The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  “Take it easy, would you please? I’m passing through is all.”

  “You’re trespassing and I’m tempted to have you arrested.”

  She raised her chin and squinted at him, defiant. She was more Indian than Latin, with a sharp-featured face, beautiful in its severity yet warm, like the head of a hatchet still red on the anvil. She tucked her phone under her chin, pulled her hair out of its ponytail, shaking free leaves and twigs, and retied it. Her tightened scalp drew back the corners of her dark eyes. Meaner. She pulled her phone from under her chin and said, “You can’t.”

  Despite her certain appeal—tight jeans, buttery smell—he was losing patience. “Get on out of here before I have the police come escort you out.”

  “Down home in Texas, people show a little more restraint with their firearms.”

  “You’re a long cow ride from Texas.”

  “You the landowner or just some squatter hermit?”

  He sniffed and didn’t holster his gun.

  “If you’re the landowner,” she said, “you should know the laws. This isn’t trespassing. You couldn’t have me arrested if you wanted to. You’ve got a river right there that’s navigable-in-fact. Anyone has right-of-way on that river even though it cuts through the middle of your property—assuming the property’s yours.”

  “You a lawyer?”

  “I’m no lawyer.”

  “Then which gas company you work for?”

  “Seeing as how I’m not breaking any laws, would you mind being a bit hospitable and give me a hand? Where I’m from, we take more kindly to strangers.”

  “How’s that, by hanging em high?”

  “The only thing we hang high is our piñatas, now if you please.”

  She was a strange mix that caused him confusion. She wouldn’t’ve been possible a generation ago—one part Southern belle, one part Menchú Tum—and he pointed to her flimsy boat that had been recently poured and pressed into its present shape. “If your canoe’s too heavy for you, you shouldn’t be out alone.”

  “Kayak. And I’m not. Got my phone to keep me company.” She slipped the slick device into her tight back pocket, and he felt himself relax.

  Her futuristic phone was a dark window into everything he’d missed over the years. With it he could access his every ignorance, if he only knew how, and he knew, with dread, he would never know how.

  Her eyes fixed behind him. “One of your friends approaches.”

  Milton awaited reinforcements he was in bad need of, Reverend coming on strong and overblown, taking too much pleasure in running folks off. Then he remembered: no one had confessed to seeing Reverend in nearly a month.

  Milton ignored the alpaca, keeping his back turned, and the animal, Sue, butted his head into Milton’s hip, knocking him off balance.

  “This one’s lively, and cute. They’re scraggly. Like they’re starving. They supposed to look so wasted-away?”

  Sue wasn’t fat, but neither was he wasting away, not with his coat coming in. Milton wondered what was telling her they were underfed. “Someone’s just carried off one of my herd. Thinking maybe it was you.”

  “Me?”

  “If I can’t have you arrested for trespassing, maybe I’ll try a lawsuit for poaching.”

  Sue nudged Milton, wanting a pull from his flask.

  “I don’t want trouble,” she said, “legal or otherwise.”

  “What, they don’t cultivate a sense of humor south of the Mason-Dixon? Let’s get your canoe in the water so I can see about solving the mystery of my vanishing camelid.” He ducked between fence rails. A complaint escaped him. He sounded like whiny Sue.

  “You okay?” She offered her hand, saying, “Evangelína,” and he didn’t take it.

  He gave her his back and grimaced, the twinge more along his ribcage than his spine. He needed to stretch, needed a minute before lifting a boat. Crouching, he untied the lace of his boot, concerned he’d need help to stand. “That true, that spiel about portaging and … What’d you call it? Navigable-in-truth?”

  “Learn something new, don’t you.” She had an authority he found reassuring in a woman so short.

  “Been here since the seventies.” He stood, slowly but without help or support from the fence. “Been running off trespassers of one kind or another. You’re not the first person to portage on my property, but none’ve ever made your argument.” He lifted the bow of her boat. A pain stitched between his ribs, like he’d popped a suture. He dragged the stern as he went. There was the hollow scraping sound he’d heard earlier. Another rustle, this one receding, came from the far treeline. Not trusting it, he was losing faith in his senses, and the world.

