Evel Knievel Days (6 page)

“What doctor?” Natasha said, but already she was smiling and digging through her purse for her car keys; already she’d taken one step ahead of me down the driveway. We got into the Mercedes wagon. First we had a short argument about who should drive. Natasha maintained that she was fine, but then she said, “I’m not as think as you drunk,” and it was clear that her argument was not airtight.

I settled in behind the wheel of the Mercedes. Not to sound like a car commercial, but there truly is something elementally magnificent about the Mercedes E350 wagon. This one was twenty years
old. But the leather seats were still tense and pillowy, and the cabin cushioned the sound of the world—held you separate from it somehow. The road passed you by, incidental and distant, a soft murmur. The doors were solid. They slammed shut with a noise like the firing of artillery. Its cracked upholstery molded readily to the contour of my back.

This was by no means the first time I’d driven the Mercedes. I reached down into a tear that had been in the driver’s seat for as long as I could remember. I worked my fingers into the foamy interior of the cushion. There, where it had been for years, was a tiny silver locket. Inside, in my shaky cursive, I’d written:
The Life and Times of Khosi Saqr, starring Khosi Saqr as himself
. I’d folded the note and snapped shut the locket and stowed it inside the seat when Natasha wasn’t looking. It was my secret.

Natasha reached over and took my hand, the one that had been resting on the gearshift. She took it and put it in her lap. She looked down at my fingers, seemed to consider each of them one by one, pressing each of my knuckles between her fingertips. She rubbed my palm, tracing the creases that made their way from one side of it to the other. “It’s your lifeline,” she said.

“It is,” I said. “And if you don’t give it back, it will be drastically shortened by a nasty car accident.”

We played an old Bill Monroe mix. It was good summer driving music, heavy on the bass and fiddle. Natasha said, “Do you ever think about what we’d be like as a couple?”

“Awful,” I said quickly. “Just terrible.”

“I disagree,” Natasha said.

I conjured a few images of what I imagined would probably be a long and happy relationship.

“We know each other too well,” I said. “There’d be no mystery.”

“Every relationship’s a mystery,” Natasha said.

“Now you’re sounding like my mother,” I said, and Natasha laughed.

Ask anyone in the state to name Montana’s most famous resident, dead or alive. They probably won’t say William Andrews Clark, my copper magnate forefather, or Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. They won’t choose some governor or actor or successful businessman. They’ll invariably say one name: Robert Craig Knievel.

Knievel was born in Butte, and he worked in the Anaconda mine as a teenager. Legend has it that he got fired trying to stunt-jump a bulldozer. He hit the main power line, and Butte was in a blackout for days. Despite this (or maybe because of it), Knievel was Butte’s favorite son, so when he got old and seemed to retire from jumping over canyons or rows of buses or through flaming hoops, the city decided to celebrate him with a festival.

And what a festival it had become. It lasted for seventy-two hours on the final weekend in July. It was a circus of motorcycle daredevils and demolition derbies; the cops cordoned off most of downtown and routed the majority of traffic through the suburbs. I’m really not making this up. It seems exaggerated or unlikely or impossible. But nothing galvanized this corner of Montana like stunt jumping and the destruction of machines. Think: a county fair with motor
oil and a Hells Angel tattoo. The sound of the festival carried up and into the hills. At a distance, it sounded like muffled thunder. And this was the first festival since Knievel passed away in November. So it was going to be the biggest, loudest, fastest Evel Knievel Days yet.

We parked on Silver Street. Immediately, we saw that the city had been taken over by pirates. Or perhaps not pirates. But a cadre of bandanna-wearing fellows, many of whom had the sort of facial hair that you might associate with lengthy sea voyages. We walked along South Clark Street. There were motorcycles everywhere, an astonishing number of motorcycles. Row upon row of Harleys glistened on the edges of the sidewalks. There was a sense of danger in the air that was lessened somewhat by the massive billboard looming immediately in front of us as we came around the corner and entered Chester Steele Park:

WALL OF DEATH!

it read. Beneath that:

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL!

The exclamation points only gave the “Wall of Death!” a friendly look, which I didn’t imagine was the intended visual goal. We purchased tickets to the next show, the midnight show, the last of the day.

All around us, the detritus of a festival churned through the lamplit darkness. A wildly drunk man was standing on the corner and talking
to the stop sign. The ground was littered with Evel Knievel programs and a number of waxed-paper noisemakers. A pack of young men wandered by, all of them equally portly, all of them wearing T-shirts with some combination of red, white, and blue. At the end of the block, the police had set up a traffic barricade. Two officers sat beside it in folding chairs; they looked like sausages stuffed into their uniforms.

I could still feel the crackle of some kind of tension between Natasha and me. But she ran up to the motordrome ahead of me. How to describe the strange thing we saw? One way would be this:

That accounts for the centripetal force of the motorcycles. But then the angle of the motordrome would have to be:

or

There’s also this: It looked like a keg of beer—a giant thirty-six-foot-diameter keg of beer. One that was made of wooden boards that had somehow been bent and molded and nailed seamlessly together by the carpenters of a bygone era. I’d never seen such a large circular wooden structure. We took our tickets and filed along a
single red velvet rope. The line led us to an alarmingly rickety set of stairs.

