The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  “He? She?”

  Kanani blew air out one side of her mouth. “Her name’s Mae. Miss Mae. Frankie must want something from her. Information probably.”

  “Where’s she from? Look at me. Come on. We’re almost done.”

  “Chinatown . . . Okay, China, originally. She fled because of the war.”

  “And she’s the one who gave you that lighter.”

  Kanani shot up on her haunches, pointing at Lett. “She was a friend. She confided in me. She’s the one who gave me a job. She was a mama-san, on Hotel Street . . .” She lowered back down and stared at the rocky earth between her feet. “She was also the one who set me up doing work on the side, for you Americans. But later she made it easier for me, got them to lay off. She knew some of your big kahunas, see. During the war we had your military intelligence here like I said, but also the CID and CIC you mentioned and especially something called the OSS. Those boys, they liked my style.”

  “Style?”

  “In Honolulu, Chinatown side, there’s always plenty talk story going around in a boogie house. Never hurt that I passed them a tip now and then. You know, for the ‘war effort.’ And, these intelligence contacts of mine? They know how to flatter. Along the way, they led me to believe I was in training to become a secret agent. They kept telling me I was good at spying. They kept saying they were going to send me to the Philippines or even Japan because my looks let me fit in anywhere.”

  “It never happened.”

  Kanani snorted. “They just used me as their ears. They probably had a good laugh about it. Then they all headed home, and now there’s a new gang in town. What? Don’t look at me like that.”

  “What way’s that?”

  “You think I’m a wahine ho’okamakama.”

  “Says you. Suppose you tell me in English.”

  “Whore. Prostitute. Brothel girl.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “When was I younger, briefly, but I moved up real fast. I told you. Assisting da management kine. Mama-san.”

  “Where is this Miss Mae now?”

  “I don’t know. She knew lots more about China and Japan and the wartime this and that than she told me. Talk about a past.” An old ashen-colored donkey sidled close. Kanani looked away from it and whispered, “Between you and me? I think she was a double agent—Japanese, Chinese, the Americans.”

  “That’s a triple agent.”

  “See. You smart. Word is, she cut a deal with the Americans, and they’re giving her a new life. Last time I talked to her, she told me she could get me this posting to The Preserve. Gave me a phone number, and that was that. Bless her heart.”

  “What about your family?”

  “What about them? I have relatives on Big Island. They knew me as a little girl, when I used to sing about liberating Hawaii, just like Faddah. I know where to go if I need them here.”

  “I mean your parents.”

  Kanani glared at Lett. “I haven’t spoken to Mother in years. She’s still not happy with me for Hotel Street. It was ‘below me,’ she said. But I was getting into trouble and it was a good way out.” She paused and looked away, as if finding the right words, and Lett caught her wiping the glisten of a tear from the corner of her eye. “Faddah, he must not be happy, either.”

  “Must not?”

  “He’s dead. Last year. Organizing. They say it was an accident. Crushed. Crates fell. But you know crates don’t just go tumbling down on their own. Mother, she’s still in mourning, I bet. And she probably blames me for that, too.” Kanani dropped back against the stone wall, letting her head roll around wearily like a GI coming off a patrol that went on far too long.

  “I’m sorry. I think I get your angle now: You’re going to show them. Every last one of them. Make them all pay if you can help it.”

  Kanani pulled out the gold dragon lighter, as if on instinct, like a good luck charm. She even rubbed it. “That’s right. Just the way I like it.”

  4.

  Gotta keep moving. Always keep moving, don’t bunch up. Stop and you’re cornered. Keep your eyes open.

  Kanani was tugging on Lett’s shoulder.

  Lett jerked up. They were riding in the bed of an old jalopy pickup. It had approached behind them as they trudged a long narrow high road heading straight up mountain. Kanani had said the pots and pails hanging off it usually meant the pickup was coffee pickers, but it wasn’t. The windows were rolled down. The driver wore khaki without insignia, had hard dark balls for eyes. Big cast-iron pots surrounded them in back as the truck jostled along, then the pots were clanking and clunking and combining with the squeaking squealing undercarriage, and to Lett all the clatter became halftracks full of SS troops flanking their line, then a King Tiger tank rolling over him in his forward hole, helmets colliding, the heads inside already dead.

