Heroes of the Frontier Read online

  “Nothing,” Josie said. “Let’s go.”

  —

  It was best, she told the kids, to get out of the Anchorage area, to really leave, to strike out and make their own path. So they stopped at a grocery store and loaded up. The store was twenty acres, it did not end; it sold stereos, lawn furniture, wigs, guns, gasoline. It was full of truckers, some large families, some people who seemed of Native blood, some weathered Caucasians, everyone looking very tired. Josie bought enough groceries for a week, stored them as best she could in the Chateau’s particle-board cabinets, and left.

  The speed limit on most highways in Alaska seemed to be sixty-five, but the Chateau would not exceed forty-eight. It took inordinately long to get to forty, and ten minutes of asthmatic heaving to get from forty to forty-seven, and after that the whole assembly seemed ready to pull apart like an exploding star. So for the first few hours Josie drove at forty-eight, while the traffic around her was going twenty miles faster. On two-lane roads, there were usually four or six cars behind her, honking and cursing until Josie could find a wide shoulder where she could pull over, allow them all to pass and then get back on the road, knowing in five minutes she would accumulate another line of angry followers. Stan had said nothing about any of this.

  She’d made the kids sandwiches, and served them on actual plates, and now they were finished and wanted to know where to put the plates. She told them to put them on the counter, and at the next stoplight the plates fell to the ground, breaking and sending the remnants of lunch to every Chateau nook and cranny. The trip had begun.

  Josie knew nothing about Seward but it was somewhere near Homer so she decided that would be their destination for the day. They drove an hour or so, and found some brutally gorgeous bay, the water a hard mirror, white mountains rising beyond like a wall of dead presidents. Josie pulled over, just for a picture or two, but already everything inside the vehicle was filthy—the floor was muddy, there were clothes and wrappers strewn about, and most of Ana’s chips were on the floor. Josie felt a sudden exhaustion come over her. She pulled the blinds, let the kids watch Tom and Jerry—in Spanish, it was the only DVD they’d brought, leaving in a hurry as they did—and on their little machine they watched the cartoons as trucks hammered past them, each giving the Chateau a gentle rocking. Twenty minutes later the children were asleep and she was still awake.

  She moved into the passenger seat, opened a twist-off pinot, poured herself a cup, and settled in with a copy of Old West magazine. Stan had left five copies in the Chateau—a forty-year-old magazine offering TRUE TALES OF THE OLD WEST. In it there was a column called “Trails Grown Dim,” where readers would send in requests for information about long-lost kin.

  “In the Republic of Texas census of 1840,” read one, “is word of Thomas Clifton of Austin County with the statement that he owned 349 acres of land. I would like to hear from any of his descendants.” That was signed by one Reginald Hayes. Josie considered Mr. Hayes, feeling for him, imagining the fascinating legal battles he had in store when he tried to reclaim those 349 Austin County acres.

  “Perhaps someone could help us locate my mother’s sisters,” the next entry read, “the daughters of Walter Loomis and Mary Snell. My mother Bess was the oldest. She last saw her sisters in Arkansas in 1926. There was Rose, Mavis and Lorna. My mother, a wanderer, didn’t write and has never heard from them since. We would love to hear from anyone knowing about them. They would be in their fifties now, I believe.”

  The rest of the page was filled with half-told stories of abandonment and distress, and the occasional hint of larceny or homicide.

  “David Arnold died in Colorado in 1912 and was buried in McPherson, Kansas,” read the page’s last item. “A wife and four children survived him. Two daughters are now living, I believe. Would like a copy of his obituary for family records or would like to know where he died and if murder was ever proved. Also, was it ever proved that the deaths of his two sons in 1913 were tied in with his murder? He was my great-uncle.”

