Heroes of the Frontier

XV

WHEN SHE WOKE AGAIN and ventured outside, the park was bright and empty. The guest cars parked near the overpass were gone. The vans and trucks were gone. The flowers were gone, the tent was gone. It was just before noon. The right thing would be to leave. Josie knew this. The park was desolate without the wedding guests, and Josie had already stayed too long. More than a few days in any place was unwise. She knew they should go. But instead of leaving she went to the office and told Jim she was staying another night, and asked if he’d like to eat lunch with them.

“I just had lunch,” he said.

“Dinner,” she said.

“How about I make you some salmon?” he said. “My brother sent me a bunch from Nome and I need to eat it. It won’t keep much longer in the fridge.”

The kids played in the river with a new group of kids who had arrived that afternoon, and at six they walked to Jim’s cabin, a hundred yards or so through a birch forest, and found him at the grill, wearing ironed jeans and a peach-colored polo shirt.

“Made you a mojito,” he said, and handed her a glass of cut-crystal. She took a sip. It was cold and far too strong.

“Got a head start,” he said, indicating his own empty glass, and poured himself a second.

Josie stared at him, imagining what he would have looked like as a young man. He looked like he’d gotten everything he wanted.

“Grenada,” he said.

“Okay,” Josie said. Nothing surprised her anymore — certainly not a man suddenly saying “Grenada” while holding a spatula.

“I saw you inspecting the ink,” he said, and pointed to his arm, the military tattoo. He raised his sleeve, to reveal the words obscured before: Operation Urgent Fury. Josie had never heard this moniker. These words, Urgent and Fury, applied to Grenada seemed a wonderful joke.

“It’s just a joke now,” he said, and Josie relaxed. She was relieved, first of all, that he was not a Vietnam vet, and that they wouldn’t have to talk about that, or about her parents, or Candyland, and she was so grateful that though he’d been part of the invasion of a country the size of the Mall of America, and though he felt, or had felt, some pride in this (the tattoo), he didn’t take it too seriously. In an instant Josie pictured a show, Grenada! No. It would be called Grenada? A dozen soldiers would parachute onto the stage, and ask themselves where they were. “Grenada,” one would say. Another would ask, “Grenada?” This would go on throughout the show. People would die, helicopters would crash, medical students would ostensibly be rescued, a petty dictator would be overthrown, and all the while the U.S. soldiers would keep forgetting where they were. One would knock down the door of a local home, pointing his gun at a family of five. “Where are we?” he would demand. “Grenada,” they would say, their hands in the air, a baby wailing. “Grenada?” the soldier would say, mugging for the audience. You could call it a comedy.

“Don’t judge,” Jim said. “Grenada made Kuwait possible.”

Now Josie was confused. What in the hell was he talking about?

“You don’t remember the national mood in the seventies and early eighties, do you?” he asked. Josie was a child during much of that time, and had not been paying attention to the national mood, no.

She needed to change the subject. If they went down this road, soon enough they would arrive at her mother and father, Candyland, Jeremy — Jeremy had already stepped into her consciousness and darkened the gauzy happiness of the day.

“You have a wonderful awkwardness,” Jim said, and for a moment Josie thought the evening was being ground to dust, first by his nonsense about Kuwait and now this, an oblique insult. “You’re beautiful, but you wear it so lightly. This,” and here he touched the small of her back with an open hand, heavy and warm, “this is where the self-satisfied women, the uppity ones, lose their appeal.” Somehow he had known to change the subject, and had effortlessly chosen a very chaste and very erotic place to put his hand. He was so confident, her sense of time shifted, broke down. Hadn’t they just started talking? Now his hand was firmly on her back; they were ready to dance. “The other women, they’re stiff here,” he continued, his voice lower now, a rumble, “they carry all their tension and outrage and impatience right here. It’s a catastrophe. But you, the way you bend, the way you shift hip to hip, it’s fluid, it’s just a breeze through long grass.”

Shit, Josie thought. Shit shit. To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she’d never noticed. It worked always. Hilariously, though, Carl had no idea. The one original thing, the one time he’d noticed something about her that she could remember — would not forget — he’d said while watching TV one night, a crime show. The detectives had shown up at the coroner’s office, and he’d pulled open a cold steel drawer to reveal the corpse of a young woman. “That looks just like you!” Carl had said, leaning forward on the couch, and Josie had thought, Will this harmless man kill me? “He seems harmless,” his mother, Luisa, once said to Josie, “but he has a terrible resolve.” What did that mean? Josie thought of that often: He has a terrible resolve. That and the comparison to the corpse: It made their last year together somewhat less carefree.

