Heroes of the Frontier

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THE SHAVED SQUARE ON THE side of Josie’s head was fascinating to Paul. This is why he wanted to sit in the passenger seat. They’d left Homer and were approaching the confluence of many highways, going east and west and north.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Does it look good?”

Paul shook his head slowly. His eyes conveyed how scared he was by this square cut into his mother’s scalp. It was not motherly. It would shake him, just as Josie had been shaken by seeing her own mother return from the hospital with her head wrapped in gauze. She’d fallen on the back deck, clumsy on mixed meds. This was when she started taking the drugs they were giving the soldiers, before the scandal, before Sunny. Josie turned her head to look at the shaved square, the lines so clean. She did not want to scar her son this way, with the knowledge of her frailty, her aptitude to be abandoned by her pseudo-sister and to get hit by Homeric delivery trucks, sent into a ditch. But the introduction of frailty in a parent — is this so terrible? It should, perhaps, be introduced right away, so the shock is not so great later. We are better when we expect tragedy, calamity, chaos.

“Budget!” Raj had said to her in one of his wild revelatory rants. “You just need to budget!” he said, or exclaimed. He was the only human she’d ever known who actually spoke in a way that could warrant that verb, to exclaim. The word was a strange one, so common in the picture books she read to her children. There, in the fifties and sixties, everyone was exclaiming, but in real life she’d never known the verb to be true. But then there was Raj, with his wide eyes and loud voice, exclaiming all the time. “You need to make a life budget!” he exclaimed. “You ever make a household budget?”

Josie said she had not. Not really, no. She had chosen instead to guess her savings, more or less know her checking balance, to over-report her earnings and underestimate her expenses.

“Never?” Raj exclaimed. “Well, it can give you great peace when things are tight, or when things feel chaotic. A dozen bills can feel like an assault, but within the framework of a budget, of expectations, they’re reasonable, powerless even. You expect them, and have means to dispose of them.”

Josie had looked around, hoping for escape.

“So think about it the same way with your life, with the country or world. Any given year you should expect certain things. You can expect to see some horrifying act of terror, for example. A new beheading of a man in orange is a shock and will make you want to never leave the house, but not if you have budgeted for it. A new mass shooting in a mall or school can cripple you for a day but not if you’ve budgeted for it. That’s this month’s shooting, you can say. And if there isn’t a shooting that month, all the better. You’ve come out ahead on the ledger. You have a surplus. A refund.”

Raj was one of the reasons she thought all her colleagues in the medical or semi-medical world were one synapse away from real madness. “Budget for your children incurring some injury before they’re ten,” he continued. “Half of your friends will get divorced. One of your parents will die younger than they should. Two of your straight friends are actually gay. And at some point someone, some stranger, some patient, will wake up one day and decide to try to destroy you and take your business!” he said. He exclaimed.

Josie had dismissed this conversation and Raj’s theory until every aspect of it came to pass — the beheadings, the shootings and then Evelyn — all within weeks. The man was a prophet.

“Where are we going?” Paul asked.

“I’m thinking north,” Josie said. She harbored the hope that she could make her children think that this was the plan all along, that they had planned to stay at Sam’s for only two nights, and then leave, without saying goodbye and with no destination in mind. She made a mental note to buy a hat.

“We’ll come back,” she said.

Now Ana became aware that something was happening. “Where we going?” she asked.

“We left Aunt Sam’s house and we’re not coming back,” Paul told her, and Ana began to cry.

“I think we should go back,” Paul said. He meant it as a threat. He’d demonstrated his power to make Ana weep, and seemed to imply he could and would do it again.

“There’s no point,” Josie said. “Sam’s working and the kids are in school. And after school, the girls play lacrosse. We’d just be sitting around all day.”

A long silence gave Josie the mistaken impression she’d scored a knockout blow. Why indeed stay at someone’s house when they were gone all day and tired at night? She’d just convinced herself that it made no sense. The trip to Homer, which she’d left open-ended, was more rightfully brief. Josie looked in the rearview mirror and caught Paul squinting.

