The yurt is empty but for the woodstove. She holds open the flap, breathes the air—their air—till Foxtrot goes in and lies down. He looks up at her, waiting.
Outside, she unscrews the top of the urn. A knotted plastic bag. She unties the knot and folds the mouth of the baggie over the rim of the urn. Ray’s ashes are just that, gray dust with little white masses that must be bone or teeth. She wets her finger and dips it in. Ray coats her fingertip. She tastes him—salty, chalky.
The child-to-be inside her—a her for sure, it feels overwhelmingly female, because a daughter would be harder for Smith to bear—maybe she, Shenandoah, would like to have something of her father’s some day, even if it’s only his remains. Smith reminds herself that she won’t get to name the girl, the girl won’t have a father, and that she, Smith, won’t be the mother. Shenandoah, a stupid name anyway, every bit as stupid as Antebellum. Like mother like daughter. Maybe years down the line, after a reunion, mother and daughter can make a road trip from Key West to Deadhorse. There, the girl, whatever Evangelína names her, can scatter her daddy’s ashes at the end of America.
She reties the bag, screws on the cap, shoves the urn in her pocket. She collects three small slabs of bluestone and balances them on top of each other.
Beside the yurt, she approaches the cliff. It’s her duty to consider throwing herself over. Not proper mourning if there’s no thought of suicide. What she feels at the idea—overlooking the valley about to break, at any moment, into leafy green—is shame.
Around front, she opens the flap, wanting nothing more than to curl up inside next to her dog and cry herself to sleep.
* * *
She wakes to the whines of Foxtrot, alert, listening for sounds outside.
A voice says, “Knock, knock,” and it’s careworn.
She falls out of the yurt, picks herself up and stumbles into Vessey’s open arms. “Easy, sweetheart. Hike up nearly did me in.” He hugs her till it hurts. “Alright now. Wiz told me you were pregnant.”
Foxtrot pokes out his head and whines.
“How about you introduce me to your four-legged friend here.”
After he gives Foxtrot a thorough petting, he rights himself, wincing, one hand in the small of his back.
She says, “Come stay with me, Vess, at the Rip Van Winkle. My back’s killing me too. And I bet I’m more incontinent.”
“You mean leave all this?”
She nods, and when he says lead the way, the three of them hike gradually downmountain.
* * *
“Okay,” Evangelína says, “so I’ve got a few listings.”
Smith shrugs the phone to her ear. “I’m peeing. So you know. I’m always peeing.”
“I understand.”
“Anything promising?”
Evangelína tells Smith that one stands above the rest. Little defunct motel for sale in Newberry Springs, two towns away from Fort Irwin. About an hour drive. Can’t get much closer to the base without living on it. The motel’s in terrible shape. On three-and-a-half barren acres, right on what used to be Route 66, which is now National Trails Highway. Property’s not listed, but there’s a hand-painted for-sale sign on it with a phone number.
“How’d you find it?”
“Took my mother on a little road trip. We needed to get out of Houston. I called the number, left a message, and the man called back in minutes. He was asking 125k.”
“That’s too much—I’ve still got debts to square.”
“Wait,” Evangelína says. She tells Smith that she compiled a comparative market analysis. In ’05, in a town two hours east of Newberry Springs, a buyer bought a Roy’s Motel and Cafe, which was in very good shape, and in working order. In addition to the motel and café, he bought the entire surrounding town of Amboy and all of its near 1,000 acres. Paid just over 400k. “I told this to the man on the phone. Made mention of the bursting of the housing bubble, the Great Recession, maybe he’d heard of them? And then I offered him five thousand dollars. He said ten, and we settled on seventy-five hundred. It’s yours if you want it. Now you can hold out for something a little better. There are a few others I found, but they’re further away and not nearly as affordable. You should probably see it first. I don’t want you to have any misgivings. The place is not just in bad repair. It needs a ton of work, but the structure’s sound. And there’s one more thing.”
“It’s on the site of a former nuclear testing ground.”
“Right next door is a little diner where they shot a German movie in the eighties. Name of the place is the same as the movie, the Bagdad Cafe.”
“You’re joking.”
