climb and plummet. She was attracted to the shiny, the moving, the blinking, the rustling, the fur-covered. Paul was none of those things so he held no interest.

  But something happened when she turned three, and after that Paul was known. Now when she did something, usually something dangerous, she wanted Paul—Paulie—to watch. Paulie, Paul-ee. Paul! Eee! Watch. Watch. Watch-watch-watch. Paul acted aggrieved by Ana’s demands but satisfying them was his life’s calling. He loved her. He brushed her hair. He clipped her toenails. She still wore a diaper at night and she preferred that he put it on. When Josie would wrap a towel around her after a bath, Paul would rewrap it, tighter, more carefully, patting it down just so, and Ana had come to expect this.

  Now, as they stood on the deck stained in pink fish blood, an older man was suddenly too close and was talking to them.

  “You kids like magic?” the man asked. He seemed to be leering. These lonely old men, Josie thought, wit
h their wet lips and small eyes, their necks barely holding up their heavy heads full of their many mistakes and funerals of friends. Everything these men said sounded hideous and they didn’t even know it.

  Josie nudged Paul. “Answer the nice man.”

  “I guess,” Paul said to the mountains beyond the man.

  Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he dropped twenty years, forgot all the funerals. “Well, I happen to know that there’s a magic show tonight on our ship.”

  The man owned a ship? Josie asked for clarity.

  “I’m just a passenger. I’m Charlie,” he said, and extended his hand, a pink and purple tangle of bones and veins. “Haven’t you seen the Princess docked here? It’s hard to miss.”

  Josie came to realize that this stranger was inviting them, herself and her two kids, the three of them unknown to this man, onto the cruise ship docked at Seward, where, that evening, there would be an elaborate magic show featuring a half-dozen acts including, the old man was thrilled to convey, a magician from Luxembourg. “Luxembourg,” he said, “can you imagine?”

  “I want to go!” Ana said. Josie didn’t think it mattered much that Ana wanted to go—she had no intention of following this man onto a magic-show ship—but when Ana said those words, “I want to go!” Charlie’s face took on a glow so powerful Josie thought he might ignite. Josie didn’t want to disappoint this man and her daughter, who continued to talk about the show, what tricks a man from so far away might be capable of, but was she really about to follow this old man onto a cruise ship in Seward, Alaska, to see a Luxembourgian magic show? She couldn’t deprive them, she knew. They had only one grandparent, Luisa, who was spectacular but who was too far away, so Josie frequently succumbed to these grandparent manqués, who bought her children balloons and gave them candy at inappropriate times.

  “We’re allowed to have guests, I think,” the man said as they walked the gangplank. The kids were astounded, stepping slowly, carefully, holding the ropes on either side. But now their host, this man in his seventies or eighties, was suddenly unsure he could have friends over. So Josie stopped and her kids peered down into the black water between the dock and the gleaming white ship. Josie watched as Charlie approached some man in a uniform. A few dozen elderly passengers went around them in their windbreakers, small bags of Seward souvenirs dangling from their arms.

  “Let me talk to this man,” Charlie said, and motioned them to hang a few yards back from the door. Charlie and the man turned around a few times to inspect and gesture at Josie and her children, and finally Charlie swung around, telling them to come aboard.

  The ship was garish and loud, and crowded, full of glass and screens—the décor was casino crossed with Red Lobster crossed with the court of Louis XVI. The kids were loving it. Ana was running everywhere, touching delicate things, bumping into people, making elderly women and men gasp and reach for walls.

  “I think it starts in twenty minutes,” Charlie said, and then again looked lost. “Let me see if we need tickets.” He wandered off, and Josie knew she was a fool. Parenting was chiefly about keeping one’s children away from unnecessary dangers, avoidable traumas and disappointments, and here she had dragged them to Alaska, and had driven them around unchosen parts of the state, and then to Seward, where no one had recommended they go, and now she had them following a lonely man onto a ship designed, it seemed, by the insane. All to see magic. Luxembourgian magic. Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made and was proud of, and she found nothing.

  Finally Charlie returned, holding the tickets in his hand like a bouquet. “Are we ready?”

  There was an escalator, an escalator inside a ship. Charlie was ahead of them, and rode upward while looking back at them, smiling but nervous, as if worried they might flee.

  The auditorium seated at least five hundred and all within was burgundy—like being inside someone’s liver. They sat in a half-moon booth near the back, Paul next to Charlie. A waitress in bright red hurried by and Charlie made no move to order anything. Josie asked for a lemonade for the kids and a glass of pinot noir for herself. The drinks arrived and the lights went down. Her glass was the size of a crystal ball, and was nearly full, and Josie felt kissed by the anonymous and irrational generosity of humankind. She relaxed, anticipating a few hours of not having to do anything but sit and watch in silence, getting harmlessly plowed.

