Heroes of the Frontier

XVI

IN THE RELENTLESS MORNING SUN Josie drove, exhausted and angry and tired of watching the bottle break across her face, but knowing she deserved it. What kind of person takes it from behind in a trailer park, with her children sleeping mere feet away? From a retired man named Jim, veteran of Operation Urgent Fury? In her visions, the bottle sometimes broke against her head, but today, first, it just bounced off with a loud low ring, like a gong. Four, five times it would strike her head, making the sound of the gong before finally breaking and spraying her face with glass.

What had she done?

After kissing her children good night she had stepped outside and all was right, all was appropriate. This older man who had babysat her children masterfully, who had allowed her the glorious ride through the forest at dusk, was sitting in one of Stan’s chairs, and she took the other, and she told him what she’d seen. She told him about the fox, and the rabbit, and the light on the hills, and Jim took pleasure in this, and feeling her mojito glow fading, Josie told Jim she’d fix them up, and stepped up into the Chateau, happy to find her children already asleep. She could only see Ana’s face but could hear Paul’s steady breathing.

She found a bottle of chardonnay, three-quarters full, and went to the bathroom to retrieve two glasses from the shower floor. The wine was warm, so she found ice in the freezer and was pouring generously for herself and Jim when she felt his presence behind her. The sound of the ice rattling in the glasses had allowed him to sneak up behind her unnoticed and now his breath was hot on her neck, his hands on her hips, and then, very much like an animal would do, he began to rub his hardness against Josie’s waist.

“Let’s take this off,” he said, and removed Josie’s STRAIGHT ARROW visor and began kissing her neck. Had he seen the bald square on her head yet? Whatever was happening here, whatever wholly wrong physical nonsense, would end when he saw the stitches’ crooked smile on her skull.

“Hm,” he murmured, touching it briefly, then sweeping his hand back through her hair and down to her chest. That was all the interest he had in the wound. He didn’t care. He returned to his grinding and the systematic kissing of every exposed part of her neck.

There are appropriate people, she thought, as she drove away from Jim. So many appropriate people, who know how to act with dignity. Think of the wedding party! she thought. Think of the father of the groom, with his generous, forgiving eyes and outstretched hands. Think of the groom carrying Ana around. The red-haired groomsman who brought Paul to bed. These were decent people who knew how to behave. There were no people at that wedding allowing an older man to rub his hard penis against their waists inside the Chateau. They knew the limits of propriety. They knew what separated humans from beasts.

But not Josie. Josie, at that moment, thought it was wonderful. Wonderful that this strange man, in his late fifties, was rubbing his hard penis against her, in the Chateau, in Bumblefuck, Alaska. She found it wonderfully spontaneous and alluring, and even had a momentary conflation, imagining it was burly Smokey the Bear, not Jim, behind her. His stove-pipe arms, his barrel chest. She thought of an elephant, too, an elephant with a man-sized penis. No, this is Jim, she noted. Grenada Jim, who you don’t know. Meanwhile her children were sleeping sweatily above. Ana’s sleeping face was visible! Paul’s was not. Then Jim, the retired man who ran the RV park, was kissing Josie’s neck, and Josie was wet, and he did some masterful things, maneuvers that showed he had learned things in his many years, had retained some knowledge and could act on it. His arm had come around her, and was resting against her chest, like a bolt laid across a door. Her pants dropped silently to the floor, far quicker than she might have been able to get them off herself. His hand was on her stomach, then two long fingers plunged in and up. She had certain thoughts: that she wanted him inside her, and also — this was important — that she believed, given his roaring arousal and heavy breathing, that whatever was about to happen would not take long.

This was Carl’s fault. If that were Carl roaring in from behind, so aroused and breathing heavily, it would be over in seconds, while they were there standing up. Josie had come to expect this kind of blitzkrieg from Carl, and it was frankly perfectly fine, to stand up at the kitchen sink, Carl in heat, Josie knowing he would be finished before she turned around.

