The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

  “As if all war aint a crying damn crime.”

  “What about you, Coach?”

  “My war crime?” She drives in silence through the desert. There’s her answer. But she says to Steed, “The one time I did my own Brazilian wax.”

  “Don’t be flip now. Why we’re here, aint it? Supposed to be swapping sob stories?”

  “Maybe at lunch, Steady, if you behave.”

  Steed says, “You sure you don’t want me up on the .50 cal?”

  “No one’s manning the machine gun, Steady. If you didn’t notice, mount’s empty.”

  Steed grabs the joystick on the control group behind Ant’s seat. To Goodman he says, “Want to play a little Call of Duty?”

  “Looks like a scaled-down version of what I flew.” A blue-collar Chicago Jew, tall, with gypsy ancestry and what Steed calls a young-Gaddafi mop of hair, Airman Asa “Goody” Goodman passed for Chilean, Greek, Palestinian, French, Algerian, on and swarthily on.

  Dopp says, “Thought you didn’t fly, Goody.”

  “I was 18-Xray. UAV driver. Ninth Attack Squadron.”

  “You,” says Dopp, “a drone jockey?”

  “Don’t believe him,” Steed says. “Yids are all full of stories.” He pushes his door wide open and the desert air washes in.

  Dopp says, “One job I wouldn’t want.”

  With a sudden jerk of his head, touching his ear to his shoulder, Goodman pops his neck. “What’s the Reaper pilot say to his sensor operator?”

  “Tell us,” Dopp says.

  “Says, What’d we hit?” Goodman waits.

  “Well?” Steed says.

  “Sensor operator answers, Either a funeral. Or a wedding…” Goodman looks out the window. “Or a funeral for a wedding.”

  Steed says, “Damn.”

  Ant brakes at the entrance to the city. There’s movement. “Okay, keep in mind, this is a peace mission we’re on. This is to recast your wartime experience with one that requires no vigilance and no violence. Understand?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “What’s our objective? Steed?”

  “Our objective’s to eat lunch, ma’am.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s right.”

  Dopp says, “We’re not here to rescue the Kobayashi Maru?”

  “Ike,” Steed says, “no one has no idea what you’re babbling about in North Korean.”

  “I do,” Goodman says, “and I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

  Steed sits up and points out the windshield. “Hajji COB-V, one o’clock!”

  “We’re a COB-V, Steady.” Ant honks the horn. “We’re civilians, on a battlefield—albeit simulated—in a vehicle.”

  A rusted-out, dinged-up jingle truck rolls by. Metal tassels hang from the undercarriage of the Hino, its windows tinted impenetrably black. The truck slows as it passes. On one wall inside the open dry-freight box, the handle of a push broom aims out.

  “Here they’re flying the Afghan flag.”

  “And here we go again.”

  The moment they’re inside Jabal, the Humvee is descended upon. Steed holds closed his door. In the middle of the street, vendors have road-blocked the way with tables displaying wares. There’s no getting around them. Ant leans on the horn. A crowd, some seven or eight men and women, push platters of fruit and dried fish toward the Humvee.

  “Must be the place.”

  “They’re putting on some serious show for us.”

  A vendor in a qaraqul hat, of the kind worn by Karzai, wraps on Steed’s window till he opens the door. “Khaakandaaz. Khaakandaaz.” The vendor makes a peace sign, then shows two shovels, one without a handle. “Khaakandaaz. Twonty Afghani.”

  “Twenty, motherfucker, twenty?”

  The man nods.

  “D, motherfucker, D.”

  The man shrugs. “Twonty. Twon-ty.”

  Steed holds up ten fingers. “Howbout ten?”

  The man makes a noise like a goat, “Baah,” spits in the dirt, and turns his back.

  “Nice attitude,” Steed says. “Hajji spits but hajji don’t surf.”

  A boy, no more than eighteen, sprints down the street. All heads turn and watch. As he swipes a toaster oven off a table, Ant waits for him to explode. The cord trails behind him in the dust like a tail. A woman in a shami dress screams, “Wudrega! Ghal!” Her chador falls from her graying hair.

  The thief dashes down a passageway too narrow for vehicles, pursued by two blue-uni Afghan police.

  Kebabs sizzle over an oil-drum grill. On a tinny portable radio, anasheed chanting sounds like it’s sung from inside a drainage pipe. A woman sells pirated DVDs.

