When he shrugs, she points to Chávez. She makes a peace sign—Ray’s desperately confused—and she puts the V of her two fingers to her lips. She points to one of the sugar skulls and again kisses her peace sign.
He fights the urge to run, an urge that in Iraq he would’ve overcome by hurting the person inspiring it.
“Momentito.” The woman bows her head and disappears down a hall.
* * *
The MPs cuffed Smith gently, loosely, arms in front, and drove her to a long three-story building painted Swiss Miss brown. There, she was photographed and fingerprinted and she filled out the initial paperwork. They escorted her upstairs to the Personnel Control Facility, where all her possessions were inventoried.
The in-processing paperwork at the PCF was more extensive. She was told, “You can speak to a JAG lawyer now if you need to, if you’re worried about self-incrimination.”
Smith shook her head.
“Next, I’ll read from DD Form 485, your charge sheet. You ready?”
She nodded.
He read an affidavit, and Smith signed her name so many times her hand ached.
Next, her clothes, save her underwear, were taken. She was given a new PT uniform: T-shirt, sweatpants, and a zip-up windbreaker. The boots were gently worn and dusted with foot powder, like bowling shoes.
Handed a hair tie, she was asked to pull back her hair. She was given a huge set of ACUs for work details. When she asked for a smaller size, the woman shook her head.
Shown to her shared room, she picked one of three empty beds.
Her guide of a guard said, “Food’s provided by the RCF and it’s awful, but that’s your worst punishment.”
“And we’re in the PCF?”
“Right. RCF’s Regional Correction Facility, the real prison.”
“This isn’t real prison?”
“This is like day care. That there’s the playroom. As you can see, it’s co-ed.”
Three men and two women sat watching Oprah reruns. The men turned and waved. They were clean-shaven, their cheeks chafed, like they all shared the same cheap razor. A man and woman at a table in a corner played cribbage.
“You get to lounge around all day,” her guide told her. “If you want, you can go on a detail. Picking weeds along the track, that kind of thing. But you don’t have to. You can go outside. There’s a basketball court. The females have an officer go out with them at all times. You can use the payphones. Man in charge is Lieutenant Laplace. Not an Army LT. He’s a cop LT. Tomorrow you see the doc for a physical, then you meet the JAG lawyers to gather up your legals requesting a Chapter 10 OTH. If you accept the Chapter 10, and they sign off on it, you’re practically out the door.”
“If I only knew.”
“If you knew, then everybody’d know, and if everybody knew, no one’d be fighting the wars we need fought.”
* * *
Evangelína sat up in bed, pulling the duvet tightly round her stomach. Naked from the waist down, she hadn’t worn panties in ages, eons since she’d pulled on pants, pants she’d be unable to button. Her painkillers, the Roxicodone, made her chiflada, loopy, and estreñida, constipated. They made her fat, or the laziness they inspired—or the liveliness they uninspired—made her fat, but they also made her uncaring of her newfound fatness. When she wore underwear, the elastic waist was a torture to her thoroughfare of a surgical scar, itchy but not aching. Under it, strangely, she was more keenly aware of the absence of her appendix than she was the emptiness where there once was uterus.
Before the man—both young and old, tired and wired awake—could introduce himself, she was apologizing, then adding: “She’s in mourning.” Evangelína’s voice felt raw, sore, but every day it sounded a little more like her, the voice she remembered, but with perforations. “Poor old widow’s reliving her grief for my father. Chávez, he’s transference.” She thought maybe he was an IRJ man just off the links, from legal, here to offer a settlement, but he didn’t have the right posture, for golf or for law.
“Maya,” Evangelína said, “wear red when mourning.” She offered him the seat by her bed, its king size sprawling to the ends of her room. She was coming down. She reached for the pill bottle on the nightstand, found it without looking but didn’t open it.
When he said he’d rather stand, she thought he must be a messenger sent by Bizzy.
“Didn’t know Chávez died,” he said. He ran his hand over his shorn head, a gesture he seemed to be trying out. “Been out of the loop. Cancer?”
“Mamí thinks not.” She rattled the pill bottle like a sad maraca, a dried cuia with too few seeds. “Mamí thinks murder.”
