Evel Knievel Days (5 page)

“Dear God,” she said, holding me at arm’s length. “He’s so brown.”

It’s true. I was. At birth, my Egyptian blood flared. Over time, I’ve grown even darker; at birth, I was the color of a paper bag. My broad nose jutted from my oblong face. A brace of black hair crowned my head. I looked, all in all, like a tiny Yasir Arafat.

This complexion made me hate—but also love—my heritage.
Hate
because I stood out, was separate, heterogeneous in a homogeneous state.
Love
because I stood out, was separate, heterogeneous in a
homogeneous state. As for my grandmother, it’s hard to say if anything improved from that first moment at the hospital bedside. I’ve often thought of my mother, three months pregnant, sitting on the edge of the newly made bed in Room 511 of Caesar’s Palace. My father is downstairs in the lobby, playing roulette. She is also playing roulette, but roulette of a slightly different kind, as she picks up the telephone and dials the 406 area code. The phone rings only once before my grandmother answers. I can imagine the sweat along the grooves of my mother’s palms, the white of her knuckles as she clasps the receiver.

By then I was embryonic and soft-shelled, although I already had arms and legs, distinct fingers and toes. It was, in a sense, my debut. It was my first appearance in the news of the world. An impending birth, a marriage in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. My grandfather locked himself in his home office and cried.

I thought about this story almost every time I passed what was my grandparents’ opulent Victorian house on Granite Street. Though they both died when I was in middle school, I remembered birthdays and holidays at that home, all of them marked by stiff table linen and even stiffer conversation. The food exquisitely arranged on porcelain plates. A piece of silverware for every course. A butler.

As I walked home, I kept seeing flashes of silver in the corner of my eye, but I’d turn and look and there’d be nothing there, just a lamppost or a gray house or a set of passing headlights. The darkness settled around me. The night sky descended. I glanced from time to time at the stars. Nothing fills me with wonder, said Immanuel Kant, like the star-filled firmament above me and the moral
law within me. Stuffy bastard, but—I have to admit—he did have a way with words.

As soon as I turned onto Mercury Street, I saw the porch light was out and the Loving Shambles was dark. Mom never remembered to turn off lights, and the sight of the house—a black shape against a black sky—made me uneasy. I checked the garage. The catering van was gone. I stopped momentarily to look at the garden, which resembled any number of photographs I’d seen of the lunar surface. It was pockmarked and cratered and bare and contributed to my general sense of unease.

“Dammit,” I said. I unlocked the front door and tried several light switches before calling Big Sky Power. My mother was notoriously absentminded when it came to bill paying, which was one of the reasons I had to move out. She’d started relying on me to handle things. When I called, I discovered this: The bill was paid, and there were no local outages.

I rummaged through the drawer but couldn’t find Mom’s pill dispenser. This morning, when she’d insisted we purge the garden of the
allium proliferum
, I’d nearly demanded to count her medication. I’d relented because Mom hated me playing the role of enforcer almost as much as I hated playing it myself. I slammed the drawer shut, feeling uncertain what to do. Tonight she was catering the yearly Evel Knievel banquet/picnic—a picnic populated by some of the most eccentric characters in Butte. Nobody would notice if she acted a little strange. Five years ago I’d found her asleep on the living room floor the morning after the event, a set of Hawaiian leis around her neck, the car parked resolutely in the vegetable garden. Nobody would notice anything amiss with her tonight.

First things first: I needed electricity. I got a flashlight and went down into the basement. The stairs creaked. I illuminated the fuse box with my flashlight’s conical glow. Sure enough: Someone had tripped the main breaker. I was about to reach for it when I heard a slow, creaking moan from the floorboards above me.

It is remarkable how quickly your home can go from safe to frightening, how simple darkness can make your imagination flare. The sound seemed to coalesce, to rise and shape itself into footsteps—solid, distinct footsteps. I flicked the switch to the right, and the house surged to life. The sound of it was large and immediate. A half-dozen appliances remembered their duties and their functions. I walked back over to the basement stairs. I ascended them slowly, step by step, straining to hear any sound from the rest of the house.

“Mom?” I called, my voice cracking a little.

“Boo,” Natasha Mariner said, leaping out from the hallway.

