Evel Knievel Days (11 page)

“How’d you know?” I said.

“That’s my job.”

I took my beer and my bourbon and sat next to the jukebox.
There were country songs on this jukebox, at least fifty country songs that could express the way I was feeling. I’d let Ray Price take control, or Moon Mullican, or Patsy Cline. I fed twenty dollars into the machine. There were at least seven hours, after all, until closing time. I walked over to the OTB monitors. I logged in. I finished my bourbon. I scanned the racing form.

There was a stakes race starting in twenty minutes at Santa Anita. I watched the horses trot out of the paddock and over toward the gate. I chose a green gelding—one with just a few races listed on the form, most of them in smaller tracks. He was a 15–1 long shot, but he had strong numbers in ten furlongs, and that was a good sign. I finished my beer. I was about to place my bet when my phone rang. I glanced at the number. It was Wada.

“Look out,” she said. “Incoming.”

I took a moment to understand what she meant. “I’m sure she’s angry,” I said.

“In her fiercest mood.”

“She knows I’m at the Yacht Club?” I said.

“Habibi,”
Wada said. “Where else would you be?”

It was a good point. “Thanks,” I said, “for the warning.”

“No problem. Good luck, my darling boy.”

I hung up the phone. When my mother was in this mood—her most fearsome—there was nothing she would refuse to do. The summer I was ten, I hit the lip of the YMCA pool on a dive from the highest board. The sickening sound of bone on concrete shot out across the parents and friends assembled in the stands for the meet. I was lucky, very lucky, to only break an arm. Obviously, I never dove again. But my mother, she was up and running in a fraction of a
second. At moments of intense stress, she did this, transformed into someone else, almost, rising to the challenge. She dove into the pool before anyone could stop her. She set some sort of world record for the crawl. She reached me ten seconds before the lifeguards. It was her fierce, steady, confident help that guided me out of the water. I was her baby boy, her tiniest charge. She was surfacing and protecting me. I was hers and hers alone.

I slipped out into the alley behind the bar and ducked around the corner. There she was, sitting in her car, idling the motor, watching me walk toward her.

“Perfect,” she said, rolling down the window. “I don’t have to go in that place.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “It’s really quite homey.”

“Look,” she said, “I don’t have time for a lot of chitchat. I have to get to tonight’s job. I just thought that, you know, some people travel with patron saints and miraculous medals to protect them.” She leaned over and pulled something out of the glove box. She handed it to me. I looked down, conscious that I already had the bracelet in my pocket and that I’d adopted
it
as a sort of talisman. But what my mom had handed me was an Evel Knievel Days souvenir program—from 2007. “And so,” she concluded, “I got you this.”

“Okay,” I said, looking down.

“Open it,” she said.

Inside was a bookmark—a stylized image of a man riding a red, white, and blue motorcycle. Around his neck was the familiar Evel Knievel cape. Why he chose to wear a cape while riding a motorcycle is something that I will never truly understand. But there,
scrawled at the bottom of the bookmark, was a shaky signature.
Keep ridin!
it said.
Evel
.

“This is probably pretty rare,” I said.

“I thought it might be his last Evel Knievel Days,” she said. “It turned out I was right.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

“For when you moved out of the house,” she said. “I thought that at that point, it would be an appropriate sentiment.”

“Keep ridin?” I said.

“Not literally,” she said.

“Unless I moved to a ranch,” I said.

“It’s a bookmark,” she said. Her voice rose slightly, leading me toward its desired conclusion. “And so?”

“So there’s a book that goes along with it?” I said.

My mother nodded and sighed. She reached between the seats and pulled out a slim white volume. She handed it to me through the open window.
Overcoming Obsessive Thoughts
. My stomach lurched. The ground felt suddenly distant. Momentarily, I flashed back to the hours and hours of mother-son therapy time, to the mental health seminars at the downtown convention center, to the self-help books on tape that lived, a rapacious and accumulating fungus, on the bookshelves of our house.

