Heroes of the Frontier

XIV

JOSIE AWOKE TO A SHRIEKING. She was sleeping on the kitchenette couch, her children sleeping above, and they were in an RV park she’d found somewhere around midnight. She had no idea where in the state they were. Through the kitchenette blinds the day seemed balmy and clear.

Six hours earlier she’d been driving through the night, had found the sign, the gravel road, and she’d paid forty-five dollars to park with full power. She’d gone to the office and woken up the manager, a handsome man in his fifties or sixties named Jim, and he’d been kind and understanding and had given her keys to the shower and a code for the clean-out (she didn’t tell him she wouldn’t be using it). He’d given her a shot of bourbon, too, guessing she needed it, and afterward she’d walked numbly to the Chateau and fallen asleep on the couch.

Now it was morning, and Josie was awake, and someone was still shrieking. It was somehow obvious that it was happy shrieking, though, cheerful shrieks of “Hello!” and “Here we are!”

“Mom?” Paul called.

“Down here,” she said.

Paul climbed down from above and while she lay on the couch he spread himself on top of her like a cheetah on a heavy bough. Ana followed, climbing down from the loft and then on top of Paul, stacking herself carefully. Josie absorbed all their weight, and briefly thought it was wonderful, then knew it would soon kill her.

“Off,” Josie said.

They stretched and ate cereal and when the sun rose past the tree line they left the Chateau and Josie remembered where they were. In her mind she replayed the drive there, the grey light of her headlights scraping across the parking lot gravel, then into the office, meeting Jim, the bourbon, him showing her the layout of the park and the most secluded spot. There was the main house, the office — a large and solidly built structure of red logs and white putty, a wide porch. There was the gravel parking lot facing the river, and then a loose grid of RVs and mobile homes tucked against the woods. The two-lane interstate was nearby, above, but quiet and passed over the river on a simple stone bridge. When she stepped out to feel the day, she noticed she was parked next to another vehicle, this one seeming more or less permanent. There was a white picket fence around it, and in its windows there were flower planters and flags.

Josie thought about what day it was and realized it was Saturday. There would be a wedding that day, at this RV park, involving the shrieking women. If they shrieked at eight a.m. while bringing plastic forks into an events hall, what noises would they make when the ceremony was underway?

The events building was between the Chateau and the river, and so it seemed natural enough for Josie to set up her folding chair facing the wedding party. She went inside, made herself tea and returned to watch the proceedings as she would the morning news on television.

The door behind her opened with a whine and Josie turned to find Paul and Ana, dressed in yesterday’s clothes.

“Who’s getting married?” Paul asked.

They were very young. The men were dressed in their groomsmen suits, their jackets off, while the bridesmaids wore shorts and tanktops and would change later, and together they began decorating the building with streamers and white carnations, while uncles and fathers brought tables and chairs inside. A great time was had by all, with the bridesmaids occasionally lifted off the ground by the groomsmen, who threatened to throw them in the river, provoking more shrieking. They were so young and Paul was walking slowly toward them, as if drawn by some unseen force.

Josie said nothing, wanting to see how far her son would go. Three steps and he stopped, watched. Four more steps. Ana was uninterested, was playing in the Chateau’s shadow, talking urgently to herself while holding a muscular green man, but Paul was in a trance, his hands in front of him, his fingers twisting fingers.

“There’s someone in my class I could marry someday,” Paul said without any emotion, as if noting a passing cloud.

“Helena?” Josie asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes fixed on the guests still arriving.

And now, from under the bridge, riding on a path along the river, came a group of six. First there was a man of about fifty, wearing a black vest, and black pants, and a button-down of sky blue. He was riding a mountain bike, and seemed to have won a race, because he said “Ha!” as he passed under the bridge and entered the gravel parking lot. Behind him was a woman in her thirties, in a pilgrim’s dress, a conservative cotton garment grey and trimmed in white, its hem tickling her ankles. She was wearing a bonnet and was grinning, her face red and alive, so happy that she’d come in second.

So they were Mennonites, Josie thought. Or Amish. But they drove here, that was certain, so that would rule out the Amish. So Mennonites. She’d once seen a Mennonite family praying before a meal at Burger King, and that Burger King had been in the middle of nowhere. Thus that was allowed — driving to the Burger King, eating at the Burger King, driving to RV parks in Alaska with a trailer of bicycles. She settled on them being Mennonites, and sat in the grass, with one eye on her children and the other on this Mennonite tableau still developing.

