The Brave (7 page)

By that time things had already started going wrong with Gina. Their early arguments had been mostly about her family. Her father had never taken to Tom nor tried too hard to conceal his opinion that his "princess," his beloved only daughter, could have done a lot better. C. J. Laidlaw was a bull of a man, tall and wide shouldered, with an ego and temperament to match. His views on almost everything, especially politics, were the polar opposite of Tom's. He liked to goad Tom, trying to flush out some liberal opinion that he could then shoot down. He had a disdainful way of asking about Tom's work, his early and largely unpublished efforts as a writer, and especially his interest in the Blackfeet. He clearly thought his new son-in-law ought to go out and get a proper job.

For the first few years of the marriage, Tom would smile and try not to be drawn, but after Danny was born, he started standing up for himself. At a Thanksgiving dinner just after Danny's third birthday, he and C.J. had had a blistering fight about Reagan's foreign policy. Gina, tellingly, sided with her father. After that things were never quite the same.

It was around that time that Tom's drinking began to get out of control. Even after years of therapy and analysis and AA meetings, he still wasn't sure why it had happened. There were simply too many reasons to choose from.

The pattern was that he and Gina would fight, usually about something to do with Danny. He hadn't been the easiest of babies. He had colic and for the first two years of his life barely stopped crying. Tom and Gina grew ragged from lack of sleep. Sometimes it felt as if they were hanging on to sanity by their fingernails. She would get angry and tell him he was no good as a father, that he left her to do all the hard stuff, that he put his work before his responsibilities to her and his son. She said she hated Missoula and blamed Tom for dragging her away from her family and friends on the other side of the mountains.

The problem was, though he never admitted it to her, Tom thought she was right. He felt they had made a big mistake in having a baby. And he came to believe that his own unhappy childhood meant he simply wasn't qualified to be a parent. He began to speculate that because everyone he'd ever loved and been loved by had died or deserted him, perhaps he'd grown too thick a carapace and was incapable of love. When Gina attacked him, instead of fighting back, he just took it and apologized and this only seemed to make her more angry. Tom had retreated into his work, finding excuses to go into town. Another trip to the UM library, he would tell her. Research.

And in a way, that's what it was. He was plumbing new, dark depths of himself. He would spend long afternoons and, as the months went by, longer evenings too, in various dingy downtown bars with other refugees from life, each with his or her own set of sorrows but all bonded by the same self-pity.

Tom guessed that in most marriage breakdowns there was a point of no return, when apology and forgiveness lose any meaning and it becomes clear to both parties that this is how it's going to be. That point, for Gina, was the canoe trip he took with Danny, just the two of them, a few days before the boy's fifth birthday.

Tom had by then taken his drinking to a new level. He'd started sneaking a swig or two in the mornings and increased the number of bottles he hid around the house: behind books on his study shelves, in his old cowboy boots in the closet, even out in the woodshed. The canoe trip had been canceled twice already because of the weather and although that Sunday morning he had a wicked hangover, he wasn't going to let the boy down again.

It was a clear, cold day in early spring and Danny was fizzing with excitement from the moment he got up. He tried to help Tom load the old green Coleman canoe onto the car roof but kept getting in the way and Tom told him, too sharply, to be careful. Gina must have heard because she came out and stood watching, with her arms folded and that expression on her face, a sort of weary, critical resignation, a look more powerful than any words. Danny went to stand beside her.

"Are we sure this is a good idea?" she said.

"C'mon, we're going to have a great time, aren't we, Danny?"

Danny nodded but didn't look convinced.

An hour later they were on the river and all was perfect: the sun dancing in diamonds on the water, the cottonwoods along the banks wearing their first haze of green. Tom's head had started to clear. Danny, in his yellow life vest and his red-and-white beanie, was grinning and whooping.

Tom had done the run a dozen times but never with Danny. It was nothing too taxing, just a few stretches of mild white water. Gina was going to meet them downstream with the car in two hours' time. They stopped in a sunny meadow to eat the sandwiches she'd made for them and then stood throwing pebbles across the water.

