Heroes of the Frontier (18 page)

“Who told you Jeremy was killed?”

Now Ana turned to Paul, who had stopped his archery, having heard it all. When Ana turned back to Josie, her eyes had welled. Josie had not told Ana about Jeremy's death, and had not told Paul, either. She looked to him now, disappointed.

“Mario told me,” Paul said, petulantly. Mario was another camper, another boy Jeremy had babysat. And then, as if to answer Josie's next question, he said, “Ana should know. Otherwise she thinks someone's alive when he's dead. That's stupid.”

A mechanical wheeze sounded behind Josie, and she turned to find an enormous vehicle, slowing to park behind the Chateau. There was dust all around, but when it settled she saw that it was a silver pickup truck with a wooden home, pitch-roofed and painted black, sitting in the bed. The little house had windows, and a tiny tin stovepipe, looking altogether quaint but for the words “Last Chance” painted on the front-facing wall. Below those words, in smaller print, were the words “Beholden to None.”

“What's that, Mom?” Ana asked.

Josie said nothing. She expected that one of the truck's doors would open momentarily, and didn't want to be caught describing the inhabitants. There was good reason to pack her children up quickly and leave, given the friendliness of the people steering a vehicle like this, which could not possibly be street-legal and hinted at the end of the world, was not guaranteed.

“Paul, come here,” she whispered, and he brought his bow and arrow to her, and she subtly arranged both him and Ana such that she stood between them and this harbinger of doom.

The door opened. “Are we open?” a cheerful voice said. It was a young woman with a brilliant mane of raven-black hair. She emerged from the truck in a two-footed jump, her heavy boots making an assertive sound of arrival in the white gravel. Wearing a loose black T-shirt and denim shorts, she began to stretch, one arm raised high, revealing a lithe and busty torso, while her other hand pushed the passenger seat forward, allowing the release of three children, all athletic and tanned, from the depths of the truck. They each jumped from the truck as she had—that is, as if landing on the moon. All seeming to be within the age range of Josie's kids, they ran directly to the empty booth, having assumed Paul and Ana had gotten their bows there. The driver's door opened and a short man emerged, no taller than the woman, and said, “Is it open?” He leaned back, stretching with a loud groan. Broad-shouldered and muscular, he wore a V-neck undershirt and canvas workpants tucked into hiking boots. He made his way around the truck and down the slope toward the archery field.

“I asked her but she didn't answer,” the woman said, nodding her chin toward Josie. Her tone was familiar.

“Sorry,” Josie said. “I didn't know you were asking
me
. I don't work here. We just got here and have been messing around.”

“So it's free,” the man said. He had an impish, closed-mouth smile but his eyes were tight and bright and lit with a kind of mischief that could go either way—practical jokes around the house, or handmade bombs in the shed.

“There's no more bows, Dad,” one of the new children said. This was a girl of about nine. She and her younger brothers had investigated the booth and found it empty.

“You bring those?” the woman asked Josie, indicating the bows and arrows Ana and Paul were holding.

“No, they were just in the field,” Josie said. “Your kids are welcome to use them. We've been here for a while.” By this Josie meant that she and her children would be ceding this field to this family, and would be fleeing quickly.

“No, no. We came because we saw you guys out here. We can wait,” the man said, and extended his hand. “I'm Kyle. This is Angie.” Josie shook their hands and introduced Ana and Paul. Kyle and Angie's kids were soon upon them, and were introducing themselves—Suze, Frank and Ritter—with the utmost civility, making Paul and Ana look skittish and impolite by comparison.

“Do you live there?” Ana asked. She was pointing to the black home sitting in the truckbed.

“Ana,” Josie said, then turned to Kyle and Angie. “Sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. We sleep there at night, yup,” Kyle said to Ana, squatting down in front of her. “You like it?” Ana was noncommittal at first, then gave a slow nod. “Sure you do,” he said, smiling his closed-mouth smile, his bright eyes shining in their devilish or saintly way. His grin grew, and now Josie saw his teeth, oversized incisors, lending his face a wolfish cast. “We built it ourselves,” he said. “You want to look inside?”

