Heroes of the Frontier

XVII

WHAT CAN WE DO to erase a terrible sight from the minds of our children? We can show them other things, brighter things. It so happened that ten miles from the site of Josie-on-Jim, they came across what appeared, from a distance, to be the Batmobile.

“Look,” Josie said, wanting to point it out to Ana especially, but knowing if she wasn’t right there would be trouble. So she waited until they got closer, careening along the highway toward it, and when they arrived, and she was sure that some lunatic had placed an actual full-size Batmobile approximation on the side of the road, in a parking lot attached to a fireworks outlet, with the sole purpose of luring in people like herself and her children, she finally told them.

“Do you see what I see?” In the wake of what she’d allowed Paul to witness the day before, this sounded more lewd than intended. She amended quickly: “Ana, you see a certain vehicle outside?”

When she did see it, there was pandemonium, and they stopped, and Ana jumped out of the Chateau and ran to it, running her hands across it. Its rough surface appeared to have been painted with black housepaint.

“Dis isn’t da real one,” Ana said, but she seemed to want to be disproved.

“It’s one of the real ones,” Paul said. “It’s a backup car. The main one is still in Batman’s cave.”

This satisfied Ana’s sense of balance, because surely Batman would have backup cars, and it was logical that he would keep at least one in an Alaskan parking lot, so she took to the car anew, her eyes allowing all the vehicle’s glaring discrepancies and anomalies, including the fact that it had no interior gauges, lights or even a stick shift. It did have a steering wheel, and Ana was reaching for it, looking back at Josie, waiting to be told no.

But while Ana had been inspecting the car, and Paul had been explaining away all its flaws, Josie had noticed that the fireworks outlet, the one using the Batman car as bait, was closed, boarded up hastily. Of course it would be closed, during a summer of wildfires, a few of them no doubt blamed on bottle rockets and M-80s.

“You can get in,” Josie said to Paul and Ana, feeling hopeful that this would eclipse forever the image of her grinding atop the RV park proprietor who drew elephant penises.

Paul climbed over the door (welded shut), and Josie lifted Ana in. They sat side by side, Paul in the driver’s seat. Ana looked to her brother as if fervently believing that because he was sitting in Batman’s seat, he was Batman. Josie watched the two of them, forgetting for a moment how badly she needed this to erase yesterday’s indiscretion. I know what you’re doing, his eyes told her.

There will be other mistakes, she said in return.

Josie took their picture, Ana looking straight through the windshield, as if scanning for evildoers, and Paul looking at Ana. And for the first time Josie felt the crushing tragedy of their aloneness, that they were only three, and had no one else, and were more or less on the lam, and that she had slept with Jim, and had no destination in mind — that they would leave the Batmobile and have nowhere else to go, that this would be the closest thing to purpose they would know today. “Ready?” she asked them. “We should go,” she said. But where? Why? They stayed.

When, an hour later, they finished with the Batmobile and were back in the Chateau, slowly pulling away, Ana unbuckled herself and came to Josie and kissed her on the cheek.

“I love you, Mom,” she said.

It was the first time Ana had ever said these words unprovoked, and though Josie knew what Ana meant was I love Batman. I love Batman’s car. And I love you for showing me Batman’s car, she was nonetheless moved.

—

They drove on, their path random, the sights bizarre. There was the strange geodesic dome, once part of a gas station, three stories tall and abandoned. They parked the Chateau behind it and stayed for a few hours, exploring within — they found a half-dead old kickball and played soccer briefly inside, and Ana collected an array of tool fragments and what seemed to be gears. They stopped at a garage sale, where the only other customers were firefighters from Wyoming. Josie bought Paul a book about heraldry and Ana a silver miner’s helmet. For herself she bought a guitar with a bullet hole in it. I couldn’t learn, so I got mad, the seller said.

They saw a moose, and pulled over to watch it lope without destination along the side of the road. But every car that passed their parked vehicle honked angrily, as if stopping for moose was not acceptable, or in bad taste, or endangered the moose in some way — Josie never knew. But she knew that seeing that moose was wildly anticlimactic, in the same way seeing a coyote, so small and weak and like the spawn of a hyena (the hunched back, the servile demeanor) and a housecat (its size, its dull eyes), was anticlimactic. This moose before them, which they were photographing with actuarial thoroughness, was a sorry specimen, thin and clumsy and not much taller than a pony.

