The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “This is nice,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I used to go camping with my dad a lot before he died,” I told him.

  He thought about this.

  “My teacher died last year,” he told me. “People said he had AIDS, but I think it was just pneumonia. He was pretty old.”

  “How’d that make you feel?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He was nice. But it didn’t feel real. One day he was there, and the next there was a lady with one big shoe who took over the class. So it just felt like maybe they fired him.”

  “One big shoe?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said, “because she had, like, one leg longer than the other.”

  I considered explaining to him the biological realities of death, what happens to the body, the way it looks, the way it smells, but decided against it. Let him go on believing his teacher had been fired. The knowledge of death can consume you if you let it, the inevitableness of it, and I wanted to protect him from that for as long as possible.

  I asked him if he remembered the things we had done together when he was young and his mother and I were still married.

  “Like, do you remember going to Venice Beach, to the promenade?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We would take you there every Saturday morning and have breakfast on the beach. You used to love to run in the sand. You were three, maybe four.”

  “Really?” he said. He told me he hated beaches now. “I don’t like the ocean,” he said. “The way it never stops, the sound of it.”

  “What else?” I asked him.

  He thought about it.

  “Blenders,” he said, “and horses. Horses creep me out. And flowers. The way cut flowers smell, the water, when you leave them in the house for too long.”

  “That’s decay,” I said.

  “Yeah. Also people’s teeth, when they’re bad. Like witches in movies. I have to turn it off. It makes me want to knock out my own teeth. Just the feeling of all those tombstones on my tongue.”

  I turned the lamb chops on the fire. Fat dripped down into the flames, making them dance.

  “So what do you like?” I asked.

  “I like it when it snows,” he said, “and everything gets muffled. And then when you walk there’s a crunch. I like the way it feels, and how you can tell where people have been.”

  “I like the feeling I get when I jump into water,” I told him. “How for a second when I first submerge it’s like I’m in and out of the water at the same time.”

  “Movie-theater seats,” he said. “All that red velvet.”

  We ate everything in sight that night, two men by a fire, licking our plates clean.

  Later, I lay in the tent listening to the sound of his breathing. It was a sound I hadn’t really listened to in years, the rhythmic sighs of my eldest son as he slept. He had been a baby once, needy and small, but that time had passed. Where had it gone? How can life move so quickly? Now he was a fifteen-year-old boy with a teenager’s mustache. Now he was a book with a torn cover. I had known him once, his tiny body, the energy of his smile, the smell of his breath, but he slipped away from me.

  The next day we hiked two miles to the lake, stopping to hydrate along the way. It was partly cloudy, but there was rain in the forecast. We reached the water around eleven, passing through rows of narrow pines, last year’s needles still thick underfoot. Daniel seemed friendlier after our night together. He told me stories of his classmates, who was an idiot and what girls were cute.

  I asked him if he had ever had a drink or experimented with drugs.

  He told me he’d been high a few times, that he had friends back in L.A. who smoked, but he didn’t like the feeling very much.

  “I don’t like feeling muddy or, like, out of touch,” he said. “I was reading about how we have so many chemicals going into our bodies, like, all the time and we don’t even know it. I think it’s important to be pure, you know? To try and stay clear.”

  I told him that I thought that sounded right. I told him people usually turned to drugs and alcohol as an escape. I said I wish I’d had that kind of perspective when I was fifteen.

  Walking back, I let Danny get ahead of me. I was enjoying the air, the sound of the leaves shivering in the wind, and the way the morning light filtered through the trees. When I looked down again, I saw Danny standing still on the path ahead. I was about to call out to him, but something about his body language made the words catch in my throat.

  When I reached his side I saw that he was staring down at the body of a dead deer. It was a doe and small, maybe a year old. Scavengers had gotten to it, and some parts were just bone. But the face was relatively untouched.

  Danny didn’t say anything. I glanced at his face, not wanting to make him self-conscious but trying to gauge his reaction.

  “He’s really dead, isn’t he?” he said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Mr. Santiago. My teacher. He’s really dead. He didn’t just quit.”

  I reached over and put my hand on his head, pulling him to me. After a minute he put his arms around me, and we stood there together, listening to the sound of the wind in the trees.

  The next day, when we got home, Fran asked me how it had gone. I told her it was a great trip. I said I felt like I’d made a breakthrough with Danny, that we’d reestablished our bond. I felt high from the experience—the woods and the fresh air, the time spent with my son in the kind of environment I had shared with my own father—but the next day I went back to work, disappearing into my busy schedule, and three months later Danny packed his things and moved back to California, to his mom’s house.

  That camping trip turned out to be the last time Danny and I ever spent more than a few hours together. The brief glimpse of his true self I felt I had seen, the insight I had gained, grew murkier as the next few years passed, until finally, when he’d dropped out of college, he had become only slightly more than a stranger.

  But at that moment, standing in the kitchen with Fran, my arms still vibrating from the steering wheel, I felt triumphant, as if I had just erased eight years of casual parenting in a single weekend.

