America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  As he concentrated, his exhales came a little clotted from his mouth. He was the child who never breathed quite easily, a lesser health that gave him an adult quality, for he could complain about symptoms, identify patterns in their uptick. His sniff and rattle distracted her and she turned, kneaded at his sinuses with the pads of her thumbs. Soon she was hunched over him, her hair slipping out of the inept braid and falling around him. She was the most in his possession like this, diagnosing an ailment, her torso contorted to better see him like some tree that grows in the direction of sun. Fay rose and was back in a minute, spreading the Vicks VapoRub over his neck, squinting to see where the application was thinner.

  “On the count of three I want you to breathe in through your nose and imagine you’re somewhere with a beautiful view, maybe high up a mountain. One, two, three.” Randy stalked in as she spoke, carrying bread and flowers and his Polaroid.

  “There’s my sweet family.” He used this phrase often, as though it were a slogan, and he had a side like this, a part that wanted to photograph them. He had shown Wright how to use a level, drilled him on multiplication tables as they walked. “There’s my sweet family,” he said again, nuzzling the door frame a little, his thin denim sleeves rolled up and the pearled snap buttons halfway undone. Wright loved him at these times, his enthusiasm for the makeshift slingshot, how he inserted their names into American songs. He had crooned a perfect Brian Wilson as he sang his revised “Surfer Girl,” Fay’s palo santo his microphone, Do you love me, do you Wright and Fay, Wright and Fay, my little Wright and Fay? Today he was buoyant, managing the door with an exaggeratedly light wrist until the air of the room closed around him.

  “Where did your walk take you, love?” Fay sat cross-legged now and patted the space next to them on the bed. Randy’s nostrils began to flare as he examined the place she gestured to, as though there were some threat there, a roach or a scorpion, that he would have to artfully remove.

  “That does makes me think of those bodies,” he said, each word a little louder than the one that had come before, the middle of a conversation he had begun without them. “Those who were lit up. Those who bought the farm.”

  Randy let out a moan then that used all parts of him, the shoulders thrown back making it louder, the tensed calves making it deeper. Fay leaned to the side, blocking Wright’s view, and threaded an arm around back to hold on to his foot. From behind her Wright brought a hand to her belly, pressed his head against the place where the crepe of her halter top met her skin.

  “We’re going to have to get it out of here,” Randy said, and soon he was in the bathroom, rifling through the shallow shelves of the mirrored cabinet, opening the few sticky drawers. She chased him in with her mouth set. There was the clatter of jars, the swishing of the shower curtain and the clicks of the rings. She was speaking his name, the meaning different with each iteration, a prayer, a threat, a command. “Where is it?” Then the stick and release of his sneakers stopped, the faucet came on, and he was standing over the bed again, lunging at Wright with a twisted washcloth.

  They were before Wright on the foot of the bed in an instant, and she had Randy’s hands behind him, her torso atop his and her knees spread on his back. She spoke into his ear, her lips contracting and releasing so quickly that her teeth appeared like flashbulbs. Wright could hear only every other.

  “Ever

  Fucking

  Touch

  Not his

  War

  Will be

  Out

  Not

  Ever

  Understand?”

  They were silent a minute, five, Randy’s breathing grinding down from its panting, and finally she freed his hands. Wright had hidden his head in the crumple of sheets so that only a slice of vision remained, but turned when Randy lay his face near him. It was totally changed, open to other people as it had been closed, wet. “I’m sorry, pal,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  At the door Fay gestured with a scoop of her shoulder for Randy to go. He stopped at the long bureau, surveying the things there, the Mamas and the Papas record with its lush colors, the end of an incense stick that wilted over the long wooden holder. Then he was gone again, leaving behind the sweet smell of his sweat.

  “I forgot something I shouldn’t have forgotten,” Fay said. “You did nothing wrong.”

  She sat on the end of the bed, speaking to him in the mirror, her hair made wild by the struggle with Randy.

