When Lansdale headed for the tent, he didn’t acknowledge Lett except to bark, “Top secret is top secret, and don’t you men forget it,” in passing.
And, now, finally, Lett truly had that bad feeling.
Suddenly the truck engines revved up. They had to be reparked because they stood too close to the soft earth of the riverbank—the water here sucked away trucks and houses alike at whim. Lett, left in the dark a moment, used the opportunity to remove the shells from the cartridge of his M1 and slip them into a pocket, leaving the gun looking as lethal as ever.
He’d gotten the urge and simply acted on it. It surprised him. This was the opposite of what the bad feeling usually brought, which was a careful, machinelike preparation of his killing tools. He couldn’t explain his impulse. Something deep inside him simply commanded him to respond differently. To resist certainty. Clear the metal chamber. He had been thinking about how relieved he’d felt not having to carry a weapon at first, and how having to carry one now should make him grow ever queasier. In the truck he had pushed his M1 aside on impulse. So why not unload it, too?
Lansdale and his Japanese partner were inside the tent. Soon screams and cries came from another man inside: a mix of Tagalog, English, Japanese, denial, lament. Lett couldn’t make it all out. But what sounded like pleading turned to moaning, and yet no promises were made to the target as in a normal interrogation. Some might call this torture. Lett heard water pouring and splashing and gasping at one point. After a pause of quiet, there came the slowly mounting screech of a man having something peeled away.
***
Longer stretches of quiet came. Lett got sandwiches, more coffee. Near dawn, the steep slopes looming around him began to reveal themselves as an ever-higher series of ridges and mountains and the river as mostly mud.
The torture continued, an early morning shift. The conversations Lett heard from inside the tent sounded like monks praying, chanting. Lett heard words carrying a Filipino accent but muffled and wet. Then, silence again.
Lansdale pushed the tent flap open, stepped outside, took a deep breath of air and rubbed at his stomach and stretched as if having had the best nature sleep of his life. His sleeves were rolled up but otherwise he looked the same. He combed his thick dark hair, though it didn’t need it, his part still perfect. His eyes still had that sparkle, too, and they caught the first rays of sun shooting up into the sky through gaps in the high ridges—rays that beamed, Lett couldn’t help noticing, much like those of the notorious Japanese rising sun.
“Rifles down, men,” Lansdale told Lett and the commando a few minutes later. “Grab a shovel.” They took turns digging a pit at the base of the large mango tree. At one point, Lett, his arms and thighs burning, had the grim thought that he was digging his own grave, but he only pushed himself harder, letting the sweat roll down him, into his eyes, stinging.
His shovel clanged against metal. Lansdale waved them away, telling them to go rest out of sight.
Lett and the commando sat sucking on canteens under the shade of a neighboring tree. A Plymouth arrived; two white men got out. They looked like adventuring engineers in their civilian khaki, slouch hats, metal-rimmed eyeglasses, and bulging briefcases. They inspected the dig, conferred with Lansdale and others. Steel pipes were laid down. One of the trucks pulled up and its winch deployed.
“Be honest, you thought maybe we were digging our own graves,” the commando muttered before spitting out a projectile of tobacco. “Not that we don’t deserve it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lett shot back, but neither discussed it. They were too tired, and too busy watching. The huge truck had difficulty dragging out two large boxes from the pit, even when they rolled along the steel pipes other men had laid, but it got them out. Lansdale, the Japanese brute, and the engineering types assembled around the boxes. One of the engineers crouched at a box while the Japanese stood over his shoulder as if coaching him. Lansdale had stepped back a few paces, Lett noticed—curiosity wasn’t going to kill a cat like that. But nothing blew, no booby traps triggered. The engineer flipped the box open, the lid blocking Lett’s view, and all stepped forward as if gathering around a newborn baby, nodding, and two were smiling. But one engineer looked like a doctor who knew something was wrong with the baby, and Lansdale wasn’t smiling, either. He shot a glare across to Lett and the commando, as if something were somehow their fault.