  The woman chased after Milton, raising the bow, unable to let their silence last more than a moment. “Most people aren’t informed. Me, I’m paid to be informed.”

  He dropped her kayak and faced her. “By who?”

  “I’m a right-of-way agent.”

  “Not just out for a joyride in your canoe, huh? Right-of-way agent. Sounds like a lawyer by another name.”

  “Kayak. I’m on company business.”

  “Gas company business.”

  “I’m under contract with SW&B Construction.”

  “Looking to build a casino?”

  “My employer’s interested in this property. We’re considering a few holdings in the Catskills. Not a casino. Too much risk before next November. We want to build a high-end golf resort that’s no more than a long drive from New York City.”

  “That part of your marketing campaign?”

  “We’re trying to decide if we should recondition an old property, like this one, or if it would be more cost-effective to buy an undeveloped parcel and start from scratch.”

  “You give me a few minutes?”

  Her eyes widened, as if she thought he might sell her the whole lot right there on the spot for some duffel cloth, ax heads, wampum, a few Jew’s harps, and a fistful of Dutch guilders. “Take your time.” She pulled out her phone. “No reception up here.”

  Maybe she was alluding to his lack of hospitality. He leaned against fence rails he’d raised from trees he felled, looked beyond the spooked alpaca that would soon be starving.

  He’d entertained offers over the years. One in ’87 he would’ve taken from the Koch administration, in a failed bid to turn the Standard into a city-owned-and-operated 600-bed homeless shelter. Local officials beat back that proposal, and it eventually led Milton to enact the idea on his own, on a smaller scale. Then there was the offer that sounded a lot like this offer; he’d already heard the one about the high-end golf resort, in the mid-eighties, from a boomtime Japanese investment firm. In bad financial and emotional shape, he’d been physically fit, even drunk, which helped him endure the boozy dinners, where three Sumitomo salarymen in Italian suits talked to him about nemawashi, digging around the roots, a process of discreetly laying the foundation for some proposed change or new project. Milton bonded with one of the men, Kensaku, who, weeks earlier, lost his wife and two teenage daughters in the Otaki earthquake when the south face of Mount Ontakesan by the Magio Dam crashed through the pines and carried his home and his family into the reservoir. Yet here he was, Kensaku, talking tee shots and bad lies, proclaiming a love of lox, sipping sake, saying Kiso-Ontakesan resembled these a Cat-a-skills. He bowed his head sharply, raised his masu, a wood box of a cup. He told Milton he would begin to mourn when he returned home, once the sale of the Standard was finalized, but Milton, after deliberation, declined, bowing his head, saying he wasn’t ready. His wife was here, dead eight years then, but still here. The other two salarymen, furious, stormed out. Kensaku stayed to pay the bill, and the two widowers finished their cold sake in shared silence.

  Milton thought to offer this Evangelína a cup of coffee, get a sense of her seriousness, but the squad would be gathering round the cook fire for morning briefing. He was to let them know that a woman, Specialist Antebellum Smith, would be joining their ranks that evening. One wom
an was plenty. He didn’t want a short sexpot to get his vets riled with her talk of a purchase. Make them think they’d again be homeless—he wouldn’t let that happen. Offers like this came to nothing more times than not.

  Staring at the leaves falling around his dwindling herd, he determined to turn her down, run her off, but he’d do so with some measure of reluctance. He understood his role. A business deal was a courtship, she was the suitor, and if she was serious, she’d be back. He said, “I would kindly like you off my property.”

  “But, wait, what just happened?”

  “Nothing happened. I’m not ready to sell yet.”

  “How could we help you get ready? We’re prepared to make a sizable offer.”

  He wanted to say: Go on over to the Mohonk Mountain House and offer size to the Smileys. See if they bite. You also got the Concord and the Nevele nearby. I’ll give you directions. Now scat. What he said was: “If I wanted to sell, I wouldn’t sell to some construction company with plans for a golf course. I’d sell to some hydrofracker for a whole heck of a lot more than you’re willing to offer.”

