The Good Father (40 page)

If he had emotions about the idea, he didn’t show them. The time for emotions had passed. They were a sinkhole, if the time he’d spent in Montana was any indication, a feedback loop, growing stronger with each regeneration. Sitting on the cot he thought about something his father had told him once, how a doctor has to put aside his emotions when trying to diagnose a patient. The only thing he should consider are the facts. This is what Carter tried to focus on now, the facts.

Fact #1—Carter Allen Cash was a wolf, not a sheep. This meant he could act when others hesitated. It was his nature.

Fact #2—The candidate was a fraud. He presented himself as a hero, but in truth he was a liar.

Fact #3—Ordinary people had been fooled by the candidate.

Fact #4—If the candidate was allowed to win the election, then ordinary people would suffer.

Fact #5—Carter Allen Cash had to stop the candidate.

Fact #6—The only way to stop the candidate was to kill him.

He sat on his cot and loaded the gun, bullet by bullet, pushing them into the cartridge with his thumb. The next day he brought a change of clothes to work. The gun was rolled up in a T-shirt at the bottom of his duffel. At four o’clock he stripped off his top and washed himself with a hose, changing in the Porta-Potty. Before he left the orange plastic shitter, he ran his hand over the reassuring bulk of the T-shirt-wrapped gun at the bottom of his duffel. When he came out, Mexican Bob said he and the other
cabróns
were going for some
cervezas
and
putas
on Whittier. Did Carter feel like getting wicked
borracho
? He shook his head, saying he had plans with a girl lined up already, over at the college.

On the bus, he held the duffel bag with both hands. He watched an Asian woman scold her daughter, the girl’s head bowed submissively, accepting the mother’s rebuke. In addition to the gun, he had a roll of duct tape he had stolen from the job site that afternoon.

Back on campus he walked the tree-lined streets, looking like every other student. He wore a burnt-orange-and-white baseball cap, the Longhorn symbol prominently displayed over the bill. He accepted the jeers of the frat boys without reaction.
Go back to Texas, pussy
. Inside Royce Hall he looked for a place to hide the gun. He knew from working the campaign that Secret Service agents would seal off the building at least two days before the speech. If he didn’t plant the gun ahead of time, the metal detectors would catch it. He’d never make it inside the hall.

He considered taping the gun under a seat in the main auditorium, but figured the agents would look there. Plus there was no guarantee he would be able to sit in the seat he’d chosen when the day came. Trying not to look suspicious, he examined the air vents and molding but found nothing. The auditorium itself was a bust. He walked up the carpeted aisle and back into the main hall. It was there he noticed the fire extinguishers set inside recessed boxes in the wall. This struck him as the perfect place to hide a weapon. But he would need to choose a box that was out of the way. He surveyed the first floor before climbing the stairs to the second. There, he found a box near the men’s room, at the end of a dead-end hallway. It was perfect. He looked around to make sure no one was coming, then unlatched the glass door. He bent quickly, unzipped the duffel. He pulled out the T-shirt and the duct tape. Another quick look around, and then he was unfolding the T-shirt, unwrapping the gun.
It lay there on the blue T-shirt, vivid and oiled. The feeling it brought him was elemental. He pulled a length of tape off the roll, bit the end, tasting the bitter adhesive. He lay three strips across the right side of the gun, stood. Still nobody in sight. He reached inside the box and turned the heavy red extinguisher, then placed the gun in the center of its hard, rounded back. He added another strip of tape to be sure, then carefully rotated the fire extinguisher until the gun and tape were invisible to the naked eye. Finished, he carefully closed the glass door, bent and zipped the duffel. Straightening he saw a teenage girl at the top of the stairs. She was pasty and nondescript. He smiled at her.

“How you doing?” he said.

She smiled.

“Fine,” she said. “Do you know where … I thought the ladies’ room was up here.”

His heartbeat was steady, calm.

“Other side,” he told her.

Outside the sky was bluer. The grass was greener. He felt like a cook setting a timer, waiting for a roast to be done. Seeing the girl had only confirmed for him that he was on the right path. A few seconds earlier she would have seen him place the gun. A few seconds earlier she would have run back downstairs and found a guard. But instead she had arrived after he was done, and now the gun was safe, an egg waiting to hatch.

