The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  “Where’s the box now?”

  “My granny’s. You can go get it now, if you like. She don’t sleep a wink.” When Smith said the morning was fine, Shoshanna wrote down the address and gave her a hug. Then she shut and locked Smith’s front door.

  * * *

  Near midnight they pull into the Big Papa’s parking lot, and before they’re parked Smith says, “There’s Foxtrot.” She lurches to a stop, not bothering to turn off the ignition.

  She runs to her dog, helmet still on, and when Foxtrot sees her, he wags his entire lower half. She gets to her knees and hugs him, and he licks her cheek, her ear, peeing on her leather pants. She unclips his leash, so wrapped and wound up that he can hardly move. “That asshole. Not even a bowl of water out here.”

  Around the open tailgate of a parked pickup, a crowd of men drink from bagged bottles and cans, same as the morning she left.

  Ray comes and sits Indian style at the feet of her dog, offering a hand. “Hello, Foxtrot. Heard lots about you.”

  Foxy-T’s all over Ray, slobbering, pawing, whining, and Smith knows right there, right then, that this man is the best she’s ever going to do. “Let’s get out of here,” she says. “Let’s just take Foxtrot and go. We’ll send the divorce papers through the mail.”

  “We came all this way.” He pets Foxtrot in a way that makes the dog drool. “Let’s finish it.”

  She sees Ray calm as can be—taking comfort in conflict—and she’s livid, furious at him for getting her pregnant, for making her love him, jealous of how her dog is all over him. “We came all this way to get my dog. Now let’s go.”

  “We don’t start the ball rolling on this thing, it won’t get done for years. I got a feeling this Travis isn’t the most responsive under the best of conditions. Let’s get it moving, let him know you’re serious.”

  “He’s probably got a gun.”

  Ray shrugs. “You want me to go in?”

  “You like this shit.”

  “What?”

  “Fucking combat.”

  “This aint combat. We’re just gonna hand him some papers.”

  She needs to get away from Ray’s self-assured face. “If I’m not back in one minute,” she says, “come get me.”

  * * *

  Travis is where she left him—he hasn’t budged—and it hurts her. She’s seen so much, faced a full lifetime of trials in ten-odd months, and here he is, in the same spot, thinner, a lot thinner. She remembers he’s handsome, intense. She feels bad for him. As he sits, in the moment before she breaks the spell, she can see—given the distance gained by her leaving—how it all went wrong for him, and for them.

  She puts a hand on his back. “Buy you a soda?”

  His head tips quickly up, like he’s just heard a voice, felt a touch, he’s been waiting nearly a year for. He doesn’t face her squarely, doesn’t meet her eyes. She can feel the force of his pride, a trembling anger. “Travy, how you doing?”

  He shows her his hard face, sharp and squared. His blue eyes like butane flame. He hasn’t been this hot since she left, hasn’t been this gaunt since their courtship. His eyes burn with something that scares her.

  When she asks him outside, he nods and stands. “After you.”

  She pushes through the front door, and gasps for breath, reaching for Ray.

  Travis says, “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Ray.” He offers his hand.

  Travis leaves the hand hanging. “Don’t give a fuck who you are. You’re at my club, in the company of my wife, holding the leash of my gotdamn dog. You don’t back the fuck off—and let go that gotdamn leash—I’ll have MPs here in no time to collect this deserter.”

  “Easy, cowboy.”

  “Travis, we’ve just come from Fort Knox, where I turned myself in.”

  “We? Fucking we?”

  “You can gohead call the MPs,” she says. “They’ll take one look at my ID and hand it back. When they do, I’ll tell them you’re dealing pills to soldiers.”

  “Horseshit you turned yourself in.”

  “Travis,” she says, “I’m taking Foxtrot—and leaving you with some papers to sign.”

  From the waist of his jeans, Travis pulls his pepperbox. “Show me right where you want my John fucking Handcock, bitch.” He points the gun at Smith’s face. “Here?” He aims the gun at Foxtrot, its barrels inches from the dog’s snout. “Here?”

  Foxtrot puts his nose to the gun muzzle, sniffs. The quad barrels catch his breath and whistle.

  “Travis,” she says. “Travis.”

  He ignores her, doesn’t raise the gun from the dog.

  Ray says, “You ever even fired that four-banger, cowboy?”

