America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  His arms were slipped down inside the torso of his too-big thrift store sweater, his ass was flush again with the truck bed. Between them was a change neither could articulate, that love could go unwanted, could become someone’s defense against her worse self. It could run over the object without mending anything.

  “Kansas,” Wright said. “Bird feeder, truck stop, fork.”

  He fell asleep soon after, his fury with her turned a strange sedative, his feeling about the noise and the road and the vibration of the truck newly appreciative. It was something violent he could climb into, something that would take him in.

  WRIGHT WOKE IN NEW YORK, his anger burned off, the world around him still again, his body attuned to the climatic facts of April: air that turned over into a chill every few moments, a morning sun that was invasive but not warm, the leafless trees planted in rows. Hands above them worked methodically, removing the things that had hidden Fay and Wright, and then four knuckles rapped the top of the cab and they knew to hop out, to follow the fingers flapping against the palm that meant This way and Now. In half a crooked block they were up the stoop of a brownstone, the steps with thick margins of cigarette butts. An exhausted wood foyer, a row of brass mailboxes, an apartment that was much like the others. The furniture was scant, a few school chairs scratched with initials, a pink velvet couch missing a leg and propped up by three bricks. Leading the way like lily pads through the unheated space were a series of worn bath mats, warped and ovular and square, puce and mauve and gray.

  “Is this Fay,” Annabelle’s voice said, an arm gesturing from the kitchen with a wooden spoon held high in her hand. He stood at the periphery, surveying the room for any place he might comfortably sit, while Annabelle embraced Fay, lifting her off her feet and twirling her, praising her, making her kneel, knighting her with the unclean spoon. Soon the people sprawled around the room had risen, a redheaded woman in a shapeless dress, a man with perfectly round glasses and his hair in a top bun, and they hugged her, too, telling her their names, congratulating her. “So rare,” he heard, “such confidence.” They touched her hair and turned her face. “Court stenographer! We thought for sure we were fucked after Oz got chased out by that security guard. How’d you get in without a badge? Tell me you wore a little plaid two-piece, brought in a portable typewriter.” He watched his mother’s pride, realizing it was foreign to him, that he had never seen her filled this way. “I brought in a typewriter case,” he heard her say, the light in her voice bringing out their laughter. “That’s where you put it? A genius, a genius.” Annabelle stepped in and hugged her again.

  With the lightheadedness of someone very hungry, Wright made his way around them toward the toilet, the closest door he could close. He sat as long as he could, comparing the cracks in the room’s plaster to the constellations he had taught himself, until someone knocked.

  Back in the main room he saw that Randy, who had arrived in New York a day before them, was perched on an ottoman, his eyes mostly closed and his hand rubbing at the back of his head. Occasionally he glanced at Fay, who was still surrounded, and bit down on the insides of his cheeks, moved his splayed hands down his thighs and up again.

  “Everything’s all set,” Annabelle was saying. “Randy and Fay and Oz and I will go around knocking on all doors. Everybody in this building is gone by eight thirty and until six. Leroy and Nadine, seven to seven. The Kiehlmans are on Long Island till Tuesday. Mr. Porter has nothing but work. We’ll have it built by five absolute latest, in the building by eight.”

  It was the first time Shelter would target the living, a ball for returning military officers and their wives, and it was a debate he had heard Randy win over the course of months. Small remarks late at night, articles about increased armament taped to a dining table. Wright thought of the dresses, inverted flowers he’d only seen on snatches of television, how the tulle and silk would lift in the explosion. He took a pack of cigarettes from a nylon duffel collapsed by the door and he stepped outside, invisible and eleven. He hated the feeling in his throat when he smoked, and he felt he deserved it.

