Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi pptx

I remember this from my childhood: the image of my mother, Amy Clark- Saqr, cooking late into the night for a catering gig, cooking, in a nearly empty house, enough food to feed a hundre

This is a work of fi ction Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fi ctitiously Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Pauls Toutonghi

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown

Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www crownpublishing com

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,

Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Toutonghi, Pauls.

Evel Knievel days : a novel / Pauls Toutonghi — 1st ed.

p cm.

1 Egyptian Americans—Fiction I Title.

PS3620.O92E94 2012

ISBN 978- 0- 307- 38215- 3

eISBN 978-0-307-95572-2

Printed in the United States of America

Text design by Philip Mazzone

Jacket design by Brian Rea

Jacket illustration by Brian Rea

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

v u

5

O n e

Egyptian cooking is folk magic Not magic in the sense of

dematerializing doves or sawing beautiful ladies in half But magic

in the deeper sense of the thing— in the raw joy of what magic once

was, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago: a surprise, a

shock, an astonishment A lesson about the invisible A lesson about

belief I remember this from my childhood: the image of my mother,

Amy Clark- Saqr, cooking late into the night for a catering gig,

cooking, in a nearly empty house, enough food to feed a hundred

people the next afternoon A feast— but not for her Saqr Catering

Butte’s Finest Middle Eastern Cuisine Since 1990

Mulukhiyya: A silky saline broth distilled from the leaves of the

jute plant It fi lls the air with the smell of garlic and onion and

boil-ing jute leaves and sizzlboil-ing olive oil It was her most pop u lar dish

She’d make it by the gallon, standing at the stove, holding the long

wooden spoon that was so familiar to me Its wood had been worn

thin and smooth, and its entire body bore black scorch marks from

the fl ames of our gas stovetop If she were mummifi ed and entombed

Pauls Toutonghi

6

in a sarcophagus, I had no doubt, my mother would request that this

spoon be buried with her Without it, she wouldn’t be able to navigate

the kitchens of the afterlife

But every scrap of folk magic is counterbalanced with a curse

Here in America especially And so, my family, we also had a

curse Copper was the curse of my family This wasn’t always true

A hundred and fi fty years ago— before Montana was a state, before

the railroads came clattering west from Chicago, before the Great

Northern cut through the Rockies at Marias Pass and connected the

mineral wealth of Butte to the booming factories of the Midwest—

copper made my family rich

My great- great- grandfather, William Andrews Clark, was a miner He dug millions of dollars’ worth of copper from the hills

surrounding Butte He was a copper king, a second- generation Irish

immigrant turned vest- wearing frontier industrialist By the time

he died, his fortune amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars

But he’d started out, in 1863, making $2.50 a day in a silver mine in

Colorado

William Andrews Clark also had, without doubt, a spectacular mustache A mustache that perched on his face like the head of a

broom Like an ornamental shrub Like the tail of a groundhog

Looking at his mustache, I often wondered how he smoked a cigar

without lighting himself on fi re

Mustache or no mustache, most of the major inventions of nineteenth- century America required copper wires Morse’s

tele-graph, Bell’s telephone, Edison’s incandescent lamp: They all needed

pure, refi ned, conductive metals And so by 1890 Butte was

export-ing thirty million dollars’ worth of copper every year Just like

cop-Evel Knievel Days

7

per made the fortune of William Andrews Clark, it also made the

fortune of this little city in Montana

While the inhabitants of Butte used to call it “The Richest Hill

on Earth,” they also called it “The Perch of the Dev il.”

Nitroglycer-ine, dynamite, pneumatic drilling: The thunder of explosives rolled

down from the mine shafts all day long Arsenic and sulfur and

cad-mium poured from the mouths of the Anaconda smelters If cows

grazed in Butte, their teeth turned a soft gold color

At the museum where I worked, I often told tourists about the early settlers near the Anaconda mine There was so much arsenic

in the drinking water that Butte’s residents grew dependent on it

Without the arsenic, they’d get headaches and nausea and

splinter-ing stomach cramps Copper made them rich, but it also poisoned

them

That’s where my story starts With an invisible ge ne tic heritage,

with a mutation of the ATP7B gene, with an autosomal recessive ge

ne-tic disorder called Wilson’s disease Both of my maternal grandparents

were carriers And so my mother’s body could never properly absorb

copper Without medication, copper would build up in her soft

tis-sues, in her liver and her kidneys and her eyes and her brain She

took an army of pastel pharmaceuticals daily; she swallowed a

rain-bow of cuprimine and cyprine and zinc acetate Children raised in

evangelical house holds can quote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

I know whole sections of The Merck Manual by heart.

There were some other aspects of my childhood that were per-haps unusual Occasionally, my mother would forget a pill and spend

a day in bed Or I’d come home and fi nd her sitting on the roof

“What,” I’d yell, “are you doing up there?” She’d answer: “Nothing,

Pauls Toutonghi

8

darling,” her voice as soft and gentle as the coo of a dove Or: “I’m

counting the stars.” Or: “I think I can see Idaho from here.”

I’d race inside to sort through the medication and determine what she was missing Then I’d shimmy out onto the roof, carry ing

a glass of water and a tiny green tablet Two hours later, she’d be

downstairs, cooking or reading a book in front of the fi replace

The list of foods my mother couldn’t eat was a long one:

shell-fi sh, mushrooms, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, dried peas, dried beans,

bran, avocados But her longings, her longings were per sis tent “Just

one Twix,” she’d say, staring at the candy aisle in Safeway “Please It

won’t kill me, I promise.” I’d push the cart forward, nine years old

and barely tall enough to reach the handle, my mother trailing

be-hind me, begging for a 3 Musketeers

This did create some problems for a caterer (as you might imag-ine) Not only was I her custodian, I was also her chief taster— a fact

that she reinforced with a frequent and impressive ardor She’d

knock on the doors of friends’ houses, or track me down at the park,

or appear in the second inning of my Little League baseball games

Once, when I was in eleventh grade, she had me summoned to the

principal’s offi ce “We’re very sorry, son,” Principal Gordon said

“But your great- uncle has passed away Your mother’s outside waiting

to take you home.” Certainly she was, sitting behind the wheel of our

big white Saqr Catering van I skulked in through the passenger’s-side

door, staring at the carpet as we made our way off of school grounds

and into traffi c

“You’re unbelievable,” I said “No one else’s mother acts like this.”

She looked straight ahead, her face expressionless, her hands on

Pauls Toutonghi

10

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 fl ourish 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 fi eld general

bidding goodbye to a lost battlefi eld, 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, per sis tent

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- fi fteen a.m It was Thursday, July 26, 2008

Evel Knievel Days

11

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

nor-mal 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 pro-vincial kingdom Rows of books crowded every available shelf I’d

or ga nized 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

Pauls Toutonghi

12

or gan i za tion al structure I had books on biology, chemistry,

calcu-lus, engineering I had encyclopedias and Bibles I had the Great

Books, the classics of world religious thinking, of philosophy and

poetry and fi ction 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 fi nish 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

none-theless 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 fi nished them off.”

Evel Knievel Days

13

“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

rat-tling 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 fl ayed 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, confi dent mass “Shouldn’t we save the eggplant?”

Pauls Toutonghi

14

“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

tourni-quets 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, muffl ing 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

any-thing, 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