An understanding, disorienting, hits Smith like a stone striking her head. This young woman and her family weren’t butchered because they were Christian in Baghdad, but because of their tie to an American soldier. Ray’s the reason this woman is dead.
She wipes her dumb eyes.
Ray’s not looking at the camera. He’s looking at his stunning new bride in her no-frills wedding dress. Her smile is distanced, distracted. She looks happy as a refugee, lovely as a last breath. Her smile hints that there’s a marginal difference between the Middle East and the Midwest.
Under the photo is cash, a lot of cash.
Wanting to close herself in the storage unit and pour her wet face over every object, Smith tucks the photo into the saddle cushion, not wanting Ray’s family to find it. She sets the cushion on the seat of the sidecar, where it fits snuggly. Half hoping someone will steal it so she won’t have to deal with it, she goes back and yanks Foxtrot’s snout out of a small tin. Inside—a severed owl foot, mummified, talons like black glass. She rolls down the door and swears never to return.
* * *
At the management office, she asks if it’s okay to bring in her dog, and then she sits and reports that Ray Tyro’s unit has been broken into.
“You his wife?”
When she starts crying, Foxtrot whines and paws at her knee, muddying her filthy jeans, and the old man comes around the desk and awkwardly pets her dog. He retreats behind his desk, an old bachelor made uncomfortable, compromised, by a crying woman. “Kept meaning to put this in the unit for the guy. But round here it’s like the march of history—one fecking thing after another. I get plum distracted.” When he asks if she wants to file a claims report, she shakes her head, and he sets on the counter an Amazon box.
* * *
At the Rip, she hooks the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, locks and bolts the door, and feeds the dog. Pulls shut the rubber curtains. Cranks up the noisy AC unit in the chilly room. She doesn’t open the box. Not her daddy’s book—too heavy—unless he wrote a doorstop. Could be more cash. A big brick of opium tar. It could be information. These days, nothing’s more valuable—ask demoted US Army Specialist Bradley Manning—nothing more dangerous.
She opens the saddle cushion and dumps its contents on the bed. Neatly wrapped 10k bundles. Finished counting in a moment, she recounts and then counts yet again to be sure, coming up with the same number three times: $190,000. She repacks the cash, thinks to hide the cushion above a panel in the depressing drop-ceiling like the ever-lowering lid of an asbestos coffin. Instead, she hides it in plain sight, leaning it against the laminate headboard, a worn leather throw-pillow on the poorly made bed.
To have a grand total, she counts $722 in her wallet. There, slipped inside, she finds the business card of Evangelína Canek. The cougar attack flickers before her open eyes as she stares at Foxtrot bolting his dry food, occasionally pausing to crunch a nugget. Her dog, unlike Egon, would’ve turned tail, pissing the snow as he fled. She’s shocked, mystified, by Egon’s courage, and by her own idiocy. She wonders how Vessey’s doing.
* * *
She almost leaves for Ray’s service in Jersey without opening the Amazon box, but she decides she wants to know before she goes, in case it’s something she needs to convey. Using the motorcycle key, she cuts the tape and finds on top a quart-sized Ziploc bag. Inside, an ancient BlackBerry and a thumb drive. Beneath the sandwich bag is a bound ream of 8½×11 office paper. On the blank cover-page is a yellow Post-it and, scribbled in dull pencil, a no-name note: We’ll always have Nama.
She spends a minute turning pages before she needs to get ready to ride south.
* * *
Frommer and Frommer Funeral Home in Highlands is surrounded by great rundown houses partitioned into efficiency apartments.
Smith parks at the edge of the lot lining the impeccable lawn, and ties Foxtrot to the motorcycle. She’ll leave the saddle cushion in the sidecar, where Foxtrot will guard it with his good humor. She pours water in a traveling bowl. Admires the building. A sprawling, glorious Victorian in perfect condition, painted in somber grays with maroon trim. The most beautiful old house in any American town has inevitably become a funeral home.