  Travis shifts the gun off to the side of Foxtrot’s face, blindly aiming at the couple of meters of slab sidewalk separating Travis and Ray.

  The muzzle flashes, warm, followed by a second flash—a scattered spark—on the cement, and the two-tone sound attending the flashes is a deafening buc-beow.

  Foxtrot bounds away onto the hard dirt of the lot.

  Travis stands nodding at Ray. “That answer your question, cowboy?”

  Ray takes a step forward. “Does indeed.” Then he sidesteps off the cement slab.

  When Travis says, “Take another step, next one’s in your eye,” Ray sits. Ray crosses his legs, like he did before Foxtrot.

  Travis raises the gun to Ray’s head. “You banging my wife? You steal her away?”

  “Travis,” Smith says, “you made your point. You’re one mean motherfucker. Now put the gun away.”

  Ray grabs his knees and pulls them to his chest. He lies back on the hardpack of the dirt lot, staring up at the night. He blows big breaths from his mouth.

  “Ray?”

  Travis steps to Ray’s side, aiming the pistol over him.

  “Travis, stop.”

  Travis leans in, takes a close look at Ray, then turns to Smith, his face a wreck. He points in her direction, with the pepperbox. “This is your fucking fault. Fuck.”

  A man approaches. “Travis, you douche, what’d your dumb civvy ass do this time?”

  Travis lowers the gun, turns, and dashes for his truck. He climbs in, has a hard time starting the Toyota. When it turns begrudgingly over, he peels out, throwing a rooster tail of dry dirt, heading in the direction of home.

  The stranger looks familiar. “He hit?”

  Foxtrot stands over Ray, licking his face.

  “Ray,” Smith says, “you okay?”

  Ray laughs, nods, not lifting his head off the dirt. He points at her cheek.

  The man says to Smith, “You’re cut.”

  “Got nicked,” she says. “Saw the slug spark off the cement.”

  “Must’ve got hit with a piece of it. That or a splinter of lead.”

  “Ricochets are the worst.” Ray’s breath is short, shallow, his voice wet, thick.

  “Specially around cherries and civvies,” the stranger says.

  Ray says, “Who’re you?”

  “Name’s Travis.”

  “You’re Travis?”

  “I’m Travis, too. Travis Saterstrom.”

  Smith says, “Ray, you hurt anywhere?”

  “Had he aimed at my chest,” Ray says, “I’d probably be missing a toe.”

  “Ray.”

  “It’s nothing.” Ray reaches up. The movement of his arm works like a pump handle. Blood, so dark it looks black, burbles out of a long narrow tear in his shirt.

  Travis uses two fingers to rip open the tear—a disk-shaped entry wound.

  Ray raises his hand to his chest and moves Travis’s hand. His fingers find the hole and he slips in two, middle and ring. “Entry wound’s elongate. Slug must’ve flattened out when it hopped off the concrete. Slipped right between ribs four and five.” He closes his eyes. “That’s not good.” He opens them wide. “Think my fingers’re in my heart.”

  Smith says, “Someone call an ambulance!”

  Someone says, “They’re on their
way.”

  “Least it’s still beating,” Ray says. “Little arrhythmic.” He closes his eyes. “Never did call my mom.”

  “Oh, Ray, if you die on me—” With both hands she forces pressure on his fingers inside his chest.

  In the sherbet light of the sodium vapor lamp humming over them, she can see the color leaving his face—she starts chest compressions. “Ray?”

  He opens his eyes, tightens his lips and forces out a few breaths. “Feeling nervous.”

  “Nothing to be nervous about. Understand? I’m here and I love you. You just keep looking me in the eyes, look me straight in the fucking eyes. It’ll be alright.”

  “Let me move my hand.” When he takes his red fingers out of the entry wound, blood gushes a half-inch off his chest before settling into a visibly rhythmic surge.

  She watches, stunned, for the duration of two pulses. Then she covers the wound with her hand and feels each warm rush, and after a moment she thinks she feels each warm rush grow weaker.

  He stares into her eyes, through her eyes, then he refocuses. He shakes his head. Something over her shoulder holds his attention, and she feels him fighting it. His eyes jerk back to hers. He gasps, catches his breath. He shakes his head, grins faintly, and his eyes shift over her shoulder.

