The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  The chickens kept the squad in eggs three out of four seasons. Thirty hens, give or take, stocky, plucky Rhode Island Reds—the Commies, they called them—with blistery combs. Their coop was the listing pro shop of the overgrown golf course. Their roosts were wood-handled wedges and irons.

  Milton clucked through a window screened off with chicken wire. The hens clucked a response and followed with their pleased trills like the slipping of thirty loose fan belts.

  The alpaca paddock and pasture was the fenced-in former fairway of the tenth hole, a dogleg par-3 once renowned for its sucking water hazard and a bottomless sand trap, Hell Bunker. Milton had never played a single stroke. The closest he ever got was carrying clubs for Sammy Davis, the only caddying he ever deigned to do. It still surprised him, the way old age worked. He woke with a person from his past in mind, and that person kept him company for days, a not unhappy haunting. Sammy made sense—Milton had been thinking more about him—Sammy died of the same thing that was killing Milton.

  As he stood before the unidentifiable tenth hole, a conspiratorial thought occurred to him. He and Sammy contracting the same cancer two decades apart wasn’t simple coincidence. Larger forces were at work. Such forces weren’t God, they were government. You didn’t get syphilis because the Good Lord was punishing you for frequenting the brothels of Tuskegee; you got syphilis because the Man subjected you to the disease to better understand long-term effects on white folk. Maybe dioxin exposure, and the increase in incidents of sterility and throat cancer, was part of a larger plot against black Amerika. Take away our ability to reproduce and, at the same time, deprive us of a voice.

  Milton shook his head hard and got his legs going, kicking through the browning grasses and fallen leaves. The minute he stopped moving, ceased working, his mind receded into dismal places. He dismissed his cancer conspiracy as paranoid, though justifiably so, something his crackpot vets would cook up round the campfire. There were so many cover-ups, so many vagaries and opacities—MKULTRA, the fifties CIA program that targeted subversive Americans, Paul Robeson the most notable among them—that it was hard to maintain trust in human goodness, never mind the decency of the US government.

  Milton focused on his surrounds. No birds flitted. All quiet save for a hushed rustling. Falling leaves settled on the fallen. When the Standard was in operation, under the tutelage of impatient Ada, he’d learned to ski and play tennis. Golf was a bourgeois line he refused to cross. He’d ribbed Sammy, told him his saving soul-brotherly grace was that he was no good at the game. In response Milton didn’t get a cutting comeback—hard to imagine that was forty-plus years ago—instead, he got Sammy’s disarming sincerity, which always carried a whiff of the stage. When he took you into his confidence, he did so with flare and a tad too much minstrel poetry, yet he rambled in a way you knew wasn’t scripted. Like the time Milton lugged Sammy’s clubs for eighteen holes while Sammy and Nehemiah went at it over their huge handicaps. A wager made between them for a whopping dollar, Sammy calling it a big bet between Jews. He told Milton and Nehemiah how he and Altovise had, earlier in the year, gone to DC. There, they’d been the first free black guests in history invited to sleep in the White House. That didn’t happen under Kennedy’s watch, short as it was. No, man. John, God rest him, snubbed little ol’ me, and after I helped him secure the Negro vote in ’60. Cold-shouldered, all cause I was married to May at the time. This when unions between whites and blacks was still illegal in thirty states. Sanctity of marriage my skinny ass. Sight of a one-eyed Negro Jew hand-in-hand with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swedish model a foot taller than me? That was too much for John, man. Those Kennedy cats were always caught up in appearances. That’s Catholics for you. Frank’s the same damn way. Shiny surface hides a shit substance. Too much pomp. Their pope’s basically a pimp in a pointy hat, man. He aint far from furs. Don’t never trust no white motherfucker in a pointy hat.

