Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie stopped the Chateau as close to the door to the station as she could and waited. He might choose this moment to attack, to avenge his harrowing ride. But again there was no movement. An idea occurred to her. She honked the horn. The volume was tripled under the canopy and echoed against the glass of the food mart. The woman at the counter startled and looked to Josie, eyes wild.

Josie waved, said she was sorry through three layers of glass, and frantically beckoned the woman out. The woman shook her head, no. She couldn’t leave her post. What reason could anyone want her to leave? The only possibilities were all dangerous.

But eventually Josie cajoled her into leaving the counter. The woman opened the front door of the food mart and poked her head through. “I can’t come outside,” she said.

Josie rolled down the passenger-side window.

“You see anything on the outside of this RV?” she asked.

“What’s that again?”

“Is there anyone on the RV? A man hanging there?”

“A man on your RV?” The woman had been scanning the Chateau all along, but her eyes had not alighted on anything. “No.”

“So there’s no one up there? On the back either?”

Now the woman’s eyes looked scared, confused about Josie and the task she had been assigned. Still, she craned her neck around to look over the back of the vehicle, and shook her head.

“No.”

Only then did Josie feel comfortable opening the door. In another ludicrous calculation, she tried to think of the man’s possible point of attack, just outside the door, so she decided to leap from the doorframe, into the open blue-light area of the gas station, creating as much distance as possible between herself and the Chateau. Maybe he would jump, miss, and land on the pavement?

She opened the door, leaped, and nothing happened. She lunged back to the door to close it — for hadn’t she just left her cowering children in danger? — and then quickly paced around the station, looking from every vantage point for a man in camouflage pants who might have been clinging for the last hour. She saw no one.

The woman inside, though, was on the phone. Most likely reporting Josie to the authorities. Josie thought briefly about staying, because she hadn’t done anything that the food-mart woman could claim or any police officer could prove.

She got back into the Chateau and drove off, picturing a bottle breaking against her face. This hadn’t happened recently, but this vision, a bottle breaking against her face, had been an intermittent part of her life since she was twelve. She could not explain this phenomenon to anyone without provoking grave concern, so she never mentioned it, because it was not problematic or a symptom of some flowering psychosis. It was not related to the numb face. It had predated the numb face by twenty years. She had been in sixth grade, just after Candyland, when it started and it occurred regularly since then, and it was not a big deal. It was just a recurring vision of a bottle breaking against her face. Of the tens of thousands of thoughts she, like anyone else, had in a given day, a couple times a day there was the vivid picture of a bottle, a seventies-era soda bottle with its curves and striations, breaking against her face, and it was not a big deal. Exactly who was holding the bottle was never clear, and their motives were not known, but in any case the bottle would swing into her vision and shatter against her nose and cheek, the shards spreading like rain. It was never painful. It was not troubling. It was just a bottle breaking against her face. It had something to do with punishment, but it was also a little slapstick, too. It was a bit of pie-in-the-face, a bit of corporal punishment at the hands of an angry clown-god.

It was nothing, really.

Her children were still hiding on the floor.

“You can get up now,” she said.

“She’s asleep,” Paul said. They were so entangled that Paul couldn’t move, either, without waking Ana, so Josie left them there on the dark dirty floor and kept driving.

JOSIE AWOKE TO A SHRIEKING. She was sleeping on the kitchenette couch, her children sleeping above, and they were in an RV park she’d found somewhere around midnight. She had no idea where in the state they were. Through the kitchenette blinds the day seemed balmy and clear.

Six hours earlier she’d been driving through the night, had found the sign, the gravel road, and she’d paid forty-five dollars to park with full power. She’d gone to the office and woken up the manager, a handsome man in his fifties or sixties named Jim, and he’d been kind and understanding and had given her keys to the shower and a code for the clean-out (she didn’t tell him she wouldn’t be using it). He’d given her a shot of bourbon, too, guessing she needed it, and afterward she’d walked numbly to the Chateau and fallen asleep on the couch.

Now it was morning, and Josie was awake, and someone was still shrieking. It was somehow obvious that it was happy shrieking, though, cheerful shrieks of “Hello!” and “Here we are!”

“Mom?” Paul called.

“Down here,” she said.

Paul climbed down from above and while she lay on the couch he spread himself on top of her like a cheetah on a heavy bough. Ana followed, climbing down from the loft and then on top of Paul, stacking herself carefully. Josie absorbed all their weight, and briefly thought it was wonderful, then knew it would soon kill her.

“Off,” Josie said.

They stretched and ate cereal and when the sun rose past the tree line they left the Chateau and Josie remembered where they were. In her mind she replayed the drive there, the grey light of her headlights scraping across the parking lot gravel, then into the office, meeting Jim, the bourbon, him showing her the layout of the park and the most secluded spot. There was the main house, the office — a large and solidly built structure of red logs and white putty, a wide porch. There was the gravel parking lot facing the river, and then a loose grid of RVs and mobile homes tucked against the woods. The two-lane interstate was nearby, above, but quiet and passed over the river on a simple stone bridge. When she stepped out to feel the day, she noticed she was parked next to another vehicle, this one seeming more or less permanent. There was a white picket fence around it, and in its windows there were flower planters and flags.

Josie thought about what day it was and realized it was Saturday. There would be a wedding that day, at this RV park, involving the shrieking women. If they shrieked at eight a.m. while bringing plastic forks into an events hall, what noises would they make when the ceremony was underway?

The events building was between the Chateau and the river, and so it seemed natural enough for Josie to set up her folding chair facing the wedding party. She went inside, made herself tea and returned to watch the proceedings as she would the morning news on television.

The door behind her opened with a whine and Josie turned to find Paul and Ana, dressed in yesterday’s clothes.

“Who’s getting married?” Paul asked.

They were very young. The men were dressed in their groomsmen suits, their jackets off, while the bridesmaids wore shorts and tanktops and would change later, and together they began decorating the building with streamers and white carnations, while uncles and fathers brought tables and chairs inside. A great time was had by all, with the bridesmaids occasionally lifted off the ground by the groomsmen, who threatened to throw them in the river, provoking more shrieking. They were so young and Paul was walking slowly toward them, as if drawn by some unseen force.

Josie said nothing, wanting to see how far her son would go. Three steps and he stopped, watched. Four more steps. Ana was uninterested, was playing in the Chateau’s shadow, talking urgently to herself while holding a muscular green man, but Paul was in a trance, his hands in front of him, his fingers twisting fingers.