  “Ray.” She feels his body slacken beneath her hands, lose all tension in a way that strikes her as wonderful—absolutely at ease, even his grin is gone—before a second later it registers as horrible. In her shock, she has a moment of clarity: even if death’s preceded by panic, it’s absolute relief at the end, she can be sure of that. She can be sure, too, that Ray’s no more. With this, she lets herself spiral down, collapsing at the boots of the onlookers shuffling in the dirt. She butts her forehead against the ground, regains herself. The only thing that keeps her sane is the work of compressing Ray’s chest for the short lifetime it takes the paramedics to arrive.

  SPRING

  2013

  IN THE CATSKILLS, THE SEASON IS MUD. Not the nostalgic mud of Yasgar’s Farm down in Bethel—playful, sexy, dopey. Nor is it the constructive mud of the Middle East, where earth is crafted into dun three-story townhomes. In spring of 2013, the iron-tinged mud of the lower Catskills seems bloody, a rusted mud. It’s sucking, deathly. Drown-the-dog mud. Squelching mud that swallows herds whole. Mud letting go of roots, felling age-old trees. A cold, ungodly mud. Muddling mud. Mud that fucks all logistics and tactics. No-man’s-land, Never-Endian mud. Mud of the trenches mud. Mad, mad mud. Each stretched moment itself becomes mud, space and time a thick suspension between solid and liquid, a slop. That’s how it feels to Smith, anyway, in the murk after Ray’s death, she not entirely sure how, or why, she’s back in the foothills of these mountains of mud. She tries to be grateful for small, sad things: at least it’s not sand.

  To escape the mud, she settles at the Rip Van Winkle Motor Inn west of Woodstock near Bearsville, where her bed feels like a foxhole she can’t climb out of. Foxtrot tracks mud everywhere. Threatened with additional cleaning fees, she pays the $100 charge with a single bill, starched cash given her by Ray.

  Here’s what she has in the world: a soggy box of personal documents, some cash, her dog, and Ray’s motorcycle, which she’s coming to hate. Every time she straddles the seat, visceral memories pass through her like a current, make her want to toss a lit match into the teardrop fuel tank. Then, there’s the unwanted attention it attracts.

  The bike, obnoxious and racist, parked outside the Rip, stops the sparse traffic on Route 212. Paunchy, furry white men woken from their winter Harley hibernations, men with too much money, too much spare time, the ones most adamant about lowering taxes and spurring freeloaders to work harder, these men pull over to gawk.

  At either end of the Rip’s twelve-unit, single-story building, a man, on the western side, and a woman, on the east, tinker with junked Oldsmobiles. The man’s automotive project seems slightly more sensible. A second-generation, bicentennial-year Toronado. The woman’s project is outright insane. It, too, is a Toronado, a ’69 Jetway 707. The stretch limousine is four-doored on each goddamn side. Off blocks it’s supposed to coast on six tires, but it will never get off blocks. Despite this certainty, Smith has to fight from lending a hand, getting greasy. Over days, she discovers that the woman, Caryn, and the man, Kip, were common-law until they split a year ago. “That’s right, honey, we separated by all of ten, tight-ass motor-inn units.” Divvying up their possessions, Caryn got first choice of Olds.

  * * *

  An hour after Ray’s murder, Shoshanna scooped up sleeping LaLa in her footed pajamas. She grabbed her purse, her daughter’s hooded faux-fur coat, and sneaked from the house Travis was about to lose to the Armed Forces Bank of Fort Leonard Wood. With that fool somewhere inside holed up, Shoshanna called 911 from the front lawn. “You best get on over here, cause my boyfriend come home out-of-his-Ozarks, saying he shot some other whiteboy by accident. But I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The standoff on Tidal Road lasted ten hours. Camera crews camped across the street. Neighbors tailgated, grilling burgers for the cops and news crews. Then the masked, helmeted SWAT unit forced the front and back doors simultaneously and stormed the house. They found Travis Wallace unconscious, overdosed but breathing, erratically, in the attic, the murder weapon, loaded, by his side, and over a hundred babyblue Roxicodone scattered about him on the plywood.

  * * *

  Smith passes herself off as a widow. She’s told no one she’s pregnant, but it must be starting to show. Patchouli Caryn and the other women of the Rip notice. The scruffy men simply stare at her aching, expanding breasts. She wonders if they know, better than she does, why her nipples are darkening.

