“ ‘I AM TRYING TO CONTACT Mr. and Mrs. Wright. I have lost their first names,’ ” Paul read aloud. “ ‘There were three boys, L.J., George, and Bud Wright. There were two girls that I knew of, Anna and another whose name I have forgotten. My brother Wheeler and I worked for them in 1928 or 1929 in the wheat harvest. We also threshed some flax, the first and only flax we ever worked in or had ever seen. The Wrights lived in a sod shanty at Chaseley, North Dakota near Bowdon, North Dakota. The last I ever heard of them, George was married and lived near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. We loved those dear ones. Would like to hear from anyone who can give me any information as to their whereabouts.’ ”
The idea to have Paul read “Trails Grown Dim” to her as they drove was a brilliant one, Josie thought. They had gone about a hundred miles north of the scene of the feces-heating, with the windows open, and the air in the Chateau was reasonably better now, though they wouldn’t be the best judges—they’d been breathing human-waste fumes for so long they wouldn’t know the difference.
They passed a large parking lot, attached to an abandoned shopping center, where a firefighters’ staging ground had been set up. FUEL TRANSPORT said one sign. FIRE SHIRTS SOLD HERE said another. A half-dozen red and yellow and white fire trucks of various sizes waited for orders.
“Do another,” she said.
“Okay,” Paul said, a serious but delighted look on his face. He was sitting up front with her, and Josie was reasonably sure this was against the law, even in this renegade state, having an eight-year-old in the front seat, sitting on a stack of towels. But Josie was enjoying his company too much to let him disappear into the back.
“Here’s the last one on the page,” he said. “ ‘I am interested in finding the whereabouts of my great-uncle, Melvin H. Lahar (pronounced Liar). He was born in Washington State between 1889 and 1893, son of Charles A. Lahar and Ida Mae Gleason Sharp. He had one full sister, Nancy L. (nicknames Emma and Dottie) Lahar Farris. He was last seen in Washington just prior to World War I. No one in the family has seen or heard of him since. He was raised in Colfax, Washington in the household of his aunt, Mrs. Minnie Longstreet. There is some talk, too, about him having been a bank robber, involved in a shootout in Bend, Oregon. Any clarity or information would be appreciated.’ ”
“That’s a good one to end on,” Josie said, hoping Ana hadn’t heard the word “robber.” It would provoke a string of questions, if not keep her up all night. “Is she asleep?” she asked Paul.
He didn’t have to turn around. “No. She’s just looking out the window.” He nodded toward the ATVs. This was a new phenomenon. The main roads were paralleled by narrow dirt paths where men and women and families traveled to and from town, with groceries or anything else, on four-wheeled ATVs. These alternate paths were everywhere now, in this part of Alaska, wherever they were.
“Why can’t we go like that?” Ana asked from the back. Josie turned to find Ana’s face was pressed against the glass.
They watched mothers with small children sitting in front of their ATVs, helping steer, as they went up and down the gentle hills of their dirt roads, and Josie, too, thought it seemed a logical way to travel. Finally they caught an eight-year-old piloting his own vehicle, a scale-model ATV, and Josie knew Ana’s imagination would ignite. She mouthed the words just before Ana said them: “I want one.”
“You can’t have one,” Paul said. “You’re five.” Now he turned to Josie. “Okay, you want me to go through my school day?” He said this as if she’d been bothering him about this for weeks and he’d finally relented in telling her. This was a new Paul: able to dismiss Ana quickly, feeling worthy of dominating the conversation. Had sitting in the front seat emboldened him that much? Josie told him she’d be delighted to hear about his school day.
Recounting it all took him fully thirty-five minutes. There was a good deal of explanation of the rows. There were four rows in his classroom, he explained, and one of them, the blues, was stacked with the rambunctious kids, and Paul.
“Were you put in the blue row as a balance against the bad kids?” she asked.
“I guess so,” he said.
He told her about the time when a police officer came to class to talk to the kids about crosswalk safety and stranger danger, and almost immediately four different kids volunteered the information that their fathers were in jail. The officer didn’t know how to handle this, and had to tell the kids to stop raising their hands.
The Ohio town where they’d lived—it was exhilarating to think of it in the past tense—had a private school, too, where the other half of the children went, and hearing Paul tell this story, thinking it interesting, Josie had the thought that for the parents in her town, a paramount purpose of private school, and its ludicrous cost, was that these private-school children would not be sharing their scissors and glue with children whose fathers were in prison. This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pull these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools—we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether, to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle.
“Archery,” Paul said. There was a sign up ahead. ARCHERY. LESSONS. TARGETS.
They had nowhere in particular to be, though Josie hoped to get to Denali the next day.
