The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  He hikes from the Standard to his storage unit in Liberty to get some cash and to roll out his motorbike. Then he rides to the Monticello Walmart, where he buys a charger for Baum’s phone. He plants himself at a computer in the tiny Liberty public library. While the phone charges, he visits the credit-union website where he last maintained a checking account, thinking the company name might be there for each of his direct deposits.

  He can’t access the records. He closed the account when he got back to the States, liquidating his savings. He visits another site, Secure Aspects Group Inc., an industry resource for private-defense contracting. There, in their members’ forum, he runs a search for Zeitgeist, the company name before they became Secure Solutions. In a few threads he finds the name of the company that purchased Zeitgeist: Allstates Technical Services.

  The title of the first hit in a Google search is Allstates Technical Services, an IRJ Company—full-service provider of professional staffing solutions including contract recruiting and staffing … Fourth in the results is a page on the IRJ website, Subsidiary Operations, that lists Allstates alongside seven other companies. At the bottom is SW&B Construction.

  The company paying Ray to gather information on Wright is the same one offering to buy Wright out. Whatever it might mean, Ray has a location. If he feels the need, he can go to Houston and start shaking people down.

  He picks up Baum’s phone, partially charged. It’s still switched off. If he turns on the phone, he might have a few quick leads, but he’ll be compromised in four dimensions: longitude, latitude, elevation, and time. He decides he’s in no hurry. It’s in his best interests not to find Canek too quickly.

  * * *

  The underground air blew Alhazred back a step with its smell, funky and faintly sweet. In the cavernous darkness, he felt for the flashlight stashed in a nook of the passageway wall.

  Knowing the sound of his own voice helped beat back the dread, he started free-flowing: “Burrowing after you, old Saddam, who’s fully armed, you and your blinging gold-plated AK, but there’s no where, no way, no how to hide from our side. We’re on the dole, and we’re gonna smoke yo scaredy-ass out your challah-hole. Check it, don’t disrespect it, don’t undermine the will of Allah … of Allah … Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…”

  Alhazred reached the old laundry room and was assaulted by the stench of rot. From underfoot came a crackle. He shone his light at the floor. Wall-to-wall corpses, small, shriveled, a rodent killing field. He hopped involuntarily—the ceiling rippled like the surface of a dark lake. Bats. As many dead underfoot as sleeping facedown overhead.

  He focused on his task. The great brass bell, upended. It seemed to swallow light, was covered in a green fuzzy patina of verdigris. Propped by debris from the four floors it fell through, the bell was big as an overturned Volkswagen Bug. Its inscriptions were in a language Alhazred couldn’t begin to parse or place. In relief on the bell were warring figures, a crowned king of some sort and a great tree towering over a battle scene—all upside-down.

  Milt said the bell was sacred, said his father-in-law bought it for the price of its scrap metal—$15,000 during the Depression—and there were archaeologists hunting for it and folklorists who’d written dissertations on its disappearance from the rubble of a Balkan cathedral bombed in the First World War.

  Alhazred wielded the sledgehammer wrapped in burlap. “Allahu Akbar,” he said, striking the upturned bell—a loud, broken knell made him ache for earplugs.

  * * *

  The veterans of the Standard Grande wanted to know what in hell they were doing making way toward the Alpine village for an emergency muster. With Milton not around to remind them, they were forgetting tasks, could not for the life of them keep track of the days. They’d started to suspect that the party was puttering to an end, but none of them knew that the assembly taking shape would be their last.

  Stotts-Dupree and Luce arrived first, Stotts-Dupree’s face filled out—he’d found his denture in a dirty coffee cup, suspected Stone hid it there to fuck with him.

  Luce huffed a warm breath in his hand and cupped his stump. “Any idea what we’re waiting for?”

  “Waiting for word.”

  They stood aimlessly around the ash-filled fountain, listening to the erratic clangs resonating under the armory, cringing each time.

  Luce said, “Hey, let’s light this bitch. My stump’s feeling the freeze.”

  Stotts-Dupree nodded and together they gathered kindling and seasoned splits from the nearby stack. When Luce started arranging kindling in a tipi, Stotts-Dupree shoved it over, saying, “Nah, log-cabin style. Way you build a fire makes a political statement.”

