America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  At the fourth pool, all narrows and shadows, he stopped. On either side, just above the surface of the water, slick plates of rock shot out, leaving only a foot-wide corridor. At the widest point, near where the flow from above terminated, was a granite shelf—and he saw he could begin sitting there and let the force of the current shoot him free. Some of the trees were still without leaves.

  “You shouldn’t let him fucking do that,” he heard Randy say. “That current is nasty. Probably forty-five degrees.”

  When Fay caught up his shirt was already off, hung on the branch of a tree, his fifty-cent thrift store jeans next to it. As Wright felt his way along the rock wall, right foot over left, he heard her voice, a chirped admonition that she began but gave up on, and then he was near where the water would push him, and then he was shoved off, charging down the path the world gave him, breaking surface and seeing only when it allowed him to, the shock of the cold a very real threat that kept him from breathing.

  At its slimmest the way through was only twice as wide as he was and he went planklike in fear. The water deposited him twenty feet downriver, and he heaved himself onto the flat and warm stone, gasping and coughing. He had wanted her to watch the violence of it but she was already gone. That he could hear Fay and Randy shouting—he would not let it matter, he thought, because he did not love these people. His attention, from now on, his study, would lie elsewhere. The shape of his life, when he could finally control it, would not include them.

  “You just couldn’t let me,” he heard Fay say. “Had to—”

  Randy’s voice came in low and tight, every word bitten off with the least possible effort.

  “—on your own trip, little girl. Not my ego that peacocked and killed our comrades.”

  Wright pecked his way back up along the rocks, thinking up a future for himself, a split-level house and a piece of chalk he gestured with before a room of students, and when he reached his mother she was squatting with her head between her knees, wobbling as she keened. At the sound of his approach she looked up, her features remade into a face he didn’t recognize, starved, toothy, patched with red.

  “Is it my fault they died,” she said, her eyes rooting around in his as though solace were something that could be stolen.

  She must understand I was not there, he thought, and then, seeing the way her hands crossed to hold her own shoulders, he knew that she would have asked anybody, any animal. In that minute she did not have a son.

  Maybe he heard Randy hustling down the path already, maybe Wright knew he’d be listening for the cars on the country road, putting together a story, arranging his hips at forty-five degrees and this thumb at ninety. Later Wright believed he had. His mother never heard from him again, that man who had spent that first night in Ecuador with her and each after that, returning only once to the room where he’d been living with his few cheap things.

  18.

  He thought he had become used to the meals one could gather in the aisles of gas stations, but the next two months played out on another frequency, each day distinct from the one before, presenting another set of challenges. In the first week they had a borrowed car, a loan from a member of Shelter who was still communicating with her, and Wright watched Fay’s hands, always at ten and two, the speedometer at exactly the legal limit. When they managed to get to one of the houses where Fay once would have been welcomed, it was silent, barbed, the people drifting through the rooms shaking their heads and sighing, kitchen to living to bath, bath to living to kitchen, as though on the track of some children’s railroad set. There were no books open, no maps spread. There was never the smell of food.

  Soon they were hitchhiking, Fay lying as much as necessary. They were on their way to a commune, New Mexico, The Last Resort, or they were traveling to an aunt with pancreatic cancer, her remaining days in the double digits, and their Greyhound had broken down. Wright couldn’t see how they presented, he and his mother, but they must have given off some smell of misfortune, because people seemed quick to pity them, to stop asking the questions with the sad answers.

  Then it became clear, at a motel where a clerk with no front teeth asked why Wright wasn’t in school and why she looked familiar, that something had changed, closing the world to them. A photo of her, scavenged from an article about Charlie and the bar, had appeared in the papers that morning, alongside a photo of Randy in uniform and the two deceased members of Shelter and the black schoolteacher their bomb had killed, a man who had died because he stayed home with the flu. The network of pay phones went largely unanswered, and the statement, sent to fifty-six newspapers, was of a different tone. Randy’s name appeared beneath it.

