Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie followed her finger to the mountains. The sky was white, choked with smoke. “How close is it?” she asked.

“Close. You have to go north. There are buses if you need them. They’re headed to Morristown. Leaving in twenty minutes.”

“Do you know if it’s already at the silver mine?” Josie asked, but the woman waved her off, and continued down the street. She was some kind of volunteer, knocking on doors.

“Where’s the fire, Mom?” Paul asked.

Sirens vandalized the air.

“Let me think,” Josie said.

The fire trucks were heading out of town, going south, while families with cars were already speeding north.

“Come inside,” Josie said, and hustled her kids into Cooper’s house. He was on the phone again. He turned to Josie. “Half hour, tops. I’d take you but I don’t have room.”

“What do you know about the silver mine?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “What silver mine?”

She took him aside, out of the kids’ earshot. She told him about staying at the Peterssen Mine, over the hills, that they had all their belongings there, all their money and an RV, that it was their only way out of town. “You think we can get there in time?” she asked.

He looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

“Just get on a bus,” he said.

—

“What about our stuff?” Paul whispered to Josie. Cooper had packed two backpacks for them, full of food and water, flashlights and batteries, and sent them down the road to the elementary school parking lot, where the buses were assembled. Most were empty — most of the people in town had their own cars and trucks.

Josie raised her hands in the air, with a magician’s flair, and stepped onto the bus. Paul and Ana followed, and aboard they found only five seats taken, by two elderly couples and one teenager traveling alone. They sat down, Josie looked into the hills, where there was a wall of green and grey smoke, wondering if the fire had already taken the cabin, or would ever take it. She’d asked everyone she knew, and no one had any idea.

“Mom, really,” Paul whispered. He needed clarity.

Josie knew she should be reassuring her children about their prospects, but she was too stunned to put on a front. She pictured the cabin on fire, all their drawings on fire, all the games on fire, Candyland on fire, the children’s swords and bows and arrows, all the food they’d just bought. She thought of the Chateau. They had not left much there, a few items of clothing, and would not miss any of it. But it would surely be gone — if the fire came to that valley it would burn quickly and hot. There were too many trees, everything so dry, and no one there to fight off the flames.

And then she saw it. A bright yellow glow from behind the hills, as if an oblong sun was quickly rising. But it was no sun, it was the fire, and she knew it meant it had overtaken the valley of the mine. Black smoke billowed upward, and she guessed one of the machines had been engulfed, the sudden burning of some kind of fuel. The Chateau. It had to be, its tank full of gas. She thought of Stan, and how she would tell Stan, standing on his white carpet, that the Chateau was no more. Knowing Stan, he’d make a profit on it.

Then she thought of the velvet bag. All the money they had left. She had about eighty dollars with her.

“Good thing we were here,” Paul said, and Josie realized the truth of it. If they hadn’t come to town, if she hadn’t made her attempts at music in Cooper’s home, they would have been at the mine that day. Alone, without a soul knowing they were there.

“Everyone ready?” the driver asked.

The bus sputtered awake and pointed itself north.

—

“Are you done with that?” Paul asked.

Josie looked over to him. He’d moved himself to the next seat over, like some independent fellow traveler. Ana was lying on the floor, gnawing on Josie’s leg, waiting to be told to stop.

“With the music?” Josie asked, and Paul closed his eyes. Of course the music, his placid face said.

Wasn’t she on the verge of some great discovery — if not one meant for the world at least a private revelation, bringing forth the music within her? Josie watched the scenery pass, the fire trucks heading the other way, toward the trouble, and she realized, with some surprise, that the music she needed to hear, that she’d just heard, that she had brought forth, had swum in, she needed no more of it. Not right now at least. Cooper would not understand this. You’re onto something, he might say. Or would he say that? She was probably not onto something. She was more likely a woman, temporarily insane, who had been conjuring dissonant madness from a group of pliable musicians wanting free dental care. But what about staying in that town, Cooper’s town, and weaving herself into it, becoming their new dentist, their resident eccentric, amateur composer, part of the musicians’ world, raising her children there? No. Or not yet. She was free of it. She was free of so many things, the fear of Carl, the ghost of Evelyn. She would not ever feel free of Jeremy, but two out of three was a start. She was no longer fleeing anything. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be kept, handled, cared for.

“I don’t know,” she told Paul.

She could not promise that she would not do it again. She had no idea. She needed no more music, but needed to do something else, and to see something else, and she needed to make her children braver and stronger by moving. She could make no promises about what she would want to do or see in the future, and she hoped her children would forgive her for this lack of certainty, this never-settled question in their lives, a limitless sky that had the power to make them fearless, utterly indomitable, or cripple them with fear.

—

They drove for hours, over streams and through wide expanses of taiga, the sky ahead a velvet blue. Cooper had said he would meet Josie and her kids, and as the scenery passed, she became unsure this was something she wanted. She was not sure she could trust her state of mind, but after twenty minutes of riding away, she felt a familiar exhilaration, the breathless freedom of having left trouble behind. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had when she left Ohio, and when they’d landed in Alaska. Now the Chateau was gone, the cabin was gone, they were free from everything again. They knew no one on the bus, and were headed to a place where they knew not a soul.

By the time they pulled into a wide parking lot loud with police lights and emergency vehicles, Ana was asleep on Josie’s lap and Paul had moved to another seat, two rows up. This was new: until even just a few weeks ago, he never would have ceded the position of human pillow; he certainly wouldn’t be so far away from the sleeping Ana, when at any moment she might need his help. Now, though, he was looking out the window, taking in the bright parking lot scene, the police lights, the dozens of volunteers in orange and yellow rushing to and fro.

“Inside the school there,” the driver said.

Josie woke up Ana, and she led her and Paul off the bus. Paul was carrying one of the backpacks and Josie had the other.

The school was a low-slung brick building, the front double doors opened wide, a woman sitting at a folding table inside.

“Hi there,” the woman said, her voice quiet and kind, as if she knew of the sleeping horror inside of them and didn’t want to wake it.

Josie gave the woman their names, and the woman directed them into the gym, where enormous lights illuminated, in discrete sections, every service available — first aid, bedding, food. At the window where the high school normally served lunch, a variety of fresh food was being spooned onto plates. Half the gym was a grid of cots that had been neatly arranged, though most were empty. A computer-printed sign advertised the services of a registered nurse. She stood by the sign, a young man lying on a cot next to her with no discernible injuries; he was leaning over the side, reading a comic book.