The Brave

by Nicholas Evans

  "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.

  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 hi
m. 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.