This is what I remember. His voice. The darkness. The lake lapping against the shore. Stars and clouds above. His arms around me. My back against his chest.

The feel in the pit of my heart.

Everything opening up before me.

He asked me what I wanted to know.

"Everything."

"Pick something."

"Okay then. Why did you go back?"

"My mum died. It was the first time I could get back."

"Did you go away again?"

"I wouldn't have stayed. Not then. Maybe never, but for sure not then."

"Now tell me where...where did you go away to?"

That night at the lake, we sat together on the hood of his truck as the engine cooled beneath us and the stars danced in and out of clouds above us. He leaned back against the windshield. I leaned back against him. His arms were around me. I felt us taking another step.

He did talk about Sam's death, but not very much. Remembering that out loud was hard for him. But he'd seen it so often inside the part of him that would never stop feeling the guilt over it, so maybe he'd seen it enough.

He felt himself a pariah in that town after Sam's death. Sometimes a man just won't be able to live with that being the one thing people know about him, that he played a part in his good friend's death and that it was all over the rivalry for a girl.

Love never seems like a good enough reason, he said to me that night. And besides, I heard him say, we were maybe never going to last. He meant him and Meg...but hearing those words made me wonder about many things a man must hold deep inside himself when it comes to love.

I wondered to myself if love was ever reason enough for anything bad you might find it had caused. I wondered to myself if he would ever consider love again or if the part of him that could love was maybe no longer hoping for it to come to him.

"Why didn't she leave?" I asked him softly. He shifted behind me and I knew this made him feel edgy. "I mean, it was all she said she wanted, her big dilemma. She was mooning around because she wanted to leave. You were the one who wanted to stay. But instead you left and she stayed."

"Just life, I suppose," he said with a sigh. "She probably blames me for her staying. Blames me worse for being the one who ended up leaving."

"Where did you go? What did you do?"

He had taken the only road out of town that led to something he thought he might have been able to say he'd be okay with. It turned out to be both his salvation and his making. But it wasn't ever easy. And it didn't sit good with him because becoming a man, out of his youth, was maybe harder than I'd ever considered.

Junee, his town, is a railroad town, he told me. It's ironic that he took a train out of town after a train killed his good friend. 

Even when he left, he still felt tied to that town because of his mother and his dead father. He had been totally at home in that place...hunting, fishing, looking forward to a life he just thought was what life was about: the stability of family, wife, children, and holding tight to what he thought would be his place in the fabric of that town. He said he was the 'nice, dependable' guy while Sam was artistic and searching. He said Meg had never really loved him but he'd been so sure she would see that he was the one who offered her the kind of love and devotion she deserved.

In the wake of Sam's death, all souls were bared...hers included. He tried to do right by her but in the end, she wanted to be alone so his leaving was the best answer all around.

He took the train to Canberra. That's where he enlisted in the Army. I turned to look at him when he said that; he looked off when I asked why...why the Army. He said what else was there for a boy like him? It seemed pre-destined somehow and yet it was something that had made his mother cry. He kept telling her it was nothing, just training and practice, because there were no wars so it wasn't like he was going to be in any danger.

But he'd been wrong about that.

His mother died a few months after he left. But he didn't go home then. Why would he? Still too many bitter feelings of remorse and confusion.

And then it all changed.

He flourished in the Army in that way that young men have when they find themselves away from all expectations put on them by those who've known their older brothers and father. He was assigned to the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, but he was barely at his first unit after training when world politics changed and there was a conflict that was going to involve him after all. Australia was only supposed to send troops in some limited support of the American military effort in Viet Nam, that undeclared war.

National Service, their version of the draft, came up in Australia. They were quickly beefing up their military. They didn't have enough officers to lead the overnight onslaught of new recruits destined for places like Viet Nam, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea. So they looked inward at the current Army men and chose those they felt had leadership along with those being called up who seemed officer material.

Johnny was one of those regular Army men selected. An officer from the ranks.

Imagine that, he said. I can, I said. He squeezed me in; I squeezed back. A man forged, I thought to myself. This would be the making of a man, would it not?