“So,” I said, searching for something to say. “How’s Calvin?”

“Fine,” Natasha said. “He wasn’t really going to come to this. He hates the idea of it as much as you do.”

“You lied to me?” I said.

“I don’t know if I’d call it lying, exactly,” Natasha said.

“You manipulated my feelings,” I said half seriously.

Natasha didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “Do you think there’s one person out there for you? I mean, my parents have been together for twenty-five years, but is that accidental? Do they love each other because they loved each other so intensely at first, and now they’re just comfortable? Couldn’t they love someone else just as intensely, I mean, if one of them disappeared?”

We came to the arena. While the motordrome itself was designed by a long-ago New York architect, the stairs were clearly designed by Wal-Mart. They shook as we ascended. We were jammed close together. The slope was precipitous. I couldn’t see beyond the person immediately in front of me.

“Doesn’t this remind you of a slaughterhouse?” I said, perhaps too loudly. The man ahead of me in line turned slightly and frowned.

“Quiet,” Natasha said.

“Moo,” I answered.

The motordrome was equipped with a viewing platform at its top. The audience perched there, high above the ground. We looked down the walls of the cylinder. As we settled into our seats, the three riders entered from a hidden door in the wall. Natasha leaned
toward me. That perfume, she’d worn that perfume even when she was ten years old. I think she used to steal it from her mom. When we were kids, Natasha would come over to my house almost every day after school. This was the discussion we had again and again: “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” “Let’s play funeral.” “Okay, let’s play funeral.” We’d orchestrate a grand scene, a cortege and a bier and an imagined assembly of mourners. We’d make the coffin by putting two kitchen chairs together and draping them with a sheet. Who’d died? It depended on the afternoon. Sometimes it was Natasha playing the corpse of her teacher or a famous pop star—one of the Backstreet Boys, for example, or Janet Jackson. Sometimes it was me playing an imaginary dead version of my father. We mourned, we gave eulogies, we acted out scenes of tremendous emotional trauma. I have this memory of Natasha standing above me and wearing a mop as a wig, saying to my assembled imaginary mourners: “He was a beautiful young boy. We will miss him, and it’s a shame he had to die like that, squashed by the rolling pumpkins from the pumpkin truck accident on the freeway.”

So this is what I thought of at the Evel Knievel Days American Motordrome Wall of Death: a fake funeral playacted by two little kids. I think I was alone in this visualization. As for Natasha’s other question, sometimes I did think that I’d only ever been in love with her.

There was certainly a lot of showmanship to the performance: Engines revved, riders stood on the seats of their motorcycles and bowed. Then they started driving in circles. They gradually ascended the walls until they were driving parallel to the floor, spinning
dizzily around and around, raising their arms with the triumph of their death-defying feat. If I hadn’t been looking directly at it, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible.

The audience went crazy. Kids leaned over the railing and handed dollar bills to the riders. I was light-headed from the exhaust. My ears rang, and endorphins began to flood my body. Some part of me couldn’t look away from the thing I was watching, and some significant part of me wanted to do nothing more than close my eyes and seal myself off from it. One of the riders was a woman. Two were men. I watched the smallest of them, a lean weasel of a man, a rope with arms and legs and a pitchfork-shaped beard. For the most part he’d smile, beaming at the audience and projecting a wild, carefree aura. But from time to time, a furrowed look of concentration would slip across his face, and it was clear to me that the cheerfulness, the seemingly untroubled demeanor—it was a mask, a falsity for the sake of his job, which was daunting and difficult and required enormous amounts of attentiveness and focus. And that, I thought, was somehow beautiful.

The performance ended. We struggled down the flimsy staircase again and out into the street.

“Amazing!” Natasha yelled as soon as we were clear of the crowd.

“Fresh air,” I said, stumbling along, feigning shortness of breath. “Can barely breathe. Must find oxygen.”

“Khosi,” Natasha said. “Come on! You must have loved that.”

“I tolerated it,” I said.

She laughed and threw her right arm around my shoulder, and we headed back toward the car. I tried to fold myself away from her touch, to preserve whatever part of me was impervious to the allure
of her skin. This was a dangerous situation. We’d be lucky to navigate this evening and make it safely back to our respective homes—to our previous lives—undisturbed.

We walked through the teeming, drunken midnight crowd. My head felt buoyant and stretched, almost like gauze. This was clearly the monoxide. Humor is my crutch, so I told Natasha a non sequitur of a terrible joke (“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you”). We stood beside the Mercedes while I searched for the keys. I found them, but I fumbled to open the door and propped myself against it. Natasha stood close to me, leaning in a little, wobbling back and forth. And then she reached out and took me in her arms. I was surrounded by the feeling of her, by her corporeal self, by her scent. My head fit neatly beneath her own. She pressed her lips against my hair. It was gentle. We fell together into the front seat of the car.