Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

On the gym’s stage, a trio of kids, all under six, chased a fourth child, a yellow-haired girl wearing a cape. “Are you sheltering here tonight?” a voice asked.

Josie turned to find a man in all black, a priest or pastor.

“I don’t know. I guess so,” she said.

Josie and Paul and Ana devoured spaghetti and broccoli, watermelon and chocolate cake. They hadn’t eaten, she realized, most of the day. “Are we going to school here?” Ana asked, her teeth brown with frosting. Paul smiled and shook his head.

“No, sweetie,” Josie said. “We’re just staying here a night or two.” But she had no idea what they would do next.

She listened to snippets of conversations between the volunteers in the gym. Most of the evacuees in the gym were from Morristown or other nearby towns. Only a few outbuildings had burned there so far, she learned. An army of firefighters were working valiantly, aided by a favorable wind that had slowed the progress of the burn.

When she brought their finished plates back to the cafeteria window, Josie noticed that a woman in a black uniform, a kind of fire information officer, had just pinned up a new map of the scope of the burn. Josie scanned it for Morristown and found it, an almost imperceptible rectangle just next to a hulking red mass, the area of the fire, the color and shape of an oversized heart. On the border between the red and the white she found, in tiny type, the words Peterssen Mine, nearly obscured by an X written in red ballpoint.

Josie returned to the trio of cots she and the kids had arranged. They had pushed them together to make one loosely connected mattress. Paul and Ana were playing Go Fish with a new deck of cards.

“Someone gave us these,” Paul explained.

Josie sat on the edge of the bed, then dropped to the pillow. She looked to the ceiling, thirty feet up, a mess of ropes and beams and banners reminding visitors of the school’s better seasons.

At nine o’clock most of the gym’s lights went off with a loud crack and sigh, leaving one bright cone in each corner. Ana wanted to continue to play cards, but Paul told her they should be quiet and still, so as not to disturb the rest of the people trying to sleep.

“You guys have everything you need?” a voice asked.

Josie looked up and squinted, adjusting her eyes to the dark. It was a man, an older man with a sweep of grey hair across his eyes. He looked familiar. Josie thought of home, someone from Ohio. No. Then she realized it was the firefighter she’d met before — it seemed like months ago — the gentle-eyed man who had come upon her when the inmates had changed her tire.

“We do,” she told him, and realized he didn’t recognize her. Why he was here, checking up on evacuees, was unclear. She didn’t want to distract him from his work, or get into a conversation about just what she’d been doing then, on that road, or what she was doing now, hundreds of miles north, in this shelter. She wouldn’t be able to explain it if she tried.

—

“Rain’s coming.” These were the first words Josie heard in the morning. It was dawn, and already the gym was bustling with volunteers loudly preparing breakfast. “This afternoon,” the voice said. It was coming from outside the gym, this booming voice with this significant news. Ana had woken up with the noise, but Paul slept on. Josie led Ana silently off the mattress and into the lobby, looking for the booming voice, but he had disappeared. Still, throughout the school hallways there was talk that the worst had come and gone, that the weeks ahead would bring more rain, more cold, a wet autumn that would end the fires and purify.

They walked outside to find the sky was still the same, white and yellow and smelling acrid. Josie stepped farther into the parking lot and now saw, coming from the north, a wall of dark clouds. Back inside, Josie peeked into the gym to see if Paul was awake, but he was still splayed on the bed, his mouth open, as if astonished by rest.

When she turned around, Ana was not at her side. Josie looked through the lobby, and heard some small voices coming from another hallway. She turned the corner to find Ana at the drinking fountain with another child, this one smaller. At first glance it looked like Ana was being Ana, pouring water from the fountain onto the head of this other child, a tow-headed boy of about four.

Josie was about to tell Ana to stop when she realized that Ana was feeding water to the child. Ana had directed the child to turn the faucet on, and while the water flowed, Ana reached up, her tiny hands making a tiny bowl, and she was bringing this water to the child, most of it landing on their shirts but enough finding its way to the blond child’s mouth.

Josie walked to them, and Ana looked up at her, worried, knowing she would need to explain.

“It’s okay,” Josie said.

“He couldn’t reach,” Ana said.

“I know. It’s fine. Let’s clean up, though.”

And so the three of them found paper towels in the bathroom and cleaned the water from the floor. The boy’s mother arrived as they were finishing and took the boy back to the gym. Josie and Ana stood in front in the hallway, next to the school’s darkened trophy case.

“Do we have to sleep here again?” Ana asked.

Josie didn’t know.

“I don’t want to,” Ana said.

“I don’t, either,” Josie said, realizing this was the first candid conversation she’d had with Ana in months, maybe ever. Usually she was strategizing how to tell Ana something, avoid telling her something, parsing and obfuscating in order to get a civilized result. Now she looked into Ana’s eyes, knowing that her daughter was different, she had evolved, and she saw, too, that Ana knew. She knew that she had shed one shape and was taking on another.

“We only have eighty-eight dollars,” Josie said, looking not at Ana now but at the portrait of some champion athlete from the early nineties, a girl who was probably now Josie’s age.

“Eighty-eight?” Ana said. “That’s a lot!”

—

Paul slept through a loud breakfast, and through the activation of the loudspeakers above, which announced a series of developments, the imminent arrival of other evacuees, and more news about the rain coming from the north. When he finally woke, there was a smattering of applause from the volunteers. A grandmotherly woman brought him a bowl of homemade oatmeal, which he ate greedily as she watched.

“Well, you’re safe now,” she said to Josie and her kids, as if concluding a conversation about their prior worries. “And at noon we’re having an activity for all the evacuees. All the families will be invited to participate in a crafting workshop, and afterward to talk about their feelings. It’ll be very therapeutic. But fun, too!”

Josie smiled, and the woman left to pick up the bowls left in various parts of the gym by the dozen or so children now running roughshod through it. The gym had gotten more crowded in the last hour, it seemed, and smelled of too many humans without access to showers, too many humans sleeping in old clothes in close proximity.

Staying here another hour suddenly seemed painful — another night altogether impossible. Josie tidied up their beds and took their two backpacks, and led Paul and Ana out of the school. She had no plan in mind, but wanted to see what options there were in town. Eighty-eight dollars would buy them one day of lodging and food at a real motel.

Now a woman was approaching. “Ma’am, I forgot to ask before”—Josie couldn’t place if she’d ever met this woman, but had to assume she had—“whether or not you have access to a phone. So many evacuees either left theirs behind or can’t get coverage. But we have landlines here. You can call long-distance, whatever.”