The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  In the rearview, Smith watched Vessey take Milt’s pulse.

  * * *

  At Castle Point, Vessey and Smith signed in Milt. They waited with him in Triage, Vessey answering the questions he could, and then more waiting in Admittance, until Milton Wright was called and the nurse saw he couldn’t make it under his own power.

  Smith wheeled Milt in and Vessey followed. They were ushered into an overflow care center, a gurney surrounded by curtains, where they waited. Three different nurses—all with the same puffy face floating above the V-neck of their scrubs—came and went.

  An hour passed before they saw an internist who seemed to know Milt and have familiarity with his medical history. He introduced himself as Sudeep Mehta, MD, Oncology, Hospice and Palliative Specialist, asked about Milt’s recent behavior, and Smith did the answering this time. Dr. Mehta nodded, took notes, and then said he was going to run tests, MRI, CAT scan, that there was an outside chance he was just critically dehydrated, but so far—he opened Milt’s eyelids, studied one, than the other—so far he hasn’t responded to the fluids at all. His best guess was that Milt’s cancer had metastasized to his brain. “If that’s the case, at most, at best, we’re talking a matter of weeks.”

  “At worst?”

  Dr. Mehta shook his head. “We’ll take him for tests now. We should know more in a couple hours. You’re free to stay.”

  Vessey said, “You bet your ass we’ll stay.”

  Minutes later, Milt was wheeled away, and Smith and Vessey dozed in their chairs. Some time after that, Milt was wheeled back in, sedated. He’d been thoroughly washed and was wearing a gown. When Smith asked for an update, the orderly told them that Dr. Mehta would be back shortly. In the meantime, the cafeteria was in the basement.

  An hour after they ate, they were given Milt’s prognosis. His cancer had indeed metastasized to his brain. The MRI revealed a constellation of tumors, acorn size and smaller. The CAT scan showed a larger tumor on the brain stem, size of a golf ball, with a smaller piggyback tumor grown on it. “Tumors on top of tumors,” the doctor said. “Not good. We’ve induced a medical coma, and his advance directives strictly forbid life support of any kind. We’ve contacted his health proxy. Now all we can do is wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “The end I’m afraid.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Vessey and Bellum sat at Milt’s bedside, each holding a hand, trying to help him over, though they were the ones needing help. The painstaking, interminable conclusion to Milt’s breathing was like labor in reverse. The contractions of his respiration grew gradually, terribly farther apart. When Milt took a breath, Vessey and Smith held theirs. Hours of anticipation, exacerbated by the beep of the EKG. A nurse came in and muted the machine. Milt’s breath came and went, once every ten minutes or more. Half an hour passed. No breath followed. The line on the heart monitor was a horizon Milt had gone beyond. What marked his end was a stillness that ached and drummed in the two living bodies sitting vigil, a pair of lives left in the tumultuous wake of the passing of a life called Milton Xavier Wright.

  * * *

  Vessey and Smith visited Ira Lependorf, Esq., and when Ira greeted them from behind the reception desk, Smith said, “What, still no secretary?”

  “These days,” he snapped, “they’re called legal aids. Apparently they don’t make them like they used to. You don’t happen to be looking for a job? Could use the order and organization of someone with a military background.” He offered them a seat and told them Milton expressly stated he wanted no service, no military burial, not even so much as a toast to him. He’s to be cremated, and he left no instructions for his ashes. He asked if they might want the cremains, and Vessey said fuck yes.

  Ira said that every vet who’d ever been in residence at the Standard was mentioned in the will, including you two, but that sorting through what’s ultimately left will take time. He also said that an offer had been made on the Standard, by a lawyer out of Kingston brokering for SW&B Construction, but it’s low. Standing timber alone is worth more. Looks like SW&B are fishing, see if we bite to avoid the bureaucratic slog. If they can’t get it for dirt cheap, they’ll take their chances at the foreclosure auction. So we’ll see what happens, and it’s bound to take awhile. Questions so far?

  She asked, “Was Milt stealing from his vets?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean all the disability. Was he secreting it away into some offshore account?”

  Ira shot Vessey a who’s-this-crazy-bitch look; Vessey shrugged and leaned away from Smith.

