The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

A pause. Lett tapped and scraped Hello with his right big toe.

  He paused. In return he got what sounded like: No . . . Hell Now.

  A giggle rippled from across the room. Then came a piercing wail. Lett sunk his head between his legs again and pressed his thighs against his ears, waiting, hoping for it to die out. It took a while, and the echoing prolonged it, but silence found them again.

  “Are you hurt?” Lett said eventually.

  No response.

  “Who are you?”

  A gagging sound came, and another, like someone who had to sneeze. And then, sobs.

  Lett’s heart thumped. Cold strips of sweat drenched his forehead, his upper lip. “Kanani? Is it you? Oh, please, no.” It couldn’t be. It was the wail of a man.

  “No,” grunted the voice. And the voice went silent again.

  Don’t let it be you, Jock, Lett thought.

  ***

  Hours passed. The other prisoner never spoke again. The man had long stopped sobbing. It might have been night or day up above, but Lett could not know, and that was the very point.

  Lett heard muffled laughing and footsteps, from outside in the corridor. Dogs barked. Lett’s cellmate moaned hearing it. Then the footsteps and laughter stopped, the barks hushed. The clank of a lock sounded and the squeal of a wheel handle spun. The door flung open, clanged against the wall. Lett heard the footfalls of four or five guards scuffling in and their dogs panting, their long claws scraping at the concrete.

  Lett pulled his legs in tight, bent over. A dog sniffed and licked at his knee.

  “Ah, reeks something awful,” one guard muttered. “Shut your pie-hole,” grunted another.

  Strong hands yanked Lett up and dragged him out. He ended up down the corridor, dropped into a chair. They untied his rope and yanked his hood off, and Lett gasped to take in new air. He blinked and squinted at the light from above. His eyes adjusted. He was sitting at a metal table. Nothing lay on it.

  Across from him sat Lansdale. He wore a crumpled beige linen suit with pale blue tie, looking like a country lawyer. Lett felt breath on the top of his head, looked around. Frankie loomed over him, larger than ever. The Army coveralls he wore didn’t help matters.

  “I think you know Francisco,” Lansdale said. “Francisco is in training. He will be running the show here. Because soon I’ll be on my merry, merry way.”

  Frankie and Lansdale shared a laugh. Lett wanted to ask where that put Selfer, but then Lansdale set a doctor’s bag on the table. He pulled out a glass syringe. This one was wider and ringed with a dull metal around the nozzle and piston and bulb, like a device from the previous century. The liquid inside wasn’t clear this time, but yellow—like urine, Lett thought. The needle had a girth to it that he did not like, not at all. Frankie moved in, held him in place. Lansdale, humming a tune now, squirted the yellow fluid and came around the table. Frankie pushed up Lett’s sleeve. Lett gritted his teeth and pressed his bare toes to the floor, but Frankie tipped the chair back and Lett’s toes dangled.

  The prick didn’t hurt. Lansdale knew how to find a vein.

  What came after was no placebo. A warmth surged through Lett. He floated. He loosened up. He grinned. This darn cell was an amusement ride, that was all, a happy Tilt-A-Whirl, and all Lett had to do was ride it out.

  “Rock it, keep that chair arockin’!” he shouted at the big ride jockey, and Frankie did so grinning.

  After a while, the ride slowed. Stopped. But Lett couldn’t get off. It was like before. His limbs wouldn’t work. No one needed to hold him down.

  “No need,” he muttered. “So don’t you even try . . .”

  The room spun now instead of him in the chair and the light whipped around and Lett squeezed his eyes shut and his stomach whipped in the other direction and he leaned forward to throw up, but banged his head on the table. Then a bucket was between his legs, and he let it rip, emptied his gut whole until it was just bile and saliva hanging off his lips.

  After a while, Lett came to again. Lansdale was still with him. Frankie was gone. Lett remembered Lansdale telling his goon at one point that he wouldn’t be required for a while.

  Lansdale pulled his chair around backward and sat on it and pushed up his suit sleeves and grinned. “Ready?” he chirped.

