Trembling, sweating, he pulled open the door, stepped into the garage, and switched on the light. His black Mercedes 560 SEL was parked where he had left it last night.
When he looked at the Mercedes, he was suddenly stricken by a memory of another car, an older and less elegant one, in the trunk of which he had stashed a dead woman—
No. False memories again. Illusions. Delusions.
He carefully placed one splayed hand against the wall, leaned for a moment, gathering strength and trying to clear his head. When at last he looked up, he could not recall why he was in the garage.
Gradually, however, he was once again filled with the instinctive sense that he was being stalked, that someone was coming to get him, and that he must arm himself. His muddied mind would not produce a clear picture of the people who might be pursuing him, but he knew he was in danger. He pushed away from the wall, moved past the car, and went to the workbench and tool rack at the front of the garage.
He wished that he'd had the foresight to keep a gun at the cabin. Now he had to settle for a wood ax, which he took down from the clips by which it was mounted on the wall, breaking a spider's web anchored to the handle. He had used the ax to split logs for the fireplace and to chop kindling. It was quite sharp, an excellent weapon.
Though he was incapable of cold-blooded murder, he knew he could kill in self-defense if necessary. No fault 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.