He nodded. “You know who I am?”
She moved to shake her head but stopped herself, the turn of her neck plucking the guywires supporting the towering pain that ran from her clavicle to her chin.
“Early Bird,” he said. “Worked for Ellis Baum to gather information on Wright. Then he, Baum, asked me to track you down after your covert landing in the Catskills.”
When he didn’t say more, she said, “Well you’ve found me back at home in bed. What took you?”
He smiled and tipped his head, and she could see he’d mistaken her comment for a come on, this incompetent general contractor who’d hunted her down months too late.
As if she were answering a question she’d remembered, she said, “Yes,” and then felt ashamed. Wearing a T-shirt, no bra. Having not brushed her teeth coated in a starchy scrim. Her tangled, unwashed hair, heavy, hurting her scalp. Aware of her own smell wafting up through the bellows of the bedclothes each time she moved.
She felt her eyes drift closed.
He was saying something, that he should go.
“No, please.”
“My … fiancée told me about the cougar attack.”
“You’re engaged,” she said, not following him, this man paid to hunt her.
When he shrugged, her eyes filled, and the evening light in the room spangled. She dabbed tears with the bedsheet and apologized. “Please,” she said, “sit down. Let me have Mamí get you something. Tea? Tequila?”
He shook his head. “You need your rest. Not even sure why I came. Other than I know that Bellum—she’d be mighty pissed to hear I made the trip and didn’t check in with you, see how you’re holding up.”
Bella: the name was familiar. He meant Bella Smith, the one person to visit Evangelína, and for no apparent reason, at Vassar. “That’s nice.”
“Is it?”
“You’re concerned for the concern of your fiancée.” She hoped she made sense.
“How they treating you?”
“They who?”
“Company you work for.”
“Don’t work for them anymore. Can’t talk about it. Case pending.”
“Wondering if maybe you couldn’t save me a trip to visit your boss.”
There was a sound outside the door, and Evangelína, in her loudest voice, painful, said, “Mamí, vete.” The hissing shuffle of bare feet scuffing over terra-cotta. “She’s shameless.” Evangelína, with practiced ease, popped open the childproof bottle and swallowed two pills with a hurtful gulp of water. “You were saying.”
“Saying I shouldn’t’ve come.”
“To see Bizzy?”
“Who’s Bizzy?”
“F. Bismarck Rolling.”
“Want him to tell me what it was for.”
When she shook her head, cringing at the pain, he added, “Why the Standard?”
Maybe he was an undercover federal agent. “If Bizzy clues you in,” she said, “I’d be eager to know, and so would my lawyer. All I ever got was that caca about golf.” She pointed to the closed closet. “Inside, on the shelf, in a shoe box, Louboutins.”
When he opened the closet, she pulled the bedsheet up over her face, flushed, her neck on fire. Embarrassed, not by the number of shoeboxes—though there were easily a hundred—but that she’d taken photos of each pair of shoes, and then taped the photo to the
side of the box so she knew at a glance what lay inside. She drew the sheet to the bridge of her nose, saw him regarding her in a new way, his exhaustion gone.
He was vibrant, and frightening—she lowered the sheet to her lap.
He took a breath, and to get some air back into the room, she said, “There, the big one that looks wrapped in brown paper.”
Setting the shoebox beside her, he sat on the bed. He reached and touched a scar on her neck. She leaned back into the pillows propping her up. Offered her throat, exposed her stomach. He looked closely at the closed puncture wounds, set a fingertip in what felt like every last one. He shifted his attention to the scars between her pubic hair and her bellybutton. The wide surgical scar, the thinner mauling scars, the scars of the sutures and staples. She was aware of, but not embarrassed by, her tummy, its two rolls meeting at her splayed bellybutton. This lack of embarrassment emboldened her. “Subtotal hysterectomy,” she said aloud for the first time in her life. The words meant little. To give them more meaning, she added, “No more womb,” which sounded silly. She smiled. Her smile made her cry.
He stood, and she felt a shockwave of affection for this man, this stranger. He felt brotherly.
