The Good Father (19 page)

Sic semper tyrannis
.

But who is the real tyrant, if not the man with the gun?

He stayed in Iowa City for four months. The weather turned warm, then wet, then fractious. Hail fell from the sky. Tornadoes blew in like crazy drunken uncles, destroying homes and lives. Some days the heat was so bad the Mexicans would fill feeding troughs with water and take turns throwing each other in. Danny found he liked riding his bike in the rain. He liked to watch the heavy clouds roll in, to feel the static charge in the air. There was a risk to it he found he responded to, the appeal of a breathless, harebrained scheme.

He saw his first funnel cloud on July 16, God’s evil finger reaching down and stirring up the American anthill. He was riding his bike north toward Cedar Rapids. Towering cumulonimbus clouds crowded the western horizon. The wind had been rising steadily for the last hour, first a steady breeze, then a thrusting gust that flapped through his hair and clothes. Rain blew sideways. Coming to a crossroad his bike tipped and bucked and he landed in a ditch. Mud soaked through his pants and into his shoes. He lay there for a moment making sure nothing was broken. In the distance he watched as massive black storm clouds squatted over the flatlands and gave birth to a twisting finger of death. The wind was roaring in his ears. He was a kid from the suburbs. What did he know about the animal threat of weather?

He watched the funnel cloud touch down and race through the farmland several miles north, swallowing cars and houses. It was an ugly black wedge. He pictured cows vaulting up in the air, circling the ground like spiders in a toilet bowl.

He got to his knees, then his feet. He started to run. The earth made a groaning sound. He looked back. The finger had become an arm, a whirling black limb battering the ground. What was he doing here? Risk is one thing. But this was insane. Around him it sounded like planes landing and taking off. He thought of another near-death experience, an airplane ride he took when he was eight. The feeling that everything was happening faster than he could control. He found a battered rock wall and hid behind it. He knew it wouldn’t protect him from the twister, but there was nowhere else to go. He was soaked from the rain. Hailstones the size of baseballs pummeled his back and shoulders. It was hard not to feel hatred toward him, as if the earth, the sky, the world
hated him
in that moment.

He remembered standing on an elevated subway platform in a blizzard one night, waiting for the F train. He was fifteen years old and living with his father. Bored, he had skipped school entirely that day to explore the city. The wind was high and cold. And the snow was blowing sideways so that it came streaking, silent and hungry, right toward him. And with the darkness hanging like a shadow under every flake, and in the muffled light of the overhead fluorescents, it felt as if he was the one who was moving, blown forward by the wind into this grid work of snow that hung frozen in the air, the way snow looks when you’re driving and the heavy wet flakes are leaping in through the glare of your headlights and colliding with the glass in front of you.

At some point he must have closed his eyes. The planes were landing and taking off. Freight trains hurtled past him close enough to touch. He realized he was yelling, a long, guttural keen that rose up from some deep reptilian place. It never even occurred to him to pray.

When he opened his eyes again the tornado was gone. The wind had died down and the clouds were breaking up, like a rampaging mob that has suddenly lost its outrage. He lay in the weeds, panting. His body felt electric, his brain. He started to laugh.

In Iowa they grew corn and soybeans. They grew hay and oats and strawberries. It was the home of honeybees and Christmas trees. Four million cows grazed the land, Guernseys and Holsteins and Ayrshires. Simmentals and Herefords. There were more than twenty-four million pigs, Berkshire and Chester White, Hampshire and Landrace. Blue-ribbon
hogs that grew to be the size of Buicks. And there was raging, terrible dinosaur weather that could kill you. These were the facts. This was the great American farm belt.

Daniel spent forty-five minutes looking for his bike, then walked home.

That night he stood in front of Bonnie’s gun case for almost an hour. Her father had been a collector, and when he died she continued his work. She had a wall of rifles, long-barreled and slim. A Winchester .30-.30, a Lee-Enfield bolt-action M10, and a Bushmaster M4 Carbine. There were pump-action and lever-action shotguns, cowboy guns resting on mahogany supports. She had tabletop cases filled with handguns on display; a Browning 9-mm, a Luger P08 Parabellum, a compact Smith & Wesson .45 ACP, and everybody’s favorite, the .357 Magnum, hulking and stout.

