The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “I appreciate the work,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. But none of this has anything to do with my son. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Doc,” said Murray. “I love you like an Indian gaming casino, but you need to accept that this thing is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

  He arrived in Austin on August 15, having meandered through Kansas and Missouri. He drove the NAFTA highway dodging eighteen-wheelers driven by men hopped up on chemically altered cold medications. When he got bored he lost himself on back roads and city streets. In Oklahoma he slept in a motel next to a truck stop. He found a bullet behind the toilet and what looked like the outline of a body shadowing the carpet. In the dappled light of the August dawn he decided that sex with truck-stop prostitutes was just another form of prayer, if the cries coming through the wall were any indication.

  In Austin he sat inside the Whip In and looked for a place to live. He went on Craigslist and found a room in a house full of frat boys near the university. Someone had painted the Texas Longhorn logo on the lawn. There were beer cans in the trees. Inside, the place looked like a museum of trash. The house had been handed down from class to class over the years, never really changing hands completely. Students moved into rooms for a semester, stacking beer cans on windowsills, failing to wash the toilet, and adding to the ever-growing Honorary UT Underwear Pile that someone had started in the living room. Then they moved out. The lease was still in the name of a guy who’d graduated when Reagan was president. It was like a time-lapse photograph of a river making a canyon out of a mountain. The mess was archaeological. Dig deep enough you might find a half-eaten sandwich from when Elvis was king.

  Danny’s room was on the second floor facing Rio Grande Street. Across the street there was a house full of sorority girls, and the frat boys would take turns lying on the roof with binoculars hoping to catch sight of some premium Texas snatch. Danny sat in his room and listened to the radio with the windows open. It was muggy in Austin, a hot, lazy climate of ceiling fans and afternoon thunderstorms.

  The frat boys called him Sport and Chief. They called him Broheme and Jefe. One guy called him Albert. It was easier than learning his name. Like the others, Danny would do his time at number 1614 then fade away, leaving only a false memory and a pair of stretched-out underwear on a pile. He was just another guy pissing in the toilet and dunking his toothbrush in a dirty mug.

  Around him things went on as usual. Austin was a city of growth. It had a population of less than a million people, many of them musicians. This made it a landscape with a soundtrack, bands playing in the supermarket, at the airport. Pecan trees lined the streets, live oaks and Texas sycamores. The city had been built on a slow bend in the Colorado River, and much of its activity had to do with water. There was canoeing on Town Lake and swimming in Barton Springs. It was a city of parks and creeks and young men in baseball caps playing frolf. If you didn’t bike or swim or run or hike in this town, he was told, there was something wrong with you.

  Riding his cheap, secondhand bike around town, Danny realized that everything in Texas either said Texas on it or was in the shape of Texas. Place mats, road signs, security gates. It was as if residents were worried they might wake up in New Jersey if they didn’t surround themselves with reminders.

  It was in Austin that Jay Seagram first entered Danny’s consciousness. It was Thursday, August 20. The first Democratic primary wasn’t for five months, but already politicians were touring the country, doing the morning shows, making stump speeches, and forming exploratory committees. Danny was riding his bike on the Lady Bird Lake Trail when he saw the first banner. He settled into a coast and wiped his brow. He could hear the sound of a crowd up ahead. Riding past the First Street Bridge he saw them, a throng of registered voters crowding the great lawn of Auditorium Shores. Onstage a man in a suit told them it was time for a change. The sun sparkled on the river. A light breeze blew in from the west. Last night the humidity had finally broken, and today it felt like anything was possible.

  He left his bike by the gate and wandered through the crowd. Young women in bikini tops sat on towels, squinting toward the stage. Dogs ran off leash, kids played with Frisbees.

  “I’m tired,” said Senator Jay Seagram, holding the microphone casually, speaking without notes. “Tired of making excuses for why bankers get rich while the rest of us get screwed. Tired of hearing stories about families being evicted from their homes. Tired of children going to bed with empty bellies. I’m tired of being told I should be afraid of people I’ve never met. I’m tired of fighting a war based on a lie. I’m tired of living in a country where people can’t get help when they’re sick, and I’m sick of multinational corporations getting away with murder at our expense. I’m sick and I’m tired, and looking out at you, I can see from your faces that you too are sick and tired.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “You’re sick of feeling like your voices aren’t heard. You’re tired of paying taxes that go to buy bullets that kill people just because they speak a different language than you do. You’re sick and tired of spending half your paycheck on gas, when car companies have the technology to make cars ten times as fuel efficient. Today. They could do this today, but they don’t. Why not? Aren’t you sick and tired of asking ‘Why not?’ ”

  People were standing now. Danny walked among them, his fingers brushing their arms. There was electricity in the air around him, like the static before a storm.