She ties back her hair and slips on her new heels. Teeters across the asphalt. Enters the foyer, ornate woodwork smelling of almonds, glinting glass chandelier that’s nearly a sound, a shattering. In the open parlor, a dozen people mill under the high ceiling.
Beside the closed casket draped with the flag, two dotty old vets stand at ease, trifocals sliding down their varicosed noses.
They’re in dress blues and gold-piping garrison caps from the local VFW. No rifles, no bugle. The military funeral detail is a VA honor guard, not an honor guard from a nearby base. She’s certain that someone looked into Ray’s file, saw he spent more years as a private security contractor than as a Ranger, and sent the blow-off squad to give the send-off. On a folding chair, the old vets have a portable stereo with a CD player. They’re surely going to need help figuring out how the fuck to switch it on.
Smith stands alone, embarrassed by the newness of her black dress, unbalanced on the heels that have bloomed blisters on her feet in a matter of minutes.
From a corner of the room comes an ambush feeling. Ray’s mother, in draped black and deep purple, huffs her way over to Smith.
Smith clenches her fists at her sides.
Before Ray’s mother squares her feet, she’s reached up and slapped Smith’s face.
Beneath the sting, not unexpected, Smith can’t help but admire the woman. Here’s someone who knows the element of surprise. Smith nods, says, “Ma’am.”
“Your husband murdered my boy,” she hisses. Ray’s mom jabs the short space separating them with an ink-marked finger. “You should not be here.”
“All due respect, ma’am.” Smith’s soft voice booms in the silent room. “I’m fucking staying. You can smack me around all you want.”
The woman’s eyes fill. She raises her hand to her lips. The ink mark on her finger is a word. Through her unspilling tears, she sizes up Smith, a regarding that makes the gaze of randy soldiers and Rip Van Winkle denizens seem heroically empathetic.
Slouching toward abortion, Smith took care to buy a black rucksack of a dress, but the woman, the potential grandmother, is not working by sight. She sniffs, as though she can smell fecundity, can sense the kindred cells multiplying inside Smith.
To distract her, Smith says, “Right before Ray was … before he was murdered, while he was dying, ma’am, he—” Smith steps out of her heels. “He didn’t relay any kind of word. But he was thinking of you. Felt bad he didn’t call you like he said.”
Ray’s mother turns her attention to a young man, about Smith’s age, who sits out of earshot in the first row, watching. “Ray’d been a bad kid—they all three were—but a smart bad kid. Made it worse and harder both. That boy could justify anything. Joining the service was the best thing for him, cause he would’ve ended up like his youngest brother, in Rahway, or worse—that’s what I always thought anyway. The service saved him. And here he is.” She glares at the closed casket, or at the American flag. “I wound up with or worse anyway.” She looks at Smith. “My boy was safer in a war than he was at home.” She dabs her nose with her thumb. “Stay if you got to.” She looks toward the ceiling. “And if that there…” Her voice breaks as she points to Smith’s midriff.
Smith reads the smudged word written on the pad of the woman’s pointer finger—breathe—and reading the word makes Smith gasp.
Ray’s mom reaches out and takes Smith’s hand. “Don’t say anything, sweetheart. Not till it’s real.” She tightens her lips. “But I promise, here at the funeral of my oldest boy, I’ll do everything I possibly can for yous two.” She turns and walks slowly away, sitting heavily in a front-row seat next to the young man. She rests her head on his shoulder and sobs. After a moment, she says something in his ear.
He stands nodding, and walks to Smith
, head bowed, his posture poor. He’s hurtfully handsome, and Ray is plainly, painfully, in his brother’s features.
When he looks up, his eyes are green flux, the kind of eyes that make it hard to look the person in the eyes. Before he reaches her, he’s saying, in an overloud voice, “None of us ever thought we’d make it to thirty.” Something about him reminds her more of Travis than Ray. “And Ray didn’t.” His laugh, like his eyes, is disarming and changeable, makes her want to get lost in him, but not for long. “Ray always had to be first. Even in this. Prick.” He smiles, his teeth the color of caramel, an eyetooth chipped, teeth that confirm the wreck she was expecting. “I’m Dean.”
