“No.”
“Need a car? Can piece something together for you, if you’re willing to hang around a few days. Got a tent we can pitch.” Another cat, balding, greasy with motor oil, pads from the warm shadows and jumps on Daddy’s lap. He gives it a moment to settle in.
“Haven’t seen the Green Machine.”
“Sold her. Money got Esperanza, Charlie and myself through most of this here Great Recession, which in central Florida’s been a downright depression.”
Carlos leans against Increase, who raises his arm to make more room.
“Even had enough left over for some decent schooling for Victor here. Got him in a Montessori school. Guy—”
“You’re paying for Catholic school?”
“Montessoris aint Catholic, Ant. But don’t ask me what they are.”
Not wanting their talk to end, she asks if he’s working on anything.
“Oh,” he tells her, “you know me and my projects. Been trying to nig—” He glances down at Charlie. “To jury-rig a steam power plant. Did what they did for their ’69 Chevelle—aw but you two don’t want to hear an old man yammer on about his projects.” He pats Carlos’s head. “Right Vic?”
Carlos shrugs and smiles, and Smith can’t keep herself from saying, “He doesn’t look like he gets the same hard friskings I got.”
Increase says to Ray, “I was a ruffian raising a daughter on his own, and she was turning woman before my eyes. Never had an easy time with women. Always treated em rough. I switched Ant’s toosh, but I never smacked her around like I did her momma. That woman asked for it. By asking I don’t mean she had it coming. She’d get down on hands and knees and beg. Resisted best I could. But I got a low tolerance for resistance. Last thing in my life I wanted was her to wind up like her mother, or, worse, wind up with a man like me, but I—”
“Talk to me, Daddy. I’m standing right fucking here.”
“Trying.” He turns to her but doesn’t meet her eyes. “Wanted to save you from this.” He points out at the rusting wrecks, weeds growing in them, one even supporting a mature strangler fig. “It’s a bearable existence, Ant, and I can bear it but there’s better.” He looks at Smith, into her. “Just didn’t know how to give it you. Then I got that call from you, right before you shipped out the first time. Just knew. Not that I needed to approve of your Missourian. But when you couldn’t even let me see the man? Or let him see me? Well, what I knew to be true was maybe what I expected all along.”
“What’s that, Daddy.”
He says to the cat in his lap, “You found you a fuckup, same as your old man.” He turns to Carlos. “Don’t let me catch you repeating that now.” He faces Smith full-on. “You wound up with a no-good son of a skunk. Same way I wasn’t no good for your momma. Simply could not reach that woman. Even when I was half a foot up in her. Your momma and me, we were BTDC.” He waits.
“I know BTDC,” Smith says.
He points a typing finger at Ray. “What about you?”
Ray says, “Before top dead center.”
Increase smiles. “This one’s a keeper.”
“What’s this got fuckall to do with momma?”
“Your mom and me, we had spark but we’d advanced before top dead center. BTDC. Thought about this an awful lot now. Wrote all about it in my book. I ought’ve waited till she got clean fore messing with her. Had I been able to delay my gratification, she might still be here. And you, Ant, might’ve had some motherlove.” His lips tighten. “I gave you what love I had. And then some. Wasn’t the best brand of love a little girl could get. Can say, looking back, I loved you—love you—more than I ever loved any thing in this life. What that’s worth.” He stands dry-eyed and, not without trouble, lifts up Carlos, saying, “Ho now, getting heavy.” He hands Carlos to Smith. “Told myself that, just maybe, I could do right by you, little bit at least, if I could do a better job caring for another little one.”
Carlos hides his face in the crook of Smith’s neck, his breath warm and tickling.
“All right, that’s it. Apologies for getting windy and sappy. Busted-up biker ought to get a few graces. Now yall git. I do appreciate you stopping by, making introductions.”
“Good seeing you’re doing good. You don’t look good. But you sound good, Daddy, real good.”
“Take what I can get. And, Ant.”
“Yeah, Daddy?”
“Nothing.”
“Go on. Don’t start filtering your talk now.”
“I am sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
She hugs him. “Everything’s enough.” He smells of sweat and motor oil, and she breathes him deeply before pulling away. “We’ll call, Daddy.”