  Isn’t it interesting how we rewrite the past in our minds, how we paint our memories in the most flattering light? With patients I am always aware not only of the things they tell me but of the things they leave out.

  It’s not just that people don’t like to share information that embarrasses them. It’s that they often block out their most painful memories. They create a subjective history, different from the truth. Was this what I had done with Danny’s childhood? Taken an absent father and rewritten him to be loving and warm and omnipresent?

  And yet how many children grow up in broken homes? How many suffer through divorce and neglect, and don’t grow up to be assassins? These truths, though painful for me, were not explanations. They did not answer the deeper question of motive. They did not tell me what I most needed to know. Why did my son feel he “had to” kill another human being? What fate or destiny did he believe in that had pushed him to join in the murder of an American hero?

  The psychiatrist who interviewed Daniel had written about a journal he had kept. I needed to see that journal. I needed to read my son’s words, to understand his journey, his process. What insights were hidden inside those pages? Truths that might be meaningless to a stranger but would not be meaningless to me. When I finished reading the psychiatric report the first time, I’d called Murray.

  “We have to get it,” I told him.

  “I’m working on it,” he said. “The problem is, he pleaded guilty, and the judge accepted it. So there’s no trial. They’re arguing that the journal falls into the trial discovery phase, and we don’t need it now. I told them if they didn’t turn it over the discovery phase would involve me discovering what it felt like to shove my fist up the guy’s ass. Mostly he stopped returning my calls after that.”

  “Murray,” I said.

 
; “I know. Don’t worry. We’ve filed a motion to get it before the sentencing hearing. We’ll appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.”

  But the prosecution hadn’t turned over the journal, and the courts didn’t force them to. And now my son was on death row. He had refused to appeal his conviction or petition to have his sentence commuted. It was accepted that he’d killed Seagram. The more time that passed, the less anybody cared about why.

  Except me. I was still fighting, still struggling to understand. I was the lone voice in the dark, the fringe dissenter, still asking questions.

  I would get that journal, if it was the last thing I did.

  The next time he saw her, he invited her to a rally. It was October, eight months before the event. The presidential election was just starting to heat up. Senator Seagram was coming to town to drum up support. There would be fund-raising dinners and photo opportunities. At headquarters a fresh sense of urgency filled the air. They had registered more than thirty thousand new voters in six months. Seagram was going to come by the office and personally thank the staff for their hard work. Walter Bagwell, who managed personnel in the Austin office, called the staff together and said it was “a historic moment.” Seagram was poised to become the Democratic front-runner, and Texas had played a big part in his ascension.

  Near the back, someone asked if Seagram’s family would be with him. Bagwell said his wife would be joining him, but the kids were in school. Carter Allen Cash thought about the boy in the lake, Seagram’s frozen son. He wondered if he would ever know that kind of sorrow. Even as he stood there he was imagining himself asking her to be with him when he met Seagram. Natalie. It had been almost a week since he last talked to her. She had missed a few days of work. Sick, the temp had said. Carter had left the library early that day, riding his bike along Mopac all the way to north Austin and back. He spent the night lying in bed reading old Russian novels.

  He went to Barton Springs every night at nine to swim. It was Indian summer, sweat running down the small of his back and trickling down his sides. He rode his bike without a helmet, without lights or even reflectors. He liked the feeling of invisibility. Hot wind blew past him, like a convection oven, cooking him evenly on all sides. Pulling into the parking lot he would ditch his bike in the bushes and dive straight into the water, still in his clothes. He liked to lie on his back in the cold water and watch the stars flicker overhead. The wavy sound of the divers found his ears through the ripple of water. He swam laps across the deep end, feeling the vegetation caress his hands and feet. He liked that there were fish navigating somewhere beneath him, lurking in the dark. He lay on the grass listening to the wind in the trees. He studied the girls in their bikinis. The fullness of their breasts made him self-conscious. He wondered how they could walk around on display like that, wondered what it took to be a woman who markets her sex.

  Did Natalie come here? Did she wear a bikini like these girls, the wet fabric hugging every curve, broadcasting her sexuality like some girl in a men’s magazine? The thought was too much. He dove deep and let the silent pressure calm his nerves. There was something about this false summer that made him restless.

  He rode to a Tex-Mex joint and smoked cigarettes out back with the busboys. He missed the camaraderie of Latin men. The joking insults, different somehow than the macho cocksmanship of the frat boys. He liked the way they drank beer from the bottle and smiled through their teeth like sharks. The busboys were from southern Mexico. They talked trash about northern Mexicans, how their chiles were smaller and their women took it in the ear.

  His clothes dried quickly in the convection-oven heat. He liked buying drinks with wet money, handing over the soggy bills, taking the cold, hard change in return. After-hours he sat on the curb outside Schlotzsky’s drinking beer out of a paper bag. One of the busboys said he knew a girl who would fuck three guys at one time. The dishwasher passed around photos of his girl back home. They had three kids together. He was going to bring them all to Texas as soon as he could put together enough money to pay the coyote.

