“I guess I did, in my own way.”
Selfer’s grin had faded. It was still a smile, though he seemed to be holding it there so it wouldn’t drop. He said, “Do you know what this means? Lansdale told me, Lett. You’ve made it to stage three. Congrats and bravo, you did it! You’re ready for your first assignment.”
10.
A few days later, Lett still hadn’t had any episodes. When the duty clerk finally told him to report for transport in the morning for his first assignment, he had expected to find a GI troop truck. But a civilian Chevy was waiting at the front gate on the south end of camp. The one-and-a-half-ton job had rounded fenders and matte blue paint that didn’t flash in the sun, and a logo of the Krieger Coffee Plantation on the side. The five men assigned to it gathered around but not too close, and Lett wondered if there had been some kind of snafu.
Then a man in new fatigues bounded up to join the group, his shoulders swinging around.
Lett got that feeling, his warning lever clicking in. The man had his back to Lett, but the Joe’s way was familiar. Lett stepped close to the opposite side of the truck bed, keeping an eye.
The man’s balding head had a sturdy shape to it, the sun glistening on its hard angles. Lett saw the longish curls around the sides. The man turned Lett’s way, and Lett saw a gauze bandage between his eyebrows and plenty of black and blue and cuts for decoration. The others were eyeing Lett and the man, stepping back too now, and Lett had to nip this thing in the bud and fast before they all had to climb up and cram in.
“It’s you?” he said.
The man held up his big mitts for hands. “Do I know you, bub?”
“We got off on the right foot,” Lett said, smiling, but the man didn’t get the joke. “I apologize,” Lett added. “I owe you a drink, owe you an explanation, one dogface to another.”
“I ain’t no Army doggie.” The man patted at his chest. “I’m all gyrene.”
Some Marines in the Pacific called themselves that, Lett had heard. He said, “Sure you are, Marine. Sorry.”
“These here Army fatigues are just what they gave me. This Army crap.” The Marine tugged at his khaki shirt and spat. “But what am I gonna do?”
The other four had left Lett and the Marine all alone near the back of the truck, where there was lots of open ground just in case. Lett couldn’t remember the Marine’s full name. Jock something. He said, “You don’t remember? You came out of the bushes . . . Your face—I did that to you.”
The Marine only stared. He raised a mitt to scratch at his head.
“I wasn’t in my right mind,” Lett said, smiling again, “me and you both, I hear.”
The Marine glared. “You!”
Lett told himself not to resist. He stepped backward, out into the open ground, and kept his arms fixed to his sides. Let the Marine have his do.
The Marine lunged. Lett flinched, closed his eyes.
The Marine hugged him, patted him on the shoulders, and took a step back to have a good look at him. “I should thank you. You saved me from my own self. Who knows what I woulda done?”
“Really?”
“Why, sure.” The Marine grinned. “Hey, come off it, why the sour puss? We’re all right.”
“We are?”
“We’re just gung-ho, me and you. My name’s Jock, Jock Quinn. Sure we are. Tell you what—after this duty, you buy me a drink, looks like you’re the one could need one or four. You like rum? They got the good stuff here from the Philippines.”
The pickup bed was staked like a fence but had a canvas pulled over it, which, Lett had to concede, did not seem to serve any purpose on a clear and fair island day other than to conceal them. The six of them climbed up and in, ready to ride on plank benches. Jock Quinn planted himself next to Lett and kept grinning and shaking his head at Lett as if he’d just discovered they were from the same hometown. The truck pulled out, the canvas top flapping in their ears, their shoulders banging into each other’s, the foul blue exhaust peppering their nostrils as they stared into battered floorboards stained through with dried mud. Lett could have been riding into any meat grinder from Normandy to the Ardennes, one of those rare short hops to the next red-hot situation. It could have been the very morning that Captain Selfer of Military Intelligence had sent them over the enemy lines with no hope in hell let alone a whisper of a prayer. When they first rolled away, the gears grinding and the springs clanging along the jagged roadway, Lett had squeezed his eyes shut, ready to lower his head between his knees. But, then, miles passed and nothing happened. He could breathe. He could perceive his actual surroundings. He could gauge how much time had elapsed exactly, having counted off the seconds and then minutes in his head, and then confirming it by checking his watch.
