Heroes of the Frontier Read Online Free PDF Page A

this pushing-away, and will lift Ana’s shirt and kiss her stomach and hear Ana’s guttural laugh, and she will love Ana so much she can’t bear it. Bring Ana into the kitchen and put her on the counter again and let her check the rice while Paul is nearby. Hug Paul, too, finish your glass of wine and pour another and wonder if you are a better parent in all ways after a glass and a half of red wine. A tipsy parent is a loving parent, a parent unreserved in her joy, affection, gratitude. A tipsy parent is all love and no restraint.
    A string of lights passed through the woods in front of her. Josie got out of the Chateau, the air faintly toxic from some unseen fire, and ran to the road, where she saw a convoy of fire trucks, red and chartreuse, racing by. The firefighters inside were only blurry silhouettes until the last truck, the seventh and smallest, where a face, in the second window, seemed to be looking into a tiny light, maybe some instrument panel, maybe his phone, but he was smiling, and he seemed so very happy, a young firefighter on his way somewhere, his helmet on. Josie waved to him like some European villager liberated in WWII, but he didn’t look up.
    Anyway, she was done. With the town. With her practice, with ceramic fillings, with the mouths of the impossible. She was done, gone. She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt. And adaptation is growth, and growth is life. A human’s choice is either to see new things, mountains, waterfalls, deadly storms and seas and volcanoes, or to see the same man-made things endlessly reconfigured. Metal in this shape, then that shape, concrete this way and that. People, too! The same emotions recycled, reconfigured, fuck it, she was free. Free of human entanglements! Stasis had been killing her, had in actuality turned her face numb. A year ago, during the start of the lawsuit spiral, her face had been numb for a month. She couldn’t explain it to anyone and in the emergency room they’d been stumped. But it had been real. There had been a month where her face was numb and she couldn’t get out of bed. When was that? A year ago, not a good year. A thousand reasons to leave the Lower 48, leave a country spinning its wheels, a country making occasional forays into progress and enlightenment but otherwise uninspired, otherwise prone to cannibalism, to eating the young and weak, to finger-pointing and complaint and distraction and the volcanic emergence of ancient hatreds. And leaving was made inevitable by the woman who had sued her for apparently causing her cancer or otherwise not holding back the tidal onslaught of carcinoma that would eventually kill her (but not yet). And there was Elias and Evelyn and Carl and his Goebbelsian plans. But most of all there was the young man, a patient since he was a child, who was now dead, because he’d said he was enlisting to build hospitals and schools in Afghanistan, and Josie had called him honorable and brave, and six months later he was dead and she could not wash the complicity from her. She did not want to think about Jeremy now, and there were no reminders of Jeremy here. No. But could she really be reborn in a land of mountains and light? It was a long shot.

II.
    JOSIE WOKE TO A KNOCKING, a relentless hollow knocking somewhere beneath her. She opened her eyes to find that at some point she’d gotten back in the Chateau and had climbed up to the sleeper. It was dark outside and Paul and Ana were both out cold, though Ana had found a way to rotate herself such that her feet were now at Paul’s head.
    The knocking paused, then came again, louder. It was Carl. He’d found her. She’d done something illegal. Crossed state lines with her children? Was that unlawful? She hadn’t bothered to check. In truth she didn’t check because she knew it might be