It was important to stay off the main roads, but not to draw too much attention on the minor roads. The more they ventured away from the highways the more they saw evidence of the fires, their proximity coming with ample clues. The red and chartreuse trucks would pass her, going the other way, or would flash their lights from behind, in hopes they could go more than forty-eight miles an hour. Then the handmade or digital signs thanking the firefighters. Then the gusts of acrid smoke, the occasional stripe of haze overtaking the sky. ENTERING BURNED AREA. EXPECT FLOODS, said one sign, and Josie looked quickly to Paul, to see if he’d read it. The natural piling-on the sign promised — first fire, then flood — seemed unnecessarily harsh, and she worried about the nightmares a sign like that could provoke in a sensitive eight-year-old. But he was asleep, his mouth agape, Ana trying to balance her ThunderCats doll in his shirt pocket.

They were driving through a land of low hills, some of them charred black, when Josie saw a scrum of fire trucks ahead, creating a roadblock, their lights popping like flashbulbs. She slowed down and stopped before the group, ready to turn around, but when she rolled down her window, a police officer, looking not much older than Paul, approached. He had full, delicate lips.

“You passing through?” he asked.

“I don’t have to,” Josie said. She didn’t know what to say. She had no destination in mind, but telling him that would seem suspicious. “I mean I can take another road—” She almost said “north” but she wasn’t entirely sure she was heading north. She might have been going east.

“It’s okay,” the officer said, his lips pillow-soft, his eyes sleepy and amused. “The road just reopened. You’re the first on it, outside of emergency vehicles. It’s safe. Just be careful.”

Josie thanked him, missing his lips already, his eyes, thinking his parents must be proud of him, hoping they were. She drove slowly around the six or seven vehicles, and then found herself entirely alone on a wide four-lane road that passed through what had been a great battlefield. The hills on the left side of the road were largely green, untouched, covered with small pines and shrubs and stripes of wildflowers. On the right, though, the land had been rendered bald, leaving the occasional black stripe of a tree trunk, a few wisps of branches extended, the ground everywhere a plush grey.

Along the side of the road, fire vehicles were parked in bunches or alone. Here, a pair of red trucks, four firefighters sitting under a tree eating lunch on the rear bumpers. There, a single chartreuse truck, with a lone firefighter in matching gear walking up the hill, through the plush grey, carrying a shovel.

The road wound through the valley for miles, the scene serene and beautiful and empty. The valley was quiet, the sky was blue, the fire defeated.

Fire vehicles and firefighters appeared occasionally, some driving the opposite way, leaving the valley, but most of them parked on one side of the road or another, all of them acting independently, it seemed. It was, that day at that hour, more like a loose assemblage of firefighting freelancers, each allowed to do whatever they saw fit, than some coordinated, military-style attack. Or maybe it was the looser, cleanup fighting done after victory is assured.

Just then, she came upon a group of six firefighters surrounding a single large pine on fire, three hoses between them, two men on each.

“Look,” she told her kids, and she slowed the Chateau.

It looked like some kind of execution. The tree seemed to be alive, defiant, gloriously on fire, wanting to be on fire, while the firefighters were dousing it, killing it.

Then a sound like a quick loud exhalation. The Chateau veered left, then right, then lurched forward.

“What is that?” Paul asked.

Josie pulled over and stopped, but she knew it was a flat. Stan had breezed through the procedure for changing a flat, and she’d seen the spare on the rear of the Chateau a dozen times a day, but now, knowing she would have to actually change it, change a tire on a decomposing vehicle weighing four tons, she briefly lost hope.

“Let’s get out,” she told her kids, and then the three of them were standing on the roadside, between the hills of green and the hills of grey, under the bright sun, the Chateau tilting rightward.

Ana found a rock and threw it in the direction of the firefighters at war with the burning tree.

“Some other guys,” Paul said, and Josie turned to see that coming up behind them was a line of men in orange, ten of them, each of them carrying a shovel over a shoulder.

“Looks like you’ve got a flat,” the lead man said. “Need help?”

