The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  Sterilized, Milton couldn’t have children. Surely that was one reason he ran a halfway house for vets acting like buckquick, cut-up kids in the Catskills. After years of deliberation, over the ramifications of bringing a half-black half-Jew into the tumult of a world unable at the time to fathom a future that promised a mulatto president, he and Ada tried to make a baby. After two miscarriages and a stillbirth—third time done harm—they gave up, he relieved, she heartbroken. They blamed her age—thirty-three with the last loss—but then, gradually, reports trickled in, after her death, about dioxin and the fifty-five gallon drums of defoliant with the orange stripe painted on the sides, and just what, exactly, this chemical agent was doing to the post-war generation of Vietnamese. Modern warfare needed another statistical designator: WAA, wounded after action. Last count—500,000 Vietnamese children born with birth defects. In his mind, the five followed by five zeros was a long white digit chalked on a blackboard. Soon, Milton Xavier Wright would be tallied among the KAA.

  Milton massaged his throat, searching for the lump that’d been concerning him for months. Size of a golf ball, it had a bad lie, buried behind the strings and cords of his neck. The lymph nodes he had left felt swollen, but not painful.

  There were people who knew, or estimated, how much defoliated jungle, how much manmade wasteland, he’d stepped stealthily through. When on base, he killed plenty of time around the buffalo turbines, trailer-mounted systems used for roadside spraying and camp applications that shot herbicide from a fire hose. Even did some spraying himself. On his first tour, he scored an occasional rear-guard assignment—no easy task for a black grunt—and one such privilege was spraying perimeters with a backpack dispenser.

  Lying on his underground cot forty years later, he could hear the slosh, slosh rushing after him over the ages.

  Milton’s mouth was nasty, his lips ashy and chapped. On the nightstand stump, he felt for his water flask, a gift from Ada. He drank deeply, threw off the heavy, unshorn alpaca hide that was his covers, and got up fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He kicked back the fur rug, doused with tea tree oil to temper the stench, and urinated painfully into the grated drain in the floor, passed gas, and replaced the rug.

  The only access to the oubliette came from the trap door at the dome of the ceiling. From it hung a rope ladder that served as a trust test. Anytime, one of Milton’s vets could stand over him and cut his tie to the surface. A fact he pointed out to new arrivals on their introductory tour. Wanting them to trust him, he needed first to show them trust. He hadn’t yet been proved a rube and left for dead, though he had one resident, Reverend, who’d become a concern before he checked out. Milton didn’t bother to tell his vets there was a drain in the floor big enough for a man to crawl through that he used as a latrine. He was proud he’d never been forced to shimmy through his own piss to find where it led.

  Milton climbed the rope ladder like a healthy man half his age, pain spurring him to climb harder. That afternoon, at 1600, he needed to pick up the girl. She showed promise. He held out the desperate hope that maybe she’d take up the torch when it fell from his hand—he’d hoped the same thing of Reverend—but Smith would need first to clear her record, get her deserter status resolved, which would take time, time he didn’t have.

  Standing in the basement, he switched on the red-filtered, right-angle flashlight. Brown bats flitted about, their squeaks like the gritting of teeth. This year, the bats seemed to be later to hibernate, insomniac.

  A primitive carpenter’s chest held his clothes, his sidearm, and sundries, many of them contraband. He didn’t exactly practice what he preached: total self-sufficiency. He gave himself some slack—he was the only Standard lifer.

  In the dim disk of red light, he changed his camos slowly in the chill, rubbed unrefined shea butter on his elbows, the fatty balm smelling like nuts about to burn. He brushed his teeth with dry baking soda, swigged the last of the water from his flask, gargled, and swallowed. He popped a lozenge into his rotten mouth. Before he laced up his jungle boots, he gave the thin leather of the toes and heels a quick shea-butter polish. He picked out his natty hair and covered it in a wool stocking cap. He checked his calendar—hard to keep track of the days living like he did—today was in fact his day to pick up Smith.

  He sat on the lid of the carpenter’s chest, turned off his flashlight and, by feel, he field-stripped the M1911A1. Placed the parts in sequence beside him on the chest. One by one, he went at them with an old toothbrush. Took more care with them than he did his teeth. He oiled and pieced the sidearm back together. The whole, its weight and potential, terribly greater than the sum of its parts.

