Evel Knievel Days (2 page)

I buried my head in my hands. “Jesus,” I said. “Nobody’s going to notice, Mom. Everybody loves your cooking. You can’t just pull me out of school in the middle of the day.”

She looked at me earnestly, her face a mixture of regret and anxiety. “I know, sweetheart, I know,” she said, and paused. “By God, I know how very much I’m damaging you even as I speak. But listen, darling. Could you just taste it and help me out?”

One fact. One instructive, inelegant fact. My mother’s husband, my father, my unknown and distant father, my mockery of that word
father
, of the term, as it’s understood by almost everyone—my satellite, my hidden galaxy, my empty suitcase, my vacant motel room—her
husband
deserted us when I was three. He taught her how to cook his country’s food, the lamb and beef and chicken and pork dishes of his Coptic Christian parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. And then: vanished, leaving her with his foods and traditions, a hundred thousand dollars in gambling debts, and a three-year-old boy as copper as a penny. He also left her his onions. To be specific: his Egyptian walking onions.

Allium proliferum
. Bulbous, sprawling, tentacular plants that filled the yard. Plants with dozens of long tendrils, with fragile purple flowers and clusters of small fruit. He planted them in the months before I was born. After he left us, after he disappeared one morning
with the coffee still warm in the coffeepot, after he returned to Egypt on a one-way business-class ticket, my mother was perpetually trying to massacre his plants.

She tried digging. She tried Roundup. She tried garden shears. But Egyptian walking onions are true to their name: They walk, season after season, across your garden. They travel through the air, in seeds, and beneath the ground, in roots. They flourish. They burrow deep. They are tenacious. She never could exterminate them completely. After three or four years, she gave up. Nothing could be done. The onions had won a decisive victory. Like a field general bidding goodbye to a lost battlefield, my mother leaned against the porch and sighed. “Even Braveheart knew when he was beat,” she said.

“They eviscerated him in a public square,” I said.

She threw her shovel underneath the porch.

“My fault,” she said. “Bad example.”

So, I was surprised one morning when I heard a polite, persistent knocking on my bedroom door. I rolled over. The doorknob turned, the door swung open, and my mother appeared, holding a small dirt-caked garden trowel.

“Rise and shine,” she said.

She looked peculiar, backlit by the light in the hallway. Her cheeks were red and puffy.

“It’s so early,” I said. I peered at the digital clock on my bedside table. Seven-fifteen
A.M
. It was Thursday, July 26, 2008.

Now, over two years later, I’ve come to imagine this moment, this glance at the clock, as the moment when the action of the story, of my story, started to slip out of my grasp—when it stretched and turned and rose out of my cupped palms like smoke, like escaping birdsong. There’s an old Egyptian saying:
A birdsong is a prediction
. I could hear the chorus of sparrows through the open window.

“What are you doing?” I asked. It was the mildest form of the question that I could imagine. It was also the most civil. “Have you taken your pills?” I added.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said, “in the front yard.”

It sounded ominous. She pulled me out of bed. I would help her, of course, but I had a few small tasks I had to complete before I could begin my day. It’s not that I had a problem; I was totally normal. It’s simply that I needed to arrange the covers of the bed at a certain angle, with just over six inches of white folded back above the top sheet. And then I had to touch all four walls of the room—north, south, east, and west. And then I had to open the door twice, only twice, and look each time into the hallway, while imagining in my head the phrase
all clear
. Then—only then—I could set about the tasks at hand. Some might call this obsessive-compulsive. I’d call it a friendly (gentle) attention to detail. To painstaking detail. Exact detail. Precise and perfect detail.

This was my room. It was my domain, my blessed plot, my provincial kingdom. Rows of books crowded every available shelf. I’d organized them by color. Actually, the system was a little more complicated than that. I’d sorted them by color within discipline, and by alphabetical ranking within discipline. This was my tertiary
organizational structure. I had books on biology, chemistry, calculus, engineering. I had encyclopedias and Bibles. I had the Great Books, the classics of world religious thinking, of philosophy and poetry and fiction. I also had an entire section of biographies of Marion Morrison, the man who became John Wayne. I liked to start each day with a Wayne aphorism. For example, this morning I read:
Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much. Excellent
, I thought. Simply excellent advice.

