“Follow close,” she whispered like a squad leader, and took off.
***
Farther down Alii Drive stood a quaint little church not much bigger than a shed. It had white wood siding, teal trim, and a corrugated roof, and it looked out over a small rocky inlet. ST. PETER’S CATHOLIC CHURCH BY THE SEA, it read on a gable above the door. Lett and Kanani were still panting, hands on their hips. Sea birds landed to watch them inhale the brackish sea air.
The door was open. Kanani went inside. Lett followed, and they wandered around the twelve blue pews, Lett squinting at the gloss white paint and altar window brighter than outside. Kanani placed her carpetbag on the last pew and they met there. She only now slid her feet into her rubber sandals, what she called “slippahs.”
“You know your terrain,” he said to her.
“You kept up.”
Sweat was rolling down her face. Back behind the bungalow he’d seen no hole in that wall of green flora, but she shot right through one, darting this way and that through more holes and passages in the foliage, and he matched her steps as best as he could. The greenery soon became a grove of knotty dry trees so dense they had to turn sideways to get through. She’d held his hand to guide him. Her breath was hot and metallic from a fear she hadn’t shown before.
“A church, that’s the last place anyone expects to find me,” she said, adding a chuckle.
She sat on the edge of the nearest pew, wiping the sweat off her face.
Lett sat with her, facing her. Their knees were touching. A cool breeze was floating in through the doorway and it danced in her hair. He let the wonder overwhelm him like it should have last night in the bungalow. He imagined her pulling herself onto his lap, and her tongue finding his, and her sweat would come rolling back, and it would’ve tasted sweet.
She smiled. They held hands, and she pulled him to her.
“I’m married,” he muttered. He showed her the silver ring on his finger.
“Ho ka, what dis?” she said in Pidgin. “Us island folks, no wear ring when marry.”
They laughed. She added a bittersweet smile. But their smiles faded, and Kanani eventually pulled herself away, mercifully so because he wasn’t finding the willpower.
Kanani stared out the window at the water. Clearly, she was considering something she hadn’t before.
“Who’s Frankie?” Lett said.
She ignored him.
“You weren’t expecting him.”
“Uh-uh, no sir. Luckily, mokes like them don’t know Big Island better than one haole.”
“So they’re from Honolulu, too?”
Again she ignored him, still looking out.
He stared down at the plank floor; the wood was bare unlike the rest of the little church. Maybe Frankie was just an ex-boyfriend. Maybe the guy couldn’t give her up. Or maybe it was worse. Lett shook his head. And here he was thinking he was the only one with a past.
“We’re heading for The Preserve,” he said eventually. “Right? So whoever was in that Packard will not be there. No sentry worth his salt is letting in the likes of them.”
Kanani showed him a pout. “Oh, Wendell Lett. You really haven’t been in the Territory long, have you?”
3.
Lett and Kanani kept moving, on foot, heading inland and uphill. “Mauka,” Kanani called it, “up mountain.” They weren’t about to backtrack to Kona Town for the daily transport to The Preserve. It was only about ten miles to the camp’s location, Kanani told him, but roads narrowed and twisted and ended dead, and they had some rock walls to hop and NO TRESPASSING signs to ignore.
As they walked along, Lett congratulated himself for not acting, once again, on his wonder-filled urges back in that little chapel.
“I feel bad about that church,” Kanani told him as they trudged up a pitted old road.
“You’re Catholic?”
She gave him a look Hawaiians called da stink eye. “That church is on top of a sacred Hawaiian site. It’s desecration.”
“Kapu,” Lett said.
She nodded.
Lett knew what was coming next.
“Tell me about your wife,” Kanani said.
“If I tell you about her, I have to tell you something else: I was a deserter.”
“You? Private Bust-em-up? I don’t believe it.”
He told Kanani how he had walked away from battle in December of 1944. Thousands of Americans had, but no one ever talked about it. Since then he’d been living under the bogus identity of one John Macklin, discharged US veteran.
