The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  * * *

  At the risk of being found out, Ray turns on Baum’s phone. The BlackBerry rings more than sixty times in twenty-four hours, the Tri-State area codes uncompelling compared to the unlisted callers coming from 713, Houston.

  He goes through the email inbox. Most messages real-estate related. Then there are four from an IRJ executive assistant, Marisol Soto-Garza, each more frantic than the last, all of them mentioning Ms. Canek.

  He finds a chatty message from the person Ray takes to be Soto-Garza’s boss, F. Bismarck Rolling, Chief Operations Officer, IRJ, Inc. The email, transcribed by Soto-Garza, includes contact information, and Ray jots it down.

  The battery’s about to die. Before it does, in response to the last email in Baum’s inbox, from the address marisol.soto-garza@irj.com, Ray sends a message, impersonating Baum, knowing there’s a good chance Baum’ll discover it and realize Ray palmed his phone: Our contractor has offered a safe rendition of Canek that can incriminate Wright. We interested?

  He wants to take a sounding of the bottom. Baum’s response on the reservoir not only reassured Ray, it made Ray admire him. Now, he wants to see if the weight behind Baum is as upstanding as its legal council.

  At a clearing in his camp, he finds a pocket of reception. The email sends with the sound of a little jet taking off.

  The phone dies before a reply comes. Turning it back on would require a trip to buy a charger, and then a couple hours at the Liberty library. Or, for five K, he could overnight the phone to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where a knob-turner former colleague and onetime Zeitgeist operator—a techie who spent a few years in direct action with the Activity before retiring, in his late twenties, to military training—does a little freelancing. The guy’s a one-man army. Everyone calls him Joe Ginsu, though his hacker handle is TrapAvoid. He could infiltrate the infrastructure systems of all but the most technologically secure nation-states. In his spare time, he steals intellectual property from companies outside the US, and he sometimes plants incriminating information—false flags—for the fun fuck of it.

  Baum’s phone would come back in one piece, accompanied by a zipped file on a thumb drive or, for an added $2,000, a bound, hardcopy ream of data: GPS positioning maps; spreadsheets of contacts, calls, and locations; a list of passwords; printouts of archived text messages and emails stored on web servers; transcripts of voicemails; tax information, answers to security questions, driver’s license and Social Security numbers. But why bother.

  The snow’s here. He busies himself with the sundry tasks in the transition from bivouac to outpost. Working on the final phase of his yurt now that he’s heaved the woodstove upmountain and into place, he bumbles and trips over the two coon kits barking at his ankles, scaling his pant leg if he stands still too long. His mind returns to a scene, an exchange of dialogue, that asks for more attention than it merits. He forces it away with little acknowledgement.

  Back it comes. Here he is, days later, and Wright’s lady vet—high-volt, low-current—is still whirring through his synapses.

  The kits bop over in the falling snow, clawing and climbing atop each other, yapping. He moves his work, skinning a squirrel, readying it for a slow roast.

  To the kits, he tosses the tail. They play with and fight over it before devouring it. Then curl up together and laze near him, their eyes drifting open every time he moves or makes a sound.

  He fits together the last length of chimney, supported by an exterior stanchion and piped out the bowed wall of the yurt. The box stove is an ancient three-legged Ransome Rathbone that’s rusty outside but sound in. Where the pipe meets the wall of the yurt, he wrapped it in a cuff of asbestos insulation pulled from the basement of Esther House. With the shelter complete, he lights a low fire to break in the stove and to see if the whole thing will blow. Once it’s burning, and the yurt warms without drawing smoke, he wants to share what he’s made.

  * * *

  Evangelína’s downright hot. Amazed by the vaguely miraculous heat her body radiates in the cold. She unzips her parka. Soon she’ll take it off in the Catskill chill before sunrise. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it was after sunset—no real difference between before the beginning and after the end. Then there’s the pulk, which she forgets for stretches now that she’s loose. Harnessed to her waist, she pulls the sled beast-of-burden behind her over the flats, poling up the steeps, down the broad snowy swath of blanketed road. The sled holds a slushy half-gallon of water, a few energy bars, her phone that gets spotty reception in the whole region, and the Standard Grande portfolio, with all its privileged information, in a gallon Ziploc freezer bag. She considers shucking her weight vest, but she’d still have to lug it in the pulk, unless she left it trailside. She continues on as she is.

