America Was Hard to Find: a Novel by Kathleen Alcott

Author:Kathleen Alcott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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