No one replied. They were surrounding the commando. Two guards held the commando by the arms. Laughing, howling, they thrust him up by his wrists as if he were the prizefighter who just KO’d to win the title belt. Others yowled and cheered, some raising bottles of Primo beer, cigarettes shooting sparks. The dogs rushed in past Lett and barked and jumped around the commando, growling and showing fangs and snapping at his feet. The commando danced for them with his mouth hung wide open like he wanted to cry or scream, but no sound came out.

Lett’s shoulders felt heavy, as if he were loaded down with gear. He slumped and lowered himself to his knees, letting the jagged rock cut into his kneecaps.

I should’ve killed the man when I had the chance, he thought, put him out of his misery.

Frankie ordered the dogs off. His guards turned the commando around, facing away from Lett. The commando’s arms found his sides, and his shoulders squared. And they marched him off, leading him into the blackest, darkest reach of the cave. And onward, and onward.

A guard bounded over to Lett with a black hood. The last thing Lett saw before they pulled the hood on was the commando’s white back fading into that pitch-black darkness, like a bag of concrete sinking into a deep lake at night, sinking down, under it went and deeper still until it would find the bottom of everything, and nothing at all.

33.

When Kanani didn’t know where to turn, she always found a banyan tree. The Preserve had one, near a trail far off in a corner of the camp perimeter. She went back to it the morning after she found Frankie waiting for her at the boogie house bungalow.

A banyan tree was special. A craggy and curvy web of roots wove its way vertically along the outside of a central trunk and horizontally along branches where they then hung, some eventually reaching earth again, intertwining, recombining. A banyan, her faddah had told her, was an interweaving of many lean roots that once began as a single seed attaching itself to some unassuming tree—and had taken over. They had moved plenty when she was a girl, but there was always a banyan tree to be found. On the plantation, and later, her faddah had always located the banyan with the tree fort, and if there was no fort, he would build her one.

What would Faddah do in her place? Well, he wouldn’t have been going for gold in the first place. He would have stood up instead. Faced these bastards. And he had paid dearly for that, she reminded herself.

For all she knew it was Frankie Baptiste himself who made sure Faddah got crushed by crates so that he couldn’t organize the union. Frankie had done some nasty work for the union busters too, after all.