He decided to walk home. It was an eight-mile walk, down the Wilshire corridor, through Westwood, Century City, and Beverly Hills. He was a young man with nowhere to be now for four more days. He threw the duffel bag in a garbage can and started walking east, past doorman apartment buildings, past the long green curve of the Los Angeles Country Club, past the Beverly Hilton with its Oscar parties and power lunches, past the office towers of Beverly Hills, crossing the clotted artery of La Cienega. He began to feel like a dog at the airport. The rumble of cars assaulted him, jarring sounds of road rage. He entered Miracle Mile, passing the tar pits, passing Highland Avenue, zeroing in on Koreatown. In four hours he saw three pedestrians. He was a refugee, a camel in the desert. The gun kept him going. The gray tape arranged in a crisscross pattern. The thought of it hidden in plain sight. He was a spider and the tape was his web.

The sun went down—golden, rosy, then surrendering to navy—and still he walked. He was beyond hunger, beyond thirst. A month ago he had slept on the ground next to his car in the foothills of the Sierras. He had woken to the taste of dew. Now he was a wolf in the city, a forest creature in a factory of noise and steel.

The next three days were a blur of heat and tar. He woke early to do his push-ups, his sit-ups. He sat in the back of the purple pickup and felt the wind on his face, watching the sun rise between a canyon of tall buildings. This time the boss drove them to the valley, a new job site. Here it was a hundred and five degrees in the shade. The Mexicans wore long sleeves and long pants. Carter took off his shirt and stirred the pots. He climbed the ladders and spread the foul muck. He didn’t feel the heat anymore. It was a test, he knew, the way the steel of a sword is tested in the forge. He drank water from plastic bottles. It didn’t matter if he got burned. All that mattered was that the web stayed where he’d left it. The impulse to return to Royce Hall and make sure was like a scab he couldn’t stop picking, but he restrained himself. They would be there now, the men in black suits. He had to have faith. His plan was sound. His destiny was secure. Otherwise the girl would have seen him. Otherwise she would have called for help.

Instead he stirred the hot black fudge, breathing its toxic fumes. Sometimes the poison went so deep he had to go behind a Dumpster and throw up. All that came out of him was water.

He watched the news, making sure Seagram didn’t cancel. He saw footage of rallies in Michigan and Miami. A man at a podium, smiling, cheering, goading a nation to change. The act of waiting made his insides feel like they were twisted, the way laundry is wrung to dry. He couldn’t stop clenching his jaw. But he did not falter. Deep down he believed in the passing of time. He had been a baby, then a boy, and now a man. He knew that tomorrow was inevitable, and yet waiting for his destiny required the patience of the sea.

Sometimes he thought about death, but not often. He knew that a gunman firing from the crowd could easily become a target himself. With this in mind, he got his affairs in order. The night before the event he laid out his clothes. He packed his few remaining possessions into a blue backpack, laying his journal on top. The Honda was parked in a lot near the Staples Center. There were two handguns in the trunk,
six boxes of ammunition. If he were a religious man he would have gone to church, confessed his sins to cleanse his soul, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t.

Instead he woke early, after only an hour of sleep. He rose quietly and showered, stepping over sleeping Mexicans. He stood under the paltry trickle of tarnished water and made sure his armpits were clean, his groin and crack. He shaved in front of the mirror, careful not to cut himself. His hair was short, and his face and body were tan from weeks spent outdoors. He was twenty years old, with the rangy musculature of a runner.

He missed the gun, wished he had it now so he could conduct the ritual of stripping, cleaning, and loading it. He thought it might relax him. Instead he stepped over the Mexicans and got dressed, putting on jeans and a white button-down shirt. He had bought a pair of black dress shoes in Sacramento, and he put them on now, lacing them tight. Then he dropped and did a hundred push-ups, trying to burn off some of this crazy energy. He didn’t even break a sweat. When he left the house, the sky was just beginning to lighten.

He walked the trash-lined streets, hands in his pockets. He stopped at the Gaylord for breakfast, sliding into a dark-red booth. The place was half empty, cabdrivers and delivery men fueling up. A few tables down sat several bleary-eyed hipsters, desperately hanging on to the last traces of night. Looking at the menu, Carter realized he couldn’t remember the last meal he’d eaten. He thought of Timothy McVeigh eating two bowls of ice cream before his execution. When the waitress with the neck tattoo came over, he ordered pancakes and eggs, hash browns, and orange juice. He had five hundred dollars in his wallet. It was all the money he had left in the world. He would need three dollars to get across town on the bus. The rest he would leave as a tip, hidden under his empty plate.