He was short and stocky, his face striped in soot. The group of them crowded around the flat, a few of them kicking the tire, as if that was in some way useful.

“You want us to help?” the stocky man asked.

“Could you?” Josie said, and the group of them began to fan out all over, like some kind of dance team — Josie was suddenly in the middle, and felt as if she should do some freestyle maneuvers while they clapped.

“You got the jack?” another man in orange asked.

Josie tried to remember where Stan had said it was, and could only think of the side compartment, where the lawn chairs were stored. She opened it, and three of the men rifled through the space — there were three of them doing any one thing — but found nothing.

“You want us to look inside?” another man, the tallest of them all, said. “My uncle used to have something like this.” He nodded at the vehicle the way he might have pointed out a tick infestation.

Josie’s bones told her not to allow ten men to tramp through the Chateau, opening every cabinet, especially given the velvet bag of money hidden under the sink. But a few of them had already seemed to be losing interest in the operation, and were standing a few yards down the road, as if moving on already, so to keep them interested she said sure, they could look through the Chateau, that maybe the tall man in orange had some insight, via his uncle, that she couldn’t access. As the stocky one opened the side door and stepped in, she met Paul’s eyes.

This is an example of making a bad situation worse, his eyes said.

But it was too late. Six of them were inside the Chateau, and Josie stood on the roadside, her children next to her, thinking that there was something unusual about this group of men, but unable to put her finger on it. Aside from the stocky one, they were smaller and thinner than the average firefighters, younger as a whole, all of them in their twenties, their arms grey with tattoos. She stepped closer to the Chateau to peek in, but the interior was a blur of orange. She turned around to find one of the men on his knees, obscuring Ana. He seemed to be talking to her.

“Ana, come over here,” Josie said, her unease growing. Ana reluctantly shuffled to her, hands behind her back.

Josie scanned the hands of every one of the firefighters, looking for the velvet bag. The tallest man jumped from the Chateau door, a twisted piece of iron over his head, his other hand holding a mechanical device, this one rusted. “Got it,” he said to everyone, and quickly there were orange men under the Chateau, and one was on the back ladder, removing the spare, and soon the vehicle was tilting high and they had removed and replaced the flat.

Just as they were lowering the jack, a new man, in chartreuse, was among them. “What’s happening here?” he asked. He was an older man wearing goggles over deep-set eyes, canopied with heavy brows. He had a presence at once authoritative and gentle, a small-town judge wanting and expecting civility from all.

“Just helping this motorist change her tire, sir,” the tall orange man said.

The men in orange had backed away from Josie and the Chateau, suddenly shy. A few of them had hustled to the roadside to pick up their shovels.

“Ma’am,” the bearded man said to Josie. His eyes were alarmed. “Have these men harmed or bothered you in any way?”

“No,” Josie said, confused, but adopting the tone of giving a traffic-accident deposition. “They’ve been very helpful.”

The gentle-eyed man relaxed, and looked around at the orange men, his eyes registering that he was both disappointed and impressed. “You guys get your gear and keep walking, okay?” he said, and those of the orange men who hadn’t done so already re-formed their single-file line and were tromping down the road. They passed the Chateau, none of them looking at Josie or Paul or Ana. The man in chartreuse watched their progress, his hands on his hips. When they were out of earshot, he turned to Josie.

“Did those men identify themselves as inmates?” he asked.

Josie’s stomach seemed to evaporate. She shook her head.

“You know how we use prisoners in some fires, to cut line and such?” the man said.

Josie had no idea what that meant.

“They’re low-level offenders. And happy for the work, it being outside and all,” the man said, chuckling. “Anyway, we’re short-handed, as you can see. Otherwise there’s usually an escort with these guys. And I didn’t know we were letting civilians through here. So a perfect storm, right?”

Josie was trying to follow. Prisoners are sent to fight fires, and the ten men who had flowed around and through the Chateau were all prisoners, and they had happily fixed her flat, and couldn’t have been more polite, and now they were gone.

“Wait,” she whispered, and climbed into the Chateau, rushed to the sink, opened the cabinet and found the velvet bag untouched.

“What was it? Anything gone?” the man asked.

“No, nothing,” she said. She looked up the road. The line of men had taken an upward path into the charred hills.

