Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

—

“Gotta leave him outside,” the checkout woman said. She’d seen the kids and Follow all this time, and when they tried to enter with the dog, the woman was ready.

“It’s a she,” Ana told her, but the woman did not care.

They tied Follow to a pole outside. “We’ll be quick,” Paul told Follow, who was dancing around in a way that implied they would return to find that she’d peed or defecated on the sidewalk. Josie made a mental note to buy plastic bags.

“Bright,” Ana said, and the three of them spent a full minute standing in the doorway, the store seeming an acre wide, two dozen rows of food stocked seven feet high. It had only been a few weeks since they’d been in a store like this, but it seemed like years. The customers were the same people she’d seen at the parade and the park, denim and baseball hats, but now Josie felt foreign among them. Under these lights, amid all this abundance, everything so clean, the antiseptic floors and blue-white lights, she was uncomfortable.

“Can we use the real bathroom?” Paul asked.

“If you can find it,” Josie said, and Ana went with him.

Josie grabbed a cart and went about quickly loading into it everything they needed — rice, beans, cans of soup and corn. Evelyn Sandalwood was dead. She thought of the funeral, all that anger. Sunny had sounded so old. What was she now? Seventy-five. Seventy-six. Josie would need to see her soon. Oh god, she thought, thinking of Sunny older still, unable to care for herself. What would happen then? Some combination of all the young women she’d helped would come to her aid. Josie would need to see her. Josie would be there for her. Oh god, she thought. She missed Sunny desperately at that moment. She wanted to call her again, see her immediately. But then her mind reversed itself, insisting that she needed to keep moving. That she was healthier here, that she and her children were growing far beyond what she could have imagined a month ago. Did that mean they could never return to their former lives? No decisions were necessary now, she knew. Right now they would get food, and would return to the cabin, and then what?

Paul and Ana emerged from the bathroom. They filled the cart with bread, canned juice, regular milk, powdered milk, cereal, granola, vegetables, an array of meats, and brought it all to the woman who had barred Follow’s entry.

“Can we go see her?” Paul asked.

“Stay on the sidewalk,” Josie said.

Before she was finished paying, though—$188, a crime, a travesty — they were back. “There’s a lady there,” Paul said.

“Mean one,” Ana said.

Josie paid, left the bags inside and followed the kids outside. Standing over Follow, holding the dog’s leash, was a large woman with black hair streaked in blue. “This is my dog,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Josie said.

“Where’d you take her from? Do I need to call the police?” The woman was wearing a puffy vest and jeans, and had already taken out her phone. Paul’s eyes were wet. Seeing his state, Ana began to cry, the tears like tiny plastic jewels tumbling down her face.

Josie explained that Follow had been all the way over the ridge, in the mine, at least two miles from town, that the dog had been scared and desperate. “Your dog followed my children home,” she said. “We fed her and took care of her.”

“No one lives there,” the woman said, meaning the mine. “I think I need to call the sheriff.”

“We’re house-sitting,” Josie said, already feeling the need to leave this conversation, this woman, her posture aggressive, her eyes wild with indignation. Paul and Ana were standing behind Josie now, hiding. Josie knew the dog was lost — the woman was clearly the owner — and the town was small, and this woman likely knew everyone in it. “We saved this dog,” Josie said. “My kids rescued her.”

The woman leaned back and crossed her arms, nodding and smiling, as if she’d heard this hustle before. It was all Josie could do not to say You don’t deserve this dog or Go to hell but she knew they needed to get away, to evaporate. “Let’s go,” she said, and hustled her weeping children back into the store, where they gathered their bags and went out the rear exit.

—

“It’s okay,” Josie said as they walked to the trailhead, knowing it was not okay. Paul shuffled behind Josie and Ana, sighing, his shoulders collapsed. “She’s got a good home,” Josie said over her shoulder, knowing that was not true, either. In an effort to cheer up her brother, Ana was walking with her hands down her pants.

“Hands in my pants!” she roared, and Paul rolled his eyes.

They were almost at the trailhead when Josie realized they couldn’t go there, either. Not in the light of day. The chances were remote, but the woman who owned Follow might have reported that a woman with two children had found her dog there, might be squatting out there, were likely to steal other animals and care for them.

“Hold on,” she said, and looked around her. There was the RV park ahead, a woman working on a satellite dish installed on her roof. There was a seaplane flying low over a row of pines. And beyond the trees, there was the Yukon. “Let’s go there. Picnic.”

They settled at the bend of the river, Ana finding a sharp stick and wetting its tip in the water. She brought the point to her nose.

“Smells clean,” she said.

They ate sullenly and watched an unmanned dinghy pass, taken downstream by the current. Josie thought of Evelyn, wanting to conjure some sadness for her death, but felt only the waste of it all, the misplaced rage, the inevitability of victims begetting victims.

“Getting darker,” Paul said, pointing to the leaking light.

“Let’s hustle,” Josie said. She was carrying the groceries in six plastic bags, three dangling from each hand. Paul and Ana had pleaded to carry their share, but she knew they would relinquish them in minutes, so she balanced the weight and they walked swiftly.

“Too dark,” Ana said.

By the time they arrived, night had come on, and the RVs in the park were bathed in moonlight. It was a quarter-moon, tinged with orange and pink, and not bright enough to guide them.

“Sorry,” Josie said.

There was one store open nearby, a gas station they’d passed that looked to have a convenience store attached, so she brought the kids along the frontage road and under the bright lights and into the store. She had eight dollars left with her, and held out hope that the store would have some smaller model of light, the kind of thing attached to a keychain.

They had no such thing. She sent Paul all over the store to no avail. They had one flashlight for sale, a forty-five-dollar machine that seemed capable of signaling planes and ships.

“You have just a regular flashlight?” she asked the woman behind the counter.

“Sorry,” she said. “We have candles, though. You lose power?”

Apparently there had been some power outages related to the wildfires, and the store had had to stock up on candles. They’d sold out three times in the last month, the clerk explained. And so Josie left the gas station with a twelve-pack of candles, each with a tin rim to catch the wax, and a pack of matches. With these they would make their way through the forest and over the ridge and back to their cabin.

“We get our own?” Paul asked.

Josie was sure that the only way she could manage to get her children aboard for this task, walking through a black forest at nine o’clock with only candles to guide their way, would be to allow each of them to hold their own.

“Yes,” she said, as if it had been the plan all along. Then, realizing that with her hands full of grocery bags she wouldn’t be able to hold a candle at all, she delivered the coup de grace. “You two will have to light our path. I can’t do it.”