  “This aint a fucking filibuster, STD, it’s a fire.” Luce pulled out a brass Zippo and snapped it open with one hand. “I’m just trying to warm up my stump here.” He held the flame to the end of his amputated arm.

  Stotts-Dupree rearranged the kindling, stacked some timber; while he did, a bird landed in a drift of ash and snow inside the fountain. Stotts-Dupree lifted the creature by its wingtip. “Bat.”

  “Leave it be. Could have rabies. Especially if it’s flying in the middle of the day.”

  “Dead. Just dropped out the sky into the cook fire, dead.”

  Luce clapped shut his lighter and inspected the bat pinched in Stotts-Dupree’s ashy fingers. “Looks like it has rabies. White dust all round its nose and mouth. That or it’s a bat with a bad coke habit.”

  Stone and Wisenbeker entered from the narrow passageway between two failing half-timbered structures, the Kosher Konditorei and Alf’s Sportladen.

  Luce said, “Either of you clowns know what’s what?”

  “Stone ran into Reverend,” Wisenbeker said, “who apparently has a crush on the lady cherry. Made her a pair of earmuffs.”

  Stone, wearing the earmuffs, held an alpaca fur in addition to the one draped over his shoulders. “If it looks like possum, smells like possum, must be possum.” He repositioned the earmuffs between his legs, one muff over his crotch, the other like a cottontail. He dropped Bellum’s alpaca hide in trampled, slushy snow. “Who’s building a log-cabin fire? Log cabin’s for gay Cub Scouts with Down syndrome.” He kicked over the unlit stack of wood and began rearranging it in a tipi.

  A bat flew overhead. They all watched it skitter through the sky and disappear beyond the shake-shingled roof of the Schokoladenladen.

  Botes came into camp holding a muddy hoe. “Anyone know what this muster’s about? This aint SOP.”

  No one responded.

  A bat flew cartwheeling over their shaking heads.

  They all looked up at the same section of sky, their attention yanked as if by reins. A sound like the distant clapping of a mob of children, faint and wafting. The contorted applause grew louder. The quizzical look on the face of Wisenbeker turned from amused wonder to terror, and as he yelled—“Incoming!”—there comes a shift. The sight, once each of the vets gets a visual, offers relief: a fleet of bats flies a few feet overhead. As the colony passes, bats flop to the ground by the dozens.

  Wisenbeker smacks Botes’s arm. “Acrobats.”

  When Botes says, “Hardy har har,” Wisenbeker starts humming what Botes recognizes as “Kill the Wabbitt.”

  The vets are laughing and yelping. Luce, too, until he catches a one-two combination, whacked in the ear and then walloped full-on in the face, the second bat’s needle teeth piercing his lip. The sharp pain, the sight of his own blood, snuffs out his sense of humor, and, waving his stump overhead, he yells, “Medic! I need a medic!”

  Stotts-Dupree hollers back, “Take cover, Luce! Reinforcements’re coming!”

  Merced runs into camp raking his short-timer’s stick through the flying thicket. He shouts at the sky dark with bats, “You find yourselves among the pueblos indígenas of the world! El mundo is indígena! The árabe! The indígenas! The mestizos! The negros! The hajji! They know the apocalypse returns again! From the cenotes of Mexico! The caves of Tora Bora! The banks o
f the Tigris! Where it all began, where—”

  * * *

  The cracked bell rang tragically. Hitting it felt like striking a living, breathing thing.

  Alhazred banged and banged again, and between bangs, in the reverberation, he heard that other noise, miraculous. The flutter of a million little wings. As he banged, the burlap wrap came undone from the head of the sledgehammer. He tore it off.

  Without the padding, he gave the bell a test whack. It clanged in a new way, a worse way, piercing, its gong become intelligible: Gone. Instead of stopping, he hit it harder, and harder still—gone, gone—his hands numbing. He slowed, tiring, and then he hit the bell a glancing blow at a bad angle, and the crack opened. The bell—in a shocking slowness of motion—began to fall into two unequal pieces.

  When the ringing stopped in the air, he still heard the faint flutter of wings and a few squeaks so high-pitched they sounded like the splintering of his teeth.

  * * *

  “Loco-ass Apocalypto Chicano caveman,” Botes says. “Surprised the bats aint flying out Merced’s damn mouth.”

