In the small of his back, he conceals the three-and-a-quarter-inch fixedblade Bloodshark, hand-forged by Tracker Dan, a Navy SEAL and sometime knife maker.
To one thigh, he ties the corvo given him by a Zeitgeist colleague, a Chilean commando turned private security contractor after the ouster of General Pinochet. Every time he ties it on, he hears Diego’s voice: For you, compadre, a corvo for Tyro. Muchas gracias for what you done con mi escoba at the Baiji refinery.
Over his tank top, Ray shrugs on a camo buttondown. Lastly, he straps to his chest a Kydex holster and slips in the tactical tomahawk, a Sayoc-Winkler RnD Hawk. The carbon steel head is snug against his sternum and the butt of the curly maple handle reaches his bellybutton. He tries and retries the quick-release bungee retainer—each time, the tomahawk slides out smooth. The weight of it in his fist is primeval.
A snowy wind, unseasonal, moves over the dark features of the mountain. Once he confirms the arrival of his replacement, his job for the lawyer is finished. He’ll collect his last payment, but he won’t leave straightaway. He’s determined to hang around, see to what end his work will be put.
He could use some R&R, has given thought to a catty-corner road trip across the continent come spring, but, first, a rough winter alone in the Catskills will help settle and center him, get him back to essentials. Strange to think that his family’s a hundred and fifty miles south, in Jersey. A rundown mother and two busted-up brothers who’ve got no idea he’s been stateside going on a year.
Trees scrape and rasp. The doors of Babylon open into dark dimensions—a place he spent time on recon, Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, eighty-five klicks south of Baghdad, patrolling the rebuilt ruins shortly before the Iron Tigers of 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, took Hillah. While there, Ray experienced recurring waves of déjà vu. They were the most intense when he passed a mound of raised red earth on the western edge of the ruins. Felt like part of him died defending that dirt. It hurt to watch the jarheads of Camp Alpha use their KA-BARs to pry bricks from the new buildings on the site, bricks stamped: This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq. When those souvenirs were gone, they went to work on what was left of the Ishtar Gate, weathered figures of dragons, having lasted two-and-a-half millennia, vanishing after a single season of the US Marines.
Early snow bends and breaks branches of trees, unfallen leaves catching the weight. The wind dies, the fire goes out, the only sound the trickle of the rivulet that passes along the outskirts of his camp and collects to become Conklin Brook, one of the many sources here at 2,500 feet atop Slawson Mountain before spilling into the Neversink Reservoir.
At 0300 hours, Ray smacks on his assault helmet. Affixed to it are his CANVS retrofitted AN/PVS-15s, color night-vision goggles. He tips them down in front of his eyes. A civilian caught in possession of the covert eye-gear would bring a great deal of heat and the heat would be federal. Likely in the form of a DHS bureaucrat in an ill-fitting suit, instigated rather than impressed by Ray’s service to his country.
Ray assumes the NSA are tracing his movements. Whoever’s assigned to Ray is surely being shadowed and documented. Dossiers on top of dossiers into infinite oblivion.
He tips up his goggles and begins the hike downmountain toward the Standard grounds, the second time in four hours he’s made the trip. The odd pieces of old horse tack slap and clack, giving away his position. He makes adjustments, tests his sound signature. His next steps are stealthy. He first fashioned the tack into a harness-and-sling that could carry a slack-bodied adult alpaca, which weighs about as much as a woman.
* * *
Smith’s second serenade came later. Milt toured her around, introduced her to her alpaca, Sue. She’d be entirely responsible for him, in addition to her other duties. She’d feed and brush him twice daily, trim his horny nails, file his fighting teeth, shear him next spring, and butcher him come fall. She’d wear the hide of her alpaca to humble herself. No part of an animal—alpaca, chicken, rabbit—went unused. They rendered the fat, offal, and bones to make lard, soap, and schmaltz.
She excused herself, found a spot shielded from Milt and the snow. You’d of thought she committed a capital offence when he intruded on her burying a tampon. “What you think this is,” he barked. “So in love with your own womanhood that you go conducting funerals every time you bleed? Off your knees. Give me that. That’s got uses.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Hand it over.” He received the bloody tampon in his bare palm.
