The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  On the way out she noticed a small photo on his nightstand. It was a girl no more than twenty-five, modestly pretty, dishwater blonde hair, angular jaw and nose and something feisty in the eyes.

  Jock was still here, she assured herself.

  She roamed the compound using secondary trails. Inside the woods it turned darker than dusk with the low clouds still pressing down, and the wind picked up, making the palms slap around. She saw the mess hall and realized she hadn’t checked it.

  The place was dead, the tables unoccupied. A young busboy in cook whites was clearing a table. On the other side of the room, in a corner, sat Jock Quinn. He wore civilian clothes—a cheap rayon aloha shirt of muted coconuts and palms, brown cotton trousers, and those strange green USMC jungle boots with canvas uppers and rubber toes and soles, like high-top basketball sneakers. Even in haole civvies he resembled a Marine in camo. She watched him from the side. He sat over a plate of rice stacked with Spam and brown gravy. A coffee mug stood at his one hand out on the table. Dim light from the window illuminated the top of his wispy crew cut.

  She stepped inside. Jock also had aviator sunglasses on, so it was hard to gauge his feeling. But this was as good a place as any. They’d have a buffer of four empty tables around them, and it might even look natural. He hadn’t looked up. She stepped toward him.

  “You found me,” he said to his plate.

  She sat across from him. “It wasn’t easy,” she said.

  They spoke in staccato, like sentry and encroacher confirming a password. She now saw his eyes behind his sunglasses because of the light from his window view. His position, she also saw, gave him a wide sightline of the main way through camp. This would do even better. From here, she could see if Frankie was coming. Though anyone could be on their payroll. Even a busboy in cook whites. Even Jock Quinn. But she had already decided. It was all worth the risk.

  No steam came off his food; he’d been letting it sit. “That’s better with a hamburger patty,” she told him. “Locals Hilo Side call that the Loco Moco.”

  Jock made a face at his plate. “You can have it.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “We shouldn’t be talking here,” he said. He lifted his coffee mug, to look natural.

  “Who’s the girl?” she said.

  His eyes fixed on her. “I told her I was never coming back. I never thought I was, either. Not then.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Told me nuthin’. Just left me. Not even a Dear John. Nothing.” He shrugged. “What was she supposed to do?”

  “You gonna try and find her?”

  He shrugged again. “Now they inform me that the Marines should take me back. Now they tell me. I’m cured, they say. Selfer told me that. Lansdale had given his okay, apparently. Some of the guys are off the hook. No strings attached.”

  “So you’re a regular joe again, eh?”

  “Gyrene, ma’am. No. I’ll never be a regular joe again.”

  “No strings attached—that means what?”

  “They don’t require my duty for any more of their special assignments. I can leave. Reenlist. Their rosters are set. Certain men passed, others did not.”

  “It sounds like you’re the one who passed.”

  “You could put it that way.” Jock looked around. “I was never here, they tell me. No one was. Top secret. I can’t speak of it, not ever. Remains classified. Me, I was just lying on some remote beach this whole time, feet up in a hammock, stoned on rum, and maybe I had me a native girl to boot.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “My last shift is done. Selfer says I need to go. I can head on down the hill. The new goons will let me out of this cage.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You packed?”

  “I got my sea bag.”

  “For where?”

  “They gave me enough pay for a one-way passage to the mainland, if I want it.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m thinking interisland steamer, Kona to Oahu.” Jock lifted his mug again. “I cool my heels on Oahu a while, make sure I don’t crack up again. Then I reenlist. In Honolulu.”

  The busboy got closer, so Kanani ranted about Jock owing her money and whisky, putting on a big act with her hands and bared teeth. Busboy snatched up silverware and scattered.

  “Why aren’t you eating your food?” she said, still baring teeth.

  “I can’t. I’m a wreck, see.”

  “Eat it, Marine.”

  He picked up his fork as if he’d never seen one before, cut at the Spam, scooped up a piece along with some rice and gravy, opened his mouth, and dumped it in. He chewed, staring at her.

  “Good. Try eating again in one minute. Look natural.”

  Jock nodded. “I just can’t leave. Not yet.”

  “You thinking what I thinking?” she said.

  “They have Lett.”

  “So what are we are going do about it?”

  “Supposing you tell me.”

  “I got a plan,” Kanani said.

  “And I’m listening.”

  “I’m not talking about some secret sneak-away out the gate, down mountain. He won’t get out that way and I won’t, either.”

  “Good. That’s just for yellow bellies anyway.”

  “Me, I’m talking about burning down the house.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “You’d be putting plenty on the line,” Kanani said.

  “If they don’t know it was me, who’s the wiser outside? No one even knows this place exists. You just let me shove off for Honolulu in one piece when it’s done. Can you do that?”

  “You’ll have to leave Hilo Side. Maybe it’s not an official berth on a steamer.”

  “A ship is a ship.” Jock shoveled in another forkful, added a lift of his coffee mug. “Like I said—I been holed up on North Shore with my rum ration for all the enlistment office knows.”

  “Good, okay.” Kanani eyed the room. “Now. Can you get us below?”

