Evel Knievel Days Read Online Free Page A

all five of her staff members call her Ms. Vogel. She wore her thick bifocals on a practical leather cord. She ate hard-boiled eggs for lunch. She had the strange habit of taking candid Polaroids of her employees. You’d be hard at work, and suddenly, a flash would burst into your peripheral vision. You’d turn toward it and there’d be Ms. Vogel, shaking the photograph vigorously.“Gotcha!” she’d say, and cackle. Rumor had it that she lived with Alice B. Toklas for several months in Paris in the 1960s, and that she’d reserved a plot in the Père Lachaise not far from the final resting place of Gertrude Stein. One of the other guides, Tom Creighton, swore that Ms. Vogel had given him Toklas’s secret recipe for hashish crème brûlée. “She made me promise not to show it to anyone,” he said, “or I’d be deeply sorry.”
    Whatever the case, Ms. Vogel kept a watch on a chain in her hip pocket, and presently, she consulted it. She raised an eyebrow. “Seventy-nine seconds late,” she said.
    “Seventy-two,” I said. “Once I’m in the door, I’m on company time.”
    “You’re slipping, Khosi,” she said.
    I was legendary at the museum for my need for order. Walk through the front door of the Loving Shambles and the reasons behind this need would be immediately obvious. At the mansion, I kept my uniform perfectly ironed and clean, my name tag straight, my workspace free of all debris. In my eight years at the mansion, my register had never been unbalanced at the end of the day.
    Ms. Vogel turned and began ascending the main staircase. Her office was on the second floor. It overlooked the entire entryway; its exterior wall was composed of massive wrought-iron French doors. On her way up there, she paused and turned back to me. “Listen,” she said, one hand on the red pine banister, “I need you to cover for Carlton tomorrow night. A party for Anaconda Savings Bank. Early evening. Six P.M. ”
    The Copper King Mansion did a significant business as a corporate retreat. We rented out the interior rooms and had our own on-staff cook. Businesses used the grand ballroom to woo their mostdesirable clients; CEOs rented the home for wedding anniversaries and birthdays and a range of different functions.
    “Tomorrow?” I said.
    “Yes,” Ms. Vogel said. “Do you want the hours or not?”
    I did want the hours. They distracted me from my current situation. My voracious online learning had just made me conscious of the ways in which I’d become the
subaltern
. “The history of the American service industry,” I could tell anyone who’d listen, “is one of wage slavery and exploitation of the proletariat’s labor power.” For some reason, not that many people would listen.
    But tomorrow was also the second night of Evel Knievel Days—America’s only festival entirely devoted to motorcycle daredevils. It was the night of the loudest parade imaginable, an all-purpose, take-all-comers affair that invariably stretched for miles and involved at least one near-catastrophic accident. As far as people-watching opportunities went, Evel Knievel Days was Montana’s zenith. I couldn’t imagine anything topping this in Wyoming or Idaho or Washington or Oregon, either (California was an entirely different matter). And yet: I did want the hours.
    “Sure,” I said. “I’m game.” Ms. Vogel nodded and disappeared into her office. There were only a few minutes left before the inaugural tour of the day.
    Outside, I heard the hydraulic hiss of that first tour bus. Around me rose the precision and order of the mansion, with its broad panels of wallpaper and its tastefully arranged western landscape paintings by William Keith and Charles Russell. The onslaught was about to begin. I could feel the house rattle as the driver downshifted and pulled slowly into the parking space closest to the mansion.The doors at the far end of the museum opened. I heard the sound of the patrons approaching. I prepared my face to meet