My mother waited for me to finish my rituals, her countenance cast into a disapproving frown. “Hurry,” she said. “It’s almost seven-thirty.”

“And? What’s so important about seven-thirty?”

She frowned more deeply. “It’s a minute before seven-thirty-one,” she said.

Once I was ready, she ushered me out into the hallway, down the stairs, and through the front door. We stood on the porch, looking out over the garden. We’d never, as long as I could remember, had a yard like anyone else’s in Butte. No grass, no gleaming metallic globe on a pedestal, no ceramic creatures of any sort, no cars on blocks. Instead, we had an organic vegetable garden. One that was intertwined by
allium proliferum
, sure, but a vegetable garden nonetheless. Now it looked like a scene of post-apocalyptic devastation. She’d already stripped part of the yard of its vegetation. She was working her way inward, leaving a blasted path of dark black topsoil wherever she went.

“Jesus,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ve been out here since four,” she said. “It’s time we finished them off.”

“Finished what off?” I said.

“Them,” she said, gesturing toward the dirt.

“What are you talking about?”

“The onions,” she said. “It’s time we got rid of these damned Egyptian onions.”

My mother hunched down and started hacking at the base of a root. I worried that she was unmedicated, that her liver was rattling to a halt, even as she raised the trowel above her shoulder. I inched toward the subject. “How are you feeling this morning, Mom?”

“Perfect,” she said.

“Are you sure you don’t need your pills?” I said. “I’ll just run and get them.”

She turned her face toward mine and stared at me. She seemed on the edge of tears. “It’s not my pills,” she said. “I’ve taken them all. Please, just help.”

I fell in line beside her. Within minutes, the knees of my jeans bore broad black mud stains—stains that soaked deep into the light blue denim. The smell of dirt and flayed vegetation drifted up and over me. I dug and cleared and labored beneath a hostile sun. I searched my mind for some kind of anniversary, for some comment or news article or scrap of conversation that I’d heard, something that could have initiated this frenzy. Garden care has always seemed to me like useless botanicide. Why remove the weeds when the weeds will just return?

“What about the eggplant?” I said. We’d spent four years growing the eggplant vines, nurturing them from tiny leafy creatures into a sprawling, confident mass. “Shouldn’t we save the eggplant?”

“We’ll grow a new one,” my mother said.

“What about the asparagus?” I said.

“It’s curtains for the asparagus,” she said. “And don’t ask so many questions,” she added. “Just get to work. We’re going to strip it all. Strip, blast, clear.” She straightened her back and wiped sweat from her muddy forehead, inhaling deeply. “Smell that dirt,” she said. “That’s the odor of success.”

I followed the onion roots, working from the surface down deep into the clay. I hacked and hacked with the tip of the shovel. Sweat poured down the sides of my spine. My socks felt like wet tourniquets. By ten o’clock it was ninety-seven blistering degrees.

Thunderclouds build and accumulate gradually; they stack and swell and layer up through the troposphere. Tornadoes form invisibly deep within the storm; the surface is beautiful, but lightning and hail incubate beneath it. That is to say, after nearly two and a half hours of essentially silent work, my mother started to tremble, to tremble slightly and then to shake, to shake, and then, muffling her face with her yellow leather work glove, to cry. She sobbed. She sank down on her knees in a swath of ground that she’d defoliated. I walked over and stood behind her. I rested my hand on her back, unsure what, if anything, I could say. “If you want to tell me what’s going on,” I said, “I can listen.” I bent over and pressed my cheek against hers.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I took a psychology course last quarter from the University of Phoenix,” I said. “I mean, it was abnormal psych, but still.”

My mother smiled. She sighed and blew her nose on her sleeve. After a few minutes the crying subsided. She stood up, unsteady.
“I’ll make us lunch,” she said, and she walked into the house. I was left there in the yard, poised with the shovel, mud soaking my jeans. I thought of ten different specific things I could have done. But I didn’t. I just stood there and let the hot air continue to descend and wrap around me. I let it settle.