“Why aren’t we in school?” he asked.

Josie looked at the road.

Ana stopped crying. “Is it time for school?” she asked the two of them.

“No, sweetie,” Josie said.

“Yes it is,” Paul said to her, but loudly, legally, announcing it to the Chateau’s speeding hall of justice. “It’s September. We should have started school Monday. Everyone’s in school without us.”

Now Ana was crying again, though she had no idea why. She didn’t care at all about school, but Paul was creating the impression that all order had fallen away, that there was no past, no future.

“Why’d we come here right when school started?” Paul asked.

“I want to be in school!” Ana wailed.

Josie wanted to explain it all to them. She yearned to. At least to Paul. He’d actually understand her point of view; he harbored no great loyalty to Carl. Not since Carl had signed up to lead his adventurer’s club. He and Paul had conceived it together, but then he’d simply not done it. Paul had gotten four other boys to sign up to hike into the woods every Saturday evening, Carl at the lead, but when it came time to do it, Carl had not shown up, had pretended that no such plans had been made, and if they had been made, they weren’t firm, c’mon. The four boys stayed all night at Josie’s house, indoors, reading inappropriate comics.

But Paul was too young to hear all this.

“No more discussion. Five minutes of quiet,” Josie said, and then thought of a nice coda. “And this trip is educational. I checked it all out with your school. This is independent study.”

“That’s not true,” Paul said.

“Get in back,” Josie hissed. She’d had enough insolence. He was eight. “And it is true.” It was true. She’d actually told the assistant principal, a mischievous older woman who dressed like a sexy mortician, all about Carl, and the assistant principal had given Josie permission to enter the school year sometime later in the fall. “No one should have to put up with that,” she’d said, and every time doubt crept into her, Josie thought of Ms. Gonzalez and the delicious way she rolled her eyes at every one of Carl’s misdeeds.

The misdeeds were many, and he was known by all who knew him to be a ridiculous man, but this new plan was too much, was Caligulian, Roveian, and she had no obligation to cooperate. Like so much about Carl, his request — his near-demand — defied all propriety, was so unprecedented in its depravity that it took one’s breath away. How to explain it? He was getting married, to someone else, to a woman named Teresa, of course it was Teresa, she had no choice but to be named Teresa. She was from some kind of established family, and there were those in the family who had their doubts about Carl. Doubts about Carl! When Josie had heard this, through an intermediary, she cackled, loving those words. Doubts about Carl. Doubts about Carl. His name could not be uttered without doubts. His name necessitated punctuation: Carl? It wasn’t right without the question mark.

“Mama?” Ana called from behind her. “Been five minutes.”

Josie looked in the rearview mirror, saw Ana, then looked in the side-view, seven or eight cars backed up behind them. She pulled over to let them pass, cursing the devil Stan. After the caravan moved on, glaring at Josie, she pulled back onto the road.

“Five minutes more,” Josie said.

Carl had called one day, had explained it in his way. “I’d love to have the kids out here for a week or so,” he’d said, as if they did this regularly, split time like this, as if every month they catapulted the kids across the country for visits with their wonderful quick-shitting father. “Teresa’s family wants to spend time with ’em,” he’d said, adopting some kind of folksy Floridian diphthong he’d invented completely (he was from Ohio), “and a’course I’d like to show ’em off.”

Speechless. She was often speechless. How could a few sentences contain so many crimes of language and ethics? But since their cleaving, any time she interacted with him, she was agog, stunned, breathless, aghast. It was worth answering the phone when Carl called because always there was something so toweringly craven, so doubtless important to anthropologists and students of deviant psychiatry. There was the time he’d watched some news segment about soy and called at ten thirty at night to talk about it. “I hope you’re monitoring the soy intake with the kids. Especially Ana. They say it accelerates a girl’s entry into puberty.” He really said this. He really said and did so many things, so precious few of them within the boundaries of predictable human behavior. Now this visit to Punta del Rey. “They’ll love it,” he’d said. “They can swim, get to know their new grandparents. Play golf. Maybe Jarts.” Jarts, he said. Jarts, which had been banned in the eighties. It was wonderful, it was perverse, it was Carl. Carl?