  Anyway, point is, it took Nixon to get a Negro an invite. After Nixon put me and Altovise up, his boy Don “Rummy” Rumsfeld, who’s running Nixon’s War on Poverty, where I’m on the advisory board—this Rummy was in Vegas giving a speech while I was doing my hundredth gig at the Sands. Hundred’s a big deal, now. And I took him and his wife to see a show. Didn’t tell them who I was taking them to see, just said I was taking them to see the greatest entertainer in Vegas, and they were game, man. So we go see Elvis at the International, right, and he’s the King of Kings. He’s got a collar like a count. Scarlet scarf and a belt buckle big as a license plate. And poor square Rummy’s looking a little hound-dogged. After the show, I take them backstage, and it was a party, man, gorgeous girls everywhere, and I look up, expecting to see Elvis mobbed by honeys hanging all over him. But no. Elvis’s towering over Rummy alone in a corner, and he’s grilling him about the Army and the draft, and it’s not like you think, Milt, militant as your Black Power ass can get despite living up here with the Lost Tribes. Cause Elvis is a big supporter of the draft. And he loved him his time in the Army, man. I served in the Big Deuce. Drafted in ’43.

  This is all going somewhere, and coming back around. This all ties in, don’t you sweat. Then I’m a make a run on that dollar over these here back nine, Chema. You wait. When I arrived for Basic, I was strapping on a watch my father gave me, and it slipped to the floor. And this white motherfucker, Jennings—I’ll never forget his name or his face—he crushed my father’s watch with the heel of his boot. Looked down at me and said, Don’t worry, boy, you can always steal another. This Jennings was the ringleader of a group of racist motherfuckers who made my life living hell. After a show I did at the Officer’s Club, Jennings motioned me to join his table, said he wanted to say sorry and slid a pitcher of beer my way. Apologized for it being warm but he wanted to make peace. When I poured a glass and started drinking, his cronies fell out laughing. I was drinking a pitcher of their piss. Well, when Altovise and I arrive in our limo at the White House, guess who’s guarding the White House gate? That’s right. Jennings. Can’t make this stuff up, man. This is God at His mysterious Motherfucking work. So I says to him, Don’t I know you? Know what he says? He says, No sir, Mr. Davis. What I’m sure to hear at the entrance to the Pearly Goddamn Gates. No sir, Mr. Davis. Out front of the Nixon White House. Not the Kennedy White House, mind you. Nixon. Took crooked-ass Dick to get a nigger a bed in the nigger-built White House. Say what you want, Nixon’s got no care for appearances. What you see is what you get, like it or not. And when we got inside, Dick offered me and Altovise the option of sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom. I said, Mr. President, I appreciate it, but I don’t want ol’ honest Abe visiting me in the night talking bout, I freed them, but I sure didn’t want them sleeping in my bed, and Dick let out that laugh like a horse shot in the hindquarter. So we opted for the Queen’s room, where you best believe Altovise and me made love in that big bed like it was nobody’s business. But we both had a good cry first, cause I remember back when I was a hoofer having to soft-shoe around, Yes sirring, and No sirring my way on and off every stage I graced, and that Klansman Jennings out front guarding us while we made love in a—

  A dismaying bleat snapped Milton out of his Sammy Davis invocation. The calls of the alpaca, high-pitched and whiny, were sweet complaints even when aggrieved. He slipped achingly between the timber fence rails as the sun nudged up over the Gunks forty miles east, igniting the turning leaves of the trees from here to there like Milton had called in a napalm strike on the Mohonk Mountain House perched atop the Shawangunk Ridge.

  The vista looking out and down was spectacularly spangled. The piney greenness. Maples reddening. The yellowed ash, bur oak, and elms. Colors of fall put him in mind of his Pan-African days, made him think of his flirtation with, his near immigration to, Liberia shortly after he got back from Vietnam. That was before he met Ada, who made America feel like home for the first time in his life.

  In the paddock, two male alpaca neck-wrestled, an exertion that usually waited till after their morning feeding, such th
at it was. A three-sided loafing shed offered shelter but, like some of his vets, they preferred the out-of-doors. He’d seen them sleeping in the open during the hardest rain and on the coldest night, sub-zero, a layer of frost on their fleece. Evolved in the Andes, they found the Catskill climate mild during the worst winters.

  Milton was in command of two squads. Each consisted of a dozen-odd members: his veterans and the alpacas they were assigned. There was a chain of command. A vet and his alpaca constituted a team, the vet the team leader. Milton kept thirteen animals, one for each resident plus two extras, which he cared for himself. Their number was down from nineteen at the start of the summer. Two crias birthed in June didn’t make it to August, one dead of what was probably a phosphorous deficiency and one eviscerated by a mangy runt of a coyote not much bigger than a cat. The squad had eaten one adult in the last two months, and three others had been carried off by someone or something. A tragedy, but Milton couldn’t help feeling relieved, because the animals were slowly starving. He couldn’t afford enough feed, and the cool spring preceding a dry, over-hot summer cut short by a wave of cold fronts made for poor grass growth and depleted minerals in their pasture. What was left of the herd was hurting.

