by Jon Land
“Kids must really love this place.”
“We do our best. Our situation’s unique in that we’re still actually a private school by definition. In addition to serving as housemaster for the boarders, I run the phys-ed and rugby programs.” Neville hesitated. “Matt’s in class now. I can get him, if you wish.”
“No,” Blaine said abruptly. “I mean, I don’t want to disturb him. I don’t want to … intrude.”
“Do you see this as intruding?”
“I don’t know what to see it as.”
“Would have been much easier for you if you hadn’t come. Not easier for him. He should know you.”
“He doesn’t even know I exist. You didn’t say anything, did you?”
Neville shook his head. “Figured you’d want all that business left up to you. Your timing couldn’t be better, though. There’s a school holiday tomorrow. Perfect opportunity to get acquainted. First meeting ought to be the toughest. After rugby practice this afternoon’d be perfect, if you don’t mind waiting.”
“I don’t mind,” said McCracken.
John Neville had a class of second formers waiting for him in the gym and left McCracken to pass the time before a bay window in the dining room with Bodie on one side of him and Doyle on the other. He watched the boys of Reading School, all dressed neatly in their gray suits, and wondered which one of them was Matthew. Then with the coming of the three o’clock bell the students rapidly exchanged suits for rugby shirts and shorts in the school colors and trudged off to practice fields not far from the school. John Neville returned shortly thereafter with a mesh bag full of rugby balls in hand.
“We’ll drive over,” he told Blaine, loading the bag into the hatchback of the British version of a Ford Escort. Then, eyeing McCracken, he added, “You might not be dressed for the outdoors.”
“I’ll do fine.”
In fact, he did anything but. After the drive, the walk across to the pitch where the third formers were practicing under the guidance of a small man with a mustache soaked his Italian loafers through to his socks. To make the proper impression at the school he had dressed well, in wear totally inappropriate for the damp outdoors. The cold was raw and unsettling, and the mist smelled like dank sweat. Neville had promised to come over and point Matt out as soon as he got his own practice started.
In the meantime Blaine was left again to his thoughts, again trying to distinguish which among the thirty boys performing warm-up exercises before him was Matt. He tried to narrow it down by recalling Lauren’s looks and attempting to superimpose them over the faces of the boys. But it was all to no avail. Strange how he had spent his life in unfamiliar places and had always been able to distinguish between the friendlies and unfriendlies at a glance. Yet here he was now coming up short in pursuit of his own …
“Come on now!” the little man with the mustache was urging, as game practice commenced with a drill in which members of two sides circled around a ball trapped in their center. “Push it out now! That’s it! And again! … And again!”
“Know the game at all, Blaine?” John Neville was asking, suddenly by his side.
“Bits and pieces.”
“A game made for children, this is. They can take the rough-and-tumble. Take a hard hit and bounce right back. The older one gets, the—”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“The small talk to help me relax. It isn’t necessary.”
Neville simply nodded and let his own thoughts stray briefly. “Playing on the right across the field. Striped shirt muddied in the front.”
And with his heart crashing against his ribs, Blaine found the boy just as a teammate gave him a perfect pass on the run and Matthew Ericson streaked down the far sideline like a champion thoroughbred. A deft stutter step stranded one opponent in his tracks, and a fake pass to the side left him with a clear path to the goal line.
The boy ran with graceful, loping strides, propelled by a high leg kick that tossed mud behind him off his soggy cleats. With token pursuit closing at the last, he slid to touch the ball to the ground in the end zone to insure the points. Then he rose to the shoulder slaps and praise of his teammates and mustachioed coach. He walked back toward the center line just as gracefully as he had sped in for the score, front thigh muscles rippling with definition. His hair was straight and longish, curled at the ends now from the dampness. His eyes were brown and radiant and he carried himself with a smoothness and confidence that seemed entirely natural.
“Want me to call him over?” Neville offered.
“No, please. Let him be.”
“Him or you?”
“What?”
Neville smiled. “After practice then?”
“Yes. Much better.”
“With you to be introduced as …”
“A friend of his mother’s. A good friend.”
“And tomorrow’s holiday?”
“We’ll do something. If he wants.”
“You’re underestimating him, Blaine. Not only will he want to, it won’t take him long to figure out what’s going on. You’d be wise to prepare for that.”
“I’ll try.”
“I was a friend of your mother,” he told the boy before John Neville had a chance to as they shook hands after practice. “A good friend.”
The boy’s grip was sweaty but firm. Blaine was surprised when he smiled. “Really? Did you know her from America?”
“Accent give me away?”
Another smile. “Would she have mentioned you, sir?”
“Call me Blaine, please. No, I don’t think she would have.”
In the next instant neither knew what to say, and John Neville stepped in.
“Matt, Mr. McCrack—er, Blaine—is going to be in the country for a bit and would like very much to spend some time with you. I suggested tomorrow’s school holiday as a possibility.”
“If you don’t have any plans,” Blaine added, wanting the boy to have a way out, or maybe himself.
