Evel Knievel Days (32 page)

“You really are a walking advertisement, aren’t you?” I said.

“For,” he said, squinting down at the print on the side of the box, “the British American Tobacco Company?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m surprised you aren’t under contract.”

“You see,” he said, “you’re an advertisement for the brand for years, and then you die a horrific, suffocating death.”

“Are you concerned at all,” I said, “about that horrific, suffocating death?”

“I’ll worry about it when I’m fifty,” he said.

“Which happened, by my calculations, in 2006.”

“Yes,” he said, and sat down beside me. “That was a tough year.” My father sighed deeply. He rubbed his forehead. He looked tired.

“So,” I said. “You’re a thief.”

My father frowned. “Oh, Khosi, what does it matter? That’s in the past. Agnes and I have come to an understanding.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“I understand that if I ever lie to her again,” he said, “she will throw me out immediately.”

“That’s so romantic,” I said.

My father smiled wistfully. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” he said. “A last chance is a last chance.” He brushed his thick gray hair back from his forehead. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

I shook my head and sighed. I reached up and grabbed one of the lowest-hanging branches from the tree. If it had been a snake, it would have been fitting, somehow. Recover from yellow fever but die of a poisonous snake bite. My hand came away with leaves. My father nodded. We sat there for a moment longer in silence.

“You know,” I said, “Agnes said a funny thing when she first arrived. She made a joke about having orchestrated everything—a joke about giving the bracelet to you intentionally to bring to Butte and hide in the trash.”

“She said that?”

“She did.”

“Interesting,” my father said.

“And?” I said.

“And what?” he said.

“It’s not true, is it?” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. Then he looked at me, and he winked, too. “I should really go back inside.”

We made our way back through the crowded hallway, past the family tree that, in the past five weeks, had been amended with my name and the name of my mother. People smiled at my father and waved to him and tried to get him out onto the dance floor, which was a confusion of tempos and ages and styles of dress. Agnes was nowhere to be seen, and my father seemed content to follow me into the kitchen, where my mother was winding down her stewardship of the meal. She’d stayed in here, not surprisingly, through the ceremony.

I marveled at how composed she looked, even as the dirty dishes built a delirious disorder around her. She stood at the stove with a dish towel flung over her shoulder. Her long, worn wooden spoon had made its way to Egypt as well. I had a momentary flash of wonder. How much of this had
she
been planning from the start?

“Khosi,” my mother said. “Have you eaten? Can I make you something small?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

“Thank God,” she said. “Because I don’t think I could feed another person.”

She saw my father. She stiffened slightly, as if poised on the edge of some kind of precipice, her body taut, beads of sweat standing out on her forehead and her upper lip.

My father came over and stood across the kitchen counter from her. “Everything is delicious,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. She laughed. “I am utterly exhausted.”

“This is a huge effort,” he said. “A monumental labor.”

“Like Hercules,” my mother said.

“Maybe a little more, even,” he said.

If, ever in the history of pauses, there was an awkward pause, this was it. A cruel, awkward pause, a slaughtering pause, the kind of pause that physically hurts when you experience it.

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’ve been cooking, too.”

“You have?” my mother said. “When?”

“Late last night,” I said. “And I’ve taken care of dessert.”

“Really?” my father said, glancing over at my mother. “Enough for everyone?”

“Absolutely.” I walked over to the big refrigerator. I took out the tray I’d placed on the bottom shelf at five the previous morning. “For dessert,” I said. I looked at my mother and my father, at the family that had been so dysfunctional and fragmented and frustrating for my entire childhood, at the family that had, for the first time, come together only to be immediately and irrevocably split apart. “For dessert, I have something really special.”

“What is it?” my mother asked.

“Is it a cake?” my father said.

“It’s not a cake,” I said, placing the tray in the center of the kitchen counter. “It’s a crème brûlée. A very special crème brûlée.” I pulled back the foil, revealing a hundred ramekins arranged in tidy rows.

“I love crème brûlée,” my father said.

