This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. 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
813'.6—dc23 2011044748

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

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 v One

u
Eg ypt i a n c o o k i ng i s fo lk m a g ic . 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 fills the air with the smell of garlic and onion and boil-
ing jute leaves and sizzling olive oil. It was her most popular 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 flames of our gas stovetop. If she were mummified and entombed

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 Pauls Toutonghi

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 fifty 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 fire.
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, refined, conductive metals. And so by 1890 Butte was export-
ing thirty million dollars’ worth of copper every year. Just like cop-

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 Evel Knievel Days

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 genetic heritage,
with a mutation of the ATP7B gene, with an autosomal recessive gene-
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 households 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 find her sitting on the roof.
“What,” I’d yell, “are you doing up there?” She’d answer: “Nothing,

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 Pauls Toutonghi

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 fireplace.
The list of foods my mother couldn’t eat was a long one: shell-
fish, mushrooms, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, dried peas, dried beans,
bran, avocados. But her longings, her longings were persistent. “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 office. “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 traffic.
“You’re unbelievable,” I said. “No one else’s mother acts like
this.”
She looked straight ahead, her face expressionless, her hands on

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 Pauls Toutonghi

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.

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 Evel Knievel Days

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
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

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 Pauls Toutonghi

organizational 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 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 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 finished them off.”

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 Evel Knievel Days

“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 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?”

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 Pauls Toutonghi

“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, 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 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.

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 Evel Knievel Days

“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 some-
thing 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 Berke-
ley 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

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