Finally, through some intermediaries — well, the same intermediary, Carl’s mom, who liked Josie more than Carl — finally Josie got the full picture: The wedding was in the fall, but there were those among Teresa’s family opposed to the union, thinking or knowing Carl for what he was — a deadbeat father, an abdicator, a man born without a spine — so Carl (and Teresa? It was unclear how much she knew) had concocted this plan to show them he was close to his progeny, that he was part of their lives. And Josie thought, you know what, goddamn you to hell. You’re in Florida? I’ll be in Alaska.

But she did not tell him this.

“Are we going back to the red house?” Ana asked from the depths of the Chateau. She’d unbuckled her seatbelt and was standing near the bathroom.

“Sit down and put your seatbelt on,” Josie said.

“Paulie said I didn’t have to,” Ana said.

“Paul, you’re on probation,” Josie said.

“Thank you,” he said.

What the hell was happening? Paul now knew sarcasm. Ana sat down again and buckled herself in.

“Of course we are,” she said, answering Ana’s question. Their house was not red, it was grey, but the trim was maroon, so Ana had taken to calling it the red house, and Paul and Josie had never corrected her.

Had she told Ana that they wouldn’t be going back? Or if they did go back, it would only be to move out? Josie’s feelings about the house were a barbed, snarling thing. She and Carl had thought buying a house a sensible thing, an objective not often debated in the civilized world. They had seen houses, and debated their merits, and finally bought one, a home needing work. Carl said he would do the work, would at least oversee the work, and do some of it himself (he had no idea how to do any such work) and she thought it would keep him busy and focused, even if he were just watching others labor. So they got themselves a loan, and bought the house at its asking price, and it was all very simple, and while they remained in their rental, Carl undertook (oversaw) (occasionally dropped in on) the first basic renovations, three months’ worth, until they could move in. Which they did, they moved in, the kids gleeful, really, they couldn’t get enough of the new bedroom they’d share, their unusually big closet, a strangely small and terrifying basement, and then, after a week of sleeping in this house, which was a fine solid house priced at the average price for the homes in their town, Carl began to lose his mind.

“This is wrong,” he said. “This is decadent.” He was standing in their bedroom, looking around like they’d entered the Vanderbilts’ Newport spread. “Look at this!”

Josie looked around the room, and saw only a mattress, an unassembled bed and a small window with a view of a lopsided apple tree. Josie was stunned, but not quite as stunned as she would have been had Carl been someone sane or stable. “What? Why? We just moved in.”

It turned out Carl was conflicted, torn, shredded, by the juxtaposition — was it a paradox? What was it? he wondered, What is it? he wailed aloud — of having just bought a house, and being in the middle of renovations. He said the word renovations like it was some filthy thing, as if they’d been burning money at the feet of orphans — all while the Occupy movement was trying valiantly to alter the foundations of our financial system. How could they, Carl and Josie, be debating what kind of wood floors to use? History was being made elsewhere, everywhere, and they were choosing paint colors and whether their lamps should have nickel or copper finishes. At the hardware store one day, when they were supposed to choose a cabinet for under their bathroom sink, he couldn’t get out of the car.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

“The door handle is just there, below the window. Pull on it,” Josie said. She already knew his state of mind. Carl was mercurial and surprising but he never surprised in his shape-shifting. He was inconsistent in all things but his cowardice. His unreliability could be counted on. Should she point out his impossible hypocrisy? The fact that he was the son of a cattle rancher who’d decimated some untold miles of Central America to feed cows that would feed Americans and Japanese? And that he’d never had a job? And that to have him judge her, their life, the life she paid for—

It was impossible. There was nowhere to start, nothing to say.

