The Brave

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY NICHOLAS EVANS

COPYRIGHT

SEMPER FORTIS

Chapter ONE

Chapter TWO

Chapter THREE

Chapter FOUR

Chapter FIVE

Chapter SIX

Chapter SEVEN

Chapter EIGHT

Chapter NINE

Chapter TEN

Chapter ELEVEN

Chapter TWELVE

Chapter THIRTEEN

Chapter FOURTEEN

Chapter FIFTEEN

Chapter SIXTEEN

Chapter SEVENTEEN

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Chapter NINETEEN

Chapter TWENTY

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

Chapter TWENTY-NINE

Chapter THIRTY

Chapter THIRTY-ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Also by Nicholas Evans

The Horse Whisperer

The Loop

The Smoke Jumper

The Divide

THE BRAVE

A Novel

NICHOLAS EVANS

LITTLE BROWN AND COMPANY

NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON

Copyright (c) 2010 by Nicholas Evans

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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First eBook Edition: October 2010

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-12563-5

The Brave

Nicholas Evans

The free have lost what mattered,

The brave stay home in bed.

The white hat now bespattered

With the blood of needless dead.

Our heroes all are banished.

We rode them out of town,

The valiant who vanished

When the sun was going down.

—''Men in White Hats'' 
Shane Van Clois

THE BOY FOLLOWED the guard along the corridor, watching the sway of his wide backside and the belt with its handcuffs and baton and the big bunch of keys that jangled as he walked. The back of the man's blue shirt was stained with sweat and he kept wiping his neck with the palm of one hand. It was a part of the prison the boy hadn't been allowed into before. The walls were bare and whitewashed and there were no windows, just fluorescent boxes on the ceiling speckled inside with dead bugs. The air was still and hot and smelled of stale cabbage. He could hear distant voices, someone shouting, someone laughing, the clank and echo of metal doors. Somewhere a radio was playing the Beatles' new number one,
"A Hard Day's Night."

The boy's weekly visits usually took place in the long hall next to the waiting room. He was almost always the only child there and the guards knew him by now and were friendly, chatting with him as they led him to one of the booths. Then he'd have to sit there staring through the glass divider, waiting for them to bring his mother in through the steel door in the back wall. There were always two guards with rifles. He would never forget the shock of that first time they had led her in, the sight of her in her ugly brown prison dress and handcuffs and ankle chains, her hair cut short like a boy's. He'd felt a pain in his chest, as if his heart were being prized open like a mussel shell.

When she came in she always scanned the booths for him and smiled when she saw him and the guard would bring her over and sit her down in front of him and remove the cuffs and she would kiss the palm of her hand and press it to the glass and he would do the same.

But today it was different. They were going to be allowed to meet in a private room, just the two of them, with no divider. They would be able to touch. For the first time in almost a year. And for the last time ever.

Wherever the guard was leading him seemed a long way inside the prison. It was a maze of cement corridors with a dozen or more barred and double-locked doors. But at last they reached one made of solid steel with a little wired-glass window in it. The guard pressed a button on the wall and another guard's face, a woman this time, appeared in the window. The door buzzed and clicked open. The woman had plump cheeks that glistened with sweat. She smiled down at him.

"You must be Tommy."

He nodded.

"Follow me, Tommy. It's just along here."

She walked ahead of him.

"Your mom's told us all about you. Boy, is she proud of you. You're just thirteen, right?"

"Yes."

"A teenager. Wow. I've got a thirteen-year-old too. Boy, is he a handful."

"Is this death row?"

She smiled.

"No, Tommy."

"Where is it then?"

"You don't want to be thinking about that."

There were steel doors all along one side of the corridor with red and green lights above them and the woman stopped outside the last one. She looked through the little spy hole then unlocked the door and stepped aside for him to go in.

"There you go, Tommy."

The room had white walls and a metal table with two metal chairs and there was a single barred window through which the sun was shafting down and making a crisscross square on the cement floor. His mother was standing in the middle of it, quite still, shielding her eyes from the sun and smiling at him. Instead of the prison uniform she was wearing a plain white shirt and slacks. No handcuffs or ankle chains. She looked like an angel. As if she were already in heaven.

She opened her arms and held him to her and it was a long time before either of them was able to speak. He'd promised himself he wouldn't cry. At last she held him away from her to inspect him then smiled and ruffled his hair.

"You need a haircut, young man."

"Everyone has it long now."

She laughed.

"Come on, sit down. We haven't much time."