  He holstered the gun at his hip and felt his way through the black basement, skirting the maze of halls he knew by heart in the dark, passed custodial rooms and the vast laundry center long defunct, where came to rest the glorious passing bell bought by Nehemiah, Milton’s father-in-law. The thirty-eight-ton cast-brass behemoth had busted its coupling and crashed through every landing of the tower and every floor of the armory’s four stories.

  The bell had been legendary in the Catskills. Guests said it had the power to disperse storms and sickness, drive away golems, and extinguish fire. It’d been tolled to ward off evil. The bell was a reincarnated Maccabee king. The bell was the voice of God. At the start of the War to End All Wars, the bell had been ordered melted down and cast as a cannon. Beaten for days, it would not bust. When the tollers finally gave up, it buzzed for a week and then cracked but refused to break.

  Milton reached the stairs ascending to the first floor, a single open area that originally provided main storage for military surplus and munitions bought at military auction. When Nehemiah acquired all the property surrounding the upstate warehouse site of his father’s Manhattan-based Army-Navy reseller, turning the location into a world-class resort-cum-game-farm, the great room of the armory castle, Masada, was reconditioned and designated Zero Mostel Hall. Reserved for special banquets and decorated with an Elizabethan theme, the Zero was the venue for summerstock presentations of Shakespeare plays, and every year without fail there was a production of The Merchant of Venice, Nehemiah’s favorite, what he referred to as Shylock after the Shoah.

  Milton stepped over the defunct tracks of the private freight line that deadended just inside the portcullis. He shouldered open the warped wicket in the great door and, like a man coming up from the fathoms, drew a full breath of brisk fall air.

  * * *

  Aboard a company jet for the first time, Evangelína studied the grain of the wood tabletop. Rolling and opalescent, more like polished semiprecious stone than a length of lumber. On the tabletop rested the closed Standard Grande portfolio, its title misspelled. Meticulously bound but sloppily compiled. Filled with too much information gathered over years, some surely scandalous, some wildly inaccurate, some plainly plagiarized, overwritten in places, sketched in others. These documents frustrated her, something decidedly gringo about them: sprawling, arrogant, excessive. The time and money expended to gather and distribute the information in the document—it was morally degenerate. Though without it, she’d have a harder time doing her job, never mind living her life. She felt the same way about el gran Estados Unidos.

  She was the only passenger on the Bombardier Global Express, which probably cost IRJ $45 million. Ferrying her to Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, was a three-person flight crew—captain, copilot, flight attendant. Back at the office, a popular conversation topic, while awaiting the beep of a microwave, was the price of these executive runs. If her colleagues were right—some had seen the numbers—the 1,500-mile one-way trip cost in the neighborhood of 15k.

  The jet could’ve accommodated twenty coach seats comfortably, but the cabin was laid out with leather-appointed berthing for six, a forward club arrangement with foldout tables, a divan, a café table and a credenza adjacent to a galley with two coffee makers and a convection warming oven. The lighting was romantic.

  Evangelína s
ipped her strong Bloody Mary, thinking of her mamí. The hola-adios the poor woman had gotten from her here-and-gone only daughter. Evangelína was aboard a jet more luxuriously appointed than Air Force One; her mamí had never flown. She couldn’t help but feel a pang of pride. In the space of one generation, her family had gone from a border crossing, albeit legal, to jet-setting.

  She opened the portfolio, flipping pages like she would a mail-order catalog. Turned to the chapter “Medical Health.” A hundred-plus pages of forms—claims, request-for-payment, dozens of grievances, appeals, forms for approving a representative for appeal—Evangelína wasn’t ready to wade into the sickening bureaucratic morass.

  Included was a copy of the police report from an accident in 1977, where Mrs. Wright was killed. There was some discrepancy over who’d been driving, Mr. or Mrs. Wright. Mr. Wright had a BAC level of 0.19%. There was an investigation. Not murder. Charges of manslaughter were brought, but Wright got off with a plea bargain, admitting guilt to DWI and reckless endangerment. He paid a $500 fine. A footnote: In 1977, a person convicted of a drunk driving offense in New York paid an average fine of $11.

