The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  “Avoiding you? Hold on. In on what?” Lett set down his drink. He shifted in his seat, but an Adirondack chair only had one position—sunk down.

  He sighed. He started to tell her. They were there to guard a shipment, from a boat—an unmarked trawler, with men disguised as stevedores. The heavy load busted a cart’s axle, so it took longer. A group got off the boat and were the kind that didn’t bother with stevedore denim.

  She leaned forward, held up a hand. “Was Miss Mae there?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I saw no women getting off.”

  Kanani sighed. “Who was it?”

  “Some men. Looked like important persons. Not all American though. Some Asian looking. Japanese, Filipino, maybe Chinese, not sure. They got in sedans. They drove with us, along with those other trucks carrying the load.”

  Kanani’s chair jumped closer with a thump. “Who else was there? Tell me. I can see it on your face.”

  Lett paused to look around. He didn’t know why he needed to, but his leg told him to. “Lansdale,” he said.

  She stared, blank-faced.

  “You don’t know him?”

  She shook her head, her eyes darting.

  That surprised Lett enough to make him take another drink. He told her about Lansdale, what he looked like. He didn’t have to tell her that she probably would know him in due time. He had been getting the feeling that Lansdale touched everything here eventually. “Well, he was on the boat, but I don’t know if it was just for a meeting or what. He might’ve been on board longer. He’d been gone at least a week.”

  “Okay, okay,” Kanani said. She sipped the rum.

  “I’m not in on anything,” Lett said. “Except getting cured.”

  “I know. I just wanted to feel things out, keep you on your toes.”

  He thought of Frankie now and what a thug like that could be doing here even if it was on the other side of the island, and the whiff of heat on his skin filled his head, rushing his brain. He sucked down his drink and wanted to kick it out into the trees. Darker thoughts found him and clawed him, and he didn’t know what hole they had crawled up from.

  “My shot,” he barked at her.

  “Your what?”

  “I need my shot. There’s a syringe.”

  “Oh. You need it? Where?”

  “Inside. Little pouch.”

  She rushed inside to get it for him, and he pressed his back to the chair until she fetched his pouch and returned and opened it and—

  “I do it myself,” he barked again. “It’s mine.”

  She backed away, holding up a hand.

  He inserted the needle, letting it sting a little, taking a deep breath.

  He had his strength back instantly. Clarity. Serenity. He pushed himself out of the chair, drew in a deep fresh breath, and sat down on the steps, letting his hands hang off his knees.

  Kanani joined him there.

  “I guess I’m not supposed to tell you about this medication they’re giving me, but we go back.” He now realized telling her was a good way to stall, to avoid the subject of gold, of Frankie even, and added a smile that he wanted to wipe off his face immediately. He told her the dose was helping him. She wanted to know what it was, but he couldn’t tell her—they wouldn’t tell him.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Doing better?”

  “Yes. I’m okay now. You just got me thinking, is all.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Sorry I barked at you.”

  “Forget it.”

  They sat there a minute. He could feel her eyeing him. She’d gone quiet. Her face had lost some color. She grabbed his wrist.

  “Now, that’s quite enough stalling,” she said.

  Lett looked her in the eyes. He sighed again. “There was another sedan, Kanani. A ’41 Packard.”

  She closed her eyes. Her head dropped between her legs. She moaned. Her head might’ve been spinning. Lett held a hand ready above her in case he had to hold her head up while she vomited. But she only muttered something in Pidgin and glared at the lava earth.

  Kanani stayed on Lett’s porch. She didn’t say much. Lett brought her water, refilled her rum, lit her a cigar from her GI Zippo.

  “But you haven’t seen him around here?” she said after a while. “Right? Only on Hilo Side. Not in The Preserve itself?”

  “Frankie? No. I’ve been keeping my eye out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I haven’t seen you.”

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

  She ignored him.

  “Have you seen your friend Miss Mae here?” he said.

