The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  Rolling looks up from his boots. “Makes you say that?”

  “You’ve got that peacetime air about you.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Peacetime soldiers—and they’re all your generation, Boomers—you’re insecure. Failure of sympathy.”

  “Technically,” Rolling says, “I’m pre-Boomer. Silent Generation. Sometimes called the Lucky Few. But what you’re talking about has little to do with serving during peacetime. What you’re talking about is old-ass age, plain and simple. Wise old man’s a myth. Bitter, insecure old man—an old man is a dirty, dirty thing—now that’s God’s honest. Let me tell you an anecdote.”

  * * *

  Friday morning, day of discharge, Smith received her paperwork for Excess Leave. Before she finished filling out forms, a bus arrived. No motorcycle waited out front. The civilian desk clerk flipped pages and asked, without looking up, “Airport or bus station?”

  “Don’t know. I’m supposed to have a ride.”

  “Well, you can’t wait here. Airport or bus station.”

  “How will my ride find me? Neither of us have phones.”

  “Same way people found folks since time immemorial. He comes by here, he’ll ask around, and he’ll be told all out-processed either go to the airport or to the bus depot in town. We’ll tell him we took you to one or the other. Which’ll it be?”

  Across the street from the bus depot, Smith ate lunch at the Gold Bar and Diner. When done, she left a huge tip for her server, Audrey, a woman with hair died the red of a hot candy apple. She took a long walk, came back for dinner and told Audrey some of her story, asked if she’d keep an eye out while she, Smith, got a room over at the Cloud 9.

  While the motel manager talked, Smith nodded vacantly, thinking that she was pregnant, pregnant with no way to reach the father. And then it hit her: no longer a deserter, she’d been deserted.

  * * *

  During World War II, Mother and I lived briefly in Coronado, California, while my father was stationed on a carrier in the Pacific. War ended, Father came home, and we moved back to West Texas. When I went off to Cambridge, Mass., for college—

  College in Cambridge. Always means the false humility of the Harvard man.

  After Harvard, I joined the Navy. Served from ’54 to ’57.

  You’re class of ’54. Telling. Korea was, what, ’50 to ’53? Year war breaks out, you decide to go off to college?

  You a reader?

  Some.

  You fly?

  Didn’t pilot airplanes, Ray tells him. Jumped out of them.

  Well I did both. And your condescension’s a bit confused, son. Because there’s no such thing as peacetime. Especially during the Cold War. And the people making the decisions in this country all have skin in the game.

  Ironic you should talk about skin in the game.

  Why, you up here looking for a pound of flesh?

  Not much of a taker. Debating whether to cut your throat or give you a tattoo.

  Must say, if you’re offering me a choice—

  We’ll start with the tattoo, go from there.

  Where will it be?

  Take your coat off. Roll up your sleeve. We’ll do you standing up, like men. Ray moves the tall desk to a wall near an outlet.

  Almost got one on a few occasions. Chickened out each time. Rolling offers his forearm, resting it on the desktop.

  Ray turns Rolling’s arm over. It’ll hurt, but you’ll survive.

  Will I?

  The tattooing.

  What’re you going to give me?

  Gonna surprise even myself.

  I’m guessing you have a few.

  Wouldn’t put you through what I haven’t been through. Close your eyes. When Bizzy does, Ray wipes a thin coat of Vaseline on the fishy underbelly of his forearm. Ray steps on the pedal. The machine jumps in his gloved hand. He goes to work.

  Hurts more than I thought.

  Bleeding more than I thought. You on blood thinners?

  One baby aspirin a day, all the medication I take. He hands Ray a hankie.

  Hold still. Eyes closed. It’ll be over in a few minutes. Meantime, tell me what you’re planning on doing with the Standard now it’s yours.

  You ever hear of the Gaia hypothesis?

  By way of an answer, Ray blots blood with the hankie.

  Can’t work in hydrocarbons and not consider the Gaia hypothesis. All life on Earth functions as a single organism. Mother Earth defines and maintains her survival. Climate deniers, and I’m not one of them, they’re the ones coming from a position of humility, albeit self-serving, saying we can’t know. System’s too complex. The Earth and its weather is too awesome to behold. Like war that way. We can’t figure it out. They, too, have a few facts on their side. That during the reign of the dinosaurs, Earth’s surface temperature was nearly twenty degrees warmer than today. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a thousand parts per million. Today, it’s under 400. We’re talking boreal forests at the North Pole. And there were no coal plants spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.