  “Let me give you some idea,” Ira told Smith, “of what it’s been to be the executor of Milt’s estate, and things are only getting started. In his will, Milt stipulated that, after liquidation, which may take for fucking ever, I will get paid for a decade’s worth of back-fees. That’s first. After that, with what’s left over, he wants to reimburse his vets for all the disability they paid in. I’ve done some prelim figuring, plugging in estimates, and I’ve found that if I write my fees off as pro bono—which is not simply out of the kindness of my heart, because I get a nice tax break—then after every last one of Milt’s vets gets back every last dime they paid him for their billet, there might be a few thousand dollars left over. Could be significantly more, could be a lot less. Depending on the foreclosure. On the logging. On and on. I won’t bore you. But you, Ms. Antebellum Smith—if that is indeed your name—should know that in his order of payments, after all the veterans’ disability reimbursements, you’re next. Now I’ve given myself a year to locate the hundred-plus beneficiaries. Which’ll be like finding a queef in a typhoon. You know what a queef is? And where the fuck do I send checks to homeless men? I’m sure I’ll go mostly to their next-of-kin. Whatever’s left after a year, assuming that everything’s been liquidated by then, will go to you. So to answer your question, no, he wasn’t stealing from his fucking vets.”

  “And what about his wife?”

  “Was he stealing from Ada?”

  “Was he responsible for her death?”

  “You’re asking me if Milton was a murderer?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “That I can’t tell you, doll. That he took to his maker.”

  * * *

  Smith drives the van to visit Evangelína at Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie, where she’s kindly turned away after dropping off the woman’s belongings, including a corporate document, thick as a phone book, in a gallon freezer bag. A nurse who helped with the surgeries—three of the four—informs her that Ms. Canek’s in critical condition, and the nurse isn’t allowed to say more. She then confides that when Ms. Canek was mauled, there was a perforation of her appendix. Appendix leaked bacteria into the abdominal cavity. Caused peritonitis, a serious infection. Performed a subtotal. Left in the cervix. Able to save the ovaries and fallopian tubes. The neck wounds were easy by comparison. And somehow she managed to rupture her Achilles. She’s gonna have trouble talking and eating for a few months, and the scarring can be lessened with plastic surgery if she wants. “But the hardest thing,” the nurse said, glancing over her shoulder, “hardest thing to recover from’s the … well, I’ve already said more than I should.”

  * * *

  “What are you gonna do now, Vess?”

  “Squat here with Merced, Wiz, and whoever else till they toss us. You?”

  “Thinking about going up to Reverend’s camp. Maybe stay the winter with him, if he’ll have me.”

  “He got on all right with STD,” Vessey told her. “Merced was weird about him. All the other guys never liked him. Can’t say I really did either. Something just plain off about him. But you know what? He’d get down on all fours and spend half an hour rolling around in the dirt with Egon, playing, wrestling, but gentle, careful of Egon’s hips. By the end of it, that dog would be on his back, exhausted and ecstatic. Egon listened to me, because I fed him, but that dog loved him some Reverend.”

  * * *

  S
mith finds Ray’s camp empty. After the monster nor’easter, there was a couple weeks of Indian summer, but the air’s cold again, the last two nights getting hard frost.

  Searching out the sound of running water she heard on her way up, she finds a rivulet drizzling between two rounded rocks. The moss growing on them is iced over, the rocks like a pair of small biospheres. A shin-high waterfall splashes into a mosaic bluestone washbasin, its little dam built to hold a couple gallons of water before it continues on its way downmountain. She dips in her fingertip and it aches with the cold.

  The yurt is warm. No fire burns in the woodstove but it’s still throwing heat. She sets her sidearm by the door flap, a new hide, and relights the fire using a couple of smoldering coals. Once it’s blazing, she strips off her clothes, soiled stiff, sour and gamey. She washes them at the brookhead basin and, naked, her teeth chattering, she rinses herself. Dashing back to the yurt, she hangs her clothes on the line. She hopes Ray will understand them as a white flag. She sits at the fireside and dons the earmuffs she brought with her. They smell like her half-rotting clothes. She feels ridiculous, desperate—what a shitty little planet—but the fur atmosphere enveloping her is a creature comfort like none she’s ever known. She’s sheltered in the hides of animals Milt cared for. Standard Company has disbanded, yet this yurt stands as a monument. She doesn’t care if Ray poached every last alpaca to make it so. Doesn’t care if he’s a merc, a spy, a killer. She’s made it this long, mostly on her own, and she needs some warm companionship.