“No! No. You go,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”

Were they really about to spend six hundred dollars on a cabinet? he wanted to know. Did they really spend five hundred and fifty dollars on beds for the kids?

“Otherwise the kids sleep on what?” she asked. She thought he might really have an alternative.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we need to start asking these questions.”

She laughed out loud. It was not planned.

He couldn’t participate in the spending of money like this, he said. Money he had no hand in making anyway. When they’d met, Carl had been fired from a vague position at an ad agency; he’d never held a job more than a year. Had she really allowed him to drift? Was it her fault? Had she actually told him to — had she said the words pursue your passion? Lord. Carl had no conception of how to earn money for his children or himself, had no sense of the steps involved between waking up one day and sometime later being paid for work done. He knew how to wake up, and knew how to cash a check, but everything in between was a muddle. All his bosses had been ogres and psychopaths — chiefly, it seemed, because they’d tried to tell him what to do. That itself was some high crime.

All those months of Occupy were disastrous. He was paralyzed. She found him in bed, lying on his back, on their capitalist mattress, a towel on his face. She found him on the floor of the children’s room, splayed like he’d fallen in a ditch. He said he had migraines. He said he couldn’t go through with it. He called off the renovations, sent the workers away, leaving the house full of plastic sheeting, billowing loudly from the open windows.

“Now these guys don’t get paid,” Josie said. “Don’t they need work, too?”

“That’s not the point,” he said, but his eyes showed some recognition that it might be part of the point. Carl had never been one to see the connection between any of his own actions and the running of the finances of their household or town or world.

All he really wanted was to be in Zuccotti Park, not in Ohio. That was the point. The average age of the Occupy campers was about twenty-four, Josie said. There are no parents of small children there. There are no children there. And if there are children, they’re living in squalor. He agreed, but he was catatonic. He couldn’t live day to day. He went on fifteen-mile runs, then got drunk. He slept half the day then looked at graduate school applications. He searched for places to live in Bali. Looked up international schools for the kids in Brazil. Then he went on a twenty-mile run and got drunker.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

“On Earth?” Josie asked. She was joking but he was not.

“How did we get so far away from everything?” he asked, and Josie realized he really meant this. He had somehow come to confuse himself with some Weather Underground revolutionary who had lately gone soft. Josie couldn’t conjure anything vaguely revolutionary that Carl had ever done. She knew he’d once voted for the Green Party. Maybe that was it. Now he pined for his Occupy brethren as if Josie had personally come to steal him from his place at the barricades. But aha, the day the protesters left Zuccotti Park, Carl’s mood brightened. The activists went back to their homes, and Carl, it seemed, was ready to live in a house himself.

Then the triathlons began. Carl joined — he paid to be part of, spent Josie’s money to be part of — a group of men and women coached by a former marine. They ran, biked, climbed on fake walls indoors. Josie came to know all their names: Tim, Lindsay, Mercury, Warren, Jennifer. Wonderful to know so much about them. This training took him all over Ohio, and away most of every Saturday and most Sundays. Josie had arranged for the care of the kids during the workdays, but thought it helpful to have their father around on the weekends.

“I feel so good about this,” Carl said.

About the triathlons, not his children. Carl never ran in one. But he was gone every weekend, and Josie found herself shattered by the sameness. Alone with Ana and Paul, after breakfast she was determined to get the morning’s errands done by eleven. At eleven, the errands done, she would fight off the desire to nap. Paul went next door, to unhappily play with the hyperverbal only child who said cruel things to him. So it was Josie and Ana, and Ana didn’t really care what they did. Maybe they could watch a video on her phone. Then yes, a nap for twenty minutes, next to Ana — an attempt, anyway, for during those twenty minutes Josie would think of the sixty or seventy worst things she’d ever done, the stupidest things she’d ever said. She would open her eyes, scalded. She would put on her running shoes, then take them off. She would consider pouring herself a drink. Who would know? She’d pour a drink and immediately pour it back into its bottle. How would the hours pass?