  The overcast sky is silvering. Her downhill pace is steady. She has little idea where she’s going as she tries to remain on the narrowing road, switchback after switchback obscured by snow. When she tires, if the landowner doesn’t accost her, all she’ll need do is turn round and retrace the swath cut by the pulk through the snow. Her return will be mostly downhill. She looks at her watch. She’s tromped for nearly an hour and hasn’t reached the Standard. Worried she’s lost, she stops, rests, takes out the Standard file and checks the topographical map, finds Wittenberg, Slide, and Peekamoose mountains, Reconnoiter Rock. She should be coming into the Sundown Wild Forest. The white road will pass the Neversink Reservoir, depositing her at the property line of the Standard.

  For Mamí, for Maya, the road is all-important. Maya cities were networks of sacbeob, white ways, raised boulevards paved with limestone stucco over rock and rubble fill, some of which stretched for hundreds of miles connecting city to coast, temple to cenote. Maya roads were hallowed white paths through shadow country. To Maya, the Milky Way was White Road, route into and out of the underworld, and the night sky was the reflective surface of the water in a sacred cenote, the pool below mirrored overhead. Cenote Sagrado was upside-down entry into the heavens, and the road was the way. Not only the beginning of life, its end and what came after, the road was life.

  * * *

  Slow, noisy. Men are cows. Throats exposed. Ever on hind legs. Offer their organs and entrails to him. More than deer, men are made to be fed upon. Fat as pigs. Men should starve. More plentiful than deer. The cougar fights his urge. Easy prey. For dogs and men. He’s hungry. The bird in him. Snow deep, early. The odor he’s after. Stronger on the trail, closer. Mixed with opened wood. The human bitch makes him hungry, a new way. He flattens his ears, puffs his tail. Crouching, he approaches. She holds a small tree. Makes human sounds. The creek where it’s shallow. Closer, he knows her smell. In heat. He shows himself. Telling her he could take her. One way or the other.

  * * *

  As Smith worked in the snowfall, her mind stirred everywhichway, a dissociative mess, her ADD overactive, her thoughts like snowflakes in the storm.

  She was used to being the only woman outnumbered by a wild bunch of hooligan Boy Scouts. Getting the crap jobs. But this, this was worse than a hazing. Could be an honest-to-god curse. “Split sycamore.” So impossible was it. Yet she was doing her damnedest to appreciate the task as part of her education.

  The temp was well below freezing yet she’d worked up an honest lather. Sweaty, she shrugged off her full fur and searched for the wedge in burying snow.

  She stopped to consider an idea that seemed not hers. More like it emerged from the Catskills. She was reasonably certain her brain would be contained in her skull till her dying day. She’d always assumed her mind would be too, but she was learning otherwise. Her mind ventured outward, went on scouting missions, its limits defined not by her body but by her interactions with her environment. The birch, the white oak, the elm, they were extensions of her while she considered them—one of the trees moved in a way that should’ve been impossible. Made her feel hallucinatory.

  Milt still hadn’t surfaced, not since they’d gotten back from visiting the lawyer. The c
ompany was worried, some of the vets scary in the severity of their instability. Even Vessey, the most together of the scattered bunch, seemed unbalanced.

  She raised the maul and swung it down and it lodged there till she yanked it forcibly out—splitting sycamore was like counterinsurgency. You couldn’t just drive a wedge into a wheel of sycamore and watch the whole thing come apart. “Need patience and finesse,” she told the wheel. Get to know it intimately—not only how cells of resistance grew but why—and this was best done by women. The feminine side of war.