  Kanani only shook her head. Lett gave her time. He refilled his rum. Eventually, she sighed. “They have a brothel here,” she said. “Well, okay, not so much a brothel but a bungalow they have set aside. Near the Main House.”

  “The same place you live.”

  She nodded.

  “Is it for anyone?”

  “No. I think just for important visitors.”

  Lett thought of those men coming off the boat in Hilo and swaggering into fancy sedans. “You work there.”

  “Uh-huh. Your friend Selfer gave me the duty.”

  “Of course. I bet he really smoothed it over.”

  “Oh, he’s one smoothie. One sharpie, too. He says I’ll run the show. Won’t have to do all the dirty work.” Kanani added a bitter chuckle. “It’s why I never invited you, I guess.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. I understand. They want to see what we can do, is all. Each of us in our own way.”

  Kanani looked away, toward the tops of the palms and crooked trees. “Where did it go?”

  “What, the shipment? Here, basically,” Lett said. He wasn’t going to lie. She perked up, so he continued. “We followed the trucks back this way, but they turned off close to camp. I didn’t see where. We were crammed in the back.”

  Kanani’s mouth formed an O. She tapped at her chin. “They got some kine underground complex here. Right? Tunnels at the very least.”

  “Yes. I’ve been down there. It’s where I started my treatment. They have rooms. I came out a stairway, just a hatch above ground like a pillbox.

  “They must have several ways in. There must be other entrances, exits, depending on your clearance.” Kanani nodded at that. “They could even stretch on into island, into caves.”

  Lett didn’t like the thought of all those tunnels merging into earthen caverns, leading ever deeper inland, a maze without a map. He buried the sickening thought away like he’d done so many times before, but another one came rushing up at him from the deepest caverns of his memory: the sight of a dead boy near the front in France. A team of GIs was pulling his bloated little body from a well. Why the damn well? Was he trying to save himself? Use it for cover? Lett would never know. He shook off the memory, took a deep breath.

  He searched his mind for something he could know. There was one thing, he now realized. He recalled his first, gut reaction in Hilo when he noticed how heavy that load was. Gold, he’d thought, a dirty word. And then Frankie, and . . . Kanani. They’d come to him like links in a chain, the chain now attached to an orb he was polishing in his mind. It was blurry at first, but he kept polishing, slowly, all without looking at it. Without looking at Kanani, either. Then he looked. It was crystal goddamn clear.

  He was glaring at Kanani.

  She jerked her head back. “What? You’re scaring me.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Eh? No, no, I’m not.”

  “You never asked me what the cargo is. The shipment to Hilo. Because you know. It’s gold, isn’t it? Gold that broke a sturdy loading cart. That’s your angle. You get in here, nab some, get out again, you’re gone. Your friend Miss Mae tipped you off to it.”

  She held up her hands. She made that sound she did with her lips, lik
e a balloon sputtering air.

  “But now Frankie is after it, too,” Lett said.

  She stared at the treetops a while. She pulled out her gold lighter finally and flipped it between fingers. “I’m afraid it’s more than that, Wendell. There’s always more to it with Frankie. He must be after everything, here to win the whole pot, or he wouldn’t be here at all.”

  13.

  Kanani had seen a man wearing a kimono before, but that outfit was the plain male version. This getup before her now was a shiny garment, pink and blue and floral all over. Kanani had also seen men in makeup. In a certain haunt of Honolulu, down a narrow alley lined with wooden fire escapes, one could find nice and fun fellows wearing a little rouge or lipstick or mascara even. But those guys were never this guy. This guy’s face had a stark white base with red lipstick and red-and-black highlighting around the eyes. The red circles on his cheeks were supposed to be blush, she guessed. And the black geisha wig he’d slapped onto his head was such a cheapie.

  She could stare at him like this because the man was out cold, his head turned her way. He lay on the chaise in the boogie house where Selfer had set her up. He was still breathing, luckily, hot air pulsing from his nostrils. It reeked like the whisky they were drinking.

