America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  He waits for the boy to nod in confirmation, which he finally does, fingers of both hands curled around the tan pull-down handle.

  And he’s fighting tooth and nail, because as it turns out, says the man at the pawnshop, this is a watch that was sold to the public. The French friend says what about the little tag sewn in that says Apollo 11, look how long the strap goes, obviously it’s meant to go over a space suit. The French friend’s English is bad, worse when he’s angry, and the guy behind the counter, a beautiful Vietnamese man, still works there, anyway pulls out a magazine where he says he’s seen the ad for this watch recently. He points out the similarities, and the friend points out the differences.

  The boy’s knees are up on the seat now, his left hand tensed on the dash. The color on his face looks daubed there by a preschooler. They come up behind a Toyota, a family of four in coordinated neon windbreakers, license plate Idaho, and overtake it with a long, mean honk that bleeds into the next mile.

  Commemorative edition, he keeps saying. Commemorative edition.

  The driver takes his hands off the wheel to ape the gesture of the man at the pawnshop, hands raised as if holding two platters by his ears. The boy’s hand shoots to the wheel.

  Commemorative edition! He acknowledges yes, the differences, the Velcro, the patch, but he asks the friend, and what can the friend really say, how can you verify? How can you prove it? No proof, no money. And this makes sense, of course. Fame like that, prestige, really we’re talking about power, it can’t just pass from one hand into the next. There’s no trickle-down. It’s nontransferable. It would only be truly worth something if Vincent Kahn sold it, and it would never be worth it to Vincent Kahn to sell it.

  He got no money?

  No, no, he got some. Be patient. He got the price of the watch, the one sold to the public, plus a few sniffs more, which of course means the pawnshop man had his suspicions. You can look it up, there are a few of them unaccounted for, the real ones I mean, lost to the black market. Anyway, with that money the three of them got a vacation rental back in town, I’ll show it to you on the drive back, this beautiful deck on a hill, a hot tub cut into it, a front room that was all found windows, just surrounded by trees. He could have spent it on more doctors, whichever fashionable eastern medicine, but he said no. They had these big dinners, of course he couldn’t really eat much, shaved truffles, oysters from Bodega Bay, I’ll take you. He made the shopping lists and wrote out the coursing in the mornings. When he sensed it was getting to be time, the end of two months, he had the idea that he wanted a going-away party. A hundred people came, formal attire. Someone brought fifty of those paper lanterns you get in Chinatown and they rigged them in the trees somehow. He had this thrifted Nehru suit, peach, and an orchid boutonniere, and he just held court on the deck in his wheelchair, kissing everybody goodbye. Anyone who cried he sent away. He was in bed by ten and they all walked to the river and sent—tea candles—down it in plastic—boats. I’m sorry, it always gets me. Brandon, his name was Brandon. We’re almost there. Isn’t that the most beautiful story you’ve ever heard? You’re not looking at me like that’s the most beautiful story you’ve ever heard.

  They are approaching the last sign to be seen for a while, a three-way stop known for its accidents, people turning against the glare onto the coast road built the century before for mules. There is a piece of a bumper, there are the shards of a clipped side mirror.

  He should have— I’m sorry, the boy says, but he should have been in a hospital. I don’t think it’s a beautiful story. I don’t care about the fucking tea candles. He shouldn’t have been sick to begin with. I don’t think it’s a beautiful story. Who was his family? What about his friend? Are you saying his friend never.

  I’ve heard it both ways. He came at the last minute, he didn’t come. Had been in New York, disappeared to Mexico after, was sending back AZT, took a photo that mattered. You’ve seen it, that boy in a wheelchair who couldn’t hold up his sign, it’s half-curled in his lap, that protest down—

  Here it is, superseding talk and feeling. It’s the last color, someone told this boy at the party, and if he didn’t believe it at the time, wanting to stay in his life and not imagine millions of others, if he didn’t believe it, he does now: that our thinking fails when it comes to this, when it comes to borders, water and sky that are the edges—that blue is the last color, in every known language, to be named.

  19.

  Hands open to the heat she waits.

  He is taking her for another flying lesson. In the pockets of her overalls there is always a pen, always some paper. She is a promising student, he doesn’t need to tell her that. Like all other growth in her life, all other knowledge, this goes without document or ceremony. It is evident only in how she speaks and moves. A word that wasn’t available to her before, a concept she turns over alone. The desert is her partner in this, a blankness where she sees new parts of her life and thinking printed.