"Dad, can we do this again?"

"Whenever you want."

They put their life vests back on and clambered again into the canoe. Danny was sitting in the forward seat with his little paddle. He hadn't quite gotten the hang of it but it didn't matter. It was only when the river narrowed and they reached the top of the last stretch of rapids that Tom realized there was more water in the river than he'd thought. There was a loud rushing sound. Diagonal waves were bouncing back from both banks. Tom told Danny to put his paddle on the floor and to hold on to the gunwales with both hands. The boy must have heard the edge in his voice for he suddenly looked scared.

Quite how it happened, Tom would never be sure. They had shipped a fair amount of water in the first hundred yards of the rapids and with every tilt of the canoe it rushed from side to side and over their feet, making everything unstable. And because there was more water in the river than on the other occasions he'd paddled there, Tom couldn't figure out what route to take through the rocks. Suddenly one of the waves rebounding from the right-hand bank slammed against the bows and the canoe swung wildly around.

"Daddy!" Danny screamed.

"Hold tight! It's okay."

But it wasn't okay. Before Tom could correct it, the canoe got sucked backward into a fast-flowing channel between the rocks. Tom had to look over his shoulder to see what lay ahead. When he glanced back at Danny, he saw plain terror on the boy's face.

"It's okay, son. It's okay."

Ahead of them were two large boulders with a narrow gushing gap between them, the water spouting in a huge silver arc down to a pool beyond. If the canoe had entered the gap straight they might have been lucky and not capsized. But the rear end crashed against the right-hand rock and there was a crunching sound and the whole boat lurched as it squeezed through the gap and a moment later it flipped over completely and they were both under water.

Tom could remember the sudden silence, the green gray slabs of rock on the riverbed below him, the swirl of bubbles, his floating paddle and the upturned canoe above him. The water was so cold it hurt his head. He struck out for the surface, his clothes dragging heavily and his lungs fit to burst. Even as he gulped the air he was looking for Danny. But there was no sign of him. Tom thrashed around in circles.

"Danny! Danny!"

Then he saw the red-and-white beanie bob to the surface and a moment later the wide-eyed face of his son, gasping, gulping the air. Tom swam heavily toward him.

"Daddy, are you all right?"

"Yes. Are you?"

Danny nodded. He was clutching his paddle. The pool was calm and Tom managed to haul Danny to the bank then went back to get the upturned canoe. They hadn't brought a change of clothes and by the time they'd paddled on down to the place where they'd arranged to meet Gina, Danny was quaking with cold, his teeth chattering. When he saw his mother standing on the bank he started to cry.

"What happened?"

"We had a bit of an accident," Tom said.

"Jesus, Tom."

She carried Danny to the car and stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped him in her sweater and coat and sat in the passenger seat, cuddling and soothing him while Tom loaded the canoe onto the roof. They drove home in a silence colder than the river. When Tom dared glance at her, she was staring straight ahead, tears running down her cheeks.

For about a month, whenever he closed his eyes, Tom replayed the scene of their capsize. The bubbles, the upturned canoe, his little boy bobbing to the surface. Daddy, are you all right? Gina didn't say a word about it, even when he begged her to let him talk about it. She didn't need to. And there was probably nothing he could say that would have changed her mind. His drinking was to blame and there was to be no redemption. He wasn't fit to be a father.

Tom had the museum almost to himself this afternoon. The soles of his shoes squeaked loudly on the polished floor as he walked from room to room, trying to find his favorite paintings. He stood for a long time in front of the picture that had once so enthralled Danny. It was called The Fireboat and showed four Indian braves on the top of a rocky cliff, a wondrous evening sky of purple blue behind them. They were on horseback and staring with bemused expressions at a steamboat making its way up the river far below them.

"Who's on the boat?" Danny had asked.

"White men."

"What do they want?"

"They want the Indians' land."

