America Was Hard to Find Read online

  Dedication

  This book is for Virgil “Gus” Grissom

  and Diana Oughton,

  Americans lost in the smoke

  Epigraph

  remember me I am

  free at large untamable not nearly

  as hard to find as America

  —Father Daniel Berrigan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1969

  Book One: 1957–1964

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Book Two: 1966–1972

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Book Three: 1980–1988

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources, Research, and Historical Veracity

  About the Author

  Also by Kathleen Alcott

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1969

  It is possible they are the only Americans not to watch Vincent Kahn walk on the moon—despite the proximity of a black-and-white television, a Panasonic rolled out for the occasion, despite the gasping and weeping around it. She and her son remain where they sit in the unnamed restaurant. Its floor is dirt, its tables are plastic, the fourth wall at their backs a retractable fence. The family in charge ferries rice and juice and deep-fried plantains from the back rooms where they live, pushing aside a half-parted wood curtain. Behind this sits an unmade bed on the tile, at the foot a toddler’s discarded sock.

  What is said about her, not often with warmth, is that her dress is poor but her teeth are rich. Her son is nine years old, and he might be the only American child who does not know Vincent Kahn’s name. He has swum that day, in the middle of July, in a tributary of the Amazon, in the Morona-Santiago province of Ecuador. He wears saddle shoes, tan and white, and so does his mother. If his chin drifts over his shoulder toward the noise, she snaps it back with her voice. On the table between them lie small squares of paper, adjectives and verbs in tight cursive, and the things he has insisted she buy him, decks of cards and glass beads. The major events in his life have been the violence of new molars in his mouth, the loud chirp of pale geckos in the windows at night.

  As the room becomes the applause, she speaks his name, Wright Fern, and touches his face. Because she has the posture of a dancer, a center of gravity that draws all to it, in the second after it seems his cheek has come to her palm, and not the other way around.

  The sounds now are minor, the clicks of saliva in open mouths, sentences that only get started. Back in the country they left, boys about to be deployed, already in uniform, lean on the floral arms of childhood couches to see Vincent Kahn cross the virgin surface. Nurses snap on the wall-mounted TVs and usher the dying awake.

  His mother is the only person he has ever really known, and he will grow up largely without any photos of her, at least who she was before this. In the second-to-last letter Fay writes to her parents, three years from now, she’ll ask that they destroy these images, and they will, along with the request.

  Book One

  1957–1964

  1.

  MOJAVE DESERT, CALIFORNIA, 1957

  In under a year she had lost touch with all of her friends, girls whose hair she had braided into hers, whose naked bodies she had watched more closely than her own, and so she would tell no one about the first day he took her up in a plane.

  They had disappeared into their new lives, those Cindys and Judys, at Scripps and Mills and Bryn Mawr, and she into hers: the gin cut with lime, the desert cut with wind. Her forearms and deltoids were toned from lifting the chrome canisters above her and shaking. The sounds of the planes from the base a mile away ceased by five, a quiet that always seemed to register with the men as a failure. It was as if, when the noises stopped, they began looking for someone to blame. When someone called her a cunt the first time, she made his ten-dollar change in pennies. There was not a second, at least that she heard. Her stationery had been lilac, embossed in gold, a gift from her parents, and the day she met him she had just thrown it out, watched the color take on oil in the trash under the register.

  Vincent and Fay were the only people who did not step outside the bar to watch, but they could hear the hooves shifting on the buckling metal slide and the pilots’ hands slapping at the shallow pool. The horse was Lloyd, astride him Fay’s sister, Charlie. If Charlie’s palomino could make it down the slide without slipping, walk the chlorinated circle, and leap over the stand of coral and olive cacti that bordered the far edge of the pool, five of the men had vowed to make their next flight without pants. If Lloyd failed or his passenger fell, Charlie owed all sixteen present a steak dinner. On the wall a fractured Coca-Cola clock said five after seven.

  The wager’s conception had left the stools along the bar pulled far from their original line, some bunched in groups where men had made bets on the bet, one on its side in the middle of the room. Atop it had stood Rusty, a pilot famous among them for a flawless record with carrier landings and for once having drawn, on the sleeping face of the first man to break the speed of sound, a permanent-markered monocle. He had pushed back his feather-fine blond hair as he composed an impromptu limerick: There was an old horsey named Lloyd, who never did see too much . . . Freude.

  Vincent sat closest to the screen door, where a desert wind came through, warm and pointed. It was his first time at the Doctor’s, as it was unofficially called. I was at the Doctor’s until very late, they would say, the Doctor demanded to see me. Fay leaned on the warped wood of the bar, her sight fixed on the window above the piano. Through it a green-barked tree with yellow flowers leaned at an angle that suggested remorse somehow, pleading.