  Behind her in the Florida evening is the rocket, designed she knows by the German whose first destroyed cities. She forgets what life is like with the cushion of sleep. In her pockets there is nearly nothing. A dime, the book of matches. The people around her know her name. To her they are legs in denim, feet in woven leather sandals. They hold signs and banners, photos of lives cut short. Numbers of innocent dead, of dollars spent on launches such as this. She knows to get to the real inside of any message is like a trip to the center of the earth. It goes only one way.

  In his truck they hardly speak. Sometimes it is like this, a kind of praise, a proxy for love, evident in how little needs to be explained. There are his two fingers on her ear, there is the air that whips from his window over his body and then over hers, comparing the interruptions of their shapes. When they reach the hangar, a structure that looks accidental in the flat of sand, he kills the truck and slips his hand past the rivets at her waist, beneath the cotton men’s undershirt to the curve of her belly.

  She is arranged in lotus posture, an exacting shape her body knows well. It is not supposed to come easily, she can remember reading. Do not sickle the ankle. Enlightenment is a thousand lives away. The tops of her feet are flush with the tops of her thighs. The soles look at the sky. Then a question appears in her body, somewhere in her molars or the juncture in the throat that allows water in. Where is her son?

  Both their doors are open. He keeps his face on the view while he does this to her, as if his middle fingers moving in her underwear are dependent on the purpling chaparral or the smear of cirrus. That he has seen this part of her more closely than she ever will, how it changes given touch or heat, has not gone unconsidered in her mind. A mirror couldn’t show her, a camera couldn’t. This is part and parcel of the female, which is created, she begins to know, not by who lives it but by who watches it—a male invention, stunning, wicked. She imagines herself as separate from the body he acts upon. At a certain moment he loses precision and goes too fast and she cries out. When it is over he calls her Clyde. Are you ready, Clyde? She hops onto the dirt first. It is how she needs him to see her, a few feet ahead, a few minutes more prepared.

  The question she treats as any other thought, a ripple in the surface. Where is my son? She allows it to pass. A thought is not a rule or fact. It cannot yell or conduct heat. A thought alone cannot open a door or turn off a light.

  As she prepares for the flight, circling the plane, he keeps his hands flat on his knees where he sits inside it. With the strength of her calves she rolls the plane two feet back to test the tread of the tires. She enunciates her checks, every light that works, calling out what this man has taught her in secret. Now she sits next to him. Right aileron. Left. Oil temperature at seventy-one.

  The oil in her hair feels cooler and lighter than she had imagined, when she let herself. Less like a change to her body and more like a change in the weather. The match she lights without seeing.

  Hats on, he says, and they slip the headsets over their ears, although she only e
ver listens. To the control tower, the low auctioneer voices that yawp numbers, it is always just him in the plane. The figures he bleats about its weight are lies, her one hundred and ten erased. What does this make her once they’re off the ground? She passes beyond being his secret into something else, a life so removed from its context it weighs nothing.

  The question comes to her again and she realizes now it is not her mind feeding it to her but something outside of her. A sound, an advancing movement. Her eyes are just cracked, a tiny crescent of vision, but what she sees is enough. Crouching, he removes the match from her hand and holds it there, a little limp. He has only planned this far. She knows this about him, the way he is led by his mind, the path up but not down.

  It’s a kind of pain she likes, becoming nobody, being nowhere anyone knows. As a child she was drawn to guest quarters yet to be furnished. As a child what she wanted to be was an empty room. The plane, taxiing now, is a sound so complete as to ask what was there before, and to answer, in the down-tick, nothing. The blue swims through the glass and into her mouth.

  It is not what she says that will make a difference, but the voice that she uses, the name. No one knows it but the two of them. In speaking it into his ear she asks his permission to go. When she can no longer hear him breathing she lights another.

  There is a kind of understanding that occurs just after. If we are lucky, we catch it at the door on our way out, watch it enter the rooms we have left. It is not always possible to tell the exact moment you have separated from the earth. So much of what we know for certain is irrelevant by the time we know it.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to

  Catherine Lacey

  The Russian River

  Charles Buchan

  The Rio Upano

  Megan Lynch

  The Carnic Alps

  Sara Birmingham

  Alexandra Christie

  The San Gabriel Mountains

  Jessica Friedman

  Jin Auh

  The MacDowell Colony

  Blake Tewksbury

  Cindy Fallows

  Alex Ross Perry

  Sebastian Pardo

  The Saco River

  Hollis, Maine

  Guerneville, California

  The Rio Grande

  Jonathan Lee

  Petaluma, California

  John Wray

  Columbia University

  Jason Porter and Shelly Gargus

  The White Mountains

  Barbara Henderson

  Brian Smith

  The Green Mountains

  Bennington College

  Anni and Peter Wünschmann

  Clinton Avenue, Brooklyn

  Friesach, Austria

  Catapult

  Dorla McIntosh

  Macas, Ecuador

  Daniel Kaufman

  The Kaweah River

  A Note on Sources, Research, and Historical Veracity

  Alan Bean, who left this planet again in 2018, was deeply generous with what he saw on the moon. My phone calls with him, speaking about color and sound, as well as life after the Apollo program, were a highlight not only of my research, but my life.

