The Preserve Read online

  He grabbed at the table’s edges again. She held his shoulders with her lovely brown hands. Something soft had fallen across his shoulder. Her silky black hair. That flower.

  “Easy, Joe, easy,” she whispered, “going stay all right,” and she sung something to him in Hawaiian, and he loosened up inside.

  He lifted his head, pushed back his imaginary helmet, and stared into her eyes to help make it go away for good. “Thank you,” he said.

  The barman showed his face behind the bar, peeking out from the back room. “Miss Kanani, try come speak one second?”

  Kanani rolled her eyes for Lett. She patted him on the knee. “I’ll be right back.”

  She and barman met at the bar, leaning into either side of it, the barman waving arms. They were speaking Hawaiian Pidgin English.

  “No call da MPs, yeah?” she said. “All pau. We talk story, he calm down already. Mo better.”

  “Not pau. I no went call before, but auwe! He lolo, dat army guy. Just now I see. He going bust up joint, and me? Dey cut neck. So he gotta go.”

  Just then three puffed-up types with sergeant stripes lumbered in. They took a table by turning the chairs backward and wrapping their legs around them, their eyes bloodshot and bulging. Lett already had them figured—three Joes on a bender ignoring yet another OFF LIMITS sign.

  Kanani and the barman kept arguing. The sergeants laughed and slapped their table and the stench of stale whisky in sour stomachs hit Lett when the wind shifted.

  And the weather would not let up. Lett lowered his head, took deep breaths. But it was no good. All light dimmed. A sharp headache came, like his skull splitting, making him drool. He shut his eyes to fight it, and rubbed at his temples, and wished he’d asked Kanani for a warm rag, a cold cloth, a baseball bat between the eyeballs, anything.

  “Speaka da English,” one of the sergeants shouted toward the bar, and his buddies roared with laughter.

  “Please one moment, sirs,” the barman told them.

  These aren’t sirs. They surely never served in the war from the looks of them, all plump forearms, pink cheeks, and soft jaws.

  More dark clouds hovered, swirling over the two palm trees as if ready to suck them up whole, the fronds slapping around. The ocean spilled forth, exploding white on the black rocks.

  Gotta keep moving, Lett told himself, repeating their old maxim from the front line, Always keep moving, don’t bunch up. Stop and you’re cornered. Keep your eyes open.

  “Buncha savages,” one sergeant said, and Kanani started backing away from the bar.

  “You there, sweetie,” another sergeant said to her. “Why don’t you climb up this here palm tree and fetch me a coconut,” and the third made monkey sounds, and—

  Lett’s head jerked up. The gears inside him launched, found their cogs, and meshed, the torque steeling him. Mechanically, he stood.

  The three sergeants stiffened.

  “Lay off these people,” Lett said to them.

  The three stood, trying to clench those soft jaws but they just didn’t have the chops for it.

  Lett lunged.

  All went dim and blurred, yet he sensed his efficient movements, the pivoting and striking. Screams followed. Metal filled the air like shrapnel, but the metal was fear and it wasn’t his.

  Lett heard a voice: “Stop! Stop it!”

  The darkness in his head cleared out. He was standing over two of the sergeants who lay on their backs, the table and chairs upended. One had blood streaming from his nose and his chin quivered. The other was curled up in a ball. The third had pressed his back to the farthest wall, the pink drained from his face.

  Lett whipped around.

  The barman had vanished again. But Kanani was peering at him with, to his wonder, a calm look of understanding.

  “Let me help you,” she whispered to him.

  “Das enough! I going call da MPs,” the barman yelled from in back.

  Lett started for the exit. Gotta keep moving. Stop and you’re cornered.

  Kanani came after him, pushing chairs clear. She grabbed his arm. “Come on.”

  Lett spun around. “Where to?”

  “Where else? The Preserve.”

  2.

  Out they rushed, and Kanani led Lett over a short coastal wall and along a narrow beach.

  Lett snapped up Kanani’s arm, but gently. “Wait a second. How do you know about The Preserve?”

  “Because they’re expecting me there. How you think?”

