The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  Since the start of the Arab Spring, IRJ had reconsidered every alternative. Shipping employees off, letting people go, despite record profits. There was the split with Halliburton. The $2 billion contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure neared completion. Everyone save the corporate officers feared for their jobs and felt the company’s mission to be adrift.

  We’re a global engineering, construction, and services company supporting the energy, hydrocarbon, government agencies, minerals, civil-infrastructure, power, industrial, and commercial markets—we also do laundry! IRJ had become a business of barracks builders and trash burners, handling logistics and operations for the US military. As the larger wars in the Middle East petered out, the company offered services to newly militarizing nations looking to cut costs and outsource some of what IRJ called the logistical Ls: lunches, linens, and latrines. This straying afield led to a crackpot company initiative, Sunrise at Seventeen Seventy.

  Earlier in the year, the pdf announcement went round. Her colleagues quoted it to one another in nasally voices: The first truly sustainable land development program in Queensland, Australia, surrounded by a national park, marine park, a recreation reserve, and a conservation park, Sunrise embraces ecological sustainability throughout in the management of the carbon, water, energy, and waste cycles. With IRJ’s own next-generation wind turbines, built to outcompete Siemens, the wind farm at Sunrise is only the beginning of the greening of the business we will grow.

  Evangelína was, admittedly, oversensitive to appropriation and cultural ventriloquism of any kind, but this was absurd. And who’d written the copy that made it sound like a petro-industry theme park? When, in passing, she’d asked Bizzy, IRJ’s COO, about the project, he said, Call it an experiment in appearances. He sighed—something about him altered. He lowered his voice: Between you and me … He shrugged a shoulder, touched her forearm, said, Please, Evy, be patient. Someday soon you may understand.

  * * *

  At the Nourishing Soup Kitchen on 110th off Fifth, Smith sat alone. A ham sandwich sagged in her hand. A strange face—hers—scowled up from a room-temperature bowl of broth.

  An old brother with swagger and a trim white goatee interrupted her lunch, introducing himself as Milton Wright. His voice was a harsh rasp that rattled in his neck: “Billet homeless vets in the Catskills. Help get them off these here streets.” He thumbed the brim of his cap. On it, a sun and star, split by a lightning bolt—the 75th Ranger Regiment insignia.

  “They say you got neck cancer.”

  He sucked on something that clicked against his teeth. “Sore throat.”

  These down-and-out vets, she’d learned, were worse than ugly cheerleaders when it came to their gossip. She swirled her broth with her cheap spoon. “Say you run some sort of camp in the mountains. Forced labor.”

  “Indentured servitude’s more like it. We do some alpaca ranching, good bit of farming. Lot of work.” He told her it was tough to get vets to shift their standard operating procedures. “Get them fretting over the Fedco seed catalog instead of Brownells gun parts. How to keep the old chainsaws well oiled and firing cleanly instead of worrying over the actions of their weapons. Make them care about the health and hygiene of their alpaca. Lot of my soldiers end up going home afterwards,” he added, “or making a home for themselves in the Catskills, where they come to feel secure.”

  Her hands—aged a year in the last few weeks. Her fingernails stank no matter how hard she scrubbed. The city was turning her dirty and mean and in a hurry. How many hundreds, thousands of bottles and cans had she sorted for their deposits?

  He ahemmed, sounding a little like the territorial, caterwauling Asian women she’d been fending off from streetcorner garbage bins, women who smelled and looked clean and surely had a warm bed, a hot bath, tiny women who could cough up and spit lungers with the precision of varsity outfielders.

  She asked, “This camp a yours got a name?”

  “The Standard Grande. My not-for-profit’s called Standard Company.” A charity, he explained. Said she was talking to the owner, executive director, president of the board of trustees, and commander-in-chief. “Inherited the place from my wife when she … well.”

  “I’m with the 58th Transportation Battalion,” Smith said. “Was with. Our motto’s We Set the Standard.”

  “Take it as a sign.”

  There was a scuffling in one corner of the cafeteria, a nonsensical shouting, some man arguing aloud with himself.

  “Got turned away from a shelter last week,” she said, “after nearly getting mugged. Told me I had to be homeless for a year to qualify for a bed. Don’t matter. I’m 88-motherfucking-mike. Motor transport operator. Always on the move.”

  “Means there’s nowhere you’re safe.”

