Free The Brave by Nicholas Evans Page B

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,