The Brave (27 page)

IT TOOK them nine days to drive to Montana, about twice as long as Diane said it might take. They crossed four states and clocked up more than a thousand miles. Sometimes they stopped at diners or cafes, but mostly they bought food at grocery stores or gas stations and ate from their laps in the car. They talked and talked and sang every song they could think of, went number by number through the musicals they knew by heart from the records Diane used to bring home from London—My Fair Lady and Gigi, South Pacific and Oklahoma! And when they grew hoarse, they would switch on the radio and listen to stations so strange they might have been beamed from outer space.

In the afternoons Tommy would start scouring the map and pick a likely town to spend the night and they would check in to some ramshackle inn or motel and huddle together in bed, eating crackers and cheese and apples in front of the TV.

Several times they drove past movie theaters that were playing The Forsaken and Tommy pleaded to go see it again but Diane said she simply couldn't bear to. In a restaurant one night in Ely, Nevada, a shy young woman hovered around their table then begged their pardon and asked if she was Diane Reed, the movie star. Diane laughed and said, golly, how she wished she were. Folks often told her there was a likeness, she said.

And all the while the weather grew steadily colder. As they crossed the state line into Utah, it began to snow and just north of Salt Lake City they were caught in a blizzard and would surely have frozen to death had an old and toothless rancher out with his snowplow not rescued them and given them shelter for the night.

It was the most exciting journey of Tommy's life. Looking out with wonder at the vast unpeopled landscape that unfolded before them, the mountains and rivers, the forests of frosted pine, he felt like an intrepid pioneer or wagon train scout from a century before. Flint McCullough in a Galaxie convertible.

With snow swirling around her legs, Diane called Cal from a phone booth in Idaho and she came back to the car beaming and saying it was as if he'd been expecting them. They were to call again when they reached Choteau.

Choteau was a pretty little town on the railroad, with a broad main street lined with trees. Men in pickups touched the brims of their cowboy hats as they drove by. That morning there was a foot of fresh snow and it sparkled in the sun and the sky was a deep, clear blue and seemed somehow to have been stretched wider than a sky should be. They called from the post office and waited there in the warmth for fifteen minutes until Cal arrived in an old pea green pickup. When they stepped out to meet him none of them said a word. Cal just opened his arms and held them both for a long time and Diane started to cry and laugh at the same time then got all embarrassed about it.

John and Rose Matthieson turned out to be every bit as sweet and gentle as Cal was. They welcomed them into their home like family. John was tall and bony and walked with a stick. He wore heavy tweed vests and shirts with no collars and reminded Tommy a lot of his grandfather. Rose, whose Blackfeet name was Little Calf, was a good six inches smaller than Tommy. She had kind, coal black eyes and long black hair that she wore in a braid that reached to her waist. She didn't speak a lot but smiled all the time.

The land around the ranch was flat and scrubby but the view of the Rocky Mountain Front, some twenty miles farther west, took your breath away. It was a giant wall of rock that blazed pink when the sun rose and purple when it set and Tommy came to think of it as having been placed there to keep all that was bad in the world at bay.

The ranch house itself was small and modest. But half a mile along the gravel road that led to the mountains there was a cozy log cabin that Cal had recently done up for himself and this was where he insisted the two of them should stay. He said he still had his old room in the ranch house and was more than happy to be there.

"Just watch out for the grizzlies," he said, as he showed them around.

"You're kidding," Diane said.

"You're right. They're all asleep right now. But come April they'll be waking up and rolling on down here. It's no big deal. You just have to keep your eyes open."

"Oh, we won't be staying that long."

"I sure hope you will. There's a lot of work to be done around here and I was counting on Tom giving me a hand."

That first afternoon Tommy helped him load some hay onto the pickup and they drove out to the pasture to see the horses who came loping through the snow to meet them. Chester's coat had grown all shaggy and he kept whinnying and snorting and nuzzling Tommy's shoulder and Cal said that meant he surely recognized him.

Diane made Tommy promise not to breathe a word about what had happened with Ray. She said she would tell him when the time was right and until then they should just pretend they had come on the spur of the moment, that it was a kind of surprise vacation.

The snow melted and the world transformed. The meadows filled with wildflowers and the horses lost their winter coats and shone like satin in the spring sunshine. Tommy went to school in Choteau and made new friends. One day they were shown a film about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. It was apparently very important not to panic. And just to get everybody used to the idea, the whole school had to do drop drill. There was an intercom in every classroom and as soon as the principal hit the button in his office and sounded the alarm you had to dive under your desk, shut your eyes and cover your head with your arms. Nobody took it too seriously.

In the afternoons and on weekends Tommy and Diane helped around the ranch and went riding. The Matthiesons had about a hundred head of cattle, Herefords, and Cal taught Tommy how to rope and ride among them, separating the ones he wanted from the herd. At the end of April the neighbors came around and everybody helped brand the new calves then sat down at a long trestle table outside the barn and ate a wonderful meal that Rose and Diane had prepared.

Rose thought it was funny that Tommy knew a few words of the Blackfeet language. She had a high-pitched squeal of a laugh, the kind that always got everybody else laughing too. They all ate together every evening down at the ranch house and Tommy would help (or mostly hinder) her with the cooking and get her talking about her parents and what life had been like growing up on the reservation.

"Oh, you don't want to know about that," she would always say. And Tommy would say he did, he really did, and pester her until she told him another story. One weekend in July they all drove up to the reservation in Browning for some special ceremony where everybody wore feathered bonnets and danced and sang. They met Rose's brother and his children and everybody made a big fuss of Tommy and wanted to hear him speak their language.