  She poured from high, the liquor catching the strata of dusky light before reaching his tumbler.

  “Fay.”

  “Vincent.”

  He spoke his name without meeting her face, which she had turned toward him and opened somehow, a stern way she had of holding it released.

  “Not in the gambling mood tonight?”

  He sat with shoulders gnarled for
ward, shook his jaw left and right.

  “There are monkeys better behaved than some of these fucks after eight,” she said.

  “Would you call them . . . flying fucks?”

  She raised her glass, gin, just ice, no soda.

  “You’re not the only one thinking a monkey might do a better job,” he said.

  “God bless us and God bless the Russians. I personally derive no small bit of happiness from the thought of those chimps in flight suits. Imagine the underwear. Imagine the shoes.”

  He straightened to look at her, the remaining light showing the difference between his eyes, one green and glacial, the other flinty, lightless as an ashtray. He was thirty-three but retained the sandiness of a boy’s complexion, a face the sun loved but hadn’t punished.

  Outside they chanted her sister’s name, the horse’s, the different cries mutating into one unrecognizable slogan of drunken menace. Someone stepped into their car to turn the radio on, and the headlights sailed through the mesh door, beating down on the tilted portraits of aviators and Hollywood cowboys, the pale Lucite beads that necklaced the beer taps. Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more, came the music.

  His eyes fell down the rag slipped between two of her fingers, the pinched area where her shirt stole into her shorts. Coating the floor were peanut shells and cellophane cigarette packages. He pointed at the book she had open on the bar.

  “What are you feeding yourself there?”

  It was Whitman, part of a transcendentalist program she was wandering through, and she read him a few lines. For these States tend inland and toward the Western sea, and I will also. He told her she looked like a cowboy when she read, something in how she turned out her feet. She replied that he looked like a horse, the way his mouth was open.

  “How many teeth do you have, besides too many,” she said, and turned around.

  Into the bar then came a different set of sounds, the bet-upon event itself: water battering the pavement and Charlie’s yell, a mean joy that sputtered, then vanished. They heard the thump of a body stopped, the percussion of the men’s feet as they all began to run.

  Fay was past Vincent and out the door in four seconds, searching for her sister. The inn’s twelve doors, arranged in a U around the pool, were painted a cheap blue, the color of ocean mixed with bleach. Across the road and into the dust, four men moved through the stands of yucca, the lone spindles leaning into the wind. A sound made her look down. Charlie was sprawled on her back, gurgling in shock. Fay reached her and crouched, swiped the bar cloth along the round of her sister’s face and over her chest, which was hauling breath erratically, short, reedy inhalations followed by groaning releases.

  “She’s okay,” someone said from above them. “Just lost her wind.”

  “And her horse,” another mentioned.

  “Might have cracked a rib.”

  Charlie opened one eye, the sharp green of it a sad dare.

  “Oh, Fay. I have to tell you something, baby.”

  “Listening.”

  “Can you make these motherfuckers steak?”

  HE DID NOT, SHE WOULD learn, much believe in valedictions. All conversations he had were part of the same long talk he had with his life, and this rendered goodbye unnecessary. As she removed the slabs of meat from the industrial fridge out back, returned to the kitchen to rub salt and pepper into them, oiled and warmed the skillets on the stove, Vincent had gone.

  The men’s conversation moved from the events of the afternoon into a language she only partially absorbed. With great solemnity they mouthed the phrase X-15 to each other and nodded, people in love and shocked by it. It was the plane, they believed, that would reach space. The mood turned over when someone grumbled a certain word, NACA, and then sweaty money emerged, raised index fingers made tight circles to indicate more, right now. She served fifth and sixth rounds. “National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,” she heard someone say through his nose. Vincent was part of this subset, three hundred men working among the two thousand others.

  A howl came from the bathroom. Someone had spread industrial glue on the toilet seat, and she spent ten minutes chipping at it with her pocketknife as she smoked, crouching on the mouth, listening to the conversation come in through the propped door.

  “Do you think that—simulator, do you think it’s anything at all like the real thing?”

  She had heard this vein of speculation so often she knew how they would be sitting. Elbows meeting on the bar, they murmured to each other, their eyes never fixed on any one thing so as to better convey the smallness, the placidity, of the question. For appearances’ sake they might have been reciting state capitals to combat boredom.

  Although they could not listen well to each other, the one not speaking was always nodding, biting at the inside of his mouth as though to extract some vital information from it, calling the other by his name so that he could hear the regard there.

  “It’s not as though they can take the X-Series from us. It belongs to the Air Force, they’re just doing some checks, maybe publishing a paper or two on what we’ve done. It’s us who will take it, space.”

