The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “And the Secret Service hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, “because it would embarrass the agency. They had the killer on their do not admit list and they let him in anyway.”

  Douglas finished his carrot sticks. He zipped the bag closed, put it away, and shut his briefcase.

  “These are nice theories,” he said. “But the fact remains, your son was caught with the murder weapon.”

  I shook my head. In my briefcase were documents ordered chronologically. There were indices and note cards, photographs and DVDs.

  “Just because your EKG says you’re having a heart attack,” I said, “doesn’t mean you have heart disease. There are half a dozen hard-to-diagnose diseases that can be misinterpreted as heart disease. I’m saying all the symptoms have to add up, not just some.”

  I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes. When I opened them I could see Douglas and Fran looking at me. I’d seen looks like this in the eyes of doctors who spoke to family members who refused to believe their brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers were dead. Denial. They thought I was in denial.

  “My son didn’t do this,” I said.

  Murray stood up, threw a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “What do you say we go for a walk?” he said.

  I thought about it for a second, then closed my briefcase. Standing up I felt tired. My joints hurt. I was an old man, the father of the vilified. Would this be my life from here on out? Was I to become the argumentative man who can’t control the volume of his own voice? The conspiracy nut with boxes of data who spouts dates and facts, as if coincidence alone can prove the existence of God?

  We walked in silence through the lobby.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said.

  “I never said you were.”

  Outside the hotel he handed the valet his ticket.

  “Danny had issues,” I said.

  “Issues,” he said, trying to sound nonjudgmental.

  “Problems. He had problems. Of course. But he’s not a killer. This man, this Peña, he has a history of threatening people.”

  “He’s done time,” said Murray. “Assault.”

  “My God,” I said. “Don’t you see? This is the proof we need. Why isn’t the government all over this guy?”

  Murray clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Douglas is right. Just because Peña was there doesn’t prove he killed Seagram.”

  I balled my fists. The world felt like it was spinning backward. I was dizzy. For a moment I worried I might pass out. Slow down, I thought. Think it through.

  “Trials are about reasonable doubt,” I said. “We don’t have to prove Peña did it. We just have to raise enough doubt to keep the jury from convicting Danny.”

  The valet pulled up. Murray walked to the driver’s door. He gave the valet a twenty. I stood on the curb watching him. Overhead the sun peeked out from behind the clouds.

  “Well,” said Murray, “what are you waiting for? Let’s go see Carlos Peña.”

  Ted and Bonnie Kirkland lived on Lackender Avenue just outside Iowa City. Their house was a small post-and-beam structure set a few hundred feet behind the feed store they ran. On the back forty they kept chickens and a vegetable garden and raised pigs for meat. Their daughter was away at school back east. Daniel Allen showed up at the feed store on April 1 looking for work. He blew in like a leaf on the wind. In college he had dated a girl named Cora. She told him about growing up in Iowa, about her parents, Ted and Bonnie, and what kind and gregarious people they were. She talked about cornfields as far as the eye could see, about growing her own vegetables and riding her bike through the September dusk. It was a place where people still slept with their doors unlocked, and dreamed grounded, midwestern dreams.

  Danny showed up on March 28, having driven Route 88 southwest from Chicago. He drove with the windows down. It was the first real spring day. Leaving Illinois he felt himself entering a land of promise. He could smell agriculture in the air, the earthen stink of manure.

  It was lunchtime when he walked into Kirkland’s Feed Store. He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of Dr. Martens. His hair was spiky and unwashed. He looked like a lost city boy looking for directions, especially when he stood for a long moment in the center of the warehouse-size store, looking around. It was Ted who approached him, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Can I help you with something?” he said.

  Ted was a tall man, broad-shouldered. He had a plate in his head where a horse had kicked him when he was a boy. When he drank at parties he would stick refrigerator magnets to his temple, much to the amusement of everyone around him. He had married Bonnie twenty-three years ago. They met when they were teenagers. He was the farmhand and she was the farmer’s daughter.

