America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  Though the chain of cars tried to pick up speed, the crowd made acceleration impossible. The three men in the convertible, their abbreviated haircuts identical, their shoulders dusted with rice, stopped using their hands to wave, bringing them to their faces instead, ducking, kissing their knees. Bodyguards climbed from one car to the next, insects in tailored suits. Over the mass of people, through the air so thin it was named the cloud forest, flew spoiled tomatoes and week-old fish heads, the dead eyes engorged and fixed on the sky.

  5.

  1967

  Rather than being the place where his life collected itself, Randy’s sleep was like another life. He muttered, words that were recognizable and acronyms that weren’t. His hand shot out across the night table between the two beds, clearing lamps and Fay’s bangles and the rocks Wright had polished. He sat up and slapped his feet on the floor and gave low, brief grunts, affirmative answers to unheard commands, and then he crawled across the bed he shared with Fay, the points of his knees everywhere, the spread of his palms making the mattress spasm.

  Wright woke at all of it, and he spent his days sick with lack of rest, always feeling a step behind his wants. The great plans he had for them aside, his Lincoln Logs stayed loose in his palm. He subjected everyone to the pain of his last adult tooth coming in, howling and pointing at his mouth, surprised they could not feel it.

  He was the first to read the telegram, which appeared under the door one afternoon with the shadow of the person that pushed it in. He had not answered the knock. Though the euphemism typed there was beyond him, the message was clear from the context. Standing in his bare feet he took the dried flowers from the vase that Fay kept on the bureau and he emptied them out, breaking off the stems, placing them at a diagonal bias around the square of bad news. She returned soon after, her back pushing the door open and her arms full with rolled straw mats, the smell of her sweat moving with her.

  Near the Fisher-Price record player he’d long grown out of, his paper planes and Randy’s stack of letters, ribbons in blues and greens that Fay kept to tie her braids, the thing kept its secret. He pointed. She gave an odd laugh, the kind made mostly of fear, and she picked it up with care not to displace the flowers.

  Eyes closed, Fay twisted her body to the left and then the right, and then she crossed to the bathroom, where he could hear the anemic shower go on, the echoing thump of her footsteps as she shifted. She emerged in a towel knotted at her breasts, her hair so full with water that fat beads ran from it at every point, and fell face-forward onto the bed, her covering detached around her, her right knee bent and her left arm shot up as she let go her first sob. He didn’t know what to do, so he read it again, and then he lay down on the bed opposite her, thinking that she deserved to be watched.

  CHARLIE PASSED

  PER WILL

  PROPERTY TO BE SOLD TO EDWDS

  PROFIT YRS

  NO FUNERAL

  CONDOLENCES

  PLEASE ADVISE RE: HORSE

  SHE PASSED TWO WEEKS PROPPED up by pillows, receiving guests that way, things spread out around the shape of her body under the sheets, a postcard of Abbott and Costello squabbling, pale purple flowers, plates of chicken and rice, crucifixes of wood and Lucite and braided leather. Lucinda was there at least once a day, telling her again that her work would be there for her when she was ready. Rising only to use the bathroom, to place the occasional phone call in the front office, Fay nodded at everything said to her, would you like the curtains open or closed, what did you dream of. Her sleep was so fitful, so foul with sweat, that Wright and Randy shared the opposite bed.

  He wondered when it would be over, but when it was, when she got up and spent all day conditioning the back of her head, when she mopped their tile floor with that flat and myopic look, he wished for that time back, the afternoons when what she had lost had made her soft and useless, and had not yet begun to change her.

  She assured Wright, when he asked daily, that they would get back to the books they read together, things she assigned outside of his regular schoolwork. He was spending more time alone than he ever had, the money his mother gave him fat in his pocket, slipping in and out of the nearby restaurants that all served plantains and roasted chicken over rice. One day he returned from school to find Fay and Randy sitting in front of their room, propped up by the nubbled wall, tears slipping untouched down their faces, laughing a little every few minutes. It was Charlie’s horse, they said, it was Lloyd. Fay had arranged for a caretaker until something more permanent could be settled, but Lloyd had chewed through his reins and shit in the drained pool and escaped. A pilot flying over had seen him running like hell, across a landing site and the winding highway, and then he couldn’t see him anymore.