“No, no. That's okay,” Josie said, but found herself and her children being led to the truck by the eager Kyle. Angie stayed with her children, who were now using the bows and arrows dropped in the high grass by Paul and Ana. Kyle jumped onto the truck's back bumper and opened the back door of the structure, which resembled a chicken coop from the outside and inside, an army barracks, with a series of bunks on either side, the floor covered in a carpet remnant. There were also stacks of towels, and magazines, and baseballs and bats, blankets. At the end of each bed, a flashlight hung from a hook.

“Cool, right?” Kyle said.

Ana readily agreed, then said, “We live in a car, too.”

Kyle laughed. “Well, then it's good we all met up, right? Fellow travelers. Mom, let me get you a chair.” For a second Josie thought Kyle's mother was somewhere in the truck, too, perhaps in a compartment underneath, then realized he was referring to her.

He pulled a short stack of folding chairs from the chicken coop—the structure was yacht-like, a paragon of space and economy—and set them out, three in a row, with a commanding view of the field. In moments Josie had been given a bottle of hard cider, was sitting beside Angie and Kyle, the three of them watching the five kids taking turns, complimenting each other, acting with stunning civility.

Kyle tapped Josie's bottle, then Angie's, in a kind of toast without a toast. “So where you headed?”

Josie told them she had no fixed itinerary.

Angie's eyebrows leaped, and she gave a conspiratorial look to Kyle. “I told you,” she said. “Single mom with two kids, using an abandoned archery field. Our kind of people, I said.”

Josie and Kyle and Angie compared notes about Homer and Seward and Anchorage and the rest stops and attractions in between. Kyle and Angie had been to the tragic zoo outside Anchorage, too, and had noticed the unmistakable pathos of that one certain antelope. He'd been looking to the mountains for salvation when they'd seen him, too. Angie was a beautiful woman, Josie realized, and she and Kyle were younger than she had first thought. There wasn't a wrinkle on either one of them, though it was clear they didn't stay out of the sun. They looked like coeds from the seventies, the silken-haired and well-tanned types once featured in cigarette ads.

“You gone for good?” Angie asked.

“How do you mean?” Josie asked, though she understood implicitly. She meant: Are you ever rejoining mainstream society? Josie had not, until then, thought much beyond August and September.

“I don't know,” she said.

Kyle and Angie smiled. They were gone for good, they said. She'd been an accountant for an oil company, and he'd been a teacher, high-school earth science. In a flurry they outlined their plan to get to the northernmost point of Alaska then make their way around the western coast, and back down, then on to Canada. Their complaints about their previous life included living in a neighborhood of fenced and barking dogs, commuter traffic, but seemed most centered on taxes—income tax, property tax, sales tax, capital gains. They were finished paying any of that. “He's the
evader,
” Angie explained. “I'm the
crusader
.” They both let that sink in. It was apparently wordplay they were acutely proud of.

“No income, no property, no taxes,” Kyle said, and Angie, the accountant, added, “We've considered renouncing our citizenship, but I think we'd have to become Canadian to do that. We're looking into staying stateless.”

Josie's mind, which normally would have registered their near-madness and would be planning escape, was instead occupied with Angie's perfect face. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes smiling—she seemed to have some Native American blood, but could Josie ask? She couldn't ask. She realized she was staring at Angie—her teeth were magnificent, too, fantastically white—so she looked away, and to the field, where she saw Ritter, their younger boy, about to release an arrow. Ana was standing next to him, her hand gently holding the tail of his shirt, as always finding a way to touch the bearer of violence. But where was Paul? Now she caught sight of him. He was bent down, retrieving arrows that had landed beyond the targets.

“Ritter!” Angie yelled.

He was about to let go while Paul, at the sound of Angie's voice, stood up. Ritter, startled, released the arrow, but it fell feebly a few feet from his bow.

“Sorry,” Angie said, and rushed to her son. She leaned over him, her arm around his shoulder, her raven-black hair all over him, scolding, pointing to Paul, who was loping back to the group, his hand full of arrows. The danger had not been great, given Ritter was only six and Paul was fifty yards away, but still.

“Keep your head up,” Josie yelled to him, trying to sound calm. In the days ahead she would wonder why it was so important to her to seem calm, or to stay at that archery field, to stay in that folding chair drinking her hard cider, trying somehow to impress those two beautiful young people.

