Evel Knievel Days (3 page)

“Did you make a lot of progress in the yard?” she said.

“As much as I could,” I said.

“Good,” she said, without elaborating further. “Good.”

She relaxed her back. I hadn’t noticed how tense, how rigid, it had been before she relaxed it. My mother’s posture has always been impeccable. It was strange to see it become momentarily even straighter.

“You seem nervous,” I said.

She laughed. “Khosi,” she said, “whatever would I have to be nervous about?” She turned off the burner and tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. She pulled a ladle from the bin on top of the stove. “Here.” She filled a bowl. “Eat.”

Our emotional lives, I think, thrive in two places, two locations, two imaginaries. One is in the remembrance of things past. The second is in our dreams of the future, in the things we hope for, in the ways we imagine ourselves moving forward through time. Two imaginaries, and my mother skirted these places as best she could. So her
emotional life was a mystery to me, except in fragments, in brief illuminations, in roadside flares that gave relief to a figure, or a single afternoon, or an idea from her past. One of these illuminations was cooking. Her chief heroism (and constancy), in fact, was dinner. Every single night, no matter how busy she was—no matter how badly she was coming apart—she cooked a meal. Despite her hatred for my father’s onions, my mother could not let go of her love for his food.

Almost everything in the Loving Shambles seemed to break down, to lapse into dirt and disorder and disrepair. But not the cooking. She’d sit there at the table, watching me eat, chewing only on a piece of pita bread, looking at me, saying: “Too much cumin?” Or: “Too little salt?” Or: “The meat is tough? Come on, you can tell me, it’s okay. It won’t hurt my feelings.” Or: “Just be honest. It’s too spicy. You can tell me.” Or: “The lentils are undercooked, dammit. I knew it. I knew the lentils were undercooked.”
Roadside flare:
My mother prepared at least twenty different Egyptian dishes—
sambousek bi lahm, ful medames, omi houriya
—many of which she was really not supposed to eat.

And so—and so—standing there in the kitchen in my dirty clothes, I decided not to bother her anymore about the bracelet, whether or not she seemed to be hiding something. I walked quietly over and peered down into the pot. The viscous green soup continued steaming. The scent of the cooking moved through me. It saturated my tired muscles like a medicinal salve. I put the bracelet in my pocket.
Why not just keep it to myself for now?
I thought.
Why not just keep it like a secret?

———

That afternoon I showered and combed my hair and rushed off to work. I kept the copper bracelet in my pocket and emptied my half-eaten bowl of soup into a big plastic thermos. My mother kissed me goodbye at the front door. “I’ve got an event at six,” she said. “You’re on your own for dinner.” She added cryptically: “Be careful.”

I drank more of the
mulukhiyya
and walked through the blossoming heat. I wanted to confer with Natasha Mariner. Natasha was, without doubt, my best friend in Butte. I’d known her since we were three feet tall. She’d gone to elementary and middle school with me. We were both Butte High Bulldogs. That, of course, is the junction where our paths diverged. While she took a scholarship to the University of Montana, in Missoula, where she majored in political science, I stayed home. I read and read and read—but on my own, taking dozens of online classes from ITT Tech and Strayer University and the University of Phoenix, working at the museum thirty hours a week. I was a card-carrying member of MENSA, but the problem was this: I hated leaving Butte. Butte was home. Butte was comfort. Butte was order.

Now Natasha was working part-time in Helena, working as a clerk for Republican State Senator Timothy Crenshaw. I was worried that the job was eroding her excellent liberal sensibilities. Natasha maintained that it was a tool, a means to an end, a line on her résumé. She’d illustrated this point by applying to jobs with liberal think tanks and nonprofits across the country. Just recently, the unthinkable had happened: She’d been offered an entry-level job by the Nature Conservancy—in Washington, D.C. I had a panic attack as soon as I heard the news. To make matters worse, her longtime boyfriend, Calvin Stuckey, had gotten into Georgetown Law in
September. It seemed all but certain, the impending move across the country, three thousand miles from western Montana’s most famous half-Egyptian shut-in (me).

