Heroes of the Frontier

VIII

JOSIE WOKE TO THUMPING from the rooms above, and knew these were the sounds of Sam and the twins eating and dressing and, Josie prayed, leaving soon. She had no clock nearby and didn’t want to know the time. She wanted only for these people to vacate the house before they woke up Paul and Ana. Sam had to work in the morning, she had said, lead a group from New Jersey, and the twins would be at school, so Josie and her kids would be left alone till the afternoon.

The front door closed with civility, then the screen door with a cannon bang, and Josie put a pillow over her head. Then the door opened again, the screen banging three, four more times. It was some kind of joke, Josie thought. But finally it was quiet, and Josie was very warm, and briefly thought she would fall asleep again, only to find, when she closed her eyes, the face of Jeremy, and his mother, and her accusatory eyes. Presented with the choice between waking up far too soon, or closing her eyes again to fight off these faces and their accusations, she threw aside the blankets and pillows and got up.

The first floor was silent and clean. Sam and her children left no mess, no sign they had eaten or in any way inhabited these rooms just moments before. In Josie’s home, dishes were not cleaned after dinner; it seemed better to leave them until the morning, as if to clear and clean them too quickly would be to prematurely erase the memory of a fine meal. Josie walked around, and, her mind awakening slowly, thought with some small pleasure that for twenty minutes or so she might be able to explore the house without being observed or interrupted. Sam had no coffee, so Josie brewed tea and walked through the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers.

The organization was astounding. There was a cabinet for glasses, another for plates and bowls, and no interloping had occurred in any of them — no rogue tumblers or platters. There was a drawer for plastic bags. A cabinet for pots. The silverware drawer had silverware in it and nothing else — no carrot grater, no corn holders. Those outliers had their own drawer. In vain Josie looked for the drawer or bin or closet where all the uncategorizable things were held, or hidden during desperate cleanings, but found nothing. The refrigerator, though an older model, was clean and bright, and inside were plastic tubs of leftover pasta and garden burgers. The milk had been somehow conjured from hemp, and the orange juice had been squeezed and bottled in Homer. A half-eaten banana had been carefully entombed in plastic.

Josie stood in the doorway to the living room, sipped her tea, and contemplated the strangeness of being in a house at all. Josie and her children had been away from home for only a few days and already this, this large house with its sturdy walls, walls so strong pictures and mirrors could be hung from them, was some foreign and unfathomable temple to solidity. Josie found herself touching the walls, leaning against them, lavishing in their strength. There was a fireplace that appeared to get use, a tidy wall of quartered logs on one side, a smaller pyramid of kindling on the other. On the mantel were some old family photos that Josie recognized, one of Sunny and Helen and Josie and Sam, an unsurprising array of the twins’ school photos and lacrosse trophies, and a large plaque that Josie passed over quickly the first time, only to realize, when she returned to it, that it had been created to commemorate Sunny’s retirement. How did Sam have that?

From above, she heard two small feet drop to the floor, and guessed from their nimbleness that it was Ana. In the mornings Paul was slower to re-enter the world. It would be better, Josie thought, if her children had a father like Zoe and Becca’s: heroic and faraway, rather than nearby and cowardly. It was far better and Josie tried to stifle the envy that was washing through her. How did Sam afford a place like this by giving birding tours for three months a year? It was ludicrous and not fair. Why should her fatherless children be so beautiful and strong? Why should she have arrived at effortless solutions to everything while Josie’s head was in a vise?

“Mom?” Ana called from above, having no concern for her sleeping brother.

“Down here,” she said, and Ana tromped down the stairs.

Ana was hungry, so Josie found yogurt and they ate a cup together. They found grapes and crackers and ate them. They found eggs and Josie made omelets. While eating her second helping, Ana noticed the play structure in the backyard and ran to it. Paul was still asleep, so Josie went back to the fridge, found chocolate kisses and ate six of eight. She opened the front door, hoping to find some answer to the question of her unhappiness that day, but found only the morning newspaper.