Now, though, there was this man, with his Grenada tattoo, his POW/MIA flag, and he was so gentle. She knew a mistake with this man was inevitable. The only hope was to contain the damage somehow, release the lust, complete the seduction without too much mess.

—

After dinner, Jim brought a set of markers and a stack of printer paper from his cabin, and Josie assumed he planned to suggest the kids occupy themselves this way while he made a move on her. But instead he sat down and asked Ana what her favorite animal was.

Josie knew Ana’s answer changed depending on the day and what show she’d last seen, so was curious to hear the answer.

“Winnie the Pooh,” Ana said, and Jim repeated the word as Ana had said it, “Windy da Pooh,” imitating her but somehow in a respectful way that seemed to confirm to Ana that her pronunciation was correct.

He cracked his knuckles theatrically and began to draw. Quickly the kids realized he knew what he was doing, he could draw, and they floated closer to him, one on either side, rapt. Ana soon had her hand on his arm, again demonstrating her belief in the transference of magic. It was a heartwarming scene until Josie came around to see the progress of Jim’s drawing and found an anatomically correct elephant, standing upright like a human, and holding a beer, a flaccid penis pointing to the earth between its legs.

“You guys run to the vending machines for a second,” Josie said, giving them a dollar each — only the second time in their lives they had held a dollar of their own. The kids ran through the birch woods and Jim sighed and sat back in his chair.

“Elephants have penises,” he said in his defense. “Paul has one. Have you seen a whale’s?”

“Your elephant even has pubic hair, you jackass,” Josie said.

“It was flaccid.” Jim grinned at her, thinking she was kidding.

She took the picture and crumpled it. “No more penises,” she said.

The children returned from the store, Jim drew for them again, everyone having a blast. For half an hour he drew whatever they asked, and they colored his pictures — but why did Ana grunt while coloring? — and then laid them out on the grass around his house, holding them down with stones. The evening had arrived at a place of perfect serenity, and Josie and her children, and this stranger named Jim, were a perfectly functioning little family. Jim couldn’t have been happier. He was not the least bit bored.

Ana put a blank piece of paper before him. “Can you do a giant, but a nice giant?” she asked.

Jim threw himself into that one, moving his mouth as he drew. Josie watched him, and a truth revealed itself to her: Older men are not confused. They aren’t going in seven directions. A retired man knows what he doesn’t want — and to those of us who have been ground into dust once or twice or more, and have somehow found a way to carry on, knowing what you don’t want was far more important than knowing what you did want. Maybe a retired man is the real prize. An older man like this (or Sam’s Leonard Cohen!) no longer worried about money; his ambitions had been satisfied or ignored, and he could now afford to draw pictures for children for hours at a time, had nowhere else to be, could take his time.

“Who wants to play air hockey?” he asked. Josie didn’t want to play air hockey, or watch anyone play air hockey, but her children had jumped and danced at the idea, so off they went. They walked back through the birch forest and to the office. Jim plugged in the air-hockey table and turned to Josie.

“Why don’t you go somewhere?” he said. “They’re fine here.”

“Go where?”

“Didn’t you ask about the bikes the other day? Take a bike. Any one you see in the shed.”

Josie dismissed the idea, because she had expected this air-hockey idea to be a ruse to get her alone in the back office — she’d glimpsed a couch there, and pictured herself sloppily on it — but Jim was soon playing with her children, and barely giving her a thought. So Josie found herself considering the bike ride, then wanting it, then calculated the probability that riding the bike in her drunken state would end in her crashing and drowning in the river. But then she thought of the Mennonites, and their bicycle joy, and wondered what lay on the other side of the underpass that had made them so happy.

“You kids keep going and I’ll come back to keep score,” Jim said, and led Josie to the shed, where a motley array of bicycles stood entangled. He was behind her, and she could smell his fermented male smell, and for the third time that afternoon she assumed he would take her, press himself into her.

“Try this one,” he said, and pulled from the chrome thicket a blue women’s bicycle with a wide white seat. He checked the tires and found them functional.

“Whose is it?” she asked.

“Someone’s. I don’t know. They might have left it. Or else it’s someone’s who works here. I don’t know. It’s yours.”

By drawing vaguely in the dirt, Jim mapped the bike path as it ran along the river, across a wooden bridge, through what used to be a lumber forest and then back, along the river’s far shore and across another crossing, this one a pedestrian footbridge made of steel.

She held the bicycle, and threw her leg around it, feeling the sensation that it was crooked. The handlebars were pointed decidedly leftward. She did not think it was a good idea to ride this bicycle. Her children were with a stranger and it was getting dark, and she was tipsy, and she had two or three miles to ride on a bicycle with handlebars that pointed due left.

