Heroes of the Frontier (8 page)

There was only the rumpled man standing at the edge of the stage. Now he was telling the audience that he'd worked for some time at a post office, and had memorized most zip codes.

Holy crap, Josie thought. He'll get murdered. What kind of world is this, she thought, when a man from the post office follows Luxembourgian magic and why were they, she and her kids, on this ship in the first place? With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity, she made precisely the wrong choice. She was a dentist but did not want to be a dentist. What could she do now? She was sure, at that moment, that she was meant to be a tugboat captain. My god, she thought, my god. At forty she finally knew! She would lead the ships to safety. That's why she'd come to Seward! There had to be a tugboat school in town. It all made sense. She could do that, and her days would be varied but always heroic. She looked at her children, and saw that Paul was now leaning against Charlie, asleep. Her son was asleep against this strange old man, and they were in Seward, Alaska. For the first time she realized how
Seward
sounded like
sewer,
and thought this an unfortunate thing, given Seward as a place was very dramatic, and very clean, and she thought it very beautiful, maybe the most beautiful place she'd ever been. It was here she would stay, and train to become a tugboat captain at the school that she would find tomorrow. All was aligned, all was right. And now, looking at her son sleeping against this man, this old man who was leaning forward, listening to the post office man talk about the post office, she felt her eyes welling up. She took a final sip from her second pinot and wondered if she'd ever been happier. No, never. Impossible. This old man had found them, and it could not be coincidence. This town was now their home, the site of this ordained and holy reunion, and all the people around them were congregants, all of them exalted and now part of her life, her new life, the life she was meant for. Tugboat captain. Oh yes, it had all been worth it. She sat back, knowing she'd arrived at her destiny.

Onstage, the post office man was telling the audience that for anyone who gave him a postal code, he could tell them what town they were from.

Josie thought this was some sort of a comedy bit, that he was kidding about the postal job, but immediately someone stood up and yelled “83303!”

“Twin Falls, Idaho,” he said. “Unincorporated part of town.”

The crowd erupted. The cheers were deafening. None of the magicians had elicited this kind of enthusiasm, nothing close. Now ten people were standing up, yelling their zip codes.

Josie, despairing for the waitress who had not returned, downed half a glass of water, and that act, the dilution of the holy wine within her, took her away from the golden light of grace she'd felt moments before, and now she was sober or something like it. Tugboat captain? Some voice was now speaking to her. What kind of imbecile are you? She didn't like this new voice. This was the voice that had told her to become a dentist, who told her to have children with that man, the loose-boweled man, the voice who every month told her to pay her water bill. She was being pulled back from the light, like an almost-angel now being led back to the mundanity of earthly existence. The light was shrinking to a pinhole and the world around her was darkening to an everywhere burgundy. She was back inside the liver-colored room and a man was talking about postal codes.

“Okay, you now,” the postal man said, and pointed to a white-haired woman in a fleece vest.

“62914,” she squealed.

“Cairo, Illinois,” he said, explaining that though it was spelled like the city in Egypt, it was pronounced “kay-ro,” the Illinois way. “Nice town,” he said.

The audience screamed, hooted. It was a travesty. Now Paul was awake, groggy and wondering what all the noise was about. Josie couldn't bear it. The noise was not about magic and tugboats: it was about zip codes.

“33950!” someone yelled.

“Punta Gorda, Florida,” the man said.

The crowd roared again. Ana looked around, unable to figure out what was happening. What was happening? Postal codes were making these people lose their minds. They all wanted to have their town named by the rumpled man with the microphone. They yelled their five digits and he guessed Shoshone, Idaho, New Paltz, New York, and Santa Ana, California. It was a melee. Josie feared people would storm the stage to rip his clothes off. Go back to sleep, Paul, Josie wanted to say. She wanted to flee, everything was wrong about all this. But she couldn't leave because now Charlie was standing up.

“63005!” he yelled.

The spotlight found him and he repeated the numbers. “63005!”

“Chesterfield, Missouri,” the postal man said.

Charlie's mouth dropped open. The spotlight remained on him for a few seconds, and Charlie's mouth stayed open, a black cave in the white light. Finally the light moved on, he was in darkness again—as if a spirit had held him aloft and suddenly let go, he sat down.

“Hear that?” he said to Paul. He turned to Josie and Ana, his eyes wet and his hands trembling. “Hear that? That man knows where I come from.”