  * * *

  Woken by a scratching sound, Smith thinks the cougar’s come for her. She scrambles for her sidearm, unholsters it and waits. The sounds move around the camp, then fade.

  She dresses, not bothering to tie her boots, finds the two coon kits, bigger, roughhousing at the foot of a white pine. They see her and scramble trilling into the woods. She follows them to Ray’s field of toppled cairns. He hasn’t restacked a stone. On a slab, she sets down her sidearm, starts righting the rocks. Hours pass before a dog bark makes her jump, and the cairn between her knees crashes down, a rock smashing the toe of her boot. She curses, hops, and there’s Ray. He barks again, then whines, and the first thing that comes out of her is an aching apology.

  He says what she hears as, “Hocus fogey.”

  Thinking of Milt—magical, old; disappeared, dead—and knowing she’s misheard, she replays the sounds in her head until they become Hope is phony. She nods, near tears.

  “My favorite place in all the world.”

  “What is,” she says, “hope is phony?”

  He laughs, and she laughs. He says, “Opus 40.”

  “Oh.”

  He nods and smiles, his eyes and shoulders rising at their edges along with the corners of his mouth. He’s smiling with his entire body, at her, and she knows in her full chest she’s forgiven, knows in her tired feet she’s welcome, knows in her butterflied pelvis she could come to love this man. She steps toward him and her toe throbs.

  “Opus 40’s not far,” he says, and there’s her invitation, implicit but unmistakable.

  She sees them wintering here, stacking stones and making daytrips, and it’s not as if she never stormed off—never called him a whore and told him to go to hell—and yet it’s okay anyway. She gets the sense that as soon as she said sorry—saying so while trying to right one of her wrongs—everything between them was settled, and not just for the moment. “I want to see it,” she says. “Opus 40, whatever it is.”

  “Now?”

  “Or not now. Later. We have time.”

  “We do?”

  She shrugs and smiles, a warm flush filling her chest.

  He says, “I’m no longer under contract.”

  She nods, then shakes her head. She feels happy, lucky; she feels like dying.

  “Hope isn’t phony,” he says.

  She nods.

  “Heard about the landman.”

  She gives another nod.

  “My lawyer told me.”

  She wants to say something, but if she opens her mouth she’s afraid she’ll scream.

  “And Merced came up here and told me about you and the cougar. Guess you were right about what you saw.”

  She shrugs.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Wright?”

  The tears come like an unyielding wall of water displaced deep in her, pushed out.

  He picks up a stone roughly the size of a brick, and she waits, hands on knees, for him to bash her brains. The thought is crazy, and she can’t help it.

  He takes her hand, isolates a finger, places it on the rough gray rock. “Feel that?”

  She wipes her eyes.

  “You’re running your finger over the head of a newborn. It’s pediatric phrenology.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Feel. Like reading Braille. A ridge that has three rises. A crevice, a nook. Anything that takes a triangular shape. You want a triangle for the same reason you want a three-legged stool. Three legs are more stable.”

  The more he talks, the better she feels. “You always talk like this?”

  “Never talk like this. Don’t have no one to talk to.”

  She laughs through her mucus.

  “Want me to shut up now?”

  “Please no.”

  “At Opus 40—old bluestone quarry in Saugerties turned six-acre sculpture. It’s drystone. No mortar. All made by one guy, Harvey Fite, over almost forty years. Somewhere into year twenty, he erected a nine-ton, fifteen-foot pillar at the center. Monster of a bluestone monolith. Rock like an exclamation point. Been standing for over half-a-century. He died at the site, fell off a ledge he—”

  She kisses him. His beard is full and scratchy and she loves the coarseness of it, how it scours her skin, the smoke-oil odor in it. She takes his hand and pulls him to his camp, into his yurt, where they spend the night, the rest of the fall, and most of the winter.