  Sam Fordyce, who worked as engineer at NASA Headquarters Office of Manned Space Flight during the Apollo program, gave me great insight into that environment and the personalities that ruled it. For this interview, and his grace in welcoming me in, I am indebted.

  Roger Hobler, at the Petaluma Pilot Training Center, taught me what I know about flying.

  In certain cases, primary sources have been positioned here as fiction. Because these materials have entered the public domain and because they are the voices of the people who lived through this moment in history, I opted not to bring my own twenty-first-century imagination to their paraphrasing. The transcript of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee on January 27, 1967, is used here, verbatim, in service of the fire that kills the fictional astronaut Sam Bisson in the fictional Apollo 1. Likewise, the letter drafted by the review committee of that incident finds direct use here. Pieces of the transcript of the Apollo 11 mission were also used in service of the fictional Apollo 11 mission, though departures in that case are significant.

  Touring the jungle with Remigio “Casi Guapo” Grefa, of the Napo Wildlife Center in Yasuni National Park, was an education.

  The memoranda of the Weathermen—who became the Weather Underground—inspired the memoranda of the fictional political collective on these pages; certain elements of their practices, ideas and misfortunes correspond with those of Shelter. Though it will be obvious to anyone familiar with that group’s history that their trajectory is not mirrored here, it feels important to clarify that mimesis of their actions was not my intention. The Weatherpeople’s writings, as collected in Sing a Battle Song, edited by Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, were deeply helpful in my early thinking about this project, as was the 1970 journalistic investigation into Diana Oughton’s life and death by Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers.

  The fictional protest image Wright describes in a letter to Vincent is, of course, in tribute to Bernie Boston’s 1967 photograph Flower Power.

  Mention of a demonstration at the fictional Apollo 11 launch refers directly to that organized by the civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy against the launch of Apollo 11. Protesters also met Apollo 11 goodwill tour stops at the University of Brasilia in Brazil, and in Montevideo, Uruguay; during a GSO tour, a GI reportedly asked Neil Armstrong why the U.S. was “so interested in the moon instead of the conflict in Vietnam.” These pieces of research, many drawn from James R. Hansen’s First Man, allowed me to comfortably imagine factually divergent instances of dissent. In terms of the Mercury, Apollo, Gemini, and Space Shuttle programs, I have tried to remain generally faithful to the milestones and trajectories as they really happened, and when.

  Other books that served me greatly during the years I spent with this project include Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon; Charles DeBenedetti’s An American Ordeal; Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On; Gabriel Rotello’s Sexual Ecology; Gloria Emerson’s Winners & Losers; Frances FitzGerald’s The Fire in the Lake; The Sixties Papers, edited by Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert; and, of course, the poems and letters in Daniel Berrigan’s America Is Hard to Find.

  Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club, which burned in 1953, served as inspiration for Charlie’s bar.

  Conversations with Dean McArthur, MSW, helped me write about gay male sex and culture.

  Finally, the reportage, correspondence, and journals of my father, David Lee Alcott (1941–2004), were a crucial introduction to my writing about the era. The light coming off my mother, Carolyn Power Alcott (1953–2013), who escaped her cul-de-sac in a Volkswagen and a few lives after that in as spectacular a manner, is at the center of this novel. “I want to be expanding gas, not shrinking solid,” my father wrote once—and so he and my mother became.

  About the Author

  Born in 1988 in Northern California, KATHLEEN ALCOTT is the author of the novels Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, ZYZZYVA, the Guardian, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine; her work has been short-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Chautauqua Prize. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, she has taught at Columbia University and Bennington College.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Kathleen Alcott

  Infinite Home

  The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AMERICA WAS HARD TO FIND. Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Alcott. All rights reserved under Internation
al and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  COVER DESIGN BY JAYA MICELI

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: © WIN-INITIATIVE/GETTY IMAGES (MOJAVE DESERT); © SHUMOFF/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS (SKY); © BRUCE FRISCH/GETTY IMAGES (ROCKET)

  FIRST EDITION

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alcott, Kathleen, author.

  Title: America was hard to find : a novel / Kathleen Alcott.

  Description: New York : Ecco, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036321 (print) | LCCN 2018037862 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062662545 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062662521 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Families--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.L344 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.L344 A82 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036321

  * * *

  Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-266254-5

  Version 04102019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266252-1

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