  6.

  MOJAVE DESERT, 1967

  Her own horse, everybody said later, into their cups, into their palms.

  Charlie got into an argument with the schoolteacher she loved, her girlfriend of five years and a secret to everyone, in her room early in the morning—the wrong time for a fight, she thought. Shouldn’t the ass crack of morning be the time for the complaints of the body? That was the first thing she said to Angeline, who was unhappy and devoted and had asked about some plans for the holiday. Her sister had been gone from the country almost five years that had felt like a cavity, a mostly occluded pain that might reveal itself barbed and whistling for reasons you didn’t totally understand.

  The question was, What are we going to do for Christmas? The assumption it built upon had not been discussed, or Charlie could not remember discussing it.

  The horse was a drinker, too. She made him that way. Could grip the bottle nose delicately enough not to break it, then tip it back, one beer in one go.

  What had she and Fay done for Christmas, for example, her girlfriend said. Charlie waved in a general outward direction, a gesture that probably looked like fuck-it-to-hell. In fact there was a shed she meant, beyond the pool, a crosshatched door painted white, then blue, inside it a cardboard box reinforced at the corners. Popcorn strings dipped in glitter, the tabs of all sodas consumed in the fall of 1958 worked together with copper wire to make the topper of a Christmas tree, an experiment that had ended badly. Honey, Charlie had said, which race car had a hair ball.

  A beautiful creature, hard to say which color. She taught it to dance to “Mack the Knife.” “Hey, Good Lookin’.”

  But the gesture was all she could make. Angeline set her jaw and began putting things in piles and systems, the beer cans into the trash, the change that came from Charlie’s pockets at the end of the night into denominations.

  Are you under the impression you treat me well, her girlfriend said.

  It was a miracle that horse had learned to be around it at all, the sonic booms all damn day. A matter of time, someone said, maybe.

  She could not answer. At that Angeline shook her head and disappeared into the bathroom to fill the water for the percolator. Charlie’s voice went up, lost its core. You probably don’t even need electricity for that, hothead. Plug the thing into yourself.

  To keep herself from speaking any further she walked out, boots unlaced, naked under her red union suit. The sunrise was a civil war in pinks and she tore through it to where he was sleeping. Almost never had she ridden him this early, because she woke with headaches most mornings and needed to keep the world as still as possible, a thing she could see but that she would not touch. As they set out he was distracted, surprised by tiny flowers he had seen every day of his life. She’d forgotten her patience, lost it in the bedroom where it was clear for the hundredth time she was not the woman for the job. Thoughts of love were not enough—she could not thread them through to the other side where they were felt. She had one hand on the saddle and another hanging, an open pint of Beam tugged onto her middle finger.

  Could have been some new test, a noise he hadn’t heard before. That he was half-asleep. Or could have been nothing, the mystery an animal has kept his whole life and then needs to get ri
d of.

  When he first picked up speed she was grateful. She thanked him. It was her turn to be surprised by the things she found familiar, a last look at the inn that had begun, fifteen years before, as an ink drawing circumscribed by the moisture ring on a cocktail napkin. Inside the velocity of his gallop, the things she could see became thinner, reduced to their most startling element. If you flattened its colors the desert was not beige but purple. Miles from the inn and crossing the highway, the car that nearly got them was only a sound.

  Irony is they made it across. Guy driving almost crashed, seeing them.

  She had stopped kicking, stopped saying his name. Whatever they were doing, wherever he was taking her, happened where speaking left off. She had belonged to him, always she had belonged to him, and it was a beautiful favor he had done in allowing the world to think the opposite. When he succeeded in throwing her she let go with a chosen freedom, knowing a locked body broke more easily.