“By October of ’44 I had reached my limit in combat, constantly on the line for months, still running patrols after every other good GI I knew was either dead or cracked or both. I was all outta change, believe me.”
They kept walking as he spoke. Kanani kept throwing him sidelong glances.
“Heloise is her name. Heloise was the one who’d truly saved me from the war,” he said. She had urged him to desert. He and Heloise, and later their young son, were living in her small Belgian town of Stromville near the Ardennes Forest. But things were not going well. “We’ve drifted apart. Because of the way I am. She doesn’t even know where I am right now.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kanani said.
“That’s what Heloise used to say. And then she stopped saying it.”
Higher, on the Belt Road, they stopped for a quick breakfast in a diner that was little more than an open shack with ceiling fans, open to the road on one side, on the other a lanai overlooking the lush Kona countryside descending to the ocean miles below. They sat in a corner, both facing out. Kanani seemed even more alert now that Lett had confided in her. She didn’t talk with the few locals but kept watch behind a Hilo Tribune-Herald with headlines about the growing threat of Communism in Asia and the martial genius of one General Douglas MacArthur. Kanani had scrambled eggs, rice, and toast; Lett, eggs and toast, papaya, Portuguese sausage. He gulped down the good coffee.
Kanani kept staring at him. “So how did they catch you?”
Lett sighed. “They didn’t. I turned myself in.”
Kanani jerked forward. “You what?”
The war had hounded him. It started out as night terrors or reactions to certain sounds or smells. Then it brought fits of fury, a blood rush to the head he couldn’t control. He would black out, not remember a thing. He’d lash out at Heloise. He couldn’t keep a job. His poor French didn’t help. Who was this odd, halting, broken-down American? To keep things under some control, he’d move with a mechanical sort of vacancy. “The nightmares, the episodes, the incidents—it was all getting to be too much as it was, and living as a deserter was only making it worse. Something had to give. Heloise agreed.”
“You’re even braver than I thought.”
“Well, I had no choice. Cutting a deal was the only card I had left. During the Battle of the Bulge, intelligence section had used me for special operations behind the lines. They had found out I had some German, from back in Ohio; a German-speaking Mennonite orphanage had taken me in as a boy. The operations were all classified. I was never to speak of it.”
Kanani pushed back her hair. “You figured you could make that work for you.”
“I figured they at least owed me something.” He said good-bye to Heloise and his boy, no tears this time—there had already been too many shed. He crossed over into occupied Germany, found the first US headquarters he could find in the US Zone. They left him in a cell to stew. He told them his whole story. Criminal Investigations Division passed him to Counterintelligence Corps, who passed him to the men in new suits who had the two photos of him. “I had their attention, you see, because there was this one intelligence officer I knew from the war. A Captain Charles Selfer. The captain is probably the whole reason I ended up how I am. He was the one running me on those missions—before I deserted, that is. But, Selfer was also your rear-line climber type. If anyone had pull, could push papers, it was him.”
“You asked for him by name? Auwe!�
� Kanani waved her hand again, but this time it was as if she’d touched a hot plate. “But it was classified. You could be in a prison.”
“I would’ve been anyway. Deserters were getting nabbed all the time. And I was a head case to boot. Word was getting around about what they did with the likes of us. A stockade on its own was a sanatorium, brimming with killers and crazies and hopeless cases. Other inmates were just silent, staring into walls, curled up, stuttering sleepwalkers. On the other hand, there were treatment centers. Hospitals you never leave, wards that stay locked up. Outdated therapies. Drugs that made you dumb. Lobotomies. That was the good old Veterans Administration for you—still doing its part for the war effort . . .”
“So this Captain Selfer,” Kanani said, “he made you the offer.”
“Not directly, no. The men in suits had been in contact with him—the good captain was now in Washington, DC, of course, true to form. They spoke for him. Told me a new intelligence group was forming. The suits told me they could offer me a new cure in a secret facility. I was a perfect candidate. Or, I was also a candidate for a court martial. And that was that. Selfer should’ve been the last person I wanted to see, but he ended up my only hope. Bremen to Boston by ship, then an unmarked C-47 to San Francisco riding with the type of soldiers who don’t wear insignia. From there it was a merchant marine steamer. I had a cabin all to myself.”
