Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“Don’t judge,” Jim said. “Grenada made Kuwait possible.”

Now Josie was confused. What in the hell was he talking about?

“You don’t remember the national mood in the seventies and early eighties, do you?” he asked. Josie was a child during much of that time, and had not been paying attention to the national mood, no.

She needed to change the subject. If they went down this road, soon enough they would arrive at her mother and father, Candyland, Jeremy — Jeremy had already stepped into her consciousness and darkened the gauzy happiness of the day.

“You have a wonderful awkwardness,” Jim said, and for a moment Josie thought the evening was being ground to dust, first by his nonsense about Kuwait and now this, an oblique insult. “You’re beautiful, but you wear it so lightly. This,” and here he touched the small of her back with an open hand, heavy and warm, “this is where the self-satisfied women, the uppity ones, lose their appeal.” Somehow he had known to change the subject, and had effortlessly chosen a very chaste and very erotic place to put his hand. He was so confident, her sense of time shifted, broke down. Hadn’t they just started talking? Now his hand was firmly on her back; they were ready to dance. “The other women, they’re stiff here,” he continued, his voice lower now, a rumble, “they carry all their tension and outrage and impatience right here. It’s a catastrophe. But you, the way you bend, the way you shift hip to hip, it’s fluid, it’s just a breeze through long grass.”

Shit, Josie thought. Shit shit. To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she’d never noticed. It worked always. Hilariously, though, Carl had no idea. The one original thing, the one time he’d noticed something about her that she could remember — would not forget — he’d said while watching TV one night, a crime show. The detectives had shown up at the coroner’s office, and he’d pulled open a cold steel drawer to reveal the corpse of a young woman. “That looks just like you!” Carl had said, leaning forward on the couch, and Josie had thought, Will this harmless man kill me? “He seems harmless,” his mother, Luisa, once said to Josie, “but he has a terrible resolve.” What did that mean? Josie thought of that often: He has a terrible resolve . That and the comparison to the corpse: It made their last year together somewhat less carefree.

Now, though, there was this man, with his Grenada tattoo, his POW/MIA flag, and he was so gentle. She knew a mistake with this man was inevitable. The only hope was to contain the damage somehow, release the lust, complete the seduction without too much mess.

—

After dinner, Jim brought a set of markers and a stack of printer paper from his cabin, and Josie assumed he planned to suggest the kids occupy themselves this way while he made a move on her. But instead he sat down and asked Ana what her favorite animal was.

Josie knew Ana’s answer changed depending on the day and what show she’d last seen, so was curious to hear the answer.

“Winnie the Pooh,” Ana said, and Jim repeated the word as Ana had said it, “Windy da Pooh,” imitating her but somehow in a respectful way that seemed to confirm to Ana that her pronunciation was correct.

He cracked his knuckles theatrically and began to draw. Quickly the kids realized he knew what he was doing, he could draw, and they floated closer to him, one on either side, rapt. Ana soon had her hand on his arm, again demonstrating her belief in the transference of magic. It was a heartwarming scene until Josie came around to see the progress of Jim’s drawing and found an anatomically correct elephant, standing upright like a human, and holding a beer, a flaccid penis pointing to the earth between its legs.

“You guys run to the vending machines for a second,” Josie said, giving them a dollar each — only the second time in their lives they had held a dollar of their own. The kids ran through the birch woods and Jim sighed and sat back in his chair.

“Elephants have penises,” he said in his defense. “Paul has one. Have you seen a whale’s?”

“Your elephant even has pubic hair, you jackass,” Josie said.

“It was flaccid .” Jim grinned at her, thinking she was kidding.

She took the picture and crumpled it. “No more penises,” she said.

The children returned from the store, Jim drew for them again, everyone having a blast. For half an hour he drew whatever they asked, and they colored his pictures — but why did Ana grunt while coloring? — and then laid them out on the grass around his house, holding them down with stones. The evening had arrived at a place of perfect serenity, and Josie and her children, and this stranger named Jim, were a perfectly functioning little family. Jim couldn’t have been happier. He was not the least bit bored.

Ana put a blank piece of paper before him. “Can you do a giant, but a nice giant?” she asked.

Jim threw himself into that one, moving his mouth as he drew. Josie watched him, and a truth revealed itself to her: Older men are not confused. They aren’t going in seven directions. A retired man knows what he doesn’t want — and to those of us who have been ground into dust once or twice or more, and have somehow found a way to carry on, knowing what you don’t want was far more important than knowing what you did want. Maybe a retired man is the real prize. An older man like this (or Sam’s Leonard Cohen!) no longer worried about money; his ambitions had been satisfied or ignored, and he could now afford to draw pictures for children for hours at a time, had nowhere else to be, could take his time.

“Who wants to play air hockey?” he asked. Josie didn’t want to play air hockey, or watch anyone play air hockey, but her children had jumped and danced at the idea, so off they went. They walked back through the birch forest and to the office. Jim plugged in the air-hockey table and turned to Josie.

“Why don’t you go somewhere?” he said. “They’re fine here.”

“Go where?”

“Didn’t you ask about the bikes the other day? Take a bike. Any one you see in the shed.”

Josie dismissed the idea, because she had expected this air-hockey idea to be a ruse to get her alone in the back office — she’d glimpsed a couch there, and pictured herself sloppily on it — but Jim was soon playing with her children, and barely giving her a thought. So Josie found herself considering the bike ride, then wanting it, then calculated the probability that riding the bike in her drunken state would end in her crashing and drowning in the river. But then she thought of the Mennonites, and their bicycle joy, and wondered what lay on the other side of the underpass that had made them so happy.

“You kids keep going and I’ll come back to keep score,” Jim said, and led Josie to the shed, where a motley array of bicycles stood entangled. He was behind her, and she could smell his fermented male smell, and for the third time that afternoon she assumed he would take her, press himself into her.

“Try this one,” he said, and pulled from the chrome thicket a blue women’s bicycle with a wide white seat. He checked the tires and found them functional.

“Whose is it?” she asked.

“Someone’s. I don’t know. They might have left it. Or else it’s someone’s who works here. I don’t know. It’s yours.”

By drawing vaguely in the dirt, Jim mapped the bike path as it ran along the river, across a wooden bridge, through what used to be a lumber forest and then back, along the river’s far shore and across another crossing, this one a pedestrian footbridge made of steel.

She held the bicycle, and threw her leg around it, feeling the sensation that it was crooked. The handlebars were pointed decidedly leftward. She did not think it was a good idea to ride this bicycle. Her children were with a stranger and it was getting dark, and she was tipsy, and she had two or three miles to ride on a bicycle with handlebars that pointed due left.