Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“Why can’t we go like that?” Ana asked from the back. Josie turned to find Ana’s face was pressed against the glass.

They watched mothers with small children sitting in front of their ATVs, helping steer, as they went up and down the gentle hills of their dirt roads, and Josie, too, thought it seemed a logical way to travel. Finally they caught an eight-year-old piloting his own vehicle, a scale-model ATV, and Josie knew Ana’s imagination would ignite. She mouthed the words just before Ana said them: “I want one.”

“You can’t have one,” Paul said. “You’re five.” Now he turned to Josie. “Okay, you want me to go through my school day?” He said this as if she’d been bothering him about this for weeks and he’d finally relented in telling her. This was a new Paul: able to dismiss Ana quickly, feeling worthy of dominating the conversation. Had sitting in the front seat emboldened him that much? Josie told him she’d be delighted to hear about his school day.

Recounting it all took him fully thirty-five minutes. There was a good deal of explanation of the rows. There were four rows in his classroom, he explained, and one of them, the blues, was stacked with the rambunctious kids, and Paul.

“Were you put in the blue row as a balance against the bad kids?” she asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

He told her about the time when a police officer came to class to talk to the kids about crosswalk safety and stranger danger, and almost immediately four different kids volunteered the information that their fathers were in jail. The officer didn’t know how to handle this, and had to tell the kids to stop raising their hands.

The Ohio town where they’d lived — it was exhilarating to think of it in the past tense — had a private school, too, where the other half of the children went, and hearing Paul tell this story, thinking it interesting, Josie had the thought that for the parents in her town, a paramount purpose of private school, and its ludicrous cost, was that these private-school children would not be sharing their scissors and glue with children whose fathers were in prison. This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pull these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools— we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether, to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle.

“Archery,” Paul said. There was a sign up ahead. ARCHERY. LESSONS. TARGETS.

They had nowhere in particular to be, though Josie hoped to get to Denali the next day.

“Can we?” Paul asked, and because he so seldom asked for anything, Josie pulled over, descending the highway and onto the long gravel driveway, the Chateau like a tired mule groaning in protest to be led this way.

They followed the signs half a mile and then saw it, the wide green field, the red and white targets. But they saw no people. Still they got out, and without waking Ana, who was sleeping, soaking in her sweat, they looked around. There was a wooden booth of some kind, painted pine green, where one would usually pay and be given a bow and told where to go. The door to the booth was closed, but a window was open. Josie peered in but saw no one. There were no other cars, so they should have presumed it closed. And it probably was closed.

“Look,” Paul said, pointing to a tree near the rightmost target. There was a bow leaning against it, an old thing, some ancient model. Josie saw no harm in Paul looking at it, so he ran off across the field, and returned with both the bow and three arrows he’d found in the thicket nearby. One arrow was bent into a parenthesis.

“Can I try?” he asked.

Paul never hurt himself, had never risked any injury to himself or anyone around him, so Josie told him he could. He took the bow in one hand and the arrow in another, and it took him some time to figure out how to do it well, but soon Paul was at least sending the arrows forward, though the bent one squirmed like some airborne snake.

Josie’s eyes wandered, and soon found their way back to the archery booth, and its open window. She leaned in and saw the booth was mostly bare but for a sleeve of styrofoam cups, a bin of broken bows and, hanging from a nail, a green visor with the words STRAIGHT ARROW printed across its horizontal swath. Josie immediately knew she would take the visor, but knew, too, that she would debate taking it for a few minutes as she watched Paul shoot. Finally she reached in, grabbed the visor, tried it on, found it fit, and then arrived at an excuse — it was in the garbage — to use when Paul would see it on her and ask about its provenance.

“Where’d you get that?” he asked, returning from the target with his bow and arrows, looking strangely adept and professional.

“I saw it on the ground next to the booth,” Josie said, adapting her story slightly, on the fly, feeling this lie becoming whiter and more inconsequential. “It hides the bald spot.”

Paul peered around the side of her head, and then pulled the visor gently upward, better covering the gap, and then returned to his archery. Eventually, by practicing and by getting ever closer to the target, Paul struck near the middle a few times and then did not want to leave. So they stayed. They had food in the Chateau, and they had nowhere to be, so Josie brought out the lawn chair, sat and watched Paul shoot until Ana woke up. The sun was dropping behind the tree line on the high ridge behind them when Ana came down from the Chateau, briefly stuporous, until she saw the visor on her mother’s head.

“Like Dad,” she said.

Josie told her the story about finding it next to the booth, Ana finding it believable and very much what she would do in the same position — Paul, if he could, would have brought it to the police station to be claimed — but having Ana remind her of Carl, and Carl’s tendency toward visors, sapped Josie’s STRAIGHT ARROW headwear of much of its appeal. She thought about tossing it, and decided she would, as soon as an alternative arrived.

Josie watched her children shoot their arrows, running and giggling, and realized that a child’s forgetting of joy is the principal crime committed upon a parent. Raj, in one of his rants, had said as much. His daughter was seventeen. Oh god, he said. The seventeen-year-olds, they will rip your heart out. A whole joyous childhood, and they will tell you it was all shit. Every year was a fraud. They will throw it all away. Josie had felt for Raj, and had feared the wrath from her own children, but then remembered: Hadn’t she emancipated herself from her own mother and father?

But for her own children, Josie was determined to thwart this crime of forgetting. She would remind them of joy. Document joy, tell tales of joy at bedtime, take photos and write diaries. Journals of joy that could never be denied or conveniently forgotten. She began to conceive a new theory of parenting, where the goal was not the achieving of a desired result. The object is not to raise a child for some future outcome, no! Times like these, together in the pines amid the fading light, as the kids run through long grass, her son gravely teaching himself archery while her daughter tries to induce some self-injury, these moments alone were the object. Josie felt, fleetingly, that she could die having achieved such a day. Get to a place like this, get to a moment like this, and that alone is the object. Or it could be the object. A new way of thinking. Stretch some of these days together and that’s all one could want or expect. Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggle for what — your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins. This was the common criminal pursuit of all contemporary humankind. Give my child an Ikea desk and twelve hours a day of sedentary typing. This will mean success for me, them, our family, our lineage. She would not pursue this. She would not subject her children to this. They would not seek these specious things, no. It was only about making them loved in a moment in the sun.