  WINTER

  2012

  THEY SLEEP SPOONED NEAR THE WOODSTOVE, Ray waking to feed the fire, she waking to watch.

  Tell me about your tattoos.

  Little intense pain in the moment. Makes you forget a whole load of past hurt. Problem is, don’t last so you got to get another.

  I see your meat tag. She touches his ribcage just below his left armpit, nine numbers overtop the letters A NEG.

  We didn’t wear dog tags. Too noisy.

  Now I can steal your identity.

  You can have it.

  Our blood’s compatible. I’m A-pos. What about this one? We are shadows of … tendon fury?

  Tender. Gave myself that one. And this one over here.

  You draw?

  A little. Or used to. Painted a few T-walls in my time. Painted our unit’s rock at Painted Rocks when we trained at Fort Irwin.

  Liked my time there. Almost got a tattoo off-base in—what’s the town’s name?

  Feel like you’re testing me.

  Well.

  Barstow.

  Test passed. You give me a tattoo?

  Maybe.

  How you feel about dogs?

  This is getting serious.

  Well.

  Think I’ve reached the stage where I’m more fond of animals than people. Part of the reason I’m up here. Rather have the company of a couple of rambunctious raccoons.

  * * *

  Naked in the warm yurt, they regard each other. For an instant, he seems virginal, tearful.

  To be able to look on you like this? See you all so beautifully … together?

  I’m smelly and hairy and, top it all off, on my period.

  You’re talking to a fellow soldier.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  I don’t feel at ease unless someone’s spilled a little blood.

  Well I might mess your yurt.

  We’re pissing, crapping, bleeding beasts. Squeamishness over menstrual blood? That’s crazy. Specially coming from a woman. It’s the same
sexist insanity of Sharia. To make menstruation an embarrassment? That’s terrible. Sight of blood’s a reminder of what we’re made, how fragile we are. Nice to see some on occasion that’s a sign of the potential for life. Instead of its end.

  Okay.

  Okay what?

  You can fuck me now.

  * * *

  You got family?

  Mother finishing out a life sentence behind the counter of a 7-Eleven. Two younger brothers. One’s in East Jersey State, other at Monmouth University.

  Good they’re both getting education.

  East Jersey State’s a max security penitentiary. Once known as Rahway. Monmouth’s more like a debtors’ prison than a college. When I left for my first tour, my brothers spiraled straight down. Think I might’ve done to them just like our father did to us.

  * * *

  The first orgasm she has with Ray feels like one of those psychic surgeries performed in the Philippines: it’s as if he goes in with bare hands and removes a mass from her. After that, they come easier, better, and their lovemaking—some hours long, some an intense minute, some all the increments in between—is the most satisfying of her promiscuous life.

  * * *

  In Iraq, when I was working for Zeitgeist, I bought a Russian Ural 650. Cost me 5 million dinars. The Fedayeen Saddam ordered a couple thousand of the bikes just before the invasion. Time the shipment arrived, Saddam was down in his hideyhole. Bikes were sold off one by one. Mine had a sidecar. Couldn’t pay people to ride in it. Ural’s a rugged, reliable little bike. Comes with two felt-lined clips in the sidecar to hold your AK. Used to ride it around the streets of Sadr City. Shiite slum that takes up most of eastern Baghdad. You put on a helmet, full face-guard, tinted, full beard growing out the bottom, and they don’t know you’re not Iraqi. You’re nimble. Traffic in Baghdad got to be terrible. On a little bike, midsize engine, you come to feel safer even though you’re exposed. Skirting lines of cars, threading through the lanes. Sitting still’s the killer. Been in a fully armored personnel carrier, the Grizzly 6×6, V-hull chassis, 12.7 millimeter machine gun mounted on top operated from a remote weapon station. Felt less safe cause we were stuck in traffic. My days off, I’d ride over to the Mohsin Mosque, cut the engine. Wait for the adhan. Then he’d call the iqama, the summons, and 10,000-plus men came in carrying prayer mats for the outdoor sermon. The imam would start the prayer, and one little voice would call back, and then another, and then 10,000 voices were chanting in unison. Never failed to raise the hair. Was thrilling, and not a little frightening. Once I started empathizing with the men who were trying to kill me, knew I’d lost my edge.