It was a nice summer afternoon, despite the heat. Butte isn’t a pretty town; it will never make a roster of the most picturesque cities in America. It’s stark and dusty and brown, but I still love it, love it for precisely this reason. I headed down Main Street, past Wells Fargo and the old Leggett Hotel. The wind that came in off the eastern plains was warm and dry. A man in a seersucker shirt tipped his Billings Mustangs baseball cap as I passed him on West Granite. I walked past the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club. The Yacht Club—or the Pit Yacht Club, or Berkeley Yacht Club, or Berkeley Yacht Club Manor—was what Natasha and I called Chuck’s, the bar closest to my house. It was an honest-to-God dive bar, one with Merle Haggard on the jukebox and a sawdust floor. We once asked the bartender-owner, Chuck Wilson, why he opted for the sawdust. He took a long time to answer, cleaning a series of pint glasses with jets of hot water, wiping their rims with a towel.

“Cheaper than carpet,” he finally said. “And it soaks up the blood when there’s a bar fight.”

Since I’d turned twenty-one, the Yacht Club had become my second home. I now knew every word to “Swinging Doors” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.” There was something comforting in the neon of that jukebox, in the way the cigarette smoke hung in the air, collecting above the pool table, so thick that it was almost creamy. There was something comforting in the order of the bottles of beer, cheap beer like Miller and Michelob and Iron City and Bud, always appearing with the exact same skin of condensation, always
arriving cold and identical and crisp. They also had off-track betting, which I’d developed a fondness for. I loved the thrill of watching the races on the monitors located in the bar’s back room, a room that always smelled of sweet cigars.

A street scene in downtown Butte? Imagine a ghost town, a Wild West ghost town from a movie with John Wayne,
The Searchers
, say, or
The Cowboys
. Now add eighty years and five stories and a few acres of cement. The streets of downtown have a certain cheerful privacy to them, especially in summer. But whenever I walk anywhere, I expect a tumbleweed to roll through and catch on a stop sign.

The names of the streets themselves tell so much of the story. They can barely be believed: Copper Street, Quartz Street, Granite Street, Mercury Street, Silver Street, Agate Street, Gold Street, Aluminum Street, Platinum Street, Porphyry Street, and my personal favorite, Clear Grit Terrace. What is porphyry? Why, it’s a large-grained igneous rock, purple and lovely and common in the Bitterroot Mountains. Only Butte, Montana, would have a street named after it. Butte was a city made by industrialists, by believers in industry. The streets were orderly and straight and wide. When the city’s forefathers needed a railroad, they built it right through town. There was no doubt which god the city plan served: the god of commerce, the god of industrial production. I arrived at the Copper King Mansion at 12:31, one minute late. A billboard advertising E
VEL
K
NIEVEL
D
AYS
had been rigged right beside the entrance to the house. I hated being late, even by seconds.

The history of this mansion is something on which, God help me, I could speculate endlessly. I know the names of the masons,
many of them summoned from Bavaria for their skill with an awl. I know the names of the Russian hardwoods (Manchurian fir and Mongolian oak and iron birch and red pine) that W. F. Beall & Company imported for the numerous parquet floors. I know where the stained glass for the bay windows was handblown (Turin, Italy) and how many nails were used in the spiral staircase in the kitchen (none, trick question). It took four years and three hundred thousand dollars to construct at a time when the average miner’s salary was under a thousand a year.

The layout of the mansion was straightforward. Staterooms on the first floor, bedrooms on the second floor, a grand ballroom (with a full organ) on the third. We had a little gift shop and a front desk for the guides and an employee break room. The exhibits were scattered throughout the house. Piece by piece, they told the history of the state, starting with the thousands of years of indigenous tribal life—the generations upon generations of Assiniboine and Blackfeet and Crow and A’aninin and Kootenai and Salish and Shoshoni and Sioux who called Montana home. A whole wing of the museum was devoted to Lewis and Clark, who entered the Bitterroot Valley on September 4, 1805, and changed its landscape forever.

I darted through the employee entrance and grabbed my name tag from the peg by the door.

KHOSI SAQR

it read.

MUSEUM GUIDE

I stood behind the cashier’s desk in the lobby and put on my most winning smile.