  He didn’t take on a new vet unless there was an alpaca for him—or her. And he’d been weighing whether to wind it all down, stop taking new vets at all, let the whole enterprise peter out. Ten years was a respectable run. Smith might be his last guest. As a charity case, she wouldn’t help his financial situation. At this point, he’d need to double the size of his company to start making a dent in his debt. He could no longer cover the costs of the interest, never mind reduce the principle, on all he’d borrowed. The esquires could sort it out when he was dead. With the help of his lawyer’s estate planning and finesse as executor, the Standard might even live on as a shelter. He reminded himself he had some life in him and that he wasn’t going to waste it on financial worry. Toward Nehemiah’s end, the old man had often said, Make sure to send a lazy man for the Angel of Death.

  Milton approached, clicked his tongue and whistled. The two males disengaged, unwinding their necks and standing at attention, ears perked. The rest of the herd gathered in a tight pack at the center of the paddock, whimpering and warking. Sue, the youngest male, sixteen months old, tiptoed over and nipped Milton’s forearm.

  Milton jerked away, and Sue jumped back bleating and rejoined the herd, burying his head between two fleecy haunches. Something was wrong, and the absence of jays, finches, and woodpeckers at their noisy morning tasks told him a predator of size was in the area. Milton counted heads of his herd: four, six, seven, ten, twelve. Someone was missing. He went through again by name. Zsa Zsa van Winkle, Four-Legger, Bandera, Al-Pac-Man, Diddy Yah Diddy, on down the line. Reverend’s animal, Wile E. Prince, was gone.

  Milton scanned the dark treeline, scouting along the perimeter of the paddock. The sun was low, and the horizontal, high-contrast light accented every nuance of the ground. Tracks of a scuffle showed in the soft soil near the loafing shed. Alpaca had no hooves; they had two nails and pads like two heels of a hand pressed together. Scratch marks in the groundcover looked to come from the wrestling males.

  A few feet away ran drag lines, four become three. Might’ve been feet while E. Prince was mostly upright. Lines ended at a broad swath—the body—as E. Prince was overturned. Wide track went under the fence. On the other side, the body swath vanished.

  No blood trail. No tufts of fleece.

  Black bear didn’t enter hibernation dens till November in an autumn like this. Known to eat adult deer but not regularly. A penned alpaca was easier prey. Couldn’t be coyote. Take a pack of three or more to kill an adult alpaca. Lone gray wolf could manage it, but they hadn’t been verified in the Catskills for nearly a century. He’d seen lynx and bobcats. Both would have a hard time taking down an alpaca, couldn’t’ve hoisted an adult off the ground. Would’ve eaten it while the other alpaca watched whining. Mess would be evident. The western cougar of the Rockies was steadily moving east, following the explosion of whitetail deer. Milton was certain they’d already arrived in the Catskills. In June a cougar was killed on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut seventy miles north of New York City. A necropsy proved it to be wild and to have walked over from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Eastern cougar had just been designated extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which held the official position that any confirmed cougar sightings in the Catskills were released cats raised in captivity, most likely western cougars. Milton knew such cougars existed. Before he auctioned off the holdings of the game farm, he released a cougar, Gizbar, at a loss of some $10,000. The plaque still hung over her cage.

  Milton approached Zum and Chewy, talking in his huffed rasp. Maybe his pretenses about Bigfoot and Sasquatch were becoming realized, because he couldn’t explain this. No blood, nothing. Four adults vanished, poof, in two months. He would be forced to herd them into the big hay barn each night, yet one more chore to manage. Reverend came to mind, a conversation he and Milt had about—

  A snap sounded, a scrape. The ears of Zum and Chewy pointed the same direction.

  Footfalls, something being dragged. The thing being dragged sounded hollow.

  Milton unsnapped the thumb brake, drew his sidearm, fingered the safety. He didn’t disengage it, didn’t raise the weapon. He took a knee, his popping joints nearly as loud as the noisy intruder.

