The Good Father (20 page)

“Well,” I said, “his family turned out to be a lie. The defining fact of his life, the bedrock. After that, I mean, don’t you think you’d be skeptical of what grown-ups said, too?”

Fran pulled away and turned so she could look at me.

“I love you,” she says. “More than I’ve ever loved anybody. But you need to accept the fact that no matter what you do he’ll never be the son you want him to be. Even if by some miracle he’s found not guilty and
released, don’t be surprised if he slips away again the first chance he gets. And I just don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

She reached out and touched my face. I closed my eyes. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t take responsibility for my mistakes? If I didn’t try to fix them? This was the oath I’d taken:
First, do no harm
. But doctors harmed their patients all the time. We misdiagnosed them. We mistreated them. We botched their surgeries. We didn’t listen to them when they tried to tell us what was wrong. We bought malpractice insurance and hired lawyers. We hid behind our hospitals. We sat in our M&M conferences and discussed our mistakes in an effort to learn from them. But we were rarely punished. And yet if there are no consequences to our mistakes, what incentive do we really have to learn from them? In medical school we are taught professional detachment. We are told to see the illness, not the person.

But that’s no way to live.

In the middle of the night the phone rang. I fumbled for it, trying to reach the receiver before the kids woke up.

“Hello,” I said.

A man’s voice said, “Hoboes.”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“It’s Murray. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. I had my guy at the FBI dig deeper into Carlos Peña, and it’s a dead end.”

I sat up, awake now. I looked over at Fran, but she was still sleeping.

“What?” I said.

“They’ve got video of him inside Royce Hall—some kid’s iPhone—during the whole thing. Peña was standing center screen. Never pulled a gun. Never came anywhere near Danny. No way he was the shooter. The shots come from the other fucking side of the room.”

The smothering weight of this pushed me back into my pillow. I realized how much I’d pinned my hopes to a long shot.

“You’re sure?” I said.

“Totally,” he said. “Carlos Peña is a no go. But check this out: I sent a PI to Sacramento. You remember the Secret Service identified Danny through an arrest report from California.”

“Vagrancy,” I said.

“Specifically,” Murray said, “he was caught riding a freight train without permission. Common rail-hobo meshugas. A young man seeing the
countryside from an open boxcar. That’s the history of America. But the train companies don’t like it because it fucks with their insurance.”

“It’s three a.m., Murray.”

“Turns out, though, Danny wasn’t the only guy on the train. There were two other men riding in the boxcar with him.”

I felt a pulse in my stomach. The first hint of excitement. Or was it anxiety?

“What men?” I said.

“Here’s where it gets interesting. Both guys are vets. One fought in Afghanistan. The other guy was in Iraq. Been out a little over two years.”

“So he rode the train with some veterans. Don’t you remember Vietnam? After they came home those guys lived in trains.”

“Yeah, except one of these guys took a job working for KBR.”

“The military contractor.”

“I had to do some digging to find it. He’s getting paid off the books. Checks deposited automatically every month. Hoopler. He bought a house last year, owns a fifteen-foot speedboat. And you have to ask yourself, where does a grunt get the money for that?”

I took the phone into the bathroom, trying to slow my pulse. First Peña, now this. Is it possible I’d been right all along? That my son really was innocent?

“You’re sure he works for KBR?”

“I’m waiting for a couple of pieces of documentation to come in, but my guy traced the house payments to a dummy corporation that lists Duncan Brooks on its board of directors. Duncan Brooks is a VP at KBR.”

I sat on the toilet and pressed my feet flat against the cold tile. I could still smell the lavender bubble bath in the air.

“What does it mean?” I said.

“Either this guy is just a train enthusiast,” said Murray, “or there’s a connection here. Was Danny recruited by KBR? Brainwashed? To what end?”

“This is crazy,” I said. “I feel like I’m living in a spy thriller.”

