Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“There’s someone in my class I could marry someday,” Paul said without any emotion, as if noting a passing cloud.

“Helena?” Josie asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes fixed on the guests still arriving.

And now, from under the bridge, riding on a path along the river, came a group of six. First there was a man of about fifty, wearing a black vest, and black pants, and a button-down of sky blue. He was riding a mountain bike, and seemed to have won a race, because he said “Ha!” as he passed under the bridge and entered the gravel parking lot. Behind him was a woman in her thirties, in a pilgrim’s dress, a conservative cotton garment grey and trimmed in white, its hem tickling her ankles. She was wearing a bonnet and was grinning, her face red and alive, so happy that she’d come in second.

So they were Mennonites, Josie thought. Or Amish. But they drove here, that was certain, so that would rule out the Amish. So Mennonites. She’d once seen a Mennonite family praying before a meal at Burger King, and that Burger King had been in the middle of nowhere. Thus that was allowed — driving to the Burger King, eating at the Burger King, driving to RV parks in Alaska with a trailer of bicycles. She settled on them being Mennonites, and sat in the grass, with one eye on her children and the other on this Mennonite tableau still developing.

More bicyclists followed, three children — boys of eight and twelve, a girl of ten — and then, most intriguingly, another woman, who seemed to be about twenty, too old to be the daughter of the first woman. They all got off their bikes, laughing and whooping and wiping their brows. They’d just had the greatest time. The boys were in black pants and all wore the same sort of blue workshirt as their father. The girl and woman wore something similar to the second-place woman. They parked their bikes, each carefully positioning their kickstands in the gravel.

“Whoo boy!” said the father.

A smile overtook Josie’s face. She spun around to see if she was the only one witnessing this. She looked to her children, who were now stomping in the shallow water, oblivious.

Josie turned back to the Mennonites. The man was husband to one of the two women, but who? The kids were by the older woman, she was sure. So the younger woman was along for fun. A niece, a fellow member of their church, their village. Her parents had died? She’d been orphaned, taken into this other happy family? Josie contemplated who she would have been had she been born or married into this family. What would she want? Would her desires have been simplified? All she would want, perhaps, was this, a good vigorous bicycle ride along the river, coming in second, just behind the handsome husband, how marvelous it all was, Whoo boy.

“Look,” Ana said, and pointed downriver, where it bent. A tribe of kids were playing in the shallow water, amid a tiny forest of high reeds. Before Josie could stop her, Ana had run down the bank. Paul followed, warning her to be careful.

There were about twelve kids, from four to ten years old, and their interest seemed to center on a huge downed tree, which lay dead in the shallows, its branches rising tragically, diagonally to the sky. Half of the kids straddled or hung from its branches, and periodically dropped into the ankle-deep water below. It was only after watching the group for a few minutes that Josie realized she was the only parent present.

Josie looked down the riverside, not believing this could be true, and finally found what appeared to be the parent charged with looking after the twelve children. She was a woman of about sixty, a grandmother perhaps, standing in the shallow water, talking on the phone, smoking, gesticulating, laughing a hoarse happy laugh. She looked up to find Josie, and she managed to both wink and wave simultaneously. Her smile was very warm, her wink seeming to acknowledge the beauty of the river, of the day, the gorgeous madness of all the kids playing together, of the two of them allowed to simply stand in or sit near the river, doing nothing.

Josie waved back. Feeling the other woman could handle it for a minute or two, Josie retrieved her folding chair and brought it to the flat grassy riverside and sat and watched. Now there were fifteen children, then twenty. The children of the river were trying to move the large tree. The alpha boy, shirtless and wearing pajama pants, had taken control of the platoon and was insisting that the tree be moved, and he was directing the other children to grab here, and there, and there, and you over there at the end. At one point he even said, “Lift with your legs!” His voice was husky and impatient.

Josie’s own children happily submitted to his directives. He was the foreman of all the work being done, and he knew how to lead. Josie puzzled for an explanation of why the log had to be moved, but the children under his command labored, unquestioning.

Now he seemed burdened. He stood, watching his workers, hands on his hips, dissatisfied. Something was wrong. He lowered his head, came to some conclusion, and raised it.

“From now on,” he said, “we’ll have to use fart power.”

He said it in a tone of seriousness, of resignation. They had apparently run out of electricity, fossil fuels, and now they would use what was left. Josie had long wondered how pioneers, how bands of cavemen, knew where to stop and settle. Along this trip so far, Josie had seen a few places where she thought, There’s a lake, and there’s a mountain, and there’s a rolling meadow where she could watch her children play. But there had been easy reasons why none of those places seemed suitable places to stay. Most were near highways. But this park, sitting at the bend of a river, spoke of welcome and permanence.

Then again, Josie thought, looking at the road where it crossed the river, there was at least some possibility that the quiet of the morning could be broken by sirens looking for her. She had a quick vision of this woman with her by the water, and the invisible parents of the river children, rising up to protect her. She hadn’t spoken a word to them, but believed that they had formed some kind of community, watching the children moving logs under the power of young flatulence.

“Hypnotic, right?” It was a man’s voice. Josie jumped. She turned to find Jim, the man who had checked her in last night. Now he was standing behind her, holding a blue cup out to her. It seemed to be pink lemonade. He had a cup of his own.

“No thanks,” she said, but he made no effort to remove the cup from her view, so she took it.

He clinked his plastic cup against hers. “I checked you in last night. Is that your name or your way of life?” he said, and nodded toward her visor.

“I found this,” she said, and saw that he was disappointed: he thought he’d delivered a zinger. But, she wanted to say, nothing good can ever come from noticing anyone else’s clothes.

She sipped the lemonade, discovering that he’d spiked it with what tasted like rum. She decided that because it was noon, and because she had escaped an innkeeping madman the night before, she deserved this. “Thank you,” she said, trying to see him. The sun haloed his head, putting his face in purple silhouette. She remembered him as handsome.

“You on vacation? On the run?” he asked.

“Will you sit down?” she asked. “I can’t talk to you standing above me like that.”

He had no chair, so sat on the grass next to her.

“You don’t have to sit on the ground,” she said.

“I want to,” he said, and ran his fingers through the weedy grass like it was plush carpeting. “Mmmmm,” he said. “Your stay good so far?”

“The best,” she said, with a useless sarcasm she did not endorse. He explained that the establishment was his, that he’d bought it five years ago, after moving up from Arizona. Josie assumed he knew she was single, and wanted to convey that he was not a clerk at the inn but its owner. Jim was younger than she’d remembered from the night before. About fifty-five? Sturdily built, strong shoulders, a round belly. There was a tattoo on his bicep, only partially visible, something military; she could see the claws of an eagle. He was a vet. The right age, build.