The Good Father (38 page)

He asked to see a German 9-mm, tested the hand feel of a Smith & Wesson .38. If he paid cash, the dealer said he’d throw in a carton of armor-piercing rounds.

“They’ll stop an intruder,” the man said. “I don’t care if he’s wearing a Kevlar vest or what.”

Austin seemed like a hundred years ago, another life. The time he had spent there felt like the memories of another person. He could no longer remember what Natalie looked like, other than the general details. He remembered the way her hair had fallen across her shoulders. He remembered the white pants.

Every place he visited disappeared as soon as he left. He had a hard time believing there was still a place called Austin in a state called Texas, where women in bikinis swam year-round in water that was always sixty-eight degrees. To that end, was there still a place called New York or Connecticut? He read about them in the paper, when he read the paper, which was almost never. They must still exist, but he couldn’t really picture that world anymore. Not here, standing in a high-school auditorium handing a man in camouflage pants three hundred-dollar bills in exchange for a Walther P99 and a box of bullets.

Three weeks later, as he sat in the boxcar of a speeding train, he would remember this moment—the dealer had put the Walther bullets in a used plastic bag from Popeyes—and it too would seem like a dream. It was becoming harder for him to stay focused. At the same time, he felt the world was becoming simpler. Sleep, eat, shit. Sleep, eat, shit. And though he could no longer see the society around him, he knew where he was going. He had the foresight of the arrowhead, which knows its destination long before the crest or the fletching. He was a race-car driver, smashing through the peripheral blur, eyes focused on the vanishing point.

A girl he met in Portland last month had turned him on to riding the trains. He had stayed in a flophouse downtown for three days on his way to California. The girl had been sitting on a blanket in the park, holding a puppy on a leash. She gave him a lollipop and told him her dad used to drive her family to the terminal and tell them to pick a platform at random. She said wherever the train went is where they’d go. Riding in a vacant boxcar now, he realized she meant he should buy a ticket and travel in a seat. But he had taken her literally. Hop on a train, she’d said. Go where it goes.

And so one night he ducked low as the caboose rode past, and took
off through the weeds, arms outstretched, reaching for a thin metal bar. It was a foggy night. The bar was slicker than he thought, and his hand slipped. For a moment he saw himself falling under the wheels of the train. He saw his death, and it was a lonely death, a hobo’s death. Kids would find his body a few days from now. The sheriff would be called, and his body taken to the morgue, where he would be listed as John Doe and given a number. In a few weeks his unclaimed body would be cremated or interred in an unmarked grave. The thought of it made him sad, though maybe it was the right death. After all, wasn’t that what he was doing out here? Trying to disappear without a trace? He heard the screech of the brakes, as the train settled into a turn, and felt the world tumble away from him, and then he was rolling on the hard ground, the breath knocked out of him.

He lay under the stars for a long time listening to his own blood. It struck him then that he wasn’t done yet. He thought of the snow. He thought of Natalie in her white pants. It was May and the spring rains had turned the rivers fat and angry. He wiggled his fingers, his toes, then climbed to his feet. The freight train was pulling away, almost out of sight. He was going to California now, the promised land, and he knew what he was going to do, and it no longer felt ugly. It was an ice sculpture shaped by a chain saw.

Sometimes
, he thought,
it takes a weapon to make something beautiful
.

When he walked into the diner later that night, he knew what song was going to be playing on the jukebox before he heard it. It was “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins. And the next train he chased, he caught.

The last plane to Iowa left at 12:35. I missed it by fifteen minutes. The clerk at the information desk told me the first plane out in the morning would depart at 5:30. I had given away my hotel room, and it seemed pointless to ride all the way back to the city just to turn around and come back, so I decided to spend the night in the airport. Wandering the empty concourse, I fought the urge to count the days until my son’s execution. To add up the weekends and national holidays, to multiply days times hours times minutes, to work it out down to the second how much time my boy had left to live.

