The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  He nodded. “San Mariel,” he whispered.

  “What’s that?” She’d heard the name but had to be sure.

  He opened his mouth to repeat it, but instead said, “Cagayan Valley.”

  “Cagayan Valley. I see. Where’s that?”

  “Cagayan Valley in the Philippines.”

  “Philippines?”

  “Oo,” he said, nodding, the two Os pronounced like Oh-Oh, then he clicked his mouth shut and wiped at his lips.

  Oo meant yes in Filipino. She’d heard it on the plantation. She’d heard Frankie say it.

  “Mabuti,” he added, which meant good.

  That was it. Her job was done. She was only supposed to extract the name of the location. She was supposed to stop there. But the stuff in his drink was still working away. He stared at the ceiling fan, losing himself in its turns. He started talking to it, in a mix of Japanese and English.

  “That big old mango tree, at base of hill. It all covered . . .” His mouth hung open.

  Covered up? She waited it out.

  “Beware!” he snapped.

  She started.

  His eyes darted. “Many traps. Many! All deadly. All dead . . .”

  What was she going to do, not listen?

  “Find him,” he muttered.

  “Find who?” she whispered.

  “De Garza. He the one.”

  “He’s the one how?”

  He shook his head. Sneered at the fan blades whirring. “Golden Lily,” he muttered eventually.

  What was that? Was that his name for her or something else? She stared, willing him to say more.

  He patted at his chest and looked at it with a gentle expectation, as if a carnation should’ve been pinned there.

  “Whose name is that?” she asked.

  “No who—what. But . . . Hindi na.”

  No. No longer. “What is covered up?”

  He beamed up at her. His eyes elsewhere, beyond those fan blades.

  “You thinking of your wife? Your children?”

  “You my wife,” he said. His eyes seemed to float in their sockets, and they were like glass balls on ocean. Empty. Going.

  “Sure. That’s right. Sure I am,” she whispered.

  His eyes found their way back to her. “You’re my gold,” he said.

  “Yes. Go on.”

  He told her, in fragments, but just as she’d hoped, about the Japanese plundering golden treasures and fine objects in China. The scheme went back decades. He was like an art dealer on his death bed, recounting his greatest sales and acquisitions.

  “Good contract,” he sputtered, “so very good. General Yamashita.”

  Kanani could feel her blood racing through her body, in her wrists, up her neck. “Where?” she demanded. “Where exactly?”

  He jolted. His head jerked her way.

  “Is it here? Right here?” she growled. “No? You understand?” She tried in her clunky Japanese, “Where here on island? Where exactly? Tunnels, lava tubes, what?”

  “You!” he shouted. “You not my wife. My wife dead. Bombings. My son.”

  “No. Hindi. No . . . Ee-eh.”

  “Do you know how many wives I kill? My unit. My crew?” His hands clawed up.

  She shook her head, the blood rushing to her head with panic. They had that opium here, pipe and all. Maybe she could load him one, maybe—

  “Children? You have?” he demanded.

  “Me? No, I—”

  He tore at his kimono as if looking for a wound. He pulled it down and sat up, half naked now, the veins in his neck throbbing. Glaring at her.

  You come at me, Geisha-san, I bust you up, she thought. But she knew she’d go down fighting all too fast against a tough like this, just a black crab facing a shotgun.

  He wiped at his mouth. He made fists. He stood up, planting one foot down, then the other, his eyes straining to focus on her.

  “You tell me,” he growled in English, “who are you? Or I kill you.”

  His hands clawed, one clenched around an imaginary sword handle, the other pointing as if wielding a pistol.

  She had a whisky bottle, somewhere behind her.

  “Please don’t,” she said, stalling.

  “Or maybe I have Frankie do it?”

  She recoiled. “Who? I don’t . . .” She could feel the bottle behind her, on the counter.

  He laughed. “He Hawaiian like you. But, oh, he good. Man, he good. Frankie, he like blood flowing . . . Maybe he like it more than gold.”

  She turned and grabbed the bottle.

  He bounded after her. She could’ve bashed it over his head. She handed it to him.

