Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

It sounded more dramatic than she’d intended, but they took the bait. They made their way down the road and at the RV park they ducked across the frontage road and into the darkness. The candles gave them a circle of light that allowed them to see one another, their shirts ghostly white. But the short reach of the candlelight meant that all around them was still darker. All along the walk, trees arrived in front of Josie’s view with alarming suddenness. She could only keep faith that they were on the right path, that the path did not split or detour, and that because it was inclining slightly all the way, they were making their way up the hillside and over the ridge.

“Smell’s getting worse,” Paul said. He was right. The wildfire’s acrid air seemed to be stronger, denser.

Tomorrow she would return to work with Cooper. She smiled to herself, disbelieving that she’d made a proposal like that to a stranger. He had agreed, and now her head was full of ideas, elaborations and reversals. The show about Grenada ? Would that be the first thing to explore? Or Disappointed: The Musical ? Or something encompassing all of Alaska. Alaska! No, without the exclamation point, because this was not a demonstrative place, no, it was a place of tension, of uncertainty, a state on fire. Alaska with a colon. Alaska: Yes. The show would start with Stan. Stan and his wife, awash in white carpet, closing the door on Josie and her children, the Chateau in motion. Josie thought briefly of Starlight Express, the actors on roller skates — that kind of debacle could be avoided. There would be Norwegians, and naked showering nymphs, magicians from Luxembourg. The zip code guy? He’d tip the show, obliterate all else, as he did on the cruise ship. You could get Jim in there, Grenada. You’d have to have Kyle and Angie. Guns everywhere.

“Mom?” Paul asked. “Has anyone ever done this before?”

Paul asked this question every so often, when they were in new situations, when something seemed wrong. He’d asked it once when he peed in his pants at school. Has anyone ever done that before? he wanted to know. There was comfort in precedent. Happens every day, Josie had said then. Now she said, “Walk in the dark? Every night, Paul, someone is walking in the dark.”

For a moment it seemed Josie’s wording had made it worse, conjuring an army of stealthy night strollers, but Paul seemed satisfied, and Josie returned to her show. Could it be that there would be periodic shots in the theater? The actors would sing, the orchestra would play, but every few minutes a rifle shot, the pop of a handgun, would break open the air, and there would be little to no attention paid to it. Who was shot? Was it real? The play would go on. Josie thought she would try that the next day with Cooper’s group — some kind of arrhythmic interruption that might mean death but would not stop the music. The crazed music — for it had to sound like organized lunacy — would always go on, loud and ceaseless.

“Champagne on my shoulders!” Ana yelled.

Then: “Stab stab stab!”

And: “PBS kids dot com!”

Josie laughed, and Paul laughed, and they both knew that by her getting a laugh, Ana would not stop until forced to. Encouraged, she sang louder. “Cham pagne ! On my shoul ders!” Where could she have heard these things? But then again, Ana was tuned to a different galactic frequency, and there was no telling what signals she was picking up. Josie had no choice but to allow Ana’s babbling nonsense; she needed both kids to be happily distracted from the fact that they were walking without the dog they had in the morning, over a mountain in the dark holding disintegrating candles.

“Mine’s almost done,” Paul said, and they stopped so Josie could transfer the flames from the gnarled and spent candles to the pristine new ones, and the kids seemed similarly re-energized with the new candles. Josie chose not to think about the possibility that they would be attacked by bears, wolves or coyotes. She had seen signs warning of the presence of all of these animals nearby, but she guessed, without any evidence to support her thesis, that the candles would ward them off.

So there would be periodic gunshots. Mortar fire. Thunder but no rain. There would be horns, and strings, but the woodwinds would dominate. The clarinets — and flutes! They sound innocent but always signal deviance. They would underline the madness. The air would be full of smoke. At times the audience would barely be able to see the action, and everyone, especially the Alaskans, would wonder why Alaska, the last frontier, pure and undiminished, ragged and filthy, endless, independent but then wholly dependent, which had sent billions of gallons of oil through a pipeline to be burned and sent into the atmosphere, was now on fire. And so there would be tragedy, too.

“There it is!” Paul yelled. On the opposite side of the ridge, the rusted roof of the mine was visible, just a slant of black against the sky, and Josie had the strange sensation of being home. The abandoned mining town was now their home. The path was illuminated by the partial moon and the kids could find their way.

“Wait,” Josie said, and scanned the area for cars. She half-expected a police car to be waiting. But there was no one. They were still alone, and her heart swelled.

“Can we run?” Paul asked.

Ana looked to him, as if unsure if she could support this suggestion. Then she nodded vigorously, kicking herself for doubting any radical act, especially one involving running.

“Just to the cabin,” Josie said, and enjoyed saying that. The kids ran ahead, down a dark path, toward the amber light.

Could you have animals in the show? she wondered. Wolves and bears. A bighorn sheep. An eagle dropping it a thousand feet to a silent death. Cruel logical murder in the wild. More gunshots. Someone would die but no one would care. The fires would burn. That could be part of the soundtrack — the slow hushing crackle of the fires. Sirens. She couldn’t help picturing the curtain call: cops, prisoners, firefighters. Evaders and crusaders. The fires, on stage, would rage behind them, pushing them to the edge. Finally the actors would leap into the audience, flee for the doors. More gunshots, real or unreal, no one would know, as everyone left the theater and ran into the night. When they left the theater, they’d forget where they’d come from.

—

Josie unlocked the front door, let the kids in and turned the light switch on. Nothing happened. She tried again, nothing. They entered the cabin by candlelight, trying anything electric, and found that something had happened: the power was out. She opened the fridge, feeling its fleeting cold, threw their groceries in, and closed it, wondering what among the things they’d just bought would go bad by morning.

“Is this okay?” Ana asked.

Josie turned to find her face, orange in the candlelight, her eyes shining. What Ana meant was: Should the lights really be on? Did someone turn off the lights because we shouldn’t be here? Should we be in Alaska, in an abandoned mine, alone, in this home that isn’t ours? What does it mean that it’s dark here, and we have only candles, and we just crossed a mountain to get here, and were not harmed by beast or man? How is this all allowed?

“It’s fine,” Josie said.

They lit more candles and brushed their teeth, and Josie read them C. S. Lewis from a copy they found in a bathroom drawer, and in the flickering candlelight, while reading Prince Caspian, Josie felt that they were living a life that had kinship with the heroes of these books. They had only walked two miles through the dark, through a forest and over a ridge to their home in a twice-abandoned mining town, but she felt there was not so great a difference between what she and her children were capable of and what these other protagonists had done. Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.