I wonder sometimes if my parents chose my name to
provoke
playground teasing. In Arabic, Khosi means
lion
. And Saqr? Saqr means
falcon
. Few kids on the elementary school playground, however, spoke fluent Arabic. So they made fun of both of my names with an impressive and dedicated ardor. They called me “Hozey” and “Cozy” and, when they were a bit older, “Blow Me.” But also “Sucker” and “Fucker” and, my personal favorite, “Puker.” Sometimes I thought of introducing myself like this at parties: “Blow Me Puker,” I’d say upon shaking hands. “So nice to meet you.”

This is what it feels like to be half of something: You’re never truly anything. You never fit in anywhere. I doubt that I’ll ever be quite at ease in America—anywhere other than in my museum. Every time I introduced myself, every class I attended, every time I made a dinner reservation over the phone, I cringed. And so I pretended: “Table for two? Certainly, sir. Under what name?” “Sam Jones,” I said, “Sam Jones.”

Margaret Vogel, my manager, walked into the room. Margaret Vogel was a matronly old woman who tucked her hair into an imperious gray bun and insisted that all five of her staff members call her Ms. Vogel. She wore her thick bifocals on a practical leather cord. She ate hard-boiled eggs for lunch. She had the strange habit of taking candid Polaroids of her employees. You’d be hard at work, and suddenly, a flash would burst into your peripheral vision. You’d turn toward it and there’d be Ms. Vogel, shaking the photograph vigorously.
“Gotcha!” she’d say, and cackle. Rumor had it that she lived with Alice B. Toklas for several months in Paris in the 1960s, and that she’d reserved a plot in the Père Lachaise not far from the final resting place of Gertrude Stein. One of the other guides, Tom Creighton, swore that Ms. Vogel had given him Toklas’s secret recipe for hashish crème brûlée. “She made me promise not to show it to anyone,” he said, “or I’d be deeply sorry.”

Whatever the case, Ms. Vogel kept a watch on a chain in her hip pocket, and presently, she consulted it. She raised an eyebrow. “Seventy-nine seconds late,” she said.

“Seventy-two,” I said. “Once I’m in the door, I’m on company time.”

“You’re slipping, Khosi,” she said.

I was legendary at the museum for my need for order. Walk through the front door of the Loving Shambles and the reasons behind this need would be immediately obvious. At the mansion, I kept my uniform perfectly ironed and clean, my name tag straight, my workspace free of all debris. In my eight years at the mansion, my register had never been unbalanced at the end of the day.

Ms. Vogel turned and began ascending the main staircase. Her office was on the second floor. It overlooked the entire entryway; its exterior wall was composed of massive wrought-iron French doors. On her way up there, she paused and turned back to me. “Listen,” she said, one hand on the red pine banister, “I need you to cover for Carlton tomorrow night. A party for Anaconda Savings Bank. Early evening. Six
P.M.
”

The Copper King Mansion did a significant business as a corporate retreat. We rented out the interior rooms and had our own on-staff cook. Businesses used the grand ballroom to woo their most
desirable clients; CEOs rented the home for wedding anniversaries and birthdays and a range of different functions.

“Tomorrow?” I said.

“Yes,” Ms. Vogel said. “Do you want the hours or not?”

I did want the hours. They distracted me from my current situation. My voracious online learning had just made me conscious of the ways in which I’d become the
subaltern
. “The history of the American service industry,” I could tell anyone who’d listen, “is one of wage slavery and exploitation of the proletariat’s labor power.” For some reason, not that many people would listen.

But tomorrow was also the second night of Evel Knievel Days—America’s only festival entirely devoted to motorcycle daredevils. It was the night of the loudest parade imaginable, an all-purpose, take-all-comers affair that invariably stretched for miles and involved at least one near-catastrophic accident. As far as people-watching opportunities went, Evel Knievel Days was Montana’s zenith. I couldn’t imagine anything topping this in Wyoming or Idaho or Washington or Oregon, either (California was an entirely different matter). And yet: I did want the hours.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.” Ms. Vogel nodded and disappeared into her office. There were only a few minutes left before the inaugural tour of the day.

Outside, I heard the hydraulic hiss of that first tour bus. Around me rose the precision and order of the mansion, with its broad panels of wallpaper and its tastefully arranged western landscape paintings by William Keith and Charles Russell. The onslaught was about to begin. I could feel the house rattle as the driver downshifted and pulled slowly into the parking space closest to the mansion.
The doors at the far end of the museum opened. I heard the sound of the patrons approaching. I prepared my face to meet the faces I would meet.