Afterward, he felt drunk on calories. His belly was like that of a pregnant woman. The sun was up now, and leaving the dark restaurant he shielded his eyes from the light like a vampire. It was six thirty in the morning. He had eight hours before he needed to be at UCLA. He got on the bus, heading west, and rode it to the ocean. Along the way he got used to the rhythm of traffic and may have dozed. It had been weeks since he’d slept through the night.

Stepping off the bus, he could smell the ocean breeze. The Santa Monica pier stood in the distance, Ferris wheel bald against the skyline. He walked down Ocean Avenue past the pier and angled onto the beach, past the dapper white awnings of Shutters. When the police searched him later they would find sand in his shoes. He stood in the shade and watched the volleyball players, boys in knee-length trunks and women in jogging bras, spiking the bone-white ball into the sand.

There was something about the blue relief of water stretching into forever that relaxed him for the first time in days. He took off his shoes and walked down to the water’s edge. There was a gun waiting for him in Westwood, a twenty-four-ounce hammer of metal, mechanized and deadly. Standing there, feeling the foam bubble around his toes, he realized that this was his prayer. The ocean. He was a man in a mosque, bowing toward Mecca, readying himself for the mission to come.

As soon as it had come, the relaxation he had felt disappeared under a wave of intestinal urgency. His system, unused to food in such quantities, had decided to rebel. He hurried back to the street, ducked into a taco restaurant, locking the bathroom door behind him. He voided his breakfast in seven great surges, enduring the pounding of other patrons. Outside he felt light-headed. The sand in his shoes shifted and bunched. He walked east into Santa Monica, passing the promenade. He had grown up near here. The woman he sometimes referred to as his mother lived on Twelfth Street, just north of Montana. He pictured her home now, sitting with her coffee and
The New York Times
. He had promised to call when he got to town, but he hadn’t. He felt as much allegiance to her now as he did to the homeless in their bumzebos. The son she knew had vanished somewhere in the Texas Hill Country.

He kept walking. It was what he was now, a pilgrim. He reached the campus around one. A crowd was already gathering, police barricades set up outside the hall to direct the flow of traffic. He saw the girls who had called him Pigpen standing near the front of the line. He worked his way toward them.

“I clean up okay, right?” he asked them.

They were happy to see him. It was one of those callback moments that young people mistake for fate. He was a handsome, clean-shaven young man with a rich tan wearing a clean white shirt. He introduced
himself as Carter. The blonde said her name was Cindy. The brunette was Abbey. He asked them where they were from.

“I’m from Albuquerque,” said Cindy.

“Montana,” said Abbey.

Carter told them he had just come from Montana. He said he’d spent the winter up there.

“Doing what?” they wanted to know.

He told them he’d been studying wildlife. He was going to be a naturalist. The girls thought that sounded cool. Carter told them that before that he’d worked for Seagram in Austin. The girls wanted to know if he’d met the man.

“A few times,” he told them.

Cindy suggested that Carter go in with them. They were supposed to meet some friends, but maybe they could all hang together. Did Carter think the senator would remember him? Carter said he did, suggesting that the three of them might even get backstage to say hello. This seemed to animate them, and they squealed and chattered rapidly. Carter checked out security at the main entrance. He saw six campus security guards and five Los Angeles police officers in uniform. Looking deeper, he saw two men in black suits standing near a metal detector at the front door.

At two forty-five, a guard removed the barrier and the crowd surged forward. Carter stuck close to the girls. They showed their IDs at the door, emptied their pockets, and stepped through the metal detector one at a time. Inside the girls tried to remember where they were supposed to meet their friends. Cindy decided they should head in and grab seats before the good ones were all gone. Carter told them to save him one. He had to go to the men’s room. He climbed the stairs, hand on the railing, feeling electricity shoot up his arm, as if the banister were the third rail in a subway tunnel. On the second floor he saw more guards standing at the balcony doors. He walked past them, heading for the restrooms, then stopped. There was a police officer standing near the bathroom. The gun was in a box three feet behind him. Carter considered turning back but didn’t. He walked past the cop, entered the men’s room. It was empty. He felt the urge to urinate but didn’t. Instead he washed his hands, dried them, then washed them again, trying to figure
out what to do. He settled on a lie about overhearing some students plotting to sneak in through a side entrance. He would approach the officer and try to manipulate him into leaving his post. It felt wrong. Too ambitious. There was fear in his belly.