  “You?”

  She pushed at him. “Yes, me. Why you think I was in that bar if I wasn’t the help?”

  “Oh, all right. But, I’m not due till tomorrow.”

  “Me neither,” Kanani said, and marched on ahead.

  Soon the sand gave way to more of those slick, jagged formations of black lava rock and they tiptoed across them, keeping one eye on the calming waves. Without shoes, Lett’s feet would’ve been ground beef. Small black crabs jumped out of his way.

  “So, we’re not going to The Preserve?” he asked.

  “Not yet. We gotta get you calmed down. You can’t be back there when MPs come. Ho ka! You really bust ’em up. Quite the warrior, aren’t you? Those lugs had no chance.”

  “Well, I just can’t stomach MPs,” Lett muttered.

  The rain had stopped. The wind dwindled to a welcome breeze. Kanani’s shortcut had delivered them farther down the main road, Alii Drive. They were heading south. Lett’s simple black-face Elgin watch read six o’clock—the sun would be setting within the hour. As they walked, Lett sorted things out inside his head as best as he could like he always did after an incident, reordering the chronology, separating flashback and daytime nightmare from reality. He rechecked his hands. His knuckles ached but there was no blood or swelling. He’d been swift and effective. At least those sergeants weren’t carrying weapons and trying to use them—he could’ve separated those goofs from their guns in seconds flat and might even have used one on them. He hadn’t held a gun since the war. He had vowed never to pick one up again, and his new masters here had, thank God, not issued him one when he arrived on the steamer.

  His legs had felt light and strong from the adrenaline, but now they were tiring. Once they were a good distance down the road from the billet, a couple hundred yards maybe, Kanani stepped into the cover of trees and faced him with her arms crossed, but not as if mad. From the look on her face, it was more like she’d just eaten a good meal.

  A few yards farther along she reached into a hibiscus hedge and dragged out a large English safety bicycle from the days of the Hawaiian Kingdom, it seemed.

  “How far we going?” Lett said. “Pretty much all I’ve got is here on my person apart from a toothbrush.”

  “Just down the road. And I got one for you.”

  Lett took the heavy bicycle from her and sat on the hard leather saddle. “Here, get on the handlebars.”

  Kanani’s handlebar ride lasted about ten yards before Lett started wobbling. Kanani had leaned back, her hair brushing his lap, framed inside his arms, and it was all too much. Just as he imagined his dead friends all too clearly, or saw himself killing someone again and again, he sometimes also visualized bearable things, lovely things worth living for. Intensely. It was the sole wonder of his affliction. So he had imagined what might come next with Kanani—and careened right off the shoulder and spilled them both into the soft crabgrass.

  Kanani only laughed. But he walked the bicycle for her instead after that. She watched him in the dimming light, walking backward, her feet finding her way along the shoulder as if she were strolling forward.

  “Kanani’s a lovely name,” he blurted. “What’s it mean?”

  Her face nuzzled her neck like a girl blushing. “The ‘pretty one.’”

  “Mahalo,” Lett said. “That’s your word for thanks, right? For getting me out of there.”

  “It is. Don’t mention it.”

  They walked on, in the middle of the empty road now. They heard cricket
s chirping and the honk of an island animal. “Check ’em out,” Kanani said. “Dat one nēnē bird.”

  “Adorable. Sounds like a goose with a cold,” Lett said, smiling.

  Kanani punched him in the arm. “Nēnē, dey rare now.”

  “Careful. You’re slipping into that Pidgin you speak,” Lett said.

  A grin stretched across her face and she wagged a finger at him. “Right, you’re correct. I normally speak like you haole folks. We learned it in school—English Standard School. I make my voice all nasally like you. I prefer Pidgin, but I better talk like you. No want sound stupid, yeah? Local kids like to pick out American first names. Joey, Freddy. Susy. Plenty haole-fied.”

  “You don’t have a name in mind?”

  She shook her head. “Kanani stay my name.”

  Lett wondered if they should part ways. A special truck would transport him to The Preserve from town if he wanted—it left every morning from the billet. Yet they kept slogging along, which felt all too natural to the old dogface under Lett’s skin.

