The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  Later she asked around. Other terps told her he was probably saying, Maní piss, my father. Watusi was from Zaranj. Village one klick from the Iranian border, a place coalition forces didn’t go, a place she couldn’t get to, to say sorry to his father, so she let it rest.

  Milton was watching her in a way that made her want to wipe her mouth, her face. She set down the sandwich. “I got a pattern. Going AWOL on you.”

  She left him sitting between the two towering sandwiches about to topple, and it was a few weeks before she mustered the courage to ask about him. The manager of the soup kitchen said she could send him word, that a week or so might go by before he got it, deep as he was in the Catskills and entirely off the grid.

  Took him a few visits over a couple months to cajole her upstate, and she caved after he confessed to having cancer, albeit in remission. Just like she’d done with the Army, she committed herself before knowing what she was in for. Milt had a contract for her to sign, and she flipped through without reading. The fact of it was enough; it made him seem legitimate. So she signed on the solid line, but first, he said, he needed to lay the foundation for her arrival.

  * * *

  The Standard vets called their hides ghillie suits, except for Stotts-Dupree, who called his a yowie, which was how they referred to them at Camp Robinson, Army National Guard Sniper School, where Stotts-Dupree flunked out after contracting a bad case of the yips.

  Most of the vets were accustomed to the notion that in uniform they looked like Germanic shepherds being retributively raped from behind by a herd of lanky sheep. Come winter, they’d again be grateful for the warmth the pelts provided. But here it was, end of a scalding, droughty summer, and they were in furs. They were uncomfortable and irritable.

  Their routine had been busted. They hadn’t eaten lunch. Midday Simon Says—part military drill, part camaraderie builder—had been canceled, the daily briefing pushed back to evening. All so Milt could make one of his weekly milk runs.

  Scratching their beards of varying lengths, the Standard vets stood at a remove from the old fountain pool they used to contain their cook fire. The two Marines of the company climbed in, kicked over the sewer grate that served as a grill, and stomped out the coals. Smoke tumbled up around them. They sought to settle a grudge and, despite the disruption, the entire company was glad for a diversion from their standing orders—split wood; set snares; see to the meat rabbits, chickens, and alpaca; gather their droppings to age, mash up, and water down to fertilize the three-acre garden after they tilled; weed endlessly, harvest, seed the fall crops, on and on. Readying for winter was a nine-month means they got a break from only while trying to survive its end. This unrelenting work distracted them from their real-world guilt over the families they’d abandoned, and from the certain knowledge that these families were easier off for their absences.

  In charge was Sergeant Paul Vessey, the highest-ranking officer of Standard Company and, as the only other Nam vet, the most senior man after Milt.

  Vessey was a year north of sixty with nothing to his name—nothing except his dog, Egon. Right before Vessey’s life had collapsed on him like a coalmine with no oversight, he’d managed one decent thing: he put his name on the waitlist to adopt a retired military working dog. Just before HUD foreclosed him, he got a call from Lackland Air Force Base. They had a Belgian Malinois, Egon, a sniffer who’d served six years, surviving four tours and two handlers, before hip dysplasia got him declared excess by the Department of Defense. The other vets understood that old-ass Vessey had been brevetted because of Egon. Everybody loved Egon, everyone save Private Stone, whom everyone hated.

  The two Marines untied their pelts. One of them, Merced, lay down his walking stick, mumbling, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.” The stick, carved with runes only Merced could read, was expertly topped with a five-point antler like a bony hand. MWD Egon barked at the stick, bit one end, and tried to drag it off.

  Vessey got a handle on his dog’s choker. He made rounds, using Egon’s ailment as an excuse to go slow, his knees every bit as grating as the dog’s hips. He tallied heads. One missing. Reverend. Absent yet again.

  For months, Reverend had been slipping in and out. They all figured he’d split. No surprise, but Vessey wanted to have some intel to report back when Milt returned.

  Specialist Dereemus Stotts-Dupree, the baby at age twenty-two, stood alone.

