The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  Shshshshsh…

  Daniel Coles, who, as a man, would earn the nickname “Zippo,” could not tell if the sound came from the dim and fading world around him, or was an internal echo within the darkening corridors of his own mind.

  Shshshshsh…

  Opening his eyes required a colossal effort. Above, the sky was a blissful, muted purple—the most beautiful purple he had ever seen. Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that sky. The stars shone brilliantly. Although he had no knowledge of astronomy, their order made some kind of elemental sense to him.

  Shshshshsh…

  The pain resonated at a distant level, like a cathedral bell ringing many blocks away. He stared down at his body. It was a testament to his beatific state of mind that the sight did not disturb him: the flesh flayed open and the stiffly frozen tatters of fabric peeling away from horrific wounds like dead birch bark from a tree trunk. His legs, bent at awkward angles, looked like stogies that had been crushed in someone’s pocket.

  “Shshshshsh…”

  Something was moving through his hair. A hand. A woman sat beside him, stroking his hair. She was, without question, the most beautiful woman Daniel had ever seen. Her skin was the color of burnt caramel and it glowed in the dusk. She was naked but seemed neither cold nor self-conscious. Her breasts were small and her ribs visible. It looked as if she had not eaten in quite some time. But her body, the leanness of it, the ropes of muscle running long beneath smooth brown skin, realized some kind of essential symmetry.

  “You’re hurt very badly.” Her voice was rich as cream and honey.

  “Y-yuh-yes.”

  She asked his name.

  “Daniel,” she repeated, “such a nice name.”

  Her hair and eyebrows were shockingly white. And if her face was slightly too long, the angle of her jaw slightly vulpine, Zippo neither noticed nor cared. Her eyes, though too close-set, flashed with colors he had never seen, nor could put a name to.

  “You are going to die soon, I’m afraid.” She scratched behind her ear. Not with her hand but with her foot, in the manner of a dog.

  “I cuh-could h-have b-buh-been r-ri-rich.” She had stopped stroking his hair. He wished she would do it some more. “A muh-muh-million b-bucks.”

  “That would have been nice, I suppose.”

  Tripwire’s gun was nowhere to be seen. Zippo couldn’t have shot her, anyway.

  She bent down and pressed her lips to his ear. “I can help you.” Her breath was sweetly bitter, like fresh-mown grass. “Would you like me to try?”

  More than anything in this world.

  “Y-yuh-yes.”

  “Alright.”

  Her mouth moved further down and her breath warmed his throat. Then her teeth—small and white and very, very sharp—were biting into his flesh, saliva mingling with blood…

  …he felt himself moving, pulled across the ice on a bier of flexible saplings. The bier hit a rut and pain, thick and fibrous and sickening, hammered down his legs. He passed out…

  …in a dark, warm place. In the darkness, noises. A sound like trickling water. Another like the spirited play of puppies. He touched his face to find it matted with a layer of coarse fur. A beard? How long had he been here…

  …he was in a cave. To his left a fire flickered, casting strange shadows on the rock. The woman crouched between his legs. She was licking his wounds, cleaning away the blood and pus with her small pink tongue…

  …terrible fever dreams. Every man he had every killed appearing before him as they had at the moment of death. Kenny Webb, the first man he’d killed for money, twenty-one years old with powder burns frosting the bullet hole in his neck. The father-and-son Viets, the look of utter hatred on their faces the moment before he’d flamed them in that tunnel outside Song-Be. The dreams deepened, darkened, spiraled. Now he dreamt of the great caribou herds, the scent of them, a crystal-clear sense-memory of their flesh, their taste…

  …in the cave again. Small creatures at play near the fire. Some were wolf kits, some young children, some an uneasy combination of both. Beneath a fine layer of white hair his legs were slender and scarred. Jagged scabs healed along their length. She appeared at his side. Firelight etched the contours of her face and reflected off her kaleidoscopic eyes.

  “Who?” he said, pointing at the wolf kits.

  “Mine alone,” she said. “My mate was killed by the black man.”

  “Why did you save me?”

  “Because you are a hunter.”

