The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  “This here’s day two.”

  “Who gave orders?”

  “Stone.”

  “Wright assigned me the detail my first day,” he says. “Had blisters on top of blisters. After a week, I marched over and told him to fuck himself. He could split his own damn sycamore. Know what he said? Said, What took you so long?” He wags her gun at her. “Name’s Ray.”

  She takes and holsters it at the small of her back. “Why they all call you Reverend?”

  “You been by the indoor pool?” he asks. “Pool house is something to see in the snow. Like a Siberian terrarium.”

  “Can’t.”

  He tells her it’ll take five minutes. “Then you can get back to your splitting sycamore, a job you’ll never finish. No one does. This tree finishes you. One of Milt’s psychological snares. This one a game of Uncle. Point’s to make you give up. Gauge is how long it takes.”

  “Could use a break,” she says, and he leads her on a short, silent walk through snow. At a dark stairway underground, he tells her it’s the basement door to the pump room.

  When Smith hesitates, Ray says, “Sorry. Don’t mean to scare you. No reason you should trust me. We’ll go in the front door.”

  “You don’t scare me.” She draws her pistol. “It’s okay, Ranger. Lead the way.”

  * * *

  Evangelína’s rapid heart accelerates. It must be close to 200 BPMs. She’s giddy again, has gotten a fourth or fifth wind. Races ahead, noisy as possible, to draw attention.

  She finds a trail that forks down a bank to a dry creek-bed. She charges the bank and slips. Skis a moment on her snowshoes. The toe of one catches a crag. She goes heels over head. As she falls, the sled of the pulk clips her calf—wedges into the back of her lower leg. A wet pop. Snapped against the heel and the calf with a broken bungee cord. Her hip and elbow slam against snowy ground.

  * * *

  Ray’s on point through the dank network of pipes and pumps that once heated and filtered the Olympic-sized pool. They take the stairs and ascend through a door in the floor. Noticeably warmer. The walls are windows four stories high, a glass gymnasium. Or a greenhouse gone wild. On the apron surrounding the pool, mature ferns grow over sprawling beds of plush moss. The green glow, iridescent against the snowy backdrop on the other side of glass, is otherworldly, a public pool in the abandoned Emerald City.

  “My god,” Smith says. “Gives me the feeling of being in a snow globe. Except the snow’s on the outside.”

  Ray says, “Can’t get over those chandeliers.”

  She looks up and gawks. “Chandeliers in a pool house. Wow.”

  Lichen-covered deck chairs circle the pool. There’s a diving board, a bar. Sounds of water rushing inside—snow melting and leaking though the roof. She steps to the lip of the pool. A foot of swampy water at its twelve-foot deep end, a couple of deck chairs, trash.

  “I should go,” she says into the pool.

  “I do something?”

  She turns to Ray, her face twisted. “Milt’s not gonna make it.”

  “Why so sure?”

  “Saw him have a seizure.”

  “So what are you gonna do?”

  “Me? Fuck you, I just got here. What are you gonna do?”

  “VA hospital’s probably the best place for him.”

  “That aint what he wants.”

  “And what’s he want?”

  “Curl up in the dark and die, I think.”

  Ray asks, “What’s Vessey say?”

  “Milt told me not to tell anyone. Also asked me to keep an eye on you.”

  He laughs.

  “You’re just like him, you know.”

  “What.” He spits on moss. “Washed up wannabe operator? Onetime black nationalist and LRRP with a Jew fetish? I don’t think so.”

  “Well I’ll be,” she says. “Looks like I just found me the sore spot.”

  “Sweetheart, I’ve got more sore spots than a leper colony.”

  “You got the same tendency as him,” she says. “Only difference is he goes underground. You retreat to higher ground.”

  “You sound like a shrink.”

  “What happens when you been well shrunk.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Higher ground.”

  “I’m married.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  “Ever see my husband again, might have to murder him.”

  “Honeymoon’s over?”

  “Honeymoon was my first deployment.”

  “Spent mine in Amman.”

  “Your first deployment?”

  “My honeymoon.”