  “It’s time to stop asking,” said Seagram. “It’s time to start doing. To make demands. We demand universal health care. We demand a living wage. We demand our politicians stop raising our taxes while cutting taxes for corporations. We’re tired of asking. We have been patient and we have been polite. But we’re not going to be polite anymore.”

  Danny stood next to the stage and watched as Senator Seagram raised his arms over his head. The crowd roared. Seagram looked down and his eyes met Danny’s and he winked.

  The next day Danny went to Seagram Campaign Headquarters. It was on Guadalupe, near the Co-op. He talked to a man in blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, Walter Bagwell.

  “What can I do?” Danny asked.

  Bagwell gave him a clipboard and some flyers and sent him out to raise candidate awareness. Daniel stood on the corner of Twenty-second and Guadalupe and handed flyers to students. The flyer asked the same questions Seagram had asked at the rally. It listed a website you could visit and a phone number you could call. Danny handed out five hundred flyers his first day. Walking home he saw them discarded, stuffed into trash cans and stuck to the windshields of cars. This seemed to him like a metaphor for politics itself. One man’s outrage was another man’s trash.

  At the UT library he read everything he could find about the senator. Seagram had grown up poor. His father walked out on the family when Jay was three. Seagram had put himself through college, and then through law school by starting his own college prep course for high-school students. By the time he graduated from Stanford Law, Seagram had more than eleven hundred employees, and branches of his course existed in eighteen states. He sold the company to the Princeton Review for six million dollars.

  Danny sat in the library looking at pictures of Seagram and his wife, Rachel. She was a pretty brunette with laugh lines around her eyes. She looked like a good wife, like the kind of wife who never said anything mean, who played with her children and cooked complicated meals, and liked to give head. The children were bright-eyed, pink-cheeked. They looked like kids who got good grades and played team sports. Happy children from an intact home whose parents loved them. Children who weren’t shuffled back and forth between their mom and dad for the holidays. Children who never had to listen to their mothers screaming at their fathers how they “fucking hated” them. How they “wished they would die in a fiery car crash.” Children who never had to watch their fathers slam doors and kick holes in the wall.

  It was clear. Not only did they hav
e good parents, these children; they had each other. Someone to play with, someone to lean on. They weren’t like Danny, an only child who, when he was six, snuck out of his house one night and slept in the car just to see if his parents would notice. They didn’t. Here they were on vacation, a happy family smiling beside a lake. Here they were on a sailboat, floating on Caribbean waters. Here they were at Christmas standing next to a giant tree, bright lights flashing like smiles.

  He e-mailed himself the pictures, the articles. He wanted to look at them later in his room. To make some notes.

  He first noticed the girl in Russian History. She was reshelving books about the civil war. She had light brown hair and a pointy nose. Her ears stuck out a little but not too much. Something about her face made his chest contract. Something about her light summer sweater and the swell of her buttocks against her slacks. He hid in Current Events and spied on her as she made her way through the stacks. She had a bright white smile and an easy laugh. Everyone around seemed to know her. Danny couldn’t turn his eyes away. She was the kind of girl, he thought, who gets up early to swim laps, then delivers Meals on Wheels after work. The kind of girl who doesn’t just drop off the meal but stays to hear stories, to look at pictures of grandchildren.

  He lay in bed that night and thought about her. He pictured them sailing on Caribbean waters. The thought of her in a bathing suit made his skin tighten. Downstairs the frat boys shouted at the TV and ate pizza they’d found in a box under a towel. He could hear the baseball announcer calling the game, that clipped rapid tone, the flat vowel sounds of an eastern industrial city.

  In September he registered people to vote. The Seagram campaign coordinator said she’d never seen so many signatures collected in one day. He was good with people. He saw things about them. He chatted up housewives in supermarket parking lots. He talked sports with jocks. He stood on street corners with the illegals waiting for work and learned what the slang words were for pussy in Ecuador and Brazil.

  After his shift ended he would go to the library and read about Texas. He felt it was important to know everything he could about the place where he was living. The girl didn’t work every day. She did the afternoon shift Monday through Wednesday, and morning on Thursday and Friday. Her name was Natalie. Danny got to the point where he could recognize her silhouette from a distance. He became familiar with her clothes, her outfits: the jean jackets and the long skirts. She wore an anklet on her right leg. It was something a boyfriend might have given her. He wondered if she wore it to bed. If she showered with it on.

  He thought about talking to her many times, but he never did. She was so clearly the perfect girl, and he worried that if he spoke to her she would say something or do something that would ruin it, and then she’d be just another pretty girl with a great ass he had slept with.

  He was happy in Austin. He liked the weather and the people. He liked riding his bike beside the water. He even liked the frat boys with their beer bellies and affectionate head butts. There was a girl he couldn’t stop thinking about, and a job that felt right to him. He had found a purpose. A cause.

  And then he saw the tower. And everything changed.