  He started talking a mile a minute like a carnival barker and he plied Lett with more of his anti-Commie Red Scare routine all wrapped in the red, white, and blue and bearing a golden cross. And, eventually, it started to make a lot of sense to Lett. That horrified him so much, like a child left in the dark, and he screamed to make the reason go away. Was Lansdale right? Was it the yellow liquid? Lett nodded along to Lansdale’s words and cheery appeals, but inside he fought it. He kept moving his true thoughts and shifting them around hoping to hide them; to himself he repeated reality and possible outcomes as he knew them . . .

  The cure was the cause was the cure. The end stage of the cure was killing.

  They might know that he’d let Miss Mae escape in Honolulu. That, or she was a test. He had tried. Maybe he’d failed. But he’d stayed true to himself.

  They were training him to be an assassin and wanted him to possess a modicum of anti-Red sentiment. His mission might involve San Francisco. That crude map Selfer had showed him could’ve been buildings and streets around a city square.

  Selfer might not know the whole story. He might only fear it.

  Kanani might survive, if she knew the truth. She might even help him, but he couldn’t count on that. He couldn’t count on anyone but his dead friends.

  He had Lansdale wondering something, because Lansdale was now pacing the room and studying him, tapping a finger to his chin.

  “What was that you gave me?” Lett said. “You’re testing it out on me, that it? It’s part of your next pitch? That it, ad man?”

  Lansdale grinned. He held up the finger, long and bony with that chunky class ring. “Look at the smart kid.” He dropped the grin and snorted at Lett. “You refuse to fight for the American Way?” he said. “Is that it?”

  They might be recording him somehow. He couldn’t know. He tried to speak but his mouth was so dry. He swallowed and flexed his mouth to get some last saliva going.

  “I fought for my buddies. I killed for them. But they’re all dead now.”

  “Oh? Then what about Colonel Selfer?”

  Lett spat. He didn’t have much saliva left so his mouth just popped.

  “He brought you here,” Lansdale said. “He gave you one last chance. That sounds like a friend to me.”

  Lett snorted. “Brother, you don’t know from Adam.”

  “Fine. What about Jock Quinn?”

  “You kidding now or what?” Lett snickered, shrugged. “You can’t figure a Marine. He hates dogfaces. Wants nothing to do with the likes of me.”

  “Maybe. Then what about our Miss Kanani?”

  Lett sneered now, rocking his head back, laughing. “What about her? You fucking idiot. You really thought I’d fall for that old trick? The honey pot? She’s working for you! She was playing me for the fool. She’s nothing but a whore native and a hustler and a viper to boot.”

  32.

  Lett woke up in his cell, his hood back on. Maybe an hour had passed since he had to face Lansdale, hopefully for the last time. Maybe it had been a day, considering how thirsty he was. He couldn’t remember things. He might’ve said or done something expedient, though, because his cuffs were off. And they left him alone for now. He tried to piece the episode together. That thug Frankie was there. He had said things about Kanani and Jock to divert attention from them, to ward off Frankie.

  He felt a chill all over himself, persistent, in his every fold and crevice. He was naked, he realized. Stripped naked. He curled up, but that only made his shoulders and buttocks feel colder, more exposed. He sensed his cellmate over in the other corner.

  “Are you there?”

  His cellmate grunted.

  “Who are you?”

  His cellmate snicker
ed.

  ***

  Footsteps. The wheel spun, the door flew open.

  “Where’s Lansdale?” Lett shouted. “Get Colonel Selfer. I demand to speak to them. It’s my right!”

  “Shut up,” Frankie shouted back. “What’s a haole know about rights, eh?”

  “Go to hell,” Lett said.

  “Get up,” Frankie said. “Both of you.”

  Lett heaved himself up, his head whirled inside the hood and he swayed; he used the wall to steady himself. But he was up.

  “Why aren’t you up?” two others were screaming at his cellmate, “Get the hell up,” but the cellmate only laughed a sickly cackle. Thuds sounded, groans. They were kicking at him. The cellmate laughed harder. The dogs growled, moving in.

  “Wait!” Lett shouted. “Please. Let me help him . . .”

  They paused, stood back. Lett felt his way over using his toes as feelers, the dogs nudging at them with cold noses. His shin found his cellmate’s chest. The cellmate held Lett’s ankle with both hands, grasping it like a child on a bottle.