  He had showed up, alone, and his faint knock on the door proved to be the only formality he’d shown. He was smoking one of those Filipino cigars and was already drunk. She had widened her smile and bowed and ushered him in with a sweeping gesture. Once inside, he had kicked his thick sandals off and plopped into the chairs. He kept grunting at her. He was no bulahead and certainly no kotonk—the guy was straight Japanese, and straight off the boat or plane. But she was guessing it was the boat arriving Hilo Side that Wendell Lett told her about.

  He was talking story in Japanese. She didn’t know near enough Japanese words for that. Then he barked at her in Korean, and then it was broken Chinese. She only offered him coy giggles, all the while thinking of China and what the Japanese Army did to the poor people there, and it gave her shudders like ice sliding down her neck. Miss Mae had told her about the Rape of Nanking, the mass raping, the mass murder. More “comfort women” forced into slavery.

  All the more reason to make this goon tell her what he knew. But she had to be careful. It was that Edward Lansdale who sent this important person to her—the man Wendell had told her about, and the man who got into that shiny Packard with Frankie.

  That morning, the man called Lansdale had cornered her in camp. He was wearing Army khaki without insignia and sunglasses the whole time. He didn’t introduce himself, but she knew it was Edward Lansdale. He was all thin mustache and long face with a sneer trying hard to be a grin. Lansdale told her that they were having a going-away party this evening at the Main House.

  “At some point, likely after, a certain guest of ours will be coming to see you. Aren’t you delighted? He asks for ‘comfort,’ as he puts it. He likes to drink, and drink he does. Give him this serum.” Lansdale held out a fist.

  She opened her hand. He set a small vial of brown glass into her palm. No one had asked her to do anything like this. It was just chatting and sweet-talking before. Her pulse raced.

  “Relax, honey,” Lansdale said. “It’s only a . . . let’s call it a type of truth serum. It loosens him up. He won’t remember.”

  “Oh.” She closed her hand, turned it, slid the vial between two fingers.

  “There you go. Beginner’s magic trick. No one’s the wiser. Then? Candy from a baby. He’s our friend now, sure he is, but he’s playing hard to get. Hoping to retain his value. So he just needs a little extra special coaxing.”

  Lansdale gave her vague instructions: She was to get him talking about what he called the “location.” They needed the location. She thought of asking Lansdale about Frankie, but the act Lansdale was throwing hinted at some real dark mojo. This was the real reason her pulse was racing. She wondered if Wendell had noticed the depth of the darkness. She certainly wasn’t going to ask this Lansdale about Miss Mae either, in case she showed up.

  Never speak till you know the score.

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” she had said.

  Lansdale was still sneer-grinning, showing her all his teeth. “Simply believe that you can,” he’d chirped, “and you’re halfway there to be sure!”

  When Selfer first set her up here, he had told her this or that important person might want her dressing up geisha, some of them being in Asia too long and going native. You never knew what they might want. So they had all the props here in a footlocker. They even had the opium, fancy pipe and all.

  Who knew that this Japanese goon would have geisha as his angle? She had showed the getup to him, and he put it on with little help from her. He had her rub his feet before slipping his toes into his geisha zori, and his face started to scrunch up with an anticipation of desire, and she was starting to worry a little about what came next.

  As it turned out, the man’s needs were simple. She was to sit on the floor cross-legged and watch him please himself in his geisha getup. Which was a relief to her, plenty lolo though it was, he in his makeup while dipping his fingers into the folds of that kimono and pulling it out. She did her best not to laugh. The wig fell off as he bobbed up and down, and he let it fall and she saw his shaved head had a bump or two that weren’t natural. That kept her from laughing for good. So too did his wide jaw, his scar tissue for cheeks, the fat lips, and those steel eyes. His grimace seemed to be daring her to laugh, at which point who knew what manner of blow or weapon would find her. So she kept her face a curiously sensual mask.

  You like geisha, Tojo? I’ll watch you be geisha. Then you give me the gold.