  “You can see why I need The Preserve,” he said. “It’s my noggin. They told me they can fix what’s wrong in my head.”

  “They did? They said that?”

  “Sure. They’re working on a new therapy. They want to try it on me.”

  “Oh.” She walked a few more paces, nodding along to them as if searching for the right response. “Well, The Preserve, it’s also a training camp. But you probably know that.”

  “Sure,” Lett said. He didn’t know that, or anything really. He only knew they could help him. He felt a twitch of unease in his gut but told himself not to worry about it.

  “I got lucky. It’s not easy for a local to get a post like that,” she said. “No more tough streets of Honolulu for me. Maybe they’ll send me to Tokyo, on assignment.”

  “You mean, like an agent of some sort?” Lett’s twitch had turned into a rumble, like a sour stomach.

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “This have anything to do with that gold lighter—with that person who gave it to you?”

  She turned and stared, her teeth shining in the light. But she wasn’t grinning this time.

  ***

  Full darkness came fast. Alii Drive straightened out and stayed inland, the roadsides overgrown. Any lights were dim and sparse.

  Kanani slowed her pace. “Follow close,” she whispered and led Lett and her bicycle to a clearing on the inland side. A faded sign read KAPU. She flashed her lighter around. The clearing held a clapboard bungalow, a chicken coop, two old cars sinking into the ground, a stone barbecue, and various chairs and tables that had been tossed about during the storms. Palm trees and tall bushes leaned into the clearing, swaying and shimmying, the branches and leaves drooping and dripping and feeding, below them, the many giant ferns and shrubs of budding red flowers. It was just the sort of dead-end yard Lett would never have entered alone on patrol. Too much had to be checked out.

  Kanani took the bicycle from him and walked it into the middle of the clearing. He halted close to a tree, his fingers clamping the wet bark. “Is someone home?” he whispered.

  “Just us,” she whispered back.

  “What does kapu mean?”

  “Taboo. No trespass. But we’re okay.”

  Lett detached himself from the tree and tiptoed toward her. She leaned the bicycle up against the few front steps of the bungalow and climbed them on tiptoes. He stood down below, staring up at her.

  “Why we still whispering?” she said, adding a giggle.

  “Hell if I know.”

  She let her hands slap at her sides. She stepped back down and stood on the bottom step, eye-to-eye with him. “You’re really aching, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. She reached out and touched his chin. He let her, watched her, his mouth open. He smiled. What a dummy. Say something. She opened her mouth and her teeth glistened again in the dark. It made him look down, at her brown legs, just a glance. She noticed, of course. And she said, from deep within her compact little chest, “Okay den. Are you coming, army guy, or you going?”

  ***

  Lett heard her but couldn’t answer. His throat had tightened up from gasping, from screaming inside and nothing coming out, and his eyeballs burned.

  “You had a nightmare,” Kanani repeated in the dark, her voice thin from sleep.

  It was the middle of the night. They each had a quilted mattress on the floor of the bungalow, taking up most of the sparse bedroom. The bed quilts were a Japanese roll-up she called a futon. He’d kept on his GI-issue olive drab boxers and singlet. Kanani had given him a thin sheet for a cover. She had on a simple white nightgown, no sheet. He had tried not to look at her like that and was grateful there was no moonlight. They’d had a belt of rum, and the day caught up with them. Dead tired, they had gone right to sleep.

  And then Lett was seeing people killed and killing and being killed. His friends, so many. The little German girl. Children. Too many. Dogs. He saw all their bulging white eyeballs, heard their individual muffled screams, felt their distended hearts swelling his. It kept coming at him, a crashing wave. He had to fight his way through it, flailing, punching, shooting. In the nightmare he kept killing just to make it all stop. Then he didn’t want it to stop.

  “They made me do things I never wanted to do,” he muttered after a while, after his cold sweat had dried. “But you know the real sick part? Sometimes I think about doing those things again, what it would be like. Like what I did back there in that bar, but worse. I almost . . . look forward to it. That’s what they did to me. I’m not broke—I’m retooled, see. They put a lever inside me. A gear. It can be turned on, activated.”

