Chapter 14

The next day we got up and I made breakfast as Lucy took a shower. Nothing fancy, ham and cheese over scrambled eggs. Plus some sausage patties, there was not much at the little store on the resort, but that was more than enough for the two of us.

We kissed and cuddled a bit more, then headed back out. And when she admitted she liked boats, we went over and rented the 14-foot outboard and spent about two hours going up and down the coast. We even headed up the small river that ran through the resort, until we got to the floats telling us to turn back as the area ahead was reserved for swimming.

She asked if I fished, and I admitted I had in the past, but not so much anymore. “Is these hands. I can still do big ocean fishing I guess, but things like tying the lines and baiting hooks for trout, I can’t handle things like that anymore.” She nodded and asked if I would keep her company. Turns out she loved fishing and had her equipment in the trunk of her car.

An hour later we were sitting on logs upstream of where the swimming area and she said looked good for bass and catfish. We sat and talked, and she told me that is actually what had brought her grandparents together.

“Grandpa was stationed outside of a village, and there was a river there. He went whenever he had time off, and after a while got to know some of the other fishermen. The occupation was still going on then, but he said the fishermen did not seem to care he was a Yankee because they all loved fishing. Most barely knew English, and he barely knew Japanese. But they could still get their points across. One of the ones he got to know had a daughter who was 16, and they became friends.”

She had a wistful look on her face, and I knew this was a special story for her. “Gramps thought it was funny, as the Japanese called them all ‘Yanks’ or “Yankees’, and he was from Florida. Well, the second time he was fishing with the man and his daughter he finally caught something. And he was surprised when she took it from him and started to clean it. He said it was not needed, but she laughed and said ‘You hand so big, I have small hand, do it better’, so he let her. He said that he always gave them all the fish he caught except one, she had 3 brothers and sisters, and he was doing it for fun while they did it for survival. And after about 6 months, he was invited to their house.”

She smiled at me, and I grinned back. Already caught up in her story, and wanting to hear more despite knowing how it obviously ended. “It was months later when he finally had the courage to ask her out. She then insisted he ask her dad for permission. He did so, then her dad sent gramps to her mom. With the daughter and father translating, she said she understood and said no. Her father then asked his intentions, and he said to take her to see a movie. ‘Royal Wedding’, with Fred Astaire. Thankfully her parents both knew that movie and said it would be appropriate. Then came the rules he would have to follow.”

She then giggled, and turned, and kissed my cheek. “They had to take her oldest brother, two years younger than she was. He was to sit on her other side, and they could do no more than hold hands once the lights went off. No holding hands at any other time, and when they returned she could kiss his cheek at the door if she enjoyed herself and wanted to do it again. But nothing else. Well, as soon as the lights were off she took his hand in hers and held it the entire time. And after walking them home, she kissed both of his cheeks and simply said she looked forward to seeing him fishing again the next weekend. Gramps said he almost floated the entire 5-mile walk back to base.”

I was entranced, listening as she reeled in her line and cast it out again. “This went on for the next three months. They would talk as he and her dad fished, and she cleaned the fish. By then he was keeping his fishing equipment at their house, and after walking back together he started eating dinner with them. Then her oldest brother would accompany them to the movie. Then one day when they arrived, it was another movie. Her brother went with them to the seat, then said he had a date also and moved to the other side of the theater. The lights had barely gone out when grandma used her hand so he faced her and started kissing him.”

Wow, over three months before even getting a kiss. Things were really different back then! “Well, the brother did not have a date, grandma bribed him by promising to buy him a slide rule he wanted if he did as she asked. And that night when he walked them home, she sent her brother in alone. ‘Tell pappa and momma that I am kissing my boyfriend goodnight, we will talk when I come inside’. And that is exactly what happened. The chaperons ended, so he could take her to dances and hold hands. And kiss at the end of the night. But grandma told me if she wanted kisses elsewhere she always had to instigate it.”