"Do they get it?"

"Oh, yes. They promised they wouldn't take it, but they did."

Tom tried to summon the feelings he'd had that day with Danny but he couldn't even find an echo. Only the hollowing memory of his long-lost son and his own lost self.

TOMMY AND DICKIE SAT on the vast cream leather back seat of the Bentley, looking out of the open rear window at the crowd of Ashlawn boys that still engulfed Ray Montane and Diane. The boys were jostling one another to get autographs and they kept shouting out Red! Red! and making guns with their fingers and thumbs then blowing the smoke off the end of the barrel which was a sort of trademark thing that Red McGraw did in Sliprock, like the way he said See ya along the trail at the end of every episode.

Ray had long ago run out of the Red McGraw photos that he had brought with him and instead was autographing Speech Day programmes and any other scrap of paper that was thrust in front of him. Diane, at his side, was being kept almost as busy. The photographer from the local newspaper, a rumpled little man whose red cheeks now glistened with sweat, had taken about a hundred pictures of them already but was still snapping away.

"Red! Red! Sign this!" the boys called out. "Please! Diane! You too!"

Charlie Chin Rawlston was standing by, trying to look important and making sure things didn't get too out of hand. He had been smarming up to Ray and Diane ever since they arrived two hours ago, though Dickie said somebody must have first had to explain to the old fool who they were.

Tommy still couldn't quite believe they were here. In her last letter, his mother had told him she and his father wouldn't be coming to the school's summer Speech Day and that Diane would be there instead. But there had been no mention of Ray Montane coming too. Perhaps they'd wanted it to be a surprise.

And it certainly had been. In fact their appearance was probably the biggest sensation Ashlawn had known since one of the chimneys got struck by lightning and crashed down on Matron's Morris Minor (unfortunately she hadn't been in it at the time). Their arrival had been perfectly timed. Parents and boys had all gathered down at the sports field, eating their picnic lunches and watching the cricket team get its annual thrashing from the fathers. The parents' cars, whose make and age announced precisely the social status of their owners, were parked side by side around the boundary, plaid rugs and picnic hampers laid between them on the soggy grass.

Gloomy and famished, Tommy and Dickie sat watching from the steps of the pavilion. Because Dickie's parents were in Hong Kong and never came to any school events, Tommy had invited him to share the picnic Diane was supposed to be bringing. She was already two hours late and Tommy was mortified. And the sight of everyone tucking into their cucumber sandwiches, pork pies and chicken legs was almost unbearable. He was about to apologize for the tenth time when in through the school gates purred a big white Bentley.

It had darkened windows and by the time it had glided across the grass and pulled up some distance from the other cars, at least three hundred pairs of eyes were upon it. There was a hush of anticipation and for a long while, nothing happened. The car just stood there. By now the cricket match itself had come to a halt. Every player, even the umpires in their white coats and panama hats, stood waiting to see who was going to emerge.

"Look," Dickie said.

The driver's-side door of the Bentley was opening. A chauffeur in a dark blue cap and uniform got out and opened the rear door.

"You know who it is, don't you?" Dickie whispered.

" 'Course I don't."

"It's your sister, dumbo. Look!"

And there she was, stepping gracefully out of the car, laughing at something as she smoothed her dress and adjusted her sunglasses.

"Crikey, just look at her," Dickie murmured in wonder.

"And look who's with her!"

Except for the white Stetson, Ray Montane was dressed entirely in black. He was wearing a bootlace tie and a belt with a big silver buckle shaped like a coiled rattlesnake. His boots had silver tips and his shirt was studded with what looked like diamonds, though Dickie said they were probably only rhinestones which weren't so precious. The only thing missing was his gun belt.

Oddly, he didn't really look too out of place because everybody seemed to dress up strangely for Speech Day. Charlie Chin and Ducky Lawrence and some of the other masters were wearing their college gowns, voluminous black capes with giant hoods, trimmed with red or purple satin or white fur, that flopped down their backs. All the boys and staff had flowers with sprigs of fern pinned to their lapels and some of the fathers were wearing gaudily striped blazers. Most of the mothers and older sisters had hats with flowers or feathers in them.