She wasn’t squeamish—prissiness was for civilians, a privilege soldiers couldn’t afford—but she avoided Milt the rest of the day, disgusted. The morning after, she kept her distance when he took her on frozen dawn patrol in two feet of snow, until he called her over. A fresh possum, still warm and soft, killed in one of the company’s countless snares, snares illegal in the state of NY—ITDs Milt called them, improvised trapping devices—and from the corner of the possum’s bloodied mouth dangled the white string of her tampon.
At the cook fire, snow still falling, Smith wonderfully warm under her hide, she and Milt shared a look and a wink over their possum stew, a look that none of the other vets caught, save Merced, who got irate. He funneled his anger at Botes.
Minutes before lights out, Stone broke out an old-school cadence call none of them had heard but Vessey and Milt, cause it’d been banned before they’d all enlisted:
Rich girl uses Vaseline,
poor girl uses lard
But Bellum uses axle grease
and bangs them twice as hard.
Bang Bang Bellum. Bang away all day.
Bang Bang Bellum. Who ya gonna bang today?
Rich girl uses tampons,
poor girl uses rags
But Bellum’s cunt’s so goddamn big
she uses burlap bags.
Bang Bang Bellum. Bang away all day.
Bang Bang Bellum. Who ya gonna bang today?
She’d heard worse, and to shut them up, she drew her pepperbox, aimed it at Stone’s gaping face. One by one, they went silent, smirking, their smirks saying her pistol was too cute to kill a man.
* * *
After a ten-mile, off-trail hustle in the snowy dark, Ray approaches the outskirts of what was the thousand-acre Standard Game Farm, its fall-down separation barrier a twenty-foot-high fence erected to prevent animal immigration. The corrugated sheet-metal panels, corroded, have parted like curtains. He slips through an opening used by a division of deer. He hears movement to the east, some hundred meters off.
Adrenalin fizzes through him. He regulates his breathing—in through nose, out through mouth—allowing himself the benefits of the endorphins without succumbing to a debilitating amygdala hijack. Time slows. His periphery contracts and his focus tightens. He draws his tomahawk, crouches and scans the perimeter.
He catches a shadow low to the ground, a nocturnal carnivore. He tips down his night-vision goggles—a raccoon at the base of a tree pulls on its paw with its front teeth.
Ray’s in a hurry. His objective: snag a woodstove from the Standard Quartermaster’s Store, hump it up to his camp. It’ll be the hot heart of the nearly finished yurt that will get him through winter.
He needs to get the stove before insomniac Wright starts busying about, but Ray hasn’t eaten protein in weeks. In this, he’s a fundamentalist. He strives for autarky—a closed system—like Afghanistan under the Taliban. He would starve to death before he bought provisions at the Price Chopper, and E. Prince, in the cold weather, must hang for another week before Ray can slow smoke him the way he’d been taught to prepare cabrito.
Here at the promise of a more immediate meal, his weakness takes shape as need. Better to be rushed and nourished, or faint but with the luxury of time?
He lets fly the tomahawk—strikes the raccoon squarely in the hindquarter. The blade lodges in the tree trunk with a wet tock, pinning the raccoon. It yelps and gnaws the handle, pulling and pushing with paws
that are practically hands, hands that horrify Ray for an instant—small, black, and spindly, the hands of a baby scorched by the blast of a 500-pound smart bomb, a bomb guided by Ray, he the one laser painting the target with the SOFLAM—he wills the image away and draws his fixedblade.
He pins the coon’s head with his boot. A fingertip locates the tiny atlas bone. Top of the spine. Occipital bone, base of the skull. There, he slips in the blade.
Ray tells himself that the lump in his throat is hunger, not anguish. Then he’s willing to acknowledge it: he’s sad for the kill, clean as it is, in a way he refuses to be with armed men done in by his hand.
From the canopy overhead comes a warbling bark, like a lapdog being drowned. A run of trills follows a whine. The raccoon kit, hiding in plain sight, sways like a drunk. It’s weeks old, weighing two pounds at most.
