America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  They sped under low-hanging telephone wires, through flats of brown where barely verdant tufts appeared, brief and nagging. Not long into their drive he patted his front pocket, reached across her to check the glove box.

  “See any sunglasses down there?” he asked, pointing floorward. “Tan case. Might be under the seat.” Instead of bending she wriggled straight down into the wide space there, crouching as she slipped a hand under, her cheek resting on the seat where her thighs had been. When she rose she arranged them on his face.

  “Hey now. That looked a little too easy for you. Rosebud, was you done born in the belly of a truck?”

  It was the first time she laughed, bright, quick, a bird as stunning and red as it was swiftly gone. He looked at her long enough that she gestured to the road—he should watch it.

  A teal convertible pulling alongside of them turned the moment over, Rusty gesturing in a tight twirl, Vincent sighing as he acceded and rolled the window down.

  “How about a race, finally? You missed out on a good one last night, nearly to Vegas. Rick switched between my car and Chip’s at eighty on the freeway.”

  “I like my bones very much as they are.”

  “Come on, Kahn. You say that every—”

  “I like my bones. I have a few things I’d like to do with them.”

  He shouted slowly over the wind from the deep cab of his truck, every syllable doled out evenly onto the conversation. When Rusty pulled in front of them and sped away, his hand floated out the passenger side, fingers clapping twice to the palm.

  A silence passed, more comfortable than it should have been to two people new to each other, as they climbed into the San Gabriel Mountains. She removed her boots and pressed her heels into the dash. He said what he did next as the view fell open, the fact that diminished their options against the sky that seemed to increase them.

  “You should know I’ve got a wife.”

  “No ring.”

  “It’s uncomfortable to fly with.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet it’s a real encumbrance.”

  “For maximum control you want to be able to feel absolutely everything.”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I haven’t, but I’d very much like to.”

  “That seems like an excuse I could just-almost buy if I were your wife. Maximum control.”

  To this he did not reply, a way of cutting the remark from existence, and they parked soon after. On the mountain the seven o’clock light could barely provide for them, but they spent the last of it pitching the planes he had folded. She was underdressed for the altitude and he stood behind her arranging her arms and fingers, crouched to correct the dig and splay of her bare feet. The first thing he ever kissed was her ankle, briefly, a small and eager threat. A sliver of moon appeared, tactful above the scabrous bushes that ran the cliff.

  “There’s a German scientist, arguably he was a Nazi, who says we can put a person on the moon by 1978.”

  “I’ll be forty by then,” she said. “Speaking of other planets and the completely unknown.”

  The remark was irrelevant—she felt it die. There was nothing inherently compelling about her being young, but it was the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.

  “Where did you come from,” he said, both hands back in his pockets.

  “Not far from here geographically, but very far from here. Do you know about my sister? About Charlie?”

  “She was—is?—an aviator. Broke an Earhart record. If you don’t mind my saying, a raiser, manufacturer even, of hell.”

  “Truly, she seized the means of production on hell. She wasn’t, in fact, raised naked in an outhouse. We come from people who care deeply about the appropriate silverware. My grandfather invented the question mark, was the town joke. What he actually did was, the second Sutter’s foreman had his lucky morning, before Polk had even made his announcement, he went up and down California, buying out all the shovels and trowels and importing more. And then he sold them for twenty times the cost. Some saloons, too, where the people who made money lost it.”

  He nodded. She should go on.

  “No,” she said. “What about you?”

  Ohio, was all he would say. Son of Andrea and Frederich, brother of Sophie. Boy Scout Troop 46. Cabin in the mountains, quieter than the base though not the done thing. He acted as though he knew nothing about his life except what could be seen.

  There was no discussion of leaving—he simply got into the car. Had she upset him, she wondered, as they coasted down the canyon, but then he placed two fingers on her earlobe and kept them there the whole drive back, a slight pressure that made her delirious, all of who they might be to each other imagined by that gesture.

  3.

  Listening to the ticks of the car shutting down, Vincent stood looking up at the crowd of stars. Ash-colored scrubs grew rabidly along the cabin, atop their widening tangles small ruby blooms that seemed like concessions to ugly beginnings. Inside he removed his boots and set them on a high driftwood shelf near a canvas bedroll, a worn pair of binoculars, and a fishing rod. His steps and adjustments were all economical, considered so as not to wake the woman on the couch. Squatting now he felt the things around her, the pale mug inside of a glass on the floor and the heels of her brocade slippers under the coffee table, trying to infer the shape of her day by the temperature of the things she had touched. He retrieved the blue-and-white quilt from where it had bunched at her toes and he spread it over her.

  HIS WIFE HAD BEGUN TO complain about the dust as soon as they arrived. Elise had spoken of it without a name, like a domestic menace so familiar to the inhabitants it needed none. It sneaks in and changes things, she said.

  While he was diving and spinning one Thursday—nailed to his seat by the negative gravity, the force of it tugging the skin of his jaw to his ears, calling on his calves and torso to make even the slightest adjustment to the controls, reaching the speed brake and watching the plates of metal bloom before the windshield—she was moving through their apartment on the base with a roll of duct tape around her wrist. She bit off stretches as long as her torso, applying them along the walls of the house with her head tilted.