Carl would come home in the afternoon, and after any workout or pretend-workout, he would be randy, and he would be unfussy about how the spilling of his seed happened — he was just as happy using his hand or hers, but somehow the manual labor always took longer and was twice as boring. Afterward, lying on their backs, the ceiling so white, they would share a moment, having accomplished something, but then again nothing. Then he’d click his tongue and get up. “Gotta go to the can,” he’d say.

Her memories of Carl involved either him shitting or lying, paralyzed by the heroes of Zuccotti. Oh wait. That was better than Disappointed: The Musical. Think of it: The Hero of Zuccotti. This would be about Carl, a man in Ohio, the son of a land baron who raped a thousand miles of Costa Rican forest to feed his cows. Now Carl was the Hero of Zuccotti. A child of wealth, dedicated to the cause of the poor, even though he did not technically ever go to Zuccotti, or do anything overtly to support the Occupiers. Maybe he was part of the 99 % because technically he had no income? Was that the connection? The show would center around him running — running at night with a headlamp! On a treadmill. Just running. His thoughts, his dreams, represented by video of various protests and marches, projected behind him as he ran, as he stretched out after running, as he rubbed his legs with Ben Gay after running, as he drank a cold beer after running, as he watched some women’s soccer on his phone after running, jerked off in the downstairs bathroom after running — here we could show Josie, upstairs and alone in bed — all the while, the rest of the world was happening on-screen behind him, the tents and placards and marches and altercations with cops, and every so often he would look up and nod meaningfully, as if one with the protesters, even while he was alone, his dick in his hand.

A few months after their split he’d gotten a job in Florida and was gone. His employment out of state, it seemed, gave him license to become a ghost. He found this logic unimpeachable. I can’t be in two places at once, he said. A college friend had given him a sales job, commission only, in a start-up. Could you call it a start-up if they sold roof racks for compact cars? Child support was never discussed or contemplated. For six months he wasn’t seen at all. But when he reappeared, he acted like he’d been there all the while. “Are you sure about this school they’re in?” he’d asked last fall, the last time he’d visited. “Are they being fully challenged?” When he said this, he was wearing shorts and sandals and a visor. These were beach clothes, Florida clothes, but he was in Ohio. He’d flown in for the weekend, rented a car, shown up at their house. Who was this man? Where had he found this visor? Josie actually asked him, she had to know.

“Where’d you get the visor?”

He told her that he’d bought it online. And thus! And thus in this world existed a man who ordered visors online and said things like Are they being fully challenged?

Josie had since met others in her position, single parents who had these ghost-appendage partners, people like Carl who did nothing, who were simply not there, not in any way part of their children’s lives — but who walked around perfectly confident that they were pulling their weight. Josie was sailing the ship of her children’s lives, hoisting the sails, turning the winches and bailing water, and Carl was not on that ship, Carl was sunning himself on some faraway unnamed island — wearing his visor! — but he believed he was on the ship. He believed he was on the ship! How can someone be on the ship when they are not in fact on the ship? When they are in fact on some faraway island? Carl had seen his children once in the last fourteen months, but in his mind he was tucking them into bed every night. What evolutionary mutation permitted this kind of self-deception?

All this could figure into the musical. All throughout, as Carl jogged, and stretched out, and jerked off, his family and Occupy would be going on around him, projected on the screen behind him, though he would confuse this with actually being there. And at the end of the show, during which the actor playing Carl had done nothing at all for anyone, he would arrive on stage and bow, and take curtain calls, and say Thank you, thank you, I thank you so very much.

Now all Josie wanted was to be left alone. She wanted to say to him: Do not reappear. Do not offer advice. Do not enter my home and comment on my housekeeping. Do not comment on the role of soy in my daughter’s entry into puberty. No, she would not send her children to Punta del Rey. She would not be party to his ploy. Was this small of her? Embittered? Ungenerous? Ridiculous to flee her home for Alaska, where she and her children could not be found for his photo-op? Yes, he, and Teresa, and her parents, and whoever the fuck else, wanted photos of him with his children — to show he was a real father. Look at him frolicking with his daughter and son! They wanted to frame this photo, these photos, and have them there on the bridal table, central to whatever display they would assemble for their godforsaken guests. Some descendant of Goebbels was now a wedding planner and had been hired by these jackals to produce this fiction.