  Jock nodded. “I’ve done sentry duty down there.”

  “You ever see Wendell down there?”

  “Not personally. But he has to be there. They have cells down below. I even have a map.”

  “Oh. Even better.”

  “They don’t know it, but I do,” Jock added.

  A silence crept in. Both listened to the room, and to outside, looking around. Things were just too quiet. They heard taps, then tapping. Kanani peered outside. The first drops of rain were splashing on the dirt, fluttering the grass.

  “Hate the fuggin rain,” Jock muttered. “Even when it’s warm.”

  Kanani picked up Jock’s fork and took a bite. The meat was tough, the rice mushy, the gravy bitter, all of it overcooked. She made a face. “Folks make this better Hilo Side.”

  “So I’ll have to go try it there.”

  “First, we go for broke. Eh, gyrene?”

  “Yep. We bust ’em up.”

  “Ho, not bad for a haole. You’re gung-ho.”

  “Mahalo.” Jock pushed his coffee over to her.

  “Why are you doing this with me?” she said.

  Jock smiled. He shook his head. He eyed her and the grayest slivers of his irises shined like metal. “What the brass and the con men and the rich suits never will get is that we don’t do it because they order us to. We do what we do for each other. And that’s that.”

  37.

  Lett lay in the dark, so pitch-black he could hold his hand before his face and see nothing. In one respect, it was as if he didn’t exist anymore. He couldn’t see himself. At times he couldn’t feel himself, so he would pinch his ribs or unwrap the greasy blanket to feel the brunt of the cold on his skin like a dunk in a winter stream. It was getting colder. His light bulb had gone out so long ago. He had screamed for a guard then, but no one came.

  Sometimes he would wake and panic that he wasn’t even in the cell anymore, that he was down in
side an abyss they’d dumped him in. Other times he was underwater, a casualty from a ship torpedoed, or he was floating beyond the earth in a black space, like man would someday but in control of it, unlike he. Not like this. Not held in suspension. This must’ve been what it was like for the commando deep in that lava tube, with nothing, no one, only the beating of his heart and gasps choking his throat. Giving up all hope. To quell the panic, he clawed at his blanket and felt the concrete to confirm that he was still in the cell. Then, through the cold, he could smell his shit bucket. It was half full now.

  He craved light more than warmth. He had to see something. He would stare and stare, hoping his eyes would adjust, but they never did. Such was the seal on that cell door. The Seabees or whoever built this had done a hell of a job, for the war effort. To contain the Japanese. To preserve democracy. Good for them.

  Death for him.

  And yet they had brought him food, a metal dog bowl of mixed slimy scraps, stringy meat and gristle and mushy rice or tapioca mixed in, all in a gelatinous pap that could be anything from raw egg to the guards’ saliva. He couldn’t see it. He tried not to smell it because it had a foul tang a little too close to the reek of bodies rotting in front-line mud. At one point he wondered if the meat wasn’t the commando himself. He then realized that they didn’t necessarily want him to starve in case they needed him half coherent and strong enough for whatever they were to do with him—even if it was just a vile setup to frame him as the fall guy.

  No guards had passed by out in the corridor for what felt like a day or more. What if they just left him here? Packed up and went. He would go mad even without their needles and guinea-pig drugs. Someone else might find him. He would wake up in a VA nutcase ward, if he was lucky—though it might just be the electric chair. He wouldn’t put that past the America of today, let alone in the iron-fisted leviathan that the cabal coveted and was sure to get, those mongers of the insidious plot. The way forward wasn’t what anyone expected. We had forged our past and won the present but we would lose the future.

  They will see, he thought, and laughed. But it will be too late by then, the seeds already long sown. No one will see.

  He imagined himself as a corpse in here. He wondered if the cold would stave off decomposition and preserve his body for a time, like a pig carcass hanging in a butcher’s cold storage. He figured his soul or whatever a person wanted to call it would exit well before then. But where would it go? Would it hover in here until his body reached a certain state, until his body spasmed and clenched up as he’d seen bodies do from violent death on the line? Or would his body relax, all flaccid, and then only harden up with rigor mortis many hours later? He told himself he would close his eyes and mouth upon dying, and willed himself to do it, chanting it even. “Close eyes, close mouth . . . mouth closed, eyes closed.” More than anything, he hated the thought of something crawling in his mouth, or of his eyeballs decomposing bared to the air.

  His stomach clenched up and his head spun and he clambered over to the drain and vomited into it. But only bile came up now, bitterly sour like apple vinegar.

  He could try to kill himself, but even then, they had him. They will let him be found however they want him to be found. Supposing it’s a building in, say, San Francisco, or some other major US city he had never seen and never will, six stories up, situated by a window, overlooking a plaza where an important person or even the president might have been shot, his rifle still beside him. Maybe he’d used it to blow his brains out, though he wouldn’t know about that. He would never get to be present at that meeting where his death is staged and he thereby gains a certain notoriety in that dark pantheon of assassins.