Quite when or how it happened, Tommy would never know. Either he was too young at the time to pick up the signs or else, more likely, Diane and Cal had taken care to disguise it. But at some point during the summer it became clear that they were more than just friends. When the evenings grew warm, after Tommy had gone to bed, they took to sitting out on the little porch behind the cabin and would watch the sun slide down into the mountains. Tommy couldn't hear what they were saying but there was an unmistakable tone to their voices and once he sneaked a look and saw Cal had his arm around Diane, her head resting against him. She seemed happier than Tommy had ever known her.

Maybe it was just the actress in her, but it still sometimes surprised Diane how effortlessly she could slip into a new world and make it her own. On their journey north she had been so full of doubt that she had almost turned the car around. She'd been worried about whether Cal had really meant it when he asked them to come visit, whether it was wrong and presumptuous. But from the moment he showed up to meet them at the post office that first crystalline morning, it had felt like coming home.

This didn't stop her worrying about what people would make of her sudden disappearance. She had called Herb Kanter and told him, in confidence, what had happened and where they were. He was kind and understanding and made her promise to keep in touch. And as the weeks went by, he kept her up to date with what was being churned out of the Hollywood rumor mill.

Herb had put out a press release saying that Diane was convalescing after a sudden illness. Despite his efforts, it didn't fool anyone. The word was that she had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown. According to Herb, Ray was the main source of this. Several newspapers quoted him as saying he had become concerned about his wife's behavior, that in the weeks prior to her disappearance, she had become increasingly unstable. Louella Parsons kept the story going for the best part of a month, with headlines urging readers to CATCH A FALLING STAR. She called Diane the star who never was, a one-pic wonder, even drew comparisons with the demented Frances Farmer and poor Peg Entwistle (that other tragic British failure) who'd leaped to her death from the Hollywood sign.

Diane found that she didn't care. She was only happy to be free of the place, free of all the phonies and the fakery and the trashy venality that was Hollywood. When Herb warned her that her career could be jeopardized, she actually laughed. All that mattered was here and now, watching Tommy grow and thrive and turn golden under the wide-angled blue of the Montana sky. And finding a man, at last, with whom she felt safe.

For two weeks, every evening after supper, Tommy and Cal had been breaking in a young horse, though Cal didn't like the word breaking. He said the last thing you wanted to do with a horse was break its spirit. He preferred to call it starting. You had to build a partnership, he said, help the animal find the confidence to team up. The horse was a fine cream-colored mare with a proud strut and an almost regal tilt to her head. Though still a hand too big for Tommy, she was to be his. Tommy named her Cloud.

Diane was helping Rose clear up after supper, while John sat watching the news on their ancient black-and-white TV. The picture was like driving in the rain without wipers. The signal had to fly fifty-five miles from Great Falls and by the time it reached the antenna on the ranch house roof it was too tired to deliver any more than Channel Five with no sound and Channel Three with no picture. It was enough however to give an idea of the rampant paranoia that had seized the world beyond the mountains. It sounded as if the Russians were due to invade any moment.

Diane said goodnight and stepped out through the screen door. She stood for a moment on the baked dirt of the yard, staring west toward the mountains. The sun still had some way to travel before it vanished behind them but already the sky was getting ready for its routine show of pink and red and orange swirls. High in the jet stream two intersecting vapor trails drifted west in a vast and crumbling letter X. It had been another clear, hot day without a stir of wind. The air had that smell Diane had come to love, the smoky whiff of dust and sage.

She walked up along the dirt road toward the corrals. She could hear their voices, Tommy calling the mare's name and Cal laughing. They were too busy to notice her arrival and she leaned with her arms folded on the bleached wood rail of the arena to watch. A cloud of sunlit dust glowed like amber around them. They had the horse saddled and Cal was holding her bridle and stroking her neck while Tommy got ready to climb aboard. The little mare scuffed the ground with her front foot and took a few small steps sideways.

"It's all right, sweetheart," Cal said. "That's my good girl, that's my beauty. Okay, Tom, slowly now."

He guided Tommy's boot into the stirrup and hoisted him gently into the saddle, talking quietly all the while to the horse. She tossed her head and took a few quick steps back and to the side. But then she settled and stood and Cal kept stroking her and telling her it was okay, everything was okay.

"Hey, Tom," Cal said. "You did that like you'd done it a hundred times before. Congratulations. How does she feel?"

"She feels great."

"You look like you were made for each other. How about taking her for a little walk?"

"Sure. Hi, Diane!"

"Look at you," Diane said.

"He did all the hard stuff," Cal said. "The guy's going to put me out of work if I don't watch out."

He led Tommy around the arena a couple of times and then asked him how he felt about going on his own. Tommy nodded gravely and said he felt fine about it and he pushed his hat down firmly onto his head and gathered the reins and when they came near to where Diane was, Cal let go of the bridle and stood back. And they watched him ride slowly around the arena three more times with the little mare blowing and snuffling as if she'd done it a hundred times before.

The sun was slipping behind the mountains now and in the purple twilight they led the horse to the pasture in front of the cabin and took off her saddle and bridle and turned her loose. And the three of them stood and watched her run off with the other young horses, nonchalantly tossing her head as if telling them what she'd just done and how it was no big deal.

Back at the cabin, Tommy had a glass of milk and a cookie then got ready for bed and Cal sat on the boy's bunk and read him a story from an old book he'd had as a child, called Tales of the Blackfeet Nation. Diane settled on the old couch that they'd hauled out on to the porch. She couldn't hear every word but the story was about a clever hunter called Little Teeth and his thwarted attempts to catch a wise old bull elk.

When the story was finished, Cal came to find her and she went inside to Tommy's room to say goodnight.