But not Diane. Her hair fell loose in thick, gleaming swirls that bounced as she walked. She was still tanned from her trip to California and was wearing high-heeled sandals and a pink dress that showed her shoulders and enough bosom to have all the boys and most of the fathers transfixed.

In front of everyone she gave Tommy a hug that seemed to go on forever and squeezed all the air from his lungs. Then she said hello to Dickie and made him blush by kissing him on the cheek. Ray shook hands with them both, telling Tommy he'd heard all about him. Tommy hoped that didn't include the bed-wetting. He had the bluest eyes Tommy had ever seen. In the back of the Bentley was a wickerwork picnic hamper at least three times the size of anyone else's. It had a giant F&M on the lid which Diane said stood for the famous shop where they'd bought it. It had all kinds of strange things in it, like pate made from goose liver and black fish eggs called caviar, which Dickie loved but Tommy thought were disgusting. The chauffeur laid rugs on the grass and the two boys sat down and stuffed themselves until they felt sick.

Charlie Chin was supposed to be entertaining the red-faced colonel who had earlier dished out the school prizes and sent everyone to sleep with a long speech about the importance of being a team player, but you could tell he was itching to meet Diane and Ray and eventually he managed to and insisted on giving them a tour of the school. Tommy went with them and soon wished he hadn't because the headmaster kept patting him on the back and sharing little jokes with him as if they were the best of friends. The hypocrisy was sickening. As they walked past the changing room Tommy wanted to say and here's where this slimy creep enjoys thrashing the living daylights out of us.

But something even better happened. Just when they were having tea outside the cricket pavilion, Tommy spotted Whippet Brent talking to the colonel's little ferret-faced wife and whispered to Diane that he was the most savage and sadistic beater of them all. Ray Montane overheard.

"Did he ever beat you, Tommy?"

"Loads of times. He beats Dickie almost every night."

"He's a real pervert," Dickie said.

Ray gave a thoughtful nod.

"What's his name?"

"Mr Brent. We call him The Whippet."

Before anyone thought to stop him, Ray walked straight over and tapped The Whippet gently on the shoulder.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he said, touching the brim of his Stetson to the ferret. "I just need a quiet word with this gentleman. We'll only be a moment."

Brent frowned but allowed himself to be steered aside. Ray leaned in close and talked quietly to him for a few moments. Then he put a hand on Brent's shoulder, smiled sweetly at him and walked back to join Tommy and Diane. The Whippet looked as if he'd just seen his own ghost.

"What on earth did you say to him?" Diane whispered.

"I told him if he ever laid a finger on either of you again, I'd come back and shove his whippety pervert nose right up his ass."

Now, as the afternoon drew to a close and Ray and Diane were standing by the car, signing the last few autographs, Charlie Chin moved in again.

"All right, boys, that's enough now. No more autographs. Mr Montane and Miss Reed have got a very busy schedule, I'm sure."

"Hell, Charlie, I was figuring on staying all day," Ray said.

The headmaster threw back his head and brayed with laughter as if this were the funniest remark he'd ever heard. Ray looked into the car and gave Tommy a sly sideways wink from under the brim of his Stetson. Tommy already liked him, though he still couldn't get used to the idea that this huge star, Red McGraw from Sliprock, was now his sister's boyfriend. It was almost as amazing as if she had come home from Hollywood on the arm of Flint McCullough. Ray looked quite a bit older than he did on TV—and certainly a lot older than Diane—but that was probably because he spent so much time out in the sun, riding the range.

"Well, I certainly hope you'll come and see us again," the headmaster went on, his eyes darting furtively to Diane's breasts. "Both of you. I mean... Um, in fact, Mr Montane, perhaps you would like to come and be our guest speaker at next year's Speech Day?"

