Heroes of the Frontier Read Free Page B

said, removing his hand from the shoe and offering it to her. “From the dentist’s office.”
    He laughed a long while, as if the idea of a job at Foot Locker, for anyone, was the greatest joke. “No. No, I don’t work here,” he said.
    He was four years younger than Josie and had the energy of a housebound puppy. For a year it was fun. She was a year into her own practice, and he helped out, ran errands, hung pictures in the waiting room, kept everything manic and light. He liked to ride bikes. To get ice cream. To play kickball. He ate chocolate power bars from crinkly gold wrappers. His libido was unstoppable, his control nonexistent. She was dating a twelve-year-old.
    But he was twenty-seven. He was not gainfully employed then, and had never had a steady job before or since. His father owned some immeasurable stretch of Costa Rica, which he’d clear-cut to make room for cows destined to be eaten by American and Japanese carnivores, and so any occupation involving a scale less grand somehow did not quite suit Carl.
    “We’ve raised a dilettante,” Luisa, his mother, said. She was Chilean by birth, raised in Santiago, her mother a doctor, her father a diplomat, also a depressive. She’d met Carl’s red-haired American father, Lou, in Mexico City, when she was a graduate student. She’d had Carl and his two brothers while Lou, raised in an oil family, bought land in Costa Rica, razed forests, raised cows, built an empire. He’d asked for a divorce ten years before to marry the ex-wife of a well-known and dead Chiapan narco. Luisa and Lou had an improbably good relationship. “He’s so much better from a distance,” Luisa said.
    Now she was a wizened, beautiful woman of sixty, living on her own terms in Key West, with a group of sunburned, day-drinking friends. When they met, Josie loved everything about her—her candor, her grim wit, her insights into Carl. “He inherited his father’s short attention span, but not his father’s vision.”
    Carl had collected a dozen or so licenses and skills. He was a realtor for a few years, though he sold nothing. He’d dabbled in furniture design, fashion, sport fishing. He had a closet full of photography equipment. Though Josie and Luisa were both obliged to love Carl, the tragedy was that they liked each other far more than either liked him.
    “Last year he had me videotape him,” Luisa said in her raspy voice. “He’s still discovering his relationship to the world,” she said, “discovering his own body, you know. One day he asked me to film him walking—from the front, the back and the side. He said he wanted to be sure he walked the way he thought he walked. So I filmed my son, this grown man, walking up and down the street. He seemed satisfied with the results.”
    “He’s prettier than you.” That’s what Sam said when she met Carl. “That can’t be good.” He could be fun. Cowards are often fantastically charming. But could anything begun at a Foot Locker become grand? Josie had never married Carl, and that was a story, a series of interconnected stories, episodes, decisions and reversals, both she and Carl culpable. Finally, with her strong endorsement, he’d left. At the time she was happy for it. Coward. Coward coward, she thought—it was the basic building block of his DNA, cowardice and whatever mutation had produced his gripless bowels. On so many levels he was a coward, but she had not anticipated the way he would disappear after he moved out. What had she wanted? She’d wanted general involvement, a monthly visit maybe, a father who would take the kids for a weekend. He was good enough with children—harmless around Ana, benign with Paul. He seemed to like children, really, thought he could make them laugh, and his juvenile outlook on life seemed to sync perfectly with theirs.
    He was, years after they met, still a child, still discovering his relationship to the world, discovering his own body. One day he asked Josie to film him