Afterward, on the gangplank, Charlie offered to walk them back to the Chateau. Josie declined, and kissed his cheek.

“Give Charlie a hug and say thanks,” she told her kids.

Ana rushed in and hugged Charlie's legs. He put his hand on her back, his fingers spread like the ancient roots of a tiny tree. Paul moved closer but stopped, hoping, it seemed, that Charlie would fill the distance between them. Now Charlie was on one knee and his hands were outstretched. Paul shuffled toward him and Charlie brought him in, and Paul's head dropped onto Charlie's shoulder with something like relief.

“Let's write letters,” Charlie said into Paul's hair.

Paul nodded, and pulled back, as if to see if Charlie was serious. Josie knew Paul would obsess about these letters, and she was terrified by the possibility that she would have to offer their address to this man.

“How?” Paul asked. “Can we send a letter to a ship?”

Charlie didn't know. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out what turned out to be an itinerary. “Just take it,” he said to Josie, and she saw that on it was the ship's every port of call.

IN THE WHITE LIGHT MORNING
Josie had not slept well and her mood was apocalyptic. It was not a matter of falling asleep. After the magic show, they'd walked the mile home along the waterfront, the night brisk and the moon bright. They walked past the fishing boats, to the end of the docks, and then along the dirt road and through the woods until reaching the Chateau. Ana and Paul had been animated at first, recounting the show, asking questions about Charlie, where he was from and when he would die (Ana wondered this, throwing a stone into the cold water), but then, when they arrived at the Chateau, the kids were silent, somber, and didn't bother to take off their jeans or socks before dropping off to sleep.

After a nightcap of pinot—the last of the second bottle, she deserved it, given all she'd done and endured—Josie climbed up to join them, and fell asleep readily. But at first light she awoke, as she often did, her mind leaping with the realization that she had indeed killed that young man. Some young prosecutor with Josie's own face—it was her, but younger and with hair in a high tight bun, a great suit. This legal version of herself was leaping around a courtroom, wood-paneled and filled with sensible citizens, insisting upon it. Convict this woman! Hold her accountable!

Josie opened the door to the quiet woods and walked to the waterfront. The sun was beginning to bring pale color to the mountains on the bay's far shore. She squinted at the water's blinding shimmer and beyond, the otherworldly glow of the low sun on the mountain snow. She walked across the beach, almost stepping on the otter skull her children had presented to her the day before. She sat down again on her petrified white tree stump and raked her hands through the gravelly sand, lifting a handful, letting it pass through her fingers.

Jeremy. He'd been a patient since he was twelve. One of those boys who said
Ma'am. Yes Ma'am. Thank you Ma'am
. He had beautiful teeth. Every time she saw him she hoped for cavities, loved seeing him that much, but it was only twice a year in the office, a cleaning, a checkup, some conversation, and the occasional sighting on the street. The kind of boy who, when they ran into him at the park, he would leave his group, a group of teenagers lying about, a pride of lazy lions doing nothing on the park bench by the creek, and he would jog over and crouch down and talk to Paul and Ana, would offer them whatever gum or mints he had in his pocket. His parents were not well-off but they were solid—both worked for the city and had good health plans. The father was from Venezuela, the mother from Cuba, and they began to come for check-ups, too, on his recommendation—Jeremy had vouched for Josie, was the light of the family, and though the parents weren't nearly as talkative or preternaturally aglow as their son, they all liked to talk about Jeremy. How could we make more Jeremys? He had four younger siblings, and he knew everything about each one of them. Josie could ask any detail, How's little Ashley? And he'd have a story. What's the baby doing now?

Then he was seventeen, eighteen, and had become a tall and strikingly handsome young man with a boomerang jawline. Tania, the hygienist, took notice of the way he filled a room, six two, his wide shoulders, and made sure to brush her breasts against him as she cleaned his teeth. His bright green eyes, his unblemished flesh, his impossibly smooth chin. He did not need to shave, he said. “No Ma'am. Once or twice a year is all I need right now.” He smiled and ran his hands over his noble face. He played soccer, lacrosse, and then, at Josie's doing—she insisted when she signed up—he had been Paul's counselor at the rec center summer day-camp.

