The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  She touched a large green oval banyan leaf, like a glossy piece of thin leather, and followed the path up its root and more roots, like a gargantuan ivy. Some haoles liked to figure this was all just ivy gone out of control and immediately conceived ways of cutting it back. How dare they.

  They too were getting cut back, each got shafted in their own way. Wendell Lett thought he was coming here to get cured, but they were only using his combat fatigue to remake him into the type of man who didn’t require a conscience. A psychopath. The end stage was killing, he’d told her. The cure is the cause. Wendell had told her about Miss Mae, about the bad things they were training him for. It didn’t surprise her, not after what happened to Faddah.

  As for her? They never were going to give her a chance. It was all lip service as usual, just like on Oahu. She could get them something they needed, and they got it. So be it. But she still had her shot at that gold. And then Francisco appeared. He was their new man. It changed everything. Now she had to find a way to neutralize him.

  Even Charlie Selfer the climber was getting the shaft. Someone had promised him a big shortcut up the ladder of success, but now he was getting left behind and fast. A bait and switch, the haoles called it—Selfer’s dear old deadbeat for a dad was probably real good at that move. How humiliating for Selfer. He was feeling a grudge at first, but now it was one hell of a panic because the new owners had installed Francisco and for the duration.

  Maybe ex-Marine Jock Quinn was the smartest of all, she thought. He had kept his head down. They couldn’t find a way to use him for their own ends—and destroy him in the process.

  The banyan roots, her faddah had told her, eventually envelop the tree supporting it, killing off its trunk, and when the trunk rots away there remains a hollow center. Natives used to live and meet and hide in them. If only this one held such a refuge inside, she thought. She could hide in there indefinitely. Meanwhile those roots could keep spreading and spreading, seeded by birds she commanded, and she imagined her web of roots taking over this whole damn evil camp. If she could only give the order. Strangle Lansdale! Strangle Frankie!

  It only made her sigh. This banyan wasn’t developed enough or old or strong enough for strangling or even for hiding, and it might just be too high up mountain to survive forever.

  Still, Frankie would get his comeuppance. Because that moke was getting suckered into the oldest con: the ones in power lead you to believe that you really could become like them, all so that you avoid thinking what was best for you and your own.

  She wondered, again, if this was what was happening to her too, and then she pushed the thought from her mind by pulling binoculars from her bag. She looked toward the perimeter fence, topped with barbed wire. Just beyond this stretch of the fence, maybe a half mile mauka, was supposed to be one of those markings on the map she remembered. She’d nabbed the binoculars from the Main House. She lifted them to her eyes.

  The clouds were low but she could still make out a hill, and what might be a lava tube entrance, but the rise of land obscured it. A two-rut road led up to it.

  She had given up trying from inside The Preserve. Frankie lurking above and below made it too risky, especially without help. She had finally considered enlisting Wendell Lett, but then she couldn’t find Wendell and she could only hope he wasn’t on his next mission already. This location outside of camp was one close enough that she remembered from the map markings. But how to get there? If she exited camp toward the interior, there might be no returning to this side of the island. She would be fleeing alone in the rugged and unforgiving saddle, exposed between the two volcanoes.

  She heard crunching. She turned to see Jock Quinn coming her way. He carried no sentry gun and had his shirt unbuttoned. His sleeves were rolled up like a sailor spoiling for a fight after losing a game of craps.

  She lowered her binoculars into her bag, stepped out from the hanging roots, and waved.

  He didn’t wave back. By the look on his face she thought he was going to bust her up. She pegged him for drunk, maybe.

  “What are you doing?” she said, putting a smile on.

  One side of his mouth turned up but it was no smile. “I should be asking the same of you,” he snarled as he bounded up to her.

  “Can’t an island girl take a stroll? I love banyan trees, see, my faddah, he—”

  “I haven’t seen him,” Jock said and stopped before her. “He’s just vanished like.”

  Her gut twitched with uneasy feeling. “Wendell, you mean? Maybe they sent him on assignment.”

  “He’s not. I got it on authority. I’m worried. I’m worried he might’ve told them where to get off instead.”

  “Get off? Oh. Instead of what?”

  “Instead of just getting his damn points and peace of mind and cure and getting posted the hell out of here.”

  She nodded, glaring at the ground. It was clear to her now. They must be holding Wendell underground, below The Preserve. But no one went down there. Only Selfer could probably get her down there, but he refused to discuss the subject.

  “What are you doing with those binoculars?” Jock said.

  She winced and he could probably tell he’d caught her off guard. He certainly wasn’t drunk. Now she wondered if he’d been tracking her out here. He was a Marine guy after all.

  She patted the binoculars inside her bag. “Just . . . taking in the volcanoes,” she said. “I was hoping there might be a way to climb up these roots for a better look.”

  Jock nodded up at the roots. “Might be better if it was hollowed, then you make your way up without being exposed, but you’d still need a good perch with leafage for, uh . . .”

  “For a sniper?”

  “For the OP,” Jock insisted. “Observation post. It’s not always about killing.”

  “No,” she muttered. “I guess not.”