  Charlie had a different plan. The show started, and Josie realized that Charlie intended to talk throughout. And the words he wanted most to say were “See that?” For Ana, the answer was always “See what?,” so they made a beautiful pair. Charlie would notice something that every member of the audience had seen, and then would ask Josie and her kids if they’d seen it, too. Ana would say “See what?” and Charlie would then explain what he had seen, talking through the next five minutes of the show. It was wonderful.

  The first magician, a pretty man in a tight silk shirt, had, it seemed, been told to make his act more of a personal story, so his monologue returned again and again to the theme of how he had always welcomed magic into his life. Opened the door to magic. Said hello to magic. Or how he had learned to appreciate magic in his life. Did he say he was married to magic? Maybe he did. It all made little sense and the audience seemed lost. “Life is full of magic if you look for it,” he noted, breathlessly, because he was moving around the stage in a thousand tiny steps, as a woman in a sparkly one-piece bathing suit vamped behind him with long strides.

  The pretty magician produced some kind of flower from behind a curtain, and Josie struggled to see this as magical. She and Charlie clapped, but few members of the audience joined her. Her children didn’t clap; they never clapped unless she told them to. Were they not taught clapping in school? The magician was not impressing this audience, though who could be easier to impress than five hundred elderly people in windbreakers? No, they were waiting for something better than carnations produced from screens.

  Josie began to feel for this man. He’d been a magician in grade school, no doubt. He’d been pretty then, with lashes so long she could see them now, fifty rows back, and as an adolescent, apart from his peers but not concerned about this, he and his mother had driven forty miles to the nearest city, to get the right equipment for his shows, the right boxes—with wheels!—the velvet bags, the collapsing canes. He’d loved his mother then and had known how to say it, maybe with a flourish, and his unguarded love for her had made his apartness unimportant to him and her, and now she was so proud that he had made it, was a professional magician, traveling the world making magic, welcoming magic into his life. All that, Josie thought, and these elderly assholes wouldn’t clap for him.

  Josie downed half her pinot and gave the pretty magician a whoop. If no one else appreciated him, she would. Every time he asked for applause, which was often, she yelled and whooped and clapped. Her children looked at her, unsure if she was being funny. Charlie turned to her and smiled nervously.

  Now the long-legged woman was helping the pretty magician into a big red box. Now she was turning it around and around. It was on wheels! Everything in the act had to be on wheels, so it could be turned around. It was a rule of magic onstage that everything must be turned around and around, to prove there were no strings, no one hiding just behind. But in its absence did the audience ever wonder about the turning around? Did they ever ask: Um, why hasn’t someone turned the box around? Turn the box around! My god, turn it!

  Now the sparkly assistant opened the box. The pretty man was not in the box! Josie whooped again, clapping over her head. Where had he gone? The suspense was fantastic.

  And now he was next to them! Suddenly a spotlight was on their table, or near it, because the pretty man was next to them. “Holy shit,” Josie said, loud enough that the pretty man, whose hands were outstretched, again asking for applause, heard her. He smiled. Josie clapped louder, but again the rest of the audience didn’t seem to care. He was up there, she wanted
to yell to them. Now he’s here!

  You fuckers.

  Up close she saw the magician was wearing a tremendous amount of makeup. Eyeliner, blush, maybe even lipstick, all seemingly applied by a child. Then the spotlight went dark, and he stood for a moment, next to their table, hands up, while a second magician appeared onstage. Josie wanted to say something to the pretty man, a heaving silken silhouette a few feet away, but by the time she arrived at what she would say—“We loved you”—he was gone.

  She turned to the stage. The new magician was less pretty.

  “This is the one from Luxembourg,” Charlie whispered.

  “Hello everyone!” the new magician roared, and explained he was from Michigan.

  “Oh,” Charlie sighed.

  The Michigan magician, red-haired in a white shirt and stretchy black pants, was soon in a straitjacket and was hanging upside down twenty feet above the stage. He explained, his breath labored and his arms crossed like a chrysalis, that if he did not escape from the straitjacket in some certain amount of time, something unfortunate would happen to him. Josie, trying to get the attention of the waitress, had not caught exactly what that consequence was. She ordered a second pinot, and soon some part of the contraption holding the magician was on fire. Was that intentional? It seemed intentional. Then he was struggling in an inelegant way, ramming his shoulders against the canvas jacket, and then, aha, he was free, and was standing on the ground. An explosion flowered above him, but he was safe and not on fire.

  Josie thought this trick pretty good, and clapped heartily, but again the crowd was not impressed. What were they waiting for? she wondered. Fuckers! Then she knew: they were waiting for the magician from Luxembourg. They did not want domestic magic, they wanted magic from abroad.

  The man from Michigan stood at the edge of the stage, bowing again and again, and instead of the applause growing, it dissipated until he was bowing in silence. Josie thought of his poor mother, and hoped she was not on this cruise. But she knew there was a very good chance the Michigan magician’s mother was on this cruise. How could she not be on this cruise?