  When Rolling falls silent, Ray asks, And what’s that got to do with the Standard?

  Oh, you know, we were planning on building a massive under-mountain bunker so the nation’s elite, which of course includes me, can survive Armageddon.

  Ray lifts the tattooing needle off Rolling’s skin. He studies the old man’s face, the lenses of his bifocals flaky and greasy.

  We had a few contingencies, too, Rolling tells him. Wasn’t in the Standard file you helped put together, but maybe you’re well aware that Sergeant Wright was one of the demo experts hired to carry out the false-flag operation otherwise known as 9/11. You and I both know the fall of the Towers was a controlled demolition. Overseen by Mossad. Sergeant Wright was a Mossad agent if there ever was one. Rolling opens his eyes but doesn’t look down at the tattoo-in-progress. He locks his gaze with Ray’s, says, There’s your smoking gun, and closes his eyes. The old man then says, Of course, I tell you all this only to distract you from our real plans.

  Ray steps off the pedal; the tattoo gun quiets.

  Because the aliens, Rolling says, who seeded the Earth—

  Ray stomps the pedal and presses hard into Rolling’s skin.

  —this is that Panspermia I mentioned earlier—the aliens have picked the Catskills for the landing site of the mother ship. Rolling’s grin is mischievous, wacky not wicked, but Ray wants it gone. He gouges with the vibrating needle. The harder he presses, the better the numbers will look.

  IRJ’s been contracted to build the alien landing pad—ow. Apparently, airspace over Area 51’s gotten too congested with UFOs.

  Alright, I get it.

  Do you? Because conspiracy theories are the last refuge of the powerless now. Gap between information and understanding. We know so damn much, grasp so very little. Harder you look for the pattern, worse the world seems. Take the Gulf of Tonkin, which some of us lived through. The Maddox was attacked. Torpedoes two days later were probably dolphins. Just because the mistakes of the second day lead us to the Tonkin Resolution doesn’t mean the whole thing’s a conspiracy. Paranoiacs and crackpots see mistakes as grand plots. Which, in the end, is all well and good. Makes the decision-makers, ones making the mistakes—old white men like me, on their way out—seem a lot smarter than we are. Rolling opens his eyes. Besides, if I told you what we were planning at the Standard, you’d have to kill me.

  Ray nods, says, Keep your eyes closed, Bizzy. Almost done. When the old man does as ordered, Ray works in silence for a time. In it, he realizes he’s come to like the old coot. He’s got spine, stooped as it is. Maybe it’s all a ploy, but Ray’s having a hard time caring enough to cause any more harm.

  Ray steps off the foot switch and studies his work. Six simple digits—114944. He blots bloody ink, begins to understand the bean counter’s compulsion. Make the seemingly infinite feel finite. Almost lends a sense of closure. When Ray says, I’m done, he’s not talking about the tattoo.
/>   You made me a Jew?

  Out of duty, a decent soldier following through, Ray tells Rolling, I’ve got Baum’s phone. So I’ll ask one last time. What’s your interest in the Standard? If you don’t say, you now know I’ve got a way to find out. Baum’s phone offers all sorts of sordid details. And I can tell you the data pulled from it isn’t meaningless. That’s the reason I’m not recording this. Already got plenty of evidence to incriminate you. Enron’ll look like a misdemeanor.

  What do you want?

  An apology.

  That it?

  And howbout an admittance of guilt.

  What am I guilty of? What am I apologizing for?

  Everything.

  You want me to say I’m sorry for everything? Admit to being guilty of everything?

  Ray nods.

  By everything, do you mean Iraq?

  For starters.

  That’s easy, because I am sorry, and I do feel guilty.

  But.

  But we, too, got the bait and switch. At the beginning, Iraq felt like an alignment. Turning a profit and doing some good in the world. It was only after the ball got rolling did we—and by we I mean the executives here and the board—only then did we realize, slowly, the alignment was false. By then, it was too late. Pulling out, changing course, would’ve done more harm.

