The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  “That’s it,” she says, “pretty sure.” She tells them that the command here, at the National Training Center, changes the city names from conflict to conflict. “Supposed to have a couple Russian towns left over from the Cold War. Hear they’re fully operational yet again. When I trained here in ’07 it was Iraqi. Think this was Medina Jabal.”

  Riding shotgun, Dopp says, “For me it was Ertebat Shar, sim Afghanistan.”

  “How come I didn’t train here?” Goodman asks from the backseat.

  Steed pounds the heel of his fist lovingly into Goodman’s shoulder. “Cause you’re a blue buddy, served in the Chair Force, piloting a D4D.”

  “Didn’t know you flew,” Dopp says over his shoulder. “What’s a D4D?”

  Steed laughs.

  “Technically, I didn’t fly,” Goodman says. “D4D’s a desk, four drawers.”

  Ant recruited her three boys in San Julian Park, downtown LA, two hours away, found them scuffling among the other Hollywood homeless, bivouacking in the streets.

  A concrete-block footbridge, slathered in gray stucco, angles up and arcs sharply over both lanes of the two-lane road.

  Steed says, “Ambush in wait, right there.”

  A flagpole stands at the center of the footbridge. On the pole, at half-staff, a Syrian flag luffs in the sizzle breeze.

  “Well, boys,” Ant says. “We’re a tad early. Don’t see anyone, so we’ll sit loose and wait for the welcome araba.”

  “This fake town,” Dopp says, “this Yekiti Bajar was supposed to be Medina Jabal in your time?” At her right, Lance Corporal “Big” Ike Dopp is her favorite, nervous, compact, and canny. His acne blurs the line of his strong chin, bubbles his honed cheekbones.

  She looks hard at him questioning her. In his clear eyes, it’s there: not long ago, when called upon, he was capable of doing severe harm. The violence in him, like with all of them, was circumstantial not constitutional. Once Dopp gets a little more distance on puberty, Ant’s sure he’ll be decent, and handsome. She’s trying to fix him up with the pretty petite bartender at Lil’s Saloon in the Calico Ghost Town turned state park. But riding shotgun, picking his pimples while challenging her command, he could pass for a zitty eighteen, a cherry inductee daydreaming about the legal prostitutes of Kuwait. “I don’t think so, ma’am,” he says. “Think this must be Medina Wasl. Or what was.”

  “Big Ike,” Steed says, “how the hell you know?”

  Dopp shrugs, pinches a red welt on his neck he’s been fussing with for days.

  Ant swats his hand, and when he apologizes, she throws the Humvee into gear, drives under the fortified city gate of the footbridge.

  Well trained, they part their mouths and breathe in quick gulps till they’re released out the other side. Smack-dab into a narrow, nameless street tight as a tourniquet. The two-story buildings look designed to disorient. Walls an inch or more off plumb. Windowsills unleveled. An ensnaring cat’s cradle of electrical wiring hangs overhead. The rooftops are arrayed with gray satellite dishes aimed every which way.

  She knows her boys are stiff with dread—the shit talk’s gone silent. They pass an open-air butcher shop, no butcher. A skinned goat, bloodied, hangs from the ceiling beam. On a stainless-steel table rest three slabs of meat. The sight is gruesome, but no flies buzz. No sweet-metallic smell wafts through the door Steed’s opened to get a better look.

  Goodman says, “Like everyone bolted in the middle of whatever the hell they—”

  Steed slams his door. “At’s how they do when they know an IED’s about to blow.”

  Her heart’s up now, and she rounds the traffic circle at the center of the village. Five roads branch off at odd angles. There, surrounded by Jersey walls and in between a pair of dead palm trees, is the three-story international hotel, the Lyndon Marcus Jr., which was in Medina Wasl not Medina Jabal, far as she can remember. “Month after next,” she says, “if we don’t botch this mission coming and going, we’ll spend the night there.”

  “Goody and Dopp get one room,” Steed says, “you and me share the honeymoon suite?” A lapsed black Mormon turned lackadaisical Five Percenter, Private First Class Ruffin “Steady” Steed talks on occasion about his deceased father, who didn’t believe military service was a substitute for missionary service, and so disowned him.

  They drive past the mosque visible on the approach. A slice of crescent moon, golden, perches over it, sharp as a Soviet sickle.