Outside the runways were silent and dark. The empty airport embodied a kind of bloodless limbo. The word “terminal” is not used by accident. The darkness made mirrors of the windows, reflecting everything exactly backward. These were the ghost hours of the night. The hazy cataract dream of time, where we come unmoored from our lives, floating in non-space, in non-time, divorced from the context that makes us who we are. Two a.m. Three a.m. I watched the clock. I rode across treadmill floors. I pissed in bathrooms with a hundred self-flushing urinals. How different this airport was than the one I had scrambled through in New York, trying to reach Los Angeles that first night. The battle was over. The war was lost. Eight hundred miles from here, my son slept in a concrete coffin, locked inside the last home he would ever know.

I was running out of time. A familiar panic came over me. How naïve I was to think my son had been safe on death row these last few months. That just because he was somewhere that I could see him, visit him, he
would stay put. He had always been an escape artist, after all. When he was an infant we had to dress him in two onesies when he slept, the top layer zipped in the back, to keep him from slipping out of his clothes in the night like Houdini escaping from a straitjacket. As soon as he was old enough to walk he would disappear in supermarkets and clothing stores, vanishing somehow the minute your back was turned. During high school in L.A., he would go out the window after midnight, shimmying down drainpipes and clinging to the teardrop siding like Spider-Man. He had always found a way to slip from my grip, like a wounded animal I had tried to save and failed. One that would not listen to reason.

Death would be his final escape.

As I wandered the empty concourse I told myself I would call Murray in the morning. We would appeal the sentence. It was the only thing I could do. I was his father. If Daniel chose never to speak to me again because of it, I would accept that silence as the price for his life. I would do what I had to do to make sure he didn’t leave me again, this time for good.

At three forty-five I stood before a urinal, half asleep, swaying on my feet. The fluorescents overhead flickered at a frequency that seemed to mimic the exact rhythm of REM sleep. Behind me I heard a few soft footsteps, then a man’s voice, soft and low.

“I hear you been looking for me.”

I half turned. A stocky man in his fifties stood six inches behind my right shoulder. He wore a janitor’s uniform.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

Instead of speaking, the man walked over to the stalls, and one by one pushed open the doors to make sure they were unoccupied.

“They put up rope lines and metal detectors and tell you you’re safe,” he said. “But the truth is, anybody can bypass airport security if they know where the gaps are.”

Nervously, I zipped up my pants and stepped away from the urinal. If I called out for help would anyone hear me? The urinal flushed automatically, startling me, the boom of it echoing in the empty bathroom.

“Is the bathroom closed?” I asked, confused. “Did I miss a sign?”

The janitor checked the stalls, keeping an eye on me in the mirror.

I thought about the words in my son’s journal.

Wolf
or
Sheep
?

“Do you know who I am?” the janitor asked.

I looked at him, clueless. The sum of all time collapsed into that moment. This was a dream, a dream about a janitor. He was a symbol of something. But what? Then, out of the blue, it hit me. A black hole opened up beneath my feet.

I said, “You’re Marvin Hoopler.”

He nodded.

“Captain Marvin Hoopler,” I said. “Special Forces, retired.”

“And you’re Paul Allen,” he said. “A doctor who lives in Colorado, via Connecticut, via New York. I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

My mouth was dry. “From who?”

Hoopler finished his tour of the stalls. He stood for a moment, listening, a faraway look on his face, then, satisfied we were alone, he turned to face me.

“From people.”

I was sweating in the small of my back.

“I need your help,” I said. “My son.”

He nodded.

“I met your son once,” he said. “On a train.”

My heart beat faster.

“A freight train,” I said.

“He said his name was Carter, but it’s not.”

“No, it’s Danny. Daniel.”

Hoopler turned from me to wash his hands at the sink, the soap and water dispensed automatically onto his hands.

“You have questions,” he said. “Your life took a turn and you can’t make sense of it.”

I nodded.

“These things happen,” he said. “Events. They blindside you. They’re like those asteroids—what do they call them?—global killers. They knock you out of your life and into something else.”

“I need to know what happened,” I said. “What really happened.”