  “I’m looking for a job,” said Danny.

  “A job,” said Ted. “I thought you wanted directions.”

  “Don’t need directions. This is the place.”

  Ted looked at Danny. He had just finished restocking the livestock pharmaceuticals: bags of Duramycin-10, packages of Atgard Swine Wormer, jars of Calf Bolus.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re not really hiring right now.”

  Danny nodded.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I just drove all the way from Vassar.”

  “In New York?”

  Danny nodded.

  “And this girl I knew there, a friend of mine, she said her family had a feed store in Iowa City. She said they had a guest apartment over the garage that they rented out. Ted and Bonnie Kirkland. She said if I was ever in Iowa City I should look them up.”

  Ted considered the young man in front of him. Was he dangerous? A con man, maybe? The kind who sneaks into your life then tears it down brick by brick. Ted had a farmhand’s stoicism. His face was unreadable.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “all that is true. It is. What’s the name of this girl, your friend?”

  “Cora Kirkland.”

  “And your name?”

  “Daniel Allen,” said Danny sticking out his hand. Ted shook it. He still didn’t know what to make of the kid. He excused himself for a minute and went to call Cora. She laughed when he told her whom he’d just been talking to. She couldn’t believe that Danny was in Iowa City, standing in front of her father. They had dated for just a few weeks. She liked Danny, but he was always so distracted. He was a lost boy, and she was a girl with places to go, so she broke up with him one night over pizza. Danny didn’t seem to mind, and they’d stayed friends. Now she asked to talk to him.

  “Danny,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  “I dropped out of school,” he said. “I needed a change of pace. I thought a few months working the land.”

  “My parents don’t work the land,” she said. “They sell horse feed and farm supplies.”

  “Well,” he said, “that sounds good, too.”

  Sometimes when they made love, Danny would stop in the middle and go do something else—watch TV or make a sandwich. Cora thought of him now as a little brother.

  “My parents are square,” she told him. “They go to bed at eight o’clock.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he told her. “Besides, I like it here. The air is so fresh.”

  “It smells like cow shit.”

  “Isn’t that what fresh air smells like?” he asked.

  He moved into the apartment over the garage. There wasn’t a kitchen, but he had a hot plate and an old livestock trough to bathe in. At night he’d climb onto the roof and look at the stars. He never knew there were so many. That first night he lay on his twin bed and watched the shadows of trees flutter across the wood-slat ceiling. He listened to the wind, and for a few hours felt like somebody else.

  During the days he loaded and unloaded trucks. He wore a Velcro back brace and durable canvas work gloves. He stocked shelves. He learned the names of things: the Chore Boot and the Muckmaster. Neatsfoot oil was a natural preservative and softener of leather products. Red Hot Spray was a special formula of soap, spices, and flavoring to stop an
imals from chewing on bandages, leg wraps, and casts.

  He ate flat, fast-food hamburgers on the loading dock with the other stock boys. Mostly Mexicans. He practiced his Spanish, learning the dirty words first. Chingar meant “to fuck,” as in chinga tu madre. Manoletiando meant “to masturbate.” Hoto was a term for gay people. Pendejo meant “idiot.” He liked to wait until his fries were cold to eat them. The Mexicans thought this was crazy. They called him Cabrón. Only later did he learn it meant “asshole.”

  He had dinner every night with the Kirklands. Bonnie insisted. She was a tiny brunette with a gun collection. Her father had taught her to hunt when she was a girl, and she loved the feel of oiled steel in her hands. A week earlier she’d had a long conversation with Cora about Danny. She wanted to know if he was dangerous. Cora said, “God, no. Just a little lost.” Lost was something Bonnie could handle. She was a mother, after all, and lost boys call on frequencies only mothers can hear. Danny became her mission. Bonnie would make sure he was fed, that he washed properly. She would attend to his physical and spiritual health.