She brought it back to the kitchen and paged through it while keeping an eye on Ana, who was busy finding weak spots in the play structure. Josie knew she would break some part of it, and knew also that Sam’s kids were far too old to play on it. With Ana, Josie did calculations daily: How likely will it be that she breaks this? What will it cost in time or money to repair it? She scanned the structure, looking for the worst Ana could do, and arrived at the conclusion that it would involve the thin chains that held the swings to the thick posts above. The chains were the structure’s weakest point and Ana knew this, and was already pulling wildly on them.

Josie refilled her cup with tea and turned her attention to the local weekly newspaper. The cover stories concerned a city employee who had made away with twenty-five thousand dollars in quarters he’d pilfered, over three years, from parking meters. The paper was astonished, wounded, but Josie thought: that is some extraordinary planning and follow-through. That man had some talent. A few pages later, the Announcements page graphic featured two words in large letters: Births, accompanied by a rattle and bottle, and Police, with a picture of handcuffs. These two words and pictures were next to each other, tilted jauntily, and were above what was mostly a police blotter of extraordinary clarity.

8/16

An anonymous caller reported a semi-truck traveling down the road with a tire on fire on East End Road and Kachemak Bay Drive.

A caller reported an aggressive dog on Beluga Court.

A caller reported an injured otter on the beach. The Alaska SeaLife Center, consulted, said to let the otter have time to see if it would go back into the water.

A caller reported neighbors being loud outside her window on Ben Walters Lane.

8/17

A caller reported he found a black lab on Baycrest Hill.

A man on Svedlund Street reported being yelled at by his woman all the time. He stated he did not want officers there.

A woman turned in a found purse.

8/18

Someone reported an overturned trailer on Ocean Drive Loop.

A caller reported that her husband was assaulted while walking along the roadway.

A caller reported theft of an outboard motor on Kachemak Bay Drive.

A caller reported a man walking down the road wearing shackles.

8/19

A man came to the police counter and advised he thinks someone stole his golden retriever.

A caller reported an injured sea otter.

A woman reported a bright light filling her home.

It was all very lucid and yet Josie had many questions. Was the man in shackles somehow involved in the assault of the husband on the roadway? Was it the same otter on 8/16 and 8/19?

Paul came downstairs and something in his eyes echoed Josie’s own thoughts about this house: it was warm and solid and made Josie’s family’s existence in the Chateau seem utterly irresponsible and cheapened their humanity. Josie made him an omelet and poured the last of the hemp milk, while his eyes asked just what they were doing — in the RV, in Homer. Why couldn’t they live here, or like the people here? A loud whine cut through the day’s quiet and Josie looked out the window to find a man wearing some kind of jetpack attached to a vacuum cleaner. Oh no. A leaf blower. The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

Sam had said she’d be back by three, so at two, realizing they had done nothing but eat all day, Josie knew they’d have to go grocery shopping. She dressed the kids and they made their way down the road, enjoying the new experience of being able to walk to the store. Josie was sure she’d seen a food market down that way the day before, but the store they found was half hardware store, half discount grocery, and wasn’t the one Josie had in mind. The ceilings were high and the shelves piled precariously with wholesale goods, enormous bags of rice and flour, and a remarkable variety of food for dogs. All the brands were different from any Josie had seen before, none of them recognizable. The kids were confused. The cereal aisle was indistinguishable from the aisle, next door, that sold garden supplies.

They found what they could and paid some irrational sum for it all. Walking home, Josie carried four bags, and the kids each carried one, and in a steady drizzle they made their way up the hill. All was routine until Ana began splashing in the puddles, Josie unwisely allowing it. The water eventually weakened Ana’s paper bag and her groceries fell through and onto the street. The kids began retrieving them, but there were cars speeding by, and there was no sidewalk, so Josie positioned Paul and Ana on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the ditch, and arranged the stray groceries in their remaining bags, gave one soggy sack to Paul and carried the others herself, and they resumed their journey. Dignity was at an ebb.

With the house in view, three blocks up the hill, Paul turned to Josie. “Why are you sighing?”

“I was yawning.”

“No, you were sighing,” he said.

She told him she didn’t know what she’d done or why, and it was raining so they should hurry. When they turned the corner Josie saw Sam’s truck, and her heart split. She was home early, and Josie had the unmistakable feeling that she was about to be scolded.