“Me, too,” my mother said. “I’m so hungry, I just might eat three.”

I nodded. “It has a secret ingredient,” I said. “One that’s especially popular in Paris.”

“Let me guess,” my mother said. “Cardamom pods?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Cloves?” my father said.

“Wrong again,” I said.

“Maple syrup?” my mother said. “Sometimes I put a touch of maple syrup in my crème brûlée, just to give it a little zest.”

“Does Egypt have a lot of maple trees?” I said.

“Khosi’s being mysterious,” my father said. “We’re clearly just going to have to taste it and see.”

That’s what he did. And so did the rest of the wedding party.

It’s funny, but I haven’t mentioned Evel Knievel’s greatest failure—his most spectacular and catastrophic accident, one that was broadcast live to much of the world. On May 26, 1975, millions of people watched him jump a row of double-decker buses at Wembley Stadium in London. Imagine that spectacle: Knievel rocketed down the ramp at ninety miles per hour, clutching the handlebars with his leather gloves, his red, white, and blue starred jumpsuit almost blurry because of the speed. The ramp disappeared. The motorcycle rose into the air, its arc surprisingly small, its front wheel flaring and reaching for safety.

When it landed, it was inches short. The footage showed the motorcycle catching the edge of the landing pad instead of its flat surface and then bucking him up in the air like a maddened rodeo bull. “Oh my God,” the announcer said, too shocked to think of anything else as he watched Knievel’s body tumble, along with the Harley, through the dusty and suddenly silent stadium.

The amazing thing is this: Watch the slow-motion video from ABC’s
Wide World of Sports
, and you can see that he almost made it—he almost held on despite everything, despite being perpendicular
to the bike, despite his wrist breaking in half, despite the initial impact shattering his pelvis. He kept the handlebars straight. For one second, for one fragment of a second, he almost brought himself back down on the seat. But then he lost control of the throttle, and the motorcycle decelerated; that’s what finally threw him to the ground.

After the accident, Evel Knievel dusted himself off. He stood up. The audience roared. Two of his trainers came to his side and walked him back up the ramp to a spot where he could see nearly everybody in the crowd. Inside Wembley Stadium, it was pandemonium; stomping feet shook the steel beams of the facility. The motorcycle lay on the ground a hundred feet away, discarded and smoking, its front wheel still spinning, turning in a gradual Ferris-wheel way. Smoke draped the air, silvery and funereal. And then Evel Knievel did something unusual. Holding the microphone in his one shaky, unbroken hand, he promised the crowd that he’d never jump again.

Did he do it? Did he keep his promise? It seemed like an unscripted moment, the manifestation of a feeling he had, of some deep interior turmoil about the role he played in the world. I think sometimes about those seconds—those airborne seconds, plunging through the air with the metal frame of the motorcycle, the engine useless, the body isolated and alone, transitory, weightless. Light everywhere, flashbulbs bursting from the bleachers, and he’s done it, he’s committed to the jump. It’s unclear if he’ll make it. And there it is, the elemental, feathering darkness, small and faint at first but then building and roaring and reaching out to consume him. I wonder something, something I’ll never know.

Did he close his eyes?

I remember the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. I was four years old. My mother and I watched the
NBC Nightly News
with Tom Brokaw on our thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron. Mom loved Tom Brokaw. “I’d cook his steak any way he likes it,” she said to me, somewhat inappropriately. At the time I just wondered how she knew that he even wanted steak. “They all want steak,” my mother said. “Trust me. You’ll understand when you get older.” We were sitting on the couch in the Loving Shambles, drinking hot chocolate.

“A historic moment tonight,” Brokaw said, “as the Berlin Wall can no longer contain the East German people.” Later that night, putting me to bed, my mother cried as she sang me a lullaby, and I remember wondering why she was crying, wondering if they were going to tear down walls in Butte as well.

“It’s a different kind of wall, darling,” she said to me. “There aren’t walls like that over here.”

