The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  I looked up at the windows. The place was laid out like a motel. There were bicycles chained to railings. The elevator was out, so we climbed to the fourth floor. Murray was huffing by the time we reached the top.

  “I bill double for exercise,” he said.

  We stopped in front of 4F. Murray tried to peer through the window, but the blinds were closed.

  He knocked. The door opened immediately, startling us. Carlos Peña peered out, his right hand hidden behind the door. He was a skinny man with a pockmarked face.

  “You cops?” he said.

  “I’m a lawyer,” said Murray. “He’s a doctor.”

  Carlos thought about this. Then he stepped back and let us in.

  “Sorry about the mess,” he said, “my girlfriend breaks stuff when we fight.”

  The living room was a wreck. There was glass in the carpet. The coffee table was busted. What looked like the handle of a steak knife was sticking out of the sofa.

  “Are you really a doctor?” Carlos asked. I nodded. He lifted his shirt.

  “I got this rash,” he said.

  The skin around his left hip was swollen and red.

  “It looks like a rug burn,” I told him.

  He thought about this.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, remembering. “Never mind.”

  He brushed some plates and magazines off the sofa, gestured for us to sit down. The handle of the steak knife was three inches from my left shoulder. If Carlos attacked us I could grab it and stab him in the stomach.

  Murray spent a few moments straightening the creases of his slacks.

  “My client,” he said, “is Daniel Allen’s father.”

  Carlos looked at me.

  “Who’s that?”

  “He also goes by the name Carter Allen Cash.”

  Carlos smiled.

  “The guy who shot the senator.”

  “Allegedly,” said Murray. “Allegedly shot.”

  “We’ve been informed,” I said, “that you were in Royce Hall when the shooting took place.”

  Carlos got up suddenly and went into the bedroom. Murray and I looked at each other.

  What do we do? I mouthed.

  He shrugged. I reached over and touched the handle of the steak knife. It was sticky. Carlos came out of the bedroom carrying a box. I quickly lowered my hand. He sat on a gutted Barcalounger, holding the box on his lap.

  “My brother had a colostomy bag,” he said.

  Neither Murray nor I could think of anything to say to that.

  “He stepped on a land mine in Fallujah. They were able to save his legs, but his insides were all fucked up.”

  He put the box on the table in front of us.

  “The doctors told him he might be able to crap normal again. Maybe in time. After a few surgeries. They gave him hope. So then every day he crapped in a bag he was miserable. He spends his time dreaming of the day when he can sit on the toilet like a man. When he can go back to having those miracle shits that make you feel like you just took a cruise. And he has the surgeries, and he has the therapies. And none of it works. It’s two years later and he’s still crapping in a bag. So one day he takes a gun and blows his brains out. My mom came home, found his skull spread all over the living room. We had him cremated, put his ashes in a box.”

  He reached out and taps the box he’d brought in.

  “And every day I take this box out and look at it,” he said. “And do you know what I think?”

  Murray shook his head. I shook mine.

  “Acceptance is the key to happiness,” Carlos said. “If those doctors had told my brother he’d be crapping in a bag for the rest of his life, he would have accepted it. He could have found a way to be happy. But instead they gave him hope. They promised him a better life. And so he spent every day hating the life he had.”

  He looked at me. His face had the consistency of a pepperoni pizza.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he said.

  “No,” I said, though even as he said it the words were resonating in my head.

  “You need to surrender yourself to the truth,” he said. “You won’t be happy until you do.”

  “And what truth is that?” I said, my voice cracking.

  “That your son is lost to you. That you don’t know him. That he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Which might not be a long time.”

  “Did you wrestle with my son at Royce Hall?” I asked, my voice hard. “Did he take something from you?”

  He smiled.

  “Wrestle?” he said. “Did I wrestle?”

  We looked at each other, unblinking. His smile widened, but there was no happiness in it. No life.

  “Tell us about these letters you write,” said Murray.

  “What letters?” said Carlos, holding my eye.

  “To congressmen, senators.”

  “I have opinions,” said Carlos. “Thoughts. I express them. It’s not healthy to keep that stuff inside.”

  “These thoughts,” said Murray. “They are sometimes of a threatening nature, are they not?”

  “What is that?” said Carlos. “A threatening nature? What does that mean?”

  “Why did you go to Royce Hall?” Murray asked.

  Carlos looked at him.

  “There’s nothing for you here,” he said.

  “We have a photograph that shows you wearing a white button-down shirt,” I said. “You stood less than ten feet from the stage.”

  Carlos stood up.

  “I showed you the box,” he said. “Next I’m going to show you the gun.”

  Murray stood. He gestured to me. I stood up, too. Together we could take him, couldn’t we? Two against one? A Jewish lawyer and a rheumatologist who’d never hit another person in anger.

  “You own a lot of guns, Carlos?” asked Murray.

  “It’s not the guns that get you,” said Carlos. “It’s the bullets.”

  I looked at the steak knife. Why was it sticky? Was that blood on the handle?

  “Let’s go,” I told Murray.

  He took out his business card.

  “If you change your mind and want to talk,” he said, “call me.”