  They ate meat that came from the Kirklands’ own pigs and corn from their neighbors’ fields. It was fresher than any meal Danny had ever had. He could taste the dirt in every vegetable, the oaky compote of the soil. Eating a summer squash he felt like he could count every raindrop that went into it.

  They asked him about his family. He was vague. His parents were divorced. His mother lived in Los Angeles. His father lived in Connecticut with his new family. Danny was nineteen years old. He wanted to travel, see the world.

  “Well,” said Ted, “I wouldn’t say Iowa’s the world, but we like it.”

  They gave him an old bike that was rusting in the barn. He cleaned it up, bought a new seat and new tires. He would ride it for an hour every morning before work, racing down dirt roads, watching the sun come up. He was getting the lay of the land, figuring out his place. On weekends he would pick a direction and bike all day, riding north until lunchtime, then turning around and heading back. The ten pounds he’d put on in college eating sugary cereals and drinking beer melted off. The muscles of his thighs and calves started pressing against the legs of his jeans. Ten-hour days hauling feed sacks was giving mass and definition to his back and arms.

  One night he and the Mexicans went into town for a beer. They drove to Ugly’s Saloon, a bar near the university. One of the Mexicans had landed himself a college girl, Mabel. She was fat with frizzy hair, but she had a nice laugh and Jorge said she gave great head. The four Mexicans and Danny sat in a corner booth. They ogled girls and called them names in Spanish. The Mexicans told Danny that if he was ever in Mexico and he wanted to start a fight with a Mexican he should say Chinga tu madre. They told him the best place to hide a knife was in your boot. The fat girl showed up with three friends. One of them looked like Olive Oyl from the old Popeye cartoons. They ordered pitchers of watery beer. Jorge put salsa music on the jukebox. Things started to get rowdy. Danny ended up sitting next to Olive Oyl. She tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

  He went to play some pool and ended up in a showdown with a blowhard from the outdoor rec program at the state college. The guy was a foot taller than Danny and he kept whacking him with his cue when he turned around. The first time he apologized. The second time he knocked the beer out of Danny’s hand. Seconds later the Mexicans were surrounding the guy. Jorge was up in the blowhard’s face. He called him some of the names they’d taught Danny: maripso, maricón, mariquita. The blowhard had friends, flat-top yokels from the rugby team. The blowhard asked Danny if he brought his wetbacks with him to the toilet, too. Danny smiled without humor. His heart was racing in a way he’d never felt before. He saw Jorge reaching down for the knife in his boot. The bouncers were almost there, hulking, farm-raised boys from Swisher and North Liberty, pushing through the late-night crowd.

  “Concha de tu madre,” Danny said, then hit the blowhard in the throat with the heel of his hand.

  Later, after the melee that followed, after the bouncers charged in with their ham-hock fists and zero-tolerance policy, they sat on the curb drinking beer out of brown paper bags. Danny spit blood into the gutter. Jorge clapped him on the back. He was one of them now, an honorary Mexican. Danny told them he was probably the only white boy in America who was climbing down the social ladder instead of up it. The Mexicans thought that was hysterical.

  That night he called Samantha Houston from a pay phone. She was the girl he’d met in Chicago. Why did he call her, a girl he barely knew? Perhaps the unfamiliarity of his surroundings and the distance from everyone he knew conspired to make Danny feel lonely. Or maybe it was the one-two punch of alcohol and violence making him horny. Whatever the reason, it was after midnight. The Mexicans had taken him to a dive bar out near the interstate where they drank cheap tequila and shouted at the soccer game on television. He stood in the back hall near the bathrooms, one finger jammed in his ear, and yelled into the phone.

  “I’m in Iowa,” he said.

  “Why are you yelling?”

  “If you’d said the word ‘Iowa’ to me six months ago I couldn’t have even found it on a map,” he said.

  “Who is this again?” she asked. “It’s Danny. Or as I’m known here, Cabrón.”

  “You know that means ‘asshole,’ right?”

  “Does it? Son of a bitch.” He put a hand on the wall to steady himself.