“One of them give you that?” the man asked Ana.

Josie looked down to find that her daughter was holding a tiny yellow flower.

—

She could drive all night, she decided. She could pull over anywhere. It didn’t matter. She was free and her children were safe. She felt powerful, capable, again heroic as she had when they’d left the bed and breakfast. She wanted a drink.

And here, up ahead, was what she’d been looking for in Alaska, an all-night diner with a neon beer sign in the window. She pulled into the parking lot, and saw that the place was oddly bustling for 9:23 p.m. She pulled over. The kids were asleep, but she needed to be around people, under strips of fluorescent light. She saw a pair of empty booths by the side window, and parked the Chateau so she could see it from one of the booths. She intended to sit and drink whatever they had, keep an eye on the RV that held her sleeping children, get some food for them to eat whenever they woke up. She had the feeling she would be talking to some stranger inside, the waitress at the very least. She was in one of those moods, she knew — once a month an ebullience came over her and she found herself small-talking someone at the checkout counter, people walking their dogs, nurses pushing the elderly down the sidewalk. What a day, right?

Seat yourself, the sign inside said, and Josie thought her heart might burst. She took one of the empty booths and opened the menu, to find not just the beer advertised in neon but two different wines, red and white. The waitress approached, and as she loomed close enough to appraise, Josie saw that she was a stunning woman in her forties, possibly the most beautiful woman she’d seen in Alaska. Her blond hair was streaked with white, which might have been age or might have been a style choice, it didn’t matter. Her eyes were dark, and she had dimples, which announced themselves just after she’d asked Josie how she was and what would she have.

“White wine,” Josie said.

Dimples. “Just a glass?” the woman asked, her eyes shining like those of a beloved childhood dog. “We have carafes.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “The carafe. Thank you. That’s mine,” she added, indicating the Chateau just outside. There was no reason to announce this just after ordering a carafe of white wine — as if she wanted the waitress to know what she’d be driving when she was finished drinking.

“You parking overnight?” the waitress asked. Dimples.

“Can I?” Josie asked.

Now the waitress was confused. Finally Josie put it together: the waitress had assumed that was why she’d pointed to the Chateau.

“Yes,” Josie said, more assuredly now. “Do I pay here or…”

Dimples. “I can add it to the bill. I’ll bring the registry over.”

And now Josie was in a new kind of bliss, and felt sure she would get a little drunk.

The carafe arrived, and she finished her first glass greedily. She was thirsty, and followed the wine with water, and was still thirsty. She couldn’t remember if she’d eaten since breakfast. She settled on the fact that she’d eaten half of a sandwich sometime in the afternoon, so she should eat now, should have a feast soaked in wine, and ran her eyes down the menu, ordered a chicken salad and started on the bread.

The diner was in full swing. Josie was in her flannel shirt, so she was invisible and enjoying a second glass of chardonnay. She looked around. There were two women who had come there, Josie was sure, to get laid; they were dressed like rock groupies. There were pairs of tired truckers, and a group of college-age kids who seemed to have spent the day rafting. One was still wearing a life vest. And then there was a man in front of her. Sitting in the next booth, facing her, as if the two of them had come with invisible companions and were stuck looking at each other.

He had one of those fat, round ageless faces that could be thirty or fifty. Lucky, Josie thought, to have all that fat in his face. He’ll be set forever. He’ll always look happy. And because he seemed so harmless and alone, she invited him to join her.

“You can come over here if you want,” she said. She noticed he had ordered nothing but a cookie and a glass of water. “Bring your water and cookie.”

The man reacted strangely. Josie thought it was not unreasonable to assume he would be glad to be asked by a woman to join her. Men did not often receive such invitations. But a long moment passed, during which his face took on looks of surprise, and suspicion, and assessment. Finally he tilted his head and said, “Okay.”

He carried his plate and cookie over, and placed them on Josie’s table, and she saw that he was a softly built man in loose jeans and a plaid button-down, even more harmless now that she saw him up close. He sat and looked at his cookie, as if gathering the courage to look up at Josie. She found him vulnerable, shy, unassuming, safe.

“I’m surprised you would invite me over,” he said, still looking at his cookie.