She steps back into her heels, and they shake hands. “You want his motorcycle?”
“No shit?”
“I got to get rid of it.”
“Cause you’re pregnant?”
“Cause I’m heartbroke.”
“Hear you. How much you want for it?”
“Nothing.”
“No shit.”
Two wigged women, old and odored as the parlor, press fingers to their grossly painted lips and shush Dean’s cussing.
He raises both middle fingers, holding them at their flinching faces. “Anyway.” He points to Smith’s stomach. “Know what it says, you showing up here pregnant?”
“Says go fuck yourself?”
“That’s my kind of mouth.” He’s assessing the small crowd, shaking his head. Those gathered are all older, over fifty. “Thought more fuckers would show for a fucking war hero. What happens, I guess, when the hero never comes home. Most of these assholes I ran into over the last however many years thought Ray’d already died. Prepared me for today I suppose.” He turns to her. “What kind of bike was he riding?” When she tells him, he winks and says, “Anything I need to do to get her?”
She says he has to clean out Ray’s storage unit, and when he asks how long he’d been in the States, she says a little over a year.
“Fucking asshole. You probably know him better than me. Heard yous two dropped in on Ma a month or so ago. Could’ve taken a minute to fucking come call on me. Haven’t seen him in … ah fuck.” He shields his eyes, his fingernails chewed short.
With those eyes covered, Smith feels a degree of relief, like stepping out of the desert sun into hot shade. “One other thing you can do is go with me to a car dealer. Then the bike’s yours. Title’s in his storage unit.”
He says he totaled the last hand-me-down. “Glad for a second shot. Make it up to him, the memory of him.” He shuffles his feet. “Come sit with us.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Come on. Don’t be a cold bitch. We’ll lose our fucking shit together. You can have Shane’s seat. We saved him one, same way we do for every family occasion.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“Fucking fucked of us is what it is.”
“I didn’t mean … doesn’t matter. I don’t think your mother would appreciate me sitting with yall.”
He takes Smith’s hand, pulls her along, and guides her into the seat beside his mother. “Welcome to the carnival,” he says, still standing, and when his mother nods and pats Smith’s hand, he adds, “Don’t say I didn’t fucking warn you.”
* * *
Smith doesn’t attend the off-site cremation after the service, but she arranges to pick up Dean later. He lives with his mom in half of a sad duplex in a sadder part of town, by the marina along the waterfront. She’s not sure she’s seen a more depressing neighborhood with harbor views, and Dean’s outside before Smith sounds the horn.
He stands at the sidecar, gives whining, slobbering Foxtrot a dog-person’s rubdown. He reaches into the pocket of his cracked, black leather jacket. He flips her a small ceramic cylinder, which she catches.
“Your share of Ray.” He leans in to kiss her. It’s brotherly, and then it’s not.
She punches him away, saying, “That was wrong in so many fucking ways.”
Rubbing his ribs, he says, “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“The fuck I can’t.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “I have to ride in there?”
“If you want the bike you do.”
“Helmet?”
She tells him Ray’s is in the sidecar, somewhere under all that paper. “His tomahawk and knife are too. All yours but my dog and that cushion.”
* * *
At Highlands Used Autos, Smith stands crying with her field pack slung over her back, Foxtrot’s leash in one hand, saddle cushion in the other.
Dean, sitting on the running motorbike, asks if she needs help picking a car. When, through her gathering mucus, she tells him she thinks she can manage, he thanks her and rolls the throttle. “I’ll be sure to take better care of this one.” There’s sincerity in his voice, but sadness, too, desperation even—she knows it too well, having married it—and she’s sure he’ll sell the $30,000 bike and sidecar for a fraction of its worth, go on a two-week rip, and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. But what does she know. Maybe this moment is the one that turns his life around, sets him down some other road toward a job, his own place, a cleaner mouth, whiter teeth.