I yelped and nearly fell backward. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Did you have to do that? I’ve had the strangest day.”

“It just got better,” she said. “I brought you beer.” She hoisted a six-pack of Miller High Life. Only four of the bottles were intact. One was missing, and one was half-empty and clutched in her other hand. She was, it seemed, a little drunk. Natasha was drunk and I was jumpy. She opened a beer for me, and I launched into a narrative of my day, starting with the walking-onion massacre and continuing through the attentive stranger with the overcoat and the new-model Chevrolet. We eased our way through the house as I talked, heading toward the front porch.

“He was probably a maniac,” Natasha said. “You’re lucky to be alive and in one piece.”

“You’re making fun of me,” I said, shaking my head.

“I mean: Maybe he’s still lurking here in the house. Maybe we’re doomed even as we sit here, innocently talking about nothing. It’s about to get really gruesome.” She paused. “I’ve totally seen this movie, and the virgins always live.”

“I’m not a virgin,” I said.

“I know,” Natasha said. “That’s why you’re doomed.”

“You’re not a virgin, either,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “Why do you think I’m drinking?” she said. “I don’t want to be sober when I die.”

Natasha Mariner, I would just like to point out quickly, spent all of her adolescence looking like a jackrabbit. Besides the freckles and the red hair, she had prominent buckteeth, teeth that no amount of orthodonture could wrangle into alignment. Lord knows her parents tried. I was there through it all, through the seven years of braces, through the headgear, through the rubber bands so thick that their application would make her howl in pain. In the end, her teeth were unreformed. Combined with the big ears and the persistent cowlicks and the large brown eyes and the unfortunate tendency to button shirts all the way to the collar, Natasha looked like a hare. At some point I learned the word
leporine
. I tried calling her this for a while, but it didn’t stick. So imagine my surprise when Natasha Mariner graduated from college entirely transformed. She’d grown into her features. She was suddenly self-assured and somehow even beautiful. And this beauty was noticeable. It nagged at me
whenever we spent time together. I found myself, without meaning to, tracing the lines of her body with my eyes, and then—ashamed, embarrassed—staring stridently at a spot on the floor.
Oldest friend
, I thought.
Oldest, best, closest, nonsexual friend. She is a special category of sexless human being
.

“So what happened to the yard?” Natasha said. “Your mom just woke up with the drive to strip it?”

“Indeed,” I said.

Natasha’s eyes widened. “Wilson’s flare-up?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“Well,” Natasha said, “goddammit.”

“God bless it,” I said. “Just say
God bless it
. It’s a softer sentiment. It’s not nearly as vulgar.”

“You know,” she said, “I’m
so
thankful you’re here to tell me how to curse.”

“It’s just easier on the ears,” I said. “Besides—you’re a politician now. You have to be judicious. Stentorian.”

It wasn’t important enough to argue over. So I quickly suggested to her that we put a record on.

“How about Haggard?” I said. “Or Bill Haley?”

Natasha didn’t answer me. Instead, she walked into the living room. I heard her flip through my crates of albums. Sound blossomed around us, rich and immediate, composed of a fiddle, a snare drum, a bass, and a crooning, melodious voice: Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys. She walked back over to me and, misjudging the distance between us, sat far too close. Her knee bumped against mine, and she teetered a bit, throwing her shoulder into mine for a moment. I didn’t push her away. I felt the softness of her body against
me. It was a partial disclosure, a suggestion of form, an implication of the shape of her arm, the line of her rib cage, the gentle pressure of her breast. I noticed. I imagined. I couldn’t help it. And then the chorus of “Heartaches by the Number” swooped out into the night:

We started singing. We sang as loud as we could. We howled. We yodeled. Natasha practically bayed the last lines. “I love that song,” she said, breathing hard.

“I think it’s the greatest numerically oriented country-western song about heartbreak,” I said.

Natasha laughed. “Don’t go out on a limb,” she said.

“I am!” I protested. “That’s saying a lot. That’s saying it’s better than ‘Lonesome 7-7203’ by Hawkshaw Hawkins. And ‘1-800 Used to Be’ by Lorrie Morgan. And ‘I’m Gonna Sleep with One Eye Open’ by Lester Flatt. And ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford.”