“Don’t call. Friend me.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
Without word, Ray reaches out a hand and he and Daddy shake. Ray ruffles Carlos’s hair, and with the same hand he takes Smith’s.
They walk back to the dusty motorcycle. Before they leave, Smith knocks on the trailer door, gently this time, and when Esperanza comes to it, opening it a crack, Smith says, “Muchas gracias, Esperanza, muchas, muchas.” She backs away waving.
* * *
Near Elizabethtown, at the start of a Kentucky dusk like a distant barn burning, they ride North Dixie to the cloverleaf that exits toward Bullion Boulevard and Fort Knox. Smith curls in the sidecar, burying her face in her knees.
Ray rests his palm on the back of her neck. “Incoming.”
An M24 Chaffee light tank aims at them, parked atop a two-tier brick platform. The road widens to four lanes. Flanking the road are two more platforms, where an M1 Abrams and an M2 Bradley face off, tank versus tank. They both read Welcome to Fort Knox.
“It’s only going to be a few days, right?”
“Cording to the internet,” he tells her, “long as you don’t bring up any issues the Army has to investigate, we’re talking three, four days. Today’s Tuesday, and they in-process into the PCF on Wednesday. Out-processing’s Friday morning.”
“What are you gonna do while I’m in?”
“Got an errand to run.”
“Please tell me you’re not gonna go see Travis.”
From the Wet Ones tub in a saddlebag he counts out ten bills. “Here.”
“A thousand dollars? No, Ray.”
“Case something happens.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Got some unfinished business in Houston I need to see to.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Means I want someone to tell me why I spent a year at the Standard spying on Wright.” He turns over her hand, opens it. “Key to the little lock on my storage unit. Remember that camel saddle?”
“This a joke?”
“Saddle’s got a ratty leather cushion. Cushion’s got a seam on the underside. Something happens to me, you go get that cushion. What’s in there’s yours, you understand? Not my mother’s, not my brothers’. My mother’ll get my life insurance.”
“Feeling sick.”
“Motorcycle’s yours too.”
“Stop dictating your fucking will to me!”
“I’ll be back by Friday.”
“And what if you’re not? How do I get ahold of you?”
“Ant, I’ll be here.”
“Don’t Ant me.”
“Look, I’m all in. If I’m not here on Friday, it’ll only mean one thing.”
“Don’t.”
“That I’m being detained or I’m dead.”
“That’s two things, two entirely different fucking things. Detained I’ll forgive you for. But if you’re dead, you fuck, I’m gonna be so fucking furious at you I’ll never—”
“Then I’ll be sure to live forever.”
Her eyes narrow and he sees her harden. She’s a good soldier. Flipped the switch, her fear gone from making her anxious to making her angry. “The Standard is not Iraq.”
“I know that.”
“You thin
k you’re gonna go there and conduct an interrogation till some muckety-muck caves? Says they thought Milt had a stockpile of WMD? Under the armory? The big bell. So they ousted him. Maybe poison him. Make it look like cancer.”
“Believe that before I bought the golf horseshit.”
“If you got to do this, then do it, but just know this.”
He waits, feels himself flinch.
“And maybe it’s selfish of me,” she says, “but I’d rather have you beside me and absent some of the time, off in your own dark head space, than not have you at all. You understand, you asshole? What I’m saying is I want all of you, however you are. Now kiss me and pull up to the gate before I change my fucking mind. The guards are eyeing us like I’m riding inside a fertilizer bomb.”
The guard, a pimply kid in a civvy security uniform, nods. His nameplate reads Hoyt.
“Here to turn myself in,” Smith says. “I’m a deserter.”
“Need to see ID. Military and driver’s if you got both.”
She hands them over.
“Hold tight. I’ll give the MPs a call. They handle the trip to the PCF.” He smiles at her. “Nothing to be concerned or ashamed of. Alright?”
“Preciate it.”
“It’s in our blood, what I like to tell yall. Country was founded—hell, and filled—by folks running away. Deserting. Few things more American, you ask me. Maybe that’s why we treat yall like we do—nice. Worst thing about it’s the corporal tunnel you’re sure to get filling out all the paperwork. And the food.”