  He had leaned on the door, all the lightness he felt after flying replaced with an intestinal roil. The unclean ripping sound as the seal gave way, the jerks of its opening as the last bits of glue detached, were a warning he could not ignore. In moments like these he saw his father’s ossified pointer finger, the spill he had not cleaned, the grade that would not do. The open hand, the leather belt. Like his father, he saw things in two ways, acceptable and not.

  Elise was silent, very much a piece of the dark, still room, upright at the dining table, fingering the silver roll she wore as a bracelet. Tape bordered the windows, the crack that grew up the bare east wall.

  It did keep the dust out, she said, as though remarking on the finer aspects of a mediocre meal. He sat down across from her and pressed his palms together, waiting a minute to speak.

  This won’t do.

  The next day he’d entered the housing office, a box of three bowls and their framed wedding photo balanced on his hip, and told a version of the truth, alluding to health issues, mentioning the mountain air. He slid two bare keys across the grain of the desk. There was no protocol, no form to fill—no one ever chose not to live on the base, the name of which pilots across the country spoke very slowly—so the kid with the reddish crew cut just nodded, stunned. Elise, in the idling car, turned the radio knob every three seconds. On the dried-up lake beds shadows of planes appeared and vanished. They had driven through the blue day inside a silence that was calm but not happy. It had been six months.

  BAREFOOT NOW, DONE LOOKING AT her, he killed the light and passed through the small, dark kitchen. In the bedroom the air was stiff, made up of her nail polishes and removers and perfumes, so he shoved open a window and went straight to sleep.

  4.

&nbs
p; Someone pulled the plug on the patio lights, a string of fat bulbs that fell from the eaves, to see the satellite better. From the frequent flare of matches the smell of sulfur had gathered and stuck, and glass bottles hung empty between the middle and index fingers. Lloyd moved behind the rough line they formed, placing his fifteen-pound head on various shoulders, licking sweat from the backsides of sunburned ears.

  Standing with her thumbs hooked into the waist of her overalls, Fay imagined Vincent behind some hulking telescope on a neat patch of sand, an olive cardigan pushed up to his elbows, the men around him sober and well equipped.

  The feeling couldn’t have been more feverish outside Charlie’s, the men less certain. A ladder leaned against the far side of the building for reasons immediately forgotten, abandoned tumblers sat in clusters on the porch railings. Although it would signify a failure and a threat and the obsolescence of an era over which they had reigned, when it came it was easy to love, particularly under the desert’s primitive covering of beige, where nothing could truly glow. Like debris raised up by a gathering wave, they lifted an inch off their heels as Sputnik gave its last detectable winks.

  Inside, after, the mood was hot and finicky, the course of it hard to determine, and Charlie, smelling the money that might slump out her door, announced half off the next two rounds.

  “And anyone,” she said, her torso swaying to reach different parts of the room, “who can tell me the exact percentage of piss in the ocean gets a free kiss on the ass.”

  She always spoke this way, around these men, an outsized simulacrum of the bravado that had made her. Alone with Fay she would be monosyllabic, eaten by her own performance, upset by the smallest sound, but now she was on the piano, her elbows in flight. It was a song they all knew and that hardly needed playing, so engraved was it in the collective memory. Someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner—is the someone Mack the Knife?

  At the register, a pen behind her ear, Fay followed suit, doing her own part in massaging the collective morale, speaking like an auctioneer. “Nineteen forty-five. Bud’s got a shiny silver 1945. Who can go lower? Have I got a 1944, 1943?” With the pads of their fingers, the men scraped their coins around on the bar, creating piles, squinting.

  “’Thirty-nine!” someone yelled from the far end.

  “’Eight.”

  “’Thirty-fuckin’-two.”

  “’Thirty-two, we’ve got ’thirty-two. Can anyone here top Tom’s lustrous, golden ’thirty-two penny?”

  Tom was squat and silent with long eyelashes, a man who seemed unnecessary even to himself. He held the coin in his closed fist, grinning in a way that seemed private. There was the scratching sound of twenty of them double-checking, then a lull through which Charlie’s singing voice stabbed—a cement bag’s drooping down.

  From the center of the bar Rusty shot a hand up and held it there until all eyes had climbed up to meet it. He would not say the number, she realized. He would make her go to him, touch his scorched fingers to retrieve the dime.

  “Nineteen eleven,” Fay said, knowing he would be there the next six days, redeeming his free shot of whiskey, memorizing the length of her fingernails, the placket of buttons on her shirt, for some use of his own.

  The rest of the night passed easily, rearranged by the familiar models of contest and loss. “You’re my fireworks girl,” Charlie said, kissing Fay on an ear on her way out. Fay played gardener to the last few men, taking from them what they didn’t need, presenting them water. She stacked pint glasses fifteen high, twenty, until the last customer had gone. An hour poured in around her as she mopped. Only in killing the lights of the bar did she understand the lamp in her room was on.