“That’s not a song about heartbreak,” Natasha said.

“Is, too.”

“Is not.”

“Is, too. It’s a song about the heartbreak of laboring for a company store, about the way that capitalism enslaves the working class and yokes them to their own oppression.”

“Thank you, Karl Marx,” Natasha said. She tipped her beer all the way back, drinking it with alarming speed. With a theatrical flourish, she stood and walked out the door and to the edge of the porch. She pitched the empty bottle up in a shimmering arc through
the sky. I heard it shatter on the driveway. This was my first clue that something wasn’t right. Natasha wasn’t the kind of person who came over to your house and smashed a bottle in your driveway. She was much drunker than I’d thought. She walked back over to me. She grabbed me and pulled me up to standing. The next song was playing, a fast-paced number, and she put her arm around my waist and clasped my right hand with her left. I saw that her nails had been chewed to bloody, ragged half-moons. She pulled my hips tight against hers.

“I can’t believe you broke a bottle in my driveway,” I said softly.

“Let’s dance,” Natasha said.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll lead. I’m a much better dancer than you, anyway.”

I turned away from her. “I can’t dance,” I said. I walked to one end of the porch. In order for me to dance, several things would have to happen in a particular and precise order. I would have to, first of all, take off my shoes. Then I’d have to straighten my socks, pulling them taut against the surface of my legs, until they were precisely 50 percent of the way to my knee. This would give me an ideal surface for dancing, smooth and without wrinkles. Then the shoes would go on again. What a lengthy affair that would be. “I just can’t,” I added lamely.

“Fine,” Natasha said. “Suit yourself.” She turned and faced away from me, looking into the darkness of the Butte night. I went inside and retrieved the dustpan and the broom from the hall closet. I returned to the porch.

“Stargazing?” I said over my shoulder, walking toward the glass in the driveway.

“Come on, Khosi,” Natasha said. “Let’s drive somewhere. Let’s go watch the freight trains up above the Berkeley Pit.” When I didn’t react, she said, “I know: Let’s go downtown and—and do something you’ll hate.”

“Something I’ll hate?” I said. I turned around and looked at her. She’d managed to procure the final beer and was in the process of opening it. She looked so beautiful, standing there in silhouette. Shadows gathered across her cheeks, illuminating the whites of her eyes, which shone with a watery intensity. Mosquitoes buzzed around us in a hungry cloud. “You mean,” I said, “like break into the mansion and reorganize all the items in the gift shop?”

“No,” Natasha said, brandishing her beer like a saber, “that’s something you’d
love
. I’m talking about the exact opposite. Let’s go to the American Motordrome Wall of Death. I think there’s a midnight show.”

I must have looked horrified. The American Motordrome Wall of Death was a new attraction at this year’s festival. There had been a lot of coverage by the local media. Apparently, it involved gravity-defying motorcycles. It seemed entirely sickening. And letting Natasha loose on the world just now—I didn’t know if that was an excellent idea.

“Come on, Khosi,” she said. Then she did something that we did all the time. She quoted George Hamilton from
Evel Knievel: The Movie
, in which he played—you guessed it—Evel Knievel. “ ‘I am the last gladiator in the new Rome,’ ” she exclaimed. “ ‘I go into the
arena and I compete against destruction and I win. And next week I go out there and I do it again.’ ”

I just shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a little buzzed.”

“Well,” Natasha said, “Calvin did say he’d go with me tomorrow night.”

I considered this. I liked Calvin, but he was sort of an impossible case: the valedictorian of the Class of 2007, a four-year starter on the Grizzlies’ lacrosse team, a grin as wide and white as the Bitterroot Mountains.
Ruggedly handsome
would undersell his good looks. It was hard not to be jealous of Calvin Stuckey. He’d graduated a year ahead of her from Montana and had spent much of the past fourteen months building a sustainable agricultural infrastructure in rural Peru. Now law school. His image, his broad grin, popped into my imagination. I nodded. I adjusted my belt around my waist.

“I guess,” I said, carefully placing the broom and the dustpan at the edge of the porch, “a little stunt-bike performance might be just what the doctor ordered.”