He studied me, assessing something—my level of desperation, my ability to hear hard truths, how far I’d gone off the rails.

“I had a son,” he said. “Maxwell. He choked on a carrot in preschool. I was in Yemen, fighting. His mother packed his snack—apples and carrots. Not cookies or candy. A healthy snack. She used the baby carrots. The ones that come prepackaged. He was three.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“They make coffins for babies,” he said. “I didn’t know that. I mean, it only makes sense, but you don’t think about it, you know? And then you see them and they’re like … jewelry boxes for children.”

“It’s not fair,” I said. “The things we live through.”

He dried his hands with a paper towel, slowly, meticulously.

“You want to know, did I tell your son to kill a senator? Did I plant the seed, the idea? Or more. Did I meet him outside Royce Hall and slip him an unregistered handgun? Was I his handler, his controller? You want your son to be a vessel, a tool.”

I nodded.

“But it’s not true,” he said. “I can give you eight witnesses who’ll say I was in Dallas that day.”

“An alibi isn’t always the truth,” I said.

He thought about this.

“I don’t know where he got the gun,” he said.

“But you told him to use it,” I said.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you work for KBR,” I said. “Because they wanted Seagram dead. You found him on the train and you—pushed him into being a part of this.”

Absently, he took the wet paper towel and used it to wipe down the sink basin.

“After my boy died,” he said, “I asked to be sent to the front. In front of the front. As dark and as deep as they could jam me. The day they buried my son I was a hundred miles behind enemy lines, crawling in the dirt. Me and six guys. We grew beards and wore traditional clothing. We carried knives and had to drink our own piss. Not all the time, but enough.”

“Why were you on that train?” I said. “You and Cobb.”

I used Cobb’s name like a weapon. I wanted him to know that I knew the details. I wasn’t an amateur. This wasn’t a hobby. I would save my son. I would pry the truth from his lips, no matter what.

“My wife sent me letters,” he said, “but I didn’t answer. I was afraid of what I’d write.”

He used the wet paper towel to erase a smudge from the mirror, rubbing at a spot directly in front of his face, as if trying to erase all evidence of himself.

“I mean, how long does it take to cut up half a dozen carrots?” he said. “Slice them lengthwise or chop them into tiny pieces? What did she want me to tell her? He was a little boy who loved carrots. She was his mother. She was supposed to protect him.”

“My son has an execution date,” I said. “They’re gonna kill him.”

“In country,” he said, “we communicated primarily with hand signals. English was off-limits. Somebody might hear. We lived in the mountains, places I’m not allowed to name. Six guys with knives looking for trouble. Cobb was one of them. He used to chew all the skin off his lips. He had nervous hands, but he could shoot the eye out of a potato from a mile away.”

There it was. The connection. Overhead the lights flickered, stuttered.

Hoopler balled the wet towels in his hand.

He said, “These are guys you would die for, guys you would swallow a grenade to protect, but that doesn’t mean you like them. Cobb was squirrelly. He used to polish his shoelaces. I think the altitude made him partially insane. But the guy shot an RPG out of the sky with a handgun, so you learned to ignore the batshit behavior.”

“Somebody stabbed him,” I said. “A few months ago. Sixteen times under a freeway.”

He nodded. If he was surprised by the news he didn’t show it. As I watched, he dropped the used paper towel in the trash, careful not to touch the metal with his skin.

“A few missions later he catches some shrapnel, ends up with a discharge. And you think, no way is that guy gonna make it back in the real world, where you gotta get a job and pay the gas bill and remember how to turn the other cheek. It’s just not gonna happen. And meanwhile, I’m in the process of joining a certain private enterprise.”

“KBR.”

He shrugs.

“Why fight for free?” he said. “I had skills, assets. These things have value.”

I didn’t respond. What did I know about it?

“It took my wife two years to divorce me,” he told me. “I didn’t call. I didn’t write. What do you think she was waiting for?”

I felt dizzy.

“Can you—please—talk about my son?” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

He stood without moving, leaning against the sink. He was a man who had learned how to be still in a place where any movement got you killed.