  A silhouette. A figure low to the ground dragged something beside it. Milton disengaged the safety. Applied a hair of pressure to the heavy, combat-weight trigger. Performing a snap assessment of distance, the background, his periphery, he prepared for the full-bore rush of a massive 200-pound cat. Sprinting at forty-five miles-an-hour. Capable of a forty-foot horizontal leap. Coming head on at high speed, the cougar would make a tight target almost impossible to hit. Milton might have time to squeeze off one potshot.

  The hunched figure—on the far side of Milton’s gun sight—reared up and emerged from the trees. “Aquí, vicuña, vicuña”—a woman’s voice—“here, pretty vicuña”—an accent, Spanish but not Nuyorican, sounded like Southern Spanglish.

  Here was Ada, his wife, speaking a foreign language, come home calling to his alpaca, which had once been hers. A wash of dread—he wasn’t thinking he saw Ada. He was observing it. Here she was. Young, displaced. Then, as soon as she was, she wasn’t.

  The voice belonged not to Ada but to Smith. Smith had hitched her way up here to save him a trip. He lowered his sidearm—he reraised it. The trespasser, the woman, was young but not white, wasn’t rangy and athletic like Smith. Stepping into the sunlight, she was short but not squat, a Latina, busty and hippy, early thirties, her hair in a dark ponytail coming undone. Her new blue jeans were muddy and wet to the knees and she held out a phone like a wafer of black glass, pointing it at the herd on the far side of the paddock.

  His instinct was to run her off without her getting sight of him. Normally, he’d fire a round, a sounding of the alarm sending his squad on high alert. They’d resort to their assigned scare tactics in his ongoing PSYOP campaign against scrappers and vandals, but his squad were all asleep.

  He could shoot over this short woman’s shoulder. The more fear that surrounded the Standard, the more people would stay away—that’d been his intent, implemented since the shuttering of the resort. He wanted to leave trespassers with the impression that the Standard was haunted, that Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti dined on over-curious hikers drawn to ruin, that crazy Catskill mountain men had the run of the place and were willing to hunt down hunters trying to take deer from private property, or murder meth-heads seeking to yank every last inch of copper wiring from the walls to sell for next to nothing.

  His voice wasn’t strong enough to command this lady’s attention from where he kneeled. He holstered his sidearm—this was what disease, more than age, did to a man, made him timid and soft, too compromising. He stood, bit down on the cuticles of his pinkies and let out a catcall.<
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  She jumped—“¡Ay, Dios mío, ayúdame!”—and dropped her phone. It landed on the ground beside her kayak—that’s what she’d been hauling. She looked around to locate the whistler. She hollered, “You scared me,” bending over at the waist in what seemed to him a cleft offering, suggestive, found her phone in the fallen leaves, waved and said hello.

  He stood ground and glared.

  She leaned against the fence and perched her new hiking boot on the lower rail, at home on the range. She was too comfortable; she’d mistaken his whistle for a flirtation.

  “This is private property.”

  She cupped a hand to an ear. “Beg your pardon?”

  He strode to the fence and swiftly kicked her foot off the rail.

  “¿Estás loco?”

  “You’re on private property.” His breath was bad and he employed it like an unconventional weapon.

  She took a step back. “I’m sorry. But that doesn’t warrant assault.” Barely over five feet, she gestured to her plastic boat that had a store sticker still on it. “I’m portaging.”

  He set his hand on the butt of his holstered sidearm, still warm from his grip, his heart yet to settle after the misplaced fear, the painful confusion, she’d stirred in him.

  Her eyes went to his hip. She took another step back.

  He said, “Portage elsewhere.”

  She shot a look at her boat. Protruding past the seat was a black shotgun barrel and in one motion he opened the thumb brake and drew his sidearm with a zipping sound as the sight scraped the nylon weave. He held the .45 down at an angle. She was saying, “Tranquillo, easy, please,” before he realized the gun barrel in her boat was a paddle.

  He was making mistakes he wouldn’t have made ten years ago, but he kept the gun drawn and lowered. “Dangerous for a woman to be trespassing up here alone. Could get you shot. Or worse.” He wanted to fix some healthy concern in her, make her muddle-minded, the way she’d done him, but didn’t want her running to cops with a wild story about an armed and dangerous quick-draw old Negro at the Standard.