“Remember JFK?” said Murray. “Dealey Plaza. Police arrest three tramps they pulled off a freight train after the assassination. One of them is later identified as Charles Rogers, aka
the man on the grassy knoll
. Speculation about the other two connects them to both the Mob and the CIA.”

I stood and looked at myself in the mirror. There was a line here I wasn’t sure I was willing to cross. A descent into something convoluted and humorless. Fran was right. I couldn’t get lost in this, couldn’t disappear into obsession. Three men rode a train across the Sacramento delta. One of them was my son. The other two appeared to be war veterans, one an employee of a company that would have lost millions had the Seagram Bill passed the Senate and been signed into law. Was it true? Even if it was true, what did it mean? It was tempting to see a pattern here, a connection, but it also felt like the first step into something darker. A step down a road from which few men came back.

“I have to go,” said Murray. “My guy is supposed to fax me the arrest reports.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “We can’t sound crazy. I don’t care what the evidence says. The minute people think we’ve become a bunch of conspiracy fanatics, we’ve lost.”

I could hear Murray chewing on the other end of the phone.

“Ask Danny,” he said. “You’re seeing him tomorrow. Say Frederick Cobb to him. Say Marvin Hoopler. They may have used aliases. Tell him you know about the men on the train. See what he does.”

“I should have spent more Christmases with him. I should have fought harder to get custody.”

“Ask him if there are periods of time he can’t remember. If sometimes he goes to sleep in one place and wakes up someplace else.”

“I should have known he was going to be troubled. He never liked to be hugged. His entire adolescence he wouldn’t take off his headphones.”

“That’s every teenager. I’m talking about mind control. Brainwashing. We need to figure out where Danny was for those days we can’t reconstruct. November 14 through December 1. February 2 through 8. There are holes in the FBI’s records. Was this when KBR had him?”

“I appreciate the work,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. But none of this has anything to do with my son. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Doc,” said Murray. “I love you like an Indian gaming casino, but you need to accept that this thing is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

He arrived in Austin on August 15, having meandered through Kansas and Missouri. He drove the NAFTA highway dodging eighteen-wheelers driven by men hopped up on chemically altered cold medications. When he got bored he lost himself on back roads and city streets. In Oklahoma he slept in a motel next to a truck stop. He found a bullet behind the toilet and what looked like the outline of a body shadowing the carpet. In the dappled light of the August dawn he decided that sex with truck-stop prostitutes was just another form of prayer, if the cries coming through the wall were any indication.

In Austin he sat inside the Whip In and looked for a place to live. He went on Craigslist and found a room in a house full of frat boys near the university. Someone had painted the Texas Longhorn logo on the lawn. There were beer cans in the trees. Inside, the place looked like a museum of trash. The house had been handed down from class to class over the years, never really changing hands completely. Students moved into rooms for a semester, stacking beer cans on windowsills, failing to wash the toilet, and adding to the ever-growing Honorary UT Underwear Pile that someone had started in the living room. Then they moved out. The lease was still in the name of a guy who’d graduated when Reagan was president. It was like a time-lapse photograph of a river making a canyon out of a mountain. The mess was archaeological. Dig deep enough you might find a half-eaten sandwich from when Elvis was king.

Danny’s room was on the second floor facing Rio Grande Street. Across the street there was a house full of sorority girls, and the frat boys would take turns lying on the roof with binoculars hoping to catch sight
of some premium Texas snatch. Danny sat in his room and listened to the radio with the windows open. It was muggy in Austin, a hot, lazy climate of ceiling fans and afternoon thunderstorms.

The frat boys called him
Sport
and
Chief
. They called him
Broheme
and
Jefe
. One guy called him
Albert
. It was easier than learning his name. Like the others, Danny would do his time at number 1614 then fade away, leaving only a false memory and a pair of stretched-out underwear on a pile. He was just another guy pissing in the toilet and dunking his toothbrush in a dirty mug.