  Lying on your back in the water of Barton Springs there was nothing to do but breathe. You felt the water cupping your face, tracing the outline of your body. His wet clothes clung to him, pockets full of water. His flip-flops threatened to float away and sink down into the pitch black below. He could feel his imminent departure, like a head cold coming on. He gave himself two more weeks, three at the most. The girl was the wild card. The possibility that she might fall in love with him, that they would date and she would be able to see who he was. To see the reason for him, the point. If she did, would she tell him? Is that what he was waiting for? Someone to explain himself to him?

  He was ready when he saw her the next day. He had spent all morning thinking of the right words, practicing his offhanded tone. At the library he lurked beside the Russian classics, waiting for her to walk by, the girl in the white pants, a girl he thought he could love.

  “Hey,” she said, when she saw him and smiled.

  The smile made him feel liquid in the middle, like a cookie fresh from the oven.

  He said, “There’s a rally tomorrow. Seagram’s in town—the presidential candidate—and, you know, I volunteer for the campaign. Anyway, he’s coming by the office afterward to say thanks. I thought maybe you might want to go—with me. Meet him.”

  She flushed and nodded. Her smile was like that moment where a rainbow forms, a great arc of color, brightening the storm-dark skies.

  The next night he picked her up in a cab. They went to Shady Grove on Barton Springs Road. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and slacks he had spent twenty minutes steaming flat in the shower. They sat out under the trees and ate burgers and onion rings. She had a whiskey. He drank water without ice.

  Natalie was too pretty to look at directly. When he did, he felt like a man falling down a circular staircase or water spiraling down a drain. This was the way it worked. Men are a brick wall. Women are a doorway. Sitting across from her, he felt a great need to explain himself, and the stronger the need became, the less he knew how to satisfy it. Trying to put who he was into words was like trying to say how many marbles were in a giant jar. The best he could do was guess.

  She laughed a lot and told him about her hometown, the way her parents raised her to be a yes person, not a no person. He listened to stories of her buddy-buddy nuclear family as if they were tales of the outrageous.

  He told her that his own father had moved out when he was seven. The muscles of her face formed a frown.

  “That must have been hard,” she said.

  He shrugged. He wanted her beauty to be a calming thing, but instead it agitated him. He could not think about her lips without picturing them on the head of his penis. He wanted her to be a nun, but he knew that under the right conditions she would yield to heat and pressure. Why, he wondered, did everything have to be so base and predictable? When it came right down to it, no one ever asked you if you wanted to be an animal. You just were one.

  Wolf or sheep?

  That was the question.

  They took another cab to campaign headquarters. There was a line outside, security doing pat downs and checking purses. Waiting to be screened, Natalie took his hand and squeezed it. He could see the excitement in her face, a certain redness in the cheeks. Her breathing was shallow and fast. As they approached the front door, she leaned over quickly and kissed him on the cheek. He recoiled as if slapped, then tried to cover.

  He had never had a problem being with women before, the intimacy of words and bodies, but something had shifted in him on the road, the part of him that was open to connection. It was like a gear that had broken off in transit and was rattling around somewhere inside the engine, just out of sight.

  He squeezed her hand in apology and managed a smile. She smiled back questioningly, eyes hopeful. The spot where she’d kissed him was itchy, like a bug bite.

  Inside, they found their place in the crowd. The room was packed w
ith well-wishers, Austinites of all ages, shaking with liberal Pentecostalism. Carter positioned himself and Natalie so that they were near the door. Beside him, Natalie was literally vibrating with excitement. This was the effect Seagram had on people. They smiled when he walked into a room. Their core temperature rose. Carter had observed it before on TV, but now he was experiencing it firsthand. Around him everyone grinned and rocked up on their toes. Natalie put her hand on his arm and squeezed. He glanced over at her, and she said, “Thanks again for bringing me.”

  He didn’t reply. Seagram was almost to them now. There were two Secret Service agents in the lead, checking the room. Two more followed closely behind. Carter felt like a surfer waiting for a wave. He took a deep breath and made his face friendly and open. As Seagram got closer, he stuck out his hand. Seagram grabbed it firmly with both hands, and squeezed, but his eyes were elsewhere, lighting up with something like recognition.

  Charged by the power of the handshake—the dominating pressure the Great Man exerted, like the stranglehold of a python—Carter turned to see what Seagram was looking at and found Natalie, blushing. She was wearing something new tonight, something she had bought just for the event. It was a blue dress, sleeveless, mid-length, low cut. Her hair was down. Her eyes were sparkling. Her lips resembled fruit that would go bad by tomorrow, collapsing into soft, blackening pulp.

  Carter turned back in time to see Seagram’s eyes drop to Natalie’s cleavage. It was a fast glance, almost imperceptible, the candidate’s eyes already moving on, but Carter saw it, saw this so-called “great man” check out his date’s rack. He felt dizzy, like a balloon that had sprung a slow leak. It was the vertigo of crushed expectations, the disorienting feeling that a landmark he had steered by these last few months had turned out to be a mirage.

  The Great Man was not a great man. He was a regular man pretending to be a great man. He was a false diamond, a common body that shits and fucks and lusts, just like everyone else.