Evel Knievel Days (4 page)

The first tourist walked through the main doors. He was a large man, and he was wearing a skintight T-shirt that said: D
OES
T
HIS
S
HIRT
M
AKE
M
Y
B
ASS
L
OOK
F
AT
? The shirt was emblazoned with a cartoon of a corpulent and happy-looking fish.

“Nice bass,” I said to the plus-sized gentleman, dying a little on the inside.

He seemed surprised. “You like it?” he said.

“Yeehaw,” I answered.

The sarcasm in my voice was lost in the crush of tourists surging into the lobby. I sighed. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my job. I loved the order and taxonomy of the museum, the way it could channel and organize history, give it a flowing narrative. I even loved the shape of museums, in general, and the geometric principle that organized them: the nested rectangle. That’s what museums were, box inside of box inside of box. It was tremendously gratifying to think about. When I was twelve years old, my mother and I went to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. It would be my only trip out of Montana in the decade to come. Seattle terrified me. It was big and unruly and often uncontained in space. But Cornell’s boxes? They were beautiful and precise and regimented. I was enraptured. Is it strange to say that nothing is as satisfying to me as a series of rectangles, each decreasing in size?

Despite my love of Cornell, I’d never seen his work in person again. I never really traveled after that. The idea of travel was too much to bear. I liked to drive into the hills around the city, but that
was always with a return in mind, with a moment of homecoming that I could play out in my head to soothe my fears. Besides, after a lifetime of caring for my mother, could I trust her to be on her own, even for a little while?

Deep breath.

Inhale, exhale.

So: the tourists. The tourists could overwhelm me at first. I remembered my breathing exercises. And I smiled. “Welcome to Butte’s Copper King Mansion,” I called out in a loud voice. “Built by my great-great-grandfather in 1886.” That always got their attention. I tried to project my voice to make it fill the lobby. “My great-great-grandfather William Andrews Clark was a miner. He dug millions of dollars’ worth of copper from the hills surrounding Butte. He was a copper king, a second-generation Irish immigrant turned vest-wearing frontier industrialist. By the time he died, his fortune amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars …”

Facts, someone once said, are only half an empire. By the end of the day, my anxieties had dulled to a low hum in the background; I would see Natasha soon. It was the evening’s last tour. The man in the gray wool overcoat stood at the edge of the crowd.

What destroys order and tidiness and a regimented worldview? In my case, a gray wool overcoat. It was, admittedly, somewhat difficult to miss. I was sweating in my plain cotton button-down. Beneath his coat, I imagined, he was broiling to perfection. He was tremendously handsome in the way that an older man can be handsome. He’d grayed well, with streaks of silver at his temples and a
gruff near-white stubble across the planes of his cheeks. His sunglasses were expensive. Small and wiry, they perched on the bridge of his nose like a blackened praying mantis.

As the hour progressed, he eased closer to me. He appeared to be listening intently. He laughed at my bad jokes (“Question: What’s the first thing a baby learns to say in Butte? Answer: It’s mine!”), and he seemed genuinely moved by my account of the Speculator Mine fire. I spent a significant portion of the tour on the grisly 1917 murder of the labor organizer Frank Little. I told the story in all of its shocking and lurid detail: corrupt cops dragging Little through the streets of Butte behind a Ford truck, then stringing his flayed body from the trestle of a bridge on the outskirts of town.

Everyone had a strategy to get tips.

For me, it was concentrating on the lurid details, on the way the skin peeled off of Little’s arms and legs, how vigilantes beat him savagely and castrated him and then hanged him. The deeper the horror, the more the wallets opened. Though guides did make a small hourly wage, most of our salary came from the tourists, the folks whose emotions we sought to arouse.

It had been a long and exhausting day. My feet ached. My voice was hoarse. At the end of the last tour, the stranger had asked an odd question. In a velvety accent of some kind, he’d said: “Are you happy, dear one, with the work you do here?”

Dear one?
I thought. I smiled and brushed the question aside, saying yes, I was happy, certainly. “Never let them see you sweat,” Tom liked to say. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was quoting a women’s deodorant commercial.

When the day ended, when the last patron drifted away and I
had only thirty-two dollars in my pocket, I stumbled to the little break room behind the gift shop and collapsed into one of the oversize padded leather armchairs. It was eight-thirty. There were two of us closing the museum that night—Tom Creighton, Women’s Deodorant Peddler, and me. Tom was a tall, skinny kid with a raft of pimples that didn’t seem to diminish with the progression of time. He loved tequila. Typically, closing time was when he pulled his flask from his vest pocket and offered me a swig. When I was eighteen, the shot of tequila had seemed dramatic and exciting, an illicit end to a long and challenging day’s work. Now it just burned. Today, however, Tom had forgotten the liquor.