Paul was no athlete but had been treated with special consideration. Jeremy had given him a nickname, El Toro, because Paul had one day worn a T-shirt bearing the silhouette of a bull, and Paul grinned shyly when Jeremy yelled the name across the street, from his car window, whenever he saw Paul in town. “El Toro! Charge!” Josie had found it written on all the flyers Paul took home from camp. Under “Name of Camper,” Jeremy had always written, in bold all-capitals, EL TORO! Even the exclamation point.

After summer camp she'd been one of the many mothers who asked Jeremy to babysit. So rare to have a male babysitter, she said, every other mother said. She'd been able to wrangle his services three times, and as far as she could tell he had spent each of those nights being attacked, with affection, by her children. Were they so starved of contact? When she got home she would find them asleep, their hair matted to the pillow, Jeremy on the couch, exhausted, smelling sweetly of sweat, and he would tell her about the night. They'd eaten their pizza, he'd say, and as they walked away from the table, Ana had leaped on him like a wolverine.

“I don't think she let go for the next three hours,” he said. Paul was reticent at first, but soon the three of them were wrestling, were jousting with Jeremy's lacrosse sticks and shields made from couch cushions. “But mostly wrestling. Me on the ground and them jumping on me like little animals. They're pretty physical. Way more than Paul was at camp,” Jeremy said.

Convinced that they were expelling some latent aggression toward their absent father, that this could only be healthy, she asked Jeremy to come back, and he did, two more times, and each time the battles grew more epic, the final one taking place in the backyard.

“They would have broken something in the house otherwise,” Jeremy explained. “Ana called me
Dad
at one point. When I was brushing her teeth. It was pretty funny. Paul was embarrassed.”

Josie was mortified. Did Jeremy know that Carl had moved out? Was he old enough to know that her children were starving for a male presence in the house, and that her daughter, being four, had virtually no memory, would be happy with Jeremy as a replacement man, that he could eclipse and erase Carl in a matter of weeks?

“So were you in Panama?” he asked, pointing to a photo of Josie with a dozen Peace Corps volunteers. She'd spent her two years in Boca del Lobo, and it was a mixed bag, a few successes, a few friends, the whole issue with her friend Rory, now in prison, but still. Good work could be done, she said.

Jeremy didn't know what he would do after high school. This was the fall of his senior year. She had assumed he would have had a sturdy plan by then, limitless college options.

“I don't want to be in more classrooms right away,” he said, and turned at the sound of footsteps. It was Ana, awake, in her Buzz Lightyear pajamas. Josie stretched out her arms, and Ana rushed to her but then paused between them, as if wanting to fall into her mother's arms but afraid this would alienate Jeremy in some way, would hurt the chances he'd come back. Instead she did a sort of twist-dance on the carpet, and said “Champagne on my shoulders!” She'd been saying that recently.

“Step here,” Jeremy said, crouched on the floor, putting his palms out. Ana did not hesitate. She put one bare foot on each of his hands, balancing herself with her hands on his shiny black head. Her eyes betrayed that she didn't know what would happen, but was certain it would be incredible and worth any risk.

“Okay, now let go,” he said. She obeyed.

Now he slowly rose to his full height, somehow balancing Ana on his palms with such sureness that she felt free to spread her arms wide, as if receiving the bounty of the sun.

“My dad used to do that with me,” he said, barely exerting any effort, this forty-pound child still standing on his hands. Now he lifted her higher. “Can you get the ceiling?” he asked.

Ana reached, grunting, until she tapped it with her finger. “Down please,” she said, and he lowered her slowly, then dropped her in a heap on the couch and pretended to sit on her, trying to get comfortable as she shrieked gleefully below.

“You're a great mom,” Jeremy said to Josie, still sitting on Ana. “I mean, in general, but especially because you let me do stuff like this. Not all parents do. But kids are beasts. They need to sweat and scream and wrestle.” Jeremy collected Ana in his arms and plunged his mouth into her stomach, making a loud wet raspberry. Ana's eyes were charged, her hands like claws in front of her, waiting for the next attack. But instead Jeremy smoothed her shirt, patted her tummy and stood her up on the carpet, as if restoring a fallen statue.

“Thank you,” Josie said, overcome.

In return for Jeremy's kindness and strength, all Josie had ever wanted was to tell him how much she felt he was the hope of the world. Is that all she did? No. She said more, and this is why she should not speak, ever again, and why she cherished every day when she spoke to no one but her two children. She knew that the color of the sky affected her moods, the sun changed her outlook and words, and if she took a brisk walk during lunch and saw something beautiful she was liable to say something exuberant, or be too full of happiness for an hour or so, and this was when she made mistakes. In her exuberance she would reveal too much about herself. She would overpraise, she would urge people into tasks they could not complete.