  Lett crouched down. “Just do as they say. All right? Can you understand? I’m with you.”

  The cellmate rose from the floor along with him, holding on, hanging on his shoulder. They stood side by side, their shoulders pressed together.

  “Move out,” barked a guard, and each of them got a stiff jab in the side.

  No cane or bat jabbed like that, Lett knew. That was cold steel.

  ***

  They were led along, prodded if they slowed. Lett’s hood was still on. Doors opened, shut, opened. They never exited outside yet the air had changed, and Lett’s breathing seemed to create a faint echo. It was as if he’d been led into a giant bucket standing on its side.

  Jagged, hard ground poked at his bare feet and he had to keep repositioning them, like a kneading old cat. They left him to stand in one spot. He heard the crunch of footsteps and talking that echoed.

  A light clinked on—bright white through the hood. “Stay still,” barked a voice. It was Frankie. Lett’s hood came off. He folded forward, shielding his eyes from the light. Spotlights. He let his eyes adjust, peering around. He was standing in what seemed to be a clearing, though he could make out no trees or bushes. About fifty feet away, at the other end of the clearing, a man was curled up on the ground, also naked, his skin glowing fluorescent in the harsh light.

  His cellmate.

  A guard bounded out and kicked at him, yelling, “Stand the hell up!”

  The cellmate rose, pushing up from all fours. His hood was off, too. His face was puffy and splotched with dried blood. He held his bound hands over his genitals. His squinting, blinking eyes stopped on Lett and kept blinking, as if hoping to make Lett’s image go away.

  It was the commando.

  They must’ve shipped him back, shackled down in the cargo hold, on the very same boat that he and Jock returned on.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Lett said to him. “Just do as they say.”

  The commando nodded back. A sick laugh rose out of him and drool hung from his mouth, swinging in the light.

  It seemed like they were outside, but . . . Lett looked up. The sky was pitch black. Too black. No stars? How could that be? He stepped forward.

  “Stay put,” someone yelled at him, and that echoed, too.

  And Lett understood why.

  They were in a cave—a lava tube, they called them here. These were all over the island. No one knew how many there were. Some were massive. They stretched far and deep into the land, into the earth, and within their cores the ancients had hidden from foreign invaders. It was just like in the Philippines. But the tunnels under The Preserve had led to it.

  Lett now made out silhouettes along the lava rock walls—men in those belted coveralls. Lansdale wasn’t among them. Lett recognized none and imagined they were Frankie’s handpicked crew, though none looked Hawaiian. He could see Frankie too, relaxed, rocking on his heels.

  His crew had machine guns and pistols, pointing at him and the commando.

  The commando’s eyes had gone glossy with sadness. He sucked up the drool.

  A guard strode over to Lett and the commando and handed each a Colt pistol. Lett held his by the end of the butt, letting it hang as if it had been dragged in shit.

  “Better grab onto that,” the guard said, backing up.

  “Nothing doing,” Lett muttered.

  Lett and the commando stared at each other, the guns dangling at their sides.

  “It’s duel time,” Frankie said. “Raise your weapons.”

  The grip safety was off, the safety lock off, and the hammer cocked. Keeping his finger off the trigger, Lett eased the butt upright, into the crook of his thumb and forefinger, and he raised his gun halfway so that it aimed at just before the commando’s feet. The man was doing the same, nodding along to Lett’s moves.

  “No way to hold a weapon, soldier,” someone said. Jeers followed. Chuckles.

  Lett spoke to the commando, soft yet firm, his head craning forward. “Listen to me. Don’t do it. Don’t let them make you. Okay? Can you?”

  The commando nodded.

  “Take aim,” Frankie shouted. Someone giggled.

  The commando was shaking his head now. Good man.

  “Take aim or we fire,” Frankie shouted.

  Lett glanced sideways. Their machine guns and pistols were trained on them. They’d have to be good shots or they’d strike the lava rock, and no one wanted ricochets in here.

  “Last chance. Take aim!”

  “Don’t do it,” Lett repeated to the commando.

  But the commando aimed his Colt with both hands. He leaned forward, knees bent.

  “Goddamn you,” Lett muttered. He raised his gun with both hands but kept his index finger off the trigger, resting it along the barrel.