“Wow, that is amazing, Lucy. How long did this go on for?”

“Almost three years. She was almost 19 and he was 21 when he got his orders to return to the US. He asked for her father’s blessing and got it. He then proposed to her, but there was not enough time. So he went home, did his last six months, and got out. And less than a month later flew back to Japan. By that time he had the approval, and they got married there in Japan. Then flew home, and got married yet again for his family. And were together until he died, three sons and two daughters together. Grandma is still sad, said he was the only man she ever loved.”

“That is so sweet, no more problems?”

“No, the war ended long ago now. But most of us still fish, and he loved telling that story. Funny thing is, grandma never really fished herself. She would come along, and still insisted on cleaning them. She said fishing bores her, she only went at first to get out of the house. But after meeting him, she wanted to know him better as he was cute and shy, not like most Americans she knew by then.” By this time Lucy had 2 bass and a catfish, and put up her tackle and started cleaning them. It was starting to grow dark, and I asked if that was dinner tonight.

“Oh no! Lunch, tomorrow. We need to go to the store and get some things first. No, tonight we are going in, and we are going to shower and get dressed. Clint, did you bring the shirt and tie as I asked?”

“Of course I did, I would have anyways. Formal?”

“Yes, I want to wear the nice dress I packed, and come in on your arm. Then afterward we can dance. I do not care if you are good or not, we can at least fake it. We still have two more nights after this, depending on tonight we may even do it again, so remember that.”

I grinned, and winked at her as I said “We might? I take it that is your decision, and I have no say in the matter?”

“Of course you do. You can agree if I like it, or come up to the buffet in casual clothes alone if you do not agree with me.” She winked back, then put her hands on my cheeks and pulled me in for a kiss. “OK, let’s go back and get ready.”

Thankfully there were two bathrooms, and I was not surprised when I came out in my black slacks, blue shirt and dark blue tie and Lucy was not out yet. I moved to my “laptop” on the oversized desk and went through my emails. I answered a few, there was nothing of critical importance. And when I heard Lucy come out, I logged off and stood up and turned around.

Wow, she looked amazing and different. Her dress was a light green, and she had done something with her makeup. I realized she had used it in a way with eye shadow to accent her eyes, seeming to be even “more Asian”. We hugged and I softly kissed her cheek, then holding hands we headed over to the hotel again.

This time we got a table in the more formal dining room, and the food and drinks were all included (so long as we drank well drinks and wine on tap). But it was enjoyable, and not so busy as we felt the need to leave after finishing. So the two of us held hands and talked, and Lucy continued to surreptitiously study the room around us.

“Clint, is that Howler I see over there?” I looked over my shoulder and nodded.

“Yep, and once again, remember this is all pretty much secret. That is her, and her husband. As you can see, a lot of us like places like this because we can relax. I have talked with her a few times, we both have the same problem, actually. We can not revert to how we looked before that night, so are stuck like this forever. She is lucky though, her husband stuck with her after she changed.”

Howler was another on the lower end of the Paladin scale. Enhanced strength, she was now over 6 feet tall, and had claws. And a dark gray almost black coat of fur, like a wolf. And sadly, no vocal cords. She could kind of “whisper” in a soft almost drunken slur, but her tongue was so soft many sounds were beyond her. She had a wrist computer that she could type on though and used that when talking to most.

“So she’s married? I never knew that.”

“You are not supposed to, remember what I said about the ‘Mary Jane Watson effect’. Most of us keep that a secret, to keep those we love out of danger. She is married, has a child, and has a secret way to move from where she lives as Howler to where her family lives. I would probably do the same.”

“What about those that change bodies?”

“Well, it is true. There are some they call ‘Greater Chameleons’, who are Paladins that can do that. Those are the most top-secret there are. I know only one, and they keep their real identity such a deep secret that most do not even know they are Chameleons at all. And yes, it is only a rumor that makes them a Paladin automatically. Their new form still has to have enough abilities to be a Paladin, but that can offset some.”