  Carlos took the card, examined it.

  “I’ll add it to my special-interest pile,” he said.

  Murray took the card back.

  “On second thought,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  We went down the stairs and past the pool. Murray had his keys out before we reached the car. We climbed inside and locked the doors. We sat there, neither of us talking, for several moments. The rain had returned, a steady drizzle that ran down the windshield in dirty rivulets.

  “Well,” said Murray, “that was a thing and a half.”

  “What should we—”

  “Keep an eye on him. I’ll get a PI I know to tail the guy, see where he goes.”

  “He did it,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  Murray thought about this.

  “He seems capable,” he said. “But there’s a big difference between stabbing a sofa and shooting a presidential candidate. The world is full of crazy motherfuckers, Paul. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Why did everyone keep saying that? As if I had any hope left in me. I was living in a world of worst-case scenarios. Either my son was a murderer or he was innocent, and keeping his innocence a secret for reasons I could not begin to understand.

  “It’s not about hope,” I said. “It’s about facts. It’s about figuring out what really happened that day, and why my son doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Murray looked at me for a minute, his face skeptical. I could see him form a response, then think better of it. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “You think those were really his brother’s ashes in that box?” he asked.

  I shook my head. All I knew was that if we didn’t find some evidence of Danny’s innocence soon, I would end up with a box of my own.

  For his las
t meal Timothy McVeigh ate two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. Jimmies, some people called them. Ice-cream dirt. McVeigh had asked for them specifically. He saw ice cream as a sprinkle delivery system, nothing more. It was midafternoon, June 9, 2001. That morning he’d been transferred from his eight-by-ten cell at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, to the red-brick death house five hundred feet away. It was a place few prisoners ever go. One from which none return. At 5:10 a.m. he’d stood naked in his cell. The guards had lifted his sack. They’d told him to bend over and spread his cheeks. This was a common occurrence around here. Prison is all about men in uniforms looking up your ass.

  Inside the red-brick death house, McVeigh was placed in isolation, one last day in a tiny dismal cell. This one was a hundred feet from the execution chamber, a large empty room that contained the last bed on which McVeigh would ever lie. At one p.m. the guards delivered his last meal. He ate both pints of ice cream without pausing. What did he care if he felt sick later? He’d be dead. A guard watched him through a hole in the door. McVeigh sat on his cot watching television. For his last day of life the warden had allowed him to surf basic cable. McVeigh was addicted to all-news networks. He watched CNN. He watched MSNBC. He saw his own face looking back at him. He watched himself walk out of the courthouse in an orange jumpsuit six years earlier. News anchors with spray-on tans said McVeigh was scheduled to die at eight a.m. tomorrow morning New York time. They interviewed pundits who talked about closure. They talked to the family members of his victims, mothers whose children had died at day care, blown to bits by a five-thousand-pound bomb parked outside in a Ryder truck.

  They didn’t understand. Nobody understood. This was a war. He was a soldier. McVeigh poured the rest of the sprinkles into the bowl and licked his spoon. He had been raised Roman Catholic in Lockport, New York, though the God he had come to believe in after firing a 25-mm cannon atop a light-armor Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the first Gulf War was a God of Volume and Might.

  On TV they showed footage of the siege at Waco. Had it really been eight years? The talking heads spoke of inspiration. They said Waco was where it had started for McVeigh. This is where the seed was planted. Revolution. In his cell, McVeigh remembered seeing the first reports on TV in 1993. A compound of families under siege by the federal government. Women and children being teargassed. And in that moment he saw the war to come, neighbor versus neighbor, the individual versus the state. McVeigh drove to Waco and sold bumper stickers out of the trunk of his car. He lowballed copies of William Pierce’s book The Turner Diaries. The siege lasted fifty-one days, and then the government went in and burned those people to death. They shot them as they ran out of the flames. Women and children writhing in agony.

  He joined the gun-show circuit, driving from town to town buying and selling. He stood on desert ranges with bikers and ranchers and other out-there freedom fighters. They shot bazookas into the nothing. “It’s all right here,” he told people, showing them a copy of Pierce’s novel about the coming race war. He fired automatic weapons into the middle distance, gritting his teeth against the racket. But bullets were too small for him. A gun was a meager statement. A bomb, on the other hand—a bomb was a shout.

  He made contact with an old army buddy, Terry Nichols. They sat in bars and talked about how they wanted to bring the fight to the government’s doorstep. They talked about end times, about blowing shit up. They wanted to see the look on Clinton’s face.

  Eight years later McVeigh lay on the bed of his death-house cell. For the first time in years he was able to see the night sky. He lay under the tiny window and watched low-slung clouds glide across the dark, blacking out the moon. It felt like love.

  On TV he saw his father, Bill. Dad looked old, haggard. He had retired from the radiator plant where he worked for more than a decade. There was an orange sign on his garage that read NO MEDIA ALLOWED. The reporter said Bill spent most of his time in the garden. They showed the verdant backyard where he grew strawberries, asparagus, peas, onions, corn, beans, and cabbage. Everything but cauliflower, which, he said, just wouldn’t grow.