  Then the afternoon azan, the call to prayer, blares from the cloverleaf of horn loudspeakers perched on a minaret of the mosque, this one gold-domed.

  Two old men don’t budge from their backgammon game, talking through smoke they pull from a shisha pipe, placing bets with big brass coins.

  In the circle of the town center, a woman in a perahan tunban and Jackie-O sunglasses sells naan stacked in towers and tied with string. Through Steed’s open door, Steed serving as middleman, Goodman buys a stack for five dollars. He doesn’t haggle. He says, “So we don’t come to lunch empty-handed.” He sniffs the stack and nods.

  “Black sesame?” Steed says.

  “Nigella seeds, I think.” Goodman points his chin at the woman backing away holding her lone stack of naan. “You look closely, you see the tells. She’s wearing a Seiko.”

  “You see their shoes?” Steed says. “Every villager’s wearing American-made boots.”

  A woman in a burqa over a shami dress and white pants, white chador, comes out of the town center accompanied by a man in an embroidered linen perahan tunban, a red camel-wool pakol, like a burlap beret, worn back on his head. They wave.

  “Now those two waving there,” Ant tells them, “they’re who we’re meeting for lunch. We’re gonna park, get out, and with not a single weapon between us, without even securing a perimeter, we’re gonna sit down—look, they set up a Bedouin tent—and eat us some hummus and tabbouleh and we’re gonna break Goody’s naan with them. Maybe drink a little hibiscus tea. How you boys doing?”

  “How you know they’re the ones?”

  “In the town center, we’re to meet a couple, man in a red hat.”

  “Could be a setup.”

  “All they did was set up lunch, Steady. Okay, I’m pulling around and parking.”

  “We do this how often?”

  “My agreement with the LC’s that we schedule a Sunday a month to bring vets of the Bagdad Grand on base to one of the villages. Have a nice time, then we go. Calling it Operation Homeward Surge.”

  They park and fall out. The woman looks like an Afghan refugee, kohl eyeliner; the man could be too, that or an Arab-American language specialist, this a part of his training.

  “Naame ma Zamda ast,” the woman says. “My name is Zamda. This is Lakhkar.” Her English is exceptional, her accent not glottal Pashto or Dari but lilting British.

  “Kindly pleased to meet you,” Ant says. “Apologies for being late. Got a little lost along the way.”

  “It’s alright, though it doesn’t leave us much time. But please, make introductions.”

  “I’m Ant. This here’s Ike, Ruffin, and—”

  “That’s Young Gaddafi,” Steed says, a potshot followed by his white flag of a smile.

  “Yes, I see it,” she says to Goodman.

  Goodman smiles shyly, bows his head and hands Zamda the bound naan. “For you … Zamda is it?”

  “Zamda, yes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he says. “What does it mean?”

  She laughs awkwardly and to Lakhkar says something in Dari. She turns back to Goodman. “Not my given name you understand. Staged name.” Zamda lifts the naan by its tie. “Very kind.” She gestures under the tent. There, a dastarkhan is laid out on the ground, a large tablecloth spread over
a Persian rug and, on the cloth, a feast.

  They duck under the tent. Zamda holds up a copper basin. “Aftabah wa lagan.” She nods. “We wash hands.” She goes around, first to Ant, pouring warm water. There’s a hand towel for each of them.

  “Remember,” Ant says, “never step on, or even over, the dastarkhan.”

  “Oh, it is okay. We are not fundamentalists here. Sit, sit.” Zamda moves like a woman with formal attan training, her hand opening like a bird stretching its wing. “Relishes and torchi, pickled peach, lemon, eggplant. Basmati rice, qabili palao, fried raisins, carrots, and pistachios. Kufta, meatballs. Tea is in two copper teapots. Help yourselves.” She pulls Lakhkar’s sleeve. “Will you please excuse us? We must make a call. Continue enjoying.”

  When they’re out of sight, Steed says, “Managed not to get beheaded in Baghdad, here I’m gonna get my head cut off at a picnic in the motherfucking Mojave.”

  Ant tosses a leek dumpling at Steed. “Fill your mouth, wouldja?”

  Goodman says, “You tell us your war crime, Specialist Smith?”

