Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi

and listened to her intone: “I have adored you for years. Oh. There’s no one else in my thoughts.”
    It’s a separate book, those Saturdays with Wada and the imam and his more or less devout Islamic brethren. In Islam, the ideal of knowledge is as important as the ideal of prayer. Who knows that here in America? Everyone knows that single word,
jihad
. It’s a common part of the American lexicon. Who knows a similar word,
ijtihad
, which means
innovative thinking
and is an Islamic ideal, one encouraged by the Prophet Himself (blessings be upon His name). Who knows that
ijtihad
drove Islamic artisans to perfect cutting-edge techniques in dozens of disciplines, techniques that revolutionized ninth-century art and architecture and mathematics and society? I do, I guess. But that doesn’t seem to be helping much.
    Tante Wada would wait in the car for me or go shopping in Billings’s tiny downtown shopping district. On the way home, I’d be allowed to talk only in Arabic, even when we stopped the car to get gas or use the restroom. Mostly, I’d communicate with hand signals. Occasionally, I’d startle a pimply teenage gas station attendant. “
Aya al hammam?
” I’d demand, standing at the counter at the Arco. “
Al hammam! Al hammam!
” Somehow, almost always, he’d know exactly what I meant.
    The next day—Friday, July 27, 2008—all I had to work was the private party in the evening. I always have trouble with empty time off. I never know what to do with myself. That morning I had to fight the urge to go to the museum. I hadn’t slept well, so it would be a reliefto appear behind the desk and start organizing things, straightening a little bit, making sure that everything was in order. Sorting the pencils in the pencil drawer. Color-coding the keys and arranging them alphabetically. Imagining a dozen new exhibits and writing comprehensive treatments and proposals for each of them. You know, that sort of thing.
    It was still early, but I thought about calling one of my high school friends: Jeremy Dean, now studying to be a carpenter in Los Angeles. Or Brandon Baldwin, who’d recently started his first year in a Teach for America program in rural Maine. But all I’d get from calling them was nostalgia and a sense that life had started happening without me, that my friends had all moved away from Montana—to L.A. or New York City or Chicago or the pine woods of Maine—and begun their next adventure.
    I checked my messages. Nothing. Not a whisper from Natasha. I turned the phone off.
    I decided to drive out into the hills surrounding Butte. I was going stir-crazy in the house. The drive would clear my head, help me put things in order. I threw on some running shorts and a pair of sandals. I padded my way outside. I hit the road and drove north. Debris from Evel Knievel celebrators was scattered everywhere throughout town. Driving through the city, I must have seen three different people in Evel Knievel jumpsuits, some of them even wearing the motorcycle helmet despite the heat. Public trash cans were overflowing. Bottles littered the sides of the road like an outbreak of glass flowers.
    This is a big part of what I love about western Montana. Even our cities are surrounded by thousands of acres of forestland. InButte, it’s a short drive to wilderness. The air conditioner was broken in my old Ford truck, but that was fine. I put in Junior Brown and drove with all the windows open. The song, “I Bought the Shoes That Just Walked Out on Me,” seemed to be based on an especially piquant cruelty. Within ten minutes, I was surrounded by nothing but old-growth forest.
    For sweeping expanse, for limitless vista and broad unfolding sky, there was nowhere more striking than Montana, than the states of the northern plains, with their scrub-brush hillsides and canvaslike emptiness. There were no cities. There were a few cattle ranches. I rolled down the window. Striations of light illuminated the forest. I took a