  “All right, that’s it. You get a five count,” shouted a guard. “Five . . .”

  The commando’s eyes bulged but his arms steadied and his finger found the trigger cage.

  “Four . . . Three . . .”

  “Aw, hell.” Lett’s finger found the trigger. The commando’s pale chest was easy to see.

  “Two . . . “

  Then, Lett took his finger off the trigger. He stood up straight, chest out, not caring that he was naked. His heart had suddenly calmed.

  “One . . .”

  Nice and steady. Hit me right in the heart, please.

  “Fire!”

  The commando swung his gun around and rammed it into his mouth and fired.

  It clicked. No round.

  The commando squeezed the trigger. Still no round. He squeezed again, stumbling backward. Nothing, nothing. He landed on his back and kept squeezing, his legs kicking.

  Lett aimed down at the lava rock earth and squeezed his trigger, again and again. Nothing. No rounds in the chamber or in the magazine, none at all.

  They were laughing at the commando, howling and pointing, gasping from the hilarity. “Ha, my sides are splittin’,” someone said. “Shoulda gone with the bullets,” said another.

  Frankie was just shrugging, shaking his head, like a parent who doesn’t quite get why children love a playground so.

  Lett should’ve known that he had no ammo, just by the lighter weight of the weapon. That riled him more than anything. He glared at the guards. Sweat ran down his forearms in long hot slivers. “Did I pass?” he barked.

  No one replied. They were surrounding the commando. Two guards held the commando by the arms. Laughing, howling, they thrust him up by his wrists as if he were the prizefighter who just KO’d to win the title belt. Others yowled and cheered, some raising bottles of Primo beer, cigarettes shooting sparks. The dogs rushed in past Lett and barked and jumped around the commando, growling and showing fangs and snapping at his feet. The commando danced for them with his mouth hung wide open like he wanted to cry or scream, but no sound came out.

  Lett’s shoulders felt heavy, as if he were loaded down with gear. He s
lumped and lowered himself to his knees, letting the jagged rock cut into his kneecaps.

  I should’ve killed the man when I had the chance, he thought, put him out of his misery.

  Frankie ordered the dogs off. His guards turned the commando around, facing away from Lett. The commando’s arms found his sides, and his shoulders squared. And they marched him off, leading him into the blackest, darkest reach of the cave. And onward, and onward.

  A guard bounded over to Lett with a black hood. The last thing Lett saw before they pulled the hood on was the commando’s white back fading into that pitch-black darkness, like a bag of concrete sinking into a deep lake at night, sinking down, under it went and deeper still until it would find the bottom of everything, and nothing at all.

  33.

  When Kanani didn’t know where to turn, she always found a banyan tree. The Preserve had one, near a trail far off in a corner of the camp perimeter. She went back to it the morning after she found Frankie waiting for her at the boogie house bungalow.

  A banyan tree was special. A craggy and curvy web of roots wove its way vertically along the outside of a central trunk and horizontally along branches where they then hung, some eventually reaching earth again, intertwining, recombining. A banyan, her faddah had told her, was an interweaving of many lean roots that once began as a single seed attaching itself to some unassuming tree—and had taken over. They had moved plenty when she was a girl, but there was always a banyan tree to be found. On the plantation, and later, her faddah had always located the banyan with the tree fort, and if there was no fort, he would build her one.

  What would Faddah do in her place? Well, he wouldn’t have been going for gold in the first place. He would have stood up instead. Faced these bastards. And he had paid dearly for that, she reminded herself.

  For all she knew it was Frankie Baptiste himself who made sure Faddah got crushed by crates so that he couldn’t organize the union. Frankie had done some nasty work for the union busters too, after all.

  She stood among the hanging roots and gazed mauka, inland and upland, through a break in the forest. Farther up mountain, the forest gave way to desiccated thickets and knotty shrubs as lava earth and old flows reclaimed the terra and turned it scrubby then bare. In the southeast this naked land rose steeply, ever higher to Mauna Loa. In the northeast it rose before mighty Mauna Kea. And straight ahead, in the arid and jagged center of the island, that exposed saddle of vast lava fields stretched between the two volcanoes, on and on until the green earth was reborn near Hilo Side.