  At the center of the traffic circle stands a clumsy cement statue, cast not sculpted. The head of the towering woman is covered in a hijab, and one hand clutches her abaya, raising the hem to outrageously show her ankle. She holds up her other hand, palm out—she’s either waving or she’s commanding, Wadrega!

  More and more, Ant believes they’re in the wrong damn medina.

  There’s a bicycle repair shop. Pile of dusty tires and rims, pile of rusty frames. An archway shows a sign to the souq, the open-air market. They pass a closed gift shop.

  “Amazing,” Goodman says. “I want a souvenir.”

  The gift shop does it. “You were right, Big Ike. This must be Medina Wasl not Jabal. Or what was Wasl.” She exits the traffic circle first chance she gets.

  Steed says, “What if we’re in the wrong damn medina and they’re conducting live-fire exercises in this here one?”

  “If we’re in the wrong medina,” Goodman says, “we’ll be late for our rendezvous.”

  “We’ll double-time it to Jabal,” she says. “Seven klicks separating the two medinas.”

  “How many medinas they got?”

  “Whole slew,” Ant says. “Secretary of General Staff, LC Perry, toured me through Medina Wasl and Jabal, or whatever they’re now called, one right after the other. Month passes, I guess they blurred together on me.” She pulls into a driveway and, without a rear windshield to see through, makes a blind K-turn. They take another spin around the traffic circle.

  “Making Goody dizzy,” Steed says. “He’s gonna sick-up.”

  “This is our first run at this, boys. Maiden voyage. Yall are my guinea pigs, so we’ve got some problems to work out.”

  “Ah, Houston?”

  “There’s no danger, Steady. Relax. The Box here’s all a secure part of Fort Irwin.”

  “Second I relax’s when the world ends.”

  Dopp asks, “World or the war?”

  They find the route out of the faux-Arabian ghost town. Head east-southeast toward the Chocolate Mountains on a rougher patch of road. The heat opens like a furnace door.

  “Big Ike,” Goodman says, “how’d you know that wasn’t the right medina?”

  He tells them that he did three weeks of MILES training out here way-back-when. “Jabal means mountain. Mountains’re up ahead there.” He flushes, his pimples turning purple, and says, “Did well on the DLAB.”

  “Which is what?” Behind Big Ike, Goodman cracks his knuckles. When done with those, he’ll start popping other larger parts of himself. None of her boys can sit still, keep quiet, not even while asleep, when they tremble and whimper like pups with distemper.

  “Defense Language Aptitude Battery. Enlisted to become a Marine cryptologist. Was sent to Monterey, Cali-forn-i-a, where I flunked out of the DLI, lasted—”

  “Don’t acronym us to death.” Goodman pulls a knee to his chest with a liquid snap.

  “Defense Language Institute. Did okay in conversation, but there was something about the text, which goes right to left like your Hebrew, Goody, that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Flunked out. Got the swift desert boot. Fore I knew it, I was in Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, in southern Helmand, reinforcing Brit and Estonian forces at Now Zad.”

  “Big bullshit, Big Ike.” Steed flings open his door—hot air floods in—the door bangs shut. “You mean to tell us you fought the Battle of Now Zad? How we just hearing this?”

  “Know how it is, Steady. Marines do most the fighting but you Army boys do most of the talking and the dying.”

  “You
my brother from another mother, Dopp, but that don’t mean I wont drop you, eat the eyes straight out your skull, part your eyelids like labia, and have me my merry fucking way with your head.”

  “Alright, Steady,” Ant says, “that’s about enough of that.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. I get overexcited. Talk about it, Dopp.”

  “Bout getting skull raped?”

  “About Apocalypse Now Zad.”

  Dopp laughs like a boy too often bullied. “Shot a lot.” He stares out at the desert.

  Over these months—hell, years—Ant’s been waiting for and working toward this moment. Get vets to let down their guards in the desert. She says, “Go on, Ike.”

  “Got shot at a whole lot more. Sampled some poppy pods. Pashtuns eat em like crab apples. Reason their teeth are falling all out their beards. Opium’s everywhere in Helmand. They grow poppies way we grow corn. Combat I was part of went house to house. Field to field. For six straight months. Had a few firefights in acres of blooming poppies.”