“Can we?” Paul asked, and because he so seldom asked for anything, Josie pulled over, descending the highway and onto the long gravel driveway, the Chateau like a tired mule groaning in protest to be led this way.
They followed the signs half a mile and then saw it, the wide green field, the red and white targets. But they saw no people. Still they got out, and without waking Ana, who was sleeping, soaking in her sweat, they looked around. There was a wooden booth of some kind, painted pine green, where one would usually pay and be given a bow and told where to go. The door to the booth was closed, but a window was open. Josie peered in but saw no one. There were no other cars, so they should have presumed it closed. And it probably was closed.
“Look,” Paul said, pointing to a tree near the rightmost target. There was a bow leaning against it, an old thing, some ancient model. Josie saw no harm in Paul looking at it, so he ran off across the field, and returned with both the bow and three arrows he’d found in the thicket nearby. One arrow was bent into a parenthesis.
“Can I try?” he asked.
Paul never hurt himself, had never risked any injury to himself or anyone around him, so Josie told him he could. He took the bow in one hand and the arrow in another, and it took him some time to figure out how to do it well, but soon Paul was at least sending the arrows forward, though the bent one squirmed like some airborne snake.
Josie’s eyes wandered, and soon found their way back to the archery booth, and its open window. She leaned in and saw the booth was mostly bare but for a sleeve of styrofoam cups, a bin of broken bows and, hanging from a nail, a green visor with the words STRAIGHT ARROW printed across its horizontal swath. Josie immediately knew she would take the visor, but knew, too, that she would debate taking it for a few minutes as she watched Paul shoot. Finally she reached in, grabbed the visor, tried it on, found it fit, and then arrived at an excuse—it was in the garbage—to use when Paul would see it on her and ask about its provenance.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked, returning from the target with his bow and arrows, looking strangely adept and professional.
“I saw it on the ground next to the booth,” Josie said, adapting her story slightly, on the fly, feeling this lie becoming whiter and more inconsequential. “It hides the bald spot.”
Paul peered around the side of her head, and then pulled the visor gently upward, better covering the gap, and then returned to his archery. Eventually, by practicing and by getting ever closer to the target, Paul struck near the middle a few times and then did not want to leave. So they stayed. They had food in the Chateau, and they had nowhere to be, so Josie brought out the lawn chair, sat and watched Paul shoot until Ana woke up. The sun was dropping behind the tree line on the high ridge behind them when Ana came down from the Chateau, briefly stuporous, until she saw the visor on her mother’s head.
“Like Dad,” she said.
Josie told her the story about finding it next to the booth, Ana finding it believable and very much what she would do in the same position—Paul, if he could, would have brought it to the police station to be claimed—but having Ana remind her of Carl, and Carl’s tendency toward visors, sapped Josie’s STRAIGHT ARROW headwear of much of its appeal. She thought about tossing it, and decided she would, as soon as an alternative arrived.
Josie watched her children shoot their arrows, running and giggling, and realized that a child’s forgetting of joy is the principal crime committed upon a parent. Raj, in one of his rants, had said as much. His daughter was seventeen. Oh god, he said. The seventeen-year-olds, they will rip your heart out. A whole joyous childhood, and they will tell you it was all shit. Every year was a fraud. They will throw it all away. Josie had felt for Raj, and had feared the wrath from her own children, but then remembered: Hadn’t she emancipated herself from her own mother and father?
But for her own children, Josie was determined to thwart this crime of forgetting. She would remind them of joy. Document joy, tell tales of joy at bedtime, take photos and write diaries. Journals of joy that could never be denied or conveniently forgotten. She began to conceive a new theory of parenting, where the goal was not the achieving of a desired result. The object is not to raise a child for some future outcome, no! Times like these, together in the pines amid the fading light, as the kids run through long grass, her son gravely teaching himself archery while her daughter tries to induce some self-injury, these moments alone were the object. Josie felt, fleetingly, that she could die having achieved such a day. Get to a place like this, get to a moment like this, and that alone is the object. Or it could be the object. A new way of thinking. Stretch some of these days together and that’s all one could want or expect. Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggle for what—your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins. This was the common criminal pursuit of all contemporary humankind. Give my child an Ikea desk and twelve hours a day of sedentary typing. This will mean success for me, them, our family, our lineage. She would not pursue this. She would not subject her children to this. They would not seek these specious things, no. It was only about making them loved in a moment in the sun.
Ana walked over to her chair and leaned against it. Her bow was around her shoulder in a startlingly professional way.
“Mom?” Ana said. “Are there robbers here?”
“No,” Josie said. On cue, a distant siren knifed through the air. “That’s a fire engine,” she said, pre-empting. Paul was nearby, still shooting his arrows.
“But are there bad guys?”
“No.”
“Where are they then?”