  He grabbed the bottle with both hands and chugged the last few fingers of whisky left. He threw it against the wall, and it clunked away, somehow not breaking.

  She handed him the bottle of rum now, the Filipino rum. He grabbed that with both hands and chugged, backing up to the edge of the chaise. Panting. He groaned and leaned forward. She snatched the bottle from his hands right as he vomited out onto the floor with a loud slap. She stepped back, the sour stench filling her nose.

  He grabbed the bottle from her, chugged some more. He positioned himself in the middle of the room, his toes mixing with the vomit, but he held his ground, feet wide apart.

  “Gold!” he screamed at her. “There. We have it. They have it.”

  “San Mariel,” she said in a calming monotone. “Cagayan Valley?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “But here, too? Under us? Or near?”

  His head was rolling around like a coconut dropped into a bowl, and she couldn’t tell if he was confirming it or not.

  “No? Yes? That a yes?”

  His face screwed up, and his mouth stretched open wide as if yawning. Then that coarse mug of his slackened with one big sigh that sent more acrid vapors her way. “You take me there, please? Take me home, mother,” he muttered and took another chug, and the bottle slipped from his fingers and hit the floor with a crack, splitting in two, splashing vomit.

  He swayed and pivoted and his eyes rolled back and fluttered and he dropped, his forehead hitting the rug as he went down. Thunk.

  She checked the Japanese thug’s pulse as he lay there half on the rug, half in his own vomit. He was still alive. She couldn’t lift him. She opened the windows to flush out the stink. She tried to lift him again, heaving and hoing, and almost threw her back out. Eventually a couple guard types from the Main House came over, followed by Lansdale.

  Lansdale took her out on the lanai. As she reported to him, she could only see his silhouette in the darkness, which helped her tell it to him the way she did. She mentioned her mark wanting the kimono, but neither of them laughed about it—to Lansdale it was surely just useful information, another weak point. She told him about his drinking hard, but they knew that already. The pakalolo didn’t surprise Lansdale—they probably gave him the reefer themselves to keep him good and loose. The dose from the vial worked like a charm, she reported. She sweet-talked him and went for broke. Eventually their Japanese visitor told her a location.

  “San Mariel,” she stated. “Cagayan Valley.”

  Lansdale’s eyes flashed, just a half second. “Are you sure?”

  She shrugged. “That’s for you to decide, sir. I only know that this was his answer.”

  Lansdale’s shadow seemed to grow and move closer, though he hadn’t budged. “Good, good. How did you ask it?”

  “I just asked. He was good and loose, just like you said. So I went for broke, see. I had him confirm in different ways. At one point he said it was the Philippines, and in that valley.”

  Lansdale was nodding along.

  “He said one other thing,” she added.

  “Go on.”

  “A name. I don’t know if it means anything.”

  “In what context?”

  “No context. He just blurted it out. He was muttering at that point. That serum, it was wrestling with the hooch and the reefer.”


  “I see. So, what was it?”

  “The name was de Garza, Grazza, something like that.” She had to give up the name. Just in case. It would prove her worth, giving them something extra.

  “Did he say anything else useful? Anything at all.”

  “No. At that point he was plenty stoned. He was thinking I was his wife, then his mommy.” She shook her head at the notion.

  The two guards passed them carrying the Japanese thug away, one at each end.

  “Where they taking him anyways?” she asked Lansdale.

  “Back to his room, in the Main House. He’s flying out pronto. He’s gonna have a heck of a hangover.”

  “I hope so,” Kanani said, “and with plenty of blackout.”

  “Now don’t you worry,” Lansdale said. “It’s just like I told you: He won’t remember anything. It’s amnestic, that stuff.”

  Kanani shuddered anyway, and it made her shoulders quiver. “I would hate to see that one getting ahold of a sword or pistol. Because I think he’s used both of those plenty.”

  Lansdale stared over her, at the doorway, nodding as if thinking over what she said.

  “Got one pig shitting on fence,” she added, “take plenty whitewashing for make dat fence look mo nice.”

