Evel Knievel Days (7 page)

Natasha’s mouth was soft and warm and wet, and her lips tasted like salt. Her legs wrapped around me, her boots heavy against the backs of my thighs, her body beneath mine. We kissed, and I ran the tips of my fingers along the lines of her cheekbones. I kissed her collarbone and unbuttoned her white blouse. She smelled like perfume and sweat and, strangely, firecrackers. I licked the underwire of her bra, winding my tongue slowly underneath the unfriendly, starchy fabric. I fumbled with the clasp of it, feeling the sweat on the tips of my fingers as I struggled with the intricate metalwork. My thoughts skittered madly from destination to destination. Safety had fled. There was only the fact of this moment, the fact of Natasha’s body.
Oldest friend
, I thought. The furious surge of desire crested, it
expanded to the edges of my body, my newly lost body, my body that felt foreign, foreign and distant.

Natasha grabbed my shoulder blades and pulled me against her, her nails digging into my skin. It was sudden; our clothes were off and we were entangled with each other; I was inside of her; I was inside of her and she gasped and then she was biting, truly biting, the rise of my collarbone. It hurt. I was bleeding, I was sure of it. Was my blood in her mouth? This is what I was thinking of—my blood in Natasha’s mouth—as the car shook a little, as the windows clouded with the condensation of our breath, as her body seemed to stretch infinitely long and wide and consume me completely, erase me. We were all erasure, and in the middle of one of the loudest festivals in the country, in the center of its most uproarious night, I could hear nothing but my breathing and Natasha’s. There we were in the front seat of the Mercedes station wagon, and it was quiet enough to imagine the ghost of Evel Knievel wrapping itself around the city, enfolding Butte in its infinite vaporous hush.

Growing up, I was drawn to stories about werewolves and lycanthropes and all manner of shape-changing beasts. I think this was partly my mother’s fault. I never knew when I’d come home to find her utterly transformed. My interest in shape-changers, however, had led to an especially mortifying moment in eighth-grade biology class where I’d mentioned
lycanthropy
as if it were a real medical condition. The teacher laughed because she thought I was kidding.

“But really,” I persisted. “Is there a treatment?”

By lunchtime the whole school had heard the story of Cozy Sucker, the boy who believed in werewolves.

Natasha found me hiding in the PE supply closet, sitting on a pile of playground balls. “I poisoned the Kool-Aid in the lunchroom,” she said. “You won’t be having any more problems.”

“Hope it’s slow-acting.”

She assured me that it would also be disfiguring. “They’ll turn into moose,” she said. She always seemed to say the right thing.

In the front seat of the car, I wasn’t the only one dislocating from the present moment. Natasha, I noticed, was also somewhere else, her body almost lifeless. We were both naked. My skin stuck to the slightly warm, moist leather, and to make matters worse, I was wedged up against the steering wheel, the knob of the gearshift poking into my side. I looked up at Natasha’s face—looked across the flat plane of her stomach and the soft, feathery hair that marked the center of her body. She was staring at the roof of the car.

“Is everything okay?” I said. I kissed her hip bone.

Natasha said nothing. That made me nervous. Then she said, “Khosi,” and that made my palms start to sweat. I rested my head on her stomach. I pressed against it with my face; I wanted to burrow. Natasha never used my name in conversation. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. That didn’t make things better. I stared up at her: the luxurious sweep of her once-wild red hair, the soft, rich fabric of her unbuttoned blouse crumpled on the seat beside her. There was a touch of East Coast prep school to her clothes these days. There was a whisper of the
real
yacht club about her now—not just the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club, not the yacht club coded with irony.

“Last night,” she said, and sighed. “Calvin asked me to marry him.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “What are you talking about? And—and you said no?” I sat up in the driver’s seat. “You said no, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Otherwise we’d be wearing clothes.”

Natasha retracted her legs and curled herself into a wedge on the other side of the car. Her voice was soft and distant and ruminative and filled with a certain smoke. “I said yes,” she said.

I shook my head. “We just had sex in a station wagon—and you’re telling me you’re going to marry someone else?”