Is that true? I wonder now. I had to travel all the way around the world to understand that those walls are everywhere—it’s just rare that they get built in a physical form. And so in February 2011—when I camped for eighteen days in Liberation Square, in Midan Tahrir—I remembered that night, twenty-two years earlier, and our tiny television and the darkened living room a few thousand meters from the Berkeley Pit.

It had been only two decades. But in 1989 Brokaw was the only news anchor in place at the moment of crisis. Even West German news channels took hours to get their reporters to the scene. Now, in 2011, in Tahrir Square, some of us followed CNN’s coverage of
the protests on our smartphones. We watched Anderson Cooper film us watching Anderson Cooper film us watching Anderson Cooper film us, receding endlessly into the mirrored dark.

I can’t describe those eighteen days, not really. I was shot with a rubber bullet; it left a bright lilac-colored welt on my calf, a welt that slowly became a bruise and then even more slowly disappeared. When the camels rode through the square, they nearly flattened my tent, which, after all, was nothing more than a plastic tarp thrown over a guide wire. I stood in front of the Egyptian Museum with a golf club; I slept wrapped in an Egyptian flag. My clothes were constantly dirty. I ate whatever I could find, whatever the street vendors happened to bring past the barricades. When Hosni Mubarak announced on February 10 that he would try to hold on to the presidency, I chanted, along with the rest of the crowd, “Leave! Leave! Leave!”

The protests changed everything.
Or did they really?
We don’t actually know yet. There’s a chance, a nagging fear, that they changed nothing at all. I do know this: I’ve always had a list of ten adjectives for Cairo, a list that I keep on a legal pad next to my bed. Now it reads:
flag-filled, bloody, desiccated, sweaty, petrol-scented, improvised, wired, cacophonous, hopeful, sung
.

Today I’m sitting at Cairo International Airport in the arrivals hall, waiting for a particular jet to touch down, Turkish Airlines Flight 328, a flight from Washington, D.C., to Istanbul to Egypt. I’m not sure how I will feel when I see Natasha for the first time in two and a half years, but I do know one thing: I’m going to kiss her and hold her close to me, hold her close, and I may not let go. She
and Calvin have been apart for over a year now, a disentangling that began that night at Evel Knievel Days.

“Don’t take too much credit for that, Khosi,” Natasha said when she called to tell me she was coming, the day after Mubarak fell. “I’ve always said it was the American Motordrome Wall of Death that changed my life, not you.”

I should say, just for the record, that the amount of hashish in the wedding reception crème brûlée was pretty minuscule. At most, the guests felt a slight buzz, a general hunger and an excited, slightly gauzy disorientation. Except, that is, in the two ramekins that I reserved for me and my mother. After everyone had gone to bed—at almost four in the morning—we took ours up onto the roof.

“You’re sure I won’t have a heart attack,” she said.

“If you do, it’s because of the heavy cream,” I said, “not the hash.”

We ate them. A delicate, creamy flavor, a burnt-sugar crust that dissolved on the tongue. We licked the containers clean. From that rooftop, the city argued its way into the distance, a haze of glitter—streetlamps and licorice-red brake lights and marauding taxi cabs. We leaned against the post of a big satellite dish. I could smell the Nile. Cairo was so different at night, from a rooftop. At night, copper wires brought out the structure of the grid. We sat there together, my mother and I, a little bit stoned, clothed in a diminishing darkness. We waited and listened to the muezzin, and then we watched as the sun rose and the sunlight erased it all.

I’d like to thank Kate Kennedy for her tireless, insightful, and patient attention to the manuscript. I also owe a significant debt to Shaye Areheart, who took a risk on a young novelist almost a decade ago, and to Skip Horack, whose comments proved tremendously useful during the revisions of
Evel Knievel Days
. My colleagues at Lewis and Clark College—in particular John Callahan and Rishona Zimring—provided support and advice throughout the four separate incarnations of this project, as did my agent, Renée Zuckerbrot. And of course, P.M.M., without whom the book could not have been written. Thank you.