  She had to get to the gold before Frankie. Who cared what he did after?

  The Japanese goon uttered a soft honk, which sounded like a nēnē bird, and this almost sparked a laugh from her belly, but she choked it back down by clearing her throat. To keep any laughs away she thought of a dead nēnē she’d seen on one of the camp paths, just a baby male with little black head and bill and legs and feet. Poor thing. And so rare now, what with the haoles and Asians bringing so many predators to the islands for so long. Some unlucky nēnēs couldn’t fly properly. It must have been lost up here in the forest. She then thought of its mother looking for it all day and night. So, she ended up setting it alongside the path in case her makuahine was still looking. The next day she returned and found it still there—but gone to heaven. She buried it just among the trees, wondering how many sentries or staffers or important visitors strolled on by it without even a care. They could all go to hell.

  “Ohhhh,” the geisha man grunted in conclusion.

  She handed him another handkerchief. She didn’t want to have to clean that kimono.

  Then she served him another whisky, this one nice and special with ice, soda water, lime.

  But extra special, too.

  The prospect of serving up that extra-special whisky to her geisha goon had made her sweat between and under her breasts. But it had proved so easy. All she needed to do was turn her back to him while he wiped up and dump the serum right in, lots of soda and lime in a big glass. He had chugged it right down. Apparently, the Japanese man trusted his new masters. He certainly had no choice on account of recent history. The next thing she knew, the tough guy was smoking pakalolo in a skinny, neatly rolled reefer he brought with him. He had made her smoke some and she’d held it in her mouth, pretending to inhale it. And then, he was giggling.

  And now here he was, just lying there passed out with his head turned her way, that hot whisky reek pumping out of him. He made that honking sound again, apparently dreaming of jacking off in a geisha getup while he was at it.

  She rolled her eyes.

  Then the Japanese goon’s face went slack. Kanani sat up, took notice. What if she hadn’t given him enough? Or too much? They needed this man for information, because he, by the looks of him, had surely extracted his share of information from others during the wa
r. He was a thug, a gangster. Yakuza was a word she’d heard used for Japanese mokes like this.

  Now he released a long hiss. His eyes popped open. They were glazed over, tilting around. They found the ceiling fan, and finally her. She let him stare. He kept staring, in wonder it seemed, his mouth curling up in a smile.

  “How you feeling?” she said.

  “Pretty . . . pretty lady.”

  “Mahalo.”

  They exchanged a few embarrassed smiles, his white face flushing a horrid salmon color.

  “You like me?” she said.

  “Ah. Oh, yes.”

  “That makes me happy.”

  “I happy,” he said.

  “Good . . .” She leaned forward, holding his hand, her other hand on his thigh. “So, you were saying? Something about a certain location.”

  He beamed. “Location!”

  She nodded. “Yes, the same place your good friends here asked you about. You really, really like to tell me.” She kept nodding. It couldn’t hurt.

  He nodded. His eyes turned hard, though, and it brought her sweat back. It was night outside by now. Where would she run if she had to? What would she shout? Why hadn’t she asked that creepily cheerful Lansdale if they were going to post guards outside, just in case. She could slap herself now. She just had to assume, hope, stay wary.

  “You should tell me,” she added. “That makes me happy, too.”

  He released a happy groan and was grinning again. His English improved suddenly. He rambled on about glory, about his military days and many gangster triumphs, some of these two one in the same, it seemed. He boasted of running the show in China, which he called Manchukuo. “Special units,” he said. “We eliminated so many, we showed them,” he blathered on. Then he made sliced motions with an imaginary sword that was all too real. She was sure he had been in Nanking. It was just as she thought. But it was all hemming and hawing.

  Then he said, “You are not my wife?”

  “What? No, dear.”

  “Where is she, eh?”

  “She’s back home? That’s my guess.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She rubbed at his thigh and squeezed his hand, wide and full of knuckles, all rough skin. “Now, like you were saying—you like to give me that location.”