  Over the flapping mass die-off, there comes an ungodly clang, a ringing thunderclap like the big bell’s been lightning-struck. The ground shakes.

  Feeling the tremor vibrate up through him, Luce uncurls from the fetal position, checks his bloodied lip and shoves Merced off the short wall into the tipi wood stack. Standing over Merced splayed in the fountain, Luce yells, “That’s it! I can’t take any more! I’m the fuck out of here!”

  Wisenbeker yells, “Where you think you’re gonna go?”

  “To get a drink! Then back to my fucking ex! Maybe she’ll house me till it stops raining bats!”

  As Luce exits the Alpine village, the bats begin to thin, and then the last few stragglers bumble overhead.

  Stotts-Dupree asks no one, “This the end of the end of the world?”

  Stone pokes out from under his alpaca hide. “The fuck’s Luce going?”

  Wisenbeker says, “Share a drink with his ex-wife.”

  “Now that Milt’s dead,” Botes says, “what you gonna do, Stone?”

  Stotts-Dupree says, “How you know the good brother’s dead?”

  “Come on, STD, it just rained bats.”

  “That case,” Stone says, “and if Luce is back on the bottle, I’m gonna go score.”

  “Strip club in Liberty?” Botes says. “Nice. What’s it called?”

  “You got a meth-head confused with a ladies’ man. I’m heading straight to Neversink. I’ll see you boys on the backslide.” He unties his alpaca hide, steps out from under it, and files in after Luce.

  * * *

  The bright blather that filled the Stardust Room made Milt squint. Sputnik chandeliers—spindly, gleaming, sharp—pulsed over the crowd.

  Backed by the big band, Sammy crooned “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” When the applause faded, he announced in his nasally voice, I’m taking five, fine people. Thank you very kindly. During the break, we’ve got a little something special planned, something far out—I mean that literally now—and we think you’ll dig it. Shirt unbuttoned halfway down his birdy chest, collar spread-eagled, he folded himself over in a limber bow. Hopping off the circular stage, he strode in that short gait of his—part showtime hustler, part pulled muscle—to the Teplitsky table.

  The band started a jazz standard Milt didn’t recognize. In most every joint down in the city on this Saturday night, people his age—black and tan, brown and yellow, red, white and blue—were disco dancing. A year after Travolta took his turn as Tony Manero, king of the dance floor at 2001 Odyssey in Brooklyn, and America still had the fever. It should’ve been the summer of Summer—Donna had charted one hit after another—but there’d been a serial killer on the loose, and so the summer belonged to Sam.

  But not at the Standard, where time slow danced.

  Sammy tipped an imaginary hat brim to Nehemiah, winked at Milt, and, over his blue tinted glasses, he looked at Ada sitting between them. Care to dance, doll?

  She said, Excuse me, Tateleh, touching her father’s hand, and stood without a glance Milt’s way.

  They’d been arguing for weeks. Over his drinking, over her last miscarriage, over Nehemiah’s reluctance to face the inevitable. Resorts were closing all around them—Youngs Gap, the Ambassador, the Flagler, the Laurels. Ada was also disappointed about her run in summer stock that just wound to an end, a run that didn’t include one leading role. In a stage whisper to Sammy, she said, Married the one soul brother in America who can’t get down.

  Sammy flashed his perfect dentures—Hahaa!—and shrugged a shoulder at Milt.

  Milt knocked back his bourbon and watched the fuzzed scene like a soft-focus shot in the movies. He and Ada had met in a black cinema class that screened Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Seven years later, the steady flow of Blaxploitation flicks had slowed to a trickle, and he and Ada had seen every one that opened in the city. Mandingo, her favorite, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, his. These days it was all Star Wars and intergalactic spin-offs, and it seemed to Milt that the only space-faring black man was a masked fascist with the ventilator voice of James Earl Jones.

  His wife shimmied with Sammy. It was hard to feel bad about it. Not many places in this country where a black man, even a famous older brother like Sammy, could waltz around a white woman.

  A busboy, last name Fishman, nice college kid from Brownsville, removed Milt’s empty tumbler. He offered a generous hello to Nehemiah, bowing as he did. He turned to Milt. Hope it’s okay what I told you earlier. It’s just a story I heard, and my cousin’s a storyteller.