  To the bottom line.

  Sure, but to the Iraqi people too. Here we are, over a decade later, and we’re still trying to figure out how to leave without the whole thing falling into the wrong hands. So I say to you, I am sorry. When I’m being honest with myself, I’d have to say that, on the whole, I feel more shame than pride. That is the reason I’m still here. Working to tip the scales before I get fired or die. So my successor doesn’t have to clean up after me.

  Ray hands back Rolling’s handkerchief, stained with the old man’s thin blood. It’s not enough, but it’s something. In the red Rorschach of it, shapeless, Ray sees that there won’t be an end to war, but there can be an end to any part he plays in it.

  He packs the tattooing equipment into the FedEx box, the dollar-symbol gun, the Motorola computer. Then he removes the needle, unplugs the tattoo gun, and tosses it to Rolling.

  He catches it one-handed. That’s it?

  Thanks for your time, Bizzy. I’ll show myself out. He turns to go, then turns back around. One more question?

  Rolling waits, studying the tattoo machine. Ever the engineer, figuring out the mechanics.

  How’s your landman doing after the attack?

  You know how she’s doing.

  Want to hear it from you.

  She’s suing us is how she’s doing.

  She going to win?

  Known her all her life. Worked with her father. Close to her mother. I had my druthers, we’d settle. But these days, corporations are not dictatorships, benevolent or otherwise. Accounting runs the numbers. Fair amount of money can be saved by stalling till her savings runs out.

  Bet you know to the penny how much she has in her accounts.

  She could have some cash socked away. He sets the tattoo gun on the desktop, and with his handkerchief he blots his forearm. Walk you to the elevator.

  Bizzy pushes the down button. And this number?

  You’re a bean counter. You’ll figure it out. You can’t, you can always hire a contractor to crack the code.

  Tell me, you’re how old?

  Twenty-nine.

  You’ve got everything before you.

  Doesn’t feel that way.

  Never does, son.

  * * *

  Riding out of Houston, Ray felt—not satisfaction, not resolution—a simple, unmistakable sense of being finished with his soldiering days. He’d done his duty. He wasn’t sure what came next, but he was sure it would come, and fast. He made even better time going north—he was still a day late.

  After asking around at Chaffee Gate, at the Welcome Center, getting no information, he rode to the Greyhound station in downtown Louisville, unable to imagine why she’d opt for the airport. He inquired of all the Greyhound ticket tellers—nothing.

  He stood outside, watching the Ohio River, the milling Louisville homeless, their winter jackets open in anticipation of a spring just around the corner. Desperation roiling in his gut like hunger, he went into the diner across the street.

  Before getting seated, he asked the only server if a young lady’d been in, by herself, about yea tall, long brown hair, brown leather jacket and pants.

  She smiled brightly behind her schoolmarm glasses and bit her tongue ring between her front teeth. With a menu she pointed to a booth.

  Bellum sat glaring.

  Survived my deployments, Ray thought, decade as a shooter in Iraq, only to be killed by a look in the Gold Bar and Diner. He walked over, head down, and without looking up, said, “Seat taken?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He sat heavily, apologetically. “Look, I’m so very sorry.”

  “Don’t matter.”

  Way she said it made him certain they were done. “Ant, please, it matters and I’m sorry. I’m good now.”

  “I don’t think I like you calling me Ant.” She gave him a look he’d never seen from her, withholding and worrying.

  “Has something happened? Anybody hurt you in there?”

  “You hurt me.”

  “And, know what? I can’t promise I won’t do it again, hurt you I mean.”

  “You motherf—”

  “Hush. Don’t curse me. Let me finish. Hurt’s part of what this is all about. Willingness to hurt one another, as little as possible, and then getting over the hurt, together. I am sorry for hurting you.”

  “Another I’m sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry for being a day late.”

  Smith said, “You get the answer you were looking for?”

  “Did not. But, like you, I did get an apology.”

  She pushed away her plate of sandwich crusts, a pickle wedge missing a bite. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay I’ll marry you.”

