Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“Do you still have kids?” Josie asked. “Or do they already have jobs at a cannery or something?”

Sam raised her chin toward the shore. A few hundred yards toward the water two silhouettes were standing before a large boulder. On the boulder was a giant bird, and Josie laughed to herself, figuring that any second she would be told that it was a bald eagle.

“Bald eagle,” said a man’s voice, and she turned to find Doug, holding a brown bottle of local beer out to her.

“You guys want to go see Zoe and Becca?” Josie said, and gave Paul an imploring look. “Go say hi and come back to eat.” Paul took Ana by the hand and walked toward the water.

Josie had a surging feeling that Sam had made a good life for herself here — she had many friends, friends willing to come out to the beach on a weeknight to greet Josie and her children.

“You get lost?” Sam asked. “We got here at four, set everything up and everyone showed up at five. We said five, right?”

Josie tried to flare her nostrils.

“We knocked on the doors of a bunch of the RVs up there,” Sam continued, “but no one had seen you guys.”

It was fascinating, Josie thought, how little she knew what to expect from Sam. Five years was a long time, and Sam, a shape-shifter to begin with, might have changed into some entirely new entity by now. But she was still a keeper of grudges.

Josie explained that they had been driving all day, and that they were off schedule, napping at odd times, that she didn’t have a phone, and thus didn’t have an alarm clock, and anyway so what, it’s summer and Sam was among friends anyway, so who cares if she was late, does anyone really care anyway, ha ha.

At the end of her soliloquy, Josie saw that Sam was looking at her in a certain way, her eyes searching and her mouth amused, and she remembered that Sam had often done this, had presumed she had a direct line into Josie’s elemental soul, could get messages no one else could receive or decipher.

“Don’t do that,” Josie said. “Don’t act like you know me so well. I haven’t seen you in five years.”

This delighted Sam even more. Her eyes opened like cartoon headlights. “You left your practice and fled Carl. Or fled your practice and left Carl. That’s what I heard.”

The only person she could have heard any of this from would have been Sunny, who was anguished over the loss of Josie’s practice and who would never have put it in such terms. But Sam had always been flippant about any loss, any tragedy. She felt it her right, as a survivor of a broken personal world.

“Well,” Josie said, and couldn’t conjure a way to finish the thought. She hoped the one word would suffice.

In the stretch of Josie’s silence, Sam only grew more delighted. “Well indeed!” she said, as if they were engaged in some cute verbal dance they both knew and loved.

“My kids should eat,” Josie said, hoping to focus herself and Sam on practical matters.

“Doug’s on it,” Sam said, nodding toward a bonfire, which Josie realized was also the barbecue. This was a barbarian arrangement — a vast open fire being fed with giant logs, and over it a grill held high by a complicated latticework of sticks.

“They like bratwurst?” Doug asked.

Josie said they did, knowing she would have to cut them into tiny pieces and tell her children they were hot dogs.

Paul and Ana returned with the twins, thirteen years old, identical, willowy and athletic, taller than their mother or Josie. Their hair was strawberry blond and thick, and with their light freckles and their eyes dark and bright and intense and laughing, they had the look of medieval warrior-women just back from joyous plundering and man-beating and whale-riding. They strode to Josie and hugged her as if they really knew and loved her. Josie, overcome, told them they were beautiful, that she couldn’t believe it, and they each looked directly at her, actually listening. They were not quite of this world.

They took their leave, throwing sticks that the many large dogs could chase, and Josie gave her children plates piled with fragments of bratwurst and corn grilled in foil. Her kids sat on an enormous log, next to a line of boys, all of whom were nine or ten years old, and each of whom was holding his own carving knife. As Paul and Ana ate, the boys whittled, their fists white, their long hair covering their eyes. Paul was watching passively, but Ana was enthralled. Josie knew she would want a knife and would talk about nothing but knives for days.

“You look tired,” Sam said.

“You’re sunburned,” Josie said. “That your boyfriend?” She indicated Doug, who was dodging the changing direction of the bonfire’s smoke. Sam shrugged and went to Doug, rubbing his back and then ducking from the smoke as it enveloped her.

Josie glanced over to see that Ana had repositioned herself. She was now sitting on the sand in front of the child-carvers, her eyes at blade level. The boys were laughing, thinking Ana was a trip, that this girl was the craziest thing they’d ever seen. Then Ana’s eyes lit on an idea, and she lifted her sweater, the Bolivian one, all that heavy wool woven loosely, pulled it over her head with great effort to reveal a Green Lantern shirt underneath. She was showing the boys that she was no girl, no simple girl — that she was like them, that she liked Green Lantern, that she appreciated fighting evil with great supernatural force, appreciated the cutting of wood with big knives. The boys didn’t care enough, though: they glanced, chuckled, but said nothing. Ana was not dissuaded. Shivering in her Green Lantern shirt — the temperature was dropping into the fifties — she squeezed in next to them on the log, every so often putting her hand on one boy’s forearm, as if to participate somehow in the carving. As if, through this human transference, she could be carving, too. Josie served her a second brat on a paper plate and Ana devoured it, never taking her eyes off the boys and their knives.

Paul, meanwhile, took his plate and walked to the twins near the eagle and the boulder on the beach. Josie watched as he made his way directly to them, and then stopped short. The girls turned toward him and seemed to acknowledge his presence in some satisfactory way. He squatted on the beach and ate his food and the three of them looked at the eagle, and a pair of horseback riders trotted slowly across the horizon in the shallow water, until one of the girls threw a rock close to the bird, and it lifted off, its shoulders seeming tired, the movement of its wings far too slow and labored to create flight, but then it was up, rising like it was nothing, flight was nothing, the planet was nothing, nothing at all, just another place to leave.

AFTER THE BARBECUE THE KIDS CLIMBED into the back of Sam’s pickup, with Sam and Josie in front, and they drove back to Sam’s house, passing young pines all the way, about a mile up a hill of tidy homes. The house, with a rolling lawn and orderly rows of shrubs surrounding it, had a clear view of the rest of Homer below. This was not some deep-country log cabin. This was a respectable and modern house, newly painted and sturdy and clean.

To be a bird-watching guide in Homer, wow. Sam had it right. She had gone up to Alaska and opened her bird-watching operation, no fuss, didn’t ask anyone’s permission. She had the run of the forest, some island off of Homer, and she had it figured out. Had she left society, as Josie wanted to? Yes and no. She ran a business, she had kids, the kids went to school, she paid taxes, she sent emails. She was as trapped as Josie was, but she had a boat, and wore boots, and her daughters were these holy outdoor creatures with long-flowing sweet-corn hair. She’d figured out a few things. She’d simplified.