“Boy, you sure did some house-exploring, ha ha,” Sam said after a moment, without anything like mirth. “And eating! You guys must have been hungry!” Josie tried to recall. Had they opened drawers, left them open? Closet doors? They must have.

“We bought food,” Josie said, holding the bags high in the air. She brought them to the kitchen, and as she began to unpack them, she realized they hadn’t done any kind of organized replenishing. She’d bought some basics, eggs and milk — regular milk; they hadn’t had the hemp variety Sam favored — some stuff she and her kids wanted, some stuff the kids put in the cart and then a fair number of items even Josie wasn’t sure they’d eat. She looked back upon herself from just an hour ago, at the store, and couldn’t fathom anything at all about that person who had done that.

“Looks like I’m going grocery shopping, ha ha,” Sam said.

“Just make a list,” Josie told her. “I’ll go out again.”

“It’s fine.”

“Let me go, Sam.”

“No, it’s okay. You’re the guest. You relax.”

To make her point as clear as possible, and to be the biggest ass she could be, Sam got her keys and went out then and there.

—

An hour later Sam returned, her hands full of newer, better groceries, and a wide smile on her face. It was as if, having proven her point — Josie could not be trusted with any task — a grand benevolence had overtaken her. She seemed under the impression that she and Josie were close again, that the dressing-down she’d given Josie an hour ago was right and just and had been dutifully absorbed. Grinning like they were in pajamas and still sharing a bedroom, Sam suggested a plan for that night whereby the twins would babysit Paul and Ana, and she and Josie would go out on the town. When the kids got wind of the possibility of staying alone with Zoe and Becca, ordering pizza and watching TV, it was over.

Soon Josie was in Sam’s truck, and they were driving to a bar Sam insisted was for locals only, as if what Josie wanted and needed more than anything in the world was to drink with locals — that drinking with or near tourists was not right.

“This is my place,” Sam said, and Josie nodded appreciatively. It looked like a VA bar. This was Sam’s place. Sam had a place. The walls were decorated with pictures of fish and battleships. It seemed a pivotal and regrettable moment, when you had a place at all, and it was a place like this. Sam ordered margaritas not from the bartender, but from Tom. He was a large man with a pink face that seemed to be prematurely falling, like a wax figure in the midst of melting.

“We hooked up once,” she said to Josie, loud enough to be heard by Tom and anyone else. He smiled to himself while turning a glass upside down and setting it in a mound of salt.

“Cheers,” she said, and clinked Josie’s glass. As a teenager, Sam didn’t drink. Not through college, either — she was a puritanical young woman fueled by her sense of control, her ability to avoid all substances and temptations. Sunny couldn’t get her to take aspirin. Now Sam was this. She’d downed half her margarita and had hooked up with the bartender. When?

Above the bar, a football game was in the middle of some celebratory moment. “Look at that,” Tom said.

It wasn’t a touchdown, though. The players now rejoiced after every play. Whether they were winning or losing, every time they did anything, they found something to celebrate.

“I have to pull my girls from school,” Sam said, her eyes on the TV, where an adult male in silver spandex was doing some dance involving a football and a towel. “You ever hear of girls giving boys a rainbow blowjob?”

Josie had not. Tom had stopped moving, was visibly listening, thinking so hard his forehead had sprouted twin diagonals from his temples to the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t wait to hear about the rainbow blowjobs.

“Apparently this is done,” Sam explained. “A girl puts on red lipstick, and gives a guy a red ring on his dick. Then her friend puts on orange, another ring. Then another girl with yellow, another with green, blue. Would it be blue next?”

Tom was nodding vigorously. Yes, blue.

“Now I have this to think about,” Sam said, finishing her first drink and ordering another. “Will one of my girls be doing this? I mean, there’s no right way. Either I let them do whatever they want and they go and give rainbow blowjobs, or I try to control them, and to spite me, they go give rainbow blowjobs.”

None of this seemed possible in Alaska, not with these girls. All the girls she’d seen, especially Sam’s twins, seemed of an entirely other world, another time, apart from any contemporary teenage nonsense, more likely to harness and ride a whale than want to be indoors with tiny boy-penises.

“They’re how old?” Josie asked.