  Irony is, his loyalty. If he hadn’t come back after he threw her, who knows.

  As he doubled back, a shadow galloping toward her, she put a hand over her face, a final vanity, irrelevant as any. He had come back to find her before the glister of ten miles had really left him, and could not know precisely where he was going, where his feet would land when he leapt the line of chaparral—it obscured the flat place where he’d lost her.

  7.

  WASHINGTON, DC, 1967

  It was the color of the lemon that had struck Vincent, a yellow so unlike anything else in the room, the industrial slates and grays, his lilac-jawed colleagues. Sitting atop the Block 1 command module simulator, the lemon had a shape so flawless he might have charted its curve, nature’s haughty perfection. Then he got the message. Bisson had put the fruit there to say what they all knew.

  The press had lighted briefly on a rash of departures, engineers who had walked at the unreasonable timelines, the tests that did not account for certain variables. But the stories Americans wanted were of those born needing less sleep than the rest of us, of the many colors of a rocket launch at dawn. They did not want to hear of young, educated men shaking their head at the repeated mention of the assassinated president’s words—before this decade is out—of their voices pitching up and wheedling as they insisted on more time. They did not want to know about this crew of astronauts, preparing for the simulation launch of Apollo 1, gesturing to each other, protesting as diplomatically as possible. They had spoken against it sternly, against the Velcro on the walls, against the nylon netting that the oafish technicians thought so handy, above all against the hatch that required a screwdriver, but these aspects of the module had remained. Under the lemon balanced on its peak, Vincent had briefly seen the triangular shape of the command module as menacing, the point that would narrow overhead a message of diminishing returns, but he let the thought go as soon as his mind would let him. He told himself fear was always a part of respect.

  Vincent was at the White House when it happened, having witnessed the signing of a treaty. Space would not be militarized. The stiff afternoon bled into a series of cocktails, handshakes, group photographs. Tan shoes on teal carpet, wallpaper of pale gold stripes. In the minutes Bisson and Slate and Bailey had suffered, Vincent had been speaking to the First Lady about cayenne pepper as squirrel repellent.

  When he returned to his hotel suite at dusk, the carmine wink of a message punctuated the room, the cuff links he had decided against on the dresser, his engraved shoehorn by the door. He had not turned on the bedside lamp, and he got the news in the dark. He could imagine what had gone wrong immediately. He saw the lemon, saw Sam placing it there with his thumb and forefinger and a smirk. He saw all the exposed wiring in the command module, resembling the blueprints of cities where it lined the floor, uncovered for the sake of decreasing weight at any cost, and the technicians marching in and out all day; he saw the bolts on the hatch, felt the ten twists of a screwdriver required to free them. He heard that pissing sound of the oxygen tanks.

  What he found himself asking, in those odd negotiations made in the shock, was that Sam die in flight, or at least fly in death. Perhaps it was not too late to send him up, perhaps the body could be strapped in and—no. The world brought him back from the thought.

  He answered another call from the center when it came in, nodded through the talk. “Thank you, sir, for the information,” he said, although the voice said nothing new, although the information was evil. There was nothing to be solved today, nothing to be decided, but he knew they would make calls all night. Then there was a knock, room service, and the distance even to the door, where a pinprick of light came in through the peephole, seemed insurmountable, something his legs would not do. What sort of misunderstanding had there been, who had believed he might want fries or some damp club sandwich. He dreaded any obligation now, even food. But because he had never in his life let a knock go unanswered, he got up anyway. “Thank you,” he said again, to a face he did not see.

  It had been an oversight, the ice cream, something planned days before that the center had forgotten to cancel when the launchpad caught fire. They had wanted to celebrate the signing of the treaty, the anticipation of the landing that it seemed would finally be theirs. They had dyed it a marbled silver, the perfect globular scoop, had imitated craters with fine dimples in the surface. At a jaunty eighty-five-degree angle was a paper flag on a toothpick, the stars hand painted. He set it on the nightstand, near the phone that filled him with hate, and when he woke five hours later it had melted down the shallow bowl, over the blond cherrywood, and into the drawer with the Bible.