“Well,” Josie said, “we were both eating alone, and that seemed unnecessary. How’s your water?”

“It’s fine,” he said, and as if to prove it, he lifted the glass and took a sip, finally peering over the ridge to look at Josie. There was something in his eyes, she thought. Something suspecting, as if he was still questioning her motives for inviting him over. She flattered herself, guessing he thought she was out of his league.

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she said.

He shook his head, looking down at his cookie, and as if knowing how long he’d been staring at it, he broke it in half.

Josie took a sip of her wine, knowing this wasn’t going well. The longer he sat there, the more his strangeness was amplified. Every second of his tense posture, his inability to meet her eyes, seemed to increase the likelihood that he was not quite normal. “What’s your name?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know if that matters,” he said, and looked up at Josie. Now there was something conspiratorial in his eyes, as if the two of them were engaged in some wonderful game.

“This yours?” a voice said. Josie looked up to see that the waitress was standing at their table, holding out a short stack of papers to the man. There were a few pages of printed maps, some pages with handwritten notes, and under those pages, an open-sided manila file folder and below that, a large closed envelope. The label featured a series of names separated by ampersands, all of it in a font both elegant and combative.

“Oh, thanks,” he said to the waitress, and laughed a little laugh, looking quickly at the waitress and then to Josie. “Would have defeated the whole purpose, right? Coming all the way up here and forgetting the envelope.” He said this to Josie, and finally it came together. He was serving her legal papers. She was being sued by someone, thousands of miles away, and this shy man was an envoy delivering this aggression.

Josie stood up. “This man just propositioned me,” she said loudly. “He said he wanted to do to me what he’s done to other women around the state.” She backed away from the table, moving toward the front door, and was satisfied to see that most of the customers in the room were hearing her. “I don’t know what that means, but I’m scared.” She said this louder, pointing at him, moving toward the front counter. She pulled two twenties from her pocket and placed them on the cashier’s counter.

Josie was almost at the front door. The process server was frozen in his seat. “He said horrible things to me!” she said, allowing her voice to peak. “I’m scared!” she wailed, and burst toward the front door.

Not bad, she thought.

Outside, she ran to the Chateau and climbed in, finding Paul and Ana still asleep in their seats. She started the engine and looked into the restaurant’s window. Two of the truckers, older men solidly built and awake to the possibility that they would create a justice event, had approached the table, and were hovering over the man, whose hands lay on top of his stack of papers. When Josie hit the gas and the Chateau lurched ahead, the man glanced at her, his face impassive, his eyes registering not defeat or surprise, but something like betrayal.

She pulled around the parking lot and passed the building again as she left the driveway and met the highway. Now there were three men and the waitress at the booth, the man obscured by the bodies surrounding him. The process server thought I knew who he was, Josie realized. He’d followed her there, and to the diner, and had been biding his time, sitting there, staring at her from the opposite booth. No wonder he was surprised she’d invited him over. He thought she knew.

—

The adrenaline sobered her instantly and made the driving easy. Her mind was alive, florid and supercomputing. She took every minor road she could while cycling through her thoughts and plans and questions. She had defeated him, all that he represented. The look on his face — Who sent him? Carl? What would the lawsuit say? Or Evelyn? She hadn’t checked in with her child DA. Maybe there was something new on that front. Maybe Evelyn’s people had found less value than promised. Maybe she was claiming fraud, false dealing—

Jeremy’s parents. Could they sue? Try to sue?

No. It was Carl. It had to be Carl. This was the boldest thing he’d ever done. He’d filed some suit, and they’d hired someone to serve her. In Alaska. Holy shit. How much would a man like that be paid? A process server in central Alaska? Was he local? He didn’t seem to be local. Likely from Anchorage. Anywhere you go there are people doing these terrible jobs.

Inviting him over had actually prevented him from serving her. After an hour of driving she was sure this was true. When she’d called him over, he’d left his papers. He’d been confused, put off balance. If she hadn’t invited him to her booth he would have simply served her when she was sitting there. But she put him off his game, took control of the situation. She congratulated herself. Some extrasensory force had compelled her to suss out his nefarious purpose at the diner.

Was she invincible? She wondered if she was guided by some higher power. Was her mission, avoiding Carl, leaving civilization, a holy one? There was no other answer.