“You two,” he barked. “Inside the tent.”
***
The face was bloated on one side. Dried blood caked the bulges and filled the cracks and crevices, some of the blood still shining gooey there. It filled an eye socket. The man’s clothes were soiled and torn, and most of his fingernails were missing, just tips of coagulating blood.
Inside the wall tent, Lett smelled urine and feces and that unmistakable smell of burnt hair and flesh. The man, slumped in a folding chair, wasn’t tied up. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Whenever he slumped enough to topple, a man pulled him back up, setting his shoulder straight like a soft pillow that wouldn’t stand.
The man propping up their interrogation target was none other than Frankie.
Frankie had arrived in a gleaming coupe after the engineer types left. Lansdale and the Japanese brute called him by name. Frankie loomed even larger inside the tent, his broad shoulders and big paws casting wild shadows on the canvas. His neck was as thick as two, and Lett saw the pointy tips of another tattoo shooting up that trunk, snaking up inside kinky black hair that was parted down the middle. His face was a block, with cheekbones so pronounced Lett could practically see the coarseness of the bone itself through the skin in the lantern light. His lips were thin and hard and purplish.
Lett’s bad feeling was even worse inside the tent. Lansdale, Lett figured, had ordered them inside to help keep the pressure on.
Seeing Lett, Frankie’s eyes lit up and he wagged a finger. “Mister Lansdale told me about you,” he said, grinning now, giving Lett the eager once-over. “He told me you something special—special army guy warrior man.”
Lett was beyond any shock at this point. He was only glad that Kanani didn’t have to deal with Frankie. He, this, they, were the distraction she likely needed while she maneuvered away back at The Preserve. So be it.
Frankie had Filipino blood too, so at first Frankie simply spoke Tagalog to the man in the folding chair. Lett had heard Lansdale call the man “de Garza” outside, but he and Frankie used the name “Reuben” to his face. The Japanese brute meanwhile piled on incomprehensible grunts and words that, from the sound and spit, Lett could only assume were an insult to someone’s mother.
Lett and the commando held their M1s unslung as ordered, but they kept their backs pushed against the forgiving canvas walls of the tent. Nothing else could forgive here. Reuben’s one good eye widened, and he tried to straighten up. But then he passed out again, slumping over. Frankie propped Reuben back up. After a couple rounds of slumping and propping, Frankie stood close to Reuben, his feet apart. He said things in Tagalog to Reuben. Reuben nodded—or at least tried to nod—and then shook his head, followed by more Tagalog, then sobbing. Eventually, Frankie said to Reuben, seemingly for Lansdale’s benefit, “This wasn’t all of it, Reuben. Not even close. You are tricking us. There is more.”
More head shaking and nodding and Tagalog and sobbing. Frankie held his ear close to Reuben, who, after several failed starts, whispered something in his ear before passing out again, his head so far to one side that his neck looked busted.
Frankie nodded. He walked over to Lansdale, whispered to him, and the two strode outside, leaving the Japanese brute confused and then glaring at the floor in something like sadness—as if left out of the ball game once again.
The brute looked up at Lett with as if suddenly realizing he was there. “You. Hello. Do you know how they know?”
“Know what?”
“How Lansdale knows this location. About Reuben! I don’t understand how. Only I know it. Tell me how.” He ad
ded a sickly sneer that not even a bow could’ve helped.
“Search me, mister, I’m just the help.” Lett shrugged.
The Japanese brute stood over Reuben with his arms cocked as if the bloody sandbag of a human in the chair were a boulder that he had to roll away with his bare hands.
Reuben woke again with a start. His surviving eye popped open. He wheezed to the Japanese man, “Why? You promised. You promised your honorable commander. Why do you give it away?”
“You shut up!” the Japanese man barked. His hands kept compacting then springing open; squeezing, opening.