More bicyclists followed, three children — boys of eight and twelve, a girl of ten — and then, most intriguingly, another woman, who seemed to be about twenty, too old to be the daughter of the first woman. They all got off their bikes, laughing and whooping and wiping their brows. They’d just had the greatest time. The boys were in black pants and all wore the same sort of blue workshirt as their father. The girl and woman wore something similar to the second-place woman. They parked their bikes, each carefully positioning their kickstands in the gravel.

“Whoo boy!” said the father.

A smile overtook Josie’s face. She spun around to see if she was the only one witnessing this. She looked to her children, who were now stomping in the shallow water, oblivious.

Josie turned back to the Mennonites. The man was husband to one of the two women, but who? The kids were by the older woman, she was sure. So the younger woman was along for fun. A niece, a fellow member of their church, their village. Her parents had died? She’d been orphaned, taken into this other happy family? Josie contemplated who she would have been had she been born or married into this family. What would she want? Would her desires have been simplified? All she would want, perhaps, was this, a good vigorous bicycle ride along the river, coming in second, just behind the handsome husband, how marvelous it all was, Whoo boy.

“Look,” Ana said, and pointed downriver, where it bent. A tribe of kids were playing in the shallow water, amid a tiny forest of high reeds. Before Josie could stop her, Ana had run down the bank. Paul followed, warning her to be careful.

There were about twelve kids, from four to ten years old, and their interest seemed to center on a huge downed tree, which lay dead in the shallows, its branches rising tragically, diagonally to the sky. Half of the kids straddled or hung from its branches, and periodically dropped into the ankle-deep water below. It was only after watching the group for a few minutes that Josie realized she was the only parent present.

Josie looked down the riverside, not believing this could be true, and finally found what appeared to be the parent charged with looking after the twelve children. She was a woman of about sixty, a grandmother perhaps, standing in the shallow water, talking on the phone, smoking, gesticulating, laughing a hoarse happy laugh. She looked up to find Josie, and she managed to both wink and wave simultaneously. Her smile was very warm, her wink seeming to acknowledge the beauty of the river, of the day, the gorgeous madness of all the kids playing together, of the two of them allowed to simply stand in or sit near the river, doing nothing.

Josie waved back. Feeling the other woman could handle it for a minute or two, Josie retrieved her folding chair and brought it to the flat grassy riverside and sat and watched. Now there were fifteen children, then twenty. The children of the river were trying to move the large tree. The alpha boy, shirtless and wearing pajama pants, had taken control of the platoon and was insisting that the tree be moved, and he was directing the other children to grab here, and there, and there, and you over there at the end. At one point he even said, “Lift with your legs!” His voice was husky and impatient.

Josie’s own children happily submitted to his directives. He was the foreman of all the work being done, and he knew how to lead. Josie puzzled for an explanation of why the log had to be moved, but the children under his command labored, unquestioning.

Now he seemed burdened. He stood, watching his workers, hands on his hips, dissatisfied. Something was wrong. He lowered his head, came to some conclusion, and raised it.

“From now on,” he said, “we’ll have to use fart power.”

He said it in a tone of seriousness, of resignation. They had apparently run out of electricity, fossil fuels, and now they would use what was left. Josie had long wondered how pioneers, how bands of cavemen, knew where to stop and settle. Along this trip so far, Josie had seen a few places where she thought, There’s a lake, and there’s a mountain, and there’s a rolling meadow where she could watch her children play. But there had been easy reasons why none of those places seemed suitable places to stay. Most were near highways. But this park, sitting at the bend of a river, spoke of welcome and permanence.

Then again, Josie thought, looking at the road where it crossed the river, there was at least some possibility that the quiet of the morning could be broken by sirens looking for her. She had a quick vision of this woman with her by the water, and the invisible parents of the river children, rising up to protect her. She hadn’t spoken a word to them, but believed that they had formed some kind of community, watching the children moving logs under the power of young flatulence.

“Hypnotic, right?” It was a man’s voice. Josie jumped. She turned to find Jim, the man who had checked her in last night. Now he was standing behind her, holding a blue cup out to her. It seemed to be pink lemonade. He had a cup of his own.