He looked at the pistols under glass. Bonnie had taken him shooting twice since he arrived in Iowa. Once they shot cans long-distance with a .22 long gun. There was almost no recoil. He lay on his belly in the grass and watched the cans jump up in the air as Bonnie shot. When it was his turn he listened to the flat crack of each shot, but the cans stayed put. He caressed the trigger with his finger while Bonnie gave him pointers.

“From this distance you have to factor in the wind,” she said. “Set your sight a little to the right of the target. When you’re ready to fire, hold your breath.”

The first time a can jumped he felt a surge of joy. He wanted to take Bonnie out and buy her a steak dinner. The second time they shot she took him to a range. She brought four handguns in a lockbox. Before they shot she gave him a gun safety demonstration in a back room. She showed him how to disarm a semiautomatic, popping the clip and ejecting the round from the chamber. She made him practice until the moves were natural, graceful. She showed him how to load the revolvers and how to stand, legs slightly apart, left hand supporting the right. He wore goggles and a pair of bubble headphones like the ones worn by airport ramp agents as they tee their marshaling wands.

When he fired the .357 it tried to kick back over his head. Bonnie grinned at him, told him to hold his arms steady like a man. He emptied each gun at the target, hitting it every time. Bonnie said he was a natural.

He cleared the casings from the swing-out cylinder and reloaded. Compared to the Magnum, the Glock felt like shooting a potato gun. It was lightweight, with a high-capacity magazine, and the holes it punched in the target were smooth and symmetrical. He thought he would feel either horror or elation shooting such close-range weapons, but he felt neither, and later he told Bonnie that he preferred the rifles, preferred shooting outdoors, but that all in all he’d rather ride his bike.

He left Iowa on August 3. On his last night he ate dinner with Ted and Bonnie. She made pork chops and apples, and a blueberry cobbler for dessert. He ate so much he had to lie down on the floor. Who knew what his next meal would be? In the four months he had worked at the feed store he’d earned just over ten thousand dollars. He kept the cash in a shoe box, like some kind of paranoid hermit.

Bonnie told him she was worried about him. Why didn’t he stay through the fall? Ted took Danny aside and said he understood a man’s need to roam. Danny was a young guy. He had a lot of living to do. But he made Danny promise he’d call if he needed anything. He was the son they’d never had. Cora had been their only child. After her, Bonnie had miscarried six times, then given birth to a stillborn boy. Ted put his arms around Danny. He smelled like motor oil and cigarettes. His chest and arms were hard. It was what a father should feel like—solid, unmovable.

After dinner Danny went drinking with the Mexicans. They’d pooled their money and bought him a switchblade. Jorge told him to keep it in his boot. They told him to drive the speed limit, and if a cop pulled him over to say
yes, sir
and
no, sir
. Do not under any circumstances call him a
taconera
or a
zurramato
.

They showed him how to hold the blade in a fight.
Don’t be afraid to bite
, they told him. Then they cut their palms and shook hands, their grip slippery but firm. Jorge said he had cousins in Texas and Los Angeles. If Danny needed anything he should look them up.

The next morning he took his footlocker and his shoe box full of cash and put them in the car. He put the switchblade in his boot. Ted and Bonnie stood near the car, unsure what to do with their hands. Bonnie had baked him six dozen cookies. They filled four huge ziplock bags. Danny didn’t know how he could possibly eat all of them, but he would.

“Where are you headed?” Ted asked him.

Danny said he didn’t know, but he thought he would drive south. He had always wanted to see the Southwest.

This time the hugs were quick, awkward. In the light of day they all realized what strangers they still were, and yet what good is a family if you can’t open it up to strangers every once in a while?

He watched them recede in the rearview mirror. He felt energy in his stomach, a spinning ball of uncertainty. What was the world if not a place to explore? He put the rising sun to his left and drove south.

We ate dinner that night at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills. The kids had moo shu and dumplings. Fran had Peking duck. I pushed around a plate of orange chicken. The kids talked baseball. I had signed them up for a fantasy league, and every morning they checked the stats. Fran watched me poke at my food.