  You did right.

  Mind if I try a little something out on you?

  Fetch a cat a bourbon neat, I’m all ears.

  The kid was back before “Lullaby of Birdland” was through, and Milt half listened to a yarn about a senior gentleman the kid knew who’d started a business making mule-hair toupees. Milt caught the cue the routine was through when the kid was saying, Get it?

  Done got.

  Fishman shuffled away.

  Overhead, the spacey chandeliers shifted, adjusting their orbits, and Milt gave his head a shake, rubbed his dry eyes. At the Standard, most everyone wanted into show business and bad—from the laundry ladies to the waiters on up to Ada—everyone, it seemed, but Milt and Nehemiah. There had been countless discoveries in the Catskills. You got your start on the service side and you were plucked out of obscurity and pushed into the limelight by the fishy hand of Sy Blackstone—house talent scout and booking agent responsible for the Standard airfield, built to fly in senators and starlets—and it took the anointed some time to realize they were still in the service industry, a high-class form of indentured servitude. But the reality didn’t matter. They were all—everyone working this room—after the flashbulb fantasy.

  Milt could foresee the stunted future spread before him. Next, the bartender would be telling Sy a version of the mule-hair toupee bit, only a bit better, not so rambling and nervous. Soon Sammy would make it forever his own, confiding the very, very personal anecdote to Johnny Carson on national television, and tens of millions would feel compelled to accompany the late-night laugh track.

  Ada’s dress—sleeveless, snug, long and black with black sequins—made Milt take a conscious breath, turned him momentarily jealous. What right did he have? He didn’t own her. Ada might be dancing with Sammy, might be fucking other men one after the other, or in unison, but she was married to him.

  Sammy and Ada shuffle-stepped over the parquet dance floor under the beeping chandeliers reconfiguring themselves into crazy constellations—a whirling Chinook; then Ho Chi Minh himself, complete with grown-out goatee—Ada in the shimmering sheath of a backless dress cut low on her sweet sweetback.

  The whole scene about bowled Milt out of his chair. Though it could’ve been the bourbon gone from his glass again. He signaled to no one, and in a moment his empty tumbler was three-fingers full.

  She’s the basmalke of
the ball, Nehemiah was saying. He sipped his seltzer.

  Milt considered his bourbon—he refused to drink white spirits—and shot it burning down the back of his throat. What’s that make me, Chema?

  You, my son, are a shvartzer schver arbiter. A hard-working Negro. Just like that one over there. But remember. Don’t work too hard. Your people worked too hard too long. Our work didn’t make us free. Made us docile. Kept us captive. What makes us free’s our leisure. Our rest. Our contemplation, what most in this crowd would call prayer—that’s why we observe Shabbos. That’s why this place, all this, exists. You come here, you’re freed from the expectations. He waved his spotted hand at the throng kept warm by the campy tummler. Look around, Nehemiah said. I’ve made a safe place for Jews. He brought his hand down on Milt’s hand. And friends to the Jews. And anyway, a person’s not a Jew because he has faith, but because he asks questions. He gave a squeeze. This is where the inquisitive come to rest. He patted Milt’s hand. Even if we can’t relax, eh? Practice for the end. That, he said with a raised finger knobby and bent, is the Shabbos. And that is the Standard. He motioned to a cocktail waitress, who discreetly removed Milt’s tumbler without asking if he wanted another. But let’s not overdo it, eh?

  Milt flushed, his cheeks hot. No one could see him blushing, but that didn’t lessen his shame. He stood to prove he could, wobbled, steadied himself on the chair back. He tugged down his blazer, buttoned the top of its three buttons.

  On Milt’s first visit to the Standard, Nehemiah found him a sport coat, helping him into it while telling him those three buttons were to be buttoned, top to bottom, always, sometimes, never. Remember, he said, always, sometimes, never. He brushed Milt’s shoulders, patted his cheek and said, Now you can blend in with the Gentiles—they had a good laugh at that, the ice between them more melted than broken. A soldier in dress buttoned every last button.

  In ways civil if not martial, Milt had been such a rube when Ada began bringing him up into these Jewish Alps, and here he was, part of the family. Felt more at home at the Standard than in smoldering Bedford-Stuyvesant.