“Mom, there’s a smell.”

It was Paul.

“What’s that? Did we have five minutes of quiet?”

Josie had lost track.

“It’s a really bad smell,” he said.

Josie inhaled deeply. It was both familiar and foreign — pungent, a mixture of organic and chemical.

“Spray some of that sunblock,” she said and Paul did, and the Chateau took on a creamy pineapple air. It didn’t last long. The previous smell was too strong. Josie opened her windows and looked around for fires, or firefighters, but saw nothing. Finally, up ahead she saw a stream of smoke leaving the chimney of an industrial building. “It’s probably that,” she said, pointing to it. She closed her window. They drove in silence for ten minutes, until they were far out of range of the building and its chimney.

The only legitimate man in her life since Carl, besides the man who wanted to smell his shit-covered finger, was Elias. She’d read about him in the local paper. He was a lawyer, and was assembling a class of plaintiffs to sue a nearby coal-burning plant over various environmental violations. The story made him out to be an everyday attorney who decided, on his own accord, to take on a billion-dollar company. There were thousands of homes within range of the plant, all subject to unknown dangers of particulates in the air, fly ash and unburned coal combustion byproducts settling onto lawns and roofs. He was asking anyone within a three-mile radius to come forward and hold GenPower accountable.

Josie was surprised to find she was within range of the plant — it was only two miles away — so she sent him a letter, and he called her, and she found herself driving into the city to see him. She expected him to work in some warren of legal offices, papers stacked neatly on the floors, boxes of documents being carried by aides. But he worked alone, and his office was tidy, spare, no papers anywhere.

There was relief in this. Since she’d written to him she’d felt strange, watched, treasonous. If Elias had operated out of some shadowy basement office, Josie would have ascended from worried to paranoid. But he was young and open-faced and smiled easily as he shook her hand. He had great teeth. They walked to a café nearby and he asked if she would join the class action. In an irrational burst driven by his unblemished skin and bright eyes, she said yes. She asked about the possibility that his lawsuit might provoke retribution from the company, that they might countersue or do something less legal and more nefarious. She’d read about these things. “Could be,” he said, but didn’t seem the least bit concerned. He filed the lawsuit, now with her name among the lead plaintiffs. She took pride in this — her standing in the community, he said, made her a prize.

A few weeks later Elias came over to update Josie on the case, and she showed him the white van that had been parked on her block for a month, and they walked around the van together, laughing at themselves, but still wondering why a nondescript van like that would be parked in front of her house, exactly the same spot each time, never down the street — never even across the street — and with the back window covered.

“I dare you to knock on the side,” she said. She was fourteen again, her heart leaping, bursting. “See if anyone’s in there with headphones.” Elias did knock. She gasped.

“You’re the one who lives here,” he said, and they laughed as they rushed from the van and back inside her house.

Josie had fallen a little bit in love with Elias, though his eyes told her he felt he was too young (or more meaningfully, she was too old). He was no more than thirty, and looked younger. When they rushed inside, and closed the door, gasping and laughing, she thought it at least possible that they would fall into each other, kissing and groping. But he said he had to use the bathroom. All the men in her life preferred to be alone in the bathroom rather than be alone with her.

After the bathroom, Elias brought out from his bag the actual lawsuit, the two hundred pages of it, with its standard and utilitarian but strangely beautiful cover page. She thrilled at seeing her name on it. What did it mean? Having her name above theirs, GenPower, as if her place above them codified her moral superiority. Then the word versus, a display of defiance and aggression. I sue you. I am versus you. I challenge you. I hold you accountable. I name you, I name me.