He told me that was how he ended up near Sydney. He was selected for the officer training program at Scheyville, which was six grueling months of turning conscripts and enlisted men like him into officers.

Marching and drilling, he said with a small groan. Always drilling. Each day was 10 to 14 hours of training, both physical and classroom.

Days spent on some godforsaken range firing guns and nights spent cramming for exams that came too fast and furious, he said, that was basically their life for all that time. Never enough time, constantly harassed, intense pressure, no lee-way for anything but doing the thing right...and many didn't make it all the way through. But he did.

Most every one of the people he trained with ended up in Viet Nam. It was the purpose for the creation of the officers training unit at Scheyville, he told me. It was odd listening to that statement, delivered so flatly. Every one of them knew they'd been selected just to be sent to Nam to lead platoons.

"How did that feel to know?" I asked him. 

"We were young," he said so softly it was almost whisper. "We didn't know any better."

"You're still young," I said.

"Not like that."

Like the rest of them, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant when he made it through the brutal training. He was sent back to the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, but it was to lead a platoon of raw recruits just finishing training in Singleton, New South Wales.

He was with the 10th Platoon, Bravo Company. When he met his division commander, he was told the group was being dispatched to Papua New Guinea for 12 weeks additional training. Next stop from there and the reason for the training? To prepare them better for Viet Nam. They would be part of Australia's "limited role" there, his commander told him. When he met his platoon sergeant a few hours later, no one was fooled by this description of what they were being prepared for. They knew the meat grinder they'd been hearing about over there.

"Did you consider resigning?" I asked him.

"Men don't do that sort of thing," he said.

Instead, he took the two weeks leave they were all granted before being shipped out to war. He went home. To Junee. At last to see his mother's grave. To say goodbye. I suppose it was the only place he had goodbye's to make.

A lot had changed in him in this time away. Scheyville offered the education that there was a big world out there...it was an eye-opening experience to have with a bunch of men you were bonding with. And those men, so many of them from cities and with worlds more experience in other areas of life than he had...well, a lot of them had ambitions he never considered before all that.

"I wanted other things by then," he said. "I hadn't even known I might want other choices."

"That's the thing, isn't it?" I said. "Until you left Junee, you wouldn't have known that maybe you'd have other ambitions. Or you might realize that your life in Junee was still the one you wanted."

"She was still there in Junee. I was headed for war. I thought maybe..."

"Oh, I can see that."

"I wanted there to be a girl waiting for me. Someone to write me letters. A picture I could carry. Love I knew would wait."

"Was she the girl?" She would have had to forgive him first, I figured. For all the wrongs, real and imagined and even the ones committed just by not being there to be blamed.

"No. Maybe she never was. This was when I really saw it. She was more content to be sad over being left behind than she was to see I was not the boy she'd so easily dismissed as boring."

I put my hand on his cheek. Stubble. Jaw working. "You were never boring. You were real. You were dear. You were passionate. You still are. You are the best of men, Johnny Ryan. The best."

He never looked back at Junee again after that. I can understand that. I can. But how lonely is it to be adrift in life without a place you can always call home?

In Viet Nam, even a "limited role" brought real casualties. He lost two men. He lost a part of himself. He found a new part to take its place.

"I grew up," he said. He said that with such a soft voice, as if it still awed him, all that he saw and all that he changed.

"You did," I said, for what else can one say to a statement like that?

His unit was one of many mini-teams of engineers that supported the units of armored personnel carriers and tanks of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps.

"Keep them running. At all costs. Whatever it took," he said. "I was good at figuring out how to do it better, make them run tighter, leaner. By the time our rotation was over, we could do it in our sleep. Sometimes we were. We'd pull one apart, find the way to use what we had to repair, dream up an improvement when the parts weren't around and get it out there to fight again."

He said he could still call up the distinctive smell of the war in Viet Nam. And, he said, it wasn't even like he was in the front lines.

"It was still war," I told him. "Don't minimize it."

"It hasn't been that long for me since I was there, I suppose," he said.

