The Brave (6 page)

"Bedford, I know who it is, for heaven's sake."

"Yes, but look what he's put on it."

Dickie peered at the large, loopy handwriting.

To Tommy Bedford,

The Quickest Draw in England.

See ya along the trail!

Red

"Did he do this specially for you?"

" 'Course he did."

"Wow."

"And you know what?"

"What?"

"Promise you won't tell anyone."

"Bedford!"

"Cross your heart and hope to die."

Dickie wearily obeyed.

"They had a date."

"What?"

"Diane and Red—well, he's not really called Red. His real name is Ray. Ray Montane. A date is when—"

"Bedford, I know what a date is."

Dickie stared at the picture for a moment. Tommy could tell he was impressed.

"So is she his girlfriend?"

"I don't know. I think so. They had dinner together, I know that. And she says he's really nice."

"Wow."

Suddenly the corridor lights went on.

"What do you two think you're doing in here?"

Charlie Chin was peering at them from the far end of the corridor. Tommy quickly slipped the photo and envelope back into his tuck box.

"Who is it? Speak up, boy!"

"Jessop, sir," Dickie said. "And Bedford. Just putting our library books away, sir."

"You know you're not allowed in here, don't you? Well?"

"Yes, sir," they said in unison.

"I'll see you both later. Now get along to your classrooms. Go!"

Two hours later, they were standing outside the changing room in their dressing gowns. It was only the second time Tommy had been beaten. The first was when The Whippet had slippered the whole dorm for talking after lights-out. But Charlie always used the cane. Tommy's knees had gone wobbly with fear. He didn't want to cry or, heaven forbid, wet himself. Not in front of Dickie. He tried to think of Flint but it wasn't much help.

"You'll be all right," Dickie whispered. "The first one hurts a bit but then it's okay. Just grip the bench and grit your teeth."

Tommy didn't trust his voice so he just nodded. The door opened and the headmaster stood there for a moment looking down at them. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. In his right hand was a thin bamboo cane, about three feet long.

"You first, Bedford."

He stepped aside to let Tommy enter then shut the door behind him.

"Well, Bedford. Jessop leading you astray, is he?"

"Sir?"

"Teaching you some of his bad habits."

"No, sir. It was my idea to go in there, not his."

"I see. Anything more to say for yourself?"

"No, sir."

"Very well. Since this is your first offence, I'm going to give you three."

Tommy swallowed and nodded.

"Take off your dressing gown and bend over that bench."

Tommy's lip began to quiver and he bit it hard. He laid his dressing gown on the bench and turned his back on Mr Rawlston and bent over until his head was inside one of the wire cages. He gripped the edge of the bench as hard as he could. For a moment all went still. Then the sound of Mr Rawlston taking a step forward and the swish of the cane as it whipped through the air and in the next instant a searing white slash of pain as it cut into his buttocks. Tommy whimpered and at the second stroke cried out. Then he remembered Dickie outside and how all the boys upstairs would be listening and he clenched his teeth and held hard to the bench and on the third stroke kept silent. But he couldn't stop the tears. Slowly he straightened himself and stood for a moment, facing the cage, trying to control himself. He felt humiliated and small and wretched and angry.

"Put your dressing gown on."

Without looking at him, Tommy did so. He was about to head for the door when he realized Mr Rawlston was holding out a hand. Tommy had forgotten this part of the ritual. The man was actually smiling. Tommy shook his hand.

"It's customary to say thank you, Bedford."

"Thank you, sir."

"Good. Off to bed now."

"Sir."

As he came out Dickie smiled at him and whispered well done. Tommy's buttocks were on fire and as he walked along the cold corridor he put a hand inside his pyjama bottoms and gingerly felt the damage. He could trace the three welts but when he checked his fingers there was no blood. He made his way up the creaking wooden staircase and as he reached the top heard the first slash of the cane. He stood there and began to count. Two, three, four, five, six.