  “The war Randy fought in was, still is, evil. That’s really the only word for it. Teenagers killing boys your age, being urged to kill. Told that was their purpose, denied privileges if they did not, socks, meals. It was an experience so frightening that it latched on to the rest of their lives, to their futures, too—have you ever had a memory come at you for a reason that didn’t seem really clear?”

  “I think so. Songs.”

  “Right. Exactly. A sound is one way we associate, and so are other ways of sensing. Smell. Is another.”

  She had her right palm half in her mouth. He imagined she was keeping her organs in, imagined them pouring over her pink bottom lip. For the next quiet minute he prayed they wouldn’t, knew they would. It would be his job to clean them. It would be, somehow, his fault.

  “That Vicks VapoRub that we put on you tonight, it means something different to Randy. It doesn’t mean medicine. In the war they put it under their noses to keep from smelling other things, so that scent immediately brings him away from us, to a time when he was very scared.”

  Wright did not ask what things. He heard Randy say it again: Those bodies. Those who were lit up. The fear of the evening had exhausted him and he brought his knees to his chest, falling into a thin, taut sleep.

  HIS VISION SANDY, HE WOKE a few hours later, alarmed by the lack of other sounds in the room. When he pulled the linen curtain he saw them on the ground, his mother’s caftan around her hips, Randy’s ass lean and puckered. Their bodies moving in concert reminded him of trains, motion made of other motion, the undying violence of wheels.

  3.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS, 1966

  The day they got word of Bisson’s assignment, an orbit—not a landing—was the last time they were photographed together, their foreheads kissing by the tank of a grill in Sam’s backyard. Nowhere in the set, published in full color in Life, was Bisson’s dense mood, the misery. The ongoing contract was a third of their income, essential considering the life insurance for which they couldn’t qualify, and it went to contingency funds for their families. As the program raced ahead, the distance between how their lives felt and how they photographed grew rapidly, until the only time they put on shorts or read was when stage-managed to do so. That their lives outside of work had become performances sent them deeper into who they were when inside it, a place without possessions or memories.

  The first orbit of the moon was not nothing, Vincent said to Bisson when they were alone, after the announcement was made, strolling down the gray linoleum hallway where every step sounded off a report of echoes and their reflections swam gleaming near their feet. Bisson dipped his chin half an inch, the smallest agreement he could give, and passed a hand down the back of his neck, the buzz cut his wife had given him on their lawn the night before while his son and the Kahns watched. He had not spoken since the meeting.

  The news came from Anderson, who had been one of the first to make the parabolic flight that qualified as space travel, and who had, shortly after, left a routine physical with the news he would not fly again. He had stayed on as head of crew operations, choosing the men who would go on each mission that he could not. A heart murmur, Vincent thought, was a term that aptly described the mood Anderson gave off, someone whose wishes were so accustomed to being swallowed that they became a defining quality of their own, a slightly sad forbearance he afforded everyone but himself. The gold tie clip that Kennedy had given him was ubiquitous, the only part of him that asked for attention. He was the first person any man called when he was feeli
ng sore or childish. Tall and too pale, Anderson solved the problems of others because his were intractable, hidden away in the dark of his body.

  Bisson had been named the commander of the trip that would circle the moon but not land on it because he was the best of them, a painful fact everyone in the room understood but would not mention. Being the best sometimes meant to be trusted with the worst, or at least the uncertain introductions. Of the thirty-six men, Bisson had wanted the landing the longest, had watched its inky beginnings sharpen into a striking line.

  Anderson made the announcement first thing in the morning, no rap of the knuckles or campy whistle. They had discussed the wearable coolant in the suit, the issues with the latest command module hatch. Bisson’s nose fell three degrees, but—because Anderson loved what they all did so permanently that it seemed to have become a line on his face, and because he had taken countless calls from upset wives and turned them placid, and because he had fought with superiors just to get the astronauts naps or Cokes or a day off—Bisson thanked him, the disappointment changing even the way his mouth moved around his teeth. He stood up and offered his hand like he would a hero a slip of paper on which to sign an autograph. “It is and will be an honor, sir,” he had said.