The current circumstances could’ve triggered one of his episodes, plainly. This disguised truck, having to face Jock, the jostling ride—something should’ve gotten his leg twitching at the very least. But Selfer had also gotten the okay from Lansdale to put him back on his regular shots. Selfer had even given him a handy little travel pouch with vials of the stuff that he could inject himself, so Lett had poked himself in the latrine before reporting to the truck.
It turned out to be a lovely morning, all blue sky, just enough breeze. The other four included a boy-faced former paratrooper, two local Hawaiian vets from the looks of them, and one grizzled gooney bird dogface—most of them likely a year or two younger than he and Jock, though only the younger local looked it. They talked among themselves.
Jock talked to Lett. Jock was from a coastal town in Oregon: Coos Bay. He thought volunteering to fight would beat working in the mill. Jock said he knew a Marine from Ohio like Lett who bought it on Okinawa, mortar hit his hole, they never found one shred of him. Lett knew a guy from Oregon who took a direct tree burst in the Hürtgen Forest, and Jock joked that the man was probably a logger, the way this world worked, and indeed he was. They didn’t laugh, though.
“How did you get the special invite?” Lett asked Jock. “It’s not like they looked you up at the Royal Hawaiian.”
“Oh, no. My trouble first started finding me in Manila. Leave wasn’t helping me, see. I’d roam the countryside on benders. Then we got transferred. It was here in Hawaii Territory where they found me. Honolulu. I was hunkered down in Schofield Barracks stockade, starting to worry they were going to throw me in the sort of hospital you don’t get out of. The VA. You hear stories.”
“I heard them,” Lett said. “But now look at us, me and you. We’re doing well enough.” He added a slap on Jock’s shoulder.
“We sure are.”
They were doing so well that they compared their memories of the different ways the putrefying enemy dead reeked, the German as opposed to the Japanese because of their different gear, and then it was how dogfaces in the ETO smelled versus gyrenes in the Pacific, wool versus twill. It was quite the icebreaker.
“We on da Belt Road,” the soldier at the tailgate said, the local Hawaiian kid. Lett could tell they had headed south. The old highway ran along the coast, and long stretches of black lava rock fields replaced the barren, wind-swept rises of shrubs and boulders and scrubby grass. The black rock spread down to the water, jagged and punctuated with holes and crevices. “Heading for da big volcano,” the kid added, though no one was asking. “Mauna Loa.”
Seeing all the rock didn’t seem to help Jock’s mood. His right foot started tapping.
“We’re going around the other side,” said the other Hawaiian. He had a Japanese face but sounded as American as Gary Cooper. Lett wondered if he was kotonk instead of bulahead but wasn’t about to ask.
A couple hours later, lush greenery gave way to open expanses and the wide ocean to their right. A few cars and pickups passed them. Shacks and bungalows appeared here and there. They were entering a community. “Next stop: Hilo Side,” said the local kid.
They shifted in their seats. All had surely entered the edges of a town before a battle, and all knew what it meant. It
could change a life forever, not to mention who a person was.
“What I don’t get,” grunted the ex-paratrooper. “Why didn’t they issue us weapons?”
Lett had been wondering the same, since they were riding like a patrol after all. He could figure why. They didn’t want anyone jumping ship on this, their first outing—it might be an assignment, but it was still a test. Lett was relieved not to be carrying.
Soon his lungs started constricting, which let him know they were close. And the more they constricted, the more he wanted a weapon. He recalled what he’d told Kanani about his wartime nightmares. He had kept killing just to make it all stop. Then he didn’t want it to stop. And sometimes he thought about doing those things again, and about what it would be like. What weapons he would use. He almost looked forward to it. I’m not broke—I’m retooled, he’d confessed to her. They put a lever inside me. A gear. It can be turned on, activated.