  This was an awkward moment for them. Neither had gotten too close to each other, even though each had to realize that the other knew a special side of Wendell Lett. Jock fell silent a moment. He kept facing her as if pretending to chat, should anyone be watching. But he peered side to side from the corners of his eyes.

  “No one’s behind you, either,” she whispered.

  “Let’s assume they’re holding him underground,” Jock said out one side of his mouth. “You think you could get to him?”

  “Get to him how?”

  “You know, with your contacts.” Charlie Selfer, he meant. Tricking him if she could.

  “What then?”

  “I’m not going to let the man rot, even if he is a doggie.”

  She fought an urge to look around her now.

  “No one behind you, either,” Jock added. “Just outback.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jock glanced in the direction of the lava tube. She held out her hands, shrugged.

  “Just, let’s keep this between us,” Jock said. “Wendell’s life might depend on it.”

  “I will let you know. Okay?”

  “Roger,” Jock said. “You know where to find me. But don’t make it obvious-like.”

  “Like you coming here was?”

  Now Jock glared at the ground, his boots digging into it. “I had no one else to try. I know he trusted you.”

  “You got a plan for it?” she blurted.

  “I might. But I don’t have much time. You?”

  “Maybe. But what if we made our plans one and the same?”

  “That could work. And then? It’s gung-ho time,” Jock said, and he stomped off glaring over his shoulders.

  ***

  On the way back, Kanani felt like some small jungle animal about to be swooped up by a giant bird. Exposed, no armor, claws too small to pierce. Or maybe a snake could snatch her and eat her whole at any moment.

  They had Wendell somewhere. What had he done now? What would they do to him?

  She had lied to Jock—she didn’t have a plan. Not yet. But she knew how she would do it. It was how th
e smaller animals did it. Like her faddah had told her. Scrawny boxers. Artful boogie house bouncers. Even Frankie probably.

  You had to react first and keep bobbing and weaving on your toes giving no one time to think let alone recover. You didn’t use your own fists. You only needed to make it work.

  34.

  There is no cure, Lett reminded himself, again and again. There never was a cure.

  They had locked him back in the same cell underground where he’d been reunited with the commando—where the commando spent the last days of his life.

  That man was dead now.

  I’m dead soon.

  Lett accepted this. They had pulled his hood off when they returned him to his cell, obviously not caring anymore what he saw or didn’t see. Because he was a goner. The one caged light bulb wanted to blind him, so he stayed to the farthest corner of the cell, sitting, letting his spine firm up against the hard wall. They’d given him a tattered and filthy T-shirt, Army-green boxer shorts. Then they threw him a raspy, soiled wool blanket so grimy it was greasy, and he drew that over his head to shield the light. He slept on his side, knees to his chest.

  He looked forward to seeing his friends again. Tom Godfrey, and Holger Frings, his foxhole buddies. He expected them to visit him now, in here. But they never came, even when he begged out loud for them to come. This made him feel colder and more horrified than that image stamped on his eyeballs of the commando descending naked into that dark cavern forever.

  He soon realized why his friends had mostly stayed away before. It wasn’t because Lansdale and his fake dose had led him to think he was getting cured. His friends didn’t visit him here for one simple fact: he was in hell. Not even they could reach him in hell. He was back in the shit, was what he was. When a certain brand of GI went back up on the line, getting his hands bloody and his brain blackened all over again, his troubles would recede. That was why certain GIs needed to be back in combat so bad—until it became a death wish.

  “Come and get it over with,” he shouted into the blanket only to inhale the sour air of the untold numbers who wore this grisly shroud before him.

  Another hour passed. Hours? He was losing sense of time. He flung the damn blanket off and paced the room, the harsh light glaring down on him as he shielded his eyes with a hand like some sickly catatonic salute. Soon his stomach rumbled and he had a dry, metallic taste in his mouth. He had to urinate so he yelled, “Hey! Gotta piss here. Got a bucket? Hey!”

  No one came. He urinated into the drain in the floor, and the translucent yellow of his stream told him he still had nutrients in him. “Lucky man,” he muttered.

  He paced the room again—five steps one way, then the other, back and forth, gotta keep moving, always keep moving, stop and he was cornered. But he was fully cornered now. They were training him as an assassin. Some might call it a hit man, others an insurgent, and some a hero. No matter the name, history told that an assassin was used for all manner of power politics, good and bad and every credo in between. Often a lowly assassin such as he was presumed to be acting alone if not crazed, especially at first, but history often proved that certain forces were at least influencing the assassin if not ordering him directly. The targets varied. Regicides. Czars killed. Among the US presidential shootings, there was John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was used by the powerful as a pretext to set in motion the mobilizations that began the first World War. And not twenty years later, the Nazis used assassination attempts and bombings real and invented to begin dismantling democracy for one final Teutonic cataclysm.