One side of Reuben’s face moved to contort into a smile. It had to hurt like hell. “You know what they do to me now. What they must do. It’s what you do.”
Reuben passed out again. The Japanese man squatted down, his back straight, his wrists fixed atop his knees, staring into space now.
About five minutes later, Lansdale strode back into the tent grinning. “Chop-chop,” he said to the Japanese brute, who stared back, not understanding.
“When the work’s begun, don’t leave it till it’s done,” Lansdale chirped. “Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
The Japanese man only grimaced, still squatting. Lansdale stood near him and gazed down on him as if about to give his kept thug a kiss on those dents in his skull.
“I’m back, Kodama,” Lansdale said. “We will continue. Understand?”
“We continue? So we finish?” the man called Kodama said.
“That’s right, kemosabe.”
“What mean ‘kemosabe’?”
“It means ‘trusty scout.’” Lansdale winked at Lett.
“Ah,” Kodama said. He muttered in Japanese.
Then Kodama glared at Lett, shot up, and bounded over to Lett. “You!”
Lett straightened up but not too much, the hot ball of disgust in his gut not letting him.
“You shoot man,” Kodama barked at him, stabbing a finger at their target passed out in the chair. “You.”
A normal man might have blanched, reared up, stormed out. But Lett had been places a normal man would never know. In times like these, just as in his nightmare daydreams and night terrors and blackouts, time did not exist. He was back in all those horrid places at once, all planes converging. It made him calmer somehow.
And there was also the fact that he had emptied his magazine.
He eyed all of them at once. Kodama’s scowl. Lansdale’s smirk behind Kodama’s shoulder. The commando’s eyebrows riding high. The target whimpering, trying to keep that one eye open.
“No, you shoot him,” Lett replied. “You Japanese started all this.”
Kodama growled, stepped closer to Lett.
“All right, all right, take it easy,” Lansdale said, moving between Lett and Kodama, “This isn’t Lett’s responsibility anyway, Kodama . . .”
Just then Frankie pushed through the tent flap and stepped inside holding up a hand like the best boy in class.
“Now that’s what I like to see,” Lansdale said.
Kodama backed away, nodding. Lansdale rocked on his heels, smiling.
Frankie paced around the chair, each step measured. Calm. He then stood behind the chair. Reuben took a couple deep breaths, closed his one eye, and let out a groan that sounded almost like a death rattle. Frankie crouched, leaning into Reuben’s side. He produced locking pliers from one of his pockets. He rammed fingers into Reuben’s mouth with the other hand and yanked down Reuben’s jaw, then prodded the pliers into Reuben’s mouth before he could bite down. Frankie swung Reuben’s head around to peer in, jerking Reuben’s head side to side, up and down. Reuben’s feet pushed out, off the ground, one chair leg rising, then another. Frankie grunting, drooling. Shoving, heaving.
He jerked out the pliers with a jolt. Slings of drool and blood hung from the pliers and Frankie’s wrists. The pliers held a white tooth. Frankie wiped at it and turned it their way so they could see its twinkle. It held a gold filling.
Reuben released another slow, deep moan. His arms hung from his sides.
Frankie plunged back into Reuben’s mouth for more—five more teeth. Reuben fought it less and less, Frankie grunting and muttering whispers in his ear. When finished, Frankie let out a deep yet satisfied sigh. He set the pliers in Reuben’s lap. Frankie looked to Lansdale, who beamed back with that sparkle in his eye and nodded. Frankie wrapped his tattooed arms and hands around Reuben’s neck and snapped it with a great crack.
16.
Lansdale finally gave Lett and the commando a break. They didn’t even have to clean up the mess that had been Reuben. They dropped down under their tree again, and the commando kept slamming his back against the gnarled trunk. This time he had a few things to say.
“Why?” he said. “Just because they can? And all on account of top secret. Who is going to know? No one.”