As she and Elias were looking at the lawsuit, and their shoulders were touching, innocent but not entirely innocent — Josie could feel the heat of him through his bright white shirt and she felt her own high heat as a result — there was a knock on the door and then Carl’s face re-entered her life.

Josie could not prove that this was when Carl decided to marry his then-girlfriend Teresa with an alacrity new to him, but it would not be improbable. He entered before she invited him, and then he registered the two of them, Josie next to this handsome lawyer with his clean white shirt. Josie and Elias were bent over the papers, and Elias’s full size and height was obscured, and so Carl rushed forward, thinking he would confront, in his way, in some way, this new man standing in the house he used to own — or at least lived in — but as he got closer, Elias straightened himself and revealed his full size, six two or so, and Josie’s heart almost burst. She loved to remember it now, watching Carl take in tall and handsome Elias. She recalled watching Carl as he slowed, reassessed, and as he stretched out his hand to shake Elias’s, no longer confrontational, now deferent, feigning friendliness — it was delicious.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Carl said.

“I should go,” Elias said.

“No, don’t,” Josie said. But soon Elias was gone and Carl was in a state of ecstatic agony and confusion and rage suppressed. Who was this other man, this tall man in his clean shirt, his shiny shoes? In the same kitchen, a moment of intellectual intimacy she’d shared with Elias devolved into an idiotic spat with an idiot.

“What are you looking for?” Josie asked.

Carl was pacing around the kitchen, looking on every surface, opening drawers like a monkey new to the complex interior of a human home. He was wearing a hoodie and huge colorful sneakers, which in contrast to the younger Elias in his minimal palette made Carl look even more childish and lost.

“A key to the storage unit,” Carl said, lying.

“You took it with you. I know you did,” Josie said, though she had no idea what the key looked like or if he’d taken it.

“Dishes stacked in the sink…” Carl now said — he seemed to have given up the pretense of the key — and he made a tsk sound, like some grandmother from the fifties. And why are the dishes in the sink the universal emblem of domestic squalor and parental failure? Is it the stacking? Dishes shouldn’t be stacked — was that the conclusion? Or is it that they’re in the sink? It’s okay that they’re stacked, but not in the sink? Should they be stacked elsewhere? In a closet, on the bed?

“Your key isn’t here. You should leave,” Josie told him.

“The kids are home from school soon,” Carl said, looking at his watch, seeing it was only one o’clock, when he knew (or did he? He didn’t know! He didn’t know!) that they didn’t finish until two. “I was hoping to see them.”

“You can’t wait for an hour,” Josie said. “Not here.”

“Wait. Ana’s in preschool till two? That’s a long day.”

Josie saw a knife on the counter, and thought how easily she could end all this. Now he was looking at the window over the sink, from an angle, examining it for cleanliness. It was not clean. Was he taking mental notes for some later lawsuit? He was.

“Did I interrupt some tryst you were about to have?” he asked, bringing his tiny green eyes to her. Who is this man? Josie thought. Was he always this ludicrous? And afterward came — it had come so many times after their split — the crashing realization that she had been with this ferret-man for eight years, that she had two children by this low scavenging mammal, that she would never escape him. After he left — he did leave, and perhaps had saved his life, the knife in her hand felt so right — she had to go for a brisk walk to try to clear her mind of the cycle of self-recrimination. She would not say the words, or think the words, I wasted my youth on, but of course she had. Or not her youth — she’d wasted her middle thirties, a time of blooming for her, when she had grown professionally comfortable, had taken full control of her body, had brought Paul and Ana into the world and was ready to look out and build. She’d wasted so much time with Carl. Eight years. Eight years with invertebrate Carl, jobless Carl, confused Carl, and now she was forty, and she was too late for Elias, anyone like Elias. Anyone with courage. Now she was in a state surrounded by firefighters. Would that yield options?

—

“The smell’s worse now,” Paul said, and Josie knew this was true. It was an acrid smell, something like the burning of garbage.