  On the witness stand at McVeigh’s trial, the defense lawyer had showed a photograph taken in 1992 of Bill with Timothy in the kitchen of his home in upstate New York. Father and son had their arms around each other, big smiles on their faces. The defense attorney asked Bill, “Is that Tim McVeigh in that picture the Tim you know and love?” And he said, “Yes, it is.” And then he was asked, “Do you still love your son?” Bill said, “Yes, I do love my son.” And then the defense attorney asked, “Do you love the Tim McVeigh who is in this courtroom?” Bill said, “I do.” And then he was finally asked, “Do you want him to live?” He said, “Yes, I do.”

  The jury sentenced him to death anyway. His crime was too massive. What could one father do or say that would combat the misery of 168 fathers?

  In the courtroom McVeigh sat stone-faced, watching his father talk. He would be strong. He would not cry. Not like yesterday when his mother had testified. Tears had leaked from his eyes, sneaking out against his will. But you can’t blame a boy for that. Not when the mother sits weeping on the stand, saying how much she loves her son and how afraid she is.

  Now, on TV, his father said, “I’m trying to treat it like any other day. I realize what it is, but …”

  During McVeigh’s trial, his attorney played a videotape the defense had assembled. It was made up of old home movies his grandfather had shot; Bill’s voice narrated the film. Tim as a boy, the schools he went to. Images of him, his hair brushed, dressed in his Sunday suit, standing outside church.

  “I think he enjoyed school,” his father said. “He was a good student, although he never got the marks that he was capable of getting, I don’t think. In high school he got an award when he graduated for never missing a day. In four years, he never missed a day of school. The first time Tim worked, I think, was the beginning of his senior year. He went to work at Burger King. After he was out, he got a New York State—$500 New York State Regents Scholarship. He went to Bryant & Stratton. It’s a business school. And he didn’t feel he was learning more than he already knew, so he decided to go back to work. And then after that, he got a job at the Burger King in Lockport. He worked for Burger King—I don’t know—maybe a year—and after that he got a job for Park Security, driving an armored car. He got the job there because he had a pistol permit. Tim graduated, and he said at the graduation that quite a few of the kids were going into the military. He come home one day and said he was going in the service, and I says, ‘When,’ and he says, ‘Tomorrow.’ That’s about all I can tell you about when he went in the service, or over to the Persian Gulf. He didn’t seem to mind going, and he was ready to go when the time come, and they went to Kuwait. And I believe it was right around the end of ’91, Christmastime in ’91 or so. And he come back, he seemed to be happy when he come home.”

  McVeigh stood by the window and watched the clouds. He had less than twelve hours to live. On TV the news anchors talked about how McVeigh’s mother has had three nervous breakdowns since the bombing. The words made McVeigh uncomfortable. There was a feeling in his stomach. A queasy expectation. Maybe it was the ice cream. Maybe it was thoughts of the needle in his arm. When they showed pictures of his mother, sad-faced and pale, with her hair falling out, he had to look away.

  The death-house cell had tan walls, a bed, a sink, and a toilet. McVeigh’s lawyer had visited him around three. They’d talked about last-minute appeals, but neither one of them was holding out any hope.

  On August 14, 1997, McVeigh made one last statement before the judge sentenced him to death. He said, “If the Court please, I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’ ”

  McVeigh paused.

  “That’s all I have,” he said.

 
; With CNN on in the background, McVeigh wrote a few letters. He called the bombing a “legit tactic” in the war against an oppressive government. He said he was “sorry that people died, but that’s the nature of the beast.”

  In an interview with Time magazine after his arrest he’d said, “I don’t think there is any way to narrow my personality down and label me as one thing or another as many people have being trying to do. That’s what they try to do with the psychological profiling, with the handwriting, etcetera, etcetera, and it’s all pretty much a pseudo-science that I really laugh at when I read. I’m just like anyone else. Movies I enjoy would be action-adventure movies, comedies, sci-fi movies and shows. I can talk to almost anybody. The big misconception is that I’m a loner. Well, I believe in having my own space and being on my own sometimes. But, that in no way means that I’m a loner, which the press likes to equate with an introvert. That’s a complete misconception. Women, social life. I like women [chuckle]. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.”

  On TV he saw his father again. This time Bill was sitting with another man, white-haired with glasses and a gentle face. McVeigh knew who the man was. His name was Bud Welch. He was the father of Julie Marie Welch, a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d been killed in the bombing. Since the trial Bill and Bud had found an uneasy friendship. They were a death’s-head nickel, two-sided: the father of a murderer, and the father of his victim.

  On TV Bud said, “In the months following Julie’s death, I was one of many seeking vengeance for the people who took my daughter. I turned to alcohol and cigarettes to ease my pain. I was angry with God for allowing this terrible thing to happen to me. But after several months, I began to hear Julie’s voice. Years before, as a child herself, I remember her telling me that she thought that executions only taught children to hate.

  “With the realization that losing a child is a terrible burden, I began to understand that Tim McVeigh’s dad, Bill, would soon be facing the same pain when the government executed his son. I reached out to Bill and his daughter Jennifer and that experience strengthened my conviction that we do not need to use the death penalty in this country.