“Can’t make this stuff up.”
“Anything else nearby?”
“Town of Barstow’s twenty minutes west.”
“I know Barstow. Almost got a tattoo there. Seventy-five hundred? Shit.”
“This guy wants cash. Price goes up ten percent with a check.”
“You let me think about it?”
“Take all the time you need,” Evangelína tells her. “Seller admitted the place’s been on the market for over a decade. You have other things you’re considering?”
“Still waiting to hear if my upgrade will go through.”
“If it does?”
“Hell if I know. You sure you still want this baby?”
“I’m sure. You taking your prenatal vitamins?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My lawyer has all the paperwork ready,” Evangelína says. “When he sent it over he reminded me, as often as not with independent adoptions, birth mother backs out. So just know I’ll understand if you have a change of heart. I’ll be disappointed but I’ll still owe you.”
“Sick and tired of changes,” Smith said, “of heart or otherwise. I should go. The Bagdad Cafe? I’ll be.”
* * *
Smith spends the next two insufferable months waffling, retching, and expanding at the Rip. She hates being pregnant, wants her fucking body back. Using her phone, she self-diagnoses: hyperemesis gravidarum. Her OB offers an official diagnosis, pregnancy, and tells her she’s free to seek a second opinion. Her vomiting has eased some, but she’s queasy more than not. Takes two ondansetron a day. Her list of ailments and discomforts gets longer by the hour. She got Vessey a room three doors down, and he works it off preparing meals she throws up, making sure she takes her vitamins, walking the dog, doing the wash at the Next to Godliness Laundromat in Woodstock.
At week thirty-four, she can no longer slide her tummy under Caryn’s Olds limousine to tinker with its shot transmission. A week later, she goes to pee, feeling indigestion and stomach upset, constipated, crampy, her lower back seizing. Blood pressure’s high, her feet swollen, her breasts weep. When she wipes, the toilet paper is blood-tinged. She stands.
In the bowl, the water is pink, and something, a fleshy mass, reddish and wormy, is sunken at the bottom. Here’s the miscarriage she’s been dying for. She reaches her hand into the pissy water and fishes out the fleshy bit. There’re none of the bones she’s seen in the sonograms. She runs her hand over the globe of her belly, still tremendous.
When she calls her obstetrician—Dr. Dyssegaard in New Paltz; Smith wanted nothing to do with the Woodstock patchouli doulas—she’s passed along to the gynecologist at the two-woman practice, Dr. Carlson, who tells Smith she’s not holding a miscarriage. “It’s your mucus plug. Toward the end of a pregnancy, it turns pink, sometimes red, which is why passing the plug’s called the Bloody Show. Dr. Dyssegaard’s here. Her hands are full at the moment. She’s saying loss of the mucus plug by no means implies labor’s imminent. But this is early, and given that you were born preterm, she wants you to go straight to Vassar Brothers. You need to remain as still as possible. Don’t drive yourself. Have someone drive you or call an ambulance. She’ll meet you there in less than an hour.”
* * *
The flight from Houston carried Evangelína over the volcanoes of Nicaragua, three of them smoldering outside h
er window—Cerro Negro, San Cristóbal, Concepción—smoke puffing out of their blasted peaks. After a rough landing in Liberia, Costa Rica, she flew aboard a puddle-jumper to the Nosara airport for the groundbreaking of her hilltop property overlooking Playa Garza and the Pacific. She’d yet to sell the parcel she owned outside Ojochal, on the northern edge of the Osa Peninsula, which hadn’t stopped her from purchasing the three acres she stood atop.
Her builder, an expat Californian surfer thickening around the middle, spoke Costa Rican Spanish like the Ticos, who didn’t roll their Rs, and was working closely with the Nosara-based Blue Morpho Architecture, the boutique firm that had designed her sustainable home-to-be.
Mamí was unhappy with the plan, but resigned to it. Move-in was three years away. Mamí said she wouldn’t live to leave Houston. Evangelína had overseen enough construction projects in Central America to know that three years likely meant five. She also expected the job to go 25 percent over budget.