The little critter fixes him with bandit eyes and pleads like a pup. Ray mimics the sound. The kit sniffs in his direction. It complains again and its whines are answered by a second kit that waddles around the tree and noses at the mother’s belly, trying to nurse.
Scavengers. Like him, trying to survive any way they can. The other kit climbs clumsily down and snuggles into its sibling, who barks. They already seem to him like brother and sister, the latter runty and aggressive, the boss.
They watch as he dresses their mother, riled by the terrible conflict of odors—mother meat. Ray removes the kernel-like scent glands from under her arms and legs. If left in too long, the glands give the meat the flavor of hot asphalt. Hungry as he is, he chokes down the nutrient-rich organs, swallowing hard and fast in between gags.
He uses the intestinal casing to bind the dressed carcass, dangling it from the branch of a tree, too high for coyotes, too long for the kits to negotiate. On his return, he’ll claim his kill. If the kits are still around when he gets back, he’ll worry about them then.
Making up lost time, Ray dashes toward the center of the Standard campus. Winded, his leg loose, he approaches the ivy-covered castle from the front. Its façade—two flanking turrets and its empty bell tower—looks like a steam paddleboat bearing down on him. He sprints toward a half-collapsed utility shed, pop-vaults onto a wall, and dynos onto the slate roof that crackles beneath his boots. He crouches and breathes.
From a hundred meters in nothing but scattered starlight, through the night-vision goggles, he studies the wicket cut in the great door of the castle armory. The rotted branch he leaned against it hours earlier remains in place—Wright hasn’t surfaced.
Ray tips up his goggles, jumps off the shed, and double-times it.
At a window, in the drafts that whistle through the gaps, Ray smells the Standard vets. He flips down his goggles and peers inside. Fine woodwork and floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall. The spines of tens of thousands of old volumes. He can make out their striped pastels in the light source at the center of the library. Looking into the hearth nearly blinds him even though it’s burned down to a few dim coals. Around the hearth lies a circle of heavy furs pulled over sleeping bodies.
He counts seven, eight. Counts again. Someone missing. He moves to another window. Still eight. There’re ten vets, including Wright and the new woman he’s heard talk of, and Wright is underground, unless he surfaced by some secret exit.
Ray turns tracker, checks exterior doors. Finds the west-facing exit propped open with an atlas. The first place he looks is the latrine. What Wright calls a composting toilet is nothing more than a scrap-lumber shithouse emptying down an old water well.
From the outhouse comes the sound of someone passing troubled gas, no privacy nor decency at the Standard.
Ray finds cover and waits.
“Oh, for christsake!” A woman’s voice. “What do yall wipe with up here, Milt, your dang left hands? You’re every bit as bad as the Taliban. Shit.” The outhouse door kicks open. Out she comes walking like a detainee. Pants and panties shackling her ankles. The triangle of her dark pubic hair. She’s hardly more than a teenager, her legs long, toned and shapely, her face fatigued. She squats and rakes through snow to reach the layer of dead leaves.
She looks up, her eyes gray through his goggles, staring right at him but seeing nothing. She winces, wiping.
He pulls off his headgear and hangs it on the branch of a box elder. The woodstove he wants hasn’t gone anywhere in years—it can wait a little longer—because here’s the perfect chance to introduce himself.
Ray crouches into a three-point stance, leans, and scrapes his boot to get her attention. When she looks his direction, he charges her across the ten meters separating them, howling like a rabid dog who’s slipped his choker.
Toppling over backward, her ankled pants tripping her up, she crab-crawls in reverse through snow.
He rears over her, huffs his chest and snarls. He can smell her, her every intimate odor, heady. Her eyes are wide and worried, and he lets himself smile.
Her eyes narrow. Gone from pleading to pissed off, and all because he showed mercy, a sense of humor. She says, “Scared the piss out of me.” She hikes up her panties, her camo trousers, nonchalant as can be, like a girl who grew up with seven or eight bullying older brothers. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
He’s smacked by her openness, her accent. He offers her a hand up. “Your gut’ll get used to the primitive Standard fare. Hit up Wisenbeker for some of his homemade alpaca-milk yogurt. Don’t know how he keeps vegetarian without wasting away.”