“I can see that. Yeah, and it is like a perfect disguise. Better than just wearing glasses or a wig. Kind of like in the comics, everybody knows who The Hulk is, but most think Bruce Banner is dead.”

“Yep. I know if I could do that, I would for sure! Hell, to be able to walk down the street and not have everybody point and stare at me! To be able to go out and meet somebody, and not worry that they only wanted me because of who I am now. At least actors and singers can try to blend in, I never can.”

Lucy squeezed my hand, and I looked into her eyes. And quickly got lost in them, they were filled with compassion, and, sadness? “Clint, I do get it. Here, they are not ready for dancing yet, let’s take a walk.” So hand in hand we went for a walk around the grounds.

“Clint, I admit I was upset when I first realized you were Sensei. I mean, you lied to me! You sent me that photo, and it was you with a cane, and you said you could barely walk or use your right hand. Then, then I find out who you really are. I was mad, I was hurt, but then I realized how it must have been for you. You told me you had a girlfriend who left you, and when you told me once I found out that she left you because of how you changed, I felt ashamed.”

We were near the golf course, and she turned and placed her hand on my chest. “Then that night you were attacked, that really dove it home. You do things that are dangerous, could even get you killed. Yet, you would find it almost impossible to find somebody to love you for who you are inside. I did fall for that man inside, and was mad when I realized that was a lie. But it was not, you simply told me what you thought you could. And I think that would be a problem for us moving forward.”

I nodded, feeling miserable. But she then reached up and caressed my face. “No, Clint. Not because of this, but because of what you do. Seeing Howler and her husband really drove that home to me just now. I would not be ashamed to be seen walking down the street with you. But you worry that would make me a target. Well, if we make this work, we will eventually have to come to an accommodation about that. I will someday want to be your girlfriend in public, if we get to that point. But when we are ready, no need to rush things. Remember my grandparents. That was less than a decade after this country and hers were trying their best to destroy each other. But both of them basically said ‘Fuck you, and fuck the world, and fuck your hate! We love who we love, so fucking deal with it!’.” And she was so passionate when she said that, I knew what she meant.

“Lucy, that is also a concern of mine. And I guess why I have been so lonely. A friend from school helped remind me that what I look like is not important, but it still always will be. Yes, I know I will never be able to have sex like a real person, but that does not mean I do not want somebody to just hold at night, and be held by them. She is the one that suggested I try dating online, which is one of the reasons I tried Virtual Worlds.”

She had me sit on a bench in the darkness, and Lucy climbed back into my lap and held me. “Yes, and it let us find each other. It’s funny, prior to that I thought I knew it all. I had a college degree and thought I knew what prejudice and hate were. After all, I was 3/4 white and 1/4 Japanese. I was neither one or the other. That soldiers and those who fight are broken people, who were violent or stupid, and did not care about anything but hurting others.”

I started to say something to that, but she put her hand over my lips. “Shhhh, my turn. Yes, I belonged to all the right groups. Several anti-defamation leagues, GLAAD, stop the wars, all that stuff. Then I met you, and I am sorry Clint, but I felt pity. This nice man, who was broken in a war, who was trying to help kids avoid who he had become. You know you fit my stereotype at that time. The broken warrior, who wants to keep others from being warriors.”

I wanted to say that was never it, but knew not to interrupt her. “Then, I find out you were Sensei! You lied, you were still a fighter. You only stopped because you had no choice. Then you told me the truth, and I looked some more. You do not like to fight, do you?”

“OK, that is a bit of a trick question. But let me see if this makes sense. Do I like to fight, yes. But remember, when Bohica and I fight, or Dire Wolf, it is really in fun. I do enjoy that, the challenge of seeing who is best. But I do not like to hurt others. I actually have to be careful with Dire Wolf and Fang, because I can hurt them. Bohica is the only one in my area I can regularly spar with, and neither of us has to worry about hurting the other. He would have to do some serious damage to hurt me, and I could drop a train on his head and he would laugh about it afterward. I am damned hard to hurt, he is as far as we know impossible to hurt.”