  “We’re offering a purchase, clean and simple.”

  “This what they call the hard buy? You have a tough time hearing no, don’t you?”

  “Here’s my business card. I’d like to be in touch.”

  He took the card. “Let’s get over to the Mongaup and launch you in your tippy canoe, Menchú Tum.”

  “Menchú who?”

  “Kids these days. If you’re not reading it off your phone, it’s dead to you.”

  They portaged together without talking, finding a walking rhythm, she synching her choppy steps to his rangy strides. The sunlight rang his ears, making him want to beat a retreat back to the dark and curl in the void of the oubliette. Bright light had gotten brighter, was audible, like the tolling of a bell. Into the treeline he followed a well-trod deer trail heading to where the Mongaup gossiped in the woods. Deer trails wending through underbrush from water source to water source. Deer trails become hunting paths, first for indigenous Americans, followed by Europeans and their slaves. Paths for hunting become wagon roads become Main Streets and Broadways. The story of America was a story of roads, and all the roads said the same simple thing: we want and will go to get.

  At the bank of bluestone slabs, she climbed in her kayak. He shoved her off, nearly dumping her into the water. He stood watching, refusing to wave, as she drifted downriver, waving. He caught a chill, pain behind his eyes like a cold icepick slipped into his temple—a wave of déjà vu that was more clairvoyance than remembrance. Milton felt watched. Tracked not by a person but a presence, stalked by the lost past. On this very spot there surely stood a former Dutch slave—father of Isabella Baumfree—sending off the daughter of a Lenape chieftain making an offer of too little, too late.

  * * *

  Ray takes the quick route from the Standard grounds, a five-mile sprint downhill beneath the zipping sizzle of the high-tension cables, where he feels secure. Under the thrumming electromagnetic field, invisible yet tactile, like ionized air before a lightning strike, there’s no need to wear a tinfoil beanie to keep his employers from reading his brainwaves.

  The scraps of metal, killer confetti scattered under the skin of his hip and thigh, burn as if still hot from the VBIED blast that projected car parts into his person. Earned him his last Purple Heart and the lifelong pledge of partial disability pay—a check that, for the past year, went straight to Wright.

  His throbbing pain lessens the farther he runs. There’s a stat he can’t get out of his head: IEDs caused over 60 percent of coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ray pulls up. Takes a knee and gives his thigh a hard rub. Sometimes he can’t believe he made it out alive. Sometimes, he’s certain he didn’t. He died. This here, his American afterlife, is but a bad dream, a living hell, the everlasting sentence he’s serving for his war crimes.

  Consolidated Edison maintains the broad service road, keeps it well cleared. In the sunken valley below him, the Neversink Reservoir stretches its dark avenue. The spangled trees, splashes of yellow, orange, and red broken up by the spires of evergreens, spread to the tinselly Hudson River and beyond, reaching the hazy foothills of the Berkshires.

  He resumes his run. At the third mile, he reaches the bank of the reservoir. He takes a few minutes to skip stones on the surface, beneath which lie whole drowned towns. Big freshwater fish, walleye and trout, trolling for little fish in churches. Soft-shelled turtles the size of tires cruising over Division Street and Old Post Road. Lives and livelihoods deluged, all so residents of the five boroughs can drink clean water.

  He walks the bank till he finds the narrow point over the Neversink River. Sweaty and ready to place his call, he enters the hamlet of Neversink, relocated after the original town was sunk. The antediluvian naming of the village, circa 1800, surely sealed its fate.

  Ray makes treks into the neighboring small towns every week, to place a call, to loiter in the public library, where he uses a computer to conduct research, or visit yurtforum.com, sometimes simply to catch sight of another face, sometimes to nurse a can of Coke at the Citgo in Neversink, where there are no bars. After the end of Prohibition, the civic Neversink elders passed a quaint dry law still in effect.