  He motioned to the server, who strode across the bustling room, and Ray said, “Could we have the check? We’ve got to find a justice of the peace and fast before she changes her mind.”

  The server did a little hop in her Doc Martens, saying, “I’ll have my manager comp it. No one’s ever proposed in here before, except for the time … Oh, you don’t want to hear about that.”

  When she was gone from the table, Ray said, “But first, let’s get you a divorce.”

  * * *

  They spend a full day in bed at the Cloud 9, stopping between fits of lovemaking to eat from the vending machines, before checking out.

  The six-hour ride from Fort Knox to Devils Elbow is, for her, an anxious blur, sunny and blinding; for him, it’s a welcome blue emptiness. The only thing she remembers of it is the stop at OfficeMax to buy, for $31.99, a Socrates Divorce Kit, most of which she fills out riding in the sidecar, clutching the fluttering pages, all the while kicking at and crumpling other office paper carpeting the floor of the sidecar, a mess Ray says is nothing more than the dandruff of bureaucracy.

  In Rolla, Missouri, a couple hours after nightfall, they switch spots, and forty-five minutes later she parks them at her ranch house. Travis’s truck isn’t in the dark drive. She puts a hand on Ray’s helmet and tells him to wait outside.

  “You want my knife?”

  “He aint here. Foxtrot either. Too quiet.”

  “First sign of trouble,” he says, “I’m blitzing in there like Tillman after Lynch.”

  She kisses him, hands him her helmet, says, “Don’t fucking damsel-in-distress me.”

  Through the front window, the TV, huge and new, casts shimmering, swimming-pool light from one full wall. Shoshanna’s watching alone, in the same spot on the microsuede loveseat Smith once occupied, eating from a yellow bag of chips.

  Smith knocks.

  Shoshanna answers, saying, “Oh, lord, girl, I don’t know,�
� an oniony smell on her breath.

  “Shoshanna, I just need to get my important papers is all.”

  “I don’t know. I should call Travis.”

  “We’re just passing through.” Smith points to the motorcycle, Ray watching from the sidecar.

  “Oh, I still don’t know.”

  “Legally, Shoshanna, this is my house. My name’s on the mortgage. Not you, not Travis, can keep me out. Now you’re welcome to keep an eye on me. All I want is the box of docs under the bed. Birth certificate. High school diploma. Medal citations. Passport. You two can have everything else. I want to cause no grief for you. I’m glad for you.”

  “Now you lying on me.”

  “Am not. I got somebody else.”

  “That him there?”

  “It is.”

  “You rode up on that thing? Your new man in the buggy?”

  “Please, Shoshanna.”

  “He finds out I just let you in here, he’ll…”

  “He hit you?”

  “He alright when he’s high, Bell. You know. It’s when he’s sober’s the problem. Right now he’s trying a little clean living. Makes him madder than I-don’t-know-what. Keep trying to get him stoned.”

  “Look, don’t let me in. Just go in the bedroom, under the bed, get that box of papers and bring it out to me.”

  “We got a new bed,” Shoshanna says. “Slept fine in you’alls but screwing in it was a little messed up. In my head, not on account of the mattress. So we bought one of them space-agey memory-foam ones? You seen these? Now our sex’s fine in my head, but on that mattress? Like screwing on a giant marshmallow.”

  “Shoshanna, you know where that box is? I’m begging you.”

  “One night,” Shoshanna says, “I come home from work. Pulled into the drive. Big plume a black smoke, awful smell, burning plastic, nasty. Thought the house was on fire. Run round back, and Travis there, tending a bonfire in the middle of the yard. I asked where LaLa was at. He said asleep. What you doing, I says. Know what he answers? Says, Overcoming. Overcoming what? I ask. He answered me with cusses, then tossed some things on the fire. Clothes mostly, which hurt me to see. He was saving your box for last.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Asked what was in it. He said all your important papers. Record of your life, he said, and he was gonna smoke it. Well I went right over there and picked that box up, him calling after me, and put it in my car. He fumed but he didn’t get violent, not that time. He knew he was crossing a line. He’s not a bad guy, Bell. Now I aint saying he good—he aint that neither—but you should see him with LaLa. Her daddy never treated her so sweet. Shoot, treats her better than he treats me.”