  Sycamore was a tree like one gnarly knot. With Vessey’s help, she was becoming a forestry buff, understanding how trees lived, thrived, what slowed their growth and killed them off. Past couple of nights, soon as the sun went down, the vets huddled around the library fireplace. She buried her face in a woodsy book so she didn’t have to interact. She was trying to know one tree from the next. Not just type from type, but developing relationships with individual trees, which had personalities and attitudes all their own. Like this here sycamore, hollow at its core, gutted by generations of carpenter ants till the tree crashed down under the weight of an earlier storm. From the outside, the sycamore looked healthy, sturdy as could be, but inside was another story. So it was with Milt.

  Vessey had handed her a coverless copy of Know Your Woods. In it she kept returning to the entry for American sycamore. Read how wood grain was determined by the arrangement of cells. In easy-to-split woods, cells gathered on a straight plane. American sycamore not only twisted as it grew, it changed direction year to year, the cells interlocking as they spiraled clockwise and counterclockwise in successive years—resistance ingrained in it. Made her think American sycamore was America. Turn right for a time only to torque left. Back and forth, year after year, a split America grown ever more resistant to splitting. Only to be brought down by ants.

  Beyond the short stack of sycamore, the forest was beautifully black, gray, and white in the snow. Scene from an old movie. She never had a favorite kind of tree, never knew enough to care. The American sycamore, the ghost tree. Could be the totem of Standard Company. Ghost platoon stationed at a ghost resort. Lost firebase in the falling snow. Spooks trying to scare off trespassers in a region of the country left for dead. Untouched bowls of ghost borscht in ghost hotels at the edge of ghost town after ghost village. Ghost mills and quarries. Ghost tanneries. Ghost industry in a Ghost Belt all but forgotten by a nation gone to hell under a ghost God.

  A noise in the hushed treeline. The snow muffling everything.

  The more aware she became of a living, breathing natural world absent of people, the more people made sense. She was getting the hang of divining their motivations and inclinations even if she couldn’t tolerate them. Maybe that was what it meant to grow up, earn some seniority and a bit of perspective. She felt ancient. War did that to you. Each day—even the down days when nothing much happened—was a lifetime anxiously lived.

  She assessed the work she’d done. All the woods, each when freshly split, had distinct smells: the ash, green olives; the oak, mustard; the maple, vanilla. The top inch of her chopping block, a wheel of hickory, had gone matted from countless cuts.

  She didn’t love it up here but she appreciated it, where you could be hot in the cold, a beautiful feeling, much better than the redundancy you got in the desert: hot in the heat.

  One of her wrecks, on MSR Tampa. Nearly killed a mother and a couple of boys—she’s tipped the HET into a culvert. Can’t get her M4 out of the rack. When she climbs from the overturned truck, one boot sloshes strangely, a boy in her face, teary and screaming. She’s sure the preteen runt is going to shoot her square in the teeth with what looks like an old shoe. A Marine shouts and has a mean bead on the boy. Turns out to be a flattened soccer ball—probably cost his family a month’s wages, that or it was given him as part of a coalition win-their-hearts-and-minds campaign—goddamn soccer ball nearly gets him shot in the chest.

  The boy gawks and points, goes silent. She’d been swinging her arm out the open door as she drove, pounding the side of the truck to scare off the bleating goats—so damn skinny their ribcages like canvas over radiators. The goats got immobilized by the sound of the air horn, stood there in the road till someone carried them off or plowed through them. Smith glances where the boy points: her upper arm has acquired an additional, odd-angled joint. The bone, white as a new tooth, busted out of her skin, tore through her sleeve. Blood seeps down the length of her and pools in her desert boot, sloshing with each step. The boy whispers a word in Pashto and runs away—she woke nights hearing his voice. Or the voice of the other boy, one she did kill in Saydabad. Woke to the voices of all the boys and girls of the wars—Afghan, Iraqi, American—like a choir lost in a dust storm.

