Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“We should move to Alaska,” Deena said one night. They were at Chuy’s, a burrito place where the kids could run around and scavenge and Josie and Deena were free to have their mojitos and take off their shoes. Deena was watching her daughter spill a basket of chips on the floor, pick them up and eat them. She didn’t move a muscle to help, she didn’t utter a word in admonition.

“Why would Alaska be any better?” Josie asked, but the idea stuck in her mind, in part because Sam lived there.

—

On the beach, the family in colorful new windbreakers disappeared behind a boulder down the shore, and Josie’s relief was great.

Ana approached carrying something carefully with two hands. Paul was right behind her, then by her side, his hands hovering around hers, ensuring that whatever it was they’d found would not fall. Josie stood, hoping to discourage them from dropping it in her lap. “Look,” Ana said with the utmost solemnity.

“It’s a head,” Paul said.

And now the stray dogs were among them, sniffing the head. Josie’s kids barely took notice of the dogs, and the dogs seemed to have no interest in eating or harming the skull.

“One of dem otters,” Ana said, and waved toward the bay. She had a skull in her little pink hands, and Josie noticed with horror that it had not been picked clean. There was still cartilage on it, and whiskers, and fur, something viscous, too. Josie conjured Socrates and thought of a question. “Why in hell did you pick this up?” In solidarity, the dogs lifted their heads to Ana and Paul, then ran off.

—

At night they went to a real restaurant in town. Josie retrieved the velvet bag from under the sink, retrieved six twenties, feeling it illogical but inevitable that she would spend most of them that night.

When they hit the main strip, they saw that a cruise ship had docked and Seward was full of identical couples in their seventies, all wearing slight variations on the same windbreaker and white sneakers. The town had been breached, the restaurants had surrendered, and Ana was running through the streets again. Josie and Paul caught her and Josie tried to appease her with a piggyback. No. Her little body, all muscle, moved like a barracuda: bending, twisting, anything to be free, so she let Ana run on the sidewalk. No negatives motivated her. Josie threatened to take away her Batman sticker book. No effect at all; she knew there were others. Josie told her she’d never watch another DVD; she had no sense of the future so she didn’t care. But if Josie said she’d get something, some dessert, some object, she would toe the line. She was the purest sort of materialist: she wanted things, but didn’t care about things.

The restaurant they went to was the cheapest one they could find, but the prices in Alaska were science-fictional. Josie looked at the menu as they were waiting to be seated. Every pickle was twenty dollars. This was what she had tried to avoid. Back home Josie was so tired, so bone-weary of spending money. It crushed the spirit. Every day she found herself at the drugstore or grocery store and always the bill was sixty-three dollars. She would go into Walgreen’s for milk and Ana’s nighttime diapers and somehow would end up spending sixty-three dollars. Always sixty-three dollars. Sixty-three dollars, three or four times a day. How could that be sustained?

But this menu, in the brightly lit hellhole they found themselves in, wanted more than that for dinner. Josie did a rough calculation and knew she would spend eighty dollars for dinner with her two children, neither of whom would care one way or another if they ate here, or ate mud and grubs dug from shallow holes. Ana, always happy to puncture the pretense of any situation, found her opportunity. After the busboy wiped down the table, Ana wiped it again, with her own napkin, saying, “Oooh yeah! Ooooh yeah!” She made it uncomfortably lewd. Josie laughed, so Ana did it three more times.

Paul, though, was in a contemplative mood. He looked at Josie with his ice-priest eyes.

“What?” she said.

He said he didn’t want to talk about it.

“What?” Josie asked again.

Finally he beckoned her closer, promising a secret. Josie leaned over the table and a plate tilted, knocking against the wood.

“Where do the stray dogs go at night?” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. Josie didn’t know where Paul was going with this so said, “I don’t know.” Immediately she knew this was the wrong answer. His face crumbled and his eyes, so pale and cold, told her he wouldn’t sleep for weeks.

She’d forgotten Paul’s thing with strays. Back at home, he’d heard about stray cats — there was some demented socialite in their town who had made the homeless cats’ plight her calling, and the ads were all over the buses and in the local newspaper, offering shelter and the HIGHEST QUALITY MEDICAL CARE! for these strays — and Paul made Josie put milk out every night for any wandering felines who happened to be passing by their home. Josie had also made up a story about how they often dropped by their house on their way home — there was an Underground Railroad for the strays, she’d explained, and they were one of the participating homes. The fiction lasted weeks, and it was Josie’s fault. She’d made up the Railroad, so had to make up the milk-being-available, and had to empty the milk at night, watch Paul check it in the morning, discuss it with him over breakfast, and so how had she forgotten his concern for these wayward animals?

Later, after she’d paid for dinner — eighty-four dollars, everyone involved going to hell — and while Ana ate an ice-cream sandwich on a bench on the boardwalk, Josie clarified some things for Paul while entertaining herself a bit, too. The stray dogs, she said, all live together in a clubhouse. And this clubhouse was built by Alaskan park rangers because the stray dogs, being pack animals, prefer to live together. They’re fed there, she said, three meals a day, by the rangers — omelets for breakfast, sausage for lunch, steak for dinner.

Paul smiled shyly. Someone who did not know Paul would assume he knew this was all made up, that his smile acknowledged the absurdity in all this — the silliness of his concern for the strays and the madness of his mother’s explanation — but this was not the meaning of Paul’s smile. No. Paul smiled because something that was wrong in the world had been righted. Paul’s smile confirmed the true north of the moral world: How could he doubt the preeminence of order and justice? His smile confirmed rightness. His smile laughed at his temporary doubt in this rightness.

Ana was finished with her ice-cream sandwich, and handed the wrapper to Josie on her way to inspect, a few feet down the pier, what seemed to be a bloody fish head. They were near the cleaning station, where the fishermen weighed and gutted their day’s catch. The boardwalk was pink with watery blood and a last fisherman was finishing his day. Ana stood below him and looked up, then down at the head of the fish, its silver skin stained with bright plasma. She picked it up. She picked the head up.

“This yours?” she asked him.

Before he could answer, she’d dropped the head, and, in an incredible feat of dexterity and fine-motor skills, kicked the head, on the fly, into the dark water below. She laughed, and the fisherman laughed, and Josie wondered just how this child was hers. “What’s my name?” Ana asked the frothing water where the head had disappeared. Josie had not taught her this expression, and Paul certainly didn’t know it. But Ana had said this before, and had also said “You want this? You want this?” And “What’d you expect?” These confrontational phrases she insisted on yelling to rocks, trees, birds. She often spoke disrespectfully to inanimate objects, and often walked around practicing gestures, facial expressions, like a clown preparing backstage.