Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“No, a meal!”

Paul tilted his head, as if he was on the verge of understanding.

“Are you hungry or not?” Josie asked.

“No!” Ana yelled, now about to cry again.

Paul looked to Ana, his eyes probing. “Is there another way you could say it?”

“I want to see it!” Ana wailed, and immediately Paul understood.

“She wants a mirror, not a meal, ” he told his mother, a flash of delight in his ice-priest eyes. Ana nodded vigorously, and a smile overtook Paul’s face. This was treasure to him, this was joy. All he wanted was to know his sister better than anyone else.

Josie lifted her so she could face the small mirror hung high over the sink. She showed Ana the wound, fearing she’d wail again, shocked by the bandage overtaking her chin. But Ana only grinned, touching it lovingly, her eyes alight.

—

They got back on the road, heading south toward the Kenai Peninsula, with an eye toward Seward, about which Josie knew nothing. The kids sat at the banquette in back, Josie unsure exactly how that was safe, given the walls of the Chateau were dangerously thin and the benches of the banquette had seatbelts as old as herself. But the kids were loving it. Ana couldn’t believe she didn’t have to be in a car seat. She felt like she was getting away with some fantastic heist.

Ana yelled something from the back. It sounded like a question, but Josie couldn’t hear anything. “What’s that?” Josie yelled.

“She asked if you ever lived here,” Paul yelled.

“In Alaska? No,” Josie yelled over her shoulder.

Ana thought her mother had lived everywhere. It was Josie’s fault; she’d made the mistake of mentioning her travels before their births, her many addresses. Her kids were too young for this, both of them were, but she found on too many occasions that she couldn’t help it. When they’d heard mention of Panama in a documentary about the canal, she told them she’d lived there for two years, explaining the Peace Corps, the village on a hill where she and two others with no particular training in mountainside irrigation tried to help the residents with mountainside irrigation. She couldn’t help herself, and assumed her kids would forget it all. Ana forgot most things, but Paul forgot nothing, and as if to thwart her efforts to write the past in disappearing ink, he made his own copy, like some tiny deranged monk. They knew that after the Peace Corps and before dentistry school she’d gone to school, briefly, to train seeing-eye dogs (she dropped out after a month but the prospect held great fascination for them). They knew about Walla Walla and Iron Mountain, two of the four places she’d lived as a child. She thought it too soon to tell them about how she’d emancipated herself at seventeen, about Sunny, the woman who supported that insurgency and took her in. They occasionally wondered about Josie’s parents, where they were, why they didn’t have biological grandparents, why they only had Luisa, Carl’s mother, living in Key West. They knew something about London, the four months in Spain — that period of whiplash moves, driven by whim and calamity. Why was it important to her that they know she’d been somewhere, had done more than dentistry? Was it wonderful to have changed so many times? She suspected it was not wonderful.

Now Paul was talking, but he was quieter than Ana, and Josie heard little more than wisps of consonants and vowels.

“I can’t hear you!” Josie yelled.

“What?” Paul yelled back to her.

The Chateau was rattling and heaving and drowned all voices. By its nature a recreational vehicle carried along all manner of kitchen items — in this case, secondhand castoffs of Stan and his white-carpet wife — and every dish rattled, every glass clinked against every other glass. There were plates, and tea sets, and coffee cups, and silverware. There was a coffeemaker. There was a stove. There were pots and pans. There was a wok. A blender. A mixer in case anyone wanted to make a bundt cake. All of these were contained in cabinets, cheap lightweight cabinets like they had at home, but at home these cabinets were not hurtling through space at forty-eight miles an hour, carried on ancient shocks and tires. And because the vehicle was a dying machine, even the cabinets were poorly assembled and only casually attached to the vehicle. The sound, then, was like one would hear during an earthquake. The silverware shook like the chains of some restless ghost. And the cacophony grew far louder when they slowed down or sped up, or drove over an incline or decline or bump or pothole.

IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? a lighted sign on the side of the road asked, and Josie felt found and accused until the sign changed to read DON’T PARK ON DRY GRASS and she realized these were messages meant to prevent forest fires.

After an hour, Josie pulled over. Going from forty-eight to a stop was a task akin to holding back an avalanche. All the weight was carried in the rear, so the front of the car heaved and shuddered, the wheels shaking. They parked in a wide lot by the water, but Josie’s nerves were shot.

She climbed up from the cab and sat on the couch opposite the banquette. She told Paul and Ana they had the unique opportunity to help with an extraordinary project. They were intrigued.

“We’re putting the kitchen in the shower,” she said.

Intuitively they understood.

Ana opened the cabinet under the sink and found a pot. “Like this?” she asked, heading for the bathroom.

“Wait,” Josie said, “let’s get towels first.”

So they lined the shower floor with towels. Then they wrapped plates and glasses and put these on the shower floor. When they were out of towels, they opened their duffel bags and wrapped plates and silverware in clothes they could spare, and they placed each bundle on the shower floor. They emptied the kitchen of plates, pans, cups and glasses, put them all carefully in the shower, and closed the door. When Josie started the Chateau again, and pulled back onto the highway, the sound was wonderfully muffled and she appeared to her children some kind of mastermind.

“What if we need to cook?” Paul asked.

“I don’t want to cook,” Josie said.

She didn’t want to drive, either, the road giving her no peace, only faces. She saw the smooth handsome face of the young soldier in whose death she was complicit. No, she thought, give me another face. She saw the yellow eyes of the cancer-ridden woman who stole her business. No. Another. Carl, grinning on the toilet. No. The face of the woman’s lawyer, her son-in-law, cruel and mercenary. Josie finally arrived at the onion-skinned face of Sunny, a face she tried to conjure when she sought peace. For a moment her mind rested there, on Sunny’s bright black eyes, imagined Sunny running her bony fingers through her hair — Josie had allowed it even though she was a teenager and furious at the world — and then and now, for a moment, she felt something like calm.

—

In the afternoon they made it to Seward, and Seward felt like a real place. It was muscular and clean. It sat at the end of a great fjord, freezing water stampeding in from the Gulf of Alaska. The town’s main strip was lousy with souvenir shops, tinkly glass shelves full of cartoon abomination T-shirts, but on the outskirts, Seward was raw, an actual place of business. Fishing boats came and went, and tankers, and small container ships, and they all passed through the narrow inlet called Resurrection Bay, a name for grizzled explorers and saints.

They arrived at an RV park outside of town, and parked facing a wide seaweed-covered beach. Across the water, half a mile maybe, there was the Kenai range, a wall of immaculate mountains — sawtoothed, silver and white, monumental and defiant. Along the shore were occasional stumps of trees rising from the sand, petrified in white.