Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

This was Carl’s fault. If that were Carl roaring in from behind, so aroused and breathing heavily, it would be over in seconds, while they were there standing up. Josie had come to expect this kind of blitzkrieg from Carl, and it was frankly perfectly fine, to stand up at the kitchen sink, Carl in heat, Josie knowing he would be finished before she turned around.

But Jim was more practiced, more controlled. Ninety seconds passed, then a few minutes, everything slow, steady, thickly filling, and she knew they needed a plan. She pulled up her pants and led him outside, and came up with an idea — at the time thought it a fantastic idea — to sit him down on the picnic bench, an arm’s length from the Chateau and her sleeping children, and then to sit on him. With the last minutes of sun pouring through the woods, her mind was lost utterly, she was a being of pure light and radiating warmth, and somewhere in the sun Paul asked what they were doing.

“What are you doing?” he said in his even wolf-boy voice. He was outside. He was standing at the door of the Chateau, with a clear view of his mother, who was naked from the waist down, sitting on Jim.

Paul knew what they were doing. From a young age, he had sought out anatomical and reproductive knowledge, asking about Josie’s parts, and his parts, and asking Carl about his parts, about the purpose of each, why Carl’s were bigger than his, why all the hair. So he knew the mechanics just as much as he knew the basics of flight and the internal combustion engine, and when Paul asked what they were doing, he meant not “Mommy, were you exercising on top of that man?” but “Why is my mother screwing this man six feet away from her sleeping children?” He knew what he was seeing.

But she couldn’t get up, not like that — Paul would have really gotten an eyeful. So she said, “Go inside for a second,” and he obeyed, and when she could see his back turned inside the Chateau she jumped off Jim, hustled to the woods and dressed herself. When she returned to Jim, he was clothed, too, and was smiling, holding out another mojito. Again he was so unlike a younger man, a man like Carl. What had happened with Paul didn’t seem to matter much; he conveyed that it would pass, that the best thing to do would be to continue outside, more or less in their same positions, sit and talk, close but not on top of each other now. Perhaps Paul’s memory of what he saw could be muddled, replaced.

Josie’s nerves were shot, so she drank her mojito, Jim repoured, and soon she was sloppy again, far less coherent than she’d been when swerving the crooked bicycle through the forest, and she found herself telling Jim about Jeremy, because in the heat of her loins and mess of her mind she thought Jim would be the very best person to share Jeremy with — there’d never been a better person, her addled brain told her. “I thought it was the right thing,” she said, “I wanted him to honor our country,” she said, sounding unlike herself but thinking it would endear her to Jim and his tattoo.

“He died last year?” he asked.

She nodded, sipping her drink, feeling very dramatic.

“In Afghanistan?” he asked.

Again she pumped her head up and down, yes.

“We ended combat operations in Afghanistan on January 9, 2013,” Jim said, and followed up with a litany of numbers and dates, using words like “draw down” and “post-occupation” but mostly using the word “exit” until Josie doubted herself. It was likely the mojito, but could it be that Jeremy hadn’t died in combat? Her image was of him shot, bleeding on a hillside, but now Jim, a veteran, was saying this was impossible. Had Jeremy actually been in Iraq, not Afghanistan? (Jim was insisting this was probably the case, that Josie was mistaken, and couldn’t it have been more like 2009, he wanted to know.) But then she remembered where Jeremy had been killed, Herat province, and the date, February 20, 2013. Jesus fucking Christ of course he’d died in Afghanistan. “I’m right,” she said, she slurred.

Jim rolled his eyes and poured himself another drink. They argued this way for the better part of an hour, as the night darkened around them, neither of them ceding ground, neither of them sure whether or not their country was still at war in Afghanistan. There were moments when Jim seemed almost wavering, almost believing that Josie could be right, that perhaps there were some combat troops still in the country…But then he dug in, disbelieving.

And so in the morning she’d left Jim’s RV park and watched the bottle break against her face, and mile after mile as she drove away, she thought how interesting, humorous even, someone from that part of the world might find it, that an American man who had fought in a conflict no one remembered didn’t know that his country was still fighting a different, larger war, still, had been since 2001. How funny! Coast to coast, most Americans would not be sure that war was still on, that we were still there, that men and women like Jeremy were still fighting and dying, that Afghans were still fighting and dying, too. Wouldn’t an Afghan, and countless future generations, find that very funny in some way?

WHAT CAN WE DO to erase a terrible sight from the minds of our children? We can show them other things, brighter things. It so happened that ten miles from the site of Josie-on-Jim, they came across what appeared, from a distance, to be the Batmobile.

“Look,” Josie said, wanting to point it out to Ana especially, but knowing if she wasn’t right there would be trouble. So she waited until they got closer, careening along the highway toward it, and when they arrived, and she was sure that some lunatic had placed an actual full-size Batmobile approximation on the side of the road, in a parking lot attached to a fireworks outlet, with the sole purpose of luring in people like herself and her children, she finally told them.

“Do you see what I see?” In the wake of what she’d allowed Paul to witness the day before, this sounded more lewd than intended. She amended quickly: “Ana, you see a certain vehicle outside?”

When she did see it, there was pandemonium, and they stopped, and Ana jumped out of the Chateau and ran to it, running her hands across it. Its rough surface appeared to have been painted with black housepaint.

“Dis isn’t da real one,” Ana said, but she seemed to want to be disproved.

“It’s one of the real ones,” Paul said. “It’s a backup car. The main one is still in Batman’s cave.”

This satisfied Ana’s sense of balance, because surely Batman would have backup cars, and it was logical that he would keep at least one in an Alaskan parking lot, so she took to the car anew, her eyes allowing all the vehicle’s glaring discrepancies and anomalies, including the fact that it had no interior gauges, lights or even a stick shift. It did have a steering wheel, and Ana was reaching for it, looking back at Josie, waiting to be told no .

But while Ana had been inspecting the car, and Paul had been explaining away all its flaws, Josie had noticed that the fireworks outlet, the one using the Batman car as bait, was closed, boarded up hastily. Of course it would be closed, during a summer of wildfires, a few of them no doubt blamed on bottle rockets and M-80s.

“You can get in,” Josie said to Paul and Ana, feeling hopeful that this would eclipse forever the image of her grinding atop the RV park proprietor who drew elephant penises.

Paul climbed over the door (welded shut), and Josie lifted Ana in. They sat side by side, Paul in the driver’s seat. Ana looked to her brother as if fervently believing that because he was sitting in Batman’s seat, he was Batman. Josie watched the two of them, forgetting for a moment how badly she needed this to erase yesterday’s indiscretion. I know what you’re doing , his eyes told her.