  “Man, I can see it,” says Goodman. “Kabloom.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, wish I couldn’t, Steady. Most unreal thing I’ve been party to. Also, most real. White and pink poppy flowers everywhere. Wore em in our helmet bands for added camouflage. Muzzle fire like orange poppies. Bullets and bees zipping past. Got bee stung on my damn neck and thought I was a goner.” Dopp fingers the welt he’s been worrying. “Getting high at night. Fighting all the livelong day. Wake up, shit in a sandy hole, too beat to cover it over, scarf some eats, go on patrol, find a fight that fills the hours, head back to base camp with heat-bent barrels. Eat, get some shut-eye, repeat. Didn’t see the end of it. Lima Company relieved us. Brits and Estonians were reassigned at the same time. Those bros needed out and bad. Brits are one thing, but the Estonians? Man alive. Dudes’re something else entirely. Nother order. Polar Bears they call themselves. Estonians at Now Zad were on a vodka drip. No joke. They had an IV bag on a pole filled with Viru Valge. They’d plug in for a minute, no one bothering to change the dirty needle. They all had phlebitis. Bad strain of meningitis went through their ranks. Were trying to get sent rearward. Brits didn’t think the IV and their shot immune systems was the cause. Said the Estonians were all buggering each other, passing the bug around that way. Those dudes’d turn on this DJ Coone jumpstyle song, I got something for your mind, was the refrain, and in unison, like someone flipped a collective Estonian switch, they’d all start hopping around like Arian fascists in some Nazi fucking musical.”

  Steed sings, “The hills are alive…”

  “I know that Coone song,” Goodman says. “Catchy.”

  “Well, got its hook in me. For damn sure. Dance they did was part dubstep, part goose step. Stechmarsch. Got something for your mind, alright. Be hearing it on repeat till the day I die. Probably be my dying words. Shit would send me spiraling. Still sends me spiraling. You want to fuck with me? Give me a full-on anxiety attack? Play that song. I’m straight back in Now Zad, mesmerized. Taliban trying to murder my ass with ABIEDs.”

  “I know VBIED,” Ant says. “What’s ABIED?”

  “Animal-borne IED,” Goodman says.

  Steed says, “Donkey bomb.”

  “There, it was goat bombs. All the bombing, improvised or otherwise, turned Now Zad into a wasteland. We were wasted as the place. Bombed-out town’d blown our minds. Snugged at the foot of the Hindu Kush. Got water from an aqueduct built by the Brits in the sixties. Was an honest-to-god oasis apparently. Electricity in the homes, a bazaar, a health clinic, a school. Place even had a gas station. Taliban started using it to rest up between fights. In ’08, Brits bombed the region to clear out insurgents and moved in on foot.”

  “Queen giveth,” Steed says, “and the Queen taketh away.”

  “We followed. That was it. My war. Rest’s just bookends.” Dopp nods at the desert. “Still there. Living terribly ever after. Here in body, but part of me, sometimes most of me, is stuck the fuck in the Now Zad.”

  After a hurtful silence, Ant says, “A life is just a body keeping pace with time, boys. All it is. Our hearts and minds, on the other hand, aint bound by time. Free to roam. Recall the past, fantasize about the future.”

  “I’ve got a fantasy for you, ma’am.”

  “Can you let the lady talk a minute, Steady, without sexually harassing her?”

  “He’s all right, Goody. I understand Steady Steed has a hard time showing affection in a way that aint preteen.”

  “Alright, ma’am. Apologies, you were saying.”

  “Part of me’s still stuck in a parking lot, Steady. Place I lost someone I loved.”

  Steed says, “Your babydaddy?”

  “When I’m in one after dark, have a hard time getting out. In heart and in mind. Sure I always will. I’m what you might call heart stuck.” She feels a downward tug, losing some of herself. To combat the loss she says, “What was I saying?”

  Goodman and Dopp say at the same time, “Heartstuck,” and Steed says, “Jinx.”

  In the crook of two mountains, Jabal comes into view, its sunbaked cluster of buildings smaller than Wasl.

  Ant slams the brakes.

  Her passengers brace themselves, and the Humvee skids sliding to a halt in the sand. The snaking column of dust they were kicking up swallows them and, through the belly of it, the sunlight filters red.