“I’d like that very much, sir.”
“Blaine.”
“He was thinking an outing to London might be smart,” Neville proposed.
“Oh yes! Smashing!” The boy beamed. “It’s been ages since I’ve been there.”
“Done, then,” Neville concluded.
But it isn’t done, Blaine reckoned, not by a longshot. Do I tell him, and if so when? Damn you, Henri, for dropping all this in my lap… .
Later, thrashing his thoughts about, Blaine drove from the school through Henley on Thames to the small Norman village of Hambleden where Lauren Ericson had lived and been buried. The village was quiet to the point of seeming deserted, and Blaine found himself easing the car door shut to avoid an echo. The moist air had the same sweaty feel as it had back in Reading. Here, though, it was laced with the warm scent of wood smoke coming from chimneys on houses that might have been fashioned out of the same light reddish brick. It was difficult to date the structures since even the newer ones had been built to blend in with and maintain the village’s rustic appeal. There were graves in the churchyard dating back to the eleventh century but only a few dug in the last few years, and their tombstones hadn’t been aged as the buildings had.
Lauren’s was a simple affair wedged in a small family plot her ancestors had obtained four centuries before. Dying, Blaine supposed, should be like coming home, and perhaps this was as close to that ideal as possible. He knelt by the grave wanting to feel something other than the confusion and uncertainty racing through him.
In recent weeks he had for some reason been reminiscing about his own parents, and all this served to only intensify his confused feelings. How unglamorous the story was. His parents had married late and had him, their only child, later. His father was an insurance salesman who made his living on the road and died in a Milwaukee hotel room of a heart attack at the age of sixty when Blaine was in high school. His mother had held up through it bravely and built a decent life for herself that ended after a
painful struggle with cancer while Blaine was in Vietnam following an aborted attempt at college. She’d been dead for six months before he learned of it, due to the incommunicado status of men who were assigned to clandestine duty such as his. In those same six months and the six that came before he had not been allowed to send a single letter. Strange how when word came about her death he wondered more than anything what he might have said if he had been permitted.
Even with everything else considered, that was the only time he really hated the war, for not allowing him the dignity of rushing to his mother’s deathbed or at least attending her funeral. And though he tried, he was unable to remember what mission he’d been on at the moment of her passing.
Blaine supposed the advanced ages of his parents had helped make him independent almost from the cradle. He had always gone his own way, never with the crowd, and spent many of his early years resenting his parents for being so much older than those of his friends. In later years he loved them even more for it. At the very least they were there. At the most, they had somehow helped mold him into the man he had become.
He thought of all the high school sporting events his father had been unable to attend and how guilty he felt for preferring this to having the old man standing out among the other parents, looking more like grandfather than father. He thought of Matthew streaking down the sidelines to bring Reading School the rugby championship … with no parent to cheer him on, no face to pick out amidst the crowd. And if it wasn’t McCracken’s face, then whose would it be? Besides Henri Dejourner there was no one. Blaine had never turned his back on an obligation before, and this was no time to start. The boy was strong and brave and beautiful, but time might work as his enemy under the circumstances. He hadn’t gone through a Christmas alone yet, or a birthday. Blaine knew all about that and it was never easy.
“I wish I could cry for you, Lauren,” he said over the grave. “I’m sorry we shared so little time. But I won’t abandon what we produced. You have my word on that.”
Chapter 4
“YOU MET MY MOTHER IN England, then?” Matt asked as they took the fast train toward London from Reading the next morning.
McCracken nodded. “I was over here for an extended time, almost a year.”
“On business?”
“Sort of.”
The boy hesitated before speaking again. “Did it have anything to do with you being a soldier?”
The question took Blaine by surprise and his face showed it. “What makes you ask that?”
“The way you move. The way you look at people. I’ve studied a lot about soldiers.”
“Yes,” Blaine told him. “I was in the army.”
“Were you in a war?”
Another nod. “Vietnam.”
The boy looked genuinely proud. “Really? As what, sir? Please, do tell me!”
“Only if you promise to call me Blaine. The story gets a little complicated.”
“I’ll understand. I’ll try anyway.”
Blaine didn’t want to lie, but he couldn’t tell the truth yet either, at least not the whole truth. “I was trained as a Green Beret.”
Matt’s mouth dropped. “The Special Forces!”
“We weren’t called that yet, but yes.”
“They predated our Special Air Service. They were the first specially trained commandos in the western alliance since World War II.”
“I was fortunate enough to miss that one,” Blaine said.
Matt flashed a smile that quickly melted back into a questioning stare. “You said it was complicated.”
“Well, yes.”
“You started to tell me.”
What the hell, Blaine figured. “How are you at keeping a secret?”
“Good. Very good.”
“Okay. Vietnam was a funny war because lots of people were running different parts of it. The army had its hands tied and that pretty much explains why we got pounded like we did. But an authorized faction of the army got together with the CIA and decided to run part of the war its own way. I was part of what they called the Phoenix Project. We did most of our work behind enemy lines and we never issued reports. Make sense?”