“They’re really far away,” Josie said, and caught Paul’s eye. Why tell her there are bad guys at all? he seemed to be saying.
“You’ll never see them in your whole life,” Josie said. “And we have army guys fighting them.” Again she caught herself saying unhelpful things.
“What about the Joker?” Ana asked.
“What about him?”
“Is he real?”
“No. He’s pretend. Someone just drew him, the same as I could draw him. Someone like me made up the Joker.”
“Someone like you?”
“Yeah. Or someone like your dad. More like your dad.”
“What about skunks?” Ana asked.
Josie tried not to laugh. “Skunks?”
“Are they real?”
“Sure, but they’re not dangerous. They can’t hurt you.”
“But are monsters real?”
“No, there are no real monsters.”
“How do we know about monsters then?”
“Well, people made them up. Someone came up with an idea and drew it and made up a name.”
“So someone can make up a name like Iron Man?”
“Sure.”
“How about Randall?”
“Randall?”
“Yeah, is that a name?”
“It is. Did you hear that name somewhere?”
“I think so. I heard that word.” Ana’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t know if it was a name.”
“It’s a name,” Josie said.
Another pair of sirens threaded through the sky. Ana listened, her eyes concentrating on Josie’s arm. She was tapping it with her tiny fingers, as if sending a coded subterranean message.
“Are the army guys big?” she asked.
“They are. Much bigger than the bad guys.”
“Are they monsters?”
“Who?”
“The army guys.”
“No. They’re regular people. They have kids, too. But then they put on a uniform and they fight the bad guys.” And to try to end the discussion, Josie added, “And they always win.”
“But they killed Jeremy.”
“What?”
“Someone killed him, right?”
Ana had been building up to this, Josie realized. She had heard the entry from “Trails Grown Dim,” the words robber and shot and had been sorting it through ever since.
“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.
“My mom was murdered by a drunk driver,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Josie said.
“You shouldn’t drive,” Kyle said gravely. “Please. Your keys.”
She didn’t drive. She gave this man her keys. All went sideways. She sat with Kyle and Angie as the night went black and the bugs became ravenous. The sirens continued their sporadic wailings, and she sat with Kyle and Angie, who laughed full-throated laughs, who seemed to be enjoying Josie, and this night, immeasurably. Periodically one of the kids would rush back to them, and ask if they could do some new thing, chicken fights or climbing a nearby dirt heap, and each time Kyle and Angie considered it with Solomonic seriousness. The children squealed and cackled in the gloaming, but finally Ana came back, resting her head on Josie’s lap, and it was time to retire. Josie and Kyle and Angie said good night with swaying hugs, and they gathered their children, and Josie felt sure that it was over, that whatever had happened was over, but then Paul asked if one of the boys, the older boy, Frank, could sleep over. Angie and Kyle thought it was the most wonderful idea, not really worth debating, and soon he had his sleeping bag and a pillow and was installed in the bed over the cab, squeezed in with Paul and Ana, all of them giddy.
Josie made the lower bed for herself, doing the math, realizing these strangers had her keys and she had their son, and just as she was settled under the covers, there was a loud tap on the window. She jumped. “Just one more!” Angie said.
Josie said nothing, being somehow still unclear on what was about to happen. A hollow pop split the night, meaning Kyle had fired another gun, or maybe it was the rifle this time.
“That’s the end!” Angie yelled, now farther away. “Night!”
Josie returned the sentiment, and the kids did, too, but no one slept. Her children were vibrating with the newness of the night, with the gunfire, with the presence of the strange tanned boy next to them, and Josie was thinking seriously that she had lost her mind. How could she stay here? Her keys were in the hands of the crusader. Or was he the evader? Up in the overhead bed, she heard Ana asking Frank about the guns. There was some affirming discussion about how Kyle would shoot any robbers, and Ana giggled to hear it.
And there were the sirens. Something had happened nearby, some kind of accident. Or the fires were getting closer. The sirens were louder now. Sleep was impossible. Her mind raced through dark woods. Had she really stayed the afternoon with these people, with the father shooting guns fifty yards away? What did she know about them? Nothing. Somehow she had to trust that they would use their bullets on targets, not on her family, that nonsensical trust seeming to be the core of life in America. She thought of her own stupidity. She laughed at her own surprise at finding people like this here, in rural Alaska. What was she expecting? She had fled the polite, muted violence of her life in Ohio, only to drive her family into the country’s barbarian heart. We are not civilized people, she realized. All questions about national character and motivations and aggression could be answered when we acknowledged this elemental truth. And why was this other child in her RV? And what about that bastard Mario, who told Paul about Jeremy? He had no right. And Paul had no right to know. Another siren, this one wild and lonely, followed by the howl of a coyote, eerily similar, as if the animal had mistaken the siren for kin.