  He laughed out loud at that. He rolled backward and kept going, kept rolling, kept moving, and rolled into the blanket as he went; rolling wrapped up, telling himself, Gotta keep moving. Always keep moving, don’t bunch up. Stop and you’re cornered. Keep your eyes open. His knees and elbows clattered against the concrete wall so hard that he might’ve broken skin if he wasn’t blanketed up. He rolled the other way, chanting, “keep moving, always keep moving, eyes open, stop and you’re cornered . . .”

  He kept at it, working up a sweat, not caring if he struck the shit bucket. Maybe he could go out this way, in pure and utter exhaustion, no fluids left, the only man ever to do so, simply expire from motion, just a wool sack, twitching and quivering, until the final spasm and he’d flame out, one last spark in his brain to turn out the lights.

  He panted and moaned as he rolled, finding the opposing walls again and again, itching from sweating, so hot now he let the blanket fall away, his limbs gathering scrapes and bruises as he went.

  “Keep moving, eyes open . . . stop and you’re cornered . . .”

  38.

  Kanani trotted through the driving rain after leaving the mess hall. She tried the cover of a forest trail, but the drops only struck bigger and faster there, propelled downward by sagging palm fronds and pointed ferns and slick leaves. Back out on the main path she dodged the forming puddles, telling herself that the rain made her running around camp look less conspicuous and hoping that she wasn’t being followed by one of the few left here.

  She headed over to the main gate, keeping to eaves and covered porches when she could, and checked the guard shack at the front gate. The half-asleep guard who normally had this shift was long gone. The new guard looked like a moke she knew from Honolulu. It was the same all over camp. Francisco was bringing in all his goons, posting them at the gates, using them for random sentry duty, and the ones who weren’t his presumably shared the same enforcer mindset of the low-grade psychopath.

  She headed back to the Main House as the sun went down, the last light fading from high inside the low clouds. She shook the wet off her like an island cat. She passed the bathroom, grabbed a towel and wiped herself down.

  She found Selfer in his office. He was passed out at his desk, face down in crossed arms like a schoolboy taking a nap—except this boy had a bottle of Filipino rum in his outstretched right hand. He wore the same outfit—he probably hadn’t bathed. As she stepped into the dim room, she felt cobwebs at her feet. No, it was teletype ticker tape. The floor of his office looked like the VJ-Day parade down King Street in Honolulu. A metal garbage can stood over in a corner, overflowing with more of that ticker tape and papers of all sizes.

  She approached the desk, dragging along ticker tape and papers stuck to her damp feet and ankles.

  Selfer twitched and sat up, his hair whipping back. He blinked at her. “What, what’s happened?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You got caught in the rain.”

  “You can see—that’s a start. Tell me, goddamn you.”

  He held up his hands. “Tell you what? What do I know?”

  She sighed and wrapped the towel around her hair and made it a big production like she was about to stomp out of the room.

  “Just, let’s take it easy,” he said. He frowned at the rum bottle.

  “I demand to know what they’re gonna do with me,” she said.

  His eyes widened as he rediscovered the room. “Look at this paper trail. I’ve always gotten certain directives via teletype, sure I have. Plenty of it’s been routine stuff, most recently about closing down this command post, handing it over to you know who.”

  “Frankie Baptiste.”

  “He goes by Francisco,” Selfer growled. “But now? Just look. More of it keeps coming and coming and piling up. I don’t know what to do with it all.”

  “Why all the paper?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s directed at me, names me by name. Don’t know what they want, can’t make heads nor tails of it. It’s all code mostly. Ordering me to implement this or that or ordering me to relent from performing deeds I’m not capable of anyway and I don’t even understand their code words anyhow. It’s like there’s a madman on the other end.”

  She blew air out one side of her mouth. “Auwe.”

  “Ow? What’s th
at mean?”

  “You got instructions for what to do with me or not?”

  Selfer pressed both hands to the desktop. He glanced around at all the ticker tape as if her orders were in there somewhere. “Right. The orders for you are clear. They want you in Honolulu. You’re to report to a new special office there, another new agency, what they’re calling the CIA—Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “They’re sending me back, you mean.”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “It’s just going in a circle.” She kicked at the ticker tape. “Back where I came from. All I am to them is their goddamn honey pot.”

  “Their what?”

  She glared at him, baring all her teeth.

  “Okay, okay, take it easy. I get you: it’s back to the boogie house for you.”

  She flung the soggy towel across the floor, it gathered paper. She turned to leave.

  He shot up and came around the desk, grabbed her elbow. “Wait, where you going?”

  “Leaving. Getting the hell out of here. I’m not sticking around for Frankie and his boys to complete his assignment, uh-uh, no way.”

  “Assignment?”

  “Sure. Why you think they brought him in, him and his goons?”

  “Enforcement? I don’t know. It’s not . . . in the paper trail. He takes orders from others. Lansdale maybe. It’s—”

  “I tried to tell you. They brought him in to clean things up.”

  “You sure? Oh, God. Of course.”

  “He’s known for that. Has the knack.”

  “Who’s he going to clean up?”

  “Everyone. Everyone left, that is.”

  Selfer pressed a hand to his chest. “Including me.”

  “Especially you. And that paper trail, it incriminates you.”

  “In what?”

  “In whatever they decide—whatever fits. Just in case. That’s my guess.”