  She lifted her stamped metal spoon, thin and bendable as foil, folded it in half, and splashed it into her plastic bowl. “Trying to scare me?”

  “Not scare,” he said, “warn. War comes home. Every soldier humps it in his ruck.”

  “Her ruck.”

  “Right. Usually I focus in on the handsome Johnnies.” He looked around. “Seeing more of you homeless Jodies out and about. Been meaning to retire. Told myself no new recruits. Then I saw you. Thought, What’s one more? Try to be a bit more … what do they call it? Gender neutral?”

  Around them, men and women shoved bland, starchy food into their unshaven faces, most of them black or brown, the white faces tanned or sunburned.

  “If I’m homeless,” she said, “it’s by choice.”

  “Easy to say here in summer. Take some advice. Go on down to the VA office. Get yourself a disability determination. Sit through the Comp and Pension, you walk out with a lifetime of income. Takes time to start collecting. Once you do it don’t stop. You’ll know you’re homeless when you can’t list an address. That’s when they’ll give your application the stamp of approval. Once you’re squared away, I got a PO box upstate you can use.”

  “What’s Comp and Pension?”

  “Psych exam. You go in. You apply for a total. Total disability compensation for PTSD pays out about twenty-five hundred a month. You got your DD 214?”

  She sniffed hard. Deserters didn’t get a Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty.

  “You got someone—” He coughed, a cough that caused him some pain. “Scuse me. Someone who can maybe get you a notarized copy? Mail it to you. Or to you care of me?”

  She’d had about enough of this know-it-all old brother. “Nobody. Nothing. No father, no husband. Don’t got no dog nor a care in the hootenanny world.”

  “What, you get a dishonorable?”

  She turned her look from mean to murder. All he did was nod. Didn’t bother to give her the snappy salute he’d given a few of the men.

  He made rounds, slapping backs and touching shoulders like a career military man—high-ranking but no general—a soldier who hadn’t pawned his soul for a gold star.

  Smith stopped paying attention.

  “Got an idea, downhome girl.” His low-throttle growl close to her ear made her gasp, his breath herbal, warm and bad. “Let me take you out, buy you a real lunch.”

  “You trying to date me?”

  “Call it a date with an edible sandwich.”

  Willing to do just about anything for a decent meal, she slapped the bread back on top of the shimmering slice of meat and said, “Homeless lady vet eats lunch—take two!”

  “We’ll go to the Carnegie Deli. New York City institution and a rite of passage both. Do me a favor first. Slip that bent spoon in your pocket so management don’t see it.”

  * * *

  Alone, applying his face covering—so black it’s blue—Ray feels like his employer, Baum, the Kingston lawyer, is redacting his features.

  As his face-black dries and cools, it contracts, drawing tight his skin. He’s bound by his current contract. The work—a combination of field consulting and covert information gathering—mostly accomplished. The retainer he
’s on is set to expire with the arrival of his replacement. He’s the boots, next come the suits. The only feeling more distressing than being confined by a contract is not knowing where or when the next contract will come.

  He isn’t cut out for undercover work. He’s conditioned to go in silent and strong, with utmost tactical discretion, camouflaged but in uniform. Passing as homeless was easy at first. Had no problem with lying. But maintaining the lies ground him down. He kept notes, made outlines and charted chronologies, until it got to be too much. He’d gathered enough intel from inside, and he decided that as an outrider he could keep a better eye on Wright and his herd. Up here, Ray can watch silly Standard Company from high ground.

  Wright and his Simon Says. His furry uniforms—that Wright didn’t deign to wear—intended to demean and embarrass so he could maintain the upper hand. Squeezing headcase grunts, capitalizing on the weak-willed, every bit a war profiteer. Worse, because he’s turning no profit. Wright’s more mercenary than Ray. Deeper in the hole because he refuses to admit it. His cancer’s surely a ploy, way to get more disability to pay down debt.

  Here at camp, Ray has the books he kept in Baghdad: broken hardback of Lattimore’s translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; soggy Signet paperback, Henry V; falling-apart copy, his fifth or sixth, of the Ranger Handbook. Page by page, he feeds them into the fire.