  We of Shelter are devastated by the loss of an innocent life and of our comrades. We are forced to reconsider our violent ideology, which we developed with the belief that we could enact change. We thought that by mirroring, on a small level, the way this country has treated others, by meeting shock and terror with shock and terror, we might as a nation begin to rethink our identity and become a more compassionate force in the global community. We were wrong, and now we are quiet, and we will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

  She read it in sunglasses at a concrete table at a rest stop. They were between rides, having terminated the last early, a man who had asked if she was saved in a way that felt like a threat. She took out a pen and an envelope. He saw her parents’ names printed in capitals, the addressor listed as Bess Rainy, but he refused to ask her why she was writing to them after so many years without a call. Her secrets held no interest anymore, and the thought of his grandparents, how she’d removed them from her life, made him silent. He would run toward the things he knew she’d rejected—a room kept neatly in your honor, photos that described you becoming yourself.

  FAY NEVER SPOKE OF RANDY and Wright never asked, though there was a certain face she made that Wright sensed was a thought of him, her lips parted and eyebrows reaching for each other. The conversation she made was benign, remote, never impeached by the events of the last six months. I wonder what type of tree that is, she would say. Do you think the people who designed cars meant to suggest a human face with the headlights, the grill, or was it a function of the subconscious? Do you like the red that house is painted, or does it remind you of a stoplight? He knew they were running out of Charlie’s money, knew that Randy had run off with half of what Fay had saved, because they were camping more and more, sometimes in state parks where Wright surveyed the other families, the Coleman coolers and rigid bedtimes, sometimes on farmland off the highway, places they ended up when they were tired of holding out their thumbs. Where are we going, he would ask her, not because he believed there was an answer but to communicate his total disdain. After a man with a shotgun had unzipped their tent and spit on its fly and given them one minute to go, somewhere in Pennsylvania, Wright offered to turn her in.

  “I could do it for you,” he said.

  They were following a two-lane country road, barely lifting their feet to make the next steps.

  “Here she is, Officer, the white woman who rejected her general luck and wealth to become an amateur bomb builder and inadvertently kill a teacher. She didn’t mean to, she just wanted to impress the creepy radical she was fucking, I’m not sure which one.”

  They didn’t speak for the two miles into the next town. The only event was a truck passing, its expulsion of air examining their dime-store T-shirts stiff with sweat. When she pulled her fifth cigarette from the box he asked her for one, feeling with some satisfaction that he could hate her for either response—if she agreed for the heresy of not treating him like a child, if she denied him for the hypocrisy of casting him as an adult. He was only a step or two behind her, close enough that he could press the tip of his sneaker down the back of her heel, which he did. After a minute she lit another one on hers and passed it back. In a café where the water-damaged wallpaper was a faded sixties pattern of interlocking flowers, in a town with three stoplights and a bar called Fath
er’s, she went through the classifieds with a pen and circled the cars for sale nearby. It was an apology, he understood that, an ill-advised risk she would undertake in the name of his peace. If the person on the other end of the ad did not look at her too long, they would have four doors they could lock. She left him in the booth with instructions not to leave and was back in two hours, keys in her fist.

  Her seat belt threaded too tight across her chest, the rasping sedan struggling when she steered it onto the highway, she turned off the radio he had turned on.

  “None of this was as I expected it,” she said. “You have to forgive me.”

  He straightened his spine and sucked his cigarette and looked into the moon.

  “There is nothing I have to do,” he said. “You taught me that.”

  THERE WAS A BEAUTIFUL LIE of a month in which she found a job, a home aide to a blind woman in West Virginia, and they resumed some version of their life in a rotting carriage house transfigured by kudzu. On a porch that looked at an anemic stream, Fay set full pots of coffee on a milk crate and he pointed out birds from his dog-eared guide. She spoke to him glancingly about quantum mechanics, the difference between serpentine and alluvial soil. Before long a visiting cousin showed up and looked too long at Fay. She told Wright, at ten that night in the bed they shared, they’d be leaving at sunrise.