  8.

  He flew in early the day after the fire, DC to Florida, in a plane lent him to fly alone, something he insisted on, and fought to be placed on the review board. At first Anderson shook his head, put one hand on his elbow and the other on his pockmarked face.

  “Uh-uh. No. Nope. Kahn, I can’t believe you, really I cannot, it is beyond— Do you understand that I do not want to cause you any more pain?”

  “I see what you’re saying, Anderson, and I respect it. Might I be placed on the incident review board?”

  “I see. You’re going to just keep asking it, just like that. You are like my fucking son. ‘Might I have fifty cents for a soda? Might I have fifty cents for a soda?’”

  They were alone in the room together, a rarity, and Vincent knew it would not last long, that soon someone would stride in and tap a clipboard and make a demand, ask for a signature or a second opinion. Anderson was standing, the chalk expanse before him a mess of equations and names and roman-numeraled lists, eager to go, eager for Vincent to let up.

  “Might I be placed on the review board.”

  His face hidden and his back bent and his palms flat now on the table, Anderson was quiet a long time. He was not wearing the tie clip Kennedy had given him.

  “You really want that, Kahn? You want to see the up-close photos of the body? You want to see how he was sitting as he died?”

  Vincent stayed where he sat. At his back were diagrams of a collapsing lunar vehicle, a rough topographical sketch of the Sea of Tranquility, but he never turned to see them.

  “I don’t want that,” he said. “The word here is need.”

  He held Anderson’s eyes with a focus that, in his life up until now, he had almost only ever used in the consideration of something inanimate, a machine that needed his guidance, the half-inch pieces of a model that could fit together if he concentrated enough. As Vincent knew he would be, Anderson was the first to let go. He whirled around, his hands bound behind his back, and said it like a curse: “Eight o’clock tomorrow.” A shadow appeared in the door’s glass window but vanished soon after.

  IT WAS THE FIRST THING he thought of once he was awake, of the accordioned arm of the space suit still bent, of the recording he had listened to over and over. How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings . . . fire in the cockpit, there’s a bad fire! It had been Bisson’s j
ob to remain at the controls, and he had, fossilized on the command couch, his spine still long and his shoulders set back.

  It was a liability and an embarrassment, grief, something akin to bringing a small child into adult places, waiting to meet its next need, muffle the shrieks and cries, follow it where it crawled. He would find himself hamstrung with it, his hands going numb on the steering wheel on the interstate, and an hour later he’d be shot through with anger, swatting at houseflies as though they were toxic. He forced himself to recite facts, his grandmother’s full name, the Boy Scouts’ pledge, his flight school’s phone number, his parents’ address, his wife’s birthday. Sylvia Inge Kahn, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight, Oakplain 0748, 322 E Street, May 8, 1932, things about his life that had always been true. The only relief came in the meetings, where at least the thing that harassed him was visible, where it was the committee’s job to say why it had happened, to promise it would never happen again.

  HE TOOK NOTES ON EVERY minute, pausing only to take a pencil sharpener from a corduroy case, asking any piece of information he didn’t like to be repeated. “Say that again.” He spoke the phrase so often it became a joke to others in the halls afterward, a steely fool’s reaction to a thing one couldn’t change.

  Lightning split your car in thirds, sir. Your wife gave birth, but it’s half horse.

  Say that again.

  In his graph paper notebook were drawings of the command module, the scale exact, red pencil highlighting the Velcro netting under the command couch. Next to it he drew up a list of its synthetic composition. The wires that ran from the equipment bay to the oxygen panel he rendered in pale blue. “Can anyone tell me,” he asked, of the room of five other men, “how many times precisely the techs walked in and out and over these during the tests that day?” There was a silence, a shaking of jowls. “Why not?” He wrote the phrase neatly in capitals: 167 POUNDS PER SQUARE INCH (PSI) ABSOLUTE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OXYGEN.