Heroes of the Frontier Read Online Free PDF

unlawful and she didn’t want to know for sure.
    Then a voice. It was a man. A different voice, not Carl’s. She thought about where she could hide the kids. She thought about the velvet bag of cash she’d hidden under the Chateau sink.
    “Wake up in there. State trooper.”
    Josie climbed down to find a man in uniform walking outside the Chateau, his flashlight scanning with quick slashing strokes.
    Josie had no reason to disbelieve this man was who he said he was, a state trooper, but the night was grey and the dark mythology of her dreams were still with her, so she did not open the door. Instead she sat in the driver’s seat and waved to him.
    “Hello,” she said through the closed window.
    The trooper did not ask her to open the window. He didn’t ask her to provide identification or insurance or any explanation at all.
    “Can’t park overnight here,” he said through the window, and pointed to a sign in front of her that said the same thing. “Okay?” he asked, now gentler.
    She felt a rush of gratitude. Her recent life was full of gushing moments of gratitude to strangers, whenever they did not yell at her, curse her, almost kill or harm her in some way. Any time she escaped an encounter unscathed—and more so when someone was actually kind—she nearly swooned with appreciation. “Good. Okay,” she said, and gave him a thumbs-up. “Thank you so much, Officer.”
    When he was gone, Josie started the engine and the dashboard clock read 2:14 a.m. She was a fool. Now the kids would be off their sleep schedule more or less permanently. And where would they all sleep if they couldn’t park this thing, a recreational vehicle, in an enormous parking lot overlooking a postcard bay? Stan had said something about the RV parks all over the state, but Josie hadn’t thought this would be their plan. What she had wanted was the freedom to just pull over anywhere, and eat, or sleep, or stay indefinitely.
    She contemplated waking Paul and Ana and strapping them in before driving off, but she harbored an irrational hope that if she left them alone they might sleep through the night. It was improbable—it was a joke, really—but her style of parenting was predicated on hoping for things over which she had little or no control.
    She turned on the radio and found nothing. She spun the dial left and right, then, thinking she’d found a faint signal, turned the volume up. It faded, and there was nothing for miles.
    Then: “I’ve got big balls!” It was a man’s voice. A song played by a man in a schoolboy’s uniform. She turned it down, hoping it hadn’t woken up the children. This had been the rule since they’d left Stan’s driveway: the radio, which he’d called temperamental, would find no sound for hours, then would come alive with a sudden burst of song.
    She drove south, looking for signs, but instead she saw the face of Evelyn, the dying woman who now owned her practice, and she saw Evelyn’s malevolent son-in-law, and then she saw the face of the dead soldier. What fool goes to Alaska alone in a vehicle like this? She had guaranteed herself limitless stretches of driving like this, her children occupied or asleep, while all she could do would be to contemplate her many mistakes and the fundamental mistake of knowing other people, all of whom would ultimately die or try to kill her.
    Finally she saw the words RV PARK on a hand-painted sign, and pulled into a gravel lot. She drove slowly past a tall wigwam, a totem pole next to it, leaning heavily to the right. The office was a pink aluminum trailer, and within there was one dim amber light. She knocked on the door, producing a weak tinny sound.
    “Second,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere deep within.
    “Thank you,” Josie said to herself and said it again to the woman who answered the door. The woman was about her age, with black hair done up in a beehive. The sight of it, almost a foot high, brought Josie briefly to a cheerful 1950s place