  “You’re one of those atoms,” he said, refusing to get up the next morning, speaking to her from under the sheets. “Exactly. You don’t exist except for when other people look at you, and that’s why we’re in this position.” She spent an hour kneeling there, trying to touch his hands, his face, whispering.

  The cousin in question saw her carrying him kicking through the pink light, and the blind woman heard what he yelled, an adult profanity. “Who is that,” she said, groping to turn on a lamp, an old reflex. In the evenings he had rubbed the pads of her feet as she listened to the TV, described to her the faces of the soap opera actors.

  Cunt, he had screamed. She could not believe it was the same boy.

  SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT of the car a month later, reading the newspaper she had sent Wright into the gas station to buy, Fay learned about a bomb in the bathroom of the New York State Department of Corrections, an admonishment to a system that had killed three rioting prisoners. As she scanned the article again, as if looking for her own name, she pulled at the yellow foam coming free from the ceiling. The second explosion came not long after, the Capitol.

  They had reorganized, the communiqués appearing in the newspaper populated with the phrases she had so often spoken. Far from telling her she had been blamed, they would not tell her anything. From the silent car he watched her dial in the roadside phone booths, boxes of light that appeared like projections onto the dark margins of gravel, standing with one foot flat on the opposite thigh. Her face opened when someone picked up one of the numbers she’d memorized, but it was always another forgotten person, waiting for word from an old life, asking her please to get off the line. Then, one day, an answer, a message—he could tell by the way her hair fell around the phone and her shoulders crawled forward. She pulled a pen from behind her ear and wrote on her hand.

  19.

  1972

  Her mouth open as she worked the tweezers in the motel bathroom mirror, her son in the next room sleeping ragged through a sinus infection, she removed her eyelashes one by one. It had been a year, more. She wanted to hang it on her vanity, the explosion, and was telling herself the story of that. On the counter was a twist-tied bag of sea salt she had bought for him to gargle with, in the garbage can the four Band-Aids she’d excised from her feet, pea green and puce, detritus of a lost battle. There were the blisters, then the fungal infection she had developed in her toenails, something she tried to hide from him. Some were half an inch thick and crumbled like old pastry.

  A feeling of cleanliness now lasted a minute, less. Even the drip of water down her back seemed to know something about her, what she’d done, who was dead. Of all people, a schoolteacher with the flu. It was possible not only her physical health had been compromised, she admitted. Her hand had brushed away cockroaches from places they were not. The old thoughts of suicide had returned, a little changed, fantasies that more resembled memories in how long they went—it was as if she could remember killing herself, but also the placidity of the world after, how her leaving had bettered it.

  She removed them one by one, the only light the pale three P.M. gray that came in through the window. The idea was to transfer the fear of people looking at her onto them, make them afraid of staring too long. In the foyer of the last diner she’d been brave enough to enter, the poster of her face was a nightmare that swelled in tinny horror when she saw it also included him, his passport photo, age nine and a half. He had looked for most of his life like someone just stolen from sleep.

  Freed from her eyelids, they fell to the wan pink of the plastic and curled there. A lifetime ago or two, on the high wooden benches of Union Station, her mother holds a palm out to her, the little black comma upon it, and asks her to wish.

  With her top right lid done, she blinked once to clear away any she’d missed and began on the bottom.

  Her thin feet flat on the cold floor, she stands in the center of the circle of Randy and Oz and Annabelle and the others. Do you think because you’re beautiful you will be an exception?