  The University of Texas clock tower was built in 1937. It stands just over three hundred feet tall on the west end of the campus. It is the tallest building for blocks in each direction. The first time Danny noticed it he was standing on the corner of Twenty-first and Guadalupe handing out flyers. He had worked the area for two weeks, but this was the first time he could remember looking up. The time on the giant clock read 3:15 p.m., gold hands crossing over brass roman numerals.

  He left the flyers on top of a garbage can and walked toward the main concourse. Entering from Twenty-first Street he passed a monument to student soldiers killed in World War I. He climbed the steps toward the main administration building, past Benedict Hall and Mezes Hall, past statues of George Washington and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. He stood on the wide concourse staring up at the tower. It held a strange hypnotic power over him. For some reason he thought of the funnel cloud that nearly killed him back in Iowa. This, too, felt like the arm of God somehow.

  As he was standing there a girl came up beside him. She was someone he’d registered to vote two days earlier. They’d talked about school and the weather. It was clear she was attracted to him, but he wasn’t interested. Susan something. Now she slid up beside him and said, “Can you believe he killed all those people here? It still gives me the willies.”

  He looked at her. He had no idea what she was talking about. “The marine,” she said. “Charles something or other. Whitman. It was back in the seventies or something. He went up there with a rifle and just started shooting.”

  She asked him if he had time for a cup of coffee. Danny made an excuse. He hurried to the library. The tower was looming in his head.

  Natalie wasn’t working that day. Yesterday he’d overheard her ask for the day off. It was for the best. He had to be back at work in an hour and didn’t have time to pine for her today. He went straight to the computer lab and typed in Austin, UT clock tower, Charles Whitman.

  The facts were these. Just after midnight on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, twenty-five, had strangled his mother with a rubber hose, then bashed the back of her head in. He then stabbed his sleeping wife, Kathy, five times with a hunting knife. The next morning he drove to the University of Texas, climbed to the top of the clock tower, and shot forty-six people with a sniper rifle, killing sixteen and wounding thirty, before he was shot and killed by police.

  Danny read the reports. He found old TV footage, news reports from the day. He saw still photographs of victims on gurneys, of police hunkered down behind squad cars.

  In the months leading up to the massacre, he read, Whitman had remarked to various people that a sniper could do a lot of damage from that tower. Cultural theorists called it history’s first modern crime, and said Whitman’s random shooting spree had given birth to the twentieth century.

  Charles Whitman was born in Lake Worth, Florida, the son of a wealthy family. He was a gifted student, an accomplished pianist, and an Eagle Scout. But he had a violent father, who would later admit, “I did on many occasions beat my wife. But I loved her. I did and do have an awful temper, but my wife was awful stubborn. Because of my temper, I knocked her around.”

  He also beat his sons, using belts, paddles, and, when nothing else was around, his fists to discipline them. In June 1959, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Charles came home drunk and his father beat him badly and threw him into the swimming pool where he almost drowned. A few days later Whitman joined the Marine Corps. He was determined to get out.

  In the marines he earned a sharpshooter badge, scoring 215 out of a possible 250. He excelled at rapid fire from long distances and seemed to be more accurate when shooting at moving targets.

  The marines saw officer potential in Whitman, so they sent him to Austin, Texas, to attend the university. In Austin he married his girlfriend, Kathy Leissner. He also started gambling and was arrested for poaching. His grades were average. The marines decided they’d made a mistake and called Whitman back to active duty. He was posted at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. He resented the Marine Corps and it showed in his behavior. In November 1963 he was court-martialed for gambling, usury, and unauthorized possession of a nonmilitary pistol. He did thirty days in confinement and ninety days of hard labor.

  Back in Austin, he returned to school. He was determined to make up for lost time. Then, out of the blue, he was struck by fits of blinding rage. His wife convinced him to see a therapist. Whitman sat in his office and told him he had fantasies of going up into the clock tower and shooting people with a deer rifle. The therapist told Whitman they’d made progress and asked him to come back in a week.

  Whitman started self-medicating with Dexedrine. He thought it made him a better worker, but in truth it made him sloppier. He went days without sleeping, sitting at the kitchen table trying to get o
rganized.

  On July 31 he bought a Bowie knife and binoculars at a surplus store and canned meat at the 7-Eleven. He picked up Kathy from work and took her to dinner. Back at home he sat down and wrote the following letter.

  Sunday, July 31, 1966, 6:45 p.m.

  I don’t quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks. In March when my parents made a physical break I noticed a great deal of stress. I consulted a Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had. I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt some overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.

  Leaving Kathy at home, Whitman drove to his mother’s apartment. Inside apartment 505 he choked her with a length of hose until she passed out, then stabbed her with the hunting knife. In this way a boy surpasses his father. He placed her body in her bed and pulled up the covers. He left a note on the door for the super, asking not to be disturbed.

  At home he went to the bedroom where Kathy was sleeping. He pulled back the sheet and stabbed her five times. Then he sat down to finish the letter he’d started earlier.