Natasha reached over and started reassembling her clothes. I looked at the car parked directly in front of us. It was an older car, a 1970s Chevrolet with a big silvery bumper and customized oversize tires. I thought about bumpers and chrome and the invention of vulcanized rubber. I inhaled. I exhaled. The door was still ajar; I opened it all the way, flooding the car with the peppery summer darkness. For some reason, I wanted to laugh. But it wouldn’t happen. The diaphragm wouldn’t activate. The laughter died in my belly. I got into my clothes, too, and started the engine of the car. Natasha looked at me. “What are you thinking?” she said.

I didn’t answer at first. We drove for a while in silence. I looked out at the roadway with its illuminated yellow strips. I turned the situation over in my mind. A wall had been broken. Something had crumbled. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew it was significant. And I was standing there, in the rubble of it, looking around and trying to reconstitute at least a part of what had been there before.

“You said yes because you love him,” I finally said.

I was again aware of Natasha’s breathing, which was low and ragged and haltering.

“Of course I love him, Khosi,” she said. “But we’re twenty-two. Well, he’s twenty-three.”

I was driving her home. I hadn’t known it until that moment, but that’s what I was doing. The car was retracing its route from earlier in the evening. I was driving it there. We drove past the Silver Bow County courthouse. The state built the courthouse in 1912 for $482,000, I knew. It towered four imperious stories above the pavement. It was a soft gray-pink color. Marble pillars framed the sides of its main glass dome. I gazed up at it, taking refuge in the facts of its size, its scope, its unshakable intentionality. And then Natasha said, “Wait, stop.”

“Stop?” I said.

“There he is, right there. It’s Calvin,” she said.

Sure enough, walking down the sidewalk, there was Calvin Stuckey. Sometimes, sometimes Butte was too small of a town.

“Speak of the devil and there he is,” I said, with perhaps a little too much emphasis.

But as we pulled up beside him, Natasha recoiled as if she’d been burned. “No, never mind,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

“Don’t stop?” I said. “He’s about to see us. I can’t just stare at him and drive by. ‘I’m sorry, Calvin, I was just screwing your fiancée a moment ago, so I didn’t feel like stopping.’ ”

“I don’t think he wants to see me,” she said, sinking lower into the seat. “And I don’t know if I want to see him.”

“Didn’t he just propose to you?” I said, and rolled the car up beside him.

He’d come downtown specifically to find her. He’d left his house after midnight and charted his way through the bedlam of
the parade’s end. That’s what I found out later, anyway: He’d imagined he might find us together downtown. The timing was fortuitous. He spotted our car before we pulled over. We rolled to a halt directly in front of him. He smiled broadly as he walked up to us. His shelf of glistening white teeth illuminated the night like a glacial peak.

“Hey, Khosi,” Calvin said. “Hi, Cube.”

This was, I knew, his pet name for her. It felt dirty to know their pet names. Or to be the kind of person they shared their pet names with. But there you had it. Cube was simple. Cube as in
sugar. Sugar cube
.

“Congratulations on the engagement, Calvin,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I went looking for you at the country club.”

I put the Mercedes in park and turned off the motor. “Yacht Club,” I said.

“Or Yacht Club Manor,” Natasha said.

“But I forgot my ascot,” Calvin said. “They wouldn’t let me in the door.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “Normally, they keep a few behind the counter.”

Calvin leaned in, his hand resting on the edge of Natasha’s window. She reached over and touched the back of his wrist. She smiled reluctantly at him. “Couldn’t sleep?” she said.

Calvin looked over at me. “Can I borrow her for just a minute, Khosi?”

And so I walked home, listening to the sound of my footsteps on the concrete sidewalk. When I turned around to look at them at the end of the block, they were standing there, on the edge of the
streetlight’s illumination, huddled close together, holding each other despite the heat. My shadow passed underneath me as I walked. A truck downshifted on the interstate. The sound of it carried out across the valley.

As I neared my house, I stopped at the Millers’ garden, a garden that I knew to be infested with walking onions. They’d built trellises for the onions, and right now they were blooming—small purple flowers almost invisible in the inky dark. I stood at their fence and felt the roughness of the boards in my hands. I heard something behind the house, rummaging around the trash bins, probably a feral cat or a raccoon. They must have lonely lives, these nocturnal creatures, digging through the remnants of other people’s trash, negotiating a darkened world.