  Atop her unmade bed Rusty was as pink and naked as the just born, far into sleep and a peace that seemed real. She looked at her things as he must have, the Mexican candles Charlie had brought her, deep red and blue, melted onto the floor, the cotton panties she had kicked off in the night crumpled like rotting blossoms. The feeling in her body was some crucial omission, an organ she’d been born without, a place where bone should be but was not. She was gone in ten seconds, waiting out the time he would leave from a room across the way, watching the pink and silver come vicious to the sky. It was the first morning of the space age, and her life most resembled an accident.

  FAY DIDN’T KNOW WHY SHE told her sister the lie she did, that the wooden handle on the older chopping knife had splintered, that they needed to order a new one from the puckered Sears catalog Charlie kept in her personal bathroom. It was in fine condition where she’d slipped it between her cot and the floor, handle side out.

  She worked her shift with the lump under her bed not far from her mind, waiting for Rusty to return and redeem his prize. He would leave money on the table for her, she imagined, a large tip that was a substitute for an apology, and she would take it. She listened to the president’s address as she mopped, in his promise that America would not fall behind the implicit admission that it already had. Brawls broke out without their customary circling, the rising bridge of insults. What she heard instead was the hollow note of a toppled chair, the liquid thud of a gut against a wall. She saw the tallest of them spitting blood from his mouth, as he floated out the door, so casually she believed, at first, it was a nutshell or a seed.

  5.

  He took her flying on her birthday, three hours she swallowed. After it happened Fay thought of the friend most likely to forgive and indulge her—a married man—and she imagined Rebecca Fuller into the room, Rebecca Fuller who had worked afternoons at the pet store and smelled indelibly of it, the shredded newspaper stained with chick urine, the warped salt lick that was the dominion of the ancient parrot. Never Becky, she had begun to say, one transformative summer after a factual lifetime of Becky. Fay could imagine how she would phrase it, circle her thumb and finger around a friend’s wrist, say, Oh Ms. Fuller, can I trouble you for a spell? Standing by the wood birdcages where Rebecca lazily ran a cloth, or shoeless but lipsticked in the orchards behind Fay’s house, they had addressed each other formally when talking about the things that were private. It was a way of rising to the occasion, of imagining themselves into the women they would be. Pinkies linked, they swore to keep their own names. Like many of the worst lies, it felt marvelous to tell.

  She had decided not to mention it, October 17. It was a way, one of many she’d devised with Vincent Kahn, of avoiding disappointment. Certainly he had never asked, never sat up naked over her some afternoon in bed and demanded to know. Her middle name, her first word or memory. He had picked up her datebook while she was in the bathroom, plucked it from the pile of beads and cards and matches.

  “What’s ‘crowning achievement’?”

  “Oh, that’s my birthday. It’s something Charlie and I say to each other.”

  He waited.

  “As in then I crowned. As I emerged from the birth canal.”

  He put two palms out as though weighing each and let them drop and rise in rotation.

  “Clever, disgusting. Disgusting, clever.”

  Two days later, her birthday began quietly. Charlie took her shift. Fay marked the occasion only by a new bar of soap, rose hip that she’d dog-eared and mail-ordered, unwrapped in the outdoor shower while the morning was still purple. He showed up at nine, two hands spread on her window, and tapped on the glass, her name in Morse code he said when asked, learned it the summer he was eight, and drove them away from the base, an hour, two, landscape that didn’t change from a long blink to the next. She was shocked by what she missed of her childhood, the sounds of a four-way intersection, radios on in mechanics’ garages, unseen children running piano scales. As a girl she had been entrepreneurial, inspired by her family’s wealth and defensive about it, had put her allowance into bonds. Some of her teachers rented from one of the buildings her father owned, and she mentioned to them how he wrote Christmas bonuses to the tenant farmers of his orchards. Her feelings about money changed when her body did, when she began to fe
el watched.

  THEY PULLED UP TO THE tiny landing strip, a stretch of corroded asphalt that didn’t last a mile, the hangar a squat tin box with two walls that rolled up. On a door-mounted clipboard he scrawled his name. He tried a series of pale dented lockers until he found one that opened, and from it he took a bulky headset and a key that glowed in the noon flowing in.

  He didn’t ask her to, but she followed him around the plane while he did his checks. Vincent dipped a knuckle into the fuel tank and sniffed, then pushed the whole thing back a foot, leaning into his grip on the wings as it rolled and he examined the tread of the tires. He didn’t ask if she was afraid, if she’d ever been in a plane, how old she was turning. She was nineteen. She felt she was entering an interstitial year, a string of months in which she would not be culpable for what her life enacted upon her. It was before her like a painting, something she could be alone with to consider but not to change.

  Inside of it the instruments, the dials she could guess at by the way her sister had once talked of planes, gave the air of waiting.

  “Put your hands on the controls,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just enough that you can feel them. The plane is incredibly reactive, all-seeing and -knowing, though less like a god and more like a nun. You can’t sneak anything past her. She’ll punish you. Feet on those pedals there. Those are the rudders, and they coordinate your turns. Think of them as your colleagues. Respect them. Think of these”—he pointed to the raised handles of the steering column—“as being the assistant to the rudders, never the other way around. You can tell a bad pilot because he forgets he has feet. Remember your feet.”