“Come on,” I said. “I don’t have a problem.”

“Of course not,” my mother said. “We all know you’re perfectly normal.”

“Denial,” I said, “ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

“Very funny,” my mother said.

“Look, Mom,” I began. I was about to tell her something that
she’d told me, countless times:
Your solutions have to be
your
solutions. They can’t belong to anyone else
.

“Just read it,” she said. “I have to go to work.” She frowned. “I mentioned that you’re making a terrible mistake.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” she said. She rolled up the window. Then she rolled it down again. “You know,” she added, “there’s an old Arabic saying: ‘Mention the wolf and have your club ready.’ ”

“There aren’t any wolves in Egypt,” I said. “I doubt it will come up.”

She stared at me.

“What does that even mean?” I said.

“Mention the wolf,” she said. “Think about it. Don’t go looking for trouble. Just be careful.”

She drove away.

I walked home. On my way, I passed the pit. It yawned out into the darkness, dimming away into the body of the hillside. I stopped at the railing of the exterior fence and gazed out at the vast toxic lake. I looked out over the water. An open-pit copper mine is a remarkable thing. Slowly, with shovels and bulldozers and backhoes, miners scoop away the dirt, boring deeper and deeper into the ground. From the sky, they must look like ants, tunneling a geometric shape by the guidance of some invisible principle. They tunnel and blast at the ground with chemicals. They destroy and destroy more deeply and destroy even more deeply still. Once it reaches a certain point, there’s nothing that can be done to heal a strip mine. The earth will forever bleed downward, leaking its groundwater through the walls of the mine.

Eventually, the Berkeley Pit will flood. Fifteen years ago, a flock of snow geese landed on its surface. Within hours they were dead. Nobody knew exactly how many had died. Because in the first few hours that those geese floated in the mine, their little goose skins absorbed gallons and gallons of toxic water. Their goose corpses turned orange. Their feathers became inky chemical sponges. They were camouflaged.

I always used to think of the pit as a terrible scar, a pockmark in the skin of the city, of the state, of the country. But as I stood there and replayed my strange last few days in my head, it looked almost beautiful. It was vast and aquatic and it was a contrast to the city that stretched up to its lip. I thought of Wendell Berry, who titled his essay about East Kentucky strip mines “The Landscaping of Hell.” Every strip-mining company had learned its trade from my family; I was complicit in this, my blood was corrosive; once upon a time, it broke the crust of the world.

“T
HE THING YOU NEED TO
know about Cairo,” my taxi driver said, “is not the traffic. It’s not the pollution. It’s not the dust.” Here he extinguished his cigarette, grinding it into his ashtray. “It’s the bread.”

He kept glancing at me in his rearview mirror as he drove, a procedure that I found a little disconcerting. He’d make eye contact with me for five, ten, fifteen seconds, even as the traffic darted past us, taillights flaring in angry blossoms of red. I had never, quite honestly, seen anything like the traffic on the road into Cairo. Even as we crossed the Sixth of October Bridge and entered the body of the city, cars moved with an aggressive madness I’d associated only with a swarm of bees.

“You see,” the driver continued, “every revolution in the history of our country happened because someone raised the price of bread,
ya’ani
. And that’s why Mubarak is in trouble.”

His cell phone rang. He frowned and answered it and instantly began an animated argument with a man who was, as far as I could
tell, his mortal enemy. With one hand, he held the phone to his ear. With the other hand, he lit a cigarette. I assumed that he was driving with his knees. I searched for my seat belt. Either it had never been installed or it had been removed by sadistic thieves.

His enemy vanquished, the driver snapped the phone shut and looked back at me again. He asked me why I’d come to Egypt.

“I’m here to find my father,” I said. “He’s Egyptian.”

The man nodded but said nothing more. “And what part of America do you come from?” he asked.