Tommy knew he was supposed to go directly back to his dormitory but instead he decided to wait for Dickie. They would return together. And as the thought occurred, standing at the top of the stairs, he began to feel something shift inside him. He wasn't crying any longer. He didn't feel ashamed or even sorry for himself. It was as if the glow of his backside were spreading and filling him with a kind of heroic pride. And now here came Dickie, grinning at him as he bounded up the stairs.

"Six!" Tommy whispered.

"Yeah. Pathetic."

Tommy smiled.

"I heard what you told him, about it being your fault. Thanks."

He put a hand on Tommy's shoulder and left it there a moment.

"Come on, better get to bed."

They set off along the corridor. Side by side, like brothers in arms.

HE HADN'T SEEN Gina for nearly five years and he was struck by how little she had aged. She'd put on a few pounds but they looked good on her and so did the little smile lines around those dark brown eyes. Her hair was cut short which suited her too. To read the menu she needed to put on glasses, narrow square ones with glossy black frames that made her look both scholarly and sexy. Life knew no justice. Approaching her mid-fifties, she was every bit as beautiful as the day Tom had first laid eyes on her.

It was she who had chosen the restaurant. It was airy and ruthlessly minimalist. The waiters all wore black and there was an open stainless steel kitchen in the middle so you could watch your food being prepared. Everything on the menu seemed to be seared or drizzled. They were the only customers and had been given a table right in the window which felt a little like being in a zoo. Gina had already apologized twice, saying the place was new and that she had no idea if it was any good. Tom didn't come to Great Falls nowadays unless he absolutely had to. The east side of the mountains held too many memories and he didn't want to risk bumping into her. It was funny how you could fool yourself that you were over somebody. Watching her now across the table while she chewed her lip, deciding what to order, he knew he wasn't and probably never would be.

The waiter, who looked about fourteen, was hovering to hear what they wanted.

"I'll have the linguini," Gina said. "Then the tuna. Rare."

"Excellent choice. You, sir?"

"Is it locally caught?"

"The tuna?"

"The linguini."

"Ah—"

"Just kidding. I'll have the same."

Gina was giving him that weary smile she always put on when he tried to be funny. Maybe she thought, given what had happened to Danny, that lightheartedness of any kind was inappropriate. She was right, of course. He'd allowed his pleasure at seeing her to get the better of him.

They had spoken on the phone almost every day since the news came through and Tom had foolishly allowed himself to enjoy being in touch with her again, almost as if he nurtured hopes. The waiter asked him if they wanted to see the wine list and Tom noticed how the question tightened Gina's attention. She was clearly interested to learn if he was still clean. He was and had been for eight years and he found it faintly insulting that she should doubt it. He ordered a bottle of mineral water.

It was almost a week since they had first found out about Danny and they still had only a vague notion of what he was supposed to have done. All the military was saying, officially, was that an incident had taken place in which there had been an "as yet unspecified number of civilian fatalities." The Naval Criminal Investigative Service had been called in to establish what had happened. All the men involved, including Danny, had been suspended from active duty and were confined to their camp in a deserted factory outside of Baghdad. Danny had called and e-mailed Gina a few times but said he had been advised by his lawyer, provided by the military to represent him, not to discuss the incident with anybody.

"Dutch managed to get hold of his friend in Naval Intelligence last night," Gina said quietly, leaning forward so as not to be overheard. Dutch (even the name made Tom bristle) was her husband. The ex-Marine she'd left him for and who had become stepfather, hero and role-model-in-chief to Danny.

"Does he know anything?"

"More than he was ready to tell."

The waiter was back with the water and they watched in silence while he filled their glasses. When he'd gone Gina leaned forward again.

"Seems Danny's platoon was out on a routine patrol when they came under attack. One of their vehicles was blown up by a roadside bomb. One guy killed and two badly injured. Danny and the others went after the terrorists and killed them. Apparently there were some civilians killed in the cross fire. That's all the guy would say. He told Dutch we shouldn't worry too much. The investigation's just routine. He said it happens all the time. It's just that after Haditha, the top brass are paranoid about the media accusing them of a cover-up."