  She pressed her lips to his cheek…

  …and then he was outside under a full moon. She was at his side. She was as beautiful, or more so, in lupine form than she was as a human. Her fur was white as snow and her body radiated grace and power. Wolfish yips emanated from the cave, interspersed with childish laughter.

  “Young mouths to feed.” Her voice was a guttural growl.

  He stared at his feet. They were longer now, and furred. His nails were dark, and hooked, and very sharp—claws. There were dark pads on the underside of each foot and he barely felt the snow beneath them. His mouth felt crowded with too many teeth. He tried to stand but his spine had acquired a streamlined curvature that made moving on all fours more comfortable.

  So he did.

  He could hear things he’d never heard before: it was as if someone had cranked the volume of the world to full blast. His nose was alive with scents more tantalizing and more deeply-textured than he’d known to exist. He opened his mouth to speak and a howl tore out of his throat. To his new ears it was the most natural sound in the world.

  She loped off into the forest. He followed, marveling at the coiled strength of his new body. Soon they were running together at speeds that were breathtaking, exhilarating. He caught the scent of something small and quick-footed ahead, sensing its stark fear, and realized he’d never been hungrier in his life.

  He ran as fast as his new legs would carry him, the taste of blood strong in his throat. She ran beside him, her body a sleek white blur. Their quarry juked ahead of them, desperate and afraid. They veered easily, a unified motion, locked on their prey.

  The creature who had once been Daniel Coles unleashed another, gleeful, howl.

  He was hunter once again.

  — | — | —

  V.

  Three Amigos

  Northwest Territories

  December 9th, 1987. 4:43 a.m.

  Nothing existed except the path.

  Sometimes it described a flat, straight line. Other times it climbed, or wound, or dipped only to rise again. They followed wherever it led. Their focus narrowed to a single overriding intent: constant forward motion. If their minds were to deviate from this goal for even a split-second, there was a chance, and a good one, they would fall and never get up again.

  The snow began to fall sometime earlier. Big wet flakes clung to the men’s sweat-slick hair and melted in thin streams down their backs. Their feet sank down into the new snow, and soon chunks of ice clung to their fatigues and bootlaces, as though to the fur of a dog. It was, Oddy noted with worming melancholy, the consistency of snow he’d always wished for as a child: moist and packable, perfect for snowmen or forts. He recalled a time when, as a child, he’d packed a rock into a snowball and thrown it at a neighborhood boy he’d suspected of stealing his toboggan. It had burst against the boy’s cheek and the rock left an inch-long gash under his eye. His toboggan re-appeared on his doorstep the next day. That was the first time Oddy realized that violence and intimidation were a form of currency and that sometimes the only way to avoid being stepped on was to wield the bigger boot.

  As the miles unwound under his feet, Oddy found himself thinking about his father, who’d also been a soldier. Oddy’s father enlisted in Roosevelt’s war on May 3rd, 1942. He took a jerry slug in the throat and, after three months recuperation in Poland, was medically discharged. Sick of the flag-wavers and flag-burners, he grew his high-and-tigh
t haircut out long and bushy, finding work at a pulp mill in Montana.

  Oddy didn’t believe his old man slept a single peaceful night in the fourteen years he knew him. Like Oddy, he kept a Barlow knife under his pillow, a .45 Desert Chief in the drawer beside the bed. Like Oddy, he rose at hourly intervals to walk the perimeter of his house. Oddy would hear him get up, stab his feet into slippers, make a brisk circuit. The height of Oddy’s bedroom window allowed him to see his father’s head and neck move past. During the final circuit he’d look in on him. Oddy remembered the first pale light of dawn cutting through the backyard cedars to silhouette his father’s head, a dark and featureless disc, except for the eyes, white and glassy, animal. Other times his father disappeared into the attic, where he kept his footlocker. Oddy once poked his head through the trapdoor to see his father in his dress blues. Standing stock still, tunic buttoned to the neck, a fruit salad of combat citations pinned to the left breast. Standing at attention, staring at the naked roofbeams, before fingering the dimpled scar on his throat. The man snapped off a four-fingered salute at nothing, no one.