“See you in an hour or so,” Jim said, and turned himself toward her children, whose silhouettes she could make out, through the window, hunched over the air-hockey table, pushing some hovering disc at each other with great urgency. They were fine. And so she pushed off, and immediately ran into the side of the bicycle shed.

“You got it?” Jim yelled from some invisible place in the woods.

“I’m good,” she said, and decided she needed to prove she was good, so rode across the parking lot, adjusting her sense of direction and equilibrium to the handlebars, which were tilted down, too.

She looked up at the path, wanting to move forward, believing she could move forward, but the machine under her was mangled and had other plans. It defied logic that she could make this work after a potent mojito, but after a hundred yards she was riding more or less straight. Then again, she passed an older woman who stared at her, aghast, as she passed. To see oneself in another’s eyes is no gift. It’s always a shock, always a disappointment to see their own shock and disappointment. You look so old. You look so tired. What are you doing to your children? Why are you riding a crooked bike drunkenly on this lovely path? How is this the right use of your time, your humanity? Have we wasted precious space dust on you?

But soon the riding was comfortable enough and the landscape was drifting by, and because the sun was setting, setting so late, it occurred to her all at once that she’d never been more connected to the land, and nothing around her had ever seemed more alive and glowing and beautiful. The purple wildflowers, the grey dirt, the smell of the pine needles cooling. The tall tree halved by lightning. The waning sun on the hills in the distance, bright blue and white. Whose bike was she riding, anyway? A log-hewn fence. The wail of a faraway truck slowing. The monotony of an unburned forest on the sun-drenched hillside. Why did she have to be tipsy before she could notice anything? A rabbit! A rabbit was just down the slope from the path, small, tawny, and staying longer than expected, looking at her with absolute recognition of her humanity, of her equal right to this land so long as she remained humble. After it evaporated loudly into the thicket, there was the metallic hum of crickets. The butterlight of some cabin in the nearby woods. The heat of the pavement below her, the faint smell of tar where someone had sutured its tendril cracks. The click of her gears, the awed hush of the highway beyond the trees, the pointless drama of all of its rushing travelers. “You know what time it is?” asked a voice.

Josie looked around, the landscape spinning in green and ocher, and saw a man on a parallel road. He was on a bike, too, standing, straddling his, outfitted in an explosion of colorful gear. After he asked the question, he took a sip of water from a tidy black water bottle. All of this, he believed, made him both virile and monumental: the bike, the gear, the straddling of the bike, the sipping of water right after asking a stupid question.

“Eight thirty,” Josie said, because she knew it was probably true.

“Thanks,” the man said, but in a way that implied he was a paying guest and she was some kind of bike-path clock keeper — that she worked on the path and was in charge of time. She thought of the bicycle man in her town, the one responsible for the maiming, the furious and florid sense of themselves these men felt. I am wearing these clothes and have gone fast. Move from my path. Fix my teeth. Tell me the time.

“Fuck you, you motherfucking asshole,” she said, not loud enough for him to hear, loathing all of humanity, and then continued on, in seconds happy again, again connected to the land, feeling everything gorgeous around her, hoping the lightning tree would fall on that man and improve the world by the subtraction of one.

She turned around a bend in the path and saw a stream, and then a pond, an empty bench facing the water, and she thought of old people, and dead people, and dirty pigeons, and then dirty landscapers, dirty housepainters. A fox! Was it a fox there, ahead of her, near the pond, staring at her? It could be a coyote. Christ, she thought, it was beautiful, with its rich coat, its luxurious grey coat, its eyes like Paul’s, Paul’s eyes always looking old, as if seeing her from a different wiser, sadder epoch.

Like the rabbit, the fox lingered far longer than she thought plausible before jogging away, into the high grass. This was dusk, when all the animals appeared. Dusk was all that mattered. Midday was nothing, nothing. Midday was for humans, for the drones of mankind, who bustle about in the heat of day like imbeciles, while the animals always waited till the cooling of the earth, waited till the light was low and the air cooling, till they appeared to do their business.

The sun wouldn’t set for another half-hour and now, as she passed between two hills, one in violet shadow and the other dirty blond with sunset light, she realized this was the time when she and everyone should be out, should see these things, share the world with the foxes and voles and moles and rabbits. The light as it passed through the cotton of the willows! The light as it haloed the trees and grass and weeds! But she was usually not out at this time. Usually she was feeding her children, putting them to bed, all of these prosaic activities that kept her from the beauty of the world. Our children keep us from beauty, she thought, then corrected herself. Our children are beautiful, too, but we must find a way to combine these things, so we’re not missing one for the other. Could it be so hard?