“No thanks,” she said, but he made no effort to remove the cup from her view, so she took it.

He clinked his plastic cup against hers. “I checked you in last night. Is that your name or your way of life?” he said, and nodded toward her visor.

“I found this,” she said, and saw that he was disappointed: he thought he’d delivered a zinger. But, she wanted to say, nothing good can ever come from noticing anyone else’s clothes.

She sipped the lemonade, discovering that he’d spiked it with what tasted like rum. She decided that because it was noon, and because she had escaped an innkeeping madman the night before, she deserved this. “Thank you,” she said, trying to see him. The sun haloed his head, putting his face in purple silhouette. She remembered him as handsome.

“You on vacation? On the run?” he asked.

“Will you sit down?” she asked. “I can’t talk to you standing above me like that.”

He had no chair, so sat on the grass next to her.

“You don’t have to sit on the ground,” she said.

“I want to,” he said, and ran his fingers through the weedy grass like it was plush carpeting. “Mmmmm,” he said. “Your stay good so far?”

“The best,” she said, with a useless sarcasm she did not endorse. He explained that the establishment was his, that he’d bought it five years ago, after moving up from Arizona. Josie assumed he knew she was single, and wanted to convey that he was not a clerk at the inn but its owner. Jim was younger than she’d remembered from the night before. About fifty-five? Sturdily built, strong shoulders, a round belly. There was a tattoo on his bicep, only partially visible, something military; she could see the claws of an eagle. He was a vet. The right age, build.

“There’s a swimming hole around the bend of the river,” he said, pointing downstream, where the river made a hard right into the woods. “Just an eddy about three feet deep, but it’s got a rope swing. You like to swim?”

“Are you like one of those chefs who won’t leave the customers alone?” she asked, meaning it lightly, but her voice sounded barbed.

“Guess I am,” he said, and stood. “See you around campus.”

As he walked away, the bottle broke against Josie’s face, but it was not a big deal. It was just a bottle across the face.

—

All day Josie allowed her children to wander near the wedding party, eating outside within sight of the preparations, and then playing in the river with the other kids, all of them with one eye on the men and women in black and white rushing back and forth between trucks and vans and the building.

“Go see what state they’re from,” Josie said to Paul.

Paul smiled and ran. “Alaska,” he said when he returned. “Are they really getting married today?” he asked, and when Josie said it seemed so, he asked where the groom and bride were, and Josie was not quite sure. All the men were dressed the same, but there was one young man who seemed slightly less joyful than the rest, moving slower, weighted with the trouble of his responsibilities, and she assumed this was the groom.

“Let’s take a bet who the groom is,” she said to Paul, and he asked if he could get a piece of paper to catalog the possibilities. He flew up to the Chateau and returned with the Yahtzee pad, which he turned over and began writing down differentiating details for each of the men. Tall skinny red hair, he wrote. Shorter brown hair beard, he wrote. Glasses and limping, he wrote.

At about two, a new car arrived and parked behind Jim’s office, close to the Chateau. The bride, Josie assumed. She watched as three women rushed from the car into the office, an older woman holding the white dress over her head. Soon a stream of new cars appeared in a cloud of dust. A bald and portly man emerged from one of them, wearing a tuxedo, the first man yet to seem comfortable in it.

“The father of the bride,” Josie said, and sent Paul to listen in on any conversations nearby, to confirm her suspicions.

He returned ten minutes later with no hard facts.

“Must be happening soon,” Josie noted aloud, thinking at least one of her children could hear her. But neither was within earshot.

Young people in sportcoats, and blue suits, and black suits, one white suit, all the women in very short dresses and very high heels, emerged from their vehicles and stepped through the gravel to the staging house. For an hour there was no movement, no sound. They were getting married, and Josie couldn’t hear a thing.

—

At dinnertime, she retrieved a few plates from the shower, and they ate inside the Chateau, a frozen pizza and greying vegetables, and as the sky bled orange the kids heard the laughter of other kids.

“Can we go see?” Ana asked.

Josie saw no reason why not, outside of her wanting them to stay with her, inside, watching a movie while their heads rested on her chest. She wanted them near her, and wanted to drink white wine while half-watching an animated movie. She was ready to let this day peacefully burn to embers, but they wanted to extend it.