She removed the cover of the box. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, sat the Standard Grande file. She patted it. “Sure a lot of what’s in here you’re well aware of, seeing how you did the fieldwork, but maybe you can spot something I couldn’t.” She replaced the lid and pushed it toward him. “I’ve got another copy. My lawyer does. I’d give you my keycard to the building, but I’m sure they voided it the moment I filed my wrongful-termination suit, which is bankrupting me. You don’t happen to want to buy an eight-acre plat in Costa Rica overlooking the Pacific?”
He shrugged.
“Silver lining is if it does, bankrupt me, the ACLU may step in. Do me a favor?” When he nodded, she said, “When you see my boss, please pass along my worst.” She closed her eyes, and was asleep almost instantly.
* * *
The temporary residents of the PCF were in a torpor, Smith included. A hangover that followed months and sometimes years of dread, dread that turned out to be unfounded, and so all the more demoralizing and debilitating. They were once again in the care of Uncle Sam, and they’d each forgotten how generous—tempting if not attentive—he could be.
At her physical exam, lying on the examination table, Smith opened her eyes. A woman doctor, stoic and middle-aged, stood over her saying, “Inhale and hold,” pushing the drum of the stethoscope, not gently, on one side of Smith’s stomach, then the other. “Guess you won’t be seeking reinstatement to your former command.”
Smith straightened. “Didn’t know that was an option.”
“I just mean you couldn’t if you wanted to. At least not for the next six or so months.” The woman narrowed her eyes. “You have any current medical conditions we should be aware of?”
“Like panic attacks?”
The doctor made a note on her form. “Anything else?”
“ADD.”
Another note. “And?”
“Feel like you’re trying to get me to say something.”
She set the clipboard in her lap. “You know you’re pregnant?”
“Ma’am?”
She nodded.
“Oh fuck no.”
“Fuck yes,” the doctor said, “which is how you wound up where you are.”
“You sure?”
“If we hear a heartbeat, you’re at least eight weeks along. You know, if you don’t get your period for a couple months, that’s usually a pretty good indication.”
“Haven’t been having regular periods. Diet’s been not so good.”
“We’ll I’m getting you started on prenatal vitamins right away.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“The prescription?” The question was plainly, painfully insincere.
Tears filled Smith’s eyes and she shook her head.
“That’s your business,” the doctor said. “Keep in mind that in the state of Kentucky, after the end of the first trimester, that’s week thirteen, an abortion’s a class D felony.”
* * *
Near sunset, Ray walks back to his hotel, shoebox in hand, unsure what just happened, unsure what’s happening. Two, three, then a fourth businesswoman smiles as she passes him. What are they drawn to? The killer in him? They must smell it on him, because before he and Canek shared their tender moment, he’d reached for his fixedblade. For a sickening instant, he thought she’d sent him into her closet to shoot him in the back. Almost gutted her, gutted her again, practically in front of her mad mother, in her own bed, in her own home, a home that felt hellish, a hell he’d revisit in a heartbeat. Confusedly, it occurred to him he’d always been there, would always be there, his life on a loop. But if there’s any justice, any goodness, he’ll do it incrementally better each time, a shade brighter. This time, passing through his hell, he didn’t hurt anyone. He might’ve even helped that woman, and she might’ve helped him.
On the sidewalk, another passerby smiles at him, and he understands it’s not him but the shoebox these Texas women beam at.
He feels a panicked pride, a sad relief: here is the finished product of his long, hard work over the last year, the presentation of it. A document in his possession that isn’t his, produced by others. The document, not his deeds, would survive him, outlast his service to his country, endure his selling out to a half-dozen security companies. Maybe someday he, like old, sweating, bare-chested Crease Smith, would have time, and a typewriter, to hunt-and-peck out his story. Because if Ray didn’t tell it, someone else would, the way IRJ got to tell the story of the Standard Grande, a story that should’ve been Wright’s to tell.
He has the document Baum compiled but he doesn’t have Baum’s phone or the information therein. Doesn’t have a clear objective, which seems about right. Standing over traffic on the skywalk, he tells himself if he runs into resistance at any phase of his op, Op Snakehead, he’ll abort, he’ll retreat back to base, Fort Knox.