  She didn’t read with purpose till she reached the last fifty pages of the nearly 400-page document. Invariably, that was where the crucial information lay buried, in an appendix. There, you found the facts that didn’t fit into the story IRJ was trying to tell. If you were the so-called independent lab commissioned by the J.R. Simplot Company, whose phosphate mining operations polluted Idaho creeks with selenium, the appendix was where you hid pictures of the two-headed brown trout.

  She stopped at Appendix VI: “Grassroots Opposition of Alarm for Catskills Region Development.” What caught her eye were the redactions. Bizzy’s version surely didn’t have text blacked out. A note read: Any future investment should take into account the strong regional resistance to development of any kind, no matter how environmentally sound.

  The appendix included an email from James Sherry, New York’s Acting Commissioner & Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services: We want to continue providing this support to the ************************************* stakeholders, while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent.

  The Sherry email cited an FBI bulletin: Environmental extremists continue to target the ****** industry. Although the incidents have mostly involved vandalism, trespassing and threats by environmental activists … this pattern is morphing—to more criminal, extremist measures.

  The redactions weren’t subtle. But they weren’t what she expected either. The IRJ redactors hadn’t blacked-out all overt mentions of Marcellus shale gas, just those that were a part of other commercial groupings. The withheld information had to involve some other part of the energy industry. Filling in the blanks was like doing a contextual crossword. Nuclear might fit the redaction—target the ****** industry—the word had to be five, six, seven characters at most. Gaming, maybe. Could simply be energy, or golfing.

  Her cover was shoddy—she didn’t know a putter from a pitching wedge, but this was business: know just enough to get by, and then move on to the next concern. Maybe she’d play a few swings, take a crash golf course. Bad as the cover was, she thought that by it Bizzy was trying to keep her safe. The Earth Liberation Front didn’t torch golf carts. They saved their Molotov cocktails for heavy industrial machinery.

  Included in the Sherry email—under a subheading called “The Concerns”—was a list of names, their affiliations, meetings they’d attended, websites visited, contact information, and driver’s license photos like mug shots. Some of the activists were familiar.

  Another appendix stated that the opposition monitoring, commissioned by New York State, had been contracted out to the Terrorism Research and Response Institute, operated by Total Intelligence Solutions.

  A regional, privately run center subsidized by the Department of Homeland Security, Total Intel’s office was a suite on the ninth floor of IRJ Tower. It was a known secret that they engaged in domestic surveillance. Ten or so analysts, half-reformed Anonymous hackers in their twenties and thirties, hunched in cubicles beneath the panoramic blue glows of desktop monitors big as picture windows. They were looking in not out. Trolling for personal information on message boards and in chat rooms, using aliases familiar to the targets to befriend them on social networking sites. Then feeding gathered information into databases that spat out spreadsheets sold to corporations and municipalities.

  Working for IRJ worried Evangelína—about her privacy, her perceived freedoms—but working the Barnett Shale in Fort Worth had made her paranoid. The citizens organized in a way that was scary, and a group of domestic ELF eco-terrorists took charge of the resistance and shook her crew. The ELFs practiced a brand of radical environmentalism. They were like treehugging, club-wielding Teamsters, willing to shatter glass and crack skulls.

  Deeper in the “Grassroots Opposition of Alarm” appendix, Evangelína read that a splinter group of the Sierra Club’s Atlantic chapter had merged with New York Residents Against Drilling (NYRAD) to form Occupy Marcellus—this made Evangelína snort into her Bloody Mary. She could see grimy gringo teenagers, matted blond dreadlocks dangling over the fronts of their Che T-shirts, packing the bowls of their water pipes in underground caverns. Strike a match and blow themselves to kingdom come. Suicide bongs.

  She knew it wasn’t funny. For every pot-smoking teenager looking for a cause there was a desperate landowner looking to get even for a perceived wrong. Someone aggrieved, who knew where to look, could find that a plane owned and operated by IRJ was flying from Houston to the airport nearest the NY Marcellus. The thought was panicked but it made Evangelína wish she’d flown commercial.

  She closed the portfolio, finished her drink, and tried to nap.