"Well, Charlie, that's real—"

"You don't have to answer now. I know in the glittery world of show business one has to speak to one's agent and all that malarkey." He laughed loudly at his own worldly wit.

It was six o'clock now and Speech Day was officially over. The boys were allowed to go home until the same time the following evening. And then just five more days and it would be the end of term and home for two whole months. Tommy quietly asked Diane if Dickie could come home with them because he had nowhere else to go but she said no, perhaps some other time. There were important family matters they had to discuss, she said. There was an odd, almost nervous look in her eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"I'll explain later, darling."

"It doesn't matter," Dickie said. "This dump's okay when there's nobody here."

He climbed out of the car and said goodbye and after more gushing from Charlie Chin, the chauffeur ushered Ray and Diane into the back seat, either side of Tommy, and off they went. A posse of boys ran alongside the car all the way to the school gates, waving and cheering and shouting See ya along the trail.

Then there was silence. Ray took two cigarettes from a silver case, lit them both and passed one to Diane. For a long time nobody spoke.

"Is Ray coming home with us?" Tommy whispered.

"Yes, but he's not going to stay. He's got to get back to London. He's flying home tomorrow morning."

"All the way to California?"

"That's right, son," Ray said.

"That's a shame."

"Yep, it sure is. But you know what, Tommy? I reckon pretty soon the two of us will be seeing a whole lot more of each other."

"Oh."

Ray glanced at Diane and Tommy turned to look at her too and saw that same odd look in her eyes. She tried to smile then turned away and stared out of the window. And although Ray and Tommy chatted about all kinds of things throughout the journey home, she didn't say another word.

Tommy hadn't been allowed home from school for many weeks and so when the Bentley pulled into the driveway he was expecting his parents might come out to greet him. But they didn't. And Ray didn't even come into the house. They all got out of the car and the chauffeur put Diane's leather suitcase down on the gravel beside her. Ray shook Tommy firmly by the hand.

"Look after my gal for me, okay, pardner?"

"Okay."

Ray grinned and did the little smoking gun thing with his fingers and thumb and Tommy did it back to him. Then Ray put his arms around Diane and kissed her full on the lips.

"Good luck, sugar," he said. "You'll see. It's gonna work out fine."

Diane didn't say anything, just nodded. Then Ray got back into the car and the chauffeur shut the door and Tommy and Diane stood and watched as the Bentley turned in the tiny driveway then purred off down the lane. Diane put an arm around Tommy's shoulders.

"Come on," she said. "We'd better go inside."

* * *

She had rehearsed the speech a hundred times in her head, even done it aloud in front of the mirror, as she did when she was learning her lines for a new play. But it didn't seem to help. She felt more nervous than she'd ever felt on stage, even on a first night in the West End. Plays were just make-believe but this was real life. What was more, she already knew the audience was going to be hostile.

Her parents were waiting for them in the lounge. The cricket scores were being read out on the television but nobody was paying any attention. Her father was sitting in his usual armchair, smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper. Her mother was at one end of the sofa with a half-empty glass of gin and tonic in her hand. You could tell from her eyes and the flush in her cheeks that it wasn't her first. As Diane and Tommy came into the room she leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

"Hello, Tommy," she said wearily.

"Hello."

Tommy walked over to her and she turned her cheek so that he could kiss it. Diane could tell from his frown that he already sensed something was wrong. Her father cleared his throat and gave him an awkward, forced smile.

"Hello, old chap. How was Speech Day?"

"It was fine. What's the matter?"

Diane's parents were both looking at her, waiting for her to speak. Her father looked sad and weary and suddenly very old. Her mother's eyes glinted with a cold and barely contained anger. After all that had been said during the past week, the shouting and threats and recrimination, it was all Diane could expect. They had spent three whole days and nights arguing before she had finally stormed out and gone back to London to be with Ray at his hotel. He was the only one who understood. Without him she wouldn't have been able to summon the courage.