  When done, tired and hungry, he lets down his guard, allows the past to con its way through the security checkpoint he’s set up, where it’s sure to detonate in his face—

  Over a decade ago, in his last battalion OPORD briefing before redeployment, Ray’s Ranger company was told by their top-heavy CO, a gone-to-pot veteran of the first Gulf War, My best piece of advice to you all is as follows …

  A long pause as they waited, most of them, like Ray, antsy to exit the hangar, cross the tarmac, board the commercial 747 contracted out as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  Finally the CO said, You’ll only hear me say this once, men. And after I’ve said it, I’ll deny having done so. He took a breath that sucked the air from their lungs like a close-quarters explosion. While you’re there, men, you make sure you have a plan to kill everyone you meet. I mean everyone.

  Here Ray is, more than a decade later, sitting cross-legged on American soil in the blue mountain morning, hours before dawn, a civilian still living in accordance with those deadly wartime orders.

  When he’s starved and sleep-deprived, he puzzles out these terrible contingencies.

  He asks the faint fire, “Where would you do the lawyer?”

  Snatch him on one of his late Kingston nights leaving his Stockade District office, weight him down and drop him like an anchor into the Ashokan Reservoir. Let the entire City of New York get a taste of him. But first, drain him of information.

  “What about Wright?”

  Where he sleeps. Draw up his rope ladder, pour in a gallon each of Hi-Yield lime sulfur pesticide and Kaboom Shower, Tub & Tile Cleaner. Let the liquids mix in the pour. If he wakes, he’ll think it’s a prank, one of the vets pissing into his hole. There on the floor of his single-sleeper dungeon, the puddle will produce hydrogen sulfide, found in natural gas, known to percolate through fractured fissures in rock and leech into water wells. Wright’ll be unconscious in seconds, dead within a minute. One of the kindest ways to go.

  “And the other Standard vets?”

  Too damn easy. Like a herd of mad cows sound asleep in a tinderbox barn. Slip a wick into the fuel tank of the generator kept in the Esther House lobby. Light it. Bar the exits with braces sure to burn. Bonfire of the PTSDs.

  * * *

  The veterans of the Standard Grande had been back from their wars for some time, trying to figure out how to live lives in the face of newfound civilian freedoms. No one barking orders but their girlfriends, wives, and mothers. Fuck them. The vets could do anything they wanted anytime—they were Americans in America—though what they wanted wasn’t what they needed.

  They had good cause to bolt home and wind up straggling in the streets of New York City, where they couldn’t qualify for HUD/VASH benefits, having exhausted the good graces of the DOM program, unable to uncover any information on Project Torch, given the runaround by the administrators of Operation Home. They had multiple DUIs, student loans for what the GI Bill 2.0 didn’t cover to attend the University of Phoenix, credit cards with 20 percent interest rates. They were drug addicts, closeted queers, amputees, alcoholics. They were Born Again. They were Black Muslim. They were violent offenders and ethical vegetarians. They’d done short time in county lockups, charged with violating restraining orders, lewd and lascivious conduct, six counts of animal cruelty for selling a litter of kittens with pierced ears over the internet. To say they all expressed both the loss of physical integrity and a response to an event that involved terror and helplessness—the hurting-for-certain hallmarks of PTSD—would’ve been too easy. The harder truth was that they were men unmanned. More than the sum of the bullet points in the revised DSM-5, they were the very reasons for some of the revisions. They were outliers. They hadn’t fallen through cracks. The ground opened up and they dove in face first—hooah! But they could only live like beasts for so long, so they’d gone with Milt, who gave order to their days, even if his orders were crazy.

  The vets mustered at the center of the Alpine village. Over their secondhand camos bought in bulk from Liberty Military PX, they wore full alpaca pelts fastened with lengths of catgut. The pelts, worn casually, were their uniforms, part of Milt’s PSYOP campaign to ward off trespassers while keeping alive the legend of the Catskills Sasquatch.

  * * *

  The packed Carnegie Deli thrummed like a hot hive. Smith sat in front of an unbelievable stack of deli meat. The piled-high gore flayed her, opened her wide before she knew what was what.

  “You alright?”

  She caught herself staring at her untouched heap of sandwich. Pushed away the plate. “Didn’t get DDed,” she said. “I’m AWOL.”

  “Alright then.”

  “Officially deserter,” she confessed. “Couldn’t do another tour. Done two.” She knew things were winding down, getting safer all the time, that shit had hit the fan and this was the clean up afterwards. Her mind said that. But her body sat there facing down a sandwich, practically paralyzed. “Did mouth-to-mouth on a face like that. Could only tell it was a mouth for the few teeth that hadn’t been blasted down Toose’s throat.”