  The day of Oddy’s fourteenth birthday, his father bought him a Remington 30/30 with a seven-cartridge clip, red bow tied around the walnut stock. He packed lunch and supper, filled a thermos with hot chocolate, and the two of them hiked deep into the seed lot flanking their property. Father and son rambled over snow-topped rocks and down a rocky daw, across frozen streams lying flat and silvery against the sun, boots crunching through mid-winter hardpack. A sharpshin hawk wheeled low into the blue strip of sky over a stand of poplars, legs trailing a brown curve of mouse.

  Listen now, Oddy’s father said after they’d set up a blind. Deer are skittish and temperamental creatures. You’ll only get one chance. He lifted his arm and jabbed a thumb into the meat below his armpit. Here. Behind the front legs. Bullet ruptures the lungs, lungs fill with blood, deer suffocates. Got it?

  He chambered a round in the breech and handed Oddy the Remington. It was incredibly heavy. Oddy said, Did you learn that in the war?

  Learn what?

  Where to shoot something so it dies.

  The older man stared up into the big safe sky. A good man, Oddy’s father. Never hit his son or wife, never catted around, gutted it out in the pulp mill’s stink and heat to provide for them. Nothing extraordinary. Just a kind, decent man. The war taught me a lot of things, he said. Most of it was…useless. He smiled at the sky, as if he’d come to a sudden revelation. It’s a sucker’s game, son. Pointless. Never get involved.

  Two months later he shot himself. Head-shot with the .45 Desert Chief while sitting in front of the television, test pattern casting multicolored bars across the broken remains of his face. A note pinned to his chest: If I had it to do all over again, I would. Oddy remembered finding a curved sliver of bone deep in the carpet years later, a tiny splinter of his father’s skull.

  Oddy turned to Tripwire and said, “You know, the greatest joy of my father’s life was his garden. He’d plant these rows of tomatoes and sugarsnap peas, peppers and carrots. He was always fussing with fertilizers and humus to, y’know, get the most out of the soil. I remember him down on his hands and knees, working the earth with a mattock, awaiting those little sprigs of green…” Oddy’s eyes rose to the sky above, to the puffy night clouds, moon the size of a dime. “I’d never seen him more alive, more at peace. My father was a gardener, man. I mean, he was a soldier, but what he should’ve been was a gardener. But we hardly ever end up where we should, do we?”

  Tripwire didn’t reply. He wasn’t being rude; he simply lacked the energy for conversation. He stumbled, took a knee, located some internal wellspring of strength and determination, stood, and continued on. He was panting helplessly, like a boxer at the end of a marathon bout. Sweat drenched his clothing and filled his eyes, freezing his lashes, blinding him. His stomach and chest were heavy, as though filled with wet stones. He felt like an egg pressed between cement blocks: the slightest pressure, the tiniest tap, and he’d shatter into a million messy pieces. The branches of the trees on either side of the trail joined overhead, and he felt as though he was groping through an endless tunnel. Shadowy shapes moved in the trees all around him. He retained the awareness that they might be nothing more than figments of a sleep-starved mind, and this kept him from firing wildly into the dark.

  One foot, two foot. Left foot, right foot. Red fish, blue fish…

  While his body applied itself to basic locomotion, Tripwire’s mind was free to wander. Memories flooded in and out with no clear sense of purpose or direction. He remembered fucking a whore in a Saigon brothel. A child had sat beside the bed, watching her mother thrust and moan. He remembered taking the whore’s hair in his fist and pulling as hard as he could. He’d needed to hear her scream. He’d needed the girl to hear her mother screaming. He didn’t know why he’d done that. Forty-eight hours earlier he’d knelt on the bank of a Mekong bay with a fisherboy’s headless body in his lap. But he still didn’t know why he’d done that thing to that woman.

  He remembered another time he’d come across an American soldier in a bamboo plantation outside Than Khe. The man—the name stamped on his dogtag necklace read “Richardson”—had been captured by some sadistic NVA’s, who’d cut the bamboo at ground-level and lashed Richardson down over it, naked. By the time Tripwire came upon the clearing, the bamboo stalks, which grew at the rate of two inches per day, had grown nearly through the poor bastard. He remembered the stark greenness of the bamboo sticking out of Richardson’s pale chest and the plugs of tissue on the ground around his body, reminding Tripwire of plugs of dirt dotting a recently-aerated soccer field. He remembered the sly displacement of soil as bamboo pushed up through the earth, through Richardson—the fucking stuff grew so fast you could hear it. He remembered how one stalk had grown up through the man’s testicle sac, skewering one of his balls like a cocktail olive on a plastic sword. But somehow the man was still alive, alive and staring at Tripwire.