—

Somewhere near dawn, at another gas station lit in white, Josie got out, filled the tank, and felt compelled to check the Chateau for tracking devices. How else could the man have known where she was? He’d had a map, though. Would he have a map if he had some kind of tracking device? She got out of the Chateau and crawled under it.

“Everything okay?” a voice said.

She looked for the source, and saw a pair of boots. She stood and saw that the voice came from a teenager, no more than seventeen, wearing a pristine yellow shirt and skinny jeans. The boots were some incongruous style mistake.

“You work here?” she asked.

“Uh huh,” he said. “You need help under there?”

She thought briefly about telling him she thought she was being followed, that she had been looking for some kind of black box affixed to the undercarriage, but then knew this would only stir interest, and make her more memorable, such that if or when someone asked if he’d seen anyone or anything unusual, he would have a story. Yes, a woman under an RV, looking for a tracking device, very nervous—

Instead, she had an idea. “You have a clean-out?”

He directed her to it, a tank buried behind the station. There was a tidy round hole in the cement ready to receive. “I’m supposed to charge you fifteen dollars,” he said. “I mean, if you’re unloading a full tank.” Josie said the load was full, it was all the shit they’d been carrying around from the beginning, and paid the man.

“I don’t know how to do it, though,” she said.

Now the teenager’s face hardened. “You don’t know how to do it?” he asked, as if Josie, in her ignorance, had no right to pilot a magnificent craft like the Chateau, had no right to carry feces within. The teenager then drew a horrible and pornographic picture of a long thick tube extending from the side of the RV and snaking into a hole in the ground. “The waste should just shoot down into the tank from here to there,” he said, drawing arrows moving up and down.

The teenager’s drawing was benign, even beautiful, compared to the reality, which first required Josie to remove a twelve-foot white tube, inexplicably ribbed, from the bumper of the Chateau. It was stored there, tastefully hidden, a long cylinder tucked inside a long rectangle. She held it gingerly, knowing that unknown volumes of the waste of strangers — of Stan and his white-carpet wife! — had passed through. How could she know if there were leaks? Who could vouch for the end-to-end integrity of the shit-cylinder? She pulled it all out from the bumper, as it came and came, like a giant earthworm.

She attached one end to the right-sized opening on the bottom of the Chateau, just below the feces tank, and then dropped the other end into the hole in the ground, the cleanout. All she had to do now was turn the small and fragile lever that opened the tank and hope, when the human waste went hurtling down the tube, that the tube would stay attached and not fall off, spraying feces everywhere. But that seemed far more likely than it staying somehow fastened amid all that activity, the volume of waste shooting through its thin white membrane.

She reached under the Chateau, under the tank, turned the lever, and leaped to the side. The tube, though, stayed attached through the horrible business of it — the pumping, jerking, the terrifying rush. The jerking was the most unsettling, as the tube, which she realized was far outweighed by the volume of that which it conveyed, jerked and convulsed as the waste passed through in clumps and squirts. The sound was the haunting song of the feces rushing from its halfway house to its final home, not despairing its fate, but joyful and eager.

And then it was over, and all that was necessary was to detach both sides without getting the waste, which no doubt still coated the inside of the tube and the ends especially, on her fingers and shoes, and then replace the twelve feet of tubing, containing so much remembrance of things passed, into the bumper again.

The teenager reappeared. “All gone?”

“All gone,” Josie said.

She followed the teenager into the office, washed her hands in the bathroom and, seeing that the store was stocked with food, bought enough for a week or so. Even stopping at RV parks from then on seemed too risky. They would stay in the Chateau, hidden in woods or valleys. She bought all the store’s peanut butter, all its milk and orange juice and fruit and bread.

She bought a thermos and filled it with coffee, loaded the groceries into the passenger seat, climbed back into the Chateau and started the engine. Standing under the green-white light of the station, the teenager said something to her, but she couldn’t hear it. She cupped her hand to her ear, smiling, hoping that would be the end of it, but instead he jogged around to her window.

“Enjoy the dawn,” he said. The way he said it sounded like a statement of common inclination — that the two of them were united in preferring these small hours, to be alone and apart.

“Right,” she said.