They sat at the table and she asked him all the usual questions: what was going on at school, how had the math test gone the previous week, had the food in the cafeteria gotten any better? He tried to give more than one-word answers, tried to make it sound as if everything was fine. He never told her what it was really like. About the locker room fights, about how the bigger kids taunted him for having a convicted murderer for a mother.

When she ran out of questions she just sat there and stared at him. She reached out and took his hands in hers and stared at them for a long time. He looked around the room. It wasn't as frightening as he'd imagined. He wondered where the gas pipes and valves were.

"Is this it?"

"What, sweetheart?"

"You know, is this the actual chamber?"

She smiled and shook her head.

"No."

"Where do they do it then?"

"I don't know. Somewhere back there."

"Oh."

"Tommy, there's so much I wanted to say.... I had a whole speech prepared."

She gave a false little laugh and put her head back and for a while didn't seem able to go on. He didn't know why, but it made him feel angry.

"But... I've forgotten it all," she went on.

She rubbed the tears from her cheeks and sniffed then took hold of his hand again.

"Isn't that funny?"

"You were probably going to tell me how to behave for the rest of my life. To be good, do the right thing, always tell the truth."

He pulled his hand away.

"Tommy, please—"

"I mean, what would you know about that?"

She bit her lip and stared down at her hands.

"You should have told them the truth from the start."

She nodded, trying to compose herself.

"Maybe."

"Of course you should!"

"I know. You're right. I'm sorry."

For a long time neither of them spoke. The shaft of sunlight had angled to the edge of the room. There were golden flecks of dust floating in it.

"You're going to have a fine life."

He gave a sour laugh.

"You will, Tommy. I know you will. You'll be with people who love you and who'll look after you—"

"Stop it."

"What?"

"Stop trying to make me feel good!"

"I'm sorry."

He would always regret that he hadn't been kinder to her that day. He hoped she'd understood. That he wasn't so much angry with her as with himself. Angry at his own powerlessness. Angry that he was going to lose her and couldn't die with her. It wasn't fair.

How long they sat like that he had no idea. Long enough for the sun to move away from the window and for the room to fill with shadow. At last the door opened and the plump-faced guard stood there, with a sad, slightly nervous smile.

His mother pressed the palms of her hands together.

"Well," she said brightly. "Time's up."

They both stood and she hugged him so hard he could hardly breathe. He could feel her body quaking. Then she held his face between her hands and kissed him on the forehead. But he still couldn't look her in the eye. Then she let go of him and he walked away to the door.

"Tommy?"

He turned.

"I love you."

He nodded and turned and went.

THEY FOUND the tracks at dawn in the damp sand beside the river about a mile downstream from where the wagons had circled for the night. Flint got off his horse, the odd-looking one that was black at the front and white at the back, as if someone had started spraying him with paint then had second thoughts. Flint knelt down to have a closer look at the tracks. Bill Hawks stayed on his horse watching him and every so often glancing nervously up at the scrubby slope that rose steeply behind them. He clearly thought the Indians who had kidnapped the little girl might be watching. He pulled out his gun, checked it was loaded, then holstered it again.

"What do you reckon?"

Flint didn't answer. To anyone else, including Bill Hawks, the tracks just looked like holes in the mud. But to Flint McCullough they told a whole story.

"Must have ridden downstream in the water so as not to leave tracks around camp," Bill said. "You can see this is where they came out."

Flint still didn't look at him.

"Uh-huh. At least, that's what they want us to think."

He swung himself back into the saddle and steered his horse into the water.

"What do you mean?"

Again Flint didn't reply. He rode across the shallows to the opposite bank, then followed it downstream another thirty yards or so, his eyes scanning every rock and clump of grass. Then he found what he was looking for.

"Flint? Mind telling me what's going on?"

"Come see for yourself."

Bill rode across to join him. Flint had dismounted again and was squatting on the bank, peering at the ground.

"Darn it, Flint, will you tell me what you're up to? What are we waiting for? Let's get after them."

"See here, among the rocks? More hoof marks. Deeper ones. The tracks on the other side are kinda shallow. No riders. It's an old Shoshone trick. They turn some horses loose then double up to send you off on the wrong trail. This here's the way they went."

Bill Hawks shook his head, impressed and a little irritated, as people often were, by Flint's brilliance.

"How much of a start have they got on us?"

Flint squinted at the sun.

"Three hours, maybe three and a half."

"How many of them?"

"Three horses, five or six men. Plus the girl."

"Let's go."

Flint mounted up and the two of them rode away along the riverbank.

"Tommy! Bedtime!"

It was his mother, calling from the kitchen. She always got the timing wrong. Tommy pretended he hadn't heard.

"Tommy?"

She appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Come on, now. It's half past eight. Up you go."