  “You’re a liar.” She leans over, hands on knees, starts breathing heavily. She yells, “Oh why’s the bottom always got to fall the fuck out of everything!” She grips her chest. “Feeling anxious.”

  “Let’s walk it off.”

  “Real easy to take advantage of me when I’m like this. Get real passive. When my husband would take it upon himself to mistreat me.”

  “Sounds like he deserves a talking to. Maybe we pay him a visit. Subject him to an enhanced interrogation.”

  Again that stricken look, more deaddog and hangdog.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “No more jokes.”

  When she starts shivering, he says, “I made you something.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She lets herself be guided outside, but not before one final look over her shoulder at the pool house like a deserted island in a glass bottle.

  * * *

  Evangelína pulls off a mitten. She finds a knot at the base of her calf. Another knot, smaller, at the top of her heel. No entry wound, no blood. No bone stabbed bluntly through the skin. Her hand has gone immediately numb in the cold. She can’t be sure of what she’s touching. Can’t flex her foot forward or back.

  Using her poles, she stands. Upright, she’s afraid her calf might burst. She hobbles over the creek-bed to her tossed snowshoe and, sitting, tries for a few minutes to pull it on. She spits. She gives up. It won’t matter; she can’t put any weight on the foot.

  Mitten off, her middle finger is the first to pass from numb to burn, as if she’d run it under scalding water. Stupid, the way the body senses a freeze and a fire in the same way. Further evidence it can’t be trusted, especially not with pain. This attitude, her mistrust of the body’s overprotective alarm system, allows her to be extreme in her exercise. She’s tempted to force weight onto the foot. First she settles her calf on a mound of snow to ice it while she unfastens the bungee cord from the tarp. She checks her phone—no service.

  She drinks from the CamelBak of slushy water, chews and swallows an energy bar like a nutty length of rubber, considers jettisoning the dead weight of the Standard portfolio. The temperature must be below zero. She takes it on faith that the sun has come invisibly up behind the cloudcover. Switching off her headlamp, she stashes it along with the thrown snowshoe under the tarp that she bungee cords back over the sled. She considers removing her weight vest, but its bulk will help keep her warm. She pulls out a few weights the size of candy bars before it becomes too much trouble.

  She can’t tell how long it takes her to scrabble over the low bank, but when she finally does, she’s exhausted in a way she’s never been. The trail from here is mostly downhill to Route 55. She descends it gradually, clumsily, falling often. Every time the toe of her hurt foot touches the ground, the anguish is so absolute she nearly blacks out.

  * * *

  Their hike felt more like an advance than a retreat, and the man on point, this Reverend Ray, was a compelling contradiction. Made Smith think of Basic Training: in his company, she felt safe and frightened both, challenged in a way that was intimidating and intense, life-changing even, but not deadly. Travis was more like war. The threat was real.

  On the trail, they passed a set of tracks in snow. She read them as a person pulling a sled, but her mind jumped
to the panther. To test Ray, she told him something was taking the alpaca, adding, “Milt said it was some cougar he released.”

  “He is losing it.”

  “That’s what I thought. But then, right before you ambushed me, I saw it.”

  “Probably a bobcat.”

  “This thing was female-lion big. Florida panther big. The tail was two feet long easy. We’re talking 200 pounds.”

  “Could’ve been a cougar I guess.”

  “Cougars and panthers the same thing?”

  “Have to ask Wright,” he said. “Some serious tracks up here that aren’t bear. Paw prints big as a wok. Mud and snow amplify tracks. Cougar track is supposed to be twice as big as a bobcat. Cat tracks show no claws. Bear and dog—coyote, Egon—show claws.”

  After a time on the trail, mostly uphill, her legs burned, her toes numb, but her body was aglow with its self-made warmth. Then, Ray left the trail.

  She stopped, looking for some sort of marker. “Where you taking me?”

  His answer came as a quickening of his pace. She felt a pang of terror: she’d soon be cooked and cannibalized according to some classified appendix of the Ranger Handbook.