“Sure,” she said. She could not keep her children from whatever happiness was outside.

Paul helped Ana get her shoes on, and while she watched Paul tie her laces, she looked back at Josie, and said, “I have diseases!” Paul finished one shoe and began the second. Ana was casual about it, as if getting her nails done, talking to a friend in the next chair. “Do you know how to spell diseases?” she asked, then answered her own question. “D-Z-Z-Z. Diseases.”

“I don’t think so,” Josie said.

Ana took Josie’s face in her hands and said, “Josie, I have diseases.”

Paul finished with her shoes, stood, and the two of them opened the door, Josie following them. Paul and Ana looked around, not immediately seeing the other children, but finally seeing the tribe not far off. The kids had made an impromptu seesaw using a wide plank sitting atop a balance beam. The alpha boy was standing in the center of it all, his arms crossed in triumph.

Josie sat in the doorway of the Chateau, watching as Paul walked toward the tribe, Ana following. Suddenly Ana turned back to Josie.

“You forget something?” Josie said.

“Yes,” Ana said, and took Josie’s face in her hands. Josie laughed, and kissed Ana on the nose.

“No,” Ana said, and repositioned her hands to get a better grip on Josie’s face. This time Ana came in for a more romantic kiss. It was all there: the closed eyes, the puckered lips, and Josie let her daughter go for it. She kept her eyes open, wanting to see what Ana would do, but after a moment of lips-to-lips, Ana seemed satisfied, and withdrew with great solemnity. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, said, “See ya.”

—

Night came on, and Paul and Ana returned, sweaty and complaining about falling off the teeter-totter. They were settling in for the night when a thumping reshaped the air. Josie assumed it was from a car passing over the road, but the pounding only grew louder.

“The wedding,” Paul said.

Josie went outside to see if this really could be music, and not some kind of military assault. She walked to the meeting house, where the lights were bright inside, and saw the silhouettes of a hundred people crammed tight and moving in sudden diagonals. Paul and Ana followed her, unbidden.

“The reception,” Josie said, and explained the idea to them, that the ceremony and dinner had happened quietly and now there was this, so loud, and it would go late. She thought about leaving the park. She thought about what she could stuff in her ears to muffle the sound. But there would be the thumping — in the ground, in the air. They would not sleep.

“We should stay here,” Paul said, and stood, squinting at the meeting house, as if they’d bought tickets to some outdoor concert and had found just the right spot. Josie sat down and brought Ana into her lap. From their vantage they could see the festivities through the large window, the guests passing across its bright picture-screen like actors in a party scene. The bride had bright blond hair and arms covered in tattoos. The groom was very tall and bearded, and seemed to be crying, laughing, lifting one guest after another off the ground and spinning them around. The music bled one song into the next, and the heads kept bobbing, and Josie pushed her chin into the furry mass of Ana’s hair as Ana drew ovals on Josie’s arm.

It was not novel for Josie to be apart and stare. As a teen, during the worst years of Candyland, she’d been through a very long few years of aloneness, a brutal and wonderful and terrible time of luxuriating in her tortured mind, her suddenly heavy thighs, her growing nose, the rumors about her parents, the word Rosemont on everyone’s tongues, always implicating her parents, her feeling of being horrified at being alone on weekend nights but not wanting to be among people, either. She railed against the injustice of her always being alone, but she loved being alone. As some sort of compromise, she’d taken to long walks at night, and that led her into the woods behind homes all over town, and when she walked behind these homes, keeping herself deep in the trees, often there were bright lights, and the people inside were illuminated as well as aquarium fish.

So on these long walks she would often sit and watch the families sit, or cook, or undress, and she found it reassuring and necessary. At a time when she doubted her place, doubted she was doing anything right, doubted her skin was really hers, doubted that she walked correctly or dressed correctly and at a time when she covered her mouth any time it was open, watching the quiet tedium of everyone else’s lives gave her renewed confidence. Her family was considered strange and unholy, a twisted family awash in VA drugs, but these other families were no better. All were deeply boring and sedentary. They barely moved. She would sit in the patchy woods, watching a house for an hour and scarcely see anyone move from room to room. She watched classmates and they were dull. She watched a classmate’s mother walk around in a bra, watched another classmate, a burly athlete, shockingly kind to all at school, come home and immediately get thrown across the room by his father. She saw certain things, scenes of violence loud and simmering. Being deep in the surrounding woods, she was never close enough to hear a word. And so in those dark woods, in the blue light of these sad homes, she realized she was no less normal than any of these sorry souls.