  Among the lost tribe of charity cases paying by the fortnight at the Rip, she and Foxtrot, the newest members, are apparently the most deserving of charity. They find takeout lo mein left at their door, number 9, a fortune cookie for each of them, and an oily paper sack of home-baked dog biscuits shaped like legless cats.

  * * *

  The interim feels to her like months, but it’s been a week since Ray died. The morning she steps on a purple crocus pushing up through mud, she splashes vomit on her desert boots.

  The scene she revisits over three insomniac nights—lying propped up and awake with indigestion, heartburn aching her sternum—is not Ray bleeding out in the dirt lot of Big Papa’s. It’s the image of the boy she ran over in Saydabad.

  Poor kid had roundworms. Worms that, with the catastrophic trauma to the warm little world of the boy’s body, exited their host moments after it expired. It lay there, the lifeless body—he lay there, the dead boy, half on the road, his cartoonishly flattened lower half. He’d fallen finally silent, and from out of his nose and mouth came no spirit, no soul, no rūḥ threading up to Muḥammad’s subservient sun. Out came worms.

  * * *

  With the impending funeral down in Jersey, Smith worries Ray’s storage unit might contain something the family will need, something of sentimental value. The stash of cash Ray mentioned, she’s decided, is hers. Holed up in her motel room, sobbing over the tiny key on her palm, she feels guilt at her decision, and at the idea of not opening the unit with the Tyros, but she refuses to go against Ray’s expressed wants.

  She sets the key on the nightstand, next to the unplugged clock and the unfilled prescription for prenatal vitamins. She can’t fight her way out of a fixated thought: had she told Ray she was pregnant, he would be alive. He would’ve held on for the paramedics, or, better, he would’ve stood down, turned from Travis. She and Ray on the road this very minute, aimed for Alaska. On the front bike fender, the glowing glass face of the Indian leading and lighting the way. Some part of her knows her thinking is the worst kind of black magic, wicked even. There are no miracles. Not in a warzone, not in the homeland.

  The morning before the funeral, she and Foxtrot ride down to Hide-Away Storage. On her cheeks, the warm spring sun is an affront. Foxtrot disagrees, biting
the breeze, happy, muddy, fattened up on takeout. The dog hops from the sidecar before it’s parked, raises a hind leg to ping his piss on the sheet-metal wall. Together they find Ray’s unit. When she bends to insert the tiny key into the tiny lock, she sees the hasp has been cut. She pulls off the lock, pockets it and the key, and rolls up the door.

  The unit is ransacked. Things of value haven’t been taken. Ray’s pair of covert military-issue night-vision goggles. A small wooden box with a couple of sterling bracelets, a gold high-school class ring, OLPH.

  In the cardboard box that once kept his motorcycle helmet, she finds a mess of medals. Tangle of ribbons, streamers, brass. She recognizes most of them: Purple Heart, Meritorious Service, Army Achievement, National Defense Service, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary, Presidential Unit Citation.

  One by one, she untangles the knot, placing each medal in a row atop the box. When they’re lined up, she can’t help herself—she stands at attention.

  At the first righting of her posture, she feels stupid, sentimental and hysterical. Yet she lifts her arm in one swift, pendulous motion, without flourish, raising her flattened hand till her fingertip grazes the edge of her eyebrow, focusing on the arranged awards, and smartly snaps down her hand.

  Having run a gauntlet of her every last emotion, she stands at ease. The camel saddle, overturned, splays its four short legs in the air like a dead Shetland pony. Expecting the cushion to be cut, gutted, and looted, she flips it. On the underside, she finds the seam laced with an old leather cord soft as chamois. She unties it. Right inside the opening—as if there to hurt her, or to prove he wasn’t a fraud—is a photo.

  Ray and an Arabic woman, a woman so striking—black hair cleaved down the center of her head; earthy eyes; skin more toasted than tanned—Smith’s drawn not to her but into her. The kind of Middle Eastern woman whose beauty is a burden she must bear into late middle-age, if only she makes it that far, a burden not just to her but to everyone in her company, her loved-ones especially. The kind of woman warlords kill for and mullahs fear, afraid of themselves, their own desire. A shameful beauty, a terrible beauty, and Ray, all of twenty, stupidly standing proud beside that beauty in his dress blues.