He thought about his various weapons. It had been so long since he’d wanted to. He told himself it was okay, healthy, part of the process. He liked his M1 carbine the best because it was so light strapped on his shoulder, so forgiving yet compliant in his grasp. His fingertips still knew that wood grip and now they tingled with that feeling. He broke the rifle down in his mind. He sighted it. Then he made himself stop. In his head he put the rifle down. And suddenly his head ached a little and he had to stand for a moment in the truck, his hands hanging off the canvas roof supports above like a prisoner in some medieval torture restraint, hovering over the guys. They told him to quit staring and they jabbed him and joked, “If you got to take a shit, bub, why not just hang it off the back?”
***
Hilo Town had been softened up and good. Their eyes widened at all the devastation. One bridge was out and debris had been piled up. Yet other objects had been swept around as if shoved there by giant hands. Whole bungalows and shacks pressed into one another, some slanting, none with any foundation. A train caboose lay stuffed under the sharply leaning second story of a clapboard building bearing the remnant of a sign that read CHOP SUEY. Cars, trucks, and even boats lay in heaps like toys, some upside down. The buttressed span of a railroad bridge stood forlorn on flat, dry lowland, looking like a skeleton of a hill.
Lett whistled under his breath, but only to disguise the briny taste in his mouth and the stomach reverberations like writhing worms from the old dogface dread that always returned at sights like this. He thought about taking another dose, even though he’d already taken one today. He wondered how he would explain his taking his shot to the rest of them. Call it insulin maybe. Penicillin would do, but he’d have to come up with a story there, too. Mostly, he didn’t want the team to think him a weak number—it would only make them worry. So, he didn’t take the second dose. And yet, no episode followed his briny taste and wormy stomach.
Then they saw that the devastation wasn’t from a bombardment of any kind. Nothing looked scorched or shredded with shrapnel. Low areas closer to the water’s edge looked to have been streets before they became swamps, the rocks and debris and trees in piles there, too. This destruction had hit a while ago, and their trained eyes picked out details that proved it. The rebuilding far outnumbered the debris, for example. Cranes rose closer to a modest main street where the downtown met the beach. Fresh plywood waited on flatbeds, paving crews were patching cracked roads, and the tang of tar filled their noses.
“You guys really don’t know?” said the local kid in the know. “Tsunami.”
“Why should they know?” said the Japanese-looking one.
“I’m not following,” Lett said.
“Tsunami means a tidal wave, see? Hit Hilo a year or so ago. Still mopping up.”
Before the center of town, they took a bumping cracked side road heading straight for the water, for the wharf area. A water tower loomed, and Lett couldn’t help but scan it for snipers or forward observers, and he wasn’t the only vet doing so. They could hear the ocean crashing against rocks. The driver was barking into a portable radio. At the south end of the wharf they passed between tall storage tanks, which the local kid said were full of molasses. “Well, I’ll be,” ex-paratrooper blurted.
“Reckon they’re fixing to put us on a boat,” gooney bird dogface said. He had faint burn scars down one side of his face and neck. “Don’t like the looks of this, not one bit.”
“Pipe down,” Jock said. “They see you spooked, it makes us all look the worse for wear.”
“I’m all right,” the man muttered.
“Of course you are. We all are. Ain’t we?” Jock was glaring at all their faces now, for sure confirmation, making each man look him in the eye. He suddenly became the exemplary Marine squad leader from the pictures, a little too much Guadalcanal Diary for Lett. But it was working. The men sat up straight. Lett could see himself going on patrol with him, he had to admit, and he didn’t imagine such a thing lightly.
“You bet we are,” someone said. Heads nodded and at one another. “Gung-ho.”
“Now remember,” Lett heard himself declare, “they send us out as a team, don’t bunch up, but stay in sight of the pack just the same, and keep it moving. Got it?”
They all nodded at Lett. Jock added a proud lift of the chin.
Next thing they knew they were jumping out the back, squinting at the bright sky. Those tall molasses tanks kept their area secluded, cutting them off from the rest of the wharf. A modest wooden dock held what looked like a large fishing boat, a trawler, towering over its mooring, even though it sat low in the water. Lett imagined the vessel smashing its berth with the slightest big wave.