  Ant makes eye contact, in turn, with each of them, torqueing herself to see Steed first. Looking at him, it occurs to her that this was how Milt felt—self-assured and insecure both—driving her up to the Standard. She saves Dopp for last, glares into him, and in his skittish eyes she sees the disconnect—he averts his eyes. She puts two fingers on his knee. “Kind of like your vehicle died on you in Now Zad and you ditched it there.”

  Steed says, “This another one of your paramilitary parables?”

  She points up ahead to Jabal. “You been traveling on foot. You’re tired. You keep thinking about that vehicle you abandoned, wishing you hadn’t just ditched it.”

  Dopp asks, “Vehicle’s my heart or my mind?”

  Ant pats his knee. “Our job’s to get it up and running. Got to get a little dirty. Check the plugs. Change the starter maybe. Sometimes rewire. Sometimes hotwire. Jumpstart. We’ve got to revisit the place, or pretend to, and do so in a safe, secure way. Might surprise you, but what we should be doing right now is playing that song.”

  Goodman says, “I got something for your mind.”

  Ant revs the V8 turbo-diesel engine. “We Americans like to talk about chasing dreams. But first—” She revs again. “—you’ve got to chase your fears. To do that, you got to identify them.” Another rev. “Woman I see in Barstow, therapist who’s not a script writer in the pocket of Big Pharma, she specializes in EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. She can help. When you’re ready. Cause if you don’t figure out your fears, dreams’ll never be within reach.” Ant slams the gas, throws the Humvee into drive. The gearbox grinds and the overburdened vehicle lurches forward, shooting two modest rooster-tails of sand. “All we’re trying to do is get your mind out of that time so you can live in ours.” She pats Dopp’s knee. “Together, here with us. Do that, terribly ever after will lose some terror. Won’t ever be happily. Promise you that.”

  Steed slams his door—it bounces back open.

  Dopp touches the bump on his neck. He presses it but doesn’t squeeze it.

  Steed leans up and says near Ant’s ear, “Weren’t you an 88-mike?”

  “Was indeed, Steady Steed.”

  “Then hows come you don’t know where in tarnation we’re supposed to be?”

  “My driving’s better than my navigation.”

  “I’d say.” Steed leans back, closes his door and reopens it.

  Ant says, “You don’t like the females in charge of things, Steady, you best stop the world and hop on off. That or emigrate to the Islamic State caliphate. Cause we women’ll be running the show here in the States for som
e time to come. Get used to it. Now take it easy on that door—that’s an order.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but do tell the door to take it easy on me. Thing won’t stay shut. Spent the better part of fifteen months living out of one of these fucked-up up-armored kegs. You white motherfuckers, yeah you, playing that grindcore shit nonstop. Band names like Hog Decapitation, Dead Baby Tree, Veil of Maya. Laugh, Goody. You think I’m making these names the fuck up. I aint. Sickass whiteboys. Took me six months and winning an arm-wrestling tournament left-handed before I got them to concede to some old-school, hardcore Body Count.” He kicks open the door and shouts out at the desert, “Shit! Like doing my goddamn service in a busted-up diving bell! My daddy was right! Should’ve went off to Haiti to raise churches. Had I wanted to be a sub-motherfucking-mariner, I’d’ve signed up for the pussyass Navy. Next time, MTO Smith, I want an M998, wide open to all the elements, the Cadillac convertible of Humvees. Can I make that one damn request, pretty fucking please?”

  “I thought you boys would want AC.”

  “What I want’s to be able to breathe.”

  “Alright, Steady, easy, you got it. Next time. Keep in mind this is a joyride. Cruise with the door wide open if you got to. Only shrapnel might come flying in’s the shell of an armadillo. This all’s an exercise. And I feel it too. Just like you. Right here’s the scene of most of my worst nightmares.”

  Goodman says, “Have this recurring one. I give Muslim women Brazilian waxes.”

  “Nice,” Steed says. “Wait, where’s the nightmare? You gay, Goody?”

  “Not far as I know.”

  “I’m not criticizing.”

  “Bothers me how they’re all lined up,” Goodman says. “Waiting for me, depending on me. Gives me the heebies. Got a sky-high stack of wooden waxing sticks. Pot of hot wax. And I go to work. One by one. Yanking their pubic hair out. As-salāmu ʿalaykum, I say. Waʿalaykumu s-salām, they say. Next.”

  “Goody,” Steed says, “you do live up to your damn name. Bet even your war crimes’re wholesome.”