Lett was the only one within earshot. He didn’t respond at first. He was too beat. So much was happening so fast. Sure, he was shocked. Like a man was after any mission. The reasoning would come later, along with the stewing if need be. For now, he would simply cope. Assignments were part of the treatment. Besides, no one said this would be easy. Selfer never promised it. He had taken their cure in exchange for doing a duty. It was keeping him out of a stockade. And, he had to admit, he’d been calmer since the cure had started.
“You stood up back there,” the commando said. “To them. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“I didn’t stand up,” Lett said. “I simply don’t see why I should do their dirty work, especially not from a former enemy—who started all this. It’s not what I’m here for.”
The commando laughed. “Don’t tell me. They’re going to fix you, right? Help you with what’s ailing you? What a crock.” He spat.
“Why don’t you get some shut-eye? You’re getting irritable.”
The commando’s head sank between his knees. Lett hoped to hear snoring. After a couple minutes, the commando popped up and started in again. “Listen. You know what the Nips did? During the war, when they had a tunnel or cave or what have you that they wanted kept secret? They buried the help in there right along with their spoils.”
“Like I was saying,” Lett said.
The commando grunted. He then muttered that he was going to go take a leak.
Lett considered using the opportunity to get his syringe from his musette bag and give himself a dose. But he didn’t. He simply didn’t feel the urge. And his body felt too heavy. He was too dazed from all the duty, the intense incidents. He let his eyes lose focus. He embraced the return of the old thousand-yard stare, and part of him even embraced the possibility of his dead friends visiting. But his old ghosts stayed away.
***
The commando didn’t return. No one had seen him.
Lansdale sent out men looking for him, but he didn’t seem perturbed when they didn’t find him, joking that one day they might discover the fellow up in the hills wearing a loin cloth muttering the “native mumbo-jumbo.” He told Lett that it wasn’t his fault.
With the commando gone, Lett had less time for rest. He was left to stand guard while others cleaned camp, loaded up. Lansdale, Kodama, Frankie, and the diligent engineers held meetings and pored over maps. They came and went. They seemed to forget about him.
As he used to do up on the line, Lett drifted in and out of sleep while standing and pacing and standing, his eyes seemingly open to an unknowing bystander. He could march like this, they all could, if they had been worn down long enough. Like this, time itself lost measure or meaning. His state only intensified here with the dense jungle and steep hillsides rising all around, another world completely, just as the cold, wet, pine- and fir-choked Ardennes Forest might as well have been the moon to a Pacific grunt like Jock or the commando. Like this, Lett retained a sense of alertness even as he lost any sense of alarm or urgency—and any recognition that he had to flee all of this now.
At one point he heard a series of ru
stles up in the higher stories of jungle around them, but one of the Filipino helpers just laughed—and told him those were only monkeys.
***
They gave Lett a pup tent to himself. He had the first few dark hours off so he could catch up on sleep finally. They were going to hit the road first thing. At first Lett couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about his still-unloaded M1, lying next to him. He could hear Lansdale and Frankie and the rest in their top-notch command tent, sometimes laughing, sometimes boasting, though he couldn’t make out the words.
Lett realized he was alone for the first time in a good while. He lay there. Soon his head turned hot and his sinuses swelled like from instant hay fever. Then the heat moved to his chest and gut.
It was Lansdale there. Inside him. Growing, distending.
His bad feeling about Lansdale was more than just a sense, he knew. It was stark reality. This third stage of his treatment was confirming it. Lansdale had helped him at first, with stages one and two. Sure he had. But the man wasn’t just ambitious, with a dominating demeanor. Lett had seen his share of those types both on and off the front line. No, this was different. He’d just witnessed Lansdale order the torture and execution of a helpless human being—and grin about it.
The stark new reality was more than just a breaking sun above the horizon, casting its rays. More than full sunlight. It was the bright and glaring white of floodlights right before an overwhelming surprise assault, blinding Lett alone in his forward-operating foxhole.
The Preserve Page 14