I never considered this. I sat very still and tried to wrap my mind about what he meant. In my time, Viet Nam was over decades ago. To him, had it happened just before he came here?

"How long ago was it to you? Did you come here right after? Was it just recently? You only came to the Pub recently, right?"

He sighed; he hugged me in tighter. He said, "Don't let me go, Ery. You're the first girl I've ever told. First girl I thought wanted to know."

"I won't let go. I won't."

He was in Viet Nam six months. That was the rotation then. When he came back, he had the choice of staying with the unit, of advancing as a mechanical engineer. But the experience had opened his eyes to something: he wanted to get a real education; he wanted to do more with a newly-discovered talent for mechanical design.

His obligation to the military over, he took the chance to leave like so many others did after that experience. The war was growing less and less popular in Australia. But for him, it wasn't disillusionment so much as it was a desire to have a life.

From the Army, he stayed in Sydney, enrolled in university. His eye was on a personal prize: he wanted to design cars, not just rebuild their engines.

This was what my father had seen in Johnny that night over dinner when quizzing him about being a mechanic all his life. My dad had seen that Johnny had something he wanted to do with his life even while he toiled in the garage doing something he liked. I had never even thought to ask that kind of question.

"An engineer?" I asked him.

"Yeah, Ery." His voice changed and got a bit cocky but it was covering up that he'd just told someone else his dream and that he was worried she wouldn't think he could live up to it. "Not a real exciting thing, right? Not like a cop or a general...or an SAS guy, is it?"

"You're not in competition with anyone," I said. But somewhere inside me, I admit, there was a glow that formed at the thought that maybe he did feel some competition with someone I'd dated in my past. "And if you were, Johnny Ryan, you'd wipe them all off the board."

He leaned into me and we swung each side to side. He kissed in at my neck, giving me a very loud and very wet smooch. It had been a good thing to tell him.

"Can you see me? Some fancy guy like that with a proper degree and a job where I don't have to work in a grease pit all day? Ah, well. Got a bit sidetracked coming here, didn't I? Not quite on my way, am I, now?"

I turned in his arms to look deep in his eyes as the moon and stars danced there. "I can see you doing that, Johnny. I think you'd be really good at it. Seems so perfect to me. You've got such talent with fixing cars. Imagine putting that together with knowing how to design them?"

"Think so? Really?"

"Really. Really and truly."

He kissed me then. It was soft and full of all sorts of things a man gives a woman when he is just figuring it out that she believes in him.

In Sydney, at university, he was taking classes to realize his new ambition. He was pretty single-minded, he said, and doing well. And then, for some reason, he got the first class that was truly difficult and he began to doubt his dream.

It was electrical engineering. He was not the only student struggling. In the friends he'd made there, not a one of them was passing the course.

One night they were all bitching and moaning...and they decided to go out to drown their brains since they didn't seem to be picking up the stuff anyway.

I thought about my brothers and how this would be just the kind of thing they'd have done in college...in fact, I suppose I knew lots of students, male and female, who'd do this. But listening to him talk about him and his buddies...it made me think about how there always seems to be a boy who lingers inside every man; a boy who comes out to play and be indulged. I find that incredibly attractive, I must admit. My father told me once that this was a secret to men that once women learned it, they understood men so much better.

It made me smile to be in Johnny's arms, to think about the boy in the man.

That night they were out drinking away their sorrows, Johnny and his friends ended up on a street of bars none of them had been on before. He doesn't remember too much from then.

When he woke up the next morning, he was no longer in Sydney. He was in a new city, a new time. He was with Colin.

Not that Colin was telling him much. Most of what he learned he figured out on his own. For a while, he tried to get back to Sydney. He met Dom. He met Alex. He met Andy.

"For some reason, that makes me so sad," I said to him.

"Why is that, love?"

"Thinking about you having to adjust...I wish I'd been there." I thought about him saying that to me earlier in the night; how things had not been pretty for him in Australia and he'd wished I'd been there. And here I was, wishing I'd been there when he first washed up here.

"You're here now, Ery. Y'know?"

