Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

There was a gasp, and all heads turned. Coming down the hill behind them were a pair of women in overalls, each of them holding the hand of a giant bear in blue jeans. It was Smokey. But this Smokey had aged, had lived a sedentary life. This Smokey was walking very slowly, and he wore his pants high around his stomach. He emerged from the woods resembling an elderly man who had been in the hospital for many months, and was for the first time walking in the light of day, more or less under his own power.

Smokey stepped carefully in front of the audience and waved a small, tentative wave. He was not the same bear they’d been seeing on the ubiquitous television spots about fire safety. That Smokey was an insurmountable brown monument. That Smokey had intermingled with Josie’s thoughts while Jim was pressing himself into her, in the Chateau, a lifetime ago. This Smokey, standing in front of a birthday cake (no candles) and still being held steady by the two assistants, had no idea where he was.

Ana and Paul grew distracted by the inflated wave. Ana asked, and Josie consented, and Paul followed his sister, relinquishing the dog’s rope leash. Josie and the dog meandered across the park, then, not wanting to be in the circle of parents watching their children climb up and slide down — Josie was not ready for conversation yet — she stopped under a small pine, and heard the faint sounds of live music, starting and stopping, sounding like the band from the parade.

She looked around her, and finally saw, in a wooded corner of the park, a circle of adults playing guitars and harmonicas and was that an oboe? It was the same band, but now expanded to nine or ten. Their arms were strumming furiously, their shoulders turning, and one man, the one facing her most directly, was sitting bow-legged, flapping his legs up and down like a frog to the rhythm. When he lifted his head, though, Josie ducked behind a tree, and for a while she stayed there, feeling ridiculous, given Follow was clearly visible, her leash giving her away if anyone cared to look.

“I see you,” a voice said.

Josie said nothing, did nothing.

“Behind the tree. We all see you and your pig-dog. Come over.”

Josie wanted to run. They didn’t know her face yet. If she ran back, maybe she could return, later, not as the woman behind the tree, but as a regular person. She could bring the kids.

“Come on,” the voice said, and Josie emerged, bashful, walking over to the circle, seeing that most of the faces were looking up at her, all of them smiling with perfect openness.

“Come sit,” the first face said. This was the voice who found her, had spoken to her. He was bearded and thin, in the realm of forty, lithe and bright-eyed, wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap. He indicated a place near him but across from him.

“My kids are on the bouncy wave,” Josie said, nodding to the giant wave-balloon across the park. She sat between a blond woman holding some kind of harpsichord and the man with the oboe. The bearded man began to play again, and the sound was bigger than before. She was in the middle of the sound, the crashing chaos of it, the diagonal violence of the strumming, the jagged strokes of the violinist, and yet the music was joyous, rollicking. What was the song? It was folksy, but had some bossa nova in there, and when she thought she knew it, a man near her, easily seventy and with a wild tangle of grey hair and grey beard, the swirl of it like an aerial view of a hurricane, began singing.

In che mondo…

Viviamo, im-pre-ve-dibile…

Was that Italian? She did not expect Italian language to come from this man’s mouth in this remote town, in this park near the Yukon. His eyes were closed. He could sing. What did it mean? Josie assumed it was something like “In this world/that we live in/incredible.” Then he sang the same verse, or some version of it, in English, and it was not quite what she expected.

In this world.

That we live in. Unpredictable. Unpredictable.

In this world of sorrow, there is justice, there is beauty…

A beautiful song, far too beautiful for this park on this afternoon, far too beautiful for her. The sun was directly above, performing its intoxication, and Josie was immediately caught up, and nodding her head, bouncing her feet.

In che mondo…

Viviamo, im-pre-ve-dibile…

Josie glanced to her right, to see the man playing the oboe, and when he saw her watching him, his long fingers on that long black tube, he winked. Was there ever anything more phallic and less alluring than an oboe? Across the circle, a woman was playing the violin, though in this context it was probably a fiddle. Josie watched them all, their hands shooting up and down again. These were unnatural movements. Without sound the motions they made would look mad. These drastic gestures up and down, their chins and cheeks stuck to these wooden instruments, fingers touching strings in certain places at certain times.

And suddenly the song was over, and Josie felt spent. These people didn’t know what they’d just done. What they were capable of. These goddamned musicians. They never knew their power. To those with no musical talent, to Josie, what they could do sitting in a park near an inflatable wave was both miraculous and unfair. They were sitting there, adjusting strings, smiling at her, murmuring about keys and about the weather, when Josie felt like she’d just heard something absolute in its power to justify her life. Her children justified her daily breaths, her use of planetary resources, and then this — her ability to hear a song like that, in a group like this. Those were the three primary justifications for her living. Surely she was forgetting other things. But what?

“We’re just jamming,” the bearded man said.

Goddamn you, she wanted to say. It’s more than that. It’s so easy for you, so hard for the rest of us.

“You have any requests?” he asked. “I’m Cooper.”

Josie shook her head, now trying to shrink. She wanted just to listen, not to be part of this. She wanted to go back behind the tree to listen unseen.

“Anything,” she said. She grabbed at a patch of grass underneath her and pulled. Was this a crowd that would know Carousel ? she wondered. Kiss Me, Kate ?

“Name something. I bet we know it,” Cooper said. Now most of the faces were looking at her, actually wanting a request. Maybe they were bored with one another, these spoiled magicians.

“Okay,” Josie said, her voice sounding hoarse. There were songs Josie knew, and there were songs she knew they would know, and there were songs she knew they would want to play, so she went for the third category.

“ ‘This Land Is Your Land?’ ” she said, shrugging, though knowing they would love this. There was some nodding and grinning. She had made a good choice, and they began to get themselves into position. The harpsichord began, and the rest of the players followed. They went through the whole song, all six verses, eight choruses, and they insisted Josie sing, too. The song seemed to last twenty minutes, an hour. She glanced at the bouncy house periodically, catching sight of Ana and Paul climbing the inflated steps, sliding down, starting over.

“You play anything?” the oboe man asked her.

She told him no, she had no aptitude at all.

“Ever try to learn?” he asked.

“So many times, Jesus Christ,” Josie said, and this was true. All the way through her teens and twenties she’d tried the piano, the guitar, the saxophone. She was equally inept at all of them.

And now she saw Paul standing at the bottom of the inflatable wave, looking around him, hand shielding his eyes, a scout watching for reinforcements.