Evel Knievel Days (22 page)

At that moment, sitting in my hotel room, my mother and I had a long and remarkably satisfying discussion about my father’s untimely end. She proposed a variety of different scenarios. Each was more gruesome and violent than the last. Many seemed to have been stolen from the execution methods of medieval Europe. She proposed, for example, rolling him down a hill in a barrel of nails.

“Where will we get a barrel?” I said.

“That’s not the real challenge,” she said. “The real challenge is getting him in it.”

“What about arsenic?” I said.

“Ah, yes,” she said, and sighed. “From the apothecaries of the vanished past.” She paused. “The son of his friend Malik,” she said, finishing the liquor. “I can’t believe you did it.”

“It happened fast,” I said.

“But still,” she said. “Didn’t you feel like you were compromising something important?”

“Haven’t you felt that way for years?” I said.

“Oh dear,” she said.

A silence inhabited my hotel room then, it rose up from the vents, perhaps, and floated out through the interior space.

“I’m going to go get a drink at the bar,” I said. “I’m tired of these tiny, incredibly expensive bottles of hooch.”

My mother nodded. “I have something else for you.” From her other pocket, she took out a shiny object. She handed it to me. It was a loop of silver chain doubled over itself. At the end of the chain was a locket—the locket from the seat of Natasha’s Mercedes station wagon.

“She gave it to me,” my mother said, “just before I left. She wanted to know if I’d heard from you. She came by the house.”

I opened it. There was the inscription I’d written so many years ago. All this time I’d been certain that she had no idea. There was also a small rolled-up slip of paper in the silvery case. I unrolled it. G
OOD LUCK
, the paper read. xo, N
ATASHA
.

“I need a real drink,” I told my mother, and turned and made my way unsteadily down the hall.

Why they were playing “As Time Goes By” in the lobby of the Kewayis Cairo Marriott, I will never be able to say. But there it was, the Frank Sinatra version, clear and syrupy, hanging in the air as I sat in the deserted bar. I held the locket in my hand, turning it over and over. The place was impressive. It boasted a lavish wall of liquor, by any standards, but no bartender. I sat in front of the bottles, the rows and rows of gleaming, glistening bottles—fine Finnish potato vodka and highest-quality Greek ouzo. Someone had arranged tiny paper menus at regular intervals along the bar. What the menus lacked were prices. If you had to ask, then you couldn’t afford to be drinking there.

“Your order, sir?”

I requested a triple Jack Daniel’s, neat. This drew a raised eyebrow.

“You should be at a
baladi
bar,” he said, even as he took the blacklabeled bottle down from its shelf.

He had a point. The
baladi
bars, I’d heard, were the place to go for booze in the city. They were cash-only and nicotine-stained, full of
sheesha
smoke. They were a little bit filthy. They escaped regulation by posing as cafeterias during the day. The drinks were stiff, but the women weren’t. That sort of thing.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

He reached across the counter and slipped me a square of brown burlap. I unfolded it. It was a guide to the city’s
baladi
bars, all fifty-one of them, and it was sponsored by Stella, the only Egyptian beer company. Stella had been owned for over three decades by the Egyptian government and only recently privatized. Now it was a subsidiary of Heineken, which had to be careful with advertising in this predominantly Islamic country. While there was a significant Coptic Christian population (almost 10 percent of Egypt’s residents), the Christians tended to be poor, to lack social and political power. What I was looking at, then, was an ad that could be easily slipped into a pocket and concealed, like a handkerchief.

I told the waiter that I had a strange and peculiar situation, one that didn’t lend itself to going out all night. Besides, the throbbing headache that I’d had all evening was only getting worse. He nodded. “Poor man,” he said.

This note of sympathy (genuine or not) was all I needed. I launched into my story, stretching backward into time, describing
even my first memories—my imagined first memories, the impossible moments with my father that I’d constructed for myself and only half believed were true. I told him the whole story of my day, beginning with my feuding aunts and including the feeling of the knife at my throat and concluding with my mother’s arrival in Cairo. I built a picture of myself for this total stranger, tied to him by the intimacy of the empty bar and the sour mash whiskey. It was a peculiar kind of unburdening, a kind of unburdening that reminded me somehow of the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club. This, then, was the Pyramid Yacht Club, the cross-ocean version of my beloved Montana home.