  Lansdale nodded at that. His teeth shined. “To grasp what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge,” he replied, this being another of his sayings or proverbs or whatever it was he liked to spew. Wendell had told her to watch out for these, but she still didn’t know what it was supposed to mean or what to say.

  “All righty,” she said.

  “You went did good, wahine,” Lansdale said.

  “Please don’t do that, mister.”

  “Do what?” Lansdale added a spurt of a laugh.

  “Try talking Pidgin. Only make one haole sound dumb.”

  “Ah.” Lansdale tapped at his temple. “Will do.”

  And he left her standing on the boogie bungalow lanai. He blended into the night. And she would have to go back inside and clean up the whole damn stinking mess. She didn’t even want to fathom what the Americans were doing working with a monster like that Japanese thug. That was Lansdale’s racket, and possibly Charlie Selfer’s, but she only hoped it wouldn’t end up Wendell Lett’s problem.

  14.

  A couple weeks into his treatment and just days after his first assignment, Lett had gotten the call—his next assignment. His cure could continue. They traveled straight from the Big Island in a Catalina flying boat, taking off from the water down in a cove along the South Kona shore. Deploying by airplane sounded first-rate, but it ended up like being inside a submarine, a tight-as-hell mess of erratically placed seats and bunks with thin padding. They had to watch their heads and elbows and toes because of all the bolts and brackets left where wartime equipment used to be—machine guns, old navigation equipment. Jock loved finally getting a ride in a floating plane, but his excitement cooled once they took off and the giant metal tube of a fuselage rattled and shook and dipped and shifted and kept at it after they rose to altitude. It had blister windows that bulged out, but looking over the vast sea below and seeing only nothingness until the horizon didn’t help a man cope. They were a six-man team again, a few from the group that did the job in Hilo, a couple new ones. The fragility of the ride didn’t help any of them want to get to know one another any better. It wasn’t like a game of craps or cards would last anyway on account of the droning racket alone.

  They landed on Guam first, for refueling, and they were only allowed to get off long enough to stretch their legs and walk around the plane. At some point—hours, maybe a day after their first liftoff—Jock was rocking Lett awake for landing. They touched down on water and floated into another cove, but this inlet was far across the Pacific from the one they had left.

  They were now in the Philippines.

  A pontoon boat was waiting, and it took them ashore. A few men joined them there, “in-country” as they called it—two more Americans looking as GI-issue as they come, and a couple Filipinos for translating, guiding, and what have you. After coffee and Spam-and-egg sandwiches and a half hour of shut-eye on solid land, they all piled into the two waiting troop trucks. Then they rode south on a narrow highway that bordered swamplands and curved along waterways of brown water lined with lush greenery wanting to overgrow to the opposite bank. Longboats rode the water; the men in them stooped. It was even more humid than in the Territory of Hawaii.

  They drove for hours, Lett nodding off half the time, as did the rest of them, leaning into one another. Sometimes he looked out the truck. They passed little villages they called barrios. Churches were in the Spanish style, more or less, but of red brick with white rounded columns. The poverty looked as bad as he’d seen anywhere, even in war. Boys sat up in trees for no reason he could make out. People, most of them barefoot, fetched their water from puddles. Ramshackle huts were slapped together from who knew what—corrugated metal, wood flats, pallets, leather, tarp sheets, all of it held together with rope and tar and mud and a whole lot of worry. Fences were just the thickest sticks people could find. Then came more of those vast swamplands along their waterway road, which Jock told him were for rice, and sure enough, rice farmers were standing out in the water tending to their crops. The wind smelled sweet, but it wasn’t from flowers or anything Lett could recall from Hawaii. It had more of a spice or tang to it.

  Lett wished he could’ve said good-bye to Kanani before he left. He would’ve warned her not to do anything stupid. He wondered how it was going in that boogie house they had her running. She must be let down by the duty, but if anyone could make it work, it was her. He only wished he didn’t know about the gold.