  “Home,” he told her, and the simple sound of his voice calling back to her—earnest and scratchy—put her at ease.

  They came up a ridge onto a reach of level ground. A dense stand of old-growth white pines, a barrens, dark, the trees over a hundred feet tall, two hundred years old. The treetops wove together and only a hint of light, a dusting of snow, reached the ground, where the carpet of needles was so deep it had bounce. Every tree looked the same as far as she could see. A piney maze. The air smelled like Christmas, felt thicker, wetter, a frost pocket, the humidity high. A creek must run nearby. Many of the treetops were reddish, their topmost branches like rusty flags. When she looked closer, a number of the trees, maybe half, seemed to be dying or dead. “What’s killing these pines? Been reading about blister rust.”

  “Some weevil.”

  Soon the stand thinned. Stack of stones, what looked like blocks of slate, stood next to the trunk of one pine. A precarious balancing act. Another stack, more precarious than the last, and then another. Countless of these stone towers, most only three or four stones, but a number stood chest high and must’ve been affixed with adhesive. Then there were two or three that defied not only gravity but believability. An oblong boulder balanced on a pebble tipped on a shard. Two massive triangular slabs perched point-to-point.

  “My cairns. How I relax.”

  They summited at a tremendous wet shelf of bluestone shielded from the snowfall or cleared of it. At the far end of the plateau, no trees grew, indication of an overlook. Near it stood a small circular structure, some kind of domed tent, stovepipe sticking blackly out one side. Lattice exterior and, inside the latticework, the walls looked suede. Like the Bedouin goat-hide tents she’d sat in sipping tea. She touched it—taut enough to bounce a rock off of. She rounded the leather tent. It came within inches of a sheer drop-off and—she gasped—a mountain view like a gut punch.

  Falling snow filled all the volume of the valley, and she intuitively knew how many snowflakes occupied the air, like white beans in a glass bowl. The number, finite, filled the limitless space of her imagination. When she tried to name it, the number, she lost it.

  In the stirring valley currents, drifting snow coursed like whitewater. The most substantial and lasting things in this world were not. This mountain holding her up was little more than the crest of a wave. Bound to break and crumble, washed away by weather.

  The mountain made her wonder if anything she’d done would survive her. She had made nothing lasting. Offered little. What if, in her small part, she’d done more harm than good? Hadn’t sacrificed, for the war efforts, the way she’d been told. Hadn’t given something of value but had taken, and by force. A burden on this wild blue ball and the people busying about it. Here she stood at an edge, gaping at a brimful valley, space and time nearly comprehensible, and she had nothing to give.

  Maybe in the end, all that mattered was not how much you did but that you simply did. You were. There would be no grand tallying. There would only be a slow, imperceptible subtraction. Like this mountain, this moment, eroding under her feet.

  She hoped there was more. She didn’t want her life to be a draw, a depression, a pull toward the downward spiral of chaos and disorder. She wanted to add order. To uplift. But she needed to start small, and maybe the place to begin was to make one supportive relationship and go gradually upward and outward from there.

  She faced Ray, long beard and wild hair. “You built this, made this, by yourself?”

  He nodded.

  “The wind won’t blow it over?”

  He told her the white pines were a natural windbreak, and the beauty of a dome was its low drag coefficient. “Wind makes downward pressure that keeps the structure in place.”

  “Who are you?”

  He took her by the sleeve and brought her to the far side of the shelter, where was stacked a face cord of split ash collecting snow. He pulled back the shearling flap.

  The yurt was entirely fur-lined save for one section of floor against a wall, where, on a foot-high slab of bluestone, crouched a cast-iron box stove silhouetted by a window and the snowy valley beyond. It was easily, undoubtedly, the coziest space she’d ever seen. She wanted to curl up inside and hibernate.

  Here was the absolute opposite of Milt’s sleeping quarters. The difference between the billet of a man at the end of his life and that of a man in his prime.

  When she moved to enter, he grabbed the waist of her pants and yanked, stopping her cold. “What,” she said, “no women allowed?”

  “Boots off.”

  His touch—firm—got her roiling.