  Vessey walked, Egon at his heel, over to him. Stotts-Dupree scuffed a sole of the hobnailed boots he swore by, back and forth—scri, scri—over an exposed slab of bluestone. With nearly every pass, the cleats shot sparks. His scruffy cheeks were sucked in under his high cheekbones—he wasn’t wearing his top teeth.

  “STD, you got any info on Reverend’s whereabouts?”

  Stotts-Dupree started straight in on the Second Coming, and Vessey turned away from the lisping prophecy, catching enough to feel crazed: how the four happy horsemen of the Apocalypse were bound to come riding down out of the Catskills and into the babbling City of New York on the backs of the Standard alpaca.

  “Luce, howbout you,” Vessey hollered. “You set eyes on Reverend?”

  Specialist Jeffrey “Screw” Luce couldn’t quit scratching the itch at the tumescent end of the stump rounded off just below his elbow. He wore army-green, button-down shirts he’d tailored himself; the shortened right sleeves boasted cuffs with cute corduroy buttons, which he claimed made them easier to manage one-handed.

  Luce shot a brown rope of chaw spit into the grass, dabbing his mouth with his stump before going vigorously back at the itch.

  Vessey gently pulled Luce’s hand from the raw nub. “Go gentle.”

  Luce jerked his arm out of Vessey’s grip. “Fucking touch me, Vess, you two-handed homo-ass motherfuck.”

  The dog flashed his yellow fangs but didn’t snarl.

  “Egon, gîter, boy.”

  “You and your French-speaking gimp of a German shepherd, you’re a goddamn—”

  “He’s a Malinois, Specialist Screw Luce. You’ll address me by my rank or I will sic Egon on you. Watch while he goes to town on your chew toy of a scrotum. Got me?”

  “Yeah, shit, I got you. Hearts and minds.” Luce leaned over, reached, and held himself with his stump. “Got you right here.”

  Vessey unclipped the leash from Egon’s choker.

  Luce stood at attention, clapping his heels together, and saluted with his stump.

  Vessey reclipped Egon’s leash, returned the salute and hailed the next man, “Stone, you seen Reverend?”

  “No I have not seen no Reverend Ranger.” Private First Class Samuel Stone was an Army National Guardsman who, in summer of ’01, signed up for One weekend a month, two weeks a year, and wound up getting twenty-four months of mobilization for his six-year fine-print conscription. He kept his eyes trained on the Marines. “Mighty beautiful thing.”

  “What, two jarheads about to bust one another over nothing?”

  “Nah, man. A meth rock. It’s a rough opal.”

  “Tell it to your sponsor.”

  “Sponsor’s been dead going on two years, which incidentally’s how long I been sober.” He squatted and held out his open hand to Egon. “Meth’s got more names than a freelance pole dancer.”

  Egon hesitated, whined, and flattened his ears.

  Stone said to the dog, “Egon, you know methamphetamine was the drug of choice for bombardiers in the Deuce? How’s that for testament to its righteousness.” He reached into his pocket, brought his empty hand out again, and rubbed a greasy finger on his palm.

  Egon sniffed, then licked, and Stone grabbed the dog’s tongue, held hard, and gave him a shove in the hindquarter.

  Egon yelped, snarled, and leaned into his bite stance.

  “Gîter, Egon.” Vessey tugged the choker.

  Stone said, “Damn mutt chewed a hole in my canteen.”

  “You got it coming to you, Stone.” Vessey pulled Egon along.

  On one thigh, another vet smacked out a f
leshy drumroll with battered drumsticks.

  “Luckson,” Vessey said, “you got a bead on Reverend?”

  “It’s Abdul Alhazred, Vess. How many times I got to tell you? It’s official. Milt’s lawyer made it legal.”

  “You becoming Muslim’s like me turning communist.”

  “Didn’t you do time on a commune?”

  “Dandelion up in Ontario. Maybe the best year of my life.”

  “There you go.” Alhazred played another run on his thigh, this one quicker, closed, the fast beat saying, Move along. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m working.”

  “On?”

  “My freestyling. Check it. My rap occupies a gray area, verbal malaria—”

  “Anyone ever told you you’re white?”

  “I’m high yellow.” Ba-da-tshh—Alhazred’s joke-roll rim shot was two pats on his thigh followed by a mouthy cymbal crash. “Where Milt at?”