  She listened to the trees around her. Her attention got stuck on a large snag centered on a trunk. The snag, an old amputation that bark had grown over, became a face. Two deep-set eye sockets, one dark, one gold verging into green, both eyes beautifully lined, high tawny cheekbones over an orange anvil of a nose, a full lipless mouth, grinning. Inhuman. When she made out ears, triangular, her skin whizzed. She froze. A big cat. Identification animated it. The beast looked to be missing an eye. It turned and offered her its profile, as if deciding she was no threat, and then prowled ahead, its body looking like the felled trunk of a tree moving between trees. She said, “Florida fucking panther in the Catskill Mountains?” and felt her hip for her sidearm, which wasn’t there. It was meters away on top of a stump, gathering snow.

  * * *

  Evangelína’s burning calf feels better when she’s moving. She sprints up the next incline. Charges downhill. Here’s the runner’s high, a wellness she only comes upon occasionally, on long distances, but she’s never worked this hard before, and soon she starts to struggle, to tire, weaken. She considers giving up. Go out again tomorrow, wait till the plows have done more work. She’s making deals with herself. Reach that tree, turn back. She reaches the tree and keeps running forward.

  She cuts off Neversink Road onto Burnt Ridge Road. Finds a trailhead that leads to a high corrugated fence, wide gaps between the metal sheets—she’s found it. Beyond, she can pick up one of the many old logging roads crisscrossing the nearly 2,000-acre Standard plat. She has a moment of fright, like at the airport. Someone’s watching.

  * * *

  The panther licks its whiskers, shuts its open eye for a slow second.

  Without looking away, Smith takes slow steps to the stump. Pulls her pepperbox. Slides the latch that pops the breech of the quad barrel. She checks the four cartridges and snaps it closed. When she looks up, taking aim, there’s no target.

  She needs to run the image from her mind. Something out there—the cat maybe—gives her the feeling of the calm before the bomb. She’ll check on Milt.

  As she gathers the wedges—cold and rusty chunks of steel, carrying the maul at Right Shoulder, Arms—she hears something. She stops, listens. She squeezes the ax handle, then drops it to redraw her sidearm.

  * * *

  After an hour of tracking, taking risks being spotted—Vessey and Egon keeping a distant watch—Ray catches Wright’s lady vet alone splitting wood.

  Her alpaca hide hangs from a tree branch, and she’s steaming in the snow.

  He takes his sweet time creeping to her. Inside three meters, he decides to redo their last encounter, their first encounter, to see if it plays out differently. He scuffs his boot. She drops her maul and wheels around.

  There’s a metallic glint at her waist that trips in him an autonomic response—he lunges and chops his ulna on her radius, torqueing up her wrist, then wraps her arm in the bend of his, his hand slipping behind his back and gripping his belt to keep tension on her trapped arm. With his free hand, he pries the small, weighty pistol from her grip, lets go her arm, elbowing her in the solar plexus to force her backward, make space, a delivered blow that drives him into a quick half-spin. He faces her. She stands doubled over. He aims her sidear
m at the crown of her head, his finger searching for and finding no safety catch.

  He waits without hurry for her to regain her breath. This encounter is a force escalation of their first; that time, he hadn’t touched her except to offer a hand.

  When she stands upright, short of breath, facing her own firearm, she doesn’t register recognition, only fear, and he remembers they met while he was coal black.

  He assesses her weapon: .357 pocket pepperbox. Looks like a cop dropgun. He breaks the breech. Loaded with .38 Special rounds. Mean little gun poorly cared for, showing some spots of rust. An engraving on its barrel.

  “I’m your huckle bearer?” he asks. “Hell’s a huckle bearer?” He flips the gun around and offers it to her butt-first, saying, “Want to show you something.”

  “Who the fuck…” She raises her arms over her head, stretching her diaphragm. “Thought you were a big cat come to eat me.” She lowers her arms, holds her ribs.

  He wants to apologize, wants to tell her his name, but he withholds. “We met,” he says. “While you were … indisposed.”

  “You’re the asshole.”

  “Get the Standard grand tour yet?”

  She says she’s still going through the hazing phase. “Been poking around some. Snow’s slowed things. Everyone preoccupied with winterizing.”

  “How long you been at this?”