The Brave (28 page)

"Boy, did you look good on that horse."

"Did I?"

"Know who you looked like?"

"Who?"

"Flint McCullough."

"Oh, yeah."

"You did, I promise. Spitting image."

She stroked his forehead. There was a pale band an inch above his eyebrows from the shade of his hat. He frowned.

"Diane?"

"What, sweetheart?"

"How long are we going to stay here?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"Can we stay forever?"

"We'll see."

"That's what you always say when you mean no."

"I don't mean no. I just mean, let's talk about it some other time."

She kissed him goodnight and went outside to join Cal on the couch. He put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek and she rested her head on his shoulder and for a while neither of them spoke. The mountains were silhouetted against a sky that would soon be milky with stars. An owl was calling somewhere down by the creek. Diane shivered.

"Are you cold?"

"No. A little."

She snuggled in closer.

"Did you hear what he asked me?"

"About staying here forever?"

"Yes."

"I was kind of interested to hear the answer too."

"You know the answer."

She kissed him. But later, when they had moved inside and made love and Cal was asleep beside her, she lay listening to the yip of the coyotes prowling the willow scrub beyond the pasture and she thought about what she'd heard on the news.

Old John Matthieson had become so worried about the imminence of World War Three that he was making his own nuclear bunker. He'd dug a big hole out beyond the corrals, twelve feet square and lined with cement. The roof wasn't yet finished, but the provisions stood ready and waiting in the barn: twenty galvanized garbage bins that Rose had packed with hundreds of cans of tuna fish, corned beef and peaches. Another ten stood ready to be filled with water. Cal had helped but made no secret of his belief that the whole enterprise was a comical waste of time. If the bomb ever did go off, he said, they'd all be dead before they knew it.

One of their favorite rides was out to what Cal called the dinosaur graveyard. It was beyond the big pasture on the other side of the creek, a kind of mudstone badlands where there were so many fossils and bones and beautiful pieces of agate, you didn't even have to look for them. You could get off your horse almost anywhere and just pluck them from the ground. Cal said some sudden and great catastrophe must have happened for there to be so many dead creatures in one place.

One afternoon, at the beginning of September when the weather was starting to cool and the leaves on the cottonwoods along the river were turning yellow, the three of them rode there again. Diane found what they later identified in one of John's reference books as the whole toe of a velociraptor. Diane gave it to Tommy. On the way home, while Tommy rode ahead, Diane and Cal got talking about Cuba and the war of words going on between what John called the two K's, Presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev.

"Anyway," Diane said. "We'll be safe here. Nobody's going to drop a bomb on Montana."

"Come with me," Cal said. "I want to show you something."

He called to Tommy and they veered south and urged the horses into a lope, riding up and over the brow of a hill then down into some rolling grassland Diane hadn't seen before. A watery sun was going down and the light was eerie and metallic, the horses' shadows stretching like phantoms across the bleached grass. Diane was beginning to wonder where they were going when, in the middle of nowhere, they came to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. There were Keep Out signs and through the wire they could see cement lids set into the ground with tracks along which they could be slid aside. In each corner of the fenced area was what looked like a camera. Diane asked Cal what on earth the place was.

"It's a missile silo. There are a whole lot of them, all along the Front. Just been built."

He said that these silos housed giant rockets called Minutemen that could travel five thousand miles and that each one of them was fitted with a one-megaton nuclear warhead capable of destroying an entire city. One night the previous year, he'd noticed floodlights here and he'd ridden out and seen a long truck with a crane, lowering the missiles into the ground.

"Are there people down there to fire them?" Tommy said.

"No, they say the red button's in Great Falls, at Malmstrom."

"Will Mr. Kennedy come and press it himself?" Tommy asked.

"I guess he'd call on some kind of special phone and tell somebody else to."

There was a gust of cold wind.

"Maybe that's what happened to the dinosaurs."

Cal laughed and said maybe he was right. But there was no need to worry. It wasn't going to happen. Having these silos here was supposed to make them all safer. The idea was called Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD for short. And you'd have to be pretty mad, Cal said, to start a war when you knew it would obliterate you and every other living creature on the planet.

A week later came the first fall of snow. It came overnight, just a few inches, and at dawn the sky cleared to show the world remade. After Tommy had gone to school Cal and Diane rode up into the foothills. They stood the horses at the top of the bluff and heard elk bugling. High in the crystalline sky, great flocks of geese were heading south in their V formations.

"I could get used to a place like this," Diane said.

"So, why don't you?"

"Oh, Cal."

"Seriously. Hell, Tom's already settled. You'd have a job getting him to leave."

"I know."

They were silent a moment, the horses' breath curling and wreathing in the chill air.

"Cal, there's something I've been wanting to ask you."

"The answer's yes."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

"It's just that... if anything were to happen to me. Say, if I had an accident or something, I wouldn't want Ray to have any kind of hold or influence over Tommy. Would you look after him?"