  “My war crime.” She bites a dolma, lemony and moist. She pulls a grapeleaf vein, stringy as floss, from her mouth. “Plowed over a boy in Saydabad with my HET.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wasn’t no accident. Swerved to hit him, not avoid him. Bout cut him clear in half.”

  Steed asks, “He a threat?”

  “He was a boy, Steady, twelve years old at most.”

  Steed tells her it don’t mean nothing. “Had a kid fire an RPG at me. Recoil hadn’t knocked him on his ass? Sailed the rocket over my head? I’d’a been done. Blowback slammed him into a wall. Knocked the wall over and knocked him out. Sidearm was this ancient, rusted-out revolver. Two dud rounds in it. Looked leftover from World War I. I zip-tied him, wrists and ankles. Kicked living hell out of him before handing him over. Sure he was back on the street in days. Maybe he’s who you hit with your HET.”

  “Tried that kind of thinking. Only made me paranoid.” She tastes the kufta, greasy and delicious. “Trick’s to try to forgive yourself for killing a kid without making the kid a villain.” She pours tea into a small brass cup. She smells it, ginger. “Anyone else, hot tea?”

  They all shake heads.

  Steed and Goodman, sitting across from her, look up from their plates perched in their laps to a spot over Ant’s head. Goodman gives his head another shake, subtler, seeming to say Please stop instead of No thanks.

  Ant ignores him. “Kid I killed wasn’t evil. Wasn’t no savage. Neither was the kid who tried to kill you, Steady. They were kids. Kids trying to survive a war. You got to find a way to hold on to the qualities that keep us open, to the world and the people in it.” She sips. “That there, boys, is not only the lifelong mission of the military veteran—it’s the duty of every single human being. You think our two hosts have it any easier than us? Uprooted from their homelands? Refugees relocated from who-knows-what warzone?” She sips again. “It’s good, ginger and chamomile, I think. You should try it.” She finishes her tea. “Does get easier. Never easy. For a time, couldn’t get behind a wheel. Now I’m taxiing you boys all around, even if I am getting us lost. But better to get lost along the way than not go. For that, for your willingness to get lost with me, gentlemen, I’m thankful.” She raises her empty cup. “But that’s just one woman’s opinion.” She feels a hand on each of her shoulders—they’re tender and they startle her.

  Zamda and Lakhkar stand behind. Her voice husky and off-key, Zamda sings:

  Oh Earth, the tax you exact costs far too much,

  you devour our youth and leave the beds deserted.

  “It is prettier in Pashto,” she says, “and I’m better dancer than singer. We have a Pashtun tradition. The landay, means short poisonous snake.” She smile-shrugs. “There is another I think of every day. I won’t sing, I’ll just say: The exiled woman never stops dying, turn her face, then, toward her motherland so she may breathe her last.” Zamda looks to the sun angling under the tent. “It is hard here for us.” She turns to Ant. “But we are women, you and I. Better to be women here than anywhere else in the world. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Ant says. “And I’m not sure I could’ve said that a few years ago.”

  “No? Well, when I get too homesick, I listen to Radio Azadi. May I tell one more?”

  “Please.”

  “It’s said to be by Malalai, a Pashtun poet and woman warrior, a folk hero, who fought alongside Ayub Khan. It goes: When sisters sit together, they praise their brothers. When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters. That’s how it is still, there, for women.” She shrugs. “Please forgive me. I’m strangely nostalgic for Herat.”

  Goodman wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “How did you come here, Zamda?”

  She tells them that in the weeks after the fall of the Taliban—in 2001, months after you lost your towers—she sought asylum, with help from a professor. “Tony Blair was very hospitable, and I was given a fellowship to attend University of London. From there, I went to grad school at Cal State, San Bernardino, where I now teach. As adjunct. This”—she sweeps her hand out—“I do on the side. As thanks. And it pays better than teaching.” She shrugs. “Now, I’m sorry, but we must bring lunch to an end. There’s another exercise. May we give you anything to take?” She steps the toe of her American hiking boot on the dastarkhan, reaches, her bangles chiming, and lifts the tied stack of naan. When she steps back, the dusty half-bootprint is glaring, and Ant pats it till it’s mostly gone.