  THE GIRL APPEARED FROM BETWEEN two cars, her nails badly painted and her hair ironed to a stiff point. She was somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, and he had never seen a pink bra through a poncho or a freckle on a bare hip. She asked for a cigarette and then a lighter and then for him to tell her if he recognized a bit of a song she had in her head and couldn’t place. There was a protest in Washington Square and she wanted to know if he would go with her. She didn’t ask to hold his hand. He was wondering about the street they were on, looking back at where they had turned from, trying to connect the roads in his head, but she told him it was the only part of the city, Greenwich Village, that wasn’t on a grid. Wasn’t that a trip? Also, she said, she was Brianna, and she knew right away she wanted to make it with him. It was an expression he was not familiar with but the meaning was vivid, because no one had ever held his hand like that, like she was trying to feel underneath the skin, to animate the bones there according to her wishes.

  When they came up on the park he tried to locate it on the vague map he was drawing in his head, filling out the streets on the four sides. The crowd of people was livid and thick, broken only by the fountain and landscaping. To calm himself he looked through the triumphal arch that crowned it all. Garlands, eagles.

  Brianna moved through the battery of people and kissed the ones she knew, a boy who almost cleared seven feet and wore necklaces down to his waist, a girl with feathers and dandelions sewn through her braids. She had not brought signs like the others, double-sided with messages. She did not shout, as the others did. Her long arm his leash, he made unheard apologies, tried to bend around the shapes of other people that seemed fixed. It was like they had been born there, the protesters, fossilized against the jostling of the police or the threat of bad weather. On their signs were photos of boys that were dead, boys that could have kissed them or thrown them baseballs, dripping numbers in red and blue that advertised the death tolls of the Vietnamese and Cambodians.

  As they emerged from the crowd he found the world outside five degrees cooler, raked by wind. Brianna was shivering, the poncho and the holey jeans an attempt to expose herself that was working too well. Her skin was an amphibious blue, her posture and walk too open for the pace of the city around her. She had a friend’s place where they could go, she was saying, where there would probably be a room for them, making these statements in a perfect imitation of innocence. He did not want to follow her, but because he could not articulate why, he still thought there would be a way to trick himself into the opposite feeling.

  The apartment they soon entered was a close imitation of the one he had left, the people fifteen years younger but the accidental feeling of the place the same. He nearly didn’t notice the two bent figures, so low were they to the ground, the beads of their spines evident even through their light sweaters, and he could not place the scent of whatever their Sterno on the floor was warming. He was still not accustomed to certain American smells, foods that listed polysyllabic ingredients, cheese that came in cans. Neither turned to greet them, just rotated their shoulders farther into the task. Brianna didn’t acknowledge this, just gave him the smile of a person deep in a private, satisfying routine.

  Directly past the boy and the girl was an unlit hallway, swaths of wallpaper falling down from the ceiling. The way they hung made him long for the jungle, the passageways of vines and webs and bromeliads. He had to remind himself that he would not return to his mother, would not give her that satisfaction, that he was here with this girl to do something that would separate him from Fay in a sense that he both could not imagine and knew would be permanent. “I have a good feeling about door number three,” Brianna said, a laugh in her throat. She felt a pride, he could tell, in the run-down places she frequented, in how unfazed she was by any dark room. When she turned the knob she giggled and closed the door again, but not so quickly that he couldn’t see the sallow bodies mov
ing there, the man with his eyes closed and the woman on her hands and knees.

  He was five feet and three inches when he walked into the next room, where Brianna pulled out a matchbook and four tea candles she had jammed into her shallow macrame purse. There was nothing on the floor but an empty Coke can and a newspaper laid to cover a spill and a cot, which was mottled brown and white and yellow. “I bet I can find us a sheet,” she said, and he waited in a squat with his eyes closed, a position his mother prescribed for calm, feeling the grit of the floor through the thinning soles of his sneakers. He wished she hadn’t lit the candles. He didn’t need to see this place, didn’t want to remember it.

