[...]... 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.” 12 Tout_9780307382153_5p_01_r1.indd 12 2/7/12 4:27 PM 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... 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 14 Tout_9780307382153_5p_01_r1.indd 14 2/7/12 4:27 PM 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... four years growing the eggplant vines, nurturing them from tiny leafy creatures into a sprawling, confident mass “Shouldn’t we save the eggplant?” 13 Tout_9780307382153_5p_01_r1.indd 13 2/7/12 4:27 PM 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.. .Pauls Toutonghi organizational structure I had books on biology, chemistry, calculus, engineering I had encyclopedias and Bibles I had the Great Books, the classics of world religious thinking, of philosophy... 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 tourniquets 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;... 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 nonetheless 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... Tolstoy was wrong Unhappy families are all alike They’re all alike in this moment—in this pause before something 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 . Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Toutongh i, Pau ls. Evel Knievel days : a novel / Pauls Toutonghi. — st ed. p. cm. . Egyptian Americans—Fiction entirely coincidental. Copyright © 202 by Pauls Toutonghi All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown