The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  When he apologized again, she said, “Quit your apologizing. Lot of people got it a whole lot worse. Least I had me a daddy to watch over me. Granted, he fucked me up in other ways. But not many Warlocks willing to change a diaper and raise a baby girl on his own. Did the best he could. Which, mind you, wasn’t good, but he kept me alive.”

  They were quiet for a time, watching the raccoons paw each other.

  “I should probably go check on Milt.”

  A pup stood and shambled behind Ray’s back. Ray winced. The pup appeared on his shoulder, whining sweetly and sniffing his ear. “Don’t think I’m gonna be able to eat them.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you’re gonna let a little affection get in the way of a coon stew. Other vets at the Standard talk about you like you’re a stone-cold killer.”

  “Like a professional athlete, career of a stone-cold killer’s a short one.”

  They were quiet again—she basked in it like the first sunny day of spring after a winter the likes of which she’d never known. The only tension came from her resisting her want to touch him, be touched by him.

  There was a single decorative note, an artful line drawing. “Why the pair of starry eyes up there?”

  “That’s the Third Star.”

  “There’s only two.”

  “You make the third one with your mind.”

  She untied her hair and shook her head. “Show me.”

  “An eye exercise,” he told her. “Two Rub el Hizb symbols. You refocus your vision on a point between them and kind of push them together. When you get it, the third star looks like it’s floating in space. Takes practice. Helps keep my vision sharp. My acuity’s deteriorating. When I took my MEPS physical, scored 20/9 vision.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Back in my youth,” he told her, “assuming you’re 20/20, I could see you at 600 meters and you’d have to close in to 300 to see me. My recruiter, after seeing my score, tried to push me toward flight training, but all I wanted was to be a pair of boots on the ground.”

  “You cold?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “You’re shaking.”

  “Nervous.”

  She smiled. “I do bite.”

  “The doc,” he said, “after he praised me for my vision, made fun of my ears.”

  She turned and regarded him, ear to ear.

  He put on the coon earmuffs, and the coon kits perked up and whined.

  “Now I see why. They’re furry, and smelly.”

  “Ears don’t line up,” he told her. “Never noticed before. One’s a quarter inch lower. Got all self-conscious. Few months back,” he said, “found this book in the Esther Library, doing some reading up on birds of prey—we’d lost six chickens in two evenings. Barn owls,” he said, “have asymmetrical ears. When they hear a noise, they can pinpoint the location because of the slight time difference it takes to reach each ear.”

  She felt herself loosen, a localized warmth and relaxation in what she imagined was her uterus. Opposite of a cramp. She’d felt the feeling in the early going of her courtship with Travis. Forgot all about it, how it came this close to queasiness but stopped just shy, like the ratchet up right before a rollercoaster drop. But here with Ray, there was more to it. Maybe it was just the yurt, the cozy fur, his owl anecdote, a warm stove, the glorious view. She said, “I should go.”

  He nodded.

  “Before I do, tell me bout your wife. Bet it’s a sob story. But I think I can take it, in here, with you. This about the most at ease I’ve felt in years.”

  “Some other time.”

  “Reverend—you can tell me that at least.”

  “After I lost my wife, I was done. I was…” They both can nearly see his thoughts arc up and out of the yurt, over the Eastern Seaboard, across the Atlantic, the European continent, like an intercontinental ballistic missile, to land in the Middle East.

  She prodded, “Go on.”

  “Right. Well. Seriously considered becoming Log Cabin. Get discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Want to know how out of my mind I was?”

  She wanted to believe him. “Yes.”

  “Became a minister.”

  “Get out.”

  “Man of the cloth. Talking to an ordained member of the Spiritual Humanist clergy.”

  “Reverend.”

  “Made the mistake of telling Wisenbeker. Sometimes I was the Reverend Right Honorable Ranger. Sometimes R&R. They love their nicknames. Certificate of ordination’s in storage in Liberty. But that alone wasn’t gonna get me out of an active duty enlistment contract, even if it was almost up. But it strengthened my claim. Gave grounds to request conscientious objector status. My CO was unimpressed, but he took pity on me after I confessed to marrying a local national. Figured he wouldn’t care now she was dead. I was right. I’d already carried my load and then some. Took a couple months to process, but it got me my honorable with a little bit of disability and a life insurance policy.”

  “I’ll be.”

  “Left Baghdad,” he told her, “went straight back to Amman. Spent all of two weeks not participating in warfare or assisting the military. Met a guy at a strip club and got a job as a shooter for a security start-up. Hopped companies three times in as many months. By March of ’04 was getting ambushed in the private sector, with the best outfit operating. Stayed in Iraq another seven years. Was an EC, expat contractor. Didn’t even come home on leave. Took all my off time in Amman.”

  “Reliving your honeymoon?”

  “Sullying it’s more like it. Stayed in Sweifieh at the Turino Hotel. Spent my days, and a lot of money, across the street, at Valentine. Topless bar. Ogle the Syrian and Lebanese girls. Never find a Jordanian working there. Lot of Russians. Chinese. Trying to recast my experience, or outnumber it. Only made things worse.”

  “What brought you back to the States?”

  “A job.”

  “How’d you lose it?”

  “Didn’t,” he said, “still doing it.”

  “What, they let you work from yurt?”

  He opened the woodstove but didn’t put another log on. A wave of dry heat flooded the air. “Being paid to find the woman who’s here to buy Wright out.”

  “Paid? By who?”

  He shrugged.

  She reached for her alpaca pelt on the floor—it was a part of the floor. Hers, she recalled, hung outside on the line.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  “I’m listening,” she said, “if you got something else to say.”

  “Spent the last year spying on Wright.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mean I’ve been paid to be here.”

  “By who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “If you’re gonna come clean, come.”

  “Some Kingston lawyer working as middleman.”

  “How’d you get this job?”

  “One of my bosses said the parent company was looking for a vet collecting disability to do a little stateside work. Good pay, low risk. Was already far past toast, so I said sign me up.”

  “What was the name of the company?”

  “Zeitgeist.”

  “That was the parent company?”

  “No, parent company was … I don’t remember. They’re all shells and subsidiaries over there. We were doing a lot of securing pipelines and refineries. But the company who swooped in and made the two SEALs who started it millionaires a hundred times over specialized in infrastructure.”

  “Construction company.”

  “Maybe.”

  “SW&B.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “You sure?”

  He told her that the company was some sort of service provider, one of those names intended to be forgettable, more generic the better. “When the company bought Zeitgeist, they changed its name to Secure Solutions—they seemed oblivious to the fact that we then became the SS—but we still went by Zeitgeist.”

  “So you’v
e been here nearly a year doing what exactly?”

  “Observing. Gathering information. Building chain of title. Vetting Wright.”

  “And you pass along this information for pay. Okay. And what am I, part of your cover? You playing me to help you weasel more information from a dying man?”

  “My work on Wright’s done. They got all they needed. Moving to the next phase.”

  “Which is?”

  “Purchase I would guess. They’ve sent in a right-of-way agent to make an offer. But they lost her.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means they can’t find her.”

  “You have anything to do with that?”

  “Come on, what do you take me for?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I was getting an idea, but you’ve just…” She started forced exhalations, beating back her panic with her breath.

  “Think they’re trying to leverage Wright out of the Standard if he refuses their lowball offer”—she was having a hard time hearing what he was saying—“lot of money behind it.”

  “If you’re done digging up dirt on Milt, why they still paying you?”

  “Lawyer wants me to track down this missing woman.”

  “So you stood to gain by her disappearance.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that. Had thought her disappearance, the possibility of it, could be useful. Even floated it by the lawyer. Told him I could subject her to a domestic rendition program. Kidnap her and pin it on Wright. Easy now. I see that look. No need to worry. I would never. I offered it as a way to see where the bottom is on this whole thing, take a sounding. Even offered you up when he shot down option one. See if the ethics got murkier with less loyalty. Not that I would. I was fishing. Trying to see if they’d bite.”

  “I’m feeling sick.”

  “I would never hurt you, or any other woman.”

  “You only kill men.”

  “Armed men that have it coming to them, that’s right.”

  “What if the lawyer’d said yes?”

  “I might’ve killed him.”

  “You’re not joking.”

  “If he’d said yes, at the very least, I was planning on working my way up the chain of command, find who’s giving the orders. Maybe kill that guy.”

  “How do you know a woman’s not giving the orders?”

  “These days, it’s possible.”

  “It ever occur to you that I’m working undercover, sent in by the same company who’s been paying you?”

  His look darted toward the door. Then he leaned back and squinted. “I’m trying to be honest and open with you, like you asked, and now you’re fucking with me.”

  “You’re a whore. You’re not to be trusted. Look me in my fucking face. You have any idea where this woman is?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  She kept quiet. It was all sinking queasily in. “Where’d all these pelts come from?”

  “Milt’s herd. Alpaca fleece is warmer than wool, hypoallergenic. Even flame-resistant.”

  She counted the hides that made up the floor and walls, at least ten—there was the zipping feeling, hairs on end. “Where’s E. Prince?”

  He pointed to the door flap. “You walked through him.”

  She stood. “Milt’s convinced his cougar took him.”

  “He gave me the go-ahead to take E. Prince.”

  She reached for the door flap and flinched from it.

  “Where you going?”

  “See Milt. Tell him he’s got a traitor. Before I do”—she pointed a finger an inch from his face—“I need to tell you, Go the fuck to hell.”

  His dark laugh troubled her more than what he shouted after her as she tore out of the yurt: “Hell’s not somewhere you go, sweetheart, hell’s someone you become.”

  * * *

  Evangelína comes to. Freezing, sodden. Blackness gives way to gray, watery. Bracken sways lazily overhead. The ellipse of un pez, a fish, swims near her face. She’s shivering. The dead are cold—she is dead. Staring up at the icy underside that is the frozen surface of the reservoir. Or not. Cloudcover. Too early for the reservoir to ice over. Not sediment falling on her—snow. Not bracken—trees, leafless. And not a fish but a face—familiar, or not familiar, but friendly. Dark-skinned. Dark-eyed. But bizarre. A face topped by a face, one human, one not—a wayob, shape-shifter.

  “Mamí,” she says.

  The lower face, the human face, speaks. Something kindly, something reassuring.

  A human hand—rough, dirty—reaches and touches her neon parka. The hand recoils, the lower face, human, twists, like an old vine. Another hand, holding something, a young tree, a sapling topped by a skeletal hand, rears up. Quick strike that snakes down and into the pit of her pelvis.

  The wayob struck her with its sapling—it all makes terrible sense—the sapling became a snake. The snake is a nauyaca, Mexican viper. A hot, venomous agony blooms below her bellybutton. When the wayob yanks back the snake, she hears a wet rip, fatty. The wayob has torn her bib ski pants, or the nauyaca has been pulled in two. Pain in, and over, her pelvis sparks a blinding brightness behind her eyes.

  The face under the face wavers. The face of her papí, younger, leaner, worn, a thin beard. The face—concerned, confused—grows. Closer. Her jacket flings open. She’s being undressed, readied for bed. She tries to say something, reach out and touch this man she’s missed so desperately, so dearly. He rears back, terror on his face, dropping the sapling-become-snake in the snow. In his hand, he holds a weight pulled from her jogging vest.

  * * *

  In the swirling flurries, Smith passes cairns topped with snow like stocking caps. A few tower overhead. Stony sentries sure to collapse. The cairns, their precariousness, make her anxious and, when at her back, they leave her with the sense she’s being watched. At the cusp of a panic attack, she enters the pines.

  After untold minutes, she’s staring over the edge of her composure, looking dizzily down into the coiled void of her anxiety. She’s comatose somewhere, catatonic, airlifted to a CSH cut into a stand of Afghan pines in Ghazni Province, awaiting transport to a fixed-facility hospital, having suffered a catastrophic head injury after one of her wrecks. She didn’t kill the Saydabad boy. She died to avoid him. This, all that’s come after, is make-believe, a drawn-out dream—her conscious mind coping with extended unconsciousness.

  She fights this rabbit-hole notion with her breath, as if her breath were the ultimate weapon. Draws big, vast pulls of sappy air to combat the condemned thinking, the claustrophobic falling. She’s freezing. Losing herself. She left behind the earmuffs. Refused to touch her alpaca hide. Inside it hid her sardine-tin survival kit sewn into its own little pocket. The only thing she brought in her flight from conniving Ray and his hurt-locker yurt was her sidearm and bandolier. She increases her pace to warm herself.

  Again, she comes to the cairns like a sprawling small-scale Stonehenge. She can’t believe they’re the same ones, can’t believe Ray hasn’t used some trick to keep them upright. Can’t believe he’s been royally bullshitting Milt for the last year. A plume of blue smoke rises from the flue of the yurt. Fuck. She turns a 180. The cairns mock her and seem to wobble. She side-kicks one—her anxiety abates. She front-kicks another. Feeling relief, she boots over cairn after cairn. They come clopping and thudding down, sliding and cracking. After she’s toppled every last tower, she feels wretched, stupid.

  More lost minutes. Ten, maybe twenty. Then, the trees thin. She arrives at her juvenile aftermath: bluestone kicked haphazardly about. For the third time, she’s found the fucking yurt. She’s feeling crazy, hopeless enough to slink back into camp and beg directions. Her alpaca pelt no longer hangs on the clothesline. Sickened, she stands before the door flap that is the hide of poor poached and skinned E. Prince. She throws it open.

  Inside, the two coon kits wake and whine. They lie curled near the stove. She doesn’t see the earmuffs, and Ray’s gone.

  Her shivers grown to shaking, she pulls
and tears the hide of E. Prince off the yurt and drapes it over her shoulders. She tromps past the once-were cairns and reenters the pines dragging a dead branch that cuts a swath behind her. After another fifteen or so minutes and a few more missteps, she finds the trail down toward the Standard.

  * * *

  Evangelína puts her hand to her stomach, below her navel. Her fingers touch something slick—her papí made an offering. Left a gift of food, his favorite. He set on her a coiled chorizo fresco—on their annual family road trips into Mexico when she was a girl—she is a girl, Papí insisting they make the dry, dusty drive to Toluca to gorge on, and then stockpile, chorizo verde, locally made pork sausages stuffed with tomatillo, cilantro, chili peppers, and garlic. She’s never seen her papí eat so much and so pleasurably. When sated to burping, he buys ten kilos he smuggles across the border in an ice chest shut into a battered valise. Evangelína and Mamí are nervous as mojadas, wet ones, crossing the Rio Grande on a moonless midnight, Papí saying in Spanish, Easy, girls, it’s only food. If they find it, they’ll confiscate the chorizo, not me.

  Papí’s offering, warm, raw, slips from her grip. Her fingers come away wonderfully red—Mamí’s poppies in a subtropical downpour. Maybe the drought has broken, maybe she can go home, to Papí, to Chichí, to a place in a cenote where all the wants and wishes of her life are met like basic needs.

  She hears Papí tromping away through snow. She must face the end alone. But his face, fatherly, under a face, feral, still hovers before her. She’s staring through the memory of it, the past painfully becoming her present.

  * * *

  Seasons ago, his mother killed the other cubs. Cubs the cougar calls for some nights. Together, they ate them. After, she clawed his eye. Screamed and hissed him off to hunt on his own. The eye dried. Fell from his head. A bad berry. His mother, old, weak. Seasons since he last caught her trail. He pads through deep overturned snow. Hears an answer to his emptiness. Kill the bird. Big, clumsy tracks. Injured bear. Huffing and grunting its hurt. Closer, not bear. Human. Warm, already open.