"Did he have any idea how long this investigation's going to take?"

"No."

"We've got to get him a proper lawyer."

"What do you mean, a proper lawyer? He's got one."

"No he hasn't. He's got some military gofer they've foisted on him. Whose side's he going to be on, for heaven's sake? He'll just be covering their ass for them."

"Dutch says these military attorneys are completely independent."

"Oh, really. That's what Dutch says."

Gina sighed and looked away and Tom silently rebuked himself for the knee-jerk sarcasm her husband's name always triggered.

"Have you heard from Danny?" she asked.

"No."

She didn't need to ask and he knew it was simply her way of getting back at him. Until the unanswered e-mail Tom had sent last week, there had been no contact between them in years. Not since their scorching argument over the boy's decision to follow his stepfather into the Marines. It struck Tom as odd that only now, when something had gone wrong, was he apparently allowed—or supposed—to be involved again in his son's life. For this he felt both grateful and slightly resentful.

He had failed at many things, but his failure to forge an enduring relationship with his only child was the one for which he most blamed himself. Even more than his failure to forge one with the boy's mother, though the two issues were difficult to disentangle. Danny's view of him, Tom guessed, was probably much the same as Gina's: that he was a dysfunctional drunk, a spineless, guilt-ridden liberal, a tribeless Englishman who had long ago slipped between the tectonic plates of two continents and never managed to clamber out. Who could blame the boy for wanting to define himself in as stark a contrast as possible to all that?

Tom used to give himself a hard time wondering whether it might all have been different if he hadn't pressured Gina all those years ago into moving to Missoula. She was a rancher's daughter and towns of any kind made her claustrophobic. Although their first years there, when they were building the house on the creek and she was pregnant with Danny, were probably—or so he now believed—among their happiest. The irony was that at the time Tom hadn't even been sure himself about the move. It had been more an act of wishful thinking. He had fooled himself into believing that at last he'd found somewhere he belonged, whereas in fact it was simply a place he wanted to belong.

The two of them had met in the summer of '78, Tom's first year on the UM creative-writing program. He was spending his vacation doing volunteer work on a federally funded program on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning. The idea was to help rekindle young people's interest in their tribal history and culture, a subject that had been his passion for many years. He and one of the tribal elders, who was a friend, were hiking with a group of Blackfeet teenagers along the Front Range and had made camp on what they'd wrongly believed to be public land. They'd lit a fire and were just starting to cook supper when up rode this fantasy figure of a cowgirl on a big black horse. She told them in no uncertain terms that this was her father's summer pasture and they were trespassing. She was wearing a white T-shirt, a black hat and a red bandanna around her neck. The horse was fiery and wouldn't keep still as she issued her reprimand. It was hard to figure out which of them looked the more scary and gorgeous.

Tom apologized and explained who they were and what they were doing and fifteen minutes later she was sitting next to him beside the campfire cooking burgers. She took off her hat and shook out a tumble of hair as black and lustrous as her horse. He was sure he had once seen a movie where something similar happened, some cattle baron's arrogant and beautiful daughter (probably played by Barbara Stanwyck) riding up in a cloud of dust and yelling at the leading man (probably Jimmy Stewart). Tom couldn't remember the title but he knew such first encounters generally had but one outcome.

She asked him if he lived around those parts and Tom told her that he once had, in his early teens, on a small ranch outside of Choteau. And after a few more questions, she announced that she knew exactly who he was and that they had been at high school together.

"I think I'd remember," Tom said. He meant it as a compliment—hers wasn't the kind of face a man would likely forget—but she seemed to take it instead as a challenge and soon proved she was right. Her name was Gina Laidlaw and she was two years younger than he was. They had indeed overlapped, briefly, at junior high.

