Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

There will be other mistakes, she said in return.

Josie took their picture, Ana looking straight through the windshield, as if scanning for evildoers, and Paul looking at Ana. And for the first time Josie felt the crushing tragedy of their aloneness, that they were only three, and had no one else, and were more or less on the lam, and that she had slept with Jim, and had no destination in mind — that they would leave the Batmobile and have nowhere else to go, that this would be the closest thing to purpose they would know today. “Ready?” she asked them. “We should go,” she said. But where? Why? They stayed.

When, an hour later, they finished with the Batmobile and were back in the Chateau, slowly pulling away, Ana unbuckled herself and came to Josie and kissed her on the cheek.

“I love you, Mom,” she said.

It was the first time Ana had ever said these words unprovoked, and though Josie knew what Ana meant was I love Batman. I love Batman’s car. And I love you for showing me Batman’s car , she was nonetheless moved.

—

They drove on, their path random, the sights bizarre. There was the strange geodesic dome, once part of a gas station, three stories tall and abandoned. They parked the Chateau behind it and stayed for a few hours, exploring within — they found a half-dead old kickball and played soccer briefly inside, and Ana collected an array of tool fragments and what seemed to be gears. They stopped at a garage sale, where the only other customers were firefighters from Wyoming. Josie bought Paul a book about heraldry and Ana a silver miner’s helmet. For herself she bought a guitar with a bullet hole in it. I couldn’t learn, so I got mad , the seller said.

They saw a moose, and pulled over to watch it lope without destination along the side of the road. But every car that passed their parked vehicle honked angrily, as if stopping for moose was not acceptable, or in bad taste, or endangered the moose in some way — Josie never knew. But she knew that seeing that moose was wildly anticlimactic, in the same way seeing a coyote, so small and weak and like the spawn of a hyena (the hunched back, the servile demeanor) and a housecat (its size, its dull eyes), was anticlimactic. This moose before them, which they were photographing with actuarial thoroughness, was a sorry specimen, thin and clumsy and not much taller than a pony.

It was important to stay off the main roads, but not to draw too much attention on the minor roads. The more they ventured away from the highways the more they saw evidence of the fires, their proximity coming with ample clues. The red and chartreuse trucks would pass her, going the other way, or would flash their lights from behind, in hopes they could go more than forty-eight miles an hour. Then the handmade or digital signs thanking the firefighters. Then the gusts of acrid smoke, the occasional stripe of haze overtaking the sky. ENTERING BURNED AREA. EXPECT FLOODS, said one sign, and Josie looked quickly to Paul, to see if he’d read it. The natural piling-on the sign promised — first fire, then flood — seemed unnecessarily harsh, and she worried about the nightmares a sign like that could provoke in a sensitive eight-year-old. But he was asleep, his mouth agape, Ana trying to balance her ThunderCats doll in his shirt pocket.

They were driving through a land of low hills, some of them charred black, when Josie saw a scrum of fire trucks ahead, creating a roadblock, their lights popping like flashbulbs. She slowed down and stopped before the group, ready to turn around, but when she rolled down her window, a police officer, looking not much older than Paul, approached. He had full, delicate lips.

“You passing through?” he asked.

“I don’t have to,” Josie said. She didn’t know what to say. She had no destination in mind, but telling him that would seem suspicious. “I mean I can take another road—” She almost said “north” but she wasn’t entirely sure she was heading north. She might have been going east.

“It’s okay,” the officer said, his lips pillow-soft, his eyes sleepy and amused. “The road just reopened. You’re the first on it, outside of emergency vehicles. It’s safe. Just be careful.”

Josie thanked him, missing his lips already, his eyes, thinking his parents must be proud of him, hoping they were. She drove slowly around the six or seven vehicles, and then found herself entirely alone on a wide four-lane road that passed through what had been a great battlefield. The hills on the left side of the road were largely green, untouched, covered with small pines and shrubs and stripes of wildflowers. On the right, though, the land had been rendered bald, leaving the occasional black stripe of a tree trunk, a few wisps of branches extended, the ground everywhere a plush grey.

Along the side of the road, fire vehicles were parked in bunches or alone. Here, a pair of red trucks, four firefighters sitting under a tree eating lunch on the rear bumpers. There, a single chartreuse truck, with a lone firefighter in matching gear walking up the hill, through the plush grey, carrying a shovel.

The road wound through the valley for miles, the scene serene and beautiful and empty. The valley was quiet, the sky was blue, the fire defeated.

Fire vehicles and firefighters appeared occasionally, some driving the opposite way, leaving the valley, but most of them parked on one side of the road or another, all of them acting independently, it seemed. It was, that day at that hour, more like a loose assemblage of firefighting freelancers, each allowed to do whatever they saw fit, than some coordinated, military-style attack. Or maybe it was the looser, cleanup fighting done after victory is assured.

Just then, she came upon a group of six firefighters surrounding a single large pine on fire, three hoses between them, two men on each.

“Look,” she told her kids, and she slowed the Chateau.

It looked like some kind of execution. The tree seemed to be alive, defiant, gloriously on fire, wanting to be on fire, while the firefighters were dousing it, killing it.

Then a sound like a quick loud exhalation. The Chateau veered left, then right, then lurched forward.

“What is that?” Paul asked.

Josie pulled over and stopped, but she knew it was a flat. Stan had breezed through the procedure for changing a flat, and she’d seen the spare on the rear of the Chateau a dozen times a day, but now, knowing she would have to actually change it, change a tire on a decomposing vehicle weighing four tons, she briefly lost hope.

“Let’s get out,” she told her kids, and then the three of them were standing on the roadside, between the hills of green and the hills of grey, under the bright sun, the Chateau tilting rightward.

Ana found a rock and threw it in the direction of the firefighters at war with the burning tree.

“Some other guys,” Paul said, and Josie turned to see that coming up behind them was a line of men in orange, ten of them, each of them carrying a shovel over a shoulder.

“Looks like you’ve got a flat,” the lead man said. “Need help?”

He was short and stocky, his face striped in soot. The group of them crowded around the flat, a few of them kicking the tire, as if that was in some way useful.

“You want us to help?” the stocky man asked.

“Could you?” Josie said, and the group of them began to fan out all over, like some kind of dance team — Josie was suddenly in the middle, and felt as if she should do some freestyle maneuvers while they clapped.

“You got the jack?” another man in orange asked.

Josie tried to remember where Stan had said it was, and could only think of the side compartment, where the lawn chairs were stored. She opened it, and three of the men rifled through the space — there were three of them doing any one thing — but found nothing.