In the heat, 80s year-round, she refused the shovel offered her, content to watch the backhoe dig its first gouges into the red-sand earth that was hers. A troop of howler monkeys in the nearby trees bellowed competitively at the excavator’s engine.
She signed documents, wrote checks, and said her goodbyes to walk downhill, dirt switchback after switchback sending scary shivers up her repaired Achilles tendon. Stepping over a procession of leafcutter ants waving green flags, she approached the house she’d rented from one of her eventual Vista Royal neighbors. She called Mamí, told her how the landscaping had been described, the plans for hillside terracing, the list of fruit trees—mango, papaya, granadillas and guanabana, rambutan, and the chicozapote you asked for, though the Ticos call it níspero—then she sat out by the rental’s pool overlooking the panoramic view of the Pacific, some six kilometers away and a thousand meters down. She opened her laptop and, after checking her email, ran the Google search she’d been performing once or twice a week for months: F Bismarck Rolling. Her search yielded two new hits.
The first was an IRJ press release titled “IRJ Announces Organizational Changes.” In fewer than 500 words—a quarter of which constituted the disclaimer about forward-looking statements—Bizzy received little more than passing mention: Former COO F. Bismarck Rolling is retiring after 33 years with the company. No direct quote from the chairman, president, and CEO. No thanks or praise. No mention of the ensuing SEC investigation. Just as they’d done with Evangelína, the company had yanked the rug out from under poor old Bizzy and swept him under it. They’d even gone so far as to name a woman—Rosalyn Johns, formerly Vice President, Corporate Compliance, at Fluor, one of IRJ’s main competitors—as the new COO.
The other hit her search turned up was “Litigation Release No. 20701 Securities and Exchange Commission v. F. Bismarck Rolling, SEC Charges Former COO of IRJ, Inc., with Extortion.” The webpage at sec.gov read:
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it charged former IRJ executive F. Bismarck Rolling with violating the anti-corruptions provisions of the federal securities laws. The Commission alleges that Rolling and others participated in an extortion scheme to coerce a private-property owner and take control of the property with the potential to lead to construction contracts worth more than $3 billion.
The Commission alleges that beginning as early as 2011, Rolling, with help from contractors working in New York, determined it necessary to frame the private-property owner in a kidnapping plot. Contracts would then follow to build a large-scale infrastructure project. To conceal the extortion, Rolling used his executive assistant to approve the kidnapping of a fellow IRJ employee, a crime that was ultimately never acted upon.
Without admitting or denying the allegations in the complaint, Rolling consented to the entry of a final judgment that permanently enjoins him from violating the inchoate offense of attempt and conspiracy, with prosecutors charging the aforementioned to be established by proof of a probable or potential impact in accordance with the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 1951(b)(2), popularly known as the Hobbs Act. Rolling has also agreed to cooperate with the SEC’s investigation, and to offer closed testimony before a senate Subcommittee on Energy hearing.
The minute she was back in Houston, Evangelína would have her attorney start the process of making a Freedom of Information Act request for the report ultimately produced by the SEC’s investigation.
* * *
Smith rides shotgun while little contractions pull across her lower stomach. Foxtrot stands on the backseat behind her, his face out the window. They’re stuck in traffic going over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.
Vessey idles in neutral, shuffling the stack of six quarters for the toll. “It’s ten thirty in the morning, where the hell could everyone be going?” He pats her knee, saying sorry, he should’ve shot down 9W and gone over the Mid-Hudson.
“It’s fine, Vess. I’m not having this baby now anyway. Even if I am, I’ll be handing it over. What do I care.” She looks hard out the window, but all she registers is the roiling ache in her uterus, the ambiguous sadness in her chest.
At the tollbooth, Vessey shouts at the attendant that he’s got a pregnant woman in the Jeep. When the woman, with inch-long, unpainted fingernails that curve like horn, asks, “She giving birth?” Smith answers with an irate, “No.”
The attendant says, “If you’re giving birth, I could radio a cop to give an escort.”
“I’m not giving fucking birth.”
Vessey asks the ETA on getting over the bridge, and the woman tells him traffic thins about halfway. Fifteen minutes here to there.
They creep forward.