She nodded and seemed to get that. “I love the challenge, and like in a game, fighting is fun. But remember, for me, it is fun and not to hurt others. But at the same time, if I have to fight to hurt I will, but do not want to.”

“Like war.”

I sighed. “That is different. Look at it from my side. I was not there to kill the Jihadists, I was there to stop them from harming others. Compare Iraq and Afghanistan with say Lebanon. There, it was mostly one Jihadi group attacking another Jihadi group. They have been doing it for centuries, and so long as they fight each other, largely nobody cares. But when they attack civilians, they get people like me mad. They do not want to fight, just live their lives in peace.”

“Yes, I do get that now. I did not then, I saw you as the guys with guns who did not belong.”

“Yea, and we do not. And if they stopped their attacks, I would be one of the first to say we leave. But I have also seen that if we leave early, they just come back and it gets worse.”

“But it was not so bad before the invasion, right?”

“Oh, it was bad. It is just that nobody cared because it did not affect them. Remember, the Taliban had destroyed statues of Buddha thousands of years old, and the world just whined. Would kill girls, stone them on camera as a warning and the world did nothing. They were like that before they attacked us, but their mistake is that they made it personal. Like so many times before, they thought we were weak and would do nothing. Well, we slapped the hell out of them for that mistake. What happens there now, we just know about it. But look it up, those public executions were going on in the 1990’s, it is just that nobody cared back then.”

“Yeah, I have seen that. And is sad, that like you said nobody cared.”

“Well, we also had no real Internet then. Then, they buried three girls up to their necks and stoned them to death, the video was shared with other villages to force them to follow them or die. Today, they release it to the world, same thing. To people like me, that is a crime. And I can not stop it there, but I can stop it here.”

“Yet, you do not lead.”

“Nope, I also do not want to fight. I will because somebody has to, but I do not want to. Want to know when I am happiest? A few weeks ago I was on a run, and heard a woman scream. This was in a park a few miles from where I live. I ran to the sound, and it was a guy about to rape a woman. He had hit her and dragged her into the bushes. I came tearing through the brush and saw her with her blouse torn. Lucy, I still fight this sometimes, I wanted to kill him! I saw that, and felt just total rage. Rage I could barely contain, a rage that made me wish I had Howler’s claws so I could rip open his belly and drag out his intestines! He was laying on top of her, one hand over her mouth and the other trying to remove her shorts, and he saw me.”

I took a deep shuddering breath, and went even more quiet. “He saw me, and rolled off of the woman. And he just laid on the ground, crying. He knew better than to even try and fight me, I won only by being there. He was a 22-year-old punk, and is in jail now. But the thing is, that is not the first time I have felt that rage. When Falcon was killed, the things I wanted to do to The Screamer were horrible. But I did not, just like with that kid.”

I felt her head on my chest, and I caressed Lucy’s back in my giant hand. “For that, I mostly thank my training. And my biggest fear is that someday, I will not stop that beast, and will kill. It has not happened yet, and it is why I refuse to lead unless there is nobody else. I never want to kill again.”

“But you will if you have to. I do get that now. And I think I know you enough by now that if you ever did, they would deserve it. Do you guys even have a name for your team?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Naw, we don’t go in for that shit. We just call it ‘The Team’. We have a few joke names, however. Dire sometimes calls us ‘The Compass City Irregulars’. The last name I heard Bohica use was ‘The Compass Gang’, after the ‘Scooby Gang’. He even joked that Dire was our Daphne and Velma combined, and Fang was Scooby. But I don’t think Dire liked that, as Fang growled.”

“Does he react to her feelings?”

“Hard to say. I know he is smarter than any other dog, and he senses her feelings. Maybe he realized it might be a bad joke on him, or that Dire thought it would be so reacted. They are almost one person in a way, impossible to tell when one ends and the other begins.”