  He couldn’t have told her where he was heading exactly because he didn’t know himself. The vast countryside had opened around them. Hours into the journey, as the sun lowered, green mountain ranges rose higher and tighter on either side. “I know where we are,” Jock told Lett. “This here is all one vast valley. Cagayan Valley. Luzon. North of Bambang, then there’s Manila south of that. To the west you got your Cordillera Range. You know they still got tribes up there wearing loin cloths? East, you got the Sierra Madre, high as hell . . .”

  Lett was hardly listening. He worried about Kanani now—because her goal, clearly, was getting at that gold. It was her way out of this world. How many had thought the same? Misled themselves? He knew what it was like to mislead oneself. Once upon a time, an eager orphan had believed that serving in battle would transform him into his own man, dependent no more.

  ***

  The giant beast stared at Lett with its mammoth horns that curved rearward as they tapered and swooped upward at the sharp tips, like bicycle handlebars sculpted by some Baroque master. The blackish brown beast faced Lett, its legs planted like posts, its elongated ears extending parallel to those horns. And it kept staring at Lett.

  Lett was guarding a modest courtyard with the others. They had slept through the darkness and were woken at dawn. The sun was only now rising above the treetops of the hills. Lett manned one solitary corner of the courtyard, and the beast stood its own ground in the low grass between the courtyard and a line of jungle foliage. It kept its black eyes on Lett, and he couldn’t help staring back.

  He thought it was a water buffalo and Jock had called it an Oriental cow, but another man told him, “They call it a carabao here. It’s the national animal—their bald eagle.”

  And that horned beast wouldn’t stop staring. Lett would shift his view from time to time, since he was watching the perimeter after all. But every time he turned back around, the beast was still eyeballing him. He wondered if the animal had any idea he was carrying a weapon. They had rifles this time, not submachine guns. He had an M1 carbine, his trusty favorite from the war, light on his shoulder, his thumb tucked under the strap of Army-green webbing. This time their weapons were loaded. Lett didn’t like the idea—not at all. He’d practically started when they issued him ammo to loa
d and told him to show the ones who hadn’t handled an M1, yet he couldn’t help but assume the role. He’d done it so often. It didn’t make him jitter or act out or black out, and to his surprise, it calmed him so much that he forgot all about taking his dose.

  The courtyard had uneven paving stones, pocked and cracking, the seams growing weeds. It didn’t seem like a place intended for an official meeting. It had one narrow road in, lined with lush green ridges on either side. A dilapidated sign read CAGAYAN MINING COMPANY. The building facing the courtyard was nondescript, two stories, stucco. A few low Quonset huts stood beyond, and a warehouse of rusting corrugated metal. Four heavy cargo trucks waited there, two of them weighted down, the tires close to fenders, their loads covered in canvas. The two other trucks stood empty, standing tall.

  Kanani would want to know about it. Lett still didn’t want to know about it. He just wanted to get the assignment over with. An hour into the guarding, he was growing restless. What the hell were they even watching for? And why had they brought them all the way here? Still no one told them. It grew more humid, and the light M1 weighed heavier on his shoulder than it should have been. If he grew jittery and felt like shooting up a dose—it was quite all right under the circumstances, he assured himself.

  Jock was the next man over, tens of yards away. They had two other sentries on the opposite corners of the square, a couple down the road, and two more at the entrance, as well as men on the rooftops.

  The next time Lett turned around, the carabao was gone. He hadn’t even heard it.

  Jock’s head rose, and Lett saw billows of dust rise from far down the narrow entrance road. They straightened up. A sedan was coming, a prewar Dodge but in fine shape. It passed through the courtyard and rolled to a stop before the two-story building.

  An Army captain in summer dress stepped out from the front seat of the car and came around to meet the two men exiting the rear seats. The two were Japanese in civvies, but they rose from the car glaring at the scene around them and assumed that erect stance of military men—or at least proud men. Two more Americans in summer dress came out to meet the car: an Army colonel and a captain. Seeing the two American officers, the Japanese men’s shoulders dropped, and they pulled off their hats and held them in their hands before them and their heads went down as the two Americans addressed them on the front steps. Within that minute, the Japanese visitors went from looking like thugs to royalty and then back down to prisoners. Their American masters waved them inside, and the two shuffled along like donkeys dragging a load.