  Kanani yanked him back down as if he might jump out any moment. “You were muttering something. Your face is plenty pale.”

  “Nothing, it’s nothing. I’m all right.”

  Lett wasn’t all right. He was getting that old feeling. Why on Earth was he going in like this, without a lick of intelligence? Sending himself into unscouted terrain. Trusting in Captain Charles Selfer? He had invoked the dreaded name himself. What a fool . . .

  The jalopy pickup neared a side road, gears grinding. An arched gate like the entrance to a ranch stood over the road. A sign read: KRIEGER LAND PRESERVE.

  Lett and Kanani traded glances, neither speaking.

  They passed through the gate. The elevation kept rising above South Kona and the denser growth persisted, branches entwining, massive shiny fronds mixing with reddish leaves. Kanani eyed the jarring terrain, their distance from the sea growing ever higher, and she bounded from one side of the truck bed to the other like a dog unsure. The rise of a volcano showed above treetops.

  “Mauna Loa?” Lett said.

  Kanani nodded. “At some point, all this green is gonna stop and it turns into lava fields, and plenty of it too, just open and barren country.”

  “I don’t think we’re going that far.”

  “Other side of Mauna Loa is Kilauea Military Camp. They held Japanese after Pearl Harbor. My mother got the lock-up there.”

  “How long?”

  “Few months. Then she got Oahu, Sand Island Camp. Fences, barbwire everywhere. Haole guards with bayonets, even in the bathroom. No dignity. Faddah got her out, sure he did. But life was never the same after.” Kanani scowled at Lett. She spat into the road.

  “You’ll show them,” he told her. “You’ll show all of them.”

  “And you, too. You gotta make this work for you, Wendell.”

  The road evened out, the truck puttering and gurgling. The greenery was still dense but the trees lining the road were drier, with knotty and gnarled trunks—like the knuckles of the shrunken dead, Lett couldn’t help thinking. They slowed. Lett and Kanani faced forward to look around the cab. Up ahead, a barricade stood across the dark, lava-dirt road. It was just an unpainted log. An unarmed sentry in khaki with no insignia appeared from the trees and lifted the primitive gate.

  Kanani grinned at Lett. Lett had to make himself grin back.

  “Go for broke!” Kanani said.

  “Go for broke.”

  ***

  The newly built hut was a single-room job, like a barracks office. No one was there. A metal desk stood in the middle, matte green. Three metal armchairs and a small table occupied another corner, but Lett and Kanani had opted for the two metal chairs at the desk. The hut occupied a tidy square of a clearing carved out of the high forest growth like a shaved patch on a head of matted hair. The patrol vehicle disguised as a local jalopy pickup had dropped them off, and the driver told them to go wait inside. And there they sat. It was so quiet they could still hear insects buzzing outside.

  They saw no signs, not even warnings. Lett had never seen a camp without official notices. Sweat rolled down his sides and dampened his waistband. Kanani reached over and wiped the swe
at on his jaw.

  “What the hell is this?” she whispered.

  “Must be some kind of holding area.”

  Lett could smell the fresh wood of the raised foundation and the framing around them and the siding, none of it painted or stained yet. Once his sweat dried, something about the stark arrangement started appealing to him. Nail heads were spaced neatly and still shining. The metal blinds were three-fourths closed—all equally turned—to let in just enough light. And that utilitarian furniture. Everything was spick-and-span. He hoped this meant this camp was all business despite the lack of warning signs, and that appealed to him even more so and deep down, like the first warm rush of a field hospital morphine—drip, drip, drip. It should’ve sent him running for cover. He should’ve felt the jolts running through his right leg, and his leg should’ve been rapping away at the floorboards like a sewing machine needle at top speed.

  “Know who came up with that saying?” Kanani said.

  “What saying?”

  “‘Go for broke.’ Us Hawaiians.”

  Then, footsteps sounded on the porch. The door opened. In strode a man who pivoted to face Lett jauntily, like a gent holding a top hat and cane. He wore the same summer khaki without insignia, but it fit him like a wealthy tourist’s casual wear. This was not buffoonish. This was not glib.