But Jim was more practiced, more controlled. Ninety seconds passed, then a few minutes, everything slow, steady, thickly filling, and she knew they needed a plan. She pulled up her pants and led him outside, and came up with an idea — at the time thought it a fantastic idea — to sit him down on the picnic bench, an arm’s length from the Chateau and her sleeping children, and then to sit on him. With the last minutes of sun pouring through the woods, her mind was lost utterly, she was a being of pure light and radiating warmth, and somewhere in the sun Paul asked what they were doing.

“What are you doing?” he said in his even wolf-boy voice. He was outside. He was standing at the door of the Chateau, with a clear view of his mother, who was naked from the waist down, sitting on Jim.

Paul knew what they were doing. From a young age, he had sought out anatomical and reproductive knowledge, asking about Josie’s parts, and his parts, and asking Carl about his parts, about the purpose of each, why Carl’s were bigger than his, why all the hair. So he knew the mechanics just as much as he knew the basics of flight and the internal combustion engine, and when Paul asked what they were doing, he meant not “Mommy, were you exercising on top of that man?” but “Why is my mother screwing this man six feet away from her sleeping children?” He knew what he was seeing.

But she couldn’t get up, not like that — Paul would have really gotten an eyeful. So she said, “Go inside for a second,” and he obeyed, and when she could see his back turned inside the Chateau she jumped off Jim, hustled to the woods and dressed herself. When she returned to Jim, he was clothed, too, and was smiling, holding out another mojito. Again he was so unlike a younger man, a man like Carl. What had happened with Paul didn’t seem to matter much; he conveyed that it would pass, that the best thing to do would be to continue outside, more or less in their same positions, sit and talk, close but not on top of each other now. Perhaps Paul’s memory of what he saw could be muddled, replaced.

Josie’s nerves were shot, so she drank her mojito, Jim repoured, and soon she was sloppy again, far less coherent than she’d been when swerving the crooked bicycle through the forest, and she found herself telling Jim about Jeremy, because in the heat of her loins and mess of her mind she thought Jim would be the very best person to share Jeremy with — there’d never been a better person, her addled brain told her. “I thought it was the right thing,” she said, “I wanted him to honor our country,” she said, sounding unlike herself but thinking it would endear her to Jim and his tattoo.

“He died last year?” he asked.

She nodded, sipping her drink, feeling very dramatic.

“In Afghanistan?” he asked.

Again she pumped her head up and down, yes.

“We ended combat operations in Afghanistan on January 9, 2013,” Jim said, and followed up with a litany of numbers and dates, using words like “draw down” and “post-occupation” but mostly using the word “exit” until Josie doubted herself. It was likely the mojito, but could it be that Jeremy hadn’t died in combat? Her image was of him shot, bleeding on a hillside, but now Jim, a veteran, was saying this was impossible. Had Jeremy actually been in Iraq, not Afghanistan? (Jim was insisting this was probably the case, that Josie was mistaken, and couldn’t it have been more like 2009, he wanted to know.) But then she remembered where Jeremy had been killed, Herat province, and the date, February 20, 2013. Jesus fucking Christ of course he’d died in Afghanistan. “I’m right,” she said, she slurred.

Jim rolled his eyes and poured himself another drink. They argued this way for the better part of an hour, as the night darkened around them, neither of them ceding ground, neither of them sure whether or not their country was still at war in Afghanistan. There were moments when Jim seemed almost wavering, almost believing that Josie could be right, that perhaps there were some combat troops still in the country…But then he dug in, disbelieving.

And so in the morning she’d left Jim’s RV park and watched the bottle break against her face, and mile after mile as she drove away, she thought how interesting, humorous even, someone from that part of the world might find it, that an American man who had fought in a conflict no one remembered didn’t know that his country was still fighting a different, larger war, still, had been since 2001. How funny! Coast to coast, most Americans would not be sure that war was still on, that we were still there, that men and women like Jeremy were still fighting and dying, that Afghans were still fighting and dying, too. Wouldn’t an Afghan, and countless future generations, find that very funny in some way?