She pats the glass Indian head on the front fender. She pats Ray’s helmet on his little brother’s head. “Take care of yourself, Dean.”
He revs the throttle, points to her belly. “And you take better care of that than you did my brother.” He races off down the road.
* * *
Smith drives back to the Rip in her used four-door Jeep Wrangler, one she bought for just under 10k cash so the dealer wouldn’t need to file a Currency Transaction Report.
After a lost couple hours with the Amazon document, she determines the ream of paper is the contents of the phone, plus additional information gained by hacking the phone. The phone belongs to Ellis Baum, a real-estate lawyer working out of Kingston, living in Saugerties. She recognizes SW&B. Understands that it operates under a parent company, IRJ, Inc. She reads occasional mention of a contractor, Early Bird, sometimes simply EB, who she takes to be Ray, and frequent mention of Evangelína Canek, or EC, a frequency that achieves hysteria with the final email exchanges. The last email in the Sent tab reads: Our contractor has offered a safe rendition of Canek that can incriminate Wright. We interested?
She flips back to the Inbox tab: the last received message is a thank-you from the Dalai Lama Foundation for a donation. The second-to-last email is a reply to the rendition query. It’s from the email address [email protected] and it is one lowercase word without punctuation: yes
Before a first, reactionary thought crosses Smith’s mind, she’s wetted by a dank sweat, a lurching twist of nausea. She tries desperately to bring back what Ray said about kidnapping Canek, and finds that the harder she grasps, the further she gets from holding Ray’s words. Whatever they were, she wants to believe them.
She also wants to believe she’s entitled to his money, but she has no idea what to do with it. Not how to spend it but simply where to keep it. Stashed in a cushion on the bed won’t do for much longer. She can’t just walk into a bank, hand the cushion to a teller, and open a checking account. She thinks of her daddy, wonders what old Increase did with the money he got from selling his Rebel Machine, sees him digging a hole in the dark, or supervising, the scalawag, while Carlos digs. She considers Milt’s lawyer, Lependorf.
Switching on the BlackBerry, surprised to find it has a charge and gets reception and service, she dials Evangelína Canek’s number.
* * *
When the phone rang in the kitchen, Evangelína sat up at her bedroom desk and listened—slow shuffle of Mamí’s widening feet, the padding of her soles thickened and flattened.
“Ah-lo?” A pause. “Se habla Español? Okay. Uno moment.” Mamí entered, her toenails painted Maya blue. Shrugging, she handed the phone to Evangelína.
“How are you?” a gringa voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“Bellum Smith. From
the Standard. You gave me your card. Number’s disconnected. Had to track down your home phone.”
Evangelína waved Mamí away. “When did I give you my card?”
“The hospital in Poughkeepsie.”
Evangelína tried to remember. “My time there, New York, is one cold blur.”
“And the attack?”
“That too, thankfully. My mother’s read me a few of the news stories.”
“Any mention of me?”
Evangelína said she didn’t think so, and Smith asked how she’d been doing since.
“Bored,” Evangelína said, “but better, getting better. Getting fat. I’m up and about. Haven’t done a bit of exercise since … well.”
After an awkward silence, Smith said, “I have a question for you, couple questions. Didn’t know who else to ask. Man I spent the winter with, he told me he went to see you. That’s the reason I’m calling you. He trusted you, and you—”
“I’m sorry I’m slow. I’m putting all this … You mean Early Bird?”
“Yes, Ray Tyro.”
“I hoped maybe I’d hear from him,” Evangelína said. “Find out if he learned anything from my old boss. When I didn’t, I figure he’d gotten stonewalled. Or … Is he okay?”
“He…”
“Jail?”
“Killed.”
“Ay, Dios. Here in Houston?”
“No, in Missouri, by my husband.”
“You’re married.” Evangelína didn’t know what else to say.
A muffled crunching came from Smith’s end.
“Your husband,” Evangelína tried, “he didn’t … Did he happen to have ties to my former employer? That you know of?”
“Travis has no ties to nothing.”
The Standard Grand Page 31