  Zamda hands the naan to Goodman. “Take this at least. Thank you dearly for thinking of us. And we hope to see you again, next month, when we’ll have more time. Lakhkar and I will be sure to be here.” She turns to Ant. “We’re very excited about what you’re doing. Making peace.”

  Lakhkar nods and bows a little.

  “We’ll look forward to it,” Ant says, “and we’ll be early.”

  They pile into the Humvee and pick their slow way through emptied-out Jabal. Not a role-player in sight.

  “Oh man.” Dopp chuckles.

  Goodman asks, “What’s funny?”

  “Sign on the spice shop. In Arabic and English. English translation said: In place of Omar for all kinds the spices.”

  Steed says, “All your spice are belong to us,” and it’s the last thing anyone says, till, talked out and tired, in Fort Irwin proper, after a ream of paper-signing, Ant swaps the borrowed Humvee for her Jeep Wrangler. They put the soft top down for Steed.

  First thing he does is ask Goodman, “I borrow your flatbread?” Using the naan as a pillow, Steed rests his head on the rollbar, closing his eyes to the low sun, the rushing air, for the seventy-five-klick drive back to Newberry Springs and the Bagdad Grand.

  They exit the main gate of the National Training Center, pass Painted Rocks, where units training at Fort Irwin each decorate a boulder with unit insignia and date. Ray painted one of those rocks, and on her first visit to base, she found it. It’s visible from the road. There. Her eyes find the faded sun and star split by a red lightning bolt on a green and blue shield, and then it’s out of sight.

  The desert road calms, reassures. It also excites. At the far end waits a warm welcome. No one talks. They’re each deep in their own heads, and she knows the vets in her company brood in dark corners. Her hope is that they might get to a spot lit like hers, out in the open, where she’s found a few devotions—her place, her vets, her dog, her boy—that get her through her days, and sometimes even eagerly.

  They spend forty dusty minutes on Fort Irwin Road, she slowing once for a rattler S-ing across the asphalt, before taking Old Yermo Cutoff. She considers making a pit stop at the Calico Ghost Town to buy a round of sarsaparillas, letting Dopp flirt with the bartender, but they’re all napping.

  She takes Daggett-Yermo and, then, they’re on the last leg, National Trails Highway, formerly Route 66. Old Mother Road once supported hundreds of small towns along its narrow bends. But no more, and here Ant is,
a single mother living and working on some 650 feet of frontage along that storied road made defunct by progress.

  Living and working just off of this ramshackle road lends her comfort. Any moment she could lift her boy and her dog into her Jeep and speed off. Visit Florida or Jersey, venture far south to Costa Rica or way north to the end of Alaska. Not that she would. She’s set down roots. They’re shallow and in loose sand, but for the time being and for the foreseeable future, she’s bound to her small patch of scorched earth.

  In her first few months at the Bagdad Grand, when it was just her, Vessey, Foxtrot, and infant Wright, they painted red the lone, low building of the former Henning Motel, same shade as the Bagdad Cafe next door.

  A short time on the National Trails and there it is, the vertical

  M

  O

  T

  E

  L

  sign left over from another era, its neon gone. Under the L it reads horizontally:

  HENNING

  FREE TV

  Under the sign—her sign—the company chickens peck and scratch in the dust. At the scattered center of them, Wright and Foxtrot dig a hole. Her filthy boy and her filthy dog. Two beautifully browned creatures making busywork not three meters from the empty road. This makes her anxious, angry. The tragedy she envisions most—too perfectly fated—is of little Wright run over. The more deserted the road, the easier it is to imagine.

  His sitter, Vessey, watches from the swinging chair chained to the front porch of the red barracks. He rolls a cigarette, a lit cigarette in his lips, a can of Drum tobacco in his crotch. His eyes narrow on his charges. She knows his worn soldiering bones and tired muscles would quicken and strengthen under duress, that he can be counted on, that he’d kill himself, to keep her boy safe.

  The older boys in the cab of the Jeep are unsound asleep. Her vets found a little ease in her vehicle with her driving. Reluctant to break the spell, she slows before the turn and takes stock: her brood, her dog, and her boy fuss on land she owns outright, land found for her by a woman whose life Ant saved, land supporting a nonprofit business she started with money Ray earned as a merc, a business, of her own making, trying to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric. She wonders how much worse off she’d be—how long she’d’ve been dead, who else she might’ve killed—if not for the Standard.