“I’m tired,” Josie said, and by that she meant she was tired of being apart from the world. They had been alone and on the road for many days, and those days had seemed like weeks, weeks where she had only her children to talk to, and there was nowhere they knew to be home, and now they were watching again, or Josie was watching again, people who belonged in the world, who were rooted and reveling in their place, who were dancing triumphantly inside. It was never good to think about Carl, his then-disdain for weddings. She didn’t want to be with Carl. What if they’d been married? Good god.

But a wedding would have been nice. She’d never had everyone in one place, the people she loved. Could you have a wedding like this at forty, forty-one? A raucous thing like this, the women barefoot in their tight dresses, dancing naughtily? You could, she could. Or perhaps she had made too many mistakes. Two children from one eel-like man, a fractured past, no family. Was she a drifter? Josie had a heavy warm child in her lap, Ana’s red hair smelling like lemons, and she had another child standing next to her, above her, leaning against her, and he was a noble human and always would be. And yet her life was that of a drifter. Where are you from? Here and there. Where are your parents? Doesn’t matter. Why aren’t your kids in school? We’re doing an independent study. Where are you going?

And then a door opened in the meeting house, a bright white sliver that enlarged into a yellow rectangle. Light poured out from the building, and down the lawn all the way to Josie and Paul and Ana, caught in the light. A man was in the door, and seemed to be relieving himself. It couldn’t be. There had to be bathrooms in the building. But no. He stood, one hand on the wall of the building, the other holding his fly open, a man pissing dramatically, and even from their distance, Josie could hear the spatter of urine against the clapboard wall. When he was finished, he turned, as if to take in the night air and bask in good work well done, but he seemed to freeze, as if he’d seen Josie and her children and was appalled by them.

And now he was walking toward her. Shame came over her at once. She knew he would scold her for sitting there and watching their sacred event. It had been a vulgar thing to do, to just sit there like it was all some show for their amusement. She would tell him she was nearsighted and couldn’t possibly see that far. That she was blind and was just listening to the music.

Now the father of the groom was upon her.

“You and your beautiful children have to join us,” he said.

He was standing over her, his face round and kindly and bright with drink and sweat. His hand was outstretched as if asking her to dance.

“No, no,” she said, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

“Oh no,” he said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

Josie apologized. “No, no. It’s very nice of you.” Why was she crying? Her face was soaked and she was choking. “No. I didn’t mean to,” she managed to say, but couldn’t complete the thought.

But he understood. He understood that she’d spent the day wondering why she hadn’t had happiness like this, Jesus Christ why had she made all the wrong decisions, these stupid teenagers getting married knew how to have a beautiful and humble wedding by this Alaskan river, goddamnit, why did she make it all so difficult when it could be so simple? And now the father of the groom was taking her hand and leading her to the lights of the party. She choked desperately on her tears but the father only held her hand tighter. She turned around and took Paul’s hand and he took Ana’s hand and like a string of construction paper people they walked to the white tables and the lights and music and when they arrived Josie was still crying, and expected to be deposited at some far table and given cake.

But the father pulled her and her children deep into the dance floor, and they were suddenly in the wild heart of it all, with the groom and bride making their fluid thrashing movements, everyone jumping and no one questioning for a second why Josie was there. And now Ana was on the groom’s shoulders. But how? And now a bridesmaid had lifted Paul to her level and was dancing with him, cheek to cheek. Everyone was turning, turning, and somehow Josie managed to dance, too, finding the rhythm and drying her face and smiling as much as she could, to tell everyone she was okay and knew how to dance, too.

The band played until two, and when the band left, the guests retrieved instruments from car trunks and drunken music was made until four. Josie couldn’t recall when she’d gone to bed. The kids were asleep on their feet at midnight, and she carried Ana to bed at one, the red-haired groomsman carrying Paul, and for some time Josie lay, trying to sleep in the Chateau, so close to the campfire laughter, and finally she returned to the party, was welcomed to the fire, and one by one the guests passed out as the best man, knowing his duty, kept the fire fed.