“Thirteen. I have a friend, an older woman, who offered to take them to live with her, in the woods. Like Sunny did with us, in a way.”

Sam spotted someone across the bar and waved. “Old friend,” she said by way of explanation. Soon he was walking over, and he was as advertised: old. Sixty. As he got closer, he seemed to be getting older. Sixty-five, seventy.

“Old friend,” Josie said, and Sam took a second, as if deciding whether to pretend the comment was funny or pretend it was offensive. She chose to blink a few times.

Then he was upon them, and looked seventy-five. He was a sort of Alaskan Leonard Cohen, tall and handsome but with no fedora.

“Robert,” he declared, and shook Josie’s hand. His touch was both wrinkled and oily, like some dying fish. He looked between Sam and Josie a few times, nodding. “This is my lucky night!” he said loudly, his voice high and limp. Tom heard but did not smile. Josie felt she was in the middle of a slanted love square — love parallelogram? — but Robert was either oblivious or didn’t consider Tom a worthy part of it.

Josie glanced back to the TV. Again the players seemed to be celebrating some minor achievement. It offended the eye at first, then Josie grew to understand it. That’s what’s missing in my life, she thought. The celebration of every single moment, like those fucking idiots on TV.

“Jager shots for the ladies,” Robert said to Tom. Tom’s wax face tightened, as if struggling with this, the fact that he had no choice but to serve. He had chosen a life where he had to serve any kind of human, had to hope for a good tip from a bad man.

Robert seemed surely a bad man. There was something about him, everything about him, that was disagreeable, untrustworthy, lecherous and leering. His shirt was open to the crease where his sunken chest met his sudden belly.

“To sisters,” he said, saying the word sisters in a strangely lewd way. Sam winked at Josie under his raised glass. She must have kept it plain with him, telling him they were simple sisters.

He ordered another round, but Josie hid her share of the second batch behind her elbow. He didn’t see or care.

“Josie’s up from Ohio,” Sam said.

“Oh yeah?” he said, now taking this geographic information as license to scan Josie, neck to knees. Arriving back at her eyes, he let loose what he would surely consider the night’s great bon mot. “I’d like to go down there sometime.”

Sam didn’t seem to catch his meaning.

“Okay,” Josie said, trying to yawn. “Think I’ll head home.”

“Don’t go,” Robert said, trying to touch Josie’s hand. Josie pulled it away so quickly she hit the man behind her.

“Sorry,” she said to him.

“Don’t be sorry,” Robert said. “Just stay.”

Sam wasn’t following any of this. She was two margaritas and two shots in, was now holding Robert’s hand, and seemed intent on making a night of this, of Alaskan Leonard Cohen. Tom was on the other side of the bar, looking up at the TV at what seemed an uncomfortable angle.

“C’mon,” Sam said, “there’s so many people here you could meet.” Robert wanted a threesome, and Sam wanted to be alone with him. She scanned the bar for people she could pass Josie on to, and came up empty.

“I’ll see you back at the house,” Josie said.

Josie turned, not expecting Sam to allow her to leave. When she made it to the door, she turned to catch Robert plunging his seventy-year-old tongue down Sam’s young throat.

—

In the sky there were low white clouds, and clouds of steamship grey, but there were visible stars, too, and a crisp white moon. Josie walked back up the hill, thinking of Sam’s face, Leonard Cohen’s face. She was sober, and she was furious, and she was thrilled to have escaped that bar, and so thankful to have been spared the sight of the inevitable dancing that Robert would want to do with Sam, the delicate swaying drunk old leches want to do in public, their gyrations, their gropings — they no longer cared about hiding any of it. Josie was intermittently confident she could get home without getting lost, and soon was reasonably sure she saw the church at the end of Sam’s street, but then looked at her watch and saw it was only ten thirty. The kids would still be awake, and would think their mother was unwilling to give them any space, time alone with the twins.

Josie stood on the side of the road and thought some thoughts, including the certainty that despite her tidiness and Popeye boat and beautiful children Sam was a monster, an immoral animal, and that she was finished with her. And she also thought: This is me living my life. And she thought: Was Sam a Leonard Cohen fan? Was that the attraction? Josie decided they shouldn’t have come to Homer.