Meantime, he’s here, in motion, in action. What else would he do while Bellum’s locked up?
After an exhausting fourteen-hour sleep, where he dreams through the impossible minutia of his plan, first thing in the morning, Ray visits a computer terminal in the hotel business center and tracks his packages. They’re out for delivery. The concierge tells him FedEx usually delivers before noon.
He takes a run, two passes by the IRJ Tower loading dock on Louisiana, coming and going, stopping to tie his shoe on the return, noting the sidearm of the lone attendant.
At his hotel after lunch, a stack of boxes waits for him at the front desk. In his room he opens them. Fixedblade strapped to his thigh, he dresses in the makeshift FedEx uniform. After a few minutes going over his lines, delivering them to the mirror, cheat sheet in hand, he dials the number for F. Bismarck Rolling, and when a woman answers, Ray says, “I’m going to have to cancel my five o’clock today with Mr. Rolling.”
“Who may I ask is calling?”
“This is Jim Jones? I’m junior vice president at Honeywell? Engineering, Operations and IT. I was scheduled to come by at five today?”
“I don’t have you down here and there are—”
“There any way I could come by a little earlier?”
“I don’t think so … Mr. James is it?
“Jim James—Jones.” He mouths, Fuck, to the mirror. “Jim or James or Jimmy. Call me anything you like, just don’t call me late for my meeting.”
“Mr. Rolling’s very busy today. He’s booked all afternoon.”
“Later then?”
“I know he has an appointment after work so I imagine he’ll be leaving directly at five. You said Honeywell? Would you’ve made the appointment with me?”
“You know what, it’s alright. It was more just to say hello. I’ll try again next time I’m in Houston. Sorry for any confusion.”
When he hangs up, he strips to his new under
wear and opens the tattooing kit. He reviews the instructions, plugs in the tattoo gun, enameled in gold and shaped like a dollar sign, its four-amp power supply with banana-jack outputs, its foot pedal like that of a sewing machine, which is all it is, ink instead of thread.
He wipes Vaseline over both bare thighs. He inserts a liner needle, fills the tube with water from the tap, and steps on the pedal. The gun buzzes in his hand like an old DC doorbell. He practices on himself. Raising watery welts that weep blood, he painstakingly draws little symbols no bigger than nickels, symbols that would fit on a forehead, anything that comes to him: a bull’s eye, a peace symbol, the Islamic crescent, a question mark.
On his other thigh, he tries text: I ♥ mom. A number he knows by heart, the count of US armed forces killed in Iraq before he left: 4425. He can’t recall the number of Iraqi dead leaked from the classified Iraq War Logs. Wants to know the number of killed contractors. He’ll check the business-center computer, come up with a grand tally, more symbolic than scientific.
He hopes these wet-run, inkless tattoos he’s giving himself won’t wind up permanent, a wingding scarification collage on both thighs. In case they don’t go away, he gives himself one more: Antebellum Always.
He showers and when his thighs stop bleeding, he changes. Into the FedEx box that contained the FedEx clothes, he packs the roll of Gorilla Tape, the tattoo gun, its power source and foot pedal, a couple of liner needles and one half-ounce bottle of ink, Black Buddha Ultra Black.
He visits the FedEx Office and Print Center on Louisiana. There, he prepares the box for shipping, sent Direct Signature, to Marisol Soto-Garza at the IRJ Tower address. The moment after the cash transaction completes, he feigns exasperation, says he forgot to put the birthday card inside. When he’s handed back the package, he asks if he has to wait in line again after he repacks it. The surly clerk tells him no. Ray fusses at a side table, then walks out with the box.
He wastes the rest of the day with the Standard Grande portfolio. The only thing enlightening is the scope and extent of the surveillance, and the veracity of Wright’s financial and physical ill-health. On paper, with this level of detail, Wright looks legit. Most of the rest of the intel Ray’s familiar with, but he goes back through one more time, feeling like he’s cramming for written exams. It’s a read more stultifying than the Ranger Handbook, which to its credit has beautiful, simple illustrations.
The Standard Grand Page 27