  “The city.”

  “Must say, stupid as his Simon Says is, and much as I hate it before I’m doing it, it’s a fine way to start the day. Hearts and minds. Way he leads it, it’s like foot drill.”

  “Beats watching Marines grope each other in the cook fire.”

  “Hope the brother’s seeing a good lady medic. One moment he his ol’ sharp self, the next he’s gone Airborne without packing a chute. Brother’s fighting cancer with cough drops. Shit aint gonna win the war. Hearts and minds, damn.”

  “They’re herbal.”

  “Vess, come off it. Least the brother could do is get a script for some medical marijuana. Then share, shit. Hearts and minds.”

  “Hearts and minds. You boys even got any idea where that comes from?”

  “Comes from our war. Said it over there a little ironic like.”

  “Comes from my war, not yours. Lyndon B. Johnson. Know who he is?”

  “Yes, sir.” Alhazred grabbed himself in a lowball salute.

  “You young guns all got the same cocky attitude.” Vessey tugged Egon’s leash and motioned over Petty Officer Ferdinand Wisenbeker, their only sailor and the only vet besides Merced who wore his fur to full effect. Wisenbeker tipped the alpaca face off his head like it was the bill of a ball cap.

  Vessey said, “Let’s get a fire lit, Wiz. Everybody’ll settle down once we eat. You’re on KP. Afternoon eggs.”

  “Don’t eat eggs, Vessey, my man. Even if I did, what’d you want? Me to cremate Merced and Botes?”

  Private First Class Jairo Merced and Lance Corporal Jacko Botes stood naked from the waist up. Merced had an epic Día de los Muertos mural, tattooed in Technicolor, up his back and across his shoulders. Botes’s torso, covered in coarse black hair, looked like the lean body of a wild boar. They bounced on the balls of their boots at opposite ends of the short fountain pool. Merced smacked himself, raising red handprints on his face, his chest; Botes flexed, stretched, and popped his neck.

  “Didn’t know Filipinos could grow body hair,” Luce yelled. “Botes, in a fag bar you’d be a bear!”

  When Stone shouted, “Let’s roll!” Merced and Botes thwacked together at the center of the ring like two colliding sides of beef.

  Wisenbeker leaned in and lowered his voice. “Been made to understand Reverend’s being paid by George Soros, who’s funding a Standard splinter group. Set up an outpost a couple klicks from here. Amassing forces. Gonna lay siege to the Standard. Shit you not. Know what else he told me?”

  Alhazred, Wisenbeker’s straight man, offered, “Wait till you hear this, Vess.”

  Egon lay down and rested his chin on his paws, and Vessey readied himself for another veteran tirade. Grunt talk was a feedback loop. Gossip, prophesy, conspiracy theory, pipe dream. In the information age, most soldiers operated with limited information. So they told stories. Like most Americans. Just trying to make sense. Of a US secretary of state displaying a fake vial of anthrax at the UN General Assembly. Of WMD spirited, eleventh-hour, over the border to Syria, a convoy of presents to President Assad. Or Uday Hussein’s snuff videos, showing him feeding the bodies of his victims, sodomized brides kidnapped from their weddings, to his pride of pet lions. Or the neatly severed heads of suicide bombers, some of them women wearing hijab, that were booted around while survivors and soldiers like Merced took photos with their phones.

  “What you want me to say?” Wisenbeker said. “Reverend’s a stuck-up special ass. Thinks he’s better—fucking wannabe West Pointer—cause he read Art of War. Whoop-de-do. Dude can do eighty push-ups in two minutes. Aint no operator. Rangers, lead the way, my cockeyed dick. Dude’s Mossad.”

  “All this time we been calling him Reverend”—Alhazred clicked his drum sticks—“when we should’ve been calling him Rabbi.”

  Wisenbeker said, “Guy sold his gun for corporate sponsorship. And that tomahawk? Come on. Shit’s a prop. No one trusts him. Tell him, Abdul.”

  “I don’t know. Seen him lodge that tomahawk in a tree from far-ass away.”