  Her son had not spoken to her in seventy-two hours, and the last word he’d said was no. The question she’d posed him was How can I make this time more tolerable for you? She had not talked with her sister in almost seven years, a fact that did not feel separate from the fact that Charlie had been dead for five. If she were brave enough, she thought, if she were limitless in feeling, some communication would be possible anyway. Their last conversation had ended in a kind of threat—Call me when you’re sober—and Charlie never did, maybe never was. The second movement of grief was less violent, a feeling of stupidity that barked occasionally at the fence it couldn’t cross. In the year since the explosion, she had carried Charlie’s letters everywhere and reread them in empty bathtubs, marking up lines and paragraphs as though to make the message new. Her sister waves from her horse, she underhands a can across the pool.

  One whole eye lashless, she felt the child’s pride in taking a punishment without upset. Here are her parents, a look exchanged across folded hands, shocked by how little it bothers her to be sent to her room. Being alone had never frightened her enough: she had never outright believed what the world would have her, that she was measured by who she was to other people. That was vanity, too, she thought, her eyes weeping at the pain now—her belief that she was an invention of herself alone.

  She had said, to the reedy male voice on the phone, that she would have to think about it, although she knew she had no better option. She was interested in what they could want from her in the way she might be in a shop window, a fantasy constructed in her absence, adjustments in tone and color already made. The Shelter member who’d relayed the details had offered few, then hung up—a name that was unfamiliar, an organization she hadn’t heard of because it had not, until very recently, existed. She had waited four days to call, or two, what constituted a day now transformed by the parentheses of sleep that had become irregular.

  No, Wright had said, an answer less to what she had asked and more to his whole life, his feeling about it. Going to disappear, he had whispered in his sleep one night, a threat that frightened her so much she had turned on all the lights and the television.

  Her eyes done, she began on her brows. It was not for other people—that was a lie. She could recognize them more quickly now, the parts of her thinking that were designed to appease.

  It was not for other people. It was for herself, it was to be kept from mirrors. It was to remind her how ugly she was. She remembered his wife speaking the word, by the pool of the inn. Elise turns to her, smoke pouring from her mouth. Can you imagine what this does to mirrors?

  She had not known s
he was going to call until the moment appeared, ripe, easier than the alternative of stepping back outside into the winter. A pay phone inside a heated garage, just visible through the door behind the gas station cash register, the mechanic, in a T-shirt improbably white, who, when she asked, spread a burnished hand and welcomed her back.

  Inside the booth the plastic was milky, on the blond wood bench a slight recession, the place where people had gripped it while they called home to report on the cost of the damages. She believed the receiver would ignite when she spoke her name. The men who’d come for her were inevitable, and she imagined them all day, Navy uniforms moving toward her in formation.

  “This is Fay,” she said. It had been four months or six since she’d spoken it.

  “We’re so glad to hear from you,” the voice said. Already the conversation was familiar, the confidence of the synecdoche, the young man speaking slowly for many. Their long acronym he explained to her with a green zeal that put her in mind of her age—she was thirty-three, older than she had ever imagined becoming. Her fantasy of herself had concluded.

  They wanted to populate the last Apollo launch, he said, with images of the people who had suffered under the American hegemony. Vietnamese children, women who wasted their lives as men’s secretaries, the assassinated members of the Black Panthers, the students slain at Kent State.

  “We are against racism and repression,” he said. “We are against misogyny and capitalism and war.”

  “How about plastics,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Are you against those, too? Hundreds of years to degrade, some of them never. Might be room for one more letter in your title. Tack a P on there.”

  He did not laugh and she did not apologize. There was the phrase smash the era that failed us, there was her imagination of how he looked as he spoke, crossing an austere apartment, books the only clutter, his slim finger purple with the cord wrapped around it. There would be other people in unraveling sweaters, mouths open as if to indicate what he said to her came from their mouths, too. She did not mention how he and the young people who admired him were not the first to make this connection, between the war on this world and the spectacular fight for others. The black reverend who had marched with two hundred people and twenty mule-drawn carts to Vincent’s launch, the signs about how the program money could be spent.