"Of course I would."

She leaned across and kissed him.

One afternoon the following week, while Tommy was still in school, they drove through the snow into town to the office of the Matthiesons' attorney. Alfred Cobb, a bright-eyed but slightly decrepit veteran of the First World War, had all the papers ready. And in front of a log fire, Diane and Cal sat at his wide oak desk and signed them. In the event of Diane's death, Cal thereby agreed that he would adopt and care for Tommy.

At the very end of October, just two days after the two Presidents K went eyeball to eyeball over Cuba and the world pulled back from the brink of war, a young man drove up to the ranch with a telegram for Diane. It was from her London agent, Julian Baverstock. YOUR FATHER GRAVELY ILL, it said. PLEASE RTN UK SOONEST.

THEY WERE HAVING a final dinner—or, as Dutch less than tactfully called it, the last supper—at Marco's. They had their usual corner booth with a red-and-white-check tablecloth and old-fashioned oil lamps. Everyone was trying not to let things get too gloomy. The hearing was due to finish the following day and any hope that it would go Danny's way had faded. That afternoon Brian McKnight had warned Tom, Dutch and Gina to expect the worst. He said that, on the balance of the evidence, Colonel Scrase would have little choice but to recommend a court-martial.

McKnight had promised he would meet them at the restaurant but his place remained empty. Then, just as they were asking for the check, he showed up. He was a little breathless and they could tell at once that something important had happened. Dutch poured him a glass of Chianti and they all leaned in to listen.

McKnight said his office had received a phone call from a young Marine called Travis Wilson, a private first class in Danny's company who had left the corps six months ago. Danny nodded and said he knew the guy but not well. McKnight went on to say that Wilson had seen the TV news the previous night and heard Harker's claim that he and Delgado hadn't conferred.

"He says it's not true. He saw them together in a bar in Coronado. After everyone got flown home."

"Did he hear what they were saying?" Dutch said.

"Enough. I hope. He's flying in tonight from Omaha. Kevin's picking him up at the airport at ten o'clock. If it all stacks up, we'll put him on the stand tomorrow."

Colonel Scrase had barely settled in his plush red throne the following morning when McKnight sprang up to ask permission to call a final witness. Wendell Richards, all set to deliver the government's closing argument, looked both irritated and wary. PFC Travis Wilson wasn't anyone's idea of perfect casting. He was short and had a rodentlike face that was covered in acne. As he took the oath, he looked about as nervous as a man could get without actually wetting himself. What he had to deliver however was the verbal version of a roadside bomb.

McKnight coaxed him through the openers: his rank and experience and what his knowledge was of the incident and of the accused.

"Travis, on the evening of July twenty-third last year, could you tell us please, where were you?"

"In a bar called Dee's Place in Coronado."

"What were you doing there?"

"Meeting Cindy—that's my girlfriend. Well, she was my girlfriend at the time. We've split up now. Anyhow, we'd arranged to meet at seven thirty, but I got there about twenty minutes early—I'm like that, always early—and I was sitting there, in one of the booths, you know, waiting for Cindy and—"

"Was there anyone else there that you knew?"

"Yes, sir. Sergeant Delgado and Eldon Harker. I realized they were sitting in the next booth."

"You recognized them?"

"Yes, sir."

"They were friends of yours?"

"No, sir. I just knew them both. In Iraq."

"And did you say hello?"

"No, sir. Well, I was just about to, but then I, kind of, heard what they were talking about and decided not to."

"And they didn't notice you?"

"I don't believe so, sir, no. Dee's is a kind of dark place."

"How clearly could you hear what they were saying?"

"Pretty clearly, I'd say."

"And what did you hear?"

"I heard Sergeant Delgado telling Harker what he'd have to say if he wanted to get the murder charge dropped."

Wendell Richards was on his feet immediately to object. And for most of the next half hour he was bobbing up and down like a gopher in a box doing the same. Little by little, however, McKnight patiently extracted from Travis Wilson all he wanted. Wilson said he had heard Delgado, effectively, rehearsing Harker in what he would have to say in order to get off the murder charge and shift all the blame onto Danny. He had even heard the magic words use your goddamn weapon.

By the time McKnight was done, he looked a good foot taller than when he'd begun.

Richards had his chance to cross-examine. He tried to cast doubt on what the young soldier had heard, suggesting that he might have some grudge against one or both of the men on whom he'd eavesdropped. But Tom could sense from Richards's demeanor that the poor guy knew the killer punch had been landed. When he was through, McKnight rose portentously to his feet and asked that Sergeant Delgado and Eldon Harker be recalled to the stand and be read their rights under Article 31.

They had to wait almost a month for the investigating officer's findings to come through. Meanwhile, in the first week of June, Kelly went into labor and gave birth to a healthy eight-pound boy. He was to be baptized Thomas David, for his two grandfathers.