When I was finished, the waiter just looked at me. “God is great,” he finally said.

I sipped at the drink. “That’s all?” I said. “I tell you my life story, and all you say is ‘God is great’?”

“Well,” the waiter said, thinking about this for a long time. “He is great.”

I shook my head. “I guess I can’t argue with that. But why does everyone here say it so much?
God is great; by the grace of God; tomorrow, God willing
.”

“
Y’ani
,” the waiter said, “think about it for a moment. What does it mean, really, to tell you that God is great?”

“Well,” I said, “it could mean several things, depending on the context or the interpretation.”

“Exactly,” he said, and turned and walked away, leaving me with my drink.

And that was that.

I drank for a while in silence. I was tired.
I’m dog-tired
, I thought.
I was carrying the bracelet and the Evel Knievel bookmark, both of them stuffed into my pockets. I felt like there was a string in the surface of the bar, one that was attached to my forehead, pulling me down toward it, closer and closer. I thought of Natasha and the locket she’d sent me. There was a small stain on the hem of my shirt, left by a crumb of falafel. And then, and then—I heard the screech of the bar stool as someone sat down beside me.

“Oh God,” I said, sensing exactly who it was, “not you again.”

“Aw, shucks, pardner,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “Ain’t no need to welcome me like that.”

“I want to have a drink in peace.” I took a sip of the whiskey. “I guess I see what you mean about Montana.”

“I hate to say I told you so,” he said. “But a ghost is always right.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Always trust a ghost,” he said.

“I get it.”

“Ghosts are unceasingly knowledgeable.”

“Would you please be quiet?” I said. “I’m trying very hard to get drunk and forget my troubles.” I darted a glance at the bartender, who appeared to be sweeping up something at the far end of the bar, unconcerned. The Ghost of William Andrews Clark stiffened. His isangelous skin wavered somewhere between opaque and translucent.

“No need to get angry,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Anger hurts,” he added.

I exhaled. “Sorry,” I whispered. “It’s just been a tough day.”

“It’s all right, pardner. It’s been that way for me, too.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Ah, son,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “I’m in a pile of trouble in the spiritual realm. I’ve been interfering too much on this side of things.” He leaned forward on the bar stool. “Cigar?”

“Sure,” I said. I reached out and took the unlit cigar. I chewed on it a bit, letting its sting numb my lips.

The ghost looked over at the bottles of liquor. “What I wouldn’t give,” he said, “for just one shot of that bug juice.” He coughed. “Look, pardner, like I said: I’m going to take a vacation. Go play the ponies in Sarasota. I’ve got a great tip on a filly in the fourth race tomorrow. You know, son, always bet on the horse with the shiniest coat. It means good circulation.”

“I should bring you back to Gezira,” I said.

“Of course you shouldn’t,” he said. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to show you something you should know about.”

He was laying a local newspaper on the counter beside me. I was astonished by what I saw when I looked at the cover. L
OCAL
W
OMAN
R
EPORTS
A
NTIQUITIES
T
HEFT
, I read. The article that accompanied the headline described a local woman—A. L. Mouri—who’d had priceless artifacts stolen from her home. The loss she’d incurred had been a large one, nearly a million Egyptian pounds. But far more interesting than this information were the photographs, prominently featured, of the items that the thieves had stolen. There, off to one side, was something I recognized. It was the bracelet that I’d found in the trash can outside my house, in the envelope marked
FOR AMY
.
It glittered with a diluted brilliance on the newspaper’s graying page. The caption read:
A replica of the stolen bracelet, dated to the reign of Ramesses II
.

“It’s over three thousand years old,” I said.

“And he’s a great guy, Ramesses the Second.” The ghost paused. “Everybody up there calls him Ozy.”

“I guess I’m confused,” I said. “Are you telling me that my father is an international smuggler of stolen pharaonic artifacts?”

“I can’t help you there, son,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “You have to draw your own conclusions.”

“But you gave me this newspaper,” I said.

“What newspaper?” the ghost said.

When I looked down, the newspaper had vanished.