  The jet touched down with a bump and a squeal. Evangelína thanked the flight crew and stood in the open doorway, freezing. The air was bracingly cold. The flight attendant said the temperature was 52. She hadn’t packed for this weather.

  At baggage claim stood a young gringo, tall, holding a sign, Canek, and he bore a resemblance to the former riverboat casino dealer aboard the oil platform. The sight of him stopped her, but it wasn’t him; it couldn’t be. She felt the presence of her papí, who used to joke that all gringos look alike. Papí was warning her with this case of mistaken identity, but the voice resonating in her head wasn’t her papí’s. It was Marisol’s. At the last moment, Bizzy’s assistant had thrust the portfolio into the elevator at Evangelína, tripping the safety sensor—the doors jerked back open.

  They stood staring at each other. As the doors reclosed, Marisol had said, Evangelína, cuidado.

  Recalled, those last words weren’t a warning—be careful—they were a threat.

  Evangelína slipped into the airport restroom and used her phone to arrange a car rental. Half an hour later, when she came out, her driver gone, she wondered if she’d just fucked-up and got her ass fired.

  * * *

  Masada hulked behind Milton, a gothic citadel sprung from a mead hall. Four-story bluestone walls. Empty bell tower. Pair of ramparts overrun by reddening leaves of poison ivy and Virginia creeper. He spent a moment listening and breathing, synching his senses with the out-of-doors. The sky in the southeast glowed vaguely orange, an illuminated immensity that might be mistaken for the sunrise. It was New York City, reaping benefits of midnight oil burned along its outskirts, down in Jersey and up the Hudson.

  At the old Alpine village, he took Standard Hill. The bunny run made history in the fifties: first ski slope in the world covered in manmade snow. Six still-standing buildings—clapboard and half-timber sided with hipped roofs and shake shingles—were set to collapse, a smorgasbord for carpenter ants. The lodge, more grand Adirondack cabin than Austrian chalet, leaned precariously downhill. Over the years, with help from his company, Milton removed and stored every fixture and piece of furniture from the doomed buildings of the Standard, which once boasted its own post office an
d airstrip, a power plant and synagogue, its own press and social daily, the Standard Tattler.

  The Standard Grande had been a testament to assimilation, a Diaspora collage of designs and themes borrowed from homelands left behind. The Alpine village always seemed to Milton the most out-of-place. Like a recreation Biloxi plantation in Liberia. Here in the Catskills would gather a thousand Jews escaping, for a few days a year, the cramped trappings of the Lower East Side, Brighton Beach, Flushing, and Yonkers, most of them Ashkenazi, but also Mizrahi, Sephardi, Bukhari, and Italkim, having survived pogroms and purges, having lived through the Holocaust, vacationing at a resort where they could enter into a large-scale Aryan architectural diorama and be served huge portions of wurst and sip schnapps after zipping down the slope on Alpine skis or bent into toboggans. To Nehemiah, that had been the point. Jews couldn’t go to the Austrian Alps and feel welcome, and so he determined to bring Hallstatt, Salzkammergut, not far from Lake Toplitz in the Totes Gebirge, to the Jews.

  What remained of the Alpine village was horseshoe-shaped. As long as the structures stood, they sheltered wind even in winter. Here, Standard Company cooked.

  Milton built and lit a fire in the small former fountain at the village center. He strained to replace the sewer-grate grill. Over coals he set the big coffee boiler, rusting beneath its chipped enamel, filled with stale grounds and clear, clean water from Trout Creek fed by the Neversink Reservoir of the New York City watershed. While the coffee heated, he checked the animals.

  He picked through lessening darkness. His old eyes, in the weak light, scanned the ground for wild mushrooms, difficult to distinguish in full sun never mind near night. After decades of training his eye, he couldn’t shut off the foraging reflex even when fruitless. There still could be found hearty bracket mushrooms, young Chicken of the Woods growing in the cold like stacked Styrofoam plates from the trunks of oaks.

  In Vietnam, this scanning reflex had been a few feet higher, his eyes darting along the treeline, the search pattern of a soldier seeking out the enemy, or hints of him, before being seen—an instant the difference between shooting and being shot.