  “It’s just the night talking,” Kanani said. “They’re gonna cure you. You said so yourself. And I’ll make sure that they do. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  The nightmares didn’t return that night. Lett woke in the early morning light. Kanani was snoring a modest rumble-growl, like a well-fed cat. He rolled off the mattress with care. The galley kitchen had a dented metal percolator sitting on the stove. In the nearly empty cupboard, he found a couple mugs and a can of joe that probably dated back to FDR’s first term.

  He found other things while wandering the bungalow. In addition to double-door locks, strips of folded paper were wedged in the back door and faint threads hung off the window latches, all to warn against intruders having entered while she was out.

  The kettle water rumbled and bubbled, and he whisked the perc off the burner. He took his hot joe out the front door and sat on the top step of the bungalow, its pink paint faded and peeling. Silly birds yelped from unknown perches. A tiny gecko stared back at him from the side of the railing. The clearing sparkled now, as if the branches and bushes were laced with garland and the furry moss on the yard debris were dotted with sequins. He even spotted a tree swing.

  He was going to The Preserve today, he remembered. His cure could finally begin.

  Soft footsteps, a yawn. Kanani wandered out in her nightgown. She sat next to him, rubbing at his shoulder, and sipped from his coffee. She spat it out over the railing.

  “Tell it to the proprietor,” Lett said, adding a smile.

  She shoved him. He tossed the coffee over the railing. They laughed at that and breathed in the fresh air.

  “I didn’t know you had much crime here,” he said, referring to her door locks and window snares. “With all your tripwires, you would’ve done well up on the line.”

  “Plenty things you don’t know about this place,” Kanani said.

  “This isn’t your house, is it?”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest. She shook her head.

  “That’s what I thought. It’s more like your hidey-hole—”

  Kanani shot up. “Wait. Hear that?”

  Something flashed by, out on the road. Kanani jumped down and kicked dirt over the tossed coffee, wiped her feet on the edge of the bottom step, grabbed him and his mug, and pulled him in
side.

  They watched, crouching at the corners of the one front-facing window. A black sedan had passed and turned around. It rolled to a stop, blocking the entrance to the clearing, about thirty yards away. It was a ’41 Packard Clipper with four doors, sloped rear end, and bright whitewall tires that were still rare because of war shortages. Its chrome gleamed out in the sun on the road.

  Lett looked to Kanani. She was nodding, counting off the number of passengers. Three.

  One tall and thick man in an oversize suit stepped out, taking his time, looking around. He circled the car and gazed down the road, as if waiting for another car, perhaps, that or making sure the coast was clear for an assault. The gears of caution kicked into motion inside Lett, and his fear dissipated as his senses intensified. His eyesight sharpened, every sparkle, color, edge, and curve imprinted in his memory. The man had darker skin. Lett first thought he had gloves on but then realized that tattoos covered his hands. The man walked around the clearing. He used hand signals to speak with the two silhouettes inside the car. No tourist gestured like that. A man like this had only one reason to wear a suit jacket here, and it wasn’t to block the wind.

  “Frankie?” Kanani muttered.

  “You know him?”

  Kanani lowered her head. She nodded at the floorboards.

  “You don’t want to see him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then don’t,” Lett said.

  She grinned at him. The grin spread and kept going.

  “I mean it,” he added.

  “Get dressed,” she blurted.

  He dressed in seconds flat as if a Tiger II tank were coming down the road. She pulled on an aloha shirt with the sleeves rolled up and new cuffed dungarees, grabbing rubber thong sandals and an aloha-print carpetbag as she went, the floorboards somehow making no sound.

  She gestured at the back door. Lett squatted there, waited for her signal. She peered out, pulled the door open just enough for them to slip out, then pushed the door shut behind them.

  The bungalow blocked any view of them from the road or clearing. But they faced a tangled wall of bushes and knobby trees and flowers with leaves longer and broader than anything in Europe.