  Wisenbeker told Vessey, “Merced says he’s got a one-man FOB up a nearby peak. On some high-alt psychotropic psychedelic psilocybin trip. Balancing rocks for enlightenment. Thinks he’s Bruce Lee in Game of Death. He knows the dim mak, my foot.”

  Alhazred said, “I know dim sum.”

  “Not talking,” Wisenbeker said, “bout no cross between oriental buffet and bingo. Talking the dim fucking mak, man.” Wisenbeker shoved two fingers into Alhazred’s neck.

  “Ow.”

  “The death touch. Said it literally means press artery in Chinese.”

  Alhazred rubbed his neck. “So what’s dim sum mean?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Wisenbeker said. “Press dumpling?”

  They watched the Marines tangle a minute, deadlocked. For most of them, the Standard was their last potshot at a decent life. Once they left, they’d be on their own, and most of them wouldn’t make it alone.

  Like Luce, who will leave in the middle of a biblical plague of bats to bum his way out to Greenport toward the end of the North Fork of Long Island. There, he begs his ex-wife, on a Tuesday, on his knees, on her sunken front stoop, to let him in, and when she does, as soon as the door closes behind them, he’s back to begging her, back on his knees. He wants to get her off with his stump. She can’t believe it, and against her bad judgment, she undresses and lets him. Despite her reservations and the ugly, unsanitary look of the thing, she appreciates it, enjoys it even, the bizarre behavioral therapy. Trying to turn loss into love. This alone gets them through the first month, but it doesn’t erase her suspicions. In month two, she catches him picking up Asian men on Craigslist, using her computer, and she throws him out. He rents a room in Riverhead at the Peconic Inn, next door to a pizza parlor, a long commute to Greenport for a job crewing aboard the Shelter Island ferry. Before work, he buys a fifth of the cheapest vodka at the closest package store. Nipping from the plastic bottle, he walks to the Riverhead train station. Moments after a train passes, he can be seen, on his knees, as if in prayer, resting one cheekbone, then the other, against the tracks. The vibrations jostle, warm, and loosen the mucus in his sinuses, the tracks heated on the iciest days by steel wheels worn to a mirror shine. For a few seconds, his head clears. He can go about his day crossing and re-crossing Peconic Bay.

  One blustery winter morning, he rises off the track lightheaded and chases after an unloaded freight train picking up speed. He heaves himself aboard with his good hand, his only hand, and settles into an empty unlocked stock-car, its floor covered in frozen manure. There, he eases into the long, windy ride, sub-zero, kept company by a fifth of Kasser’s Kavkaski, and twenty-four hours later he’s found dead, no ID, his one hand rigor stiff and curled through an opening in the steel slats. The responding firemen and medical workers are confronted with the choice of cutting through the steel wall of the cattle car or breaking the poor hobo’s wrist to free his body. An EMT tries a forearm massage to loosen up the hand. Nothing. Guy’s hard as rebar. After a call to Anacostia Rail Holdings Company, they decide against cutting
the cattle car. With a hair dryer, they take turns thawing the wrist and fingers, the freight train outrageously late by the time John Doe lets go.

  FALL

  2012

  EVANGELÍNA WOKE HUNGOVER—a mescal-induced migraine. In the watery dark outside the porthole, a helicopter jounced onto the platform’s heliport. Next came an unexpected knock and an Aussie holler from the other side of the reinforced door: “Whirlybird’s all set, Miss Canek!”

  Cursing in Spanish, she hurriedly dressed in a business suit that was asinine aboard an oilrig. She packed her suitcase, jettisoned what was left of the pound of dried apricots she’d brought with her. Her mamí, a curandera, claimed they were a fertility food. Evangelína had yet to tell Mamí she was trying to get pregnant.

  As the helicopter approached the coast, the dawning Texas haze thickened. They whirred over the countless platforms and tankers offshore. Beyond the beaches, refinery row: retention pools, storage tanks, the eternal flames of the flare stacks burning waste gas.

  They flew above the suburbs. Finally, Houston. While the sun blistered over the Gulf of Mexico, the helicopter touched down atop IRJ Tower. Evangelína—sick to her stomach, off balance—disembarked refusing the hand offered her by the copilot.