  Josie filled her cup again. She put the magazine down and looked out the window. A smile spread across her lips. Being so far from Carl and his crimes made her smile. She and Carl had parted ways a few years into his phase of heavy urination. Extraordinary, unprecedented frequency. He had been a healthy man! Maybe not a man who could carry her across the threshold—he was thin, she was not so thin—but still an active non-consumptive man with two arms, two legs, a flat stomach. So why did he piss all night and all day? The image of Carl that came to mind, now eighteen months after their split, was of him standing, a wide stance, at the toilet, the door open, waiting to piss. Or actually pissing. Or shaking after pissing. Unzipping before or after pissing. Changing his plaid housepants because he didn’t shake well enough after pissing and had dribbled on them and they now smelled like piss. Pissing twice in the early morning. Pissing six or seven times after dinner. Pissing all day. Getting out of bed three times every night to piss.

  It’s your prostate, Josie told him.

  You’re a dentist, he told her.

  It wasn’t his prostate, his proctologist said. But the proctologist had no idea what it was, either. No one had any idea what it was. Carl shat all the time, too. You could count his daily shits but why would you?

  At least six. Starting with his first cup of coffee. First sip. Again Josie pictured his back, saw him standing at the kitchen counter in front of his single-serve coffeemaker. Wearing his plaid housepants. The plaid housepants, made of wool, were too short, too thick, and were spattered with white paint—he’d painted the kids’ bathroom and had done a terrible job. And he wore these paint-spattered pants why? To remind himself and the world that he was a man of action. A man who could paint (poorly) a child’s bathroom. So he would stand there, waiting for the machine to fill his little blue cup. Finally his little blue cup would get filled, and he would take it, lean against the counter, look out in the yard, and then, at the first sip, as if that first drop had liquidated his innards, loosened all that was stuck, he would rush to the bathroom, the one near the garage, and begin his day of shitting. Eight, ten shits a day. Why was she thinking about this?

  Then he’d come out, bragging to the kids about how he did some good work in there, or that he did the job like a man should do. He knew he shat a lot and tried to make it funny. Josie committed a fatal mistake early in their union, allowing him to think he was funny, giggling along with him when he giggled at his own jokes—then she had to keep laughing. Years of strained laughter. But how could a person keep laughing under conditions like that? The kids barely saw him away from the toilet. He would have discussions with them while on the toilet. He once fixed Paul’s walkie-talkie while sitting on that toilet—as Carl laid down the batteries, the machinery of his bowels was grinding wetly below. And then they tested the walkie-talkies! While he continued to shit, or try to shit. Carl sitting there, Paul in another room. “Breaker 1-9,” Carl said, then: “Breaker B-M!”

  It was an abomination. She took to leaving the house before it began. It was like Schrödinger’s cat. She knew the shitting would happen, but if she was gone, out the door before his first sip of coffee, would the shitting actually happen? Yes and no. Josie tried to put a stop to it, but he countered. What, he said, you’d rather have an anal-retentive? He was serious. She took a long pull on her pinot. It cooled her, opened her.

  Early on they decided not to tell people Carl had been a patient when they’d met. Explaining it all rendered it all too pedestrian—he was looking to get his teeth cleaned and looked online for local dentists. Her office was the only one with a last-minute opening. For any feeling human, would that qualify as romantic? She barely noticed him during the exam. Then, a few weeks later, she was at Foot Locker, looking for socks, when a man, a customer sitting below her, one hand in a shoe, looked up and said hello. She had no idea who he was. But he was handsome, with alabaster skin, green eyes and long lashes.

  “I’m Carl,” he said, removing his h
and from the shoe and offering it to her. “From the dentist’s office.”

  He laughed a long while, as if the idea of a job at Foot Locker, for anyone, was the greatest joke. “No. No, I don’t work here,” he said.

  He was four years younger than Josie and had the energy of a housebound puppy. For a year it was fun. She was a year into her own practice, and he helped out, ran errands, hung pictures in the waiting room, kept everything manic and light. He liked to ride bikes. To get ice cream. To play kickball. He ate chocolate power bars from crinkly gold wrappers. His libido was unstoppable, his control nonexistent. She was dating a twelve-year-old.

  But he was twenty-seven. He was not gainfully employed then, and had never had a steady job before or since. His father owned some immeasurable stretch of Costa Rica, which he’d clear-cut to make room for cows destined to be eaten by American and Japanese carnivores, and so any occupation involving a scale less grand somehow did not quite suit Carl.