Ray says, “Carpal.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Don’t mind him,” Smith says. “He’s worried for me’s all.”
“Well no need to worry, sir. She’ll be doing a ton of TV watching. Got a thousand channels in there.” In his booth, Hoyt places a call. He returns and says, “Excuse me,” before giving Smith a gentle, thorough going over.
The MPs show, a man and a woman wearing ACUs.
The woman says to Hoyt inventorying Smith’s things, “Busy evening.”
Hoyt says to Smith, “Word’s out Wednesday’s in-processing. We get a good showing. Fourth one today.” He turns to the MP. “She’s good to go.” He touches Smith’s forearm. “Ma’am, it’s a long road leads here, and it’ll all be over before you know it.”
The woman MP says, “This here your husband?”
Ray stands straddling the motorbike. “Fiancé.”
“You’d think,” the man MP says, “we’d come up with a word wasn’t so French.”
The woman says, “Normally I’d have to cuff you. But seeing how your betrothed is here—” She shoves her partner in the shoulder. “—and you’ve surrendered, if you want, your man can drive you.”
“This man aint my fiancé, ma’am. That was just another of his clumsy proposals. To which,” she turns to Ray, “I say, Fuck no.”
Hoyt says, “Ouch.”
“If you’re here waiting for me when I get out,” Smith says, “I’ll reconsider.”
Ray nods. “It’s a date.”
She strides over and kisses him hard, feeling a terrible urge to tell him she loves him, an urge she’s able to resist.
* * *
Overnight on the interstate, and in just under twelve hours, Ray makes the ride from Fort Knox. By the time he’s welcomed to the Lone Star State, skirting Texarkana, he’s worked and reworked a tentative plan short on specifics, what his onetime commanding officers called a Concept of Operation.
He’ll know more when he gets to Houston for reconnoiter. Meantime, all the op needs is a name. From Queen City through to Linden, he rattles off operations he recalls, some he doesn’t. Op OK Corral. Op Tapeworm. Op Soda Mountain. Outside Carthage, he says one aloud, “Operation Snakehead,” and the rushing air puffs out his cheeks. Resaying it, “Operation Snakehead,” makes it real, makes him giddy, recalling that night with Baum on the reservoir. The first honest talk he had with another man in a long damn time.
Exhausted and chilled through his leathers, Ray’s shivering, starving, and riding a mean depravation high. Across I-69, in the Deerbrook Mall minutes after it opens, he has a momentous occasion. He clothes-shops, more jittery in retail stores than he’ll be on raid.
He visits a bathroom to shave and shut himself in a piss-rusted stall. With his fixedblade, he cuts out the right pocket-lining of each pair of shorts and pants. To his thigh he straps the Kydex sheath and slides in the knife.
In downtown Houston, he pays to park in a locked-down garage and then humps it the mile and a half to the Cullen Center, a skyscraper complex, connected by second-floor pedestrian footbridges, that includes the headquarters of IRJ, Inc.
He walks to the Wells Fargo branch in Wells Fargo Plaza and activates a prepaid debit card, wanting to deposit $5,000. A bank manager is called over, and he’s told that anything over $2,000 requires a photo ID and a forty-eight-hour hold to be placed on the card. He deposits nineteen hundred dollars, and repeats the process at the nearby bank branches in the JPMorgan Chase Tower and the Bank of America Center.
At the Crowne Plaza Hotel registration desk, he asks for a room, one overlooking Smith Street, gives his card for incidentals—“Thank you, Mr. Wright.”
The gravitational pull of the king-sized bed nearly overwhelms him. He slaps his face, makes a cup of black coffee like liquefied cardboard, and stands at the window sipping it.
A rearing bore of a building, IRJ Tower is as American as a box of instant mashed potatoes. In his tiredness, his weakness, Ray has a McVeigh moment: a powerful urge to blow it up—the company, the country—demolish it spectacularly.
Using the computer in the business center of the hotel, he visits the website for the FedEx company store and orders a 40th Anniversary Lanyard, 40th Anniversary Pen, a men’s Pima Pique Polo in medium, a FedEx Value Cap, a FedEx Waterproof ID/Media Pouch, and has them shipped to the hotel FedEx Standard Overnight.