“Vess, tell me something to take my mind off this baby and what the fuck I’m gonna do with it.”
“What do you want me to tell?”
She shuts her eyes. “Anything, I don’t care.”
“Alright. So Wiz was saying the Great Recession never happened. Or it happened but it wasn’t because some global housing bubble. What happened, cording to Wiz, was the US, the UK and the EU’ve been siphoning off trillions of dollars, pounds, and euros since climate change was confirmed. Says housing bubble became code for the ATSS.”
“Which is?”
“Advanced Technology Space Station. They’ve been building it at Dulce Base in New Mexico in conjunction with the Large Hadron Colander in—”
“Collider.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said colander.” She breathes, winces.
“Well the LHC in Switzerland? Sweden? Wiz was saying it’s the public face of a top-secret project. Half underground, half outer space. Just like our good old government. Make a big show of saying they’re shutting down the space shuttle program. Next day they launch the X37-B. You know about this? Classified space drone. Funded by the Pentagon’s black budget. Can fit it with an atomic weapon that drops radioactive rods, tungsten or some shit, on enemy targets. Rods from God, they’re called. Wiz says he’s seen it taking off and landing near the Gunks. Thinks there’s some secret base in the Catskills. We have no idea, sweetheart. Or we have—”
“Think I’m about to succumb to preeclampsia over here.”
“Don’t joke. You want that cop escort?”
She opens her door. Before she steps out, she pulls her ratty desert boots over her bare feet, her stomach in the way, and folds over the tops. When Vessey asks where she’s going, she says, “To walk aways. Look out at the river. Come pick me up. If I beat you to the other side, I’ll wait there.” She scratches Foxtrot’s jowls, and the dog squints his little-boy eyes. She plants a kiss between them. “Be good for Vess now.”
The wind blows, defining the shape of her, describing her ends. It parts the tight leather jacket she can no longer zip. She breathes deeply, reaching for the waist-high cement wall topped by a guardrail.
On the far side is the rolling horizon of the Berkshires, gentle peaks of the Catskills at her back. Between these two beautiful rises runs the Hudson River Valley, the wide si
lver swath of open waterway. A tug pushes an empty barge upriver, hardly advancing against the current, a current washing toward New York City like a faraway scream.
The more she walks, against her orders, the further the vista vanishes. She imagines what life’s like for the little body inside her body; she refused to learn its sex. Is it anxious to get out, or is the anxiety all hers, her body needing to rid itself of the drain on it?
When Smith has left behind the banks of Ulster County, passing over the choppy Hudson, she shuts her eyes, one hand on the cold, curved cylinder of the guardrail, one hand on the warm curve of her belly—what a plunge it would be—her hair whipping up around her head—and then a queer thing happens. She feels the spiral sensation that foretells one of her panic attacks, but she doesn’t feel the fear, paralyzing, and the spiral isn’t downward and inward. Everything and everyone isn’t inside her, a mad construct of her disordered mind. It’s as if here, on this bridge, with her eyes brightly closed, she can know their minds, know their lusts and trials, can understand—vaguely, mysteriously—what Travis’s life was like over this last year, and Ray’s life, too, and Milt’s and Evangelína’s, the vets of the Standard—the cougar’s even—they’re all there for her to fathom—momentarily, mistakenly—they’re all a part of her being, imperfectly imagined and misunderstood, but it’s okay, it’s something, she’s trying to know them, and it’s the trying, not the knowing, that’s everything.
A car honks. Inside her, a human floats. What a rude awakening it’s bound to get, squeezed from a warm, dense sea into the thin air of planet Earth. But it’s too soon for all of that. Smith’s only in her thirty-fifth week. She marches harder, faster. She has another month or more to go. As she thinks this, it’s as if the hooked thought—she has time—brings to bear its opposite—it’s time. She feels a pop, submerged, near the floor of her pelvis, and from out of her pours a warm flood, filling her untied boots.
APPENDIX
EVANGELÍNA GOT A CALL FROM THE NOSARA CARTERO, who said she’d been sent a large envelope with a USA return address. She and Mamí left the house early. They’d pick up the girls after their errand.
The Standard Grand Page 33