Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

COOPER LIVED IN A REAL HOUSE, a red-brick ranch with a black roof, which was surprising, though Josie didn’t know why. He’d told her he lived there in town, and he’d been wearing clean clothes when she’d met him, so did she really think he lived in a tent? Something about the hootenanny had her thinking of hoboes.

Josie and the kids had walked over the mountain trail and into town, and Cooper opened the door before she rang the bell. “Right on time,” he said. He’d told her to come at eleven, with the rest of the players trickling in after noon.

The kids entered the house reluctantly, but then Ana ran to the back porch, where she’d spotted an ancient hobby horse on wheels. Paul walked in slowly, looking around as if this might be his future home.

“I made some lemonade,” Cooper said. “The kids can drink it out there if they want,” he said, indicating the backyard, where Ana was already testing the horse for weak points. There were a handful of other playthings strewn about the porch, all of them weather-worn and missing key parts. “Or they could stay and watch.”

Ana was already outside and couldn’t hear him. But Paul stayed by Josie’s side as Cooper led them into a wide living room, most of it dark but for a cone of light in the center, coming from a bright round skylight. There were Persian rugs overlapping each other, a pair of drama masks, happy and sad, over the fireplace. Josie complimented the house, which was cave-like and clean. Cooper sat on a leather ottoman and gathered his guitar on his thigh.

“I figured we could start alone,” he said. “Just to get your bearings. Or for me to get mine.”

“And the rest of them? They’re all okay with a checkup?” Josie tried to conjure what tools she’d be able to muster and sterilize. She’d have to bend a paperclip. “And these guys are professionals or…?” She wasn’t quite sure why she asked. She knew they weren’t a band of professional musicians, playing parades and parks in Alaska.

No, no, Cooper said. They all had full-time jobs, or as close to full-time as anyone had in the town. A couple were seasonal oil workers, one was in commercial fishing, another had retired as a lumberjack. “Suki’s the drummer. She waits tables at Spinelli’s. And Cindy’s the new mailperson around here. She’s the singer,” Cooper said, and it was clear that there was something about Cindy — was she beautiful? Were she and Cooper involved? “We just found out a few weeks ago she could sing. She wasn’t at the parade.”

Josie didn’t know what to do with herself. Stand? Sit? She sat on the arm of the couch.

“So guitar?” he asked. “I play piano, trumpet…”

“Guitar is fine,” Josie said.

“You have in mind a song, or—” he asked. “I assume you have lyrics already.”

Josie didn’t have any words at all in mind. She had only the thousand notions from the night before.

“Maybe you could start with some lower chords,” Josie said. “It was when you were strumming yesterday, at the end of that last song, that I started thinking about this.”

Cooper tried a few chords, and then strummed one that sounded right.

“What’s that?” Josie asked.

“G.”

“Just G? Not flat or sharp or anything?”

“Just G. You want me to keep going?”

“I should be writing this down,” Josie said.

“I’ll remember,” Cooper said, then went to the kitchen and came back with a legal pad and a pencil. Paul was sitting close to Josie, silent and seeming to understand what was happening. She knew the important thing, now, was to act normal, in command — to avoid this being some pivotal moment where he realized his mother had left the rational world.

“Can you write for me?” she asked Paul.

He took the pad eagerly.

“Write down G,” she said, but he already had. He underlined it for her, and looked up at her, now involved, no longer concerned.

Josie asked Cooper for other chords that were low like G. He played two more, named them A and C, and Paul wrote them down.

“You have a piano here?” Josie asked.

Cooper smiled, and Paul reached across her lap to point at a small piano in the corner. Josie glanced out the back window, and saw no sign of Ana.

“Can you go check on her?” she asked Paul.

“No,” he said. Josie was stunned into silence. “I want to stay,” he said, his tone softening. “I want to hear.”

Ana reappeared from the side of the house, carrying the disembodied antlers of a deer. She seemed to be speaking to them, or to herself, animated but stern.

“Okay,” Josie said. She turned to Cooper. “While you strum the G, could I play with the piano?”

“Of course,” he said, and Paul wrote, “Mom on piano:”

She hit a key, and it sounded tinny and wrong. She moved twenty keys down, and that was all wrong, too. She found a spot in between and hit a note. It sounded like a bell. It sounded like Sunny. She hit it again.

“That’s nice,” Cooper said.

“What was it?” Josie asked.

“B-sharp.”

Paul wrote that down, and Josie had a thought, too soon to articulate. What she couldn’t say at that moment was that this sound from the piano was what should be her voice. In her head Josie heard this strumming, his low strumming, then heard a bell-clear voice, high in pitch but strong, lyrical but determined, and this voice was both hers and Sunny’s.

“Is that the note you want?” Cooper asked. “Any others?”

She tried some of the keys nearby, but none sounded as certain as that first one.

“Can you strum that G again?” she asked, and he did. “Now can you vary between G and F and D? Make some kind of song out of it?”

Cooper played the chords, and they sounded right for a moment, until he began filling the transitions with some kind of extra flourishes.

“No, no, not those,” Josie said, and mimicked what he’d been doing. He laughed, stopped, and returned to the regular rhythm he’d begun before. Paul was busy writing.

“Good, good,” she said, and returned her attention to the piano. She played her B-sharp, and then leaped a foot over and found another note she liked.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“G-flat,” he said.

Now she alternated between the two notes, the sound like a bad man walking up a set of very high steps. Her eyes welled and her breathing grew shallow, but her fingers continued, now with more force. It sounded like it happened that way. That’s the way it sounded, she thought, but she didn’t know what the music was describing, what exactly it was recounting.

“Should I keep going?” Cooper asked.

“Yes!” she said, not looking up. She saw only the keys in front of her, and she made the footstep sounds louder, then softer, faster and then slower. She paused, continued. It was exactly right, she thought, though she never wanted to hear it again.

“I’m going to check on Ana,” Josie said, and walked outside. She needed a break. It was too much. From the back porch she saw Ana in the shallow woods, holding the antlers on her head.

“You good?” Josie asked.

“I’m looking for a frog friend,” Ana said.

“Makes sense,” Josie said, and returned. Paul was scribbling furiously on his pad, as if to avoid eye contact with the two new women in the room.

“Couple new arrivals,” Cooper said.

One was introduced as Cindy, the singer. She was a blond, cherub-faced woman of about thirty, wearing a tanktop and the grey and blue pants of a mailperson. The other was Suki, Asian, lithe, muscular, in a fleece vest and shorts. The two of them were setting up Suki’s drumset.

“So you’re a dentist?” Cindy asked. “I haven’t had a checkup in a few years. Am I doomed?”