“My kids are usually more responsible,” Kyle said.

“Stay aware,” Josie said to Paul. And by this, she meant that it was normal enough to be retrieving arrows in an active archery field. That it was normal enough to be doing so with three children you had just met, who lived in a wooden shed atop a pickup truck. That it was her son's responsibility to look out, in case a child-stranger might be shooting a life-ending arrow in his direction.

“You hunt?” Kyle asked.

Josie admitted she did not.

“Angie!” Kyle shouted. “You think I can shoot just one?”

Angie looked up from Ritter and shrugged. Then she seemed to change her mind, and shook her head no.

“You see anyone around here?” Kyle asked Josie. She hadn't. “She'll let me do one,” Kyle said. “You saw her shrug. She always lets me do one. And the targets—hard to resist, right?”

With a conspiratorial smile in Josie's direction, he leaped from his chair and jogged over to his truck. He returned with a handgun and a rifle, setting the handgun on the chair and leaning the rifle against it.

“No, please,” Josie said.

“Almost forgot,” Kyle said, and flew back to the truck again. He returned with a plastic bin that rattled loudly. Bullets.

“Paul! Ana!” Josie yelled, and they ran to her, recognizing something new in her voice, something unhinged. “It was my turn,” Ana said, as Josie grabbed her hand and pulled her close.

“Your children are gorgeous,” Angie said. She was sitting next to Josie again, her hand now on Josie's knee, squeezing it twice, once for each syllable of
gorgeous
.

Josie thanked her, again getting momentarily lost in Angie's youth and beauty, thinking, she still looks twenty-four. She must have been fifteen when she had her oldest.

A crack split open the air. Josie wheeled to find Kyle kneeling, his arms outstretched, his handgun pointed toward the target.

“Kyle!” Angie roared. “Give us a heads-up at least.” She turned to Josie. “Sorry. He's such an idiot.”

“Was that real?” Ana asked, hoping it was.

Kyle jogged to retrieve his target, and Angie confirmed it was real. “You ever see a real gun go off?” she asked Ana, who was paralyzed, frozen somewhere between joy and terror.

Josie wanted to leave, but Angie's hot hand was still on her knee.

“Damn,” Kyle said, standing at the target.

Why am I here? Josie continued to ask herself, as the afternoon grew pale and darkened, but Kyle set up a barbecue, and Josie and her kids were still there, and soon he was grilling hamburgers, which Josie's children ate greedily, standing up, and Josie was drinking her second hard cider, still wondering just how she could remain there, amid all this insanity. But Angie continued to touch her, on the arm, on the shoulder, and each time she did Josie felt a stirring, and though she worried about these two, and though every fifth sentence they spoke had something to do with evading or crusading, she wanted to stay near them, and was getting too tipsy to leave.

“One more?” Kyle asked Angie. “Before it's dark?”

The children were far off in the darkening field, each of them with a flashlight, meandering like giant fireflies, and Josie had convinced herself that these were her people. Beholden to none indeed. Their children were happy and strong and polite. The family did as they pleased. Everyone had perfect teeth.

But then another shot rang out. Josie screamed.

“You didn't ask!” Angie yelled.

“I did!” Kyle yelled back, laughing, holding his rifle at the end of the field. “Josie heard me,” he said, walking toward the target. Josie remembered that he had said “One more” but she hadn't registered it.

“That's the end!” Angie said to him, and he lifted his hand over his head, in a halfhearted wave of acquiescence.

“Well, I think we should take off,” Josie said, vividly conjuring the speedy collection of her kids and swift escape. She had in mind being on the road, and away from these people, in under a minute.

Angie squeezed her arm. “You can't drive. No way.” Then she yelled to Kyle, “Josie was planning on driving tonight.”

Kyle's head dropped, and he said nothing until he returned to Josie's chair, laying his rifle on the grass before her. He looked at Josie like he was still a teacher and she a disappointing pupil. “You can't drive, Josie. That would be irresponsible.” He looked to Angie, and a moment passed between them, during which they seemed to be weighing whether or not to bring up some unspeakable thing.