The Good Father (39 page)

“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “This is what matters: He did it. Your son. He bought the gun. He hid it, and on the day in question, he retrieved the weapon and used it. That is what matters. That is all that matters.”

“Did you tell him to do it?” I asked. “Somehow plant the idea in his head?”

“You’re asking if I—what—brainwashed your kid? Planted, like, subliminal commands in his medulla oblongata? He was twenty, and aimless and—honestly?—a little fucked in the head. I joined the army when I was twenty. I was a wrecking ball in combat boots, ready to kill and die for the United States of America. The world is full of twenty-year-olds with too much in the way of balls and not enough sense. This is what young men are good for. Revolution and murder. You can’t let them wander. For your kid, dropping out of school, that was a big mistake. You should have stopped that. He needed structure. He needed something concrete to believe in. Terrorist training camps are full of twenty-year-old boys with no job, no direction, no positive role models. I’m saying—living free-range, your son was a guided missile. He just needed a target.”

“And you gave him one?”

He didn’t smile as much as smirk, as if the breadth of my naïveté was somehow ridiculous to him.

“So now it’s two years ago,” he said. “Cobb goes to Germany. And they cut the shrapnel out of him and send him home. And he malfunctions big-time. The whole classic mess—drinking, drugs, large-scale mayhem. And his mother gets worried and she’s looking for a way to help him, anything. And she finds some phone numbers in his book—old army buddies—and she starts calling. And like I said, even though you don’t necessarily like a guy like that, he’s your guy. So I talk to his mother
and I say,
I’ll see what I can do
. Maybe talk old Freddy into committing himself voluntarily. At least talk to a shrink.

“And so I track him down in California. He’s been couch surfing, sometimes sleeping in his car. I talk to people, follow the clues, and then somebody says he’s riding the trains. That maybe they heard him talking about hopping a freight train to L.A. So I climb aboard.”

I felt a click in my stomach, like a bomb had just been armed.

“You’re saying you were on that train looking for Cobb,” I said.

“A guy’s mother calls,” he said. “Even if you don’t want to, you beat the bushes. Because what if it was your mom, right?”

“And my son just happened to be riding the same train.”

“You want it to mean something,” he said. “I understand. My son choked on a carrot. The truth is, none of it means anything. It’s just noise.”

I felt myself losing control. I was too tired, too strung out, had been chasing this truth for too long, desperate for a miracle reprieve.

“So it’s, what?” I said. “A coincidence that you just happened to work for a military contractor who would have lost a billion dollars in contracts because of Seagram’s bill?”

He shrugged.

It was a fast gesture, an exaggerated feint of indifference. Looking at this anonymous man in his coveralls, I wondered if he had come here to hurt me. A former Special Forces operative, a man trained in the dark arts of human erasure. Were these the words before the bullet? The shrug before the knife? Was there a fast-acting poison, undetectable, that would soon find its way into my system? Newspapers would report that I’d died in my sleep, sitting up at the Austin airport. They would describe me as
father of convicted assassin Daniel Allen
. Or would he take me in his arms and squeeze the life from my lungs, two strangers wrestling like lovers in an empty washroom?

Even as the thought occurred to me I pushed it aside.

I said, “You want me to believe that it’s a coincidence that Cobb had sniper training and you were special ops? You want me to believe that you and my son talked about the weather, or maybe if the Mets were gonna go all the way this year, and then he got off the train and assassinated a presidential candidate? I just—I want to be clear.”

I saw something like sympathy in his eyes for a second.

“I get it,” he said. “The truth is too hard. It’s a jewelry box for children. So you want to believe that we were sent there looking for your boy. That somehow we’d been tracking him for months—a lone nut job lost in the West. Maybe we got wind of him at Vassar, watched him drop out, added his name to a list of potential patsies. And then somehow we—what? Read his mind? Saw that he was programmable? Capable of violence under the right conditions? And so the company deployed two former secret agents to brainwash him, arm the missile? And in the span of ninety minutes on a freight train we turned your son—your sweet, misguided, never-hurt-a-fly son—into something sinister, something you don’t recognize anymore. Is that your theory?”

I chewed my lip. It sounded crazy but that was exactly what I was saying. I needed it to be true for my own sanity.

“They’re going to execute him,” I said.

He thought about it.