It happened two weeks after that night. She had come back from lunch and was feeling some joy the fall air had given her, and could hardly concentrate. She had three patients that afternoon, and all were subjected to her inane bliss. First there was Joanna Pasquesi, a Rubenesque high-school sophomore who revealed she was considering going out for the school musical. It was
A Chorus Line
that year, and with altogether too much zeal Josie urged her to try out, to make their selection of her beyond debate, and went on a bit about the need for body diversity on the stage, though in reality she was trying to score a very belated victory against the gatekeepers who had kept her out of her own high-school musical,
Cabaret,
for which Josie was not called back. So Joanna Pasquesi, who had actually checked her watch twice while Josie rambled on, left feeling inspired—she said so, at least—though she might have been simply stunned into submission.

And then Jeremy came in, and they talked for a time about her kids,
Such cool kids,
he said, and they laughed about their hyperactivity, their madness, their need to wrestle with him, touch ceilings with him, and then conversation turned to her, and the Peace Corps, and though she rarely was so exuberant about it, this time she told him it was the greatest experience of her life, that they had made such a difference there, that it was just after the country had taken ownership of the canal, that there was such optimism then, so many changes, and that being part of that transition, representing the U.S. in Panama, this crucial partner, at a crucial moment—she went on and on, and it was wildly convincing. Even Tania was listening.

And then, with his smooth young face and sincerity, Jeremy told her he wanted to enlist. He wanted to be a marine. He wanted to make a difference in Afghanistan, help open schools for Afghan girls, work on clean water projects, bring stability to a country on the verge of great things. Josie's eyes filled and she squeezed his shoulder. She did not do what good people would have done, which would have been to say nothing. Enlisting during a war was such grave business that only an idiot would praise this notion. Josie should have been judicious enough to know that she could not, should not influence such a decision in any way—to recognize that this was between Jeremy and his parents. To know that she was nothing.

But she was a fool who knew no boundaries, and was not very sure about the state of the war—she was relatively certain it was winding down and would present little danger to Jeremy. So she told him that sounded wonderful. That he, as the hope of the world, a gentle soul, a formidable figure, could make such a difference. That the marines, that the region—that Afghanistan itself!—needed someone like him. Somehow she had confused her enthusiasm for Joanna Pasquesi's musical ambitions with Jeremy's nation-building hopes, and further had conflated her own time in Panama, the expression of American love through cisterns and the teaching of English by men and women in sandals and khakis (for the impulse did come from love, love of the world) with Jeremy's expression of the same love, though in uniform and carrying an AK-47. It was not the same thing, and now he was dead and his parents hadn't spoken to her since.

This has absolutely nothing to do with you, her friends said, bewildered that she would take any responsibility at all. But then why hadn't his parents been back? Josie had heard, later, that they'd been against his enlisting from the start. And what they didn't know, and she would never tell them, and had not told anyone, was that he had approached her, in the parking lot of her office one evening, at five—he knew when she'd be there, weeks after that visit where she squeezed his shoulder and said
Wonderful
—and told her that her support had been so important to him. That his parents had been unsure, they'd been worried, but they had respect for her, for Josie, his dentist, that her support had meant so much to them and him. He had enlisted and was killed six months later.

This is why she no longer offered advice, why she was happy to let go of her practice. Liberated. Thrilled. Away and free. This was why, outside her parenting duties, she had not left her bedroom most of January, her limbs unliftable and her face numb. No one had told her. Not the parents, none of their friends. The funeral had already happened. He'd been shot in some remote Afghani hillside and had bled for six hours before dying. He'd had time to write a note to his parents, which had been found on him, the contents of which Josie would never know. A boy of eighteen dying alone, bleeding alone, writing to his parents—how did all this happen? How was this allowed? Josie wanted no more of this. This idea of knowing people. Knowing people meant telling them what to do or not to do, providing advice, encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and all of these things brought misery and lonely death.

“Mom?” It was Paul.

Josie turned. Her son was in yesterday's clothes, and had somehow gotten out of the Chateau, walked through the woods, across the parking lot and found her there, on the shore.