  “Listen,” she said. “I can’t talk right now. My boyfriend just went out for cigarettes.”

  “Boyfriend,” he said. She had never mentioned a boyfriend. “I mean we had fun, don’t get me wrong, but you don’t even live here. And my boyfriend’s in law school. A girl needs to think ahead.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  The tequila was making the room spin. He said, “Maybe when I’m in Chicago again I’ll look you up.”

  “Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He went back to the bar. The Mexicans were stomping their feet and shouting. On-screen the Mexican team was running around with their arms in the air. Danny sat on a barstool and bummed a cigarette from a cowboy with one eye. He didn’t even smoke.

  He nursed his beer and thought about the things he’d learned in the three weeks he’d been here. He could name six brands of harvesting combines. He knew what tillage meant and how to recognize a chisel plow. He knew the difference between a rock picker and a leveler. He could identify a hoof pick by sight and tell you whether you needed that or a hoof knife, depending on the job. If your horse was agitated he could recommend Quietex paste or powder to calm him. They were real-world things, concrete. College was a place of ideas, of ephemera. Here he’d found details he could hold on to. Here the ground rose up to hit your feet when you walked.

  Jorge came over and punched him in the shoulder. He had a bruise on his cheek from where one of the rugby players had elbowed him. He told Danny there was a puticlub nearby. For twenty-five dollars he could put his verga in the culo of a woman. Danny told him he only had eighteen dollars left. Jorge shrugged. He and the others stumbled out to the car, laughing, leaving Danny with the bar bill.

  Walking home Danny felt the weight of the stars overhead. It seemed as if light was raining down on him. He stumbled along the shoulder of the road, his body rumbling from the speed of passing trucks. He could hear the cicadas in the roots of his teeth, that relentless exoskeletal scree. A Bubba in a pickup truck threw a beer can at his head. Danny left the road and navigated through the cornfields. The moon was shielded here. He followed its hazy glow through the claustrophobic press of leafy green stalks. By his calculation he had a mile, maybe two to go until he reached the Kirklands’ house.

  How much bigger the world felt now than it had just a few weeks ago. Wide open, like he could go anywhere, do anything.

  Something hit him in the face. Something big with legs. He brushed it away, cursing, and was hit again in the belly. He spun around, wav
ing his arms. He had always been afraid of bugs. And now they were everywhere, beating against him, getting caught in his clothes, his hair. He opened his mouth to scream and bit down on something crunchy. Panic filled him. He fell to his knees, vomited, then covered his head with his arms. Giant bugs beat against him, creatures of blind aggression the size of his fist. In the darkness he felt like he was being eaten alive, like each part of him that was hit disappeared into the corn. He rolled around like a man on fire, trying to put out flames that didn’t exist. Finally, after what felt like hours, the assault stopped. He lay panting on the ground. Around him cornstalks rustled in the wind. When Danny stood up he was disoriented. He didn’t know where the road was anymore. He brushed at his hair and clothes, trying to remove every last trace of the plum-size grasshoppers that had attacked him. He was dizzy from the tequila. His jaw hurt from where the blowhard had punched him. It was Saturday. The sun would be up in a few hours.

  For the first time he could remember he felt truly happy.

  He lay down amid the corn and went to sleep.

  Carlos Peña lived in a run-down apartment complex just east of Highland Avenue. There was a soiled mattress leaning against a palm tree near the entrance. Across the street, pit bulls barked behind a chain-link fence. Murray parked his rented SUV out front. We were both in suits, and we sat for a moment looking up at the building.

  “It’s moments like these,” said Murray, “that separate the something from the something else.”

  We climbed the front steps, examined the tenant list. PEÑA, C., APARTMENT 4F. Murray rang the bell. We waited. The door buzzed. Murray pushed it open. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the middle of a concrete courtyard. A lawn chair floated in it.

  “The thing about Los Angeles,” said Murray, “is that the defining mood is desperation. It’s a feeling that somewhere, someone else is getting the break you deserve.”