“Let me say this,” he said. “Even if it were true, even if I said something to him on that train, gave him a push—I didn’t, but I’m saying, even if I did—so what? Even if he was a pawn, a pawn is still playing the game. I’m saying even the best scenario is still bad. You can’t make a good person do bad things. You can’t change who they are fundamentally in the time it takes to eat a sandwich. That’s science fiction. The only thing that can change who we are is life.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, once you realize that there was no second shooter, that nobody else pulled the trigger, you’re stuck with the truth. Which is that your son is a murderer.”

I stood swaying on the white tiles, punch-drunk on rubbery legs.

“No,” I said, “that’s—”

“You have to stop now,” he said. “You have the truth. Your son is guilty. That’s all you need to know.”

“No. I need more.”

“What? You want to know the reason he pulled the trigger? To understand it? What made him do it? Who is he really, deep down inside? But don’t you see? Understanding the reason makes killing
reasonable
. You’re looking for justification that somehow, some way, your son did something noble. Or if not noble, at least relatable. But he didn’t. And you have to accept that. You will never understand him.”

I thought about this. My pulse was booming in my ears. Was that what I was trying to do, explain my son’s actions so I could excuse them? So that I could make him the hero in a story where he was really the villain?

A man stands in a crowd listening to a speech about hope. He raises a handgun and pulls the trigger, and, in that moment, extinguishes hope for everyone. Who is that man, if not a monster? Do we really need to know his reasons? Read his manifesto? If understanding him makes what he did seem right, justifies it, even for a moment, then doesn’t that make the very act of understanding obscene?

“Why did you come here?” I asked.

“Because I had a son,” he said, “and he choked on a carrot. And it’s time to let it go.”

My knees felt weak. I felt a sudden urge to grab him, hold on to him, like a boxer who is tired of being hit, who is suddenly too tired to stand. But I didn’t. The gulf between us was too great.

“Good luck to you,” he said.

And with that he walked out of the bathroom. I felt a cold panic tightening in my throat. He was lying. He had to be. There had to be more to it than coincidence. Three men on a train, thrown together by fate. I hurried out after him and caught a glimpse of his back as he headed toward the exit. I looked around, desperately. A man in a TSA uniform was leaning against a wall, talking on his cell phone. I hurried over.

“Hey,” I said. “I just—in the bathroom—there was—I saw a man in a janitor’s uniform carrying a gun.”

The guard hung up the phone. I pointed toward the exit. Hoopler had reached the top of the stairs. He was heading toward baggage claim.

The guard took out his walkie-talkie. He started after Hoopler. I followed. I was sweating, my breath coming in gasps.
To explain is to excuse
. We reached the stairs just as Hoopler reached the bottom.

To understand the murderer makes murder reasonable
.

Hoopler was ten steps from freedom when three TSA agents converged on him, guns drawn. They shouted at him to get down on the ground. Hoopler stopped, raised his hands, and turned.

And it wasn’t Hoopler. It was another middle-aged man with a hangdog face wearing gray coveralls, his face frozen with fear. A janitor. It was just a janitor.

Hoopler was gone.

And in that moment I finally accepted it.

Daniel was guilty.

Hoopler was right. Murray was right. Fran was right.

The diagnosis was clear, had always been clear.

A man smuggles a gun into an auditorium and uses it to kill another man. There are witnesses, photographs. The man even confesses to the crime.

The symptoms were irrefutable. The conclusion was clear.

He was guilty, and so was I.

I had been a bad father, selfish, neglectful. I had sacrificed my son for my career. I had abandoned him and moved across the country. I had put my needs ahead of his, and he had suffered because of it.

It was time to stop fighting, to stop looking for loopholes.

The only thing left was to find a way to live with myself.

June 16, 20__. The event was very close now, only hours away. He had been in Los Angeles for eight days. Jorge’s cousin, Mexican Bob, got him a job smoothing tar on a hot roof. For the better part of a week Carter got up before dawn and tied a handkerchief around his mouth like a Wild West train robber. He waited on the curbside in East L.A. with all the other migrant workers. At 5:45 a.m. a purple pickup truck pulled up, and Carter and the others climbed into the back. If you listened closely you could hear coyotes howling in the hills, stirring up the dogs. He felt very close to the end now, the way you feel when the word you have been searching for finally finds your tongue. On his first day tarring roofs, he bought a pair of gloves from another man in the truck, trading his watch for them.