  “We’ve raised a dilettante,” Luisa, his mother, said. She was Chilean by birth, raised in Santiago, her mother a doctor, her father a diplomat, also a depressive. She’d met Carl’s red-haired American father, Lou, in Mexico City, when she was a graduate student. She’d had Carl and his two brothers while Lou, raised in an oil family, bought land in Costa Rica, razed forests, raised cows, built an empire. He’d asked for a divorce ten years before to marry the ex-wife of a well-known and dead Chiapan narco. Luisa and Lou had an improbably good relationship. “He’s so much better from a distance,” Luisa said.

  Now she was a wizened, beautiful woman of sixty, living on her own terms in Key West, with a group of sunburned, day-drinking friends. When they met, Josie loved everything about her—her candor, her grim wit, her insights into Carl. “He inherited his father’s short attention span, but not his father’s vision.”

  Carl had collected a dozen or so licenses and skills. He was a realtor for a few years, though he sold nothing. He’d dabbled in furniture design, fashion, sport fishing. He had a closet full of photography equipment. Though Josie and Luisa were both obliged to love Carl, the tragedy was that they liked each other far more than either liked him.

  “Last year he had me videotape him,” Luisa said in her raspy voice. “He’s still discovering his relationship to the world,” she said, “discovering his own body, you know. One day he asked me to film him walking—from the front, the back and the side. He said he wanted to be sure he walked the way he thought he walked. So I filmed my son, this grown man, walking up and down the street. He seemed satisfied with the results.”

  “He’s prettier than you.” That’s what Sam said when she met Carl. “That can’t be good.” He could be fun. Cowards are often fantastically charming. But could anything begun at a Foot Locker become grand? Josie had never married Carl, and that was a story, a series of interconnected stories, episodes, decisions and reversals, both she and Carl culpable. Finally, with her strong endorsement, he’d left. At the time she was happy for it. Coward. Coward coward, she thought—it was the basic building block of his DNA, cowardice and whatever mutation had produced his gripless bowels. On so many levels he was a coward, but she had not anticipated the way he would disappear after he moved out. What had she wanted? She’d wanted general involvement, a monthly visit maybe, a father who would take the kids for a weekend. He was good enough with children—harmless around Ana, benign with Paul. He seemed to like children, really, thought he could make them laugh, and his juvenile outlook on life seemed to sync perfectly with theirs.

  He was, years after they met, still a child, still discovering his relationship to the world, discovering his own body. One day he asked Josie to film him walking, too. Josie was shocked, but didn’t let on she knew Luisa had done the same thing. “I think I know how I walk, but I’ve never seen it objectively,” he said. “I want to make sure I walk the way I think I walk.” So Josie filmed this grown man walking up and down the street. But then, six months later, he was gone. He saw the kids twice the year he left, once the year after.

  —

  Josie turned on the radio, heard Sam Cooke singing some simple song, and thought that only writers of pop songs and singers of pop music really knew how to live. Write a song—how long could it take? Minutes? Maybe an hour, maybe a day. Then sing the song to people who will love you for it. Who will love the music. Bring renewable joy to millions. Or just thousands. Or just hundreds. Does it matter? The music does not die. Sam Cooke, long gone, only dust now, was still with us, was now vibrating through Josie and was carving new neural pathways in her children’s minds, his voice so clear, a magnificent songbird coming through the radio and alighting on her shoulder, even here, even now, at nine o’clock, in this broken RV, somewhere between Anchorage and Homer. Though dead too soon, Sam Cooke knew how to live. Did he know he knew how to live?

  Josie, rearranging herself in the Chateau, poured herself another cup. Three would be it. She rolled down the window and took in the acrid air. The fires were a hundred miles away, she’d been told, but the air everywhere was burned and predatory. Her throat fought her, her lungs petitioned for relief. She rolled the window up and through the glass she thought she saw a deer but realized it was an old sawhorse. She swished the wine in her mouth, gargled briefly, swallowed. Occasionally a gust would push the Chateau to a tilt and the dishes in the cupboards would rattle gently.

