Evel Knievel Days Read Online Free

five stories and a few acres of cement. The streets of downtown have a certain cheerful privacy to them, especially in summer. But whenever I walk anywhere, I expect a tumbleweed to roll through and catch on a stop sign.
    The names of the streets themselves tell so much of the story. They can barely be believed: Copper Street, Quartz Street, Granite Street, Mercury Street, Silver Street, Agate Street, Gold Street, Aluminum Street, Platinum Street, Porphyry Street, and my personal favorite, Clear Grit Terrace. What is porphyry? Why, it’s a large-grained igneous rock, purple and lovely and common in the Bitterroot Mountains. Only Butte, Montana, would have a street named after it. Butte was a city made by industrialists, by believers in industry. The streets were orderly and straight and wide. When the city’s forefathers needed a railroad, they built it right through town. There was no doubt which god the city plan served: the god of commerce, the god of industrial production. I arrived at the Copper King Mansion at 12:31, one minute late. A billboard advertising E VEL K NIEVEL D AYS had been rigged right beside the entrance to the house. I hated being late, even by seconds.
    The history of this mansion is something on which, God help me, I could speculate endlessly. I know the names of the masons,many of them summoned from Bavaria for their skill with an awl. I know the names of the Russian hardwoods (Manchurian fir and Mongolian oak and iron birch and red pine) that W. F. Beall & Company imported for the numerous parquet floors. I know where the stained glass for the bay windows was handblown (Turin, Italy) and how many nails were used in the spiral staircase in the kitchen (none, trick question). It took four years and three hundred thousand dollars to construct at a time when the average miner’s salary was under a thousand a year.
    The layout of the mansion was straightforward. Staterooms on the first floor, bedrooms on the second floor, a grand ballroom (with a full organ) on the third. We had a little gift shop and a front desk for the guides and an employee break room. The exhibits were scattered throughout the house. Piece by piece, they told the history of the state, starting with the thousands of years of indigenous tribal life—the generations upon generations of Assiniboine and Blackfeet and Crow and A’aninin and Kootenai and Salish and Shoshoni and Sioux who called Montana home. A whole wing of the museum was devoted to Lewis and Clark, who entered the Bitterroot Valley on September 4, 1805, and changed its landscape forever.
    I darted through the employee entrance and grabbed my name tag from the peg by the door.
    KHOSI SAQR
    it read.
    MUSEUM GUIDE
    I stood behind the cashier’s desk in the lobby and put on my most winning smile.
    I wonder sometimes if my parents chose my name to
provoke
playground teasing. In Arabic, Khosi means
lion
. And Saqr? Saqr means
falcon
. Few kids on the elementary school playground, however, spoke fluent Arabic. So they made fun of both of my names with an impressive and dedicated ardor. They called me “Hozey” and “Cozy” and, when they were a bit older, “Blow Me.” But also “Sucker” and “Fucker” and, my personal favorite, “Puker.” Sometimes I thought of introducing myself like this at parties: “Blow Me Puker,” I’d say upon shaking hands. “So nice to meet you.”
    This is what it feels like to be half of something: You’re never truly anything. You never fit in anywhere. I doubt that I’ll ever be quite at ease in America—anywhere other than in my museum. Every time I introduced myself, every class I attended, every time I made a dinner reservation over the phone, I cringed. And so I pretended: “Table for two? Certainly, sir. Under what name?” “Sam Jones,” I said, “Sam Jones.”
    Margaret Vogel, my manager, walked into the room. Margaret Vogel was a matronly old woman who tucked her hair into an imperious gray bun and insisted that