Glaring at him, she takes his hand.
He helps her to her feet and then he squeezes, hard. She’s got a good grasp and she gives back some of what she’s getting. He tightens, sees the slightest bend of her knees, and she squeezes in return, what he guesses is the last reserve of her grip strength. She’s hurting him. He grins, and she says, “Look at you. Look like the dang dominatrix of SEAL Team 6. Look ready to tie me up, murder and rape me.” She yanks back her hand.
“In that order?”
She shrugs, even though he was trying to be personable, likable, and then there’s the voice: How would you do her?
To suppress an answer, he asks, “I look like a killer to you?”
“Face painted black, hatchet strapped to your chest? Yeah, you look like a killer.”
“Sadly, nothing confirms you’re alive and well in the world like killing a person.”
“You’re the one’s gone AWOL.”
“That what Wright says?”
“All he said was no one’s seen you in almost a month, not that they’ll admit to.”
“You keep a secret?”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t tell Wright you saw me.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Cause I can’t trust Wright.”
She says, “What’s not to trust?”
“The list is long.”
“Yeah, well, he’s been good to me, and for me.” She blows a couple breaths in her hands, warming them, then cups them over her ears, saying, “First thing I’m gonna do is tell him I saw you, so just beware.”
“That case, tell him I borrowed one of his woodstoves to get me through winter. Figure he owes me.” Ray nods and backs away. He raises a hand, and blacked-out the way it is, it seems to him more like a threat than a farewell.
* * *
On Smith’s third whiteout day in residence at the Standard, Milt pulled her aside. “How’d you feel about chauffeuring me around in the snow?”
She told him Vessey had her and Stotts-Dupree shoveling off the roof of Esther. “Vess’s worried about it caving in on our sleeping heads.”
“Vessey can find someone to shovel who’s not a motor transport operator.”
In the van, behind the wheel, when she asked where they were going, Milt said he’d tell her when they got there.
“Last night,” she said, “I met Reverend.”
“You met him? For what, dinner and a movie?”
“You sound jealous.”
“Just surprised. Haven’t seen
him for a while. You’ve been here a couple of nights, and we have a Reverend sighting?”
“He asked me not to tell you.”
“Everything’s a secret with Reverend.”
“Why’s he called Reverend?”
“That too’s classified apparently. So what was the occasion for your meeting?”
“Caught me coming out of the latrine,” she said, “in the middle of the night. Face and hands all blacked out. Looked like he was on night raid. Said to tell you he took a woodstove. What’s his story?”
Milt told her how Reverend sought him out. Milt reluctant at first, but then it started to make sense. Reverend was eager. Milt started to groom him. Never told him that. “Maybe if I had, things would’ve worked out differently and he would’ve stuck around. I don’t know. Was almost like, after a time, a switch flipped and he needed to mistrust me. Like you, he doesn’t fit with the rest of my vets. You’re all outriders, but Reverend rides outside the outriders. High-functioning but could not get along. Thought that might work to his advantage, and mine. Leader can’t be too close to those he leads. But it didn’t work. Being a Ranger counted a strike against him. Being a merc was strike two. The guy’s self-sufficient, and scary smart, but he’s got hangups. Got a good heart, it’s just atrophied. The brother’s suffered some loss, loss he has a hard time acknowledging. Reminds me of me,” Milt said, “after I got back from my war, after Ada. Plenty of differences, but it’s the similarities that matter. He could use some looking after.”
“You asking me to—”
“I don’t care what he’s doing,” Milt said. “Just want to know how he’s doing.”
They drove for a while, Milt pointing the way with hand gestures like they were out on patrol. Then she asked, “Any news on the missing alpaca?”
“I’m thinking it was Gizbar.”
“Another vet I haven’t met?”
“Gizbar’s a mountain lion I released. Before the game-farm auction. Was actually the second Gizbar. Morning I opened her cage, she refused to go. Couldn’t chase or entice her out. She’d been born at the Standard. I finally gave up. On the third day I went back, she was gone. Haven’t seen her since.”
The Standard Grand Page 13