  “The control stick a fucking broom handle. What else? Ironing boards for wings? I’ll be sure to ask Arlene whether she’s got any to spare. For progress, honey, you understand.”

  “Not going up there with one hand on my cock, the other out the window, for the joy of it, without a care in the world for the mechanisms.”

  There were the pilots she hated, but she was moved by their lives. In the main they believed in intuition, theirs, and this impressed her, the voice that was quiet until they were airborne, where it spoke in stark, lucid imperatives. It was a law she’d bought into without realizing, that the only apology a man needed offer the world was his talent.

  2.

  Even the clouds the next day seemed immutable. The roar of planes woke her, sounds receding and coming into volume again, a kind of pulse that pinned down the hours. She read on her cot, under the photographs of childhood friends still taped there and places she vaguely meant to travel, redheaded girls posing by their fathers’ cars and European cities rendered gray by war, until the heat became too great. Then she passed through the curtain that separated her room from the bar. She ground coffee beans and swept, the screen door kept open with an old iron. When the floor was clean she passed into the light and weather, wiped mauve dust from the windows of the rented rooms. In the outdoor shower she sung halves of songs she’d always known, Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. Her overalls were filthy, her undershirt was fresh. The afternoon shadows moved across the tawny landscape in spills, and she looked at the print they made with a kind of jealousy, knowing how long she would be inside.

  Perched on the counter she ate the stale peanuts and downed her first drink. Men filtered in, some with blue eyes that winked when she slid a glass across the bar, some who smoked silently as though it were a job. By eight o’clock Charlie was liquor-smeared enough to prank-call their parents, not speaking but holding up the receiver to the noise of the room, something Fay couldn’t watch. She vanished by ten, and at dawn Fay woke to the sound of her crossing the courtyard, walking the bundle of her sheets to the washing machine behind the main building. Her sister’s unhappiness had become the avoidable disasters of her body. A week passed, surly and indifferent to what Fay might have wished from it.

  He appeared on her day off in a low-slung Ford truck, driving with one arm, the other tanned and dangling out the window, something white and angular held in his clean fingers.

  From her room she could hear the tires working, shifting from the dust onto the gravel that Charlie periodically threw onto the entrance of the lot, and she cursed. There was always one who showed up, disappointed, then bellicose, forgetting the sandwich board always placed there on Tuesdays. SOMEWHERE ELSE, it said, loopy blue on splintered pine.

  She stepped into the fulvous decay of the afternoon, her lip
s and eyes posed to communicate an intractable position. Vincent kept his head down as he approached, but she didn’t match his gesture of modesty and appraised him anyway, the creased blue flight suit and the diagonal zippers that highlighted his chest.

  In his hand was an elaborate paper airplane, multitiered, slim isosceles triangles that could have been knives, and she pointed at it loosely, her index a little curved.

  “We’re closed, and, judging by the size of that thing, my condolences on your demotion, sir.”

  He didn’t answer, just blinked, as if to acknowledge that some moment he wasn’t a part of had passed.

  “For you,” he said.

  He raised a finger then, gauging the wind or making a point. They stood with their backs to the pool, the U of rooms around it, almost always empty. The pilots never recommended their families stay at Charlie’s inn, and the few stragglers that followed the sign on the highway—crooked, three exclamation points—never lasted more than a night. Rising in the air was the overwhelming smell of chlorine, under it layers of vice, a can someone had peed in and hidden under the porch, butts of Camel Wides dug into the dirt of potted plants. The wind was manic, licking at the exposed skin of her neck and arms. She wore work boots and the silk shorts she had slept in, a mechanic’s shirt whose patch said BOBO. Her clothing came almost exclusively secondhand, an insult to her parents’ wealth she relished.

  She held it limply, hardly gripping it.

  “No, you have to—”

  He stopped himself from speaking. She watched him roll his shoulders back and stuff his fists in his deep pockets, pained not to expound.

  “May I?”

  “You may.”

  Without a strategic thought she launched it. Even thrown clumsily, it seemed determined, protected, and the memory she had was of a cat, leaping. When its nose hit the speckled dust too soon, he nodded as though receiving some disappointing news, unfortunate but not unexpected.

  “A drive?” He looked at his truck as he asked, perhaps imagining her into it.

  IT WAS THE TIME IN the hour before dusk when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest, and Fay was aware of how she smelled, onions and salt, an aspect of her time in the kitchen that would not leave her. He moved to open the door but she depressed the searing button of the truck’s silver handle and leapt up into it. Already most of her upbringing had fallen away, though it could be seen still in how she held a fork, heard in how she answered a phone. In the cab her legs fell against a brown sack filled with more planes.