It was on this corner in the predawn that he had first learned that Senator Jay Seagram, the Democratic presidential front-runner, was coming to Los Angeles. A newspaper headline peeked up from the gutter.
SEAGRAM TO VISIT UCLA
. Carter grabbed the paper off the street. He read the article under the yellow streetlight. Seagram would lead a rally at Royce Hall on June 16. Carter asked one of the Mexicans where UCLA was.

“West side,” the guy said. “Just look for all the
aguayon torneados
driving BMWs.”

That afternoon after work he took the bus to Westwood, riding along congested city streets with the blacks, the Chinese, and the Mexicans. He watched the city pass in measurements of blocks. Unlike the rest of the country, every car he saw was European, and the drivers, well, as far
as he could tell, they were all
testículos
in their fancy cars, yelling into their hands-free phones. Somewhere around Beverly Hills he began to feel nauseous, but he couldn’t tell if this was from the ride or the view. After the emptiness of the West, the snarled streets of L.A. were like a machine that dispenses medicine. Each car was a pill, an ampoule, passing through sickened blood.

The bus dropped him at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood. He walked north past Peet’s Coffee and Urban Outfitters. The streets were filled with students searching for cheap meals. Carter was still in his work clothes, tar-stained jeans and a sweaty brown T-shirt. His sneakers had warped in the heat of the black sludge he’d laid down, their soles melting into gaps and nodules that gave his gait a rolling, unpracticed quality. He smelled like the inside of a smoker’s lung.

North of Le Conte, he left the city streets and entered the tree-lined roads of the campus, passing pink-hued stone buildings. A couple of coeds pointed him toward Royce Hall. They called him
Pigpen
in a way that made him think that one or both of them would have slept with him if he had applied a little pressure, the way you bear down to open a jar. He thanked them and left them unsatisfied, flirting with his back. He saw the Romanesque towers of Royce Hall before he found the building, built in 1929. Students lay on the lawn out front, girls in bikinis, boys in surfer shorts throwing Frisbees. The sound of the fountain reached him before he saw the water, that irregular splatter of liquid. The sun was falling behind the trees to his right. Looking up at the towers, he thought of another tower, this one in Austin, from which one man had taken the lives of sixteen men, women, and children, dropping them one by one by one. He felt a synchronicity from this that went beyond architecture, the way a puzzle piece feels when it clicks into place.

He found flyers for Seagram’s visit posted on a bulletin board in the lobby. There was a picture of the man with his arms up in the air, a sign of triumph, victory. Standing there, Carter could feel the pulse in his throat. He had to get out of the building before what he was thinking climbed up his throat and out of his mouth. But when he tried to move, he discovered that his melted shoes were stuck to the floor.

The next day he stood on the roof with the Mexicans and poured cold water over his head. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade. The Mexicans were used to the sun, but Carter felt dizzy standing three stories
above the ground, cooked from below by the molten sludge. Around him the skyline was wavy from the heat, making the city itself appear to be a mirage. Not for the first time he wished he was back in Iowa, sitting in a watering trough, the smell of fertilizer stinging his eyes.

He considered what he had to do. It was a simple thing, really. Point, aim, shoot. Last month he had spent a few hours at the shooting range. He knew he could hit the target. Last night he’d chosen the gun. An STI Trojan 9-mm he’d bought at a pawnshop in Long Beach. Lucky’s. This, too, was a sign. He was bunking with Mexican Bob at this point, sleeping on a cot in the laundry room of a two-bedroom house the Mexicans had tricked out to sleep twelve. After everyone went to bed Carter took out the gun and cleaned it, checking the firing pin. He loaded it with 147-grade Winchester Silvertips. The gun had a thinner grip than he liked, but it was said to be pinpoint accurate up to fifteen yards, and he’d had good luck with it at the range. Holding it in his right hand he thought about Bonnie Kirkland, and how she’d told him to steady his hand when firing, to bend his knees and hold his breath. He thought about John Hinckley dropping into a shooter’s crouch on Connecticut Avenue. He figured it wouldn’t be hard to hit a man on a stage, especially if he was standing in a spotlight, as he assumed Seagram would be. Two shots, three to be safe, then … what? Surrender? Drop the gun and run?