  Lett had to look away a moment. He felt his joints firm up. He noticed his hands had clawed. Kanani saw it, too. He pressed them flat to his thighs and held his chin higher.

  The man had not yet smiled, though his easy good looks and a hint of dimples promised that he would any second.

  “Captain Selfer?” Lett said.

  “It is I. Welcome back, soldier. Though, it’s lieutenant colonel now,” Selfer said to Lett. He glanced down at his unadorned lapels. “Not that anyone’s counting here.”

  Two whole ranks in under three years? The man must hold the record in the high jump.

  “Well? Here we are,” Selfer continued. “They told you I’d meet you here, correct?”

  “Yes. Correct.”

  Kanani shot Lett an urgent look.

  Lett said to Selfer, “This is Kanani Alana.”

  “Yes, I know,” Selfer said. “How do you do?”

  Kanani only nodded.

  “Thank you,” Lett added to Selfer. “I really need to thank you for this.”

  He and Kanani joined Charlie Selfer over in the metal armchairs in the corner only after he gestured for them to do so. He still sounded like a dashing man in a movie, though not as much as Lett had remembered. Selfer always seemed to resemble certain things more than he ever actually was certain things, Lett recalled. He looked the type to wear a pencil-thin mustache yet still didn’t; people only remembered him that way after the fact, after he’d plied you with his smooth talk. At least he was wearing less hair tonic than during the war, Lett noticed.

  Once Kanani sat down, Selfer said to her, “Oh, dear, would you mind cracking a couple blinds, maybe a window or two?”

  “I don’t see why I’d mind, no.”

  Selfer watched Lett as Kanani turned the blinds to half open on each window—on each opposing wall. Lett eyed Selfer as Kanani pushed up the rear window a few fingers and cracked the front door for the slight breeze that came through.

  “Lovely,” Selfer said. He lit up a Camel.

  “It’s not exactly ‘soldier’ anymore,” Lett said to Selfer.

  “Say again?” Selfer said.

  “When you welcomed me back just now. You said ‘soldier.’”

  “It’s only an expression. Care for a smoke?”

  “Still don’t smoke, but thanks.”

  “Why, not even one fortifying cigar?”

  Lett just shook his head, he and Selfer still eyeing each other, Selfer crossing his legs, Lett bolt upright with his palms pressed to his thighs. The metal armchair was new and stiff, did not creak. Selfer stood and offered Kanani a cigarette as she came over.

  “I’d take one of your cigars just the same,” she said.

  Selfer smirked, a thin crimson line to match his raised eyebrow and imagined pencil mustache. “Say, there’s a lady who knows the score,” he said to Lett through a chiming chuckle as he opened a silver case that probably belonged, Lett figured, to some captured high German official who resorted to hanging himself after one Captain Selfer had extracted all the finest intelligence from the man with only sterling words and promises.

  Kanani plucked a thin brown cigar from the case. She started to pull her gold lighter out but clamped her fist around it, concealing it, and tucked it away. She waited for Selfer’s light.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, batting eyelashes.

  “Do enjoy. They’re Filipino.”

  Selfer sat back and crossed his legs, wiped any ashes away, though there were none, then crushed his cigarette in the beanbag ashtray on the small table between them. He kept his limpid gray corneas on Lett. Kanani might as well have been out scrubbing the porch.

  He said, “Miss Alana, could you please wait outside? Someone is coming for you now. You two will need to be separated.”

  Lett and Kanani exchanged glances.

  “Oh, it’s nothing to worry about,” Selfer added. “It’s just for now. Standard operating procedure. They’ll check you in, confirm you’re on the roster, the usual rigamarole.”

  Kanani shrugged. She kept her cigar lit. “You’re gonna do great,” she said to Lett. “Bust ’em up.”

  “Thank you. You too. See you soon.”

  After Kanani left, Selfer showed Lett a sideways grin. “You two aren’t . . . are you?” He wagged fingers.

  “What? No.”