"Do you still want to design cars?"

"Yeah. I do."

"Then..."

"I'm taking courses I can fit in around work."

"I didn't know that."

"Didn't want to say...not to you. Afraid you'd think..."

"Think what? That you have a dream?"

"Seems out of reach sometimes. Like maybe I got too far ahead of what I should have wanted. Maybe I should have gone home...to Junee..."

"We wouldn't have met."

"No. We wouldn't have met."

"That would be awful for me."

"Too right."

I pinched him and he giggled. "For you, too, Johnny Ryan!"

"Yeah, Ery, for me, too. For me most of all, I think. Right?"

"I'm glad we met."

"I'm glad you came back to the Pub."

"I remember the first night you showed up at the Pub."

He turned me back around so I was leaning back against him. This is a sore subject between us but it shouldn't be.

"You were alone when you came in," I said, forcing him to just talk about this like it was normal, because it should have been. We didn't even know each other then. But because I'd made one snide and jealous comment about that night, it had been a sticking point between us.

"Supposed to be meeting Colin for a drink."

"Had you known about that place before? About the other men?"

"Sure. I mean, I'd already met three men who were versions of me, right? So I knew about the others. Knew a lot about 'em. Blokes talk about that kind of thing...about what kind of other men in the group, right?"

"I remember when you came in. I didn't know who you were. You looked so incredible."

"Yeah?"

"Oh yes."

"Noticed me right off, did you, love?"

"I did."

"What was it you noticed, Ery?"

I blushed in the night and giggled. He tickled me, said to tell him why I was laughing. I said, "The way you walked. The way you seemed so earnest."

"Made quite the impression? No wonder you couldn't be bothered."

"Oh, I was bothered."

"Then in Hawaii..."

"Yeah. Hawaii. You looked so fine in those swim trunks and then you took me to that beach that turned out to be for nudists. I wanted you to do something...to dare me into something. I thought you'd be a wild guy after what I'd heard...I was hoping we'd do something naughty and totally degenerate." He cleared his throat. I thought maybe that had been a bit too honest to say.

"Nice girl like you, Ery? Shame on you, love."

"You saying nice girls can't do wild things with a guy? That seems pretty boring."

"Wild things? Remember I asked you once...you said...when you say wild things, turns me on, love, but..."

"But I'm too nice for you to see that way? Johnny..."

"No, no. Love! Ery!"

I slid off the front of the truck before he could stop me. When I was standing on the ground, I turned to look back at him...this boy who'd always been a man in waiting just never knew it until he went off to war, maybe. I don't know...I just know he's always been a man with me even if there are precious parts of him that are more boyish than he might care for me to know about. But I treasure those aspects. I just treasure more the man he is with me.

"I want more than that, Johnny. More than being a nice girl...not with you. I want to be a woman just as badly as you want a man for me."

"Ery..."

I pulled off my top. "Come be wild with me, Johnny. Even if just a little."

When he didn't seem to want to move, I thought I'd made a real wrong expectation about feeling free enough to be myself around him. So I turned but before I did, I gave him a look that spoke desires for things I might not have been able to name but that I was willing to try with him...and only him. He was who I trusted. He was who I burned up for. He was who touched me and made me lust for things of unknown complexities and things I thought I'd want but never find a man I'd want to do with.

I kicked off my shoes and walked toward the lake, to that gentle curve of land that meets water. To the dark sandy perimeter that was before me.

He touched me at about the same moment the lake's waters curled up over my ankles.

"You've shown me yours...let me show you mine," I said to him and closed my eyes.

"Tell me," he whispered. He was wanting, too.

"Tell you what?" I asked him.

"Everything," he said, all husky. 

I stripped to nothing. He did as well. His hands pushed me forward, into the water.

This was where I told him. But not everything because how can you tell everything when you don't know what that may be?

He lifted me along his body as the water buoyed us. I wrapped my legs around his waist. We made love there, under the skies, out in the open.

We have much to learn. We have no reason to stop. Not now. Not when the lessons we learn are so captivating and so mesmerizing.