  They had commuted together that morning in Vincent’s Nova and they approached it together where it glowed blue-gold in the last of the afternoon. Knowing what the next-best thing to being alone would be—Sam loved to drive, enjoyed the minute theater of traffic, believed a cloverleaf on-ramp was the country’s great invention—Vincent slowed his pace, called out Sammo, and pitched the keys overhand. Bisson lit up involuntarily, receiving the crenulated jangle of metal in his hand, and then he gave the hood a little knock and stepped into the driver’s seat. The radio never went on. They had been separated.

  Vincent had no more than stepped out of his stiff leather shoes and removed his socks, run a finger between his toes to remove the lint that had accrued there, when it went off, the red phone NASA had installed in his living room. On news of the assignment, Life wanted to come over and photograph Bisson. What if they all got together, perhaps some grilling and swimming? He was not allowed any answer but yes.

  Elise he found in the bedroom, where she was perched on the window seat painting her toenails, her posture serene and the lacquer’s smell pervasive. He did not even need to explain, only to say, “Barbecue, thirty minutes.” In chignons and playful sailor’s trousers, she had become a master at last-minute appearances—those brittle years in the mountains were gone; he had watched her shed them. There was nothing about their time in California either needed to remember, and this was a promise between them, a more potent vow than any other. Evenings she read to him and he clutched her hand.

  Beside him in their walk-in, her hair a shellacked topiary, she pushed at the clacking row of wooden hangers. “This one,” she said, pulling a shell-pink button-up, “with the tan slacks, the cotton, not the linen.” She set his coffee on the vanity without a word. They were ready in five minutes, passing through the gate that connected their yard to the Bissons’.

  The first to greet them was Eli, eight, who daily papered Bisson’s windshield with drawings of guns and cougars. Today he paced the ring of adults in a New York Yankees cap, a Secret Detective glow-in-the-dark watch he had sent away for. A blue jay feather dangled from a leather string around his neck. He was bedecked like this always, in pieces that might make the difference in getting his name spoken aloud. Occasionally his voice broke through, piercing the conversation that happened a foot above him.

  “Dad? Should we scuba-dive the pool?”

  Soon they were splayed, Vincent and Elise and Marlene, in pastel lounge chairs by the chlorinated blue, the smoke from the grill hanging between them. Bisson wouldn’t move from his place by the barbecue, and the photographer was unhappy, pivoting aggressively because of it, every angle of attack, every adjustment of focus. He was a short man with a gap in his teeth that sometimes whistled, toes that pointed toward each other, and they hated him with delighted sport, mimicking his attempts at artistic direction the moment he left. I’d love one, Sam would say to Vincent, hand on his chin, where you’re looking constipated in the hammock. Don’t act constipated—be constipated.

  “I’d love to get one where the men are talking while the wives look on,” he was saying now, “a little concerned, a little proud, maybe from the poolside, you know what I mean?” Leaning across the balsa-wood console that connected their chaises, Elise and Marlene began to whisper, their trust in each other real. No one had commented on Bisson’s silence. It was as if his life could go on without his participation in it.

  The photographer had just pinched his pants up at the thighs and squatted, just begun to adjust his focus and to murmur directives at the women—“A little more somber,” “A little more scared,” “Marlene, are you frightened,” “Elise, are you relieved it’s not him”—when Eli’s backlit silhouette appeared twenty feet above them. On the roof his bike looked like something else, sleeker, the blue paint steely in the shadows cast by the peaks of the dormer windows. “Ittttt’ssss Eli,” he bellowed, undressed save a helmet and the snug Speedo he wore to swim practice and a throw blanket he’d tied like a cape. Marlene was up on her wrists in a second, scrambling to stand, straining her voice and yelling for Bisson, who was watching this unfold as though it were something televised. Vincent, next to him, slipped an arm around his neck.