  She flipped through her Old West, then threw it onto the dashboard. Even the plaintive searches of “Trails Grown Dim” made her sad, jealous. She had been born a blank. Her parents were blanks. All her relatives were blanks, though many were addicts, and she had a cousin who identified as an anarchist, but otherwise Josie’s people were blanks. They were from nowhere. To be American is to be blank, and a true American is truly blank. Thus, all in all, Josie was a truly great American.

  Still, she heard occasional and vague references to Denmark. Once or twice she heard her parents mention some connection to Finland. Her parents knew nothing about these cultures, these nationalities. They cooked no national dishes, they taught Josie no customs, and they had no relatives who cooked national dishes or had customs. They had no clothes, no flags, no banners, no sayings, no ancestral lands or villages or folktales. When she was thirty-two, and wanted to visit some village, somewhere, where her people had come from, none of her relatives had any idea at all where to go. One uncle thought he could be helpful: Everyone in our family speaks English, he said. Maybe you go to England?

  The Sam Cooke song ended, the radio news began, the word “lawsuit” was uttered, and Josie felt a white flash of pain, saw the face of Evelyn Sandalwood, the stabbing eyes of the old woman’s litigious son-in-law, and felt sure no one cared one way or another that her business was taken from her, was certain the world held only cowards, that work meant nothing to anyone, service meant nothing, that pettiness and guile and treachery and greed won always—nothing could defeat the thieving weasels of the world. Eventually they would wear down the brave, the true, anyone who wanted to go about their lives with integrity. The weasels always won because love and goodness was an ice-cream cone and treachery was a tank.

  When, eighteen months ago, she’d told Carl they should end their pretend romance and just move on as parents of Paul and Ana, he walked out of the house—the house he’d wanted and then, once bought and renovated, loathed; the Occupy movement had instilled in him the idea that home ownership was not just bourgeois but a tangible crime against the 99%—then took a walk around the neighborhood. Twenty minutes later he’d come to terms with it, and had a plan for visitations and everything else. She’d entered the discussion terrified and inspired, but afterward she was depleted. In his ready acquiescence he managed to take from her whatever triumph she hoped to feel, and he’d gone straight into logistics.

  Now, at forty, Josie was tired. She was tired of her journey through a day, the limitless moods contained in any stretch of hours. There was the horror of morning, underslept, feeling she was on the precipice of somethin
g that felt like mono, the day already galloping away from her, her chasing on foot, carrying her boots. Then the brief upward respite after a second cup of coffee, when all seemed possible, when she wanted to call her father, her mother, reconcile, visit them with the kids, when, while driving the kids to school—jail the people who abandoned the manifest right to school buses—she instigated an all-car sing-along to the Muppets soundtrack, “Life’s a Happy Song.” Then, after the kids were gone, an eleven-minute mood freefall, then more coffee, and more euphoria until the moment, arriving at her practice, when the coffee had worn off and she grew, for an hour or so, more or less numb, doing her work in a state of underwater detachment. There were the occasional happy or interesting patients, patients who were old friends, some talk of kids while picking at their wet mouths, the suction, the spitting. There were too many patients now, it was a runaway train. Her mind was continually occupied by the tasks before her, the cleanings and drillings, the work requiring precision, but over the years it had become far easier to do most of it without paying full attention. Her fingers knew their tasks and worked in close partnership with her eyes, leaving her mind to wander. Why had she bred with that man? Why was she working on a beautiful day? What if she left and never came back? They would figure it out. They would survive. She was not needed.

  Sometimes she enjoyed people. Some of the children, some of the teenagers. The teenagers with promise, with a purity of face and voice and hope that could obliterate all doubt about humankind’s dubious motives and failures. There had been Jeremy, the best of them all. But Jeremy was dead. Jeremy, a teenager, was dead. He liked to say “No sweat.” The dead teenager had said “No sweat.”

  Noon was the nadir. The noonday sun demanded answers, the questions obvious and dull and unanswerable. Was she living her best life? The feeling she should quit this, that the office was doomed, uninspired, that they were all better off anywhere else. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to throw it all away? Burn it all down?