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“All’s fair in love and war,” he said.

“Which one is this?” I said.

“Now, that’s a better question than you might imagine,” he said.

I gnawed on my lip, absorbing the information. The bracelet was stolen, then, stolen by my father from his fiancée as a kind of perverse token of goodwill for my mother. He’d smuggled it
out of
Egypt in his luggage. And now—I’d smuggled it back
into
Egypt in my luggage. I was in violation of probably a dozen international laws. Thanks, Dad.

“You’ve got to at least tell me what to do,” I said. “Or make a recommendation.”

“Didn’t you listen, pardner?” the ghost said. “I’m in a heap of trouble.”

“Is a heap less than a pile?” I said.

He ignored me. “You keep interfering, and you know what happens?” Here he made a sound like a burst of wind through an open
window. His long, bony fingers mimed the snuffing of a candle. “Extinguished,” he said. “Gone. Just like that.”

“I’d imagine,” I said, “that eternal rest would be an appealing option after a certain number of years.”

“Nah,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark, “the fear of death just gets bigger, the older you get. Life is all you’ve known, after all. Stepping forward into that open space—”

“That abyss?” I said.

“You’re not helping, son,” he said.

“You did it once already,” I pointed out. I dredged up the biographical details. “March 2nd, 1925. You had no idea what was next.”

“And look where I ended up,” he said.

“This isn’t so bad,” I said. “Is it?”

I thought about this version of William Andrews Clark, the version I was seeing, whose life had embodied so many different things: tenacity, resolve, old American grit, courage in the face of trouble. Poor Willie Clark. Mark Twain famously slandered him. His daughter, Huguette, was still alive, at the age of 102, in a New York City hospital. It must’ve been lonely—even lonelier—in the afterlife for a man who’d been as powerful as he.

“It’s not so bad,” the ghost conceded.

“Well,” I said, settling into my whiskey, “if you’re not going to help me, then at least tell me an interesting story.”

So we talked, and the ghost told me about the first miner who’d died in one of his mines, and how that had felt. How he’d walked in front of the horses himself, and helped bury the man in the public cemetery. The ghost clasped his hands, those haunted, pale, bony hands, propping them on the bar. “The public cemetery in those
days had a triumphal arch, and I remember just standing aside and watching that hearse go under it—the groomsmen with their white coats and their black top hats, the horses wearing gray fly nets, and all my men, my miners, walking hatless beside them.” He sighed. “I never forgot that, son. It’s what keeps me here, I think, at least in part.”

I thought of the fingers, the fingertips, turning the warm leather of the hatband, moving it almost unconsciously back and forth; thought of the feet, cold in their formal leather shoes, mud on the formal leather shoes, the stiff funeral collar, the smell of the horses.

The ghost smiled wistfully at me. “We went home,” he said, “back to my little house on the hill. And I cooked up a mess of skirlie.”

“For whom?”

“For his wife, Kate Stouffer.”

“Wait,” I said. “She was the first woman you married.”

“She was indeed, pardner.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. “How could you? We kept that secret close.”

“In some ways,” I said, “that’s a terrible story.”

“It felt like my responsibility,” the ghost said.

“But so many men died in your mines,” I said.

“And I felt every death like that one,” he said. “Son, a mine is a mine is a mine. It ain’t no great secret. Commerce has immutable laws. Adam Smith wrote all about them, and he’s no dry gulch rattler. If I hadn’t done what I did, someone else would’ve. Hell, Marcus Daly would have, that good-for-nothing no-’count.”

What would you do if you started having full-bodied hallucinations? Go to a psychiatrist? A medical doctor? A priest? I was in Egypt—it wasn’t the most convenient moment for this ghost to start appearing. Besides, whenever the Ghost of William Andrews Clark appeared, the air filled with a thousand different scents, with the odor of raw garlic, with honey, with the lingering acrid note of coal smoke. Sometimes cloves. Sometimes cardamom. It was distracting. I couldn’t focus on him, on the idea, the concept, of him. I kept slipping in and out of the present; I was lost and unmoored and rudderless and lacking any navigational charts. Any maps. I had no maps. I’d just lived a week without maps, a month without maps. This next year, I was certain, would be a year without maps.