Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“I’m Carl,” he said, removing his hand from the shoe and offering it to her. “From the dentist’s office.”

He laughed a long while, as if the idea of a job at Foot Locker, for anyone, was the greatest joke. “No. No, I don’t work here,” he said.

He was four years younger than Josie and had the energy of a housebound puppy. For a year it was fun. She was a year into her own practice, and he helped out, ran errands, hung pictures in the waiting room, kept everything manic and light. He liked to ride bikes. To get ice cream. To play kickball. He ate chocolate power bars from crinkly gold wrappers. His libido was unstoppable, his control nonexistent. She was dating a twelve-year-old.

But he was twenty-seven. He was not gainfully employed then, and had never had a steady job before or since. His father owned some immeasurable stretch of Costa Rica, which he’d clear-cut to make room for cows destined to be eaten by American and Japanese carnivores, and so any occupation involving a scale less grand somehow did not quite suit Carl.

“We’ve raised a dilettante,” Luisa, his mother, said. She was Chilean by birth, raised in Santiago, her mother a doctor, her father a diplomat, also a depressive. She’d met Carl’s red-haired American father, Lou, in Mexico City, when she was a graduate student. She’d had Carl and his two brothers while Lou, raised in an oil family, bought land in Costa Rica, razed forests, raised cows, built an empire. He’d asked for a divorce ten years before to marry the ex-wife of a well-known and dead Chiapan narco. Luisa and Lou had an improbably good relationship. “He’s so much better from a distance,” Luisa said.

Now she was a wizened, beautiful woman of sixty, living on her own terms in Key West, with a group of sunburned, day-drinking friends. When they met, Josie loved everything about her — her candor, her grim wit, her insights into Carl. “He inherited his father’s short attention span, but not his father’s vision.”

Carl had collected a dozen or so licenses and skills. He was a realtor for a few years, though he sold nothing. He’d dabbled in furniture design, fashion, sport fishing. He had a closet full of photography equipment. Though Josie and Luisa were both obliged to love Carl, the tragedy was that they liked each other far more than either liked him.

“Last year he had me videotape him,” Luisa said in her raspy voice. “He’s still discovering his relationship to the world,” she said, “discovering his own body, you know. One day he asked me to film him walking — from the front, the back and the side. He said he wanted to be sure he walked the way he thought he walked. So I filmed my son, this grown man, walking up and down the street. He seemed satisfied with the results.”

“He’s prettier than you.” That’s what Sam said when she met Carl. “That can’t be good.” He could be fun. Cowards are often fantastically charming. But could anything begun at a Foot Locker become grand? Josie had never married Carl, and that was a story, a series of interconnected stories, episodes, decisions and reversals, both she and Carl culpable. Finally, with her strong endorsement, he’d left. At the time she was happy for it. Coward. Coward coward, she thought — it was the basic building block of his DNA, cowardice and whatever mutation had produced his gripless bowels. On so many levels he was a coward, but she had not anticipated the way he would disappear after he moved out. What had she wanted? She’d wanted general involvement, a monthly visit maybe, a father who would take the kids for a weekend. He was good enough with children — harmless around Ana, benign with Paul. He seemed to like children, really, thought he could make them laugh, and his juvenile outlook on life seemed to sync perfectly with theirs.

He was, years after they met, still a child, still discovering his relationship to the world, discovering his own body. One day he asked Josie to film him walking, too. Josie was shocked, but didn’t let on she knew Luisa had done the same thing. “I think I know how I walk, but I’ve never seen it objectively,” he said. “I want to make sure I walk the way I think I walk.” So Josie filmed this grown man walking up and down the street. But then, six months later, he was gone. He saw the kids twice the year he left, once the year after.

—

Josie turned on the radio, heard Sam Cooke singing some simple song, and thought that only writers of pop songs and singers of pop music really knew how to live. Write a song — how long could it take? Minutes? Maybe an hour, maybe a day. Then sing the song to people who will love you for it. Who will love the music. Bring renewable joy to millions. Or just thousands. Or just hundreds. Does it matter? The music does not die. Sam Cooke, long gone, only dust now, was still with us, was now vibrating through Josie and was carving new neural pathways in her children’s minds, his voice so clear, a magnificent songbird coming through the radio and alighting on her shoulder, even here, even now, at nine o’clock, in this broken RV, somewhere between Anchorage and Homer. Though dead too soon, Sam Cooke knew how to live. Did he know he knew how to live?

Josie, rearranging herself in the Chateau, poured herself another cup. Three would be it. She rolled down the window and took in the acrid air. The fires were a hundred miles away, she’d been told, but the air everywhere was burned and predatory. Her throat fought her, her lungs petitioned for relief. She rolled the window up and through the glass she thought she saw a deer but realized it was an old sawhorse. She swished the wine in her mouth, gargled briefly, swallowed. Occasionally a gust would push the Chateau to a tilt and the dishes in the cupboards would rattle gently.

She flipped through her Old West, then threw it onto the dashboard. Even the plaintive searches of “Trails Grown Dim” made her sad, jealous. She had been born a blank. Her parents were blanks. All her relatives were blanks, though many were addicts, and she had a cousin who identified as an anarchist, but otherwise Josie’s people were blanks. They were from nowhere. To be American is to be blank, and a true American is truly blank. Thus, all in all, Josie was a truly great American.

Still, she heard occasional and vague references to Denmark. Once or twice she heard her parents mention some connection to Finland. Her parents knew nothing about these cultures, these nationalities. They cooked no national dishes, they taught Josie no customs, and they had no relatives who cooked national dishes or had customs. They had no clothes, no flags, no banners, no sayings, no ancestral lands or villages or folktales. When she was thirty-two, and wanted to visit some village, somewhere, where her people had come from, none of her relatives had any idea at all where to go. One uncle thought he could be helpful: Everyone in our family speaks English, he said. Maybe you go to England?

The Sam Cooke song ended, the radio news began, the word “lawsuit” was uttered, and Josie felt a white flash of pain, saw the face of Evelyn Sandalwood, the stabbing eyes of the old woman’s litigious son-in-law, and felt sure no one cared one way or another that her business was taken from her, was certain the world held only cowards, that work meant nothing to anyone, service meant nothing, that pettiness and guile and treachery and greed won always — nothing could defeat the thieving weasels of the world. Eventually they would wear down the brave, the true, anyone who wanted to go about their lives with integrity. The weasels always won because love and goodness was an ice-cream cone and treachery was a tank.

When, eighteen months ago, she’d told Carl they should end their pretend romance and just move on as parents of Paul and Ana, he walked out of the house — the house he’d wanted and then, once bought and renovated, loathed; the Occupy movement had instilled in him the idea that home ownership was not just bourgeois but a tangible crime against the 99 %—then took a walk around the neighborhood. Twenty minutes later he’d come to terms with it, and had a plan for visitations and everything else. She’d entered the discussion terrified and inspired, but afterward she was depleted. In his ready acquiescence he managed to take from her whatever triumph she hoped to feel, and he’d gone straight into logistics.