Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  “I’ll see you back at the house,” Josie said.

  Josie turned, not expecting Sam to allow her to leave. When she made it to the door, she turned to catch Robert plunging his seventy-year-old tongue down Sam’s young throat.

  —

  In the sky there were low white clouds, and clouds of steamship grey, but there were visible stars, too, and a crisp white moon. Josie walked back up the hill, thinking of Sam’s face, Leonard Cohen’s face. She was sober, and she was furious, and she was thrilled to have escaped that bar, and so thankful to have been spared the sight of the inevitable dancing that Robert would want to do with Sam, the delicate swaying drunk old leches want to do in public, their gyrations, their gropings—they no longer cared about hiding any of it. Josie was intermittently confident she could get home without getting lost, and soon was reasonably sure she saw the church at the end of Sam’s street, but then looked at her watch and saw it was only ten thirty. The kids would still be awake, and would think their mother was unwilling to give them any space, time alone with the twins.

  Josie stood on the side of the road and thought some thoughts, including the certainty that despite her tidiness and Popeye boat and beautiful children Sam was a monster, an immoral animal, and that she was finished with her. And she also thought: This is me living my life. And she thought: Was Sam a Leonard Cohen fan? Was that the attraction? Josie decided they shouldn’t have come to Homer.

  Consistency. I need to be consistent, she thought. The sun was consistent, the moon. Life on Earth thrives because it can depend on the sun rising and setting, the tides coming in and out. Her kids needed only predictability. But so why had she brought them to Alaska, a new place every night? She must be consistent. Bedtimes must be the same. Her tone must be the same. Atticus! Atticus! She must be Atticus. It was simple to be the same. How simple! But what about not being simple? What about being interesting? Parents could not be interesting, could they? The best parents rise and fall like suns and moons. They circle with the predictability of planets. With great clarity Josie realized the undeniable truth: interesting people cannot bear children. The propagation of the species is up to the drones. Once you find you are different, that you have moods, that you have whims, that you get bored, that you want to see Antarctica, you should not have children. What happens to the children of interesting people? They are invariably bent. They are crushed. They have not had the predictable suns and so they are deprived, desperate and unsure—where will the sun be tomorrow? Fuck, she thought. Should I give these children away, to some dependable sun? They don’t need me. They need good meals, and someone to bathe them dutifully, and to clean the house not because they should but because they want to. Not someone to keep them in this particle-board RV, carrying their dishes in the shower, their feces in a tank.

  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 angrily—they 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 Maiming—only Josie called it this, but still—in 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 town—no, 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 office—it was Oklahoma! that day—be 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?

  IX.

  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 then…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 ditch—that 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 grandfather–sex 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 her—though 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 changed—was it being run off the road? Had that altered the chemistry of her visit?—and 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 it—being hit by trucks and found in ditches, it was a valid way to spend a weeknight, nothing to get too excited about.