“You’re doing it,” she told me.

I looked at her.

“Pushing us away. Locking me out.”

I shook my head. Mostly I felt tired.

“Where did you go today?”

“We went to see Carlos Peña. And then we went to Royce Hall.”

“And?”

“And there was a steak knife sticking out of his sofa. He had his brother’s ashes in a box and he threatened us with a gun.”

“My God. Paul.”

“Well, to be fair, he threatened to threaten us with a gun. We never actually saw it.”

“Did you call the police?”

“And say what? He lives in a pigsty? He has rug burns on his hips?”

“If you think he’s connected to the case—”

“I’m beginning to suspect it doesn’t matter what I think.”

The kids ordered a caramel dessert. It arrived on fire. They played rock-paper-scissors to see who would get to blow it out, but it burned out on its own while they were playing.

Back at the hotel the boys fell asleep in their clothes. We peeled off
their socks and stuffed them under the covers. Fran and I retired to the bathroom to take a bath. She unpacked the candles she had brought in her toiletry kit. Fran takes baths very seriously. She likes the water to be a temperature just south of scalding. I joke with her that she was a lobster in her last life. It was a small tub, but we made it work. I put my back to the wall, and she lay back against me, her feet pressed up against the far end of the tub. The lights were off, the candles flickering.

“I need to know,” she said, “at what point do we stop fighting?”

Her hair smelled like lavender, with undertones of moo shu. I was too tired to talk.

“You tell me,” I said.

“I’m serious. I feel like I’m losing you to this. To him.”

“It’s not a competition.”

“Bullshit. You feel like you failed him as a father. You’re wrong. You made the best of the situation. He knows you love him. He knows you did everything you could for him.”

“Did I?”

“What I’m saying is you have to be careful. There are two boys in the other room who need you more than he does. Alex is on the edge. We’ve done good work this last year, but he has so much anger. And Wally is at that age where he’s looking for direction, a role model. You need to be there for them.”

“I am. I will be. I promise. But what if it was Alex in that cell? What if he’d been accused of a crime he didn’t commit?”

Fran was silent.

“You think he did it,” I said.

“I think he’s a troubled kid,” she said. “I think he’s always been squirrelly, at least for as long as I’ve known him.”

“Squirrelly.”

“He never looked me in the eye when I talked to him. He dropped out of school without calling. He’s been roaming the country.”

“Not roaming. Exploring.”

“This isn’t the eighteenth century,” she said. “He was sleeping in his car.”

“He had jobs.”

“Three weeks here. Six weeks there. You have to stop romanticizing it. This is not normal behavior for the twenty-first century. I’ve watched
you since he left school. Even before the shooting you were sadder, more absentminded.”

“He needs us.”

“Does he? I think he’s gone to great lengths to prove he doesn’t need anybody.”

The water was cooling around us, and I found myself shivering. “When he was a kid,” I say.

“When he was a kid he was the same way,” she tells me. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I liked him. He was funny and thoughtful. And the boys loved having an older brother. He did magic tricks, for Christ’s sake. But when I talked to him—even at fifteen—I always felt like he was only half listening. There was a quality he had, a transparency, like he was only ever really half there.”

I thought about this, trying to picture it—the half-there boy. Fran hadn’t known him as a baby, a toddler. She hadn’t known the fierce, eager kid who lived for trucks, who slept with a plastic airplane the way other kids slept with teddy bears.

“All I remember is how he adopted Alex and Wally,” I said. “How from the minute he arrived he became, like, their keeper. He showed them how to be big, taught them to make their beds, how to floss. And he was never too busy to play with them, to get down on the floor, and—”

“I know,” she said. “He was great with them, and they love him. All I’m saying is, he wasn’t that way with us. Whenever a grown-up talked to him he got a kind of, I don’t know, skeptical look on his face. He was polite, but sometimes it felt like an act. Like he was giving us what we wanted so we’d leave him alone.”

I watched a single drop of water form on the showerhead. It started as a pinhead, the barest hint of moisture, then grew fatter, surface tension holding it in place, until the weight of it became too great and it fell in a straight line, breaking the surface of the bathwater with an audible
plip
.