  Eli’s jaw was set as he pedaled off, his eyes fixed on the deepest part of the pool, and the clicks of the camera were all to be heard for the hardening moment that preceded the splash, which went on a minute and soaked an eight-foot radius. It took too long for the kid to resurface, a viscous revolution of time in which the broken water refused to return to glassiness.

  The blue of the sky at six was frail, and this was something that happened in Texas, a feeling the land was more important.

  “The moon,” Vincent was saying in Sam’s ear. “Who needs it?”

  “Oceans and witches,” Bisson said, his first words in ten hours.

  They were applauding like devoted fans as Eli rose up coughing, his hand with its woven summer camp bracelets preceding him. Marlene and Elise scowled at this, the danger their husbands could see as diversion.

  Oceans and witches became a joke they’d say to each other in passing, code for anything they could not control and so would not offer another thought, the unhappiness of their wives, any future beyond the immediate, all that went on outside the program. The last photo taken of them was barely that, just their heads pressed together, just their posture the same, extras in an image of a shouting boy driving blind through pale dusk.

  4.

  MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, 1967

  They woke Wright before sunlight one day to ask. Did he want to go to Quito? The bus left in an hour. Their minds were made up, his mother’s hair wet, her fingers pushing earrings through her earlobes as she spoke. She was happiest this way, about to leave, the kind of person with teeth marks on her passport, dark sunglasses that remarked to passersby she was on her way. Why now, he wanted to know. Would they spend the night. Finally he agreed, curiosity just outweighing his silver fear.

  On the bus he had hoped to sleep but the blinking driver kept the radio on as they rose from the rain forest into the height of the cordillera, taking curves that sent leather purses and soda cans into the aisle. Fay and Randy sat ahead of him, whispering as though they were building something complicated in the dark. Finally he dipped into a nap, dreams as jerky and protean as the ride.

  Walking on the cobblestones spaced wide and uneven, his thinking bleary and stunted by the sight of buildings so much larger than any he saw in his daily life, Wright followed his mother and Randy into the crowd of people without asking any questions. He assumed a festival, the birthday of someone famous, and soon they were immersed in it, a commotion without a center. Babies twirled at the top of the crowd, on shoulders, on the tops of their parents’ heads, the masse
s having bled from the sidewalk into the street. People weren’t moving anymore, but sound was, a knot of screaming that approached in flashes.

  As the motorcade of astronauts approached, packing the mob tighter, Wright began to understand what they had not told him. His mother and Randy were part of a unit that was within the mass but apart from it. They were not, like the other people, bringing their mouths to their hands or pointing for the benefit of their children or wiping away tears. These would be the first men to orbit the moon, Bisson and Bailey and Slate, but Randy and Fay had not come to cheer. Their shoulders forward, their eyes cut straight through the hum of bodies to the men in the cars.

  The astronauts wore white linen guayaberas and leis, and they waved in precise twists of the hand and torso, a paean to a kind of manhood he knew nothing about. He wanted to climb into their laps or inside their bodies, be the organs animating them or the pulse beating.

  The group his mother belonged to, fifteen or so, began to separate and hand out the signs they had carried here, plant their feet in a way that signified an offensive. Some were professors, still wearing their teaching clothes, sweating dark ovals in the armpits of their white shirts, others students, bedraggled, their hair uncut, their postures uneven from the heavy book bags that hung from shoulders. Their expressions were like pools in deep shade, offering only the occasional reflection of the world around them. His mother and Randy and one other veteran—a man who wore an upside-down flag, and whose left sleeve was pinned up to where his arm would have started—were the only Americans. NO MORE BREAD AND CIRCUSES, said a sign. WE ARE NOT DISTRACTED BY YOUR SPECTACLE and HOW MANY CHILDREN WILL DIE ON THIS PLANET WHILE YOU COLONIZE ANOTHER?

  “The crimes of America are not forgiven,” his mother chanted. “The crimes of America are not forgiven!”