“I seen my share of deserters before. But you’re one hot potato.” Kanani was staring at him in a new way, one that made her face harden. “You have a boy, you said.”
“I do. Holger Thomas is his name. He thinks I’m off being a sailor.” Lett added a sad chuckle at that.
“And where is this Captain Selfer now?” Kanani said.
“Oh, they tell me he’s going to meet me here. At The Preserve. Transferring to where the action is. Which should be interesting. We haven’t seen each other since the war.”
***
The vegetation thickened, rampant bushes, giant ferns, spikey ohia blossoms like little red porcupines. The roads cutting through became ruts, and it was hard to tell if the surface was old cracking asphalt or just lava rock. Kanani was right about all the locals’ warning signs. Every private property they approached seemed to have them. DO NOT ENTER, PRIVATE ROAD, KEEP OUT, KAPU. Kanani joked about them. And the higher they went, the more short rock walls they encountered. Kanani hopped those easily, kept going; Lett followed. The air grew cooler and the clouds loomed lower, nearly a fog.
Lett was the one showing her sidelong glances now.
“You’re not going to let me off the hook, are you?” she said.
“Why you think I told you all about me?”
She pushed at his shoulder. “You’re good at this.”
“Whenever you’re ready, I’m all ears.”
“Okay, okay.” Off a dirt road she found a path and a wooden gate, pushed it open. They followed more paths past more short lava rock walls. She pointed out macadamia trees and little vegetable gardens, yet another chicken coop. The farm sat on an incline. They passed donkeys that stared back and Hawaiian Japanese children who stopped playing—Kanani whispered something to them in Japanese and they smiled and ran off. Lett spotted faded Japanese writing on a shack. The scene probably would’ve scared the hell out of a GI vet from the Pacific, but he found it exotic. She gestured toward rows of trees in the distance and various structures of graying wood. “There’s the kuriba,” she said, “oh, and the hoshidana. The mill and the dryer. Dis one coffee farm, Wendell. Family kine.”
They huddled inside the ruins of a stone house. “This was a tenant farmer’s once,” Kanani said. “The Ushidas are nice. My mother knew them. They’ll leave us alone.”
The kids brought them a small basket of macadamia nuts and ran off again for good. Kanani pulled a canteen of water from her carpetbag.
“Where you want to start?” Lett said. “With Frankie, or that bungalow? Maybe the gold lighter?”
She pushed at him again.
“You have your own angle,” Lett said. “Am I right?”
“Right. Us Hawaiians, we’re all citizens of the Territory of Hawaii. Right after Pearl Harbor, we were living under martial law all the way until October of ’44. US Military Government, you call it. My full name is Kanani Alana, sure, but my mother’s maiden name? Ogawa. So maybe you see where this is going, Wendell. My Japanese mother, Yoko, she came to Hawaii as what they called a ‘picture bride’—she was ordered from a photo by a white factory manager on Oahu. That man, he abused her before hightailing it for the mainland, never to return. Leaving Mother to fend for herself. She ended up working on plantations with other Japanese, here on Big Island mostly.”
“Thus, the Japanese I heard,” Lett said.
“Dat my other Pidgin,” Kanani said. “I spent half my childhood here on Big Island. Partly grew up on a plantation. So did Faddah—my father, I mean. Joey ‘The Pug’ Alana. Now he was a native Hawaiian. Mother and Faddah and me, we were always outsiders, a mixed-race family. The Japanese families were ashamed for Mother and the native Hawaiians thought my faddah was crazy. Then he got into trouble organizing workers, and we had to flee the plantation. For Honolulu. He worked on the docks and became a union organizer there. But then the war came. The Military Government, they detained Mother on account of her Japanese connections, not to mention those relatives back in the old country who liked to carry swords and swagger around and command those planes bombing Pearl Harbor and raise children who kamikaze American ships. So, Faddah, he saved my mother from detention camp—she could’ve been shipped off to somewhere cold on the mainland like Oregon or Idaho, penned in like so many chickens with all the kotonks thinking they better than the bulaheads.”