Consistency. I need to be consistent, she thought. The sun was consistent, the moon. Life on Earth thrives because it can depend on the sun rising and setting, the tides coming in and out. Her kids needed only predictability. But so why had she brought them to Alaska, a new place every night? She must be consistent. Bedtimes must be the same. Her tone must be the same. Atticus! Atticus! She must be Atticus. It was simple to be the same. How simple! But what about not being simple? What about being interesting? Parents could not be interesting, could they? The best parents rise and fall like suns and moons. They circle with the predictability of planets. With great clarity Josie realized the undeniable truth: interesting people cannot bear children. The propagation of the species is up to the drones. Once you find you are different, that you have moods, that you have whims, that you get bored, that you want to see Antarctica, you should not have children. What happens to the children of interesting people? They are invariably bent. They are crushed. They have not had the predictable suns and so they are deprived, desperate and unsure — where will the sun be tomorrow? Fuck, she thought. Should I give these children away, to some dependable sun? They don’t need me. They need good meals, and someone to bathe them dutifully, and to clean the house not because they should but because they want to. Not someone to keep them in this particle-board RV, carrying their dishes in the shower, their feces in a tank.

But wait, Josie thought. Maybe they could could live here. Maybe there was destiny and symmetry in her coming here to live near Sam, her fellow feral. But who could live here? It’s beautiful now, yes, but the winters were surely a holy fucking horror. The clouds continued to move above her like troops in formation.

She would leave Homer tomorrow, she decided, but she didn’t know where to go. This town, because it had people like Robert in it, was an unlivable place, no better than the town she’d left, and that town had been overtaken. What had happened in her little town? “I really have to get out,” Deena said one day. “I can’t hack this place anymore.” She’d grown up there. Once it had been an actual place, a smallish town with an actual cobblestone square where children rode their scooters and were chased by tiny lamentable dogs, perversions of selective breeding, off leash and barking. Now the place was crowded, there was no parking, women in ponytails drove at dangerous speeds on their way to yoga and pilates, tailgating other drivers, honking, cheating at four-way stop signs. It had become an unhappy place.

The crime of the ponytail ladies was that they were always in a hurry, in a hurry to exercise, in a hurry to pick up their children from capoeira, in a hurry to examine the scores from the school’s Mandarin-immersion program, in a hurry to buy micro-greens at the new ivy-covered organic grocery, one of a newly dominant national chain begun by a libertarian megalomaniac, a store where the food had been curated, in which the women in their ponytails rushed quickly through, smiling viciously when their carts’ paths were momentarily waylaid. In its radical evolution toward better food and health and education, the town had become a miserable place, and the organic grocery was the unhappiest place in that miserable town. The checkout people were not happy being there, and the people bagging groceries were apoplectic. The butchers seemed content, the cheese people seemed content, but everyone else was murderous. The same terrible women (and men) who drove aggressively to yoga now drove aggressively to the organic grocery store and parked angrily — they stole the last parking spot from some elderly citizens hoping to use the nearby pharmacy, got out and rushed from their cars, half-livid, to buy havarti and prosecco and veggie burgers. These people were now all over Josie’s small town, endangering her children with their predatory driving and barely contained fury.

The town, green and hilly and with streams running through it, though not far from an abandoned steelmill, had been discovered by these hordes and their anger, and all their new money and new anger had culminated in the incident, the Bike Pump Maiming — only Josie called it this, but still — in the middle of town. The incident involved a man in a pickup truck and a man on a bicycle, and the result had been a fight that left one man half-dead. But it had not been the pickup man who had beaten the bicycle man, not at this moment, in this town — no, this was the contemporary inversion, the version where the bike-riding man, wearing spandex and riding a five-thousand-dollar machine, triumphs over the kindly lawn-cutter in his rusted truck. The bicycle man had apparently taken umbrage at the pickup driver, who scraped out a living trimming grass and doing one-man landscaping gigs, who apparently had not given the bicyclist wide enough berth while passing. They were both on the road, traveling along the tiny pond that an environmental group had preserved for migrating ducks and stationary herons. So at the stop sign, the bicyclist pulled up, yelled his choice words, at which point the pickup driver stepped out and was promptly struck in the head with a bicycle pump. The driver went down and was struck again and again until the bicyclist, in his spandex and tiny special shoes, had fractured the lawn-cutter’s skull and blood covered his face and spattered on the rhododendron that had recently been planted on the median by the Retired Gardeners’ Club (RGC), which had supplanted the Association of Green Retirees. It was inside out, utterly backwards but perfectly emblematic of these new angry people rushing to and fro, always rushing to angrily go jogging, to angrily explain, to angrily expound, to explode when interrupted or slowed down, ready to be disappointed. These were the people! Josie made a mental note. The bicycle man, the maimer, would be in her Disappointed musical. Could there be some nod to Mame? Would that be too much?