Ahead she saw a gentle decline from the path to the riverside and decided she would sit there and put her feet in the water. She found a large stone that resembled a pillow and she set her head on it, extending her feet to the river and found that her toes touched the cold water. She closed her eyes to the sun and yawned a happy yawn and woke up when? The light was the same. She’d only dozed. She looked around her, expecting cobwebs to tell her she’d slept a hundred years, her children were now grandparents, all was different, but instead she saw a small snake appear from between the rocks at the water’s edge, a water snake of some kind, and without taking any notice of her, come out and inspect a snail making its wet way across the slick rock. With a snap of its head the snake swallowed it, and then retreated back into the dark water.

Josie stood and felt the uncertain earth beneath her feet. She steadied the land and thought again about staying, at least until she sobered. No, she thought, it will be good this way, to bike home this way — she had the powerful thought that this was the way it was meant to be, that it was all so beautiful she could hardly bear it. She took a long last look at the river, moving like a thousand silver knives. The rocks on the far shore, cooling in the shadows. She turned and climbed up to the bridge.

Getting on the bike was a kind of seven-dimensional chess. Was she drunker now than before? The river and the sun had inebriated her. The bike seemed a foot taller now than when she’d ridden it hours ago. She hoisted herself onto the seat, pushed off, and immediately careened into the shrubbery to her left. Okay, she thought. Okay. She squinted into the sun and mounted the bike again and this time shoved herself forward with enough velocity that she was propelled more or less straight.

The air was cooler now, and she hoped it would sober her. Her eyes watered as she rode, sideways, her mouth open. But she regained her balance, and said these words to herself: Great night. Good evening. The greatest night. The beauty of this nowhere world. I love this. Where are my children? Can I love this without them? I can and I do. This is my best life. Among this beauty, on my way to them.

Soon she saw the rooftops of the RV park. Now she saw the first trailers and trucks, and passed a child on a scooter. Now the path connected with the dirt road that connected to the gravel road that connected to the paved road and now she saw the underpass, and it felt so good to follow in the Mennonites’ footsteps, grinning while careening under it, knowing she would see her children now, would reclaim them from Jim, and she would kiss Jim in some way. Innocent, simple, maybe a long and tight embrace and later she could pleasure herself in the passenger seat. But what about Jim? Here she was, able to be at liberty at dusk, on this wayward bike, to enjoy the beauty of the world, alone, because of Jim. This was the boon of a second parent — he could provide these moments alone, the temporary clarity of vision to see this golden light and see these gorgeous mammals, to see the play of shadows on the hills. She had the thought that she could stay. Her children loved it here, and Jim was so calm, and they could live in his log cabin, and she could become an innkeeper’s wife. She had never had a partner, never a real partner, in her parenting, Carl being a child himself. What if she had an actual man nearby, who could catch and gut and grill fish, and could draw well-endowed elephants but could be dissuaded from that in the future? But that would mean living here, and with Jim, who she did not think she could love, who had an Urgent Fury tattoo on his arm and who knew what else on his chest and shoulders — he could have some kind of battleship, a squadron of bombers. What to do with a life? One second she believed fervently that it was enough to be with her children, the next moment they bored her to tears and were an impediment to all her dreams. Goddamn them, her terrible robber children, robbing her of so much, giving her everything and robbing her of everything else, her gorgeous perfect thieving children damn them, bless them, she couldn’t wait to lie down with them, holding her old cold hands against their hot smooth faces.

—

She dropped the bike messily in the shed and walked to the office, where she found a unnamed clerk but not Jim, and no sign of her children. “He took them back to your RV,” the clerk said. At the Chateau she expected them to be outside, watching him draw or whatever other outdoor activity he might conjure, but no one was outside, and the door was closed, and rushing to the Chateau Josie paused. Had this man put her children to bed or was he doing something terrible in there? She listened and heard a man’s booming voice talking about giant poos.

She stepped up and found Paul and Ana up in their bed over the cab, and Jim sitting in the dinette, reading from a paperback Captain Underpants book. He had brought it himself.

“Again,” Ana said to Jim, and then to Josie: “Jim’s gonna do it again.”

Jim then read a passage about a villain accidentally turning himself into a forty-foot-tall walking and talking feces log. After this passage Jim turned the book to show Josie the picture, revealing that the giant feces-man was wearing a cowboy hat. The kids were giggling wildly, delighted that this older man had validated and honored this story with his theatrical reading. Finally he closed the book with slow gravitas, as if he’d just wrapped up some long and distinguished volume, and placed it on the kitchen counter.

“Night, guys,” Jim said to the children, and stepped down from the RV.

Josie climbed up and kissed her children’s foreheads as they dangled over the ledge, and then stepped down from the Chateau and returned to Jim.