The rest happened fast. Men disguised as stevedores appeared from between two of those huge tanks and ordered them around. They issued them submachine guns—newer, smaller M3s, called “grease guns” in the ETO. This made Lett wince. He expected worse feelings to hit him. But none did. His head didn’t even ache. And, he had no choice. On top of that he’d never used an M3, had never been trained on one. He didn’t need to be, as it turned out, for the weapon wasn’t loaded. Though that didn’t stop a couple of the guys from clicking out the magazine and pushing it in again, again and again, and Lett recalled that the first M3s had given dogfaces troubles up on the line. The gun was light in his hands, which he had to admit he liked. Then he and Jock were handed black MP armbands and those white helmets that MPs wore. The others weren’t given any. Lett wondered if he and Jock had been selected for some reason or if they simply didn’t have enough to go around. Either way, Lett didn’t contradict orders, even though he wanted to toss the MP gear back in their faces. It had been an MP who shot him in the back in Belgium, after all.
The men dressed as stevedores ordered them to guard the road in and the perimeter, which was only a half circle about the area of a baseball field, all hemmed in by those molasses tanks. Their MP role was just for show, Lett told himself, in case anyone got near.
From the boat came wooden crates the size of larger foot lockers, maybe four feet long, each marked RHUM and THE PHILIPPINES and FRAGILE. Two unmarked deuce-and-a-half trucks were waiting ready, two-and-a-half tons and six wheels each. The stevedores used a winch and a standard flat cart with four wheels to unload the cargo, but at one point the winch jammed. Then the cart broke under the weight of only a couple crates, busting the axle. They had to wait around for the fix.
A tractor arrived with a bigger flatbed cart that could hold a tank. Snafu solved.
Once the cargo was offloaded, about five men strode off the boat and down the gangway. Some might have been important figures. A couple were Asian, one likely Japanese, the other a Filipino, possibly. All wore civvies, but Lett could picture any of them in officer’s uniforms from the swagger they had. They swaggered into four waiting sedans. But the sedans didn’t leave. Lett and Jock shrugged at each other.
Edward Lansdale strode off the boat, down the gangway. Then another sedan pulled up: four doors, sloped rear end, whitewalls, and plenty of chrome. Lett stiffened. It w
as a 1941 Packard Clipper.
Lansdale met the car, opened the back door. And out stepped a large, darker man. The man had taken off the jacket of his oversize suit, which revealed a holster. His sleeves were rolled up, too, which revealed ornate island warrior tattoos spreading from his hands up his arms.
Frankie.
11.
Lett and his team got Spam and rice, water, and coffee. Afterward, Lett ducked into a wharf outhouse that smelled like the inside of a dead man. He produced his syringe and shot up in there. Just in case. He didn’t want what he’d seen to haunt him on the way back and get up on top of him when he needed it least. Any weakness was a blind spot.
What was Frankie doing there? Lett wondered what to tell Kanani. His mission was hush-hush of course. He’d seen her around camp a couple times since reuniting with her on that park bench, but they were kept so busy and were among so many others that he barely had time for small talk let alone for sharing telltale details. Apart from that, he’d mostly kept to himself at his bungalow, not wanting to make any false moves before his first assignment of the third stage.
Another thing rattled him. Lansdale had simply ignored him, all of them. He hadn’t shown the team the slightest nod. It was as if he’d never spent time underground with Lett, talking things out like they did. Lansdale had just shaken Frankie’s big tattooed hand and ducked into the Packard.
And then, the question lingered: what was in those trucks?
The entire operation had lasted a couple hours. Lett and the other four climbed back into their truck. They followed the two loaded and unmarked deuce-and-a-half trucks, but at a distance. The sedans traveled up front, led by the Packard with Lansdale and Frankie inside. They, too, traveled at a distance ahead. This was clearly intentional, so as not to resemble a column. The team had to keep their M3 guns, and Lett and Jock Quinn the MP garb.
The Preserve Page 9