"Mum, it's Wagon Train. It goes on for an hour."

She looked confused. The familiar evening smell of gin and cigarette smoke had wafted with her into the sitting room. Tommy gave his most angelic smile.

"It's the one I love most. Please."

"Oh, go on then, you little rascal. I'll bring your milk."

"Thanks, Mum."

Flint had found the little white girl a few days earlier, wandering alone in the wilderness. Her dress was torn and stained with blood and her eyes were wide with terror. The major questioned her gently about what had happened but she seemed to have lost her voice. Flint said she must have been with another wagon train that had run into a Shoshone raiding party and that somehow she had managed to escape. Then, last night, the Indians had crept into camp and snatched her from her bed.

But Flint McCullough, who was without any doubt the bravest and cleverest scout in the entire world, would find her, kill the Indians and bring her safely back.

In this evening's episode Flint was wearing his tight-fitting buckskin jacket with the fringed shoulders. Tommy, naturally, was wearing the same. Well, almost. His mother had made his jacket out of some beige fabric left over from her new bedroom curtains but the result was too big and baggy and, to be honest, nylon velour didn't look anything like buckskin. Still, it was better than nothing and he had a hat and a gun belt with a real leather leg-tie on the holster that were both a bit like Flint's. And the black Peacemaker six-shooter with the white handle, the one his sister Diane had given him for his birthday, looked so convincing that Tommy thought he could probably use it to rob a real bank. For this evening's adventure he had loaded it with a new roll of caps, the pale blue ones which came in a white tube and made a much better bang than the cheaper red ones you got at Woolworth's.

It was early September and the evenings were closing in. The air that drifted through the big bay window was cool and smelled of rain-soaked dust and apples rotting on the lawn. A blackbird was singing loudly in the old cherry tree and down across the meadow that stretched away from the foot of the garden, a cow was calling for its calf. Tommy was sitting at one end of the enormous new sofa. It had red and green flowers all over it that made you dizzy if you stared at them too long. It had come with two matching armchairs and they took up so much space you now had to squeeze sideways to get to the television set, which stood in one corner of the room in its important mahogany-veneered cabinet.

The house had once been a farmworker's cottage on to which his parents had built an ugly extension. Despite a unifying coat of whitewash, the place seemed at odds with itself. It stood in an acre of garden on a gentle, wooded hill from whose crest you could see the steady encroachment of the town as, one by one, farmers sold their fields to developers. Work was already under way on a massive four-lane motorway which would go all the way from Birmingham to Bristol. Tommy's father could often be heard complaining that the area wasn't really countryside anymore.

But Tommy loved it. He'd lived here all his life. He didn't care much for the front garden. It was too small and prim and civilized. But if you walked out through the back yard, up the crumbling red brick path, past the old greenhouse and the derelict raspberry cages, you found yourself in a world altogether less tame. And it was here, where the willow herb and nettles and brambles ran rampant and nobody but he ever ventured, that Tommy spent most of his waking hours. It was his own, secret Wild West. Indian country.

He'd made a few friends at the little local school that he'd been going to for the past three years and sometimes went to their houses to play. But his mother rarely allowed him to invite them back. Tommy didn't really mind. He knew the other boys thought he was a little odd and too obsessed with westerns. They often preferred to play soldiers or cops and robbers and even if he could persuade them to play Wagon Train, there was always a fight about who got to be Flint McCullough. The fact was, Tommy preferred to play on his own. Anyway, all the best cowboys were loners.

He had Flint's walk off to perfection. And the way he tilted his chin and lifted an eyebrow when he was thinking or squatting to study some tracks or poke the embers of a fire to see how old it was. In the wild end of the garden, in the little clearing where he'd whacked down the brambles, Tommy even had his own horse, the fallen limb of an old sycamore with branch stumps exactly where the stirrups should be and some brown string tied to another stump for reins. He would swing himself into the saddle just like Flint, easily or in earnest, depending on what the story playing in his head required.

There were deeper things to emulate too, things that were more difficult for an eight-year-old fully to grasp. These were all about what was going on inside. Flint could read a man's character as shrewdly as he could read hoofprints in the dust. He kept his thoughts to himself, rarely smiled and only ever spoke when he had something crucial to say. In his solitary adventures, Tommy would assume these manly traits, humming the theme tune or the more dangerous music they played whenever Indians appeared. And when the plot required, he would speak (aloud, but not so loud as to be overheard by anyone walking up the lane beyond the hedge) in Flint's western drawl.