She kissed me softly, and hand in hand we returned to the hotel. “So, I take it you get me more now than you did last year?” I asked.

“Oh, that I do. And also, just growing up. I still see things that upset me, but now also at least try to see both sides before making a judgment. I remember when one of those big pushes was happening in Iraq, and at school, we were all protesting it. Then I came home, and grandpa said I was being childish. And now I realize I was safe here at school, and you were likely actually on the ground fighting then.”

I asked her the year, and nodded. “Yeah, I was there. That was a bloody one, was a big push from one of the groups to try and take Baghdad. I was not there in that area, I was assigned to a village about 200 miles away. We were training their own government militia and trying to keep an eye on the bad guys passing nearby to pass to the flyboys.”

“You did not fight that time?”

“Only a little, we mostly tried to just get information and pass it to others, and train the locals. Was one firefight, a group running from an A-10 attack thought they would take over the village for shelter. We fought them off and sent them back into the desert.”

“You let them go?”

I shuddered, I did not like this one. “No, we still followed. A family from a local farm was missing afterward, we were afraid they had them.”

“Did they?”

“Thankfully not, turns out they had run before they got there, but we did not know that then. We chased after them for three days, finally caught them in this scabland area. They were completely freaked out when we caught them. They had tried to dig into the bank of a dead river, and found some reminders of the Saddam era.”

She looked up at me, and I nodded. “Oh, they are still finding mass graves around the country, that was one of them. They thought it was just an old trench line from the Iran-Iraq war. Turns out it was, then reused as a mass grave when they pulled out. That entire country is dotted with them, like Civil War battlefields down here. Can’t hardly pass through some areas of Georgia without seeing signs about some battle nobody else remembers. It’s the same in Iraq, he did it so often most barely remember them anymore.”

“Like you said, the things they never talk about over here.”

“Well, remember what Stalin said. ‘The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic’. Most put his butchery now at around 200,000 people. Me, I think it is more. We were there to try and prevent that from happening again, and he had to go.”

“Would you return?”

“Honestly? Hard to say. I am not allowed, the UN made that clear. No mutants with powers usable to the prosecution of war or of direct use in combat is allowed in the military of any country’. Pretty clear. Plus, some of their nutcase clerics are now screaming what happened here is proof that we are an evil, godless country and we are all demons.”

“That is silly, it did not just happen in the US.”

“Do not expect them to make sense, it is fanaticism and not reason. Remember, some clerics also screamed Indonesia got hit by those earthquakes because they were ‘Godless’, even though the majority there are Muslims.”

“Do you hate Muslims?”

“Nope, not at all. Served with many, lived in villages with them. Most are like anybody else, just want to live their lives in peace. It is fanaticism I hate. ‘You are not us so are the enemy’ kind of nonsense. The same that causes ‘Christians’ to blow up clinics. The majority are disgusted by those actions, the same there. Heck, one village had a clinic run by both Sunni and Shia doctors and nurses. To them, it was no different than say a Methodist and a Baptist doing it here. But some tried to say they were both wrong for that.”

“Are they still there?”

I grinned. “Oh, yes. One of the groups tried to attack the clinic, the militia took care of them. Then as a final insult, took them back to that same clinic, and allowed only the staff of the other sect to care for them. ‘You accept this care, or you die’ is basically what they were told. And like we saw so often, they were not even locals. Kind of like a bunch of fanatics from California going to Dallas to start shit. You are not locals, go away and fix your own problems, we did not ask for your help. The Sunni and Shia in the region banded together, and work to keep that kind of nonsense away.”

We could hear that the music had started, and sure enough, when we went inside there were many couples dancing. We went and joined them, and we both had a great time. The music alternated from slow songs that were good for dancing close to each other, and those for dancing so close we were almost a single person. And it really felt nice when during the slowest ones, Lucy pressed herself tightly against me.