"The English boy," she said. "Everybody knew who you were. We used to try and copy the way you talked. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. You don't sound like that anymore. It's such a pity."

"Well, dash it all, m'dear, I can still do it when called for."

She put her head back and laughed. The mouth was more Jane Russell than Barbara Stanwyck. Tom was already lost.

"In the end you just get fed up with people not understanding you," he said. "Going Huh? Excuse me? I remember telling somebody I'd had to queue for the lift and getting this blank look. Like the one you're giving me now."

"Queue for the lift?"

"See what I mean? Wait in line for the elevator."

She laughed again and so did the others who'd been listening. They all started teasing him and talking with English accents and Tom pretended to get haughty and cross and enjoyed every moment.

She only stayed about an hour but it was long enough for him to find out that she was finishing a master's in agribusiness at Montana State, was spending the summer working on the ranch and didn't, so far as he could ascertain, have a current boyfriend. He walked with her to where she'd tethered her horse and asked her whom he should call if they ever wanted to ask permission to camp here again. She swung herself up into the saddle and he could see from the way she was grinning down at him that she knew what he was really asking.

"Hmm. Let me think," she said. "Well, I guess you could always call me."

It turned out to be the best summer of his life. Just sixteen months later, in a little white clapboard chapel, with her father's cattle grazing the sun-bleached grass for miles around and snow already capping the mountains beyond, they were married.

"So, folks, how was it?"

The black-shirted waiter was staring at their plates, both still heaped with food. He seemed to be taking it personally.

"Didn't we like it?"

"We liked it very much," Tom said. "I guess we're just not as hungry as we thought."

Gina gave the boy a guilty smile.

"Sorry," she said.

"No problem. Can I tell you about our dessert specials?"

"I don't think so, thanks. Maybe some coffee. Regular."

"Me too."

"You got it."

They sat in silence for a while, both staring out at the street. It was a fitful spring day, scudding clouds and sudden, glaring bursts of sunshine that hurt Tom's eyes. He asked about Kelly, Danny's girlfriend. They'd been seeing each other for more than two years and Tom had never met her. Gina said the poor girl was having a hard time, that all she wanted was for Danny to come home.

"When will that be?"

"Dutch says they'll probably all get flown down to the Gulf first. They like to get them out of the combat zone as soon as they can."

"Do we know any more about who they're supposed to have killed?"

Gina swallowed and stared down at the table.

"There were some women," she said quietly. "And children."

"Oh, boy."

She was trying hard not to cry but at last a tear rolled down one cheek and she fisted it briskly away. Tom wanted to reach out to take her hand, but didn't. He could see she was angry with herself and would probably spurn any offer of comfort.

"I definitely think we should get him an outside lawyer," he said, stupidly.

"Damn it, Tom! You don't know about these things, okay? Why can't you just leave it to those who do?"

The waiter reappeared with their coffees. Tom was bracing himself for some cheery, inane comment but the boy had read the atmosphere and was keeping his head down. Tom asked for the check.

"I'm sorry," Gina murmured.

"It's okay. Just let me know if there's anything I can do."

He walked her to her car, neither of them talking. Halfway along the street she tucked her arm into his and the gesture brought tears to his own eyes but she didn't seem to notice and he quickly controlled himself.

After they parted he walked on up 13th Street to the Charlie Russell Museum, the shadows of clouds bowling past him along the sidewalk. He hadn't been to see the Russell paintings in a long while. The last time was with Danny when the boy was three years old. In Tom's view no painter had ever captured the spirit of the American West better than Russell. He remembered how Danny had been transfixed by the pictures of cowboys and Indians, of their wild-eyed horses, of the buffalo hunters, chasing and swirling across those vast red dust and sagebrush landscapes. Tom had picked the boy up and held him in his arms so he could get a better look. Every painting had a story and the two of them talked in whispers about what was going on, who had shot first, what were those Indians on the hilltop pointing at, why those men had killed the wolf, what was going to happen next.