Shadowfires

in protecting himself. Self-defense was far different from murder. It was justifiable.

He hefted the ax, testing its weight. Justifiable.

He took a practice swing with the weapon. It cut through the air with a whoosh. Justifiable.

* * *

Approximately nine miles from Running Springs and sixteen miles from Lake Arrowhead, Benny pulled off the road and parked on a scenic lay-by, which featured two picnic tables, a trash barrel, and lots of shade from several huge bristlecone pines. He switched off the engine and rolled down his window. The mountain air was forty degrees cooler than the air in the desert from which they had come; it was still warm but not stifling, and Rachael found the mild breeze refreshing as it washed through the car, scented by wildflowers and pine sap.

She did not ask why he was pulling off the road, for his reasons were obvious: It was vitally important to him that she understand the conclusions he had reached in

Vietnam and that she have no illusions about the kind of man that the war had made of him, and he did not trust himself to convey all of those things adequately while also negotiating the twisty mountain lane.

He told her about his second year of combat. It had begun in confusion and despair, with the awful realization that he was not involved in a clean war the way World War II had been clean, with well-delineated moral choices. Month by month, his recon unit's missions took him deeper into the war zone. Frequently they crossed the line of battle, striking into enemy territory on clandestine missions. Their purpose was not only to engage and destroy the enemy, but also to engage civilians in a peaceful capacity in hope of winning hearts and minds. Through those varied contacts, he saw the special savagery of the enemy, and he finally reached the conclusion that this unclean war forced participants to choose between degrees of immorality: On one hand, it was immoral to stay and fight, to be a part of death dealing and destruction; on the other hand, it was an even greater moral wrong to walk away, for the political mass murder that would follow a collapse of South Vietnam and Cambodia was certain to be many times worse than the casualties of continued warfare.

In a voice that made Rachael think of the dark confessionals in which she had knelt as a youth, Benny said, “In a sense, I realized that, bad as we were for Vietnam, after us there would be only worse. After us, a bloodbath. Millions executed or worked to death in slave-labor camps. After us… the deluge.”

He did not look at her but stared through the windshield at the forested slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.

She waited.

At last he said, “No heroes. I wasn't yet even quite twenty-one years old, so it was a tough realization for me — that I was no hero, that I was essentially just the lesser of two evils. You're supposed to be an idealist at twenty-one, an optimist and an idealist, but I saw that maybe a lot of life was shaped by those kinds of choices, by choosing between evils and hoping always to choose the least of them.”

Benny took a deep breath of the mountain air coming through the open window, expelled it forcefully, as though he felt sullied just by talking about the war and as though the clean air of the mountains would, if drawn in deeply enough, expunge old stains from his soul.

Rachael said nothing, partly because she did not want to break the spell before he told her everything. But she was also rendered speechless by the discovery that he had been a professional soldier, for that revelation forced her to reevaluate him completely.

She'd thought of him as a wonderfully uncomplicated man, as an ordinary real-estate broker; his very plainness had been attractive. God knew, she'd had more than enough color and flamboyance with Eric. The image of simplicity which Benny projected was soothing; it implied equanimity, reliability, dependability. He was like a deep, cool, and placid stream, slow-moving, soothing. Until now, Benny's interest in trains and old novels and forties music had seemed merely to confirm that his life had been free of serious trauma, for it did not seem possible that a life-battered and complicated man could take such unalloyed pleasure from those simple things. When he was occupied with those pastimes, he was wrapped in childlike wonder and innocence of such purity that it was hard to believe he'd ever known disillusionment or profound anguish.

“My buddies died,” he said. “Not all of them but too damn many, blown away in firefights, cut down by snipers, hit by antipersonnel mines, and some got sent home crippled and maimed, faces disfigured, bodies and minds scarred forever. It was a high price to pay if we weren't fighting for a noble cause, if we were just fighting for the lesser of two evils, a damn high price. But it seemed to me the only alternative — just walking away — was an out only if you shut your eyes to the fact that there are degrees of evil, some worse than others.”

“So you volunteered for a third tour of duty,” Rachael said.

“Yes. Stayed, survived. Not happy, not proud. Just doing what had to be done. A lot of us made that commitment, which wasn't easy. And then… that was the year we pulled our troops out, which I'll never forgive or forget, because it wasn't just an abandonment of the Vietnamese, it was an abandonment of me. I understood the terms, and still I'd been willing to make the sacrifice. Then my country, in which I'd believed so deeply, forced me to walk away, to just let the greater evil win, as if I was supposed to find it easy to deny the complexity of the moral issues after I'd finally grasped the tangled nature of them, as if it had all been a fuckin' game or something!”

She had never before heard anger like this in his voice, anger as hard as steel and ice-cold, never imagined he had the capacity for it. It was a fully controlled, quiet rage — but profound and a little frightening.

He said, “It was a bad shock for a twenty-one-year-old kid to learn that life wasn't going to give him a chance to be a real pure hero, but it was even worse to learn that his own country could force him to do the wrong thing. After we left, the Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered three or four million in Cambodia and Vietnam, and another half million died trying to escape to the sea in pathetic, flimsy little boats. And… and in a way I can't quite convey, I feel those deaths are on my hands, on all our hands, and I feel the weight of them, sometimes so heavy I don't think I can hold up under it.”

“You're being too hard on yourself.”

“No. Never too hard.”

“One man can't carry the world on his shoulders,” she said.

But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not even a fraction of it. “That's why I'm past- focused, I guess. I've learned that the worlds I have to live in — the present world and the world to come — aren't clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black and white. But there's always at least the illusion that things were a lot different in the past.”

Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far deeper in him than she had realized — perhaps too deep. Even virtues like responsibility and honesty could become obsessions. But, oh, what lovely obsessions compared with those of other men she had known.

At last he looked at her, met her gaze, and his eyes were full of a sorrow — almost a melancholy — that she had never seen in them before. But other emotions were evident in his eyes as well, a special warmth and tenderness, great affection, love.

He said, “Last night and this morning… after we made love… Well, for the first time since before the war, I saw an important choice that was strictly black and white, no grays whatsoever, and in that choice there's a sort of… a sort of salvation that I thought I'd never find.”

“What choice?” she asked.

“Whether to spend my life with you — or not,” he said. “To spend it with you is the right choice, entirely right, no ambiguities. And to let you slip away is wrong, all wrong; I've no doubt about that.”

For weeks, maybe months, Rachael had known she was in love with Benny. But she had reined in her emotions, had not spoken of the depth of her feelings for him, and had not permitted herself to think of a long-term commitment. Her childhood and adolescence had been colored by loneliness and shaped by the terrible perception that she was unloved, and those bleak years had engendered in her a craving for affection. That craving, that need to be wanted and loved, was what had made her such easy prey for Eric Leben and had led her into a bad marriage. Eric's obsession with youth in general and with her youth in particular had seemed like love to Rachael, for she had desperately wanted it to be love. She had spent the next seven years learning and accepting the grim and hurtful truth — that love had nothing to do with it. Now she was cautious, wary of being hurt again.

“I love you, Rachael.”