“Some creepy dude’s hanging around outside,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“When I locked the front door,” Tom said, “I saw him sort of scurry away, like he was trying to be inconspicuous.”

“Maybe he’s a stuntman for Evel Knievel Days?” I suggested. “I’ve seen a dozen Knievel impersonators walking around town.”

“Whatever he is,” Tom said, “I think he’s a little bizarre.”

“Let’s call Ms. Vogel?” I said.

“Let’s call Ms. Vogel,” Tom said.

Ms. Vogel answered her cell phone, as always, on the first ring. Not surprisingly, her advice was cryptic. “You never know to what depths the human heart can sink,” she said. And then: “But don’t worry about it, it’s probably nothing.”

Not exactly comforted, we left the break room and headed over to the entrance. We peered through the beveled glass. Sure enough, the stranger was still there. He glanced over his shoulder as he walked away from the mansion. Possibly he was the worst thief in the history
of burglary, incompetently casing the museum and arousing the suspicions of 100 percent of the employees. Tom and I watched as the man clambered into a brand-new silver Chevrolet. It gleamed like a shark’s tooth in the dim light of the dusk.

He didn’t start the engine. He just sat there, gazing into the distance.

“What’s wrong with him?” Tom said.

“Maybe he’s lonely,” I said.

Loneliness—now, that was something I understood. I could identify with any number of lonely symbols. The silver-lit Bitterroot River, the flame of a candle, the solitary moon.

Tom frowned. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe he’s really, really baked. You know what I mean? Like, super-high.”

“Your eloquence,” I said, “is simply astonishing.”

“Whatever, dude,” Tom said. And then he mimicked my voice—or a cartoonish version of my voice, high-pitched and overly precise. “Astonishing,” he said as he turned and walked toward the employee lounge. “Your eloquence is simply astonishing.”

I didn’t have the desire to stay at the mansion any longer. Maybe it was the stranger, or the fact that Tom was annoying me, or that my mother had awakened me at dawn to tear apart her garden. I felt the grooves of the bracelet in my pocket, the copper warming my hands.

“You okay closing up?” I said.

“Of course,” Tom called from the other room. I heard him sit in the swivel chair and turn on the tiny break-room television.

I gathered up my things, the now-empty thermos, my sunglasses. This was my ritual. It was simple: First I double-checked all the
numbers from the till in the gift shop. Then I arranged the pencils on the desktop in descending order according to length, with the shortest pencils closest to the edge of the desk, so they would be used most quickly. Then I sorted and aligned all of the paper clips in the holder, so the morning shift would have quick and easy access to paper-clip-clasping. I returned my name tag to its rightful place. I used a ruler to make sure its ends were straight. Now I had the all-clear. I could head back out into the world. Because of the lurker, I decided to go through the side door, just in case.

Even at nine o’clock, I had to adjust to the heat. It was a blast furnace. I felt my skin lose its tight, air-conditioned dryness. My whole body was abruptly coated in sweat. I inched down the alley and peered around the corner. The sedan was still there, but strangely, it was empty. Where had he gone? I considered running back inside. But I was probably overreacting. I was probably perfectly safe. I reached my hand into my pocket and took out the bracelet. The copper had been polished time and again over the years, and the snakes of the band had the deep, effulgent shine of well-worn metal. Driven by a strange impulse, I slipped it on my wrist. Coolness spread out along my arm and into the rest of my body. I left the mouth of the alley, reversing my course and heading in the other direction. There was, after all, more than one way to get home.

THE ALICE B. TOKLAS HASHISH CRÈME BRÛLÉE

As extracted from Tom Creighton following half a flask of tequila

T
HE FACT THAT
T
OM DIVULGED
the recipe for the hashish crème brûlée shouldn’t be held against him. I’m sure he could sense that, as the son of a caterer, I’d put it to good use someday. I’d do Alice B. Toklas proud. I’d transform an awkward, stuffy family dinner into a beatific trip into the prismatic world of the mind.

God knows I endured enough stodgy family dinners at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. Their antipathy was of the enduring kind; they never forgave me for the circumstances of my birth. An hour after I was born, a nurse handed me to my grandmother.