“Wow,” Matt said. “But what did you—”
Blaine cut him off. “That’s for another day, Matt, later.” Then, sensing the boy’s disappointment, he added, “I’ve still got some friends in the SAS by the way. Like to come out and see them train sometime?”
“It’s top secret, sir. No visitors allowed.”
“You’ve got connections, kid.”
“Could we, si—, Blaine? Could we really?”
“Just name the time.”
“I’d like that. I really would.” His face turned quizzical again. “But what exactly did you do while you were in London?”
“When we get to the city, I’ll show you.”
They came to Parliament Square in the middle of the day. Blaine had never intended to give the boy such a detailed glimpse into his history, much less such an infamous occurrence. But, damn it, he was caught up in it all, the boy’s adulation and interest serving to open up areas of discussion he had kept closed for years. And didn’t Matt have a right to know, if anyone did?
“What’s so important about Churchill’s statue?” he wondered as they drew up close to it.
“Bet you didn’t know they had to rebuild a section.”
“I didn’t. Is it important?”
“Not really. Except for the reason.”
“Reason?”
They moved closer.
“Notice the slight discoloration in the great coat right after it breaks beneath his stomach?”
“I guess so. Why?”
“They repaired it after I shot off a rather important anatomical area.”
The boy’s eyes bulged, then glared at him disbelievingly. “You’re making it up.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Okay, why did you do it then?”
Blaine eased his arm tenderly around the boy’s shoulder. “Another story for another day, kid.”
They spent hours at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Not surprisingly, Matt was most fascinated by the military exhibits. Blaine found himself enjoying the time just as much. After all, besides rejection his greatest fear in starting this relationship twelve years late was that he would have nothing in common with the boy. Well, he couldn’t have asked for much more than this and dared to wonder whether such interests could be hereditary.
They climbed to the whispering pews of St. Paul’s Cathedral and lunched at a traditional London pub in the business district called Smithfield’s. From there they took the underground to Pall Mall where Matt spent ten minutes expounding to McCracken, and a half-dozen others who had gathered, on the rigorous combat training endured by the red-clad, black-capped horsemen who ceremonially patrol the gates.
“Do you think I should join the army?” Matt asked as they strolled away.
“That depends on a lot of things you’re too young to consider now.”
“Not really,” Matthew responded maturely. “Seventh formers at Reading can sign up either with the RAF or the infantry on Friday afternoons to cover their community service. That’s not very far off at all.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“So, should I sign up or not?”
Blaine tried to show how happy he was at being consulted. “It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind. If it’s important to you, absolutely.”
“Was it important to you?”
“To enlist, you mean? Well, there was this thing called the draft and my number was about to come up anyway and college was a bore, so I joined. That way I got my choice of service.”
“And you chose Green Beret …”
Blaine hedged. “Well, actually it was chosen for me a few months into training.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Got to save some stuff for later.”
“And what about what you did in the Phoenix
Project?”
“Also later.”
Matt hesitated. “You haven’t told me much about what you’re doing now.” And before McCracken could answer, the boy did it for him, a smile flashing through the words. “I know—later.”
It was well past dark by the time Blaine got the boy back to Reading School and watched him disappear through a door.
“Thought it was you,” John Neville said as he approached McCracken with Bodie and Doyle restrained on leashes. They fought to greet McCracken as well. “I’ve just been out walking my dogs.”
“Sorry I’m so late.”
“I didn’t give you a curfew. It went well. I can tell that much.”
“It went great. It scares me it went so great.”
“Why should it scare you?”
Blaine turned fast enough to draw a slight growl from Doyle. Neville spoke again before he had a chance to.
“It didn’t go great enough for you to tell him who you were, did it?”
“I didn’t want to spoil the day.”
“Do you think it would have?”
“Maybe.”
“For you or for him?” Neville eyed him suspiciously. “You’re hedging, mate. Something’s holding you back.”
They started walking toward the playing pitches which fronted the school. With the wind gone, it felt warmer than it had the previous afternoon.
“How much did Henri Dejourner tell you about me?” Blaine asked.
“Very little, I’m afraid.”
“Then let me fill in a few of the holes. The boy’s mother kept his existence secret from me for a reason. Back then I was involved in governmental matters that required an expert hand. Things haven’t changed all that much since.”
Neville was nodding. “I’d expected as much. Or close to it. It’s your eyes. I’ve known men like you before.”
Blaine shook his head. “You’ve never known a man like me, John. It’s not possible, believe me. Right now I’m trying to sort out emotions that I’ve never felt before. Today was special for me in a way I can’t describe, and it’s tempting to see it as a sign of a new phase in my life. But the trouble is I’ve got lots of enemies. What I’m trying to say is that makes Matt vulnerable if I decide to enter his life on a full-time basis. No, change that. He’s already vulnerable and has been since Henri Dejourner paid you a visit. Whatever I decide to do—”