This time, before Josie knew that he’d unbuckled himself, Paul had gotten up to check the stove and reported that all the knobs were as they should be.

“Open the windows,” Josie said, and she reached over to roll down the passenger side. The smell dissipated but not by much.

They drove on, and though there was no evidence to believe it, Josie continued to believe that the smell — it had earthy tones with a certain toxic topspin — was coming from outside. She was happy, though, that Paul was in a spirit of cooperation — or at least had abandoned his posture of open hostility. The smell had united them.

They drove that way five miles, maybe ten. Looking back on it later, Josie could admit that she drove much farther than a more responsible person would.

Finally Paul said he felt sick, felt he might throw up, so Josie pulled over, this time without an adequate shoulder, such that when they stopped, the Chateau was at an angle so oblique that a strong wind would have tipped it over like some buckshot elephant.

The kids got out and Josie directed them to run down the embankment until they were standing next to a lone spruce tree, squat and bent heavily by some past storm. Josie hustled into the living area, and though she knew Paul incapable of error, she checked the stove, and confirmed it was not turned on, but the smell closer to the stove was far stronger than it had been in the front seat. She opened cabinets, thinking she might find rotting fruit or a dead animal. She found neither, but was sure, then, that dead animal was the answer to the question of this smell. She opened every drawer, looked under the cushions. She looked in the bathroom, finally, expecting the answer to be there, but though she found only the pile of dishes and towels in the shower, she discovered the smell stronger. She lifted the toilet seat, thinking that one of the kids had dropped a secret there, and found the toilet empty but the smell emerging with great assertiveness.

She left the Chateau to gag, and joined her children on the side of the road for a few moments, taking in the trash-laden highway. Someone had thrown a tampon out a car window, and in seconds, given its proximity to Ana and the way she was eyeing it, Josie knew that while she was in the Chateau, Ana had picked it up and been told, by Paul, to drop it. Ana was eyeing Josie warily, wondering if she was about to see her mother vomit for the first time, but she was also keeping the tampon in her peripheral vision — waiting for the opportunity to examine it more closely, or possibly put her mouth on it in some way.

“I found the smell,” Josie said.

But she had not quite found the smell.

She went back into the Chateau, wondering about a way to tape the bathroom shut, or wrap the toilet in plastic or some material impenetrable to fecal smells. And while making her way back to the bathroom, she saw something she had not seen before. On the wall just next to the stove was a switch, which Stan had not told her about, because Stan was a motherfucker. This switch looked like the kind of small metal switch in abundance in old airplanes, the kind of switch that provides a satisfying click to the user. Above the switch were the words Tank Heater.

Josie noted that the switch was turned on, meaning that some tank was being heated. She thought first of the gas tank, but knew better than to guess that there was a switch, between the kitchen and bathroom, that heated a tank full of highly flammable gasoline. The only tank, then, she could guess at was the tank of feces and urine that was below the toilet.

A gasp escaped from her mouth. It began to come together. The Chateau featured a tank-heating mechanism. Why? Josie deduced that in the winter owners would not want their feces being frozen, because frozen, the feces could not be drained through the sky-blue ribbed tube, and so there would be no room for new feces. The feces had to be kept warm and in liquid form, so it could be drained, and new feces could be put in the tank.

Ana had turned on the feces-heating mechanism. She had done this in August, when the feces didn’t need to be heated. So Josie and her family were driving through lower-central Alaska while not only carrying their feces but heating them. Cooking them. What would that be? Josie searched for the verb. Broiling? When the heat is coming from the interior surfaces of the oven, as opposed to gas or flame? She was sure the word was broiling.

She turned the switch off, returned to Paul and Ana by the lone spruce, and told them they should not turn any switches on, anywhere in the Chateau. She told them what had happened, about the feces and the broiling of it, and they nodded, very serious now. They believed this story without hesitation, and she marveled at this pure stage of life, when a child is first told about such things, about how to broil feces, why they shouldn’t do so in the summer.

They got in the Chateau and drove on. It was a great day to be alive.