  He wondered if Lansdale’s genuine dose of dope had made him tell them things when he thought he was out cold. But he hadn’t known anything to tell. What if they told him things instead? What if they suggested things to him under that dose that he would eventually come to believe? Lansdale had spoken the language of the Red Scare. What if that became natural to him later, his native language? A way of life. A belief. Faith. What if they had put their own lever inside his brain that could be flipped on at any point, quicker than a knee jerk? He couldn’t rule it out. Injecting him with various radical thoughts, just enough to leave him babbling when he was apprehended. He could be portrayed as anything from an anarchist to a Communist, a reactionary to a fascist. He was already cracked from the war, that much was proven. And a dirty deserter to boot. He was one bad apple.

  If all else failed, they were going to use him as their scapegoat. They had tried and tried to save him—tried to cure him—but it just didn’t take. He was acting on his own, they would say. Another GI that was “all out of change,” as it was called—the good soldier who lost his way and his mind. After all, hadn’t Selfer himself told him that there had been reports of him voicing threats to important persons; that he’d declared he’d wanted to kill Ike, President Truman even? He still didn’t remember ever doing that, but it didn’t matter because it was in a report somewhere.

  They didn’t even need him alive for it. It was surely cleaner for them that way, all tied up neatly, just the corpse of a cracked and spent vet with the sniper rifle that he worshipped. Someone would clean up the blood.

  All the more reason to die, and real damn soon.

  He crawled under his blanket but the greasy shroud stuck to his skin, and he couldn’t breathe through it, so he clawed at it and rolled out of it kicking. He lay on the floor, splayed on his back, glaring into the harsh white bulb, panting, drooling.

  He was their man, no matter what he did. History proved that much.

  He wanted to laugh, but only tears came out.

  ***

  Lett reckoned that another day had passed in his cell. Maybe one and a half. He noted the footsteps of guards passing and didn’t recognize any pattern or schedule. What was more, they passed more infrequently, maybe once or twice a day and no more than one or two men at a time. He wondered if he was the only one left down here, underground. That chilled him, and he pulled the grimy blanket over him and under him to keep his hips from bruising on the concrete.

  When the door opened, Lett was expecting Frankie. Charlie Selfer came to him. Selfer was alone. He stepped inside the cell and then checked the corridor. He was back to wearing summer khaki without insignia, but it didn’t fit as if tailored anymore. A button in the center of his shirt front was missing, and one sleeve was partly rolled up while the other wasn’t and it hung there flapping unbuttoned at the cuff. His hair fell in his eyes; dry, no tonic—a sight new to Lett, and Selfer kept pushing it away as if it were a fly buzzing around him.

  Lett was sitting on the floor with his back slumped against the wall. He said nothing. What could he say? He wouldn’t bother standing until Selfer was forced to make him.

  “Good Lord,” Selfer muttered. He had bags under his eyes so distended they looked ready to burst. He’d lost weight, too, his trousers cinched up under his web belt, his cheeks hollow. He was panting a little, and Lett suspected he’d jogged all the way here in a panicked lather. An unknowing stranger might have mistaken Selfer for an escaping cellmate.

  From his pocket Selfer produced a bread roll, wrapped in a white napkin, still warm.

  “You better devour that, while you can.”

  Lett nodded. He unwrapped the napkin. The roll had fresh butter and salami inside. Glorious.

  “Well? Eat.”

  He sunk his teeth in, inhaling it, and finished off the roll.

  Then Lett noticed Selfer wore the strangest thing—he had a holster on his belt, and it held a Colt pistol. Lett couldn’t remember seeing the man wear a gun, not even during the war.

  “I can show you how to use that,” Lett said.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be.”

  “I don’t have time, Lett. I need to think . . .”

  Selfer was grousing like a man twice his age. Yet Lett noticed a softness in his eye. And Lett wondered if the man had children, a boy he once put to bed and watched like this before turning th
e lights off. A wife? He always assumed not. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  He can go right to hell with me, Lett reminded himself. Selfer was the reason he was here. It all started with him.

  “Why do I get the feeling,” Lett said, “that you’re not supposed to be down here?”

  “Shhh.” Selfer listened again.

  “Let’s hope they don’t pass by for a while,” Lett said.

  “I spotted them going off on a break.” Selfer crouched next to Lett. “Listen. I’ve been doing some figuring. I still do have some wits left in my noodle, I can tell you, and I’m using them. Now, you’re going to think I’m half-cocked if not a little cuckoo, but . . .” Selfer spoke lower. “Have you ever heard of something called the Business Plot?”

  “I think so,” Lett said.

  “You do? Even better.”

  “But I don’t know the details.”

  Selfer smiled, held up his index finger. “It was 1933, to be exact. A cabal of top businessmen wanted to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and establish a fascist-style dictatorship of America.” He spoke fast, like an auctioneer, getting it all out. “The Business Plot conspirators weren’t simply angered because FDR was striving to help the common man with his New Deal programs, which big money simply could not allow. It wasn’t even their fear of any sentiment they could brand as Communism, socialism. No, the scheme was cheaper and meaner than that. The business barons were angry because FDR had taken the dollar off the gold standard. This meant they might lose a smidgen of their vast money, on paper, which was far too great a loss for them, and for this alone they were ready, willing, and able to topple American democracy while pretending to be the only ones patriotically American. For their figurehead, they wooed a maverick Marine general named Smedley Darlington Butler.”