At discountofficestuff.com, he orders a roll of Gorilla Tape and a box of Kimberly-Clark Purple Nitrile Exam Gloves. The purple’s a little off, more Grape Ape than FedEx’s shade of Purple Heart, but it should do.
The last item he has overnighted, from totalapps.com for fifteen hundred dollars, is the handheld computer used by FedEx employees the world over, a Motorola MC9500-K.
Sitting at the computer, having a hard time pushing up and out of the office chair, he suffers a moment of doubt. All he wants is to talk, gain a little understanding, but he can imagine things going wrong and F. Bismarck Rolling ending up dead.
Be nice to have a third option, the middle ground. Ray visits one last online retailer: supertattoo.com. Thinking of Bellum behind bars a coin’s throw from the Bullion Depository back at Fort Knox, he orders the Money Maker tattooing starter kit with the Gold Slinger tattoo machine, a gilded, powder-coated frame shaped like a dollar symbol.
Drowsing at the computer, he pushes away the chair and kneels at the desk. In this position, he crams, reading everything he can on F. Bismarck Rolling—there isn’t much—and then turns his attention to FedEx. Training process and services.
At the website for Brookfield Office Properties, he finds IRJ Tower, which Brookfield manages. He goes through the tenant handbook, taking notes left-handed to help keep awake. The section “Deliveries/Loading Dock/Freight Elevator” offers the loading dock’s location, where all deliveries are made. Use of the freight elevators after business hours may be arranged by contacting the Management Office.
He visits the Montrose address he has for Evangelína Canek. Spends an hour smoking across the street from the two-story townhouse on Lovett. No one comes or goes.
Resolved, he rings the bell. Behind the wrought security gate, the door opens on a woman kneeling. Dressed in red. Her chest-high face is red-veiled. Ray shakes his head hard.
She’s not kneeling. She’s tiny, four nine maybe. Her dress reaches ankles wormy with veins. Her feet are bare. Callouses pancake her heels, her nails painted oxblood.
He does some qu
ick figuring to justify his muddled operational awareness—awake for over thirty hours.
She stands regarding him on the far side of her gate, in no hurry to ask him in or usher him along. She lifts the veil. It’s not just her skin, small stature, and gray hair threaded with black that remind him of his murdered mother-in-law, it’s that the little old woman is so plainly worldworthy.
When he says hello, she nods and smiles, waiting. She raises a fist to her mouth, as if she’s about to cough. She spits something into the loose curl of her fingers and grips it in her closed hand. The thing spat was green and gleaming, like a tree frog, and he sees her anew: he’s standing before a madwoman.
He tells her he came to check on Ms. Canek, see how she’s faring.
The woman’s eyes narrow. She looks him over, and her regard is basic, bestial.
She opens the fist she spat into. On her papery palm rests a green semiprecious stone, polished, shining with her spit.
Delicately, she sets the stone on a sideboard, where rest two tall votive candles, flickering, one adorned with an image of what looks like the blue-veiled Virgin Mary, the other in the same attire and posture as Mary but skeletal, a draped Death, holding in each hand an empty scale, balanced, and a crystal ball. Candy skulls adorn the sideboard, brown ants crawling on them. A dried ear of corn, its kernels red as pomegranate seeds, its husk pulled back. There’s a carved stone creature, jade maybe, vaguely feline. At the center of the makeshift memorial is a framed portrait of Hugo Chávez wearing a red beret and holding up a green parrot wearing a red beret.
She opens the door and waves him in, saying a word that sounds like Contra.
He hesitates. Feels like he’s being shown the future scene of his murder, terrified by the tiny woman in red. Ray can’t laugh at the absurdity, because all at once he’s in his haphazard history—back at the Jalal home in Dora. It’s the Jalals’ of the present, their home after the Jalals had gone, butchered, long after the two old women had mopped up the messes—first the blood, then the spilled keşkek they cooked to mask the smell. It’s the Jalal home whisked up and deposited in Houston, now occupied by a Bolivarian septuagenarian lunatic.
Shaking his head hard enough to spark a starry ache inside his eyes—he enters. When he passes her, she says something else he doesn’t understand: “Fumar te matará.”
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