Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi Page A

deep breath of the highway pine. My father had been here, my own father—here, here in Butte, reappeared, just like I’d imagined a hundred, a thousand, times. Except he didn’t appear at my elementary school in a white Rolls-Royce, or at my tenth birthday party in a twirling helicopter. Rather, when he’d come to see me during my tour at the Copper King Mansion, I’d had no idea it was him. He’d loomed in the back, inappropriately dressed for the weather, and I’d been too tired to understand who he was, to match the face to those few family photographs.
    And Natasha.
    I thought briefly of the soft pressure of her lips, the feeling of her skin against mine.
    When she and I were children, we were certain of one thing other than our desire to simulate the funerals of the people around us. We knew that when we grew up, we’d move to Egypt and become deep-sea divers and search for buried treasure in the wreckage of Ancient Egyptian cargo ships, in the crystalline currents of theRed Sea. We devised elaborate plans around this future. We planned itineraries and created professions for ourselves and studied textbooks and made sheaths of drawings. We schemed. We collaborated. We hid suitcases in my attic with changes of clothes and books to read on the road and a copious supply of airmail envelopes for our enigmatic letters home. Oh, how we fantasized about those enigmatic letters home:
Dearest Mother
, we wrote.
Dear Families: We have gone to the Red Sea to become open-water treasure divers. Do not be alarmed. By the time you get this it will be too late to follow
.
    Ultimately, I drove back toward the city. There was a limit, after all, to what a single tank of gas could do. I decided to have lunch at Rafiq’s Falafel, the only Middle Eastern restaurant in town. Well, the Stop ’n Save did sell an Egyptian chickpea salad, but the only Egyptian thing about it was the picture of the mummy on the container (and possibly the mummified nature of the chickpeas themselves). Rafiq’s was real Lebanese food. But whenever I came here, a certain tension simmered beneath the surface of my meal. Farid Rafiq, the owner, was one of my mother’s oldest friends. And by
friends
, I mean
competitors
. He longed to buy her business, to fold Saqr Catering into his restaurant and thereby corner the kebab market in our fair city of Butte. So, when I came in, he always hovered nearby, checking to make sure that everything was fine and—perhaps more important—that I wasn’t trying to steal his recipes.
    Farid Rafiq: He was a big, potbellied man with a penchant for Aqua Velva. You could smell it from twenty yards. He kept a small bottle in his office, and he liked to dab it behind his ears at intervals throughout the day. Whenever he walked by, I couldn’t help it:
Aqua Velva
, I’d think.
Cools. Smoothes. Tones
. This afternoon he greeted mewith his customary
ahlan wa sahlan. Welcome, welcome!
With a particular gleam in the corner of his eye, he steered me toward the table farthest away from the kitchen.
    “We’re all out of everything,” he said. “Maybe you should try Burger King next door?”
    “I don’t think their Lebanese food is quite as good as yours,” I said. “My mother says hello,” I added, which—I have to admit—was more of a threat than a greeting.
    “Tell her I’ll buy her
mulukhreja
recipe for a thousand dollars,” he said.
    Even as he poured my water, he continued to insist that the kitchen was closed and that there was nothing on the menu that would even remotely interest me. I was doomed to be unsatisfied. “Why not go get a Whopper?” he suggested. “They are only a dollar ninety-nine. What a tremendous bargain, no? Nearly half a pound of flame-broiled beef!”
    “Just think,” I said, “of the ecological devastation that occurred for each of those two-dollar burgers.”
    After Rafiq finally let me order, I spent some time organizing the silverware. It needed to be perfectly aligned—organized,