Around him things went on as usual. Austin was a city of growth. It had a population of less than a million people, many of them musicians. This made it a landscape with a soundtrack, bands playing in the supermarket, at the airport. Pecan trees lined the streets, live oaks and Texas sycamores. The city had been built on a slow bend in the Colorado River, and much of its activity had to do with water. There was canoeing on Town Lake and swimming in Barton Springs. It was a city of parks and creeks and young men in baseball caps playing frolf. If you didn’t bike or swim or run or hike in this town, he was told, there was something wrong with you.

Riding his cheap, secondhand bike around town, Danny realized that everything in Texas either said Texas on it or was in the shape of Texas. Place mats, road signs, security gates. It was as if residents were worried they might wake up in New Jersey if they didn’t surround themselves with reminders.

It was in Austin that Jay Seagram first entered Danny’s consciousness. It was Thursday, August 20. The first Democratic primary wasn’t for five months, but already politicians were touring the country, doing the morning shows, making stump speeches, and forming exploratory committees. Danny was riding his bike on the Lady Bird Lake Trail when he saw the first banner. He settled into a coast and wiped his brow. He could hear the sound of a crowd up ahead. Riding past the First Street Bridge he saw them, a throng of registered voters crowding the great lawn of Auditorium Shores. Onstage a man in a suit told them it was time for a change. The sun sparkled on the river. A light breeze blew in from the west. Last night the humidity had finally broken, and today it felt like anything was possible.

He left his bike by the gate and wandered through the crowd. Young
women in bikini tops sat on towels, squinting toward the stage. Dogs ran off leash, kids played with Frisbees.

“I’m tired,” said Senator Jay Seagram, holding the microphone casually, speaking without notes. “Tired of making excuses for why bankers get rich while the rest of us get screwed. Tired of hearing stories about families being evicted from their homes. Tired of children going to bed with empty bellies. I’m tired of being told I should be afraid of people I’ve never met. I’m tired of fighting a war based on a lie. I’m tired of living in a country where people can’t get help when they’re sick, and I’m sick of multinational corporations getting away with murder at our expense. I’m sick and I’m tired, and looking out at you, I can see from your faces that you too are sick and tired.”

The crowd cheered.

“You’re sick of feeling like your voices aren’t heard. You’re tired of paying taxes that go to buy bullets that kill people just because they speak a different language than you do. You’re sick and tired of spending half your paycheck on gas, when car companies have the technology to make cars ten times as fuel efficient. Today. They could do this today, but they don’t. Why not? Aren’t you sick and tired of asking ‘Why not?’ ”

People were standing now. Danny walked among them, his fingers brushing their arms. There was electricity in the air around him, like the static before a storm.

“It’s time to stop asking,” said Seagram. “It’s time to start doing. To make demands. We
demand
universal health care. We
demand
a living wage. We
demand
our politicians stop raising our taxes while cutting taxes for corporations. We’re tired of asking. We have been patient and we have been polite. But we’re not going to be polite anymore.”

Danny stood next to the stage and watched as Senator Seagram raised his arms over his head. The crowd roared. Seagram looked down and his eyes met Danny’s and he winked.

The next day Danny went to Seagram Campaign Headquarters. It was on Guadalupe, near the Co-op. He talked to a man in blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, Walter Bagwell.

“What can I do?” Danny asked.

Bagwell gave him a clipboard and some flyers and sent him out to raise candidate awareness. Daniel stood on the corner of Twenty-second and Guadalupe and handed flyers to students. The flyer asked the same
questions Seagram had asked at the rally. It listed a website you could visit and a phone number you could call. Danny handed out five hundred flyers his first day. Walking home he saw them discarded, stuffed into trash cans and stuck to the windshields of cars. This seemed to him like a metaphor for politics itself. One man’s outrage was another man’s trash.

At the UT library he read everything he could find about the senator. Seagram had grown up poor. His father walked out on the family when Jay was three. Seagram had put himself through college, and then through law school by starting his own college prep course for high-school students. By the time he graduated from Stanford Law, Seagram had more than eleven hundred employees, and branches of his course existed in eighteen states. He sold the company to the Princeton Review for six million dollars.