  Milt had a look like he’d seen it coming. Take a fresh vet out to lunch, get a shock-and-awe story or two. He pinched his lozenge from his mouth. “Toose?”

  “Our interpreter. Haibitan. Just Haibitan.” Afghanis were like Brazilian soccer players. No last name. So they’d whipped one up. “He thought all Americans danced the Watusi. Haibitan Watusi. Even had a nametape made. Toose for short.”

  “Wife used to dance a mean Watusi,” Milt offered. “What happened? I can take it.”

  “How’s it a pack of cigarettes costs twelve bucks here? There, you get a carton for pocket change, counterfeit Camels rolled by legless orphans. Watusi smoked Pines. Loved him his Pines. He’d been having a hard time finding pottable water.”

  “Potable.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t mind me. Sometimes I just got to prove I put the GI Bill to fair use.”

  She had no idea how Toose afforded cigarettes. No running water but all the men smoked. “At checkpoint,” she said, “filled my canteen cup, handed it to him. From about a klick away, out of some school we were supposed to have secured, a sniper shot my can—” She swung her open hand, smacked herself in the chin and rocked her head back with the mimed force. “—pow into his face.” She stared at her sandwich. “What we looking at?”

  He got that klicks-away gaze she knew meant more than shared tears. It amazed her how contagious anxiety was among the war-torn, like clap in wartime. She knew Milt’d been a serious soldier. Putting some of her emotional burden into his ruck settled h
er a little. He looked confused and upset, not at her but for her.

  “Mine’s the Woody Allen,” he said eventually, “corned beef and pastrami both. I’m an honorary Jew, you know. You got—”

  “Like what’s-her-name on that show The View?”

  “We rough it at the Standard. Primitive as can be. No electric, never mind TV.”

  Took Smith a moment. She found the face on the Wall of Fame: “Whoopi Goldberg.”

  “Whoopi’s no Jew. She’s got an opportunistic stage name. Smacks of Uncle Tomism. Now Sammy Davis is another story.” His look was a plea. “Sammy Davis, Jr.?”

  She shook her head and pulled her sandwich carefully toward her.

  “Used to do one heck of a Sammy. Been known to finish it off with a few lines from ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ But I’ll spare you.” Milt pointed. “Yours is corned beef. But we can leave these plates sitting right here and get on outside if you’d feel better.”

  “You just bought me a twenty-five-dollar sandwich, on your charge card. Here’s what. I’m’a take one bite of the corn beef. See what a twenty-five-dollar sandwich tastes like. Eat the thing that threatens to eat you, right? Then score a couple boxes and get em to go. You take mine on up to your Camp David, feed it to hongry-ass Bigfoot. Cause I gots to banana, man. But first—” Smith hefted the sandwich-half with both hands. Nearly a pound of flesh. She stretched her jaw and bit. Chewed. Choked down a mouthful. Meat, warmed blood, rusty, salty, she feeling a tongue lolling in her mouth, her tongue—giving mouth-to-mouth, she’d gotten burned on a hot shard of her canteen cup buried in the exposed bone of Watusi’s chin. When she’d lifted her head for air, Watusi burbled, trying to tell her something, kept reaching upward, his mangled mouth saying what sounded like Many piss. Many piss. She told him not to talk. Found his topi, a square cap intricately embroidered with dots of mirror, deadly, that flashed in the sun. Surely what the sniper aimed for. Knowing she was doing wrong, but not knowing what was right, she placed the cap on his crotch, which wasn’t wet. He pawed his chest, trying to reach into his vest. She was losing him. His eyes filled. He looked at her, into her, and, in English, said, My number three wife. She only understood because he’d said it to her a hundred times. She laughed, painfully, said, My number two husband, if you’re proposing, you’re gonna need a ring. American women don’t settle for sheep. He nodded. From his eyes alone, warm and crimped, his mouth a wet red mess, she got the sense he was smiling. He tapped his chest. She said, Too tight? He shook his head, placed his open hand over his heart, and turned away from her. She unbuttoned his vest. Into the lining of the vest was sewn a plastic window, like in a wallet. Behind the window was a photo of her: standing in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque, scaffolding around its rebuilt clock tower, making a peace sign.