  She returned with an uninviting bundle, an old attempt at white or beige, and she spread it over the cushion. Somewhere in the place there was music, warped, at first only the refrain coming to him. What I really want to know is— She lay there while she took off her Lee denim, her floral bra. There was no underwear to be removed and he was still squatting and he thought her pubic hair looked too stiff and she was waiting for him, calling him baby—“Come here, baby, I’ve thought of you all day.” He was helpless against the command and he crawled next to her, his back to her face, shivering. She moved her hands over the down jacket he was still wearing and unzipped it, she undid each of the five buttons on his jeans, she slipped a hand across his abdomen and then she stopped. Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live? Wright was not responding correctly, tightening instead of loosening, and he could feel her calculating, calling other cases to mind.

  “I don’t think,” he said.

  “You know what I’m going to do,” Brianna whispered. “I’m just going to put my hand there. I’m just going to put my hand there until you want it to be there.” As her fingers cupped him, firm but unmoving, the smell of the room, resin and malt liquor, began to leave him. He started to feel that part of him stutter, then fall back, then move closer to her hand. It wanted to fill her fingers, to force the grip apart. She said there you go, and then she turned him onto his back. He could hear the wick of the candle crackling as she licked her hand and brought it between her legs. As she slid onto him he tried to think, begged himself to think, to come up with a reason why a part of his body would agree to something he did not want. She was hideous on top of him, all her bad teeth revealed, the peach hair that covered most of her thin ribcage frightening, her face contorting like she was trying to get rid of a stain. That their bodies were connected made him feel he should not observe her in this way, that finding her ugly made him uglier, so he closed his eyes. She moved for a while longer like that, rubbing forward in a kind of violence, the sounds she made no different from those of anger, his body in hers a problem she was going to eliminate, and then he lost feeling in his left calf and his right. His eyes had only been open a second when it all went hot, then numb, then black.

  HE LEFT WHILE BRIANNA WAS using the bathroom, leaping over someone who had fallen asleep near the entryway, running on the balls of his feet. He was on the street in under thirty seconds, then taking every turn he could, stopping only to retie his shoes, his urgency foreign in this area where people seemed only to sit on benches and smoke. “What’s the rush, little man,” someone yelled, to the laughter of an audience Wright couldn’t see, “trying to get your balls to drop?”

  He’d been panting ten minutes when moody starts of rain began beading the back of his neck, and he knew she couldn’t be chasing him, that she’d taken the part of him she wanted, so he climbed up a stoop and stood under the awning, mostly convinced he did not belong on this planet, considering ways he might die. It was of great comfort, imagining this, the subway car oncoming or the river meeting him as he fell at great speed, all thoughts he’d ever had erased, and soon his heart rate had returned to normal. He began to enjoy the rain, how it forced all these people into cafés and bars and revealed the city to him. His legs outstretched, he bent his toes in their murky nylon toward him, newly resolved. Fay could do whatever she wanted, but he would enjoy these cities where she had dragged him, their canopied boulevards, the light coming off their buildings. He wasn’t going to hide in those rooms.

  He was patting his hair back in place, counting the change in his pockets, when he noticed the van he recognized as Annabelle’s rolling very slowly toward him. The engine was still running, the sound like some animal huffing deeper in its search, when Randy and a man he didn’t know emerged, taking the steps two at a time.

  17.

  Randy was in the passenger seat and he never looked back at Wright or Fay, only occasionally at the man driving the car, who never, in the next three hours of traffic and country, fiddled with a radio knob or cracked a window or said a word. The evidence of Annabelle was everywhere, the turquoise dream catcher hanging from the rearview and the crate of typewriter ribbons and the tip of the gun that he saw sliding from under the front seat, but Annabelle was not living. Neither was Oz. That was the only information given him when he entered the car, where his mother’s hair, tied up in a bun, fell over her forehead at sudden stops. “Don’t forget to tell him about the neighbor,” Randy said. “A fucking teacher, for chrissakes, Fay, a black man, how does that look?”

  “We made a mistake” was all she would say, a hand light on Wright’s knee but her eyes affixed to the traffic.

  “Are you going to do it, or should I,” Randy said, once they’d cleared city lines.