  The warm rumble in Lett’s gut burned white hot. He remembered all too clearly that Selfer was the whole goddamn reason he was here in the first place. In Captain Charlie Selfer’s first mission for him, he and two other GIs were to cross the German border disguised as German soldiers and reconnoiter enemy strength along the Ardennes line. They ended up in bombed-out Cologne. There a German girl recognized Lett and his team as American spies. But she was alone on the rubble street. She screamed and tried to run, and she would’ve given them away. It was war. Lett strangled her. He didn’t think, just did it, mechanical. He and his sorry crew somehow found their way back over the lines. Yet Selfer didn’t want to hear the truth Lett had to report—that the Germans were amassing an invading counterattack force. This horror didn’t fit the popular intelligence reports already making the rounds that Selfer had crafted. So it was all for nothing. A poor girl suffocated for a damn report that did not fit. And Lett had nightmares about that girl ever since.

  Lett glared at his GI shoes. They should just get to the point. He was a deserter once, and Selfer, once again, had him right where he wanted him.

  But Selfer owed him. Selfer owed him the cure.

  Lett’s heat made the sweat return, trickling down his spine. He grabbed at the chair arms, focusing on a knot in the floorboards, the spot evenly spaced between his planted feet. He did this when he expected a blood rush to the head and a firefight inside his skull.

  “Hey, relax. That chair’s not made of needles,” Selfer said.

  “It’s no featherbed,” Lett said.

  Selfer held onto his smile. He held out his hands. “What can I tell you? Ask away.”

  “What about Washington, DC? Wasn’t that always your goal? I’d have figured you for a natural.”

  “Oh, I gave DC a go. All of three months. Then I got the call. You see, I want to be my own man.” Selfer’s curling mouth had taken a straight line.

  Lett wasn’t buying it. “You just like things hotter. Wilder. That Washington pond is too big and all the fish, as well. The Pacific’s just about right for a big swimmer like you.” Something made Lett refrain from calling him a shark.

  “Let’s just say that I don’t suffer mediocrity. And I don’t think you do, either. In any case, you’re in no position to be casting stones. You could still have bars blocking your way.”
r />   “So why am I not in a stockade? Or made an example, Eddie Slovik-style? So I turned myself in. Big deal. You could’ve claimed you found me—gained you a whole basket of brownie points.”

  Selfer sighed. “I told you, from that very first day—you’re special. I mean, look what you did to those halfwit blotto sergeants back at your billet.” He added a happy shake of his head.

  “They all right?”

  “They’ll live. They shouldn’t have been in an off-limits bar. You were defending your post. There was no need to run.”

  Lett glared at Selfer.

  “Okay, maybe there was,” Selfer said. “I understand. But we will fix that. You only need to listen to me. That’s all.” He added a smile. “I knew that I’d find you again. But I didn’t have to in the end, did I? Because you came asking. For me.”

  The very sight of Selfer should’ve done Lett in. But the man had said it himself: Lett had asked for him, by name. He had practically pleaded for Selfer, even though the last time he saw the captain during the war, at the height of the bloody Bulge, he had promised the man, I will head back out there for whatever you cooked up because I have no choice. But I won’t kill for the likes of you. Not anymore.

  “All you ever had to do was ask, Lett. Just tell me the truth. Tell me what you wish.”

  “I just want to be cured of it,” Lett said finally. “Of what they did to me. What you did to me.”

  Selfer let out a long, reedy sigh. He looked around the room. His eyes landed back on Lett. “Let me admit something to you,” he said. “No one knows this: My father was a simple con man. A city sparrow turned slicker, sure, but a sharpie just the same. That was me, what I was becoming. Where I was headed. Because that, in a nutshell, is Washington, DC. But things are different here. We’re all looking for a new start.”

  Lett opened his mouth, but nothing more came out.

  Selfer inserted in its place, “You remember that very last thing you said to me? At the command post? Before I sent you back out?”

  “I won’t kill for you,” Lett muttered.

  “Yes. You also mentioned the Golden Rule. The old ‘Do Unto Others.’ And I told you that I know it well,” Selfer said. “Here—on the cusp of the Orient where we’ve now ended up, me and you—they have the good rule, too. Confucius. Laozi. ‘Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.’ You see, I believe in reciprocity. Lett, listen to me. I want to help. I will help. But you have to come and meet me halfway.”