Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

He had one of those fat, round ageless faces that could be thirty or fifty. Lucky, Josie thought, to have all that fat in his face. He’ll be set forever. He’ll always look happy. And because he seemed so harmless and alone, she invited him to join her.

“You can come over here if you want,” she said. She noticed he had ordered nothing but a cookie and a glass of water. “Bring your water and cookie.”

The man reacted strangely. Josie thought it was not unreasonable to assume he would be glad to be asked by a woman to join her. Men did not often receive such invitations. But a long moment passed, during which his face took on looks of surprise, and suspicion, and assessment. Finally he tilted his head and said, “Okay.”

He carried his plate and cookie over, and placed them on Josie’s table, and she saw that he was a softly built man in loose jeans and a plaid button-down, even more harmless now that she saw him up close. He sat and looked at his cookie, as if gathering the courage to look up at Josie. She found him vulnerable, shy, unassuming, safe.

“I’m surprised you would invite me over,” he said, still looking at his cookie.

“Well,” Josie said, “we were both eating alone, and that seemed unnecessary. How’s your water?”

“It’s fine,” he said, and as if to prove it, he lifted the glass and took a sip, finally peering over the ridge to look at Josie. There was something in his eyes, she thought. Something suspecting, as if he was still questioning her motives for inviting him over. She flattered herself, guessing he thought she was out of his league.

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she said.

He shook his head, looking down at his cookie, and as if knowing how long he’d been staring at it, he broke it in half.

Josie took a sip of her wine, knowing this wasn’t going well. The longer he sat there, the more his strangeness was amplified. Every second of his tense posture, his inability to meet her eyes, seemed to increase the likelihood that he was not quite normal. “What’s your name?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know if that matters,” he said, and looked up at Josie. Now there was something conspiratorial in his eyes, as if the two of them were engaged in some wonderful game.

“This yours?” a voice said. Josie looked up to see that the waitress was standing at their table, holding out a short stack of papers to the man. There were a few pages of printed maps, some pages with handwritten notes, and under those pages, an open-sided manila file folder and below that, a large closed envelope. The label featured a series of names separated by ampersands, all of it in a font both elegant and combative.

“Oh, thanks,” he said to the waitress, and laughed a little laugh, looking quickly at the waitress and then to Josie. “Would have defeated the whole purpose, right? Coming all the way up here and forgetting the envelope.” He said this to Josie, and finally it came together. He was serving her legal papers. She was being sued by someone, thousands of miles away, and this shy man was an envoy delivering this aggression.

Josie stood up. “This man just propositioned me,” she said loudly. “He said he wanted to do to me what he’s done to other women around the state.” She backed away from the table, moving toward the front door, and was satisfied to see that most of the customers in the room were hearing her. “I don’t know what that means, but I’m scared.” She said this louder, pointing at him, moving toward the front counter. She pulled two twenties from her pocket and placed them on the cashier’s counter.

Josie was almost at the front door. The process server was frozen in his seat. “He said horrible things to me!” she said, allowing her voice to peak. “I’m scared!” she wailed, and burst toward the front door.

Not bad, she thought.

Outside, she ran to the Chateau and climbed in, finding Paul and Ana still asleep in their seats. She started the engine and looked into the restaurant’s window. Two of the truckers, older men solidly built and awake to the possibility that they would create a justice event, had approached the table, and were hovering over the man, whose hands lay on top of his stack of papers. When Josie hit the gas and the Chateau lurched ahead, the man glanced at her, his face impassive, his eyes registering not defeat or surprise, but something like betrayal.

She pulled around the parking lot and passed the building again as she left the driveway and met the highway. Now there were three men and the waitress at the booth, the man obscured by the bodies surrounding him. The process server thought I knew who he was, Josie realized. He’d followed her there, and to the diner, and had been biding his time, sitting there, staring at her from the opposite booth. No wonder he was surprised she’d invited him over. He thought she knew.

—

The adrenaline sobered her instantly and made the driving easy. Her mind was alive, florid and supercomputing. She took every minor road she could while cycling through her thoughts and plans and questions. She had defeated him, all that he represented. The look on his face — Who sent him? Carl? What would the lawsuit say? Or Evelyn? She hadn’t checked in with her child DA. Maybe there was something new on that front. Maybe Evelyn’s people had found less value than promised. Maybe she was claiming fraud, false dealing—

Jeremy’s parents. Could they sue? Try to sue?

No. It was Carl. It had to be Carl. This was the boldest thing he’d ever done. He’d filed some suit, and they’d hired someone to serve her. In Alaska. Holy shit. How much would a man like that be paid? A process server in central Alaska? Was he local? He didn’t seem to be local. Likely from Anchorage. Anywhere you go there are people doing these terrible jobs.

Inviting him over had actually prevented him from serving her. After an hour of driving she was sure this was true. When she’d called him over, he’d left his papers. He’d been confused, put off balance. If she hadn’t invited him to her booth he would have simply served her when she was sitting there. But she put him off his game, took control of the situation. She congratulated herself. Some extrasensory force had compelled her to suss out his nefarious purpose at the diner.

Was she invincible? She wondered if she was guided by some higher power. Was her mission, avoiding Carl, leaving civilization, a holy one? There was no other answer.

—

Somewhere near dawn, at another gas station lit in white, Josie got out, filled the tank, and felt compelled to check the Chateau for tracking devices. How else could the man have known where she was? He’d had a map, though. Would he have a map if he had some kind of tracking device? She got out of the Chateau and crawled under it.

“Everything okay?” a voice said.

She looked for the source, and saw a pair of boots. She stood and saw that the voice came from a teenager, no more than seventeen, wearing a pristine yellow shirt and skinny jeans. The boots were some incongruous style mistake.

“You work here?” she asked.

“Uh huh,” he said. “You need help under there?”

She thought briefly about telling him she thought she was being followed, that she had been looking for some kind of black box affixed to the undercarriage, but then knew this would only stir interest, and make her more memorable, such that if or when someone asked if he’d seen anyone or anything unusual, he would have a story. Yes, a woman under an RV, looking for a tracking device, very nervous—

Instead, she had an idea. “You have a clean-out?”

He directed her to it, a tank buried behind the station. There was a tidy round hole in the cement ready to receive. “I’m supposed to charge you fifteen dollars,” he said. “I mean, if you’re unloading a full tank.” Josie said the load was full, it was all the shit they’d been carrying around from the beginning, and paid the man.