“Bulaheads?” Lett said.
“Japanese American from Hawaii. Kotonks, they’re the Japanese from the US. They talk like you, they look at us like you.”
“What about you? They didn’t detain you? The Military Government?”
“No.”
“Your father helped you, too?”
“Of course. He my faddah.”
“How did he do it?”
“Same as with Mother. Faddah got her released owing to his contacts—as a local labor official, he was helping to make sure the islands had enough workers despite all the martial law and security measures. Because Military Government was soon realizing that if they tried locking up all the Japanese Americans, the economy would’ve fallen apart. But, he also had to keep doing things they wanted so that Mother could stay free. Way I figure it, the Military Government really only wanted to put the screws on my faddah, to show him who was really the boss man. Faddah, see, he was becoming a big organizer by then. ILWU. On the dock, and the sugar and pineapple plantations, too. Employers, politicians, the military were always looking for bust him up. So, he cooperated. He advised certain union radical guys to stand down.” Kanani grunted at that. “But it was really for us.”
“Now here you are getting posted to The Preserve. Like I said—you must have your own angle.”
Kanani stared at Lett with one eye, like a person watching a bull that got free of a pen. “You one interrogator during the war or what?”
“Something like that. I told you what I was.”
Kanani lowered her head. “I worked for the Military Government, too. All right? Cooperated, more like. During the war, certain intelligence officers started threatening me, bullying me, making me spy on friends. Like they did with Faddah—they said they would start leaning on my family if I didn’t play along. And they’d go after me, too—they could prosecute me as an accomplice.”
“To what?”
Her eyes widened. She released a sigh. “Well, to gambling and prostitution rings, and that was just the start.”
“Were you an accomplice?”
“It’s not like you think. We’re only a US territory. In your country, on the mainland, you might call things I did ‘organized crime.’ That’s what they called it. But we never saw it that way
, and the territory law you haoles brought here never see it that way before the war, either. We always had prostitution and gambling. Boogie houses, chicken fights, any kine. And all that, ho, it was both legal and tolerated, even into the war. Then everything changed. Everything was criminalized only in ’44 when martial law ended. So at first they threaten me ’cause I was a so-called Jap, and then because I was a criminal? You guys, you always changing the rules.”
“Let’s get one thing straight: They are not me,” Lett said. “Boogie houses?”
“Mainland folks call them brothels.”
“Ah. You still haven’t mentioned that Frankie fellow.”
Kanani kicked at a stone. “Okay, okay. His real name is Francisco Baptiste. I know Frankie from around Honolulu, Hotel Street mostly. Most think Frankie is native Hawaiian but he’s mostly Flip. Filipino, that is. His growing-up faddah used to beat him, really bust him up. One day his faddah disappears fishing, and no one missed the bastard. I’m guessing Frankie was on the boat with him, if you know what I mean. Frankie, he’s the new type of big kahuna moke. They’re starting to form gangs. We never had gangs before the Military Government crackdown, never needed them. Soon we won’t know what to do without them. Now, Frankie started as a bouncer on Hotel Street, but wasn’t lolo like some mokes—he wasn’t slow or dumb. He ended up the top muscle for the kine locals who never went to jail because others were sent to go there in their place. Frankie didn’t stick to one boss, though. He was known for protecting certain people, but some say he also killed people he once protected, mainlanders even. I heard he was an archery champ and a kid chess master before he became a local champ boxer. Which sounds like Frankie. The man might be too smart for his own good.”
“Or at least for staying loyal. Back up. So, what was he doing at our bungalow?”
“I don’t know. But he’s not the kine you should have to answer to, not on general principle.”
“Whose bungalow was that?”
Kanani growled. “It’s a friend’s place.”
The Preserve Page 3