  He said, “Any dirt gets in there stays. Can’t exactly plug in a vacuum.”

  She unlaced her boots in the falling snow, taking off the heavy alpaca hide and draping it over a clothesline that ran to a tree.

  He began unhitching his kit. Off came his tomahawk. Followed by a crazy-curved sacrificial knife. Last was a short fixedblade, iridescent black with a knotted-cord grip.

  “Why not just carry a gun?”

  “Gun wants—”

  “Tell me inside. I’m fucking freezing.”

  He held open the flap for her, and when she ducked in, he followed carrying an armload of firewood. Without a match, he got the fire going in a quick, magical minute.

  “Growing up,” she said, “I had this picture book, Little Fur Family. Had a fake fur cover. This is like being inside that book.”

  In his hand he held what looked like a pair of rats connected by a length of curved, whittled wood. He held the rodents out to her, and she reared back. He pulled them apart and placed them on her head—earmuffs. They were snug and warm and smelly, and she said, “Stink like road kill.”

  He reached and jerked them off her head, yanking her hair.

  “Ow, hey, no. Just because they’re smelly doesn’t mean I don’t want them. Christ almighty. This what you made for me?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Give them back. Thank you, that’s … What kind of fur is it?”

  He whistled. A moment later, from outside came a whine and growly barks.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Florida panther.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He opened the flap and made a whining noise, and in filed two small raccoons, side-by-side and leaning against each other while they lumbered like little bandit hunchbacks.

  “Fulan and Fulana.”

  They looked inseparable. Then, they separated. One of them came up and gave the earmuffs a sniff and whined.

  “These two gonna become a fur bra?”

  “Your earmuffs are their mother.”

  “Oh that’s awful.”

  “Had I known she had two pups, I wouldn’t’ve killed her. After, I thought I’d bring these two back to camp. Fatten them up first before
eating them. That upset you?”

  “Please,” she answered. “You’re talking to a Florida Cracker. Eaten me plenty of coon stew.” She told him how, when stationed at Leonard Wood, she was always trying to get Travis to go to the Gillett Coon Supper held in Arkansas ever year.

  When he got quiet, she said, “Tell me bout your wife.”

  “What are you, all of twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-five going on fifty.”

  “In the eyes, you do look middle-aged. But that’s war. You got the stony stare of a combat vet. But you’ve got the long, lovely body of a standout on the swim team.”

  “Played soccer in high school, center forward. Wanted to be Mia Hamm.”

  “I took judo and jiu-jitsu. Wanted to be Royce Gracie.”

  “That why no firearm? You all hand-to-hand?”

  He said a loaded gun wants to go off. “In a warzone, same as in the movies, always does. Coming back to the States, knew I was gonna have a tough time with that.” He mimed pulling a trigger. “Finger gets itchy,” he said. “Specially after ten years as a shooter. Coming home, every soldier’s confronted with the dilemma that a loaded gun shouldn’t go off.” He closed the damper on the woodstove. “You have to fire your weapon?”

  “More times than I can count, and all I was doing was driving truck.”

  “One of the most dangerous jobs in the service.”

  “Wish someone at the recruitment office woulda made mention.”

  “How’s it feel to get behind a wheel?”

  “Milt’s been helping me, but I’m skittish, to say the least.”

  “Ever ride a motorcycle?”

  “Practically conceived on a Shovelhead.”

  “Wait, I’m trying to see it. Okay, got it. You have some kinky folks.”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Motorcycle accident?”

  “Found burnt to a crisp,” she told him. “Mattress on the floor of a Parramore crack house. Say she probably passed out with a lit cigarette. Instead of putting her out, the other crackheads simply split. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t murdered.”

  He apologized.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Never really knew her. Hooked when she had me. Couldn’t even bother carrying me to term. I was a crack baby. Born at thirty-two weeks. Weighed all of four pounds eight ounces. Tiny. My daddy’s got a Polaroid he took of me sleeping in a cast-iron skillet, room in it for an omelet. Spent a month on the NICU. Daddy was there every day. My moms didn’t visit once.”