  Richardson motioned with his eyes to his fatigues, which lay in a crumpled ball five feet away. Tripwire rifled the pockets: a toothbrush, dental floss, a set of brass knuckles, a rabbit’s foot (oh the fucking irony), two lambskin condoms and, in the breast pocket, a letter. “Is this what you want?” Tripwire said. Richardson nodded as best he could. All around the bamboo kept growing, growing.

  Tripwire unfolded the letter and read the first few lines: Dear Kevin, I hope all is well. Sally took this picture of me at the beach and she thought I should send it to you. Tripwire looked at the photograph paper-clipped to the letter. The girl was a tall, big-boned blonde. Seventeen years old, Tripwire guessed, long white legs and blue eyes and skin like vanilla ice cream. “Do you want me to write to her—tell her what happened?” he asked. Richardson nodded again, but his eyes said something different—don’t tell her I died like this, those eyes said. Tell her I died a hero. Tripwire promised he would. Then he shot Richardson in the skull with a Swedish grease gun he took off a dead VC.

  He never wrote the letter. Ten minutes after shooting Richardson, he pulled it from his pocket, tore it up, and scattered the pieces to the four winds. People die, was his thinking at the time. Boys die out here all the time, die anonymously and without regard, and why should she know while a thousand other girls and mothers and fathers will never know? And he didn’t want to lie. Your boyfriend charged a VC machine gun nest, took down eight of them before one of the sneaking slant-eyed fucks nailed him. No. He wouldn’t do that. It would be a validation of something he no longer believed in. So he ripped up that letter, the envelope with its return address, and tossed them into the sky.

  But now, thinking back, he knows he should have written that letter, let the pretty big-boned blonde know what happened to the young man she had loved so many years ago. Lied, if he had to, because sometimes lies are okay, if they offer peace. But he did not write that letter. He ignored a dying young man’s last wishes.

  Don’t go down that road, skip. The v
oice in his head belonged to Freddy Achebe, his cameraman. The past is the past. Leave it there. Doesn’t matter now.

  But Tripwire realized, with bitter clarity, that it did matter. Of course it mattered. It mattered in the spaces between people, and it mattered in those sunless and empty spaces within every one of us. It mattered. And it hurt like hell.

  Left foot, right foot. Hup-one, hup-two, load on up and break on through…

  Why didn’t he write that letter? Why did he hurt that poor woman? Why?

  Tripwire leaned over suddenly and retched into the brush, exhausted, moaning helplessly as his stomach spasmed. His feet were on fire, the pain nearly unbearable. His throat and tongue seemed covered with wooly felt. He didn’t know how much longer he could go. He knew if he slipped on the snow he would probably stay where he fell and not get up, staring up at the few stars visible through the naked tree branches, breathing hoarsely until his breath stopped altogether.

  Answer slammed a flare alight and held it above his head. An umbrella of reddish light spread to illuminate the fringing firs. Obscured forms shrunk away from the light. Something with spidery limbs beyond numbering and flesh that glittered like wet fish scales skittered through the underbrush to his left. To his right another creature tracked steadily: segmented and cylindrical, trunk the circumference of a wine cask, pale and greasy as tallow. A massive maggot. Beyond these two were others, the sound and smell and surge of them unmistakable.

  But they did not attack. They wanted to; Answer was sure of it. But something prevented them from doing so.

  Twenty years ago, Answer had walked into the Green Beret hootch the day after A-303 Blackjack was disbanded. On a pike in the hootch’s center was the decaying head of a cougar. Next to it, on another pike, was the head of a Viet boy. The boy’s face was badly burned, and there were flies at his mouth and nose. Off in the gloom dim figures lounged on hammocks. Jangling tribal music came from a tape deck encircled by black candles.