See: I think that Tolstoy was wrong. Unhappy families are all alike. They’re all alike in this moment—in this pause before something happens, in the pause before someone reacts. And that pause: It can last seconds or minutes or days or months or years.

Though it would be difficult to verify, I do believe that we lived as close as anyone else in America to an EPA Superfund site. One of the largest abandoned open-air strip mines in the world—the Berkeley Pit—was under a mile away. The pit was gigantic. And it was filling with water. It had more arsenic and zinc and cadmium and sulfuric acid than any other body of water in the world. “Who needs a hot tub,” my mom used to say, “when you’ve got a bubbling toxic lake?”

Drive up Park, go right on Wyoming, then left on Mercury. Head for the end of the block, for the last house before the road hits the EPA fencing, a light blue Victorian that’s leaning slightly to one side. That was us. Home sweet home. The Loving Shambles, as I liked to call it.

My great-great-grandfather owned most of the hill, but in the early 1920s, production diminished in the mines. The smelters fell silent. He leased out his land, building old-style rooming houses
where the ground was most scarred. Finntown sprang up there. On the blasted slope of a blasted hill, on the once-richest slope of the once-richest hill on earth, the Helsinki Bar, St. Urho’s Tavern, the Old Finn Hall, the Vike: all of them serving Karhu beer and thin, buttery pancakes with loganberry jam. By the time I was born, in 1985, most of that was gone. By 2008 the only relic of Finntown, as far as I could tell, was the faded blue-and-white stencil of the Finnish flag on the north wall of a nearby warehouse. Every year the stencil dimmed a little more.

Once my mother went inside, I eased up. I worked for another hour. I spent sixty more minutes hacking through the loamy dirt. I could smell garlic sizzling in the kitchen. Tired and aching and sweaty, I took the last of the onions over to the yard waste bin. I looked down at the row of plastic containers. And that’s when I found it: a fat yellow envelope mixed in with the recycling, its corrugated edges shining with sticky laminate. I pulled it out and set the envelope on top of the bins.

FOR AMY
, it read.

No postage, no address, no other identifying marks. But what I discovered inside was astonishing: a copper bracelet, imbued with a deep and roseate light.

Copper is probably the oldest decorative metal in the world. Ancient Egyptians employed copper to ornament both themselves and their corpses, using it as a bartering tool in this life and the next. The Romans adorned their soldiers with copper flourishes. It is a primitive, powerful, elemental substance. I have to admit: It does make a beautiful, spooky bracelet.

Especially if the bracelet seems to consist of snakes, intertwined snakes, as this one did upon further inspection. Where was the rest of its packaging? I dug through the recycling and then the garbage. I overturned coffee grounds and eggshells and newspapers and empty cans. There were no bigger envelopes, no clues whatsoever to how the bracelet might have arrived at our house. It was a mystery, a talisman from some other time and place. Which time and which place, however, I didn’t know.

I walked inside. I headed straight for the kitchen and tossed the bracelet down on the kitchen table. It skittered atop the scarred oak veneer, rolling end over end and coming to rest near the salt and pepper shakers.

“Mom,” I said. She was standing at the stove, her back turned to me. “What is this?”

“What is what, darling?” She turned around. She frowned.

“This,” I said, pointing at the object on the table. “It was in the trash.”

My mother shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“The bracelet,” I said. I picked it up and walked over and showed it to her. “I found it in an envelope that said, ‘For Amy.’ ”

“Very funny,” she said. She brushed a strand of her gray-brown hair out of her face. From her vantage point, she gave the bracelet a cursory inspection. “I’ve never seen it before in my life,” she said, handing it back. “It’s ugly.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It looks like a prize from a carnival game.”

“The curator in me,” I said, “thinks it might be worth something.”

“Well,” my mother said, “this is one instance when the curator in you is wrong. It looks cheap,” she added. “It was probably mass-produced in China.”

“Nope,” I said. “Handmade, without a doubt. And not recently, either. Come on, Mom. Level with me.”

“I am level,” she said. “Very level. Always level.”

She’d turned back to the stove. The soup was simmering and roiling on the stovetop. She’d been in the kitchen for almost an hour now, cooking and listening to a cello sonata.