He didn't always play Wagon Train. He liked being Red McGraw from Sliprock too, the fastest draw of them all. He would stand like Red, looking dangerous, in front of his bedroom mirror, his hand hovering over his gun, and recite the words with which the show always began:

In the town of Sliprock, lawless heart of the Old West, where the many live in fear of the few, one man stands alone against injustice. His name is Red McGraw.

Sometimes, for a change, he'd be Rowdy Yates from Rawhide or Cheyenne Bodie or Matt Dillon. Maverick was okay too, except he spent too much time sitting around in saloons and wore funny town clothes. Tommy preferred those who wore buckskin and rode the range, fought Indians and caught rustlers and outlaws. What he definitely never played, wouldn't be seen dead playing, were any of those silly, cissy cowboys, the ones who carried two shiny silver guns, like Hopalong Cassidy or The Lone Ranger, and had holsters with no leg-ties. How could you be a serious gunfighter without a leg-tie? Worst of all were the ones who sang, like Gene Autry and the ridiculous Roy Rogers.

His mother had reappeared now, a glass of milk in one hand, a plate with a slice of apple pie on it in the other, a fresh cigarette jutting from her lips. Without shifting his eyes from the screen, Tommy took the milk and pie.

Flint and Bill Hawks were hiding behind some rocks now, spying on the Indian camp. Night had fallen and the Indians were all asleep around a campfire, except for the one keeping watch over the little girl, and even he looked as if he was nodding off. The girl was tied to a log and looked pretty miserable.

"Be careful now. No spills, please."

She took a puff of her cigarette, blew the smoke at the ceiling and stood with her arms folded, watching for a while.

"Oh, he's the one I like, isn't he? What's his name?"

"Flint McCullough."

"No, the actor I mean."

"Mum, I don't know."

"Robert something or other. He's so handsome."

"Mum, please!"

Just as Flint and Bill were about to launch their rescue, on came the commercials. Tommy's mother groaned and left the room. To his parents commercials were "common." Respectable families only ever watched the BBC which had the good taste not to show any. Tommy couldn't see what the problem was. In fact, the commercials were often better than what went either side of them. Tommy knew most of them by heart. Like Diane, he'd always been a good mimic and sometimes when his parents had visitors, his mother would ask him to do the Strand cigarette man. Under protest, pretending to be more reluctant than he really was, Tommy would leave the room and a few minutes later slouch in again wearing his father's old trilby and raincoat with the collar turned up, puffing moodily at an unlit cigarette he'd taken from the silver box on the lounge coffee table, and say: You're never alone with a Strand. It always got a big laugh and sometimes people even clapped. For an encore, while he still had on the outfit, his mother would ask him to do Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet.

Oh, Mum, he would groan with fake embarrassment, which would naturally prompt a pleading chorus of Oh, go on, Tommy, please! So he would duly adjust his face to its most serious, manly expression and, in Sergeant Friday's deadpan delivery, announce that the story they were about to see was true and that only the names had been changed to protect the innocent. The facts, ma'am, just the facts.

By the time he'd finished his apple pie, Flint and Bill had everything pretty well sorted out. The Indians all got shot or ran away, the little girl was rescued and when they got back to the wagons, her daddy had turned up. He had a bandage around his head but was otherwise okay. They gave each other a tearful hug then sat down with everybody else around the fire for supper. It was bacon and beans, which was the only thing Charlie the cook seemed to know how to make.

Just as Flint had so cleverly guessed, it turned out that the other wagon train had been attacked by a Shoshone war party who apparently wanted the little girl to be somebody's squaw, though Tommy wasn't quite clear what that might involve. Anyway, she got her voice back and it all ended more or less happily, as it nearly always did.

Tommy took off his cowboy hat and sat fiddling with the brim, eyes glued to the screen until the theme tune and the credits had finished.

"Come on, Tommy," his mother called from the kitchen. "Up you go. Your father will be home any minute."

"Coming."

He carried his empty glass and plate through to the kitchen, which had recently been modernized. Everything was now covered with pale blue Formica. His mother was standing by the stove, stirring a pan and looking bored. On the radio, the BBC newsreader was saying that the Russians were planning to send an unmanned rocket to the moon.

His mother's real name was Daphne, but she hated it, so everyone always called her Joan. She was a short, rounded woman with plump arms and fair skin that flared red whenever she got cross, which happened quite often. In fact, her reddish brown hair always looked cross, especially on Fridays when she had it redyed and set into a helmet of tight, wiry curls.

Tommy washed his glass and plate in the sink and left them on the draining board where his mother's cigarette lay propped in an ashtray, oozing smoke. Beside it stood a cut-glass tumbler of gin and tonic. She always poured her first the moment Big Ben struck six o'clock on the radio. This was probably her third.