Josie had known the man, the bicycle man. He’d been a patient. When he’d first come in, a few years earlier, he’d had an agenda, saying, Can we skip the cleaning? I know what I want. He wanted to replace his six silver fillings with ceramics. The silver was near-black now and he’d married a young woman who found his mouth in need of improvement, so he scheduled two appointments on successive Friday afternoons, biked to the office in full florid regalia, clicking his way across the stone floor in his special orange shoes and spandex leggings, his racing shirt sweet with sweat. He was a diminutive and tightly wound man who checked his phone as his new ceramic fillings dried, who asked that the music in the office — it was Oklahoma! that day — be turned down a notch, thanks. He was an abomination and did no time in jail after the maiming. He was facing some civil charges but no one expected him to suffer much.

Josie had biked to work for a while, hoping her commute would be transformed in some way. For a week or so it was. But then it wasn’t. She tried taking a bus, which left her half a mile away, and she had to walk along the highway like some quixotic hitchhiker. But no matter how she traveled she was still passing the same buildings, the same parking lots. How does anyone stand it? After her parents and their atomization, she had always identified with the stayers, the homesteaders. But she knew no one who stayed anywhere. Even in Panama, most of the locals she met would just as soon live somewhere else, and most of them asked her casually or directly about getting visas to come to the U.S. So who stayed? Were you crazy to stay anywhere? The stayers were either of the salt of the earth, the reason there are families and communities and continuity of culture and country, or they were plain idiots. We change! We change! And virtue is not only for the changeless. You can change your mind, or your setting, and still possess integrity. You can move away without becoming a quitter, a ghost.

That Ohio town, then, was in Josie’s past. The past could be a delicious thing, to be done with something, with some place. To be finished and able to package it, beginning, middle, end, box it and shelve it. The town had once held hippies, Ohio hippies, all of whom seemed to Josie preternaturally grateful people, who were happy for the trees, happy for the rivers and the streams and birds, and the fact of their lives, and the existence of their weed and ready sex. They built their homes from mud and twigs, here and there a dome, here and there a hot tub. But now they were older, and were moving or dying, being replaced by these bicyclists, these fast-driving women in ponytails who desired everything, who so wanted the world that they would not accept limitations, interruptions, babies at restaurants or scooters on the sidewalks. Ohio, birthplace of most of the country’s presidents, was now home to most of its assholes.

IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? Another one of those signs. This one was hand-painted, stuck on the embankment. Was there danger of forest fires here, too? Josie could see Sam’s house up ahead. It looked like a happy home, and her heart expanded as it grew closer. IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? Josie smiled at the beautiful stupidity of the question. How about you and me? Me and you? Why the negativity? Why divide us? She was suddenly overcome by the cool wind, the granite sky, the fast-moving clouds, and she felt firmly placed in the world. Sam’s world was solid, was new to her but was solid, deeply rooted, logical. Josie’s children were inside that solid house, ecstatic with their cousins. They would stay a few days. She could park the Chateau on Sam’s block. Her kids and Sam’s would eat breakfast together. They could have many contented weeks, months. It was too soon to think of school here, but still. Sam could be her anchor. Tonight was a fluke, was just some thing. More important to remember was their long history together, their common narrative. How many young women are emancipated as they were? She was petty and crazed to give up so easily on Sam, wasn’t she? She needed to attach herself to this world, this hardy and rational world Sam had created. She could and would. But what was that rushing sound, that unholy white light?