  “I promise we’re doing this for your own safety,” his mother said as she slipped the blindfold over him. The only sounds for the rest of the drive were the voices of tollbooth operators, fifty-five cents, the shifting of gears, the drift of food wrappers and stray pennies migrating under the three rows of seats.

  Even at dusk he could see that the A-frame cabin where they arrived was unsuited to their circumstance, serene to the point of parody, a place where a tree bloomed pink needles out front and a three-legged cat roamed the grounds with its simple mewling wish. Someone, of the many who received the Shelter newsletters that Annabelle and Fay typed in capital letters, who had cheered at the destruction of courthouse lobbies and Pentagon bathrooms, had taken pity on them.

  Knowing he wouldn’t get an answer, he didn’t ask where they were. He didn’t know the name of the man who’d been driving, but when they were all out of the car Wright watched him stretch, his right heel up on the bumper of the VW and his long fingers around his toes. Fay and Randy stood just behind him, quiet like they never were, their eyes seeing no farther than the foot in front of them. His mother cradled a brown paper lunch sack and he could see some gingham and cotton protruding from it, his favorite blue T-shirt, incongruous as a wound. The driver continued to sigh, bringing his arms above him in a V, twisting at his waist, rotating his ankles, jogging in place, unaware or unconcerned that they all had nothing to do but watch him. He stopped and turned and they followed him up the cement walk, which was littered with the rosy debris of the tree, and then on the porch they waited as he felt along the inner sides of the eaves, grunting at the reach. When the key took and the door heaved inward, they heard the flick of a switch and the tinks of filaments, and then they followed him into the spill of light.

  HE WOKE UP AS HE had fallen asleep, his mother’s body enclosing him from multiple angles, her ankles crossed around his and her left arm running from his hipbone to his shoulder. She had begun to cry, the night before, when he had stiffened at her touch. He was looser now, the morning coming through a cracked window, and comforted by her smell, the tea tree oil and rosewater, until he reminded himself he shouldn’t be. He extricated his arms and legs and stood barefoot, surveying the cabin. The room held two identical beds, the frames old and high and metal, and on the wall between them hung a shadowy watercolor of a tree grown through a window. Randy was asleep in the other, his lips an inch from the wall, his low-heeled boots still on.

  It had been weeks since he’d been alone in any quiet, and he was relieved, as he entered the main room, by the sight of the driver still slee
ping, his arm dangling from a pale blue love seat. In a small kitchen in the rear of the place, he pushed aside the white linen curtains that fell over some inlaid shelving, picking up and turning pickled lemons and beets, mason jars of sugar and flour and cornmeal. There was muesli labeled in neat capitals, and a white-and-red-checked cloth over a tiny table he set it on. Milk in a hip-high fridge, the glass jug unlabeled, a thick layer of cream on the surface. A passing car honked and screamed around a curve, and he heard everyone in the cabin begin to groan and shift.

  Soon his mother was near him, her hair down again, with a prosthetic cheer and a hand on his neck. “Alan tells me there’s some beautiful hiking just up the road,” she said. “A series of waterfalls, and it’s ten degrees hotter today than yesterday. Doesn’t that seem lucky?”

  He would not speak but he nodded. It was months too early to swim, a few lives removed from one that was lucky. They were out the door in ten minutes, the driver left behind looking over a map, Randy trailing a few feet behind, aphasic and chain-smoking. They ducked around a bend in a rusted link fence and then they were on the loamy trail, the insistent sound of the current a kind of permission for the fact they would not talk.

  When they came to the first, some of the rocks black and slick and some disguised in verdant moss, the cascade of mountain water dropping into a clear pool, he felt joy but wanted to redact it. Her face open with hope, she watched him, and he stared her down until her mouth closed and her head bowed. They kept walking, the three of them, each separated from the next by about eight feet, enough that they could not see each other around a bend and the sound of their footsteps was eaten by the violence of the water. There was less moisture in the air by the minute. Wright removed the sweatshirt he’d been wearing for forty-eight hours and tied it around his waist. They passed two more waterfalls, each falling from a greater height, each pool deeper and wider.