“Montana,” I said.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “It is beautiful.” He didn’t elaborate on how he’d come to this knowledge. Maybe this was his standard line. (“What part of America do you come from?” “Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania.” “Ah, yes. It is beautiful.”)

We’d driven down the Al-Orouba Road, and now we were on the Salah Salem. Big white apartment buildings—architecture in a grand modernist style—lined either side of the roadway. I thought about the density of the buildings, arranged row after row after row. And I imagined my father looking at these same buildings, driving this cityscape, having it form the backdrop to his thoughts each day. I saw my dad everywhere. I strained to find him in each person walking along the side of the road. I imagined his face in every billboard, at the wheel of every oncoming car, in the seats of every lumbering, diesel-spewing bus.

“What else should I know about the city?” I said as we pulled up to the Kewayis Cairo Marriott, where I’d gotten a room for the price of an American Motel 6.

The driver thought about this for a moment. “Well,” he said,
with his hand on the door handle, “people have been living here for seven thousand years.”

A porter collected my bags and whisked me through security. The man in front of me in line held a string of prayer beads in his hand. Islam has its own version of a rosary; a
misbaha
has ninety-nine beads on it, one for each of God’s names. I’d seen them at the Islamic Center in Billings, but never in the world, never like this. With the
misbaha
, a supplicant will recite all ninety-nine names, repeating them again and again, looping through them with the fingers. The fourteenth name: Al-Mussawir, the Bestower of Form, the Shaper. The nineteenth name of God: Al-Fattah, the Opener. The thirty-eighth name of God: Al-Kabir, the Most Great. The sixty-first: Al-Muhyi, the Giver of Life. Bestowing Form, Opening, the Most Great, the Giver of Life. Cairo, Al-Qahira, the second oldest city on the planet, Mother of the World, an organic beast, a being made by this kind of a divinity, working through the hands of its believers.

Newly landed in Cairo and safely ferried to my room, I slept for nearly sixteen hours, waking only upon the morning call to prayer. The disembodied sound of the muezzin’s voice unwound itself around me, even on the tenth floor. It was a call to prayer, sure, but it was also an alarm clock.
Prayer is better than sleep
, he was saying.
The world is beginning to awake
. The call ended. The air conditioner appeared to have stopped working, perhaps out of despair. It had decided to
heat
the room instead. The modern hotel room with its wall of windows was, after all, simply a giant greenhouse.

I stared at the ceiling. I put my legs on the edge of the mattress. But was that the right way to begin the day? Wouldn’t I be luckier,
safer, faster, happier if I leaped out of bed without coming into contact with the edge of the mattress? I felt the dried sweat on my face, felt its sheen on my upper lip. I was parched. So here I was, in need of two things that were so important to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon His name): water for the thirsty and knowledge for the ignorant. I sank back into the center of the bed, so very small and alone and puny. I was nothing, I was a fragment of nothing, I was less than a fragment of nothing, I was a fraction of a bit of a sliver of a fragment of nothing. Dust towered over me in its significance. At least dust, with more dust, could make a storm. I could not make a storm.

Honestly, I was afraid of playing private detective. I was afraid of failure, sure. But I was equally afraid of success. I was afraid that I would find my father, and then what? I’d taken those three Xanax and stepped onto the international flight. The softness, the safety, of life at the museum was utterly shattered.

Before leaving, I’d contacted a private investigator who had contacted, in turn, the local police in Egypt. Now I took the two notecards out of my wallet. I looked down at them. My mother had been no help in offering me contact information for my father’s family. “I burned it all in a bonfire,” she’d said. “When you were six years old.” A bonfire of contact information would’ve been a very small bonfire, but I’d assumed there were other things in the flames. Between the P.I. and Tante Wada, I had a list of eighteen addresses, all of which could contain my father, all of which I’d written on two 3 × 5 notecards. I’d found five phone numbers, too, but I’d tried them all, and they’d all been disconnected.