  The payphone stands outside the fire department, where two firefighters use a pressure washer to scrub and spray the big Volvo diesel pumper.

  Watching them watch him, Ray dials the real-estate lawyer who for nearly a year has issued Ray’s orders, received his briefs, and paid him in tight bricks of cash.

  The male receptionist answers, “Baum Law Office.”

  “It’s Early Bird.”

  Silence, followed by throat clearing. “One moment. Can you hold?”

  “Got all the time in the world, sweetheart.”

  The fireman holding the pressure washer regards Ray from across the twenty meters separating them. He’s Ray’s age, pushing up on thirty, Ray’s height, a couple inches short of six feet, but he’s over-inflated, his bulk built by heavy weight at low reps, his strength slow. Ray’s strength is his speed and stamina, increased by calisthenics, distance runs, and survival work. His body provides all the resistance—he’s proud of his bushman’s physique.

  He must be giving the fireman the shit-eye, because the guy aims at Ray down the barrel of the pressure washer. He winks and shoots. The jet of water arcs up and over but falls short. The implication doesn’t: Ray’s a dirtbag in need of a wash.

  Ray sniffs his underarm. He does stink, his hair long and greasy, his beard thick and filthy. He hasn’t been clean-shaven in a decade, facial hair grown out to blend in first with the Taliban and then Iraqi insurgents.

  The other fireman, tall, all sinew, is leaning on the pole of his scrub brush. He smacks a hand on his partner’s slab of a chest.

  Ray raises his arm and waves, flashing them, if they care to see, the tomahawk sheathed snug in his sopping armpit, concealed when his arm is at his side.

  They don’t wave back. They’re on guard. Ray can’t blame them. The population of the village is a couple hundred souls. These two see an unwashed mountain man—soul long sold—come down off his precipice as a threat to the soulful.

  Over the receiver, the receptionist says, “Mr. Baum on the line.”

  “Yes, hello, this is Ellis.”

  A click as the receptionist hangs up.

  “We need to meet.”

  “The usual place?”

  “No.”

  “Can you come to the office after hours?”

  “I name where.”

  A clatter of keyboard keys in the background. “Okay.”

  “I want to go fishing.”

  “Is that code?”

  “It is not.”

  “You have a New York State fishing license?”

  “Howbout you score me one, as a perk.”

  “Where you want to fish?”

  “On a boat, on the Ashokan.”

  “It’s far
for you.”

  “Don’t assume you know where I am.”

  The clack, clack of fingers over keys. Then silence, and Ray imagines Baum getting up from the mod desk positioned against the wall of the pre-Revolutionary stone-house-cum-commercial-space in the former capital of New York State, going to the window and looking out at the payphone cattycorner to his office, a phone Ray has used.

  “Since September 11th,” Baum informs him, “you need a Public Access Permit to use DEP land in the watershed. The PAPs aren’t easy to get, and you have to have one before you can apply for a Boat Tag. Once you get your Boat Tag, then you’re free to fish on the Ashokan.”

  “You have a Public Access Permit.”

  In the pause that follows, Ray nearly hears Baum’s synapses recoiling into the curlicues of question marks: What else does he know about me? That I’m married? That I have two kids, one adopted? That before I opened my Kingston real-estate office, I worked as a land-lease attorney in a Pennsylvania mining town?

  Baum says, “I do.”

  “You also have a Boat Tag. And a boat. On the north bank off Onteora Trail.”

  “You’ve been checking up on me.”

  “You wouldn’t be paying me so handsomely if I wasn’t capable of due diligence.”

  “We’ll have to get you a guest pass. The DEP’s everywhere out there. I’ve never been on the reservoir and not gotten carded.”

  “Then get me a guest pass.”

  “Can take up to two weeks. I’ll need a valid driver’s license number.”

  Ray pulls out his Jersey license. He reads the letters and numbers, transposing two.

  “I’ll arrange it.”

  “Do better than that. Expedite it. I want to meet, at twenty-four hundred hours, three days from now.”

  “We’re supposed to be getting more weather. Early November nor’easter.”