The Loving Shambles was dark again, but by now the moon was out and illuminated the front porch. I made my way through the still-unlocked front door. It was just before two
A.M
. Sure enough, sitting at the dining room table in a circle of illumination, in a spotlight of illumination from a dozen candles, was my mother. She had a cup of tea on the table in front of her. The steam rose into the air, hanging near the chandelier.

“There you are,” she said. “I was wondering where you might be, my love.”

“Mom,” I said. “Are you holding a séance?”

My mother laughed. She stood and walked over and hugged me, wrapping me in her stalklike arms. She was wearing a black pashmina. The fabric of it draped over me and gave off the sweet redolence of mothballs.

“Of course not, Khosi,” my mother said. “The ghosts of the dead
are all around us. There’s no need to summon them with artificial stagecraft.”

This was exactly the sort of thing she was prone to saying.

“Did you turn off the power, Mom?”

She took my chin in both of her hands. “I needed peace,” she said. “I needed tranquillity.”

The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon Him) once said:
Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me
. My mother’s face seemed a little sad. Her forehead folded into a set of horizontal lines.

“Khosi,” she said. “Your father’s back. Or rather, he was. He just left.” And then she pulled me into a fierce, smothering hug. “Tell your mother congratulations,” she added. “She is officially divorced.”

I often dream that I’m a contestant on
Jeopardy!

Alex Trebek welcomes and introduces us. Then he turns to the board and says, “These are the categories: Cornish Mining Methods. The Panic of 1907. The Anaconda Mine and Amalgamated Copper. The Western Federation of Miners. And finally, Pinkerton Detectives.” He stands back and gestures to us, the contestants. “Khosi,” he says, “please make your selection.” The camera pulls back, and now it’s a montage. I answer everything: $200 and $400 and $600 and $800 and $1,000 questions. I amass a fortune. The other players stand there, silent, flummoxed, dumbfounded, as I surge into the lead. Finally, the board is empty. “Time for Final Jeopardy!” Alex Trebek says, and then he reveals the topic.

I can’t quite see the words, but as Alex Trebek reads them—his
voice deepening and lengthening each syllable—I’m pitched into a sickening awareness: I’ve just lost the game. I’m finished. I have no hope. “The Emotional Life of You and Your Family,” he says, and I realize that this is not a subject that I know anything about. The game continues without me. My score is forfeit. Zeroes flash in front of my monitor. A comforting young woman in a pantsuit and a headset comes to lead me away. There will be no fortune, not for me.

On that night, I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a Scotch and soda. Then I tried to negotiate the restoration of electricity to the house. “Why don’t we just see how peaceful it can be,” I suggested, “with one or two lights on in the hallway.” I tiptoed down the stairs and threw the breaker once again.

I sat at the table with my mother. The candles remained lit, though they guttered from time to time, sending a broad smoky scent into the air, a scent that mingled with the smell of the warm summer night. I looked at my mother with her cup of steaming tea. She’d brought her pill container downstairs, possibly for my benefit. I scrutinized it as casually as was possible. Today’s section was empty. So this wasn’t Wilson’s disease.

“Divorced?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Your father and I,” she said. “It’s official now. It wasn’t official before.”

“Good to know that you’re being conscientious,” I said.

“He came to the house with the paperwork,” she said. “And I signed it.” She huddled over her mug of tea.

“Dad was here,” I said. “Incredible. It’s incredible that you didn’t think I might want to meet him.”

My mother didn’t answer. Imagine: blackberry bushes in summer. Imagine: the raw ache of too much time separated from my bed. Imagine: the cool feeling of the tabletop against the palms of my hands. Imagine: the sound of a distant freight train.

Before I could say anything, Mom slumped down and put her head on her arms. “I can’t discuss this with you now, obviously,” she said.

“How about five minutes from now?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Officially divorced?” I said. “What do you mean? You were still married?”

She didn’t answer.

“When did you know he was coming?” I said.