On a warm and cloudless morning Tom drove across the divide to the hospital in Great Falls and held his first grandchild in his arms. From the window of Kelly's room you could see the Front Range still dusted with snow and Tom snuggled the baby to his shoulder and pointed to the various peaks and passes and told him their names: Sawtooth, Ear Mountain, Steamboat. Gina and Dutch and Danny were there too and the sun streamed in on them all and there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Gina asked Tom if he'd come back to their place for something to eat but he made an excuse that he had to be back in Missoula and drove all the way home again. Perhaps one day he might be ready for that kind of integration, but not yet.

Brian McKnight called that same evening to say the report had arrived. In two hundred intricate pages Colonel Robert Scrase sifted through the evidence and concluded that Danny had acted in self-defense. He recommended that all charges be dropped. Phone calls were made and everybody exhaled, though nobody seemed inclined to celebrate. Seven innocent lives had still been lost for the one that had been saved. Danny was going to leave the corps and find something else to do.

He called Tom at the end of June and asked if they could get together and talk over his plans. He was thinking of going to college, he said, and wanted his father's advice. On a whim, Tom suggested they go fishing, something they hadn't done together since Danny was a child. Tom hauled the camping gear from the attic and it all seemed in good enough order. But it was years since he'd fished even on his own and when he checked his lines and casts they'd gone brittle and his supply of flies was pitiful, so he went into town and spent a small fortune at the Grizzly Hackle on Front Street.

Danny arrived in Missoula in the afternoon two days later and they drove for an hour to one of Tom's favorite stretches of the Blackfoot. They left the car at the trailhead and hiked with all their gear through the forest until they could hear the rush of the river below. They found a good place at the edge of the trees to pitch the tent and gathered some wood for the fire they'd make later and by the time they'd done this the light was fading and they could see the clouds of flies swirling above the water so they rigged up the rods and put on their waders and fished for their supper.

Danny caught the first, a fine brown trout, some fifteen inches long, and the boy's smile was almost as big. Tom hooked a bigger one but lost it and then lost two more before landing another, two inches smaller than Danny's. It must have taken pity on him.

They lit the fire and panfried the trout and ate them with some tomatoes and the potato-and-chive salad Tom remembered Danny being so crazy about when he was little. The flesh of the trout was pink and sweet and the two of them kept moaning in ecstasy until they were giggling too much to swallow. Tom brewed some coffee and they sat cradling their tin mugs in their hands and watching the light on the river's bend change from silver to bronze to black while an owl kept calling and calling in the pines across the river.

Danny told him his plans. He wanted to go for a bachelor of science degree in agribusiness at Montana State in Bozeman. But he was late in applying for the coming fall and, in any case, liked the idea of getting some practical experience first. Dutch had a friend who ran an agricultural supply outfit and was prepared to take Danny on to show him the business. Tom said he thought that all sounded great, just great.

They fell silent for a while. Just the hushed roar of the water below and the owl still hooting across the river. Tom put some more wood on the fire and the sparks spiraled upward between them. Danny stared at the fire for a long time. In the flicker and glow his face looked suddenly a lot older. When at last he spoke he didn't look at Tom, just kept his eyes on the fire.

"Dad, there's something I need to tell you."

"I'm listening."

There was a long pause. The boy took a deep breath.

"I was guilty."

"What do you mean?"

"You know all that stuff at the hearing, what they said about me yelling at the women, how I called them hajji bitches and..."

Danny put his head back and stared at the stars for a while, breathing heavily, as if summoning the strength to go on.

"It's okay, son. You can tell me."

"It's not true I thought the guy had a weapon."

He stopped again and swallowed. Tom waited.

"The truth is, I didn't care. I just... hated them. Hated them so much, for what had happened. For what had happened to Ricky and all of us. It was like, when the guy reached down, it was like... a good enough reason. Maybe it was a weapon, I didn't know. I was, like, totally out of my head. I didn't know. I didn't care. All I knew was... I wanted to kill the bastards, mow the whole fucking lot of them down...."

There were tears streaming down his face now.

"And then it was over and I saw them lying there, saw what I'd done. And it was like seeing them for the first time. Women and kids. Babies, for christsake... And it was me who'd done it."

Tom shifted around the fire and put his arm around the boy's shoulders.

"It was me."

"Danny, listen—"

"It was me, Dad. I meant to do it."

There was probably something to be said, but Tom couldn't think what it might be. He pulled him close and Danny hung his head and sobbed and Tom just sat there, stroking the boy's hair and holding him. How long they sat like that, he couldn't tell. A half-moon the color of bone hoisted itself above a shoulder of the mountains beyond the bend of the river and the fire crumpled to an ashen glow.

"I want to tell you something now," Tom said quietly.

"What?"

"I want to tell you about your grandmother and what really happened to her."