The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  By the time Carter had processed this, Seagram had an older woman’s hand clasped in his. He was posing for a photo, his smile perfunctory once more. How many hands had the candidate shaken in the last three years? How many wives or girlfriends had he ogled? As Carter watched, Seagram made his way to the center of the room, where he took his place in preparation for a speech.

  “That was amazing,” Natalie said.

  Carter looked at her, his face closing down, like a door that slams shut in the wind. Whatever magic he had felt with her was gone now, extinguished like a cigarette beneath his shoe. She was no longer the muse of famous Russian novelists, no longer the bright beacon he would steer toward on dark and treacherous nights. Now she was just another witless country girl, seduced by power.

  Men were predators.

  Women were prey.

  He watched Seagram take the podium in that packed office in Austin, grinning through the applause. Carter saw how the candidate’s wife looked at her husband, with hope and love in her eye. It was a look he had seen her give him many times on TV, and it had always made him feel warm—to know that a woman could feel such love for her husband (and he for her), that a family could exist where trust and faith was just a normal part of life.

  But now, watching Seagram take his wife’s hand, watching him kiss her on the cheek, Carter saw that love for what it was. Another lie. Not only was Seagram not a great man (because he was victim to gross and petty lusts, like some kind of degenerate trucker); he was also not the devoted husband and reliable father he made himself out to be. He was false, the way a marketing campaign is false, just another American hypocrite, a clandestine seducer of women, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  And it was at that moment that Carter had the first awakening as to what he would have to do. He saw it in a flash, the vision like a gunshot with a massive recoil. The power of it rocked him back on his heels.

  Afterward, on the street, when Natalie asked if he wanted to get a drink someplace, he told her he was sorry, but he had to get up early. He was leaving tomorrow and had packing to do. He needed supplies. He could see the hurt and surprise on her face, but he didn’t stay to explain. He simply left her there on the sidewalk, protesting to the moon.

  When he got home the frat boys were bumping bellies. It had been a long night of Jell-O shots and Indian burns, and they were feeling rowdy. He tried to squeeze through the crowded hall and slip into his room, but one of them grabbed him, folded him into a headlock. He dug his knuckles into Carter’s skull.

  “This guy,” he said. “This fucking guy.”

  There was porn playing in the living room. Black women with enormous asses in spandex walked slowly away from the camera. He set his heels into the floor, tried to pry himself loose. Below him, the carpet smelled of cigarettes and vomit. The frat boy hung on. Whatever playfulness he’d had in mind when he started this maneuver was now replaced by a drunken need to humiliate.

  “Where you going, Nancy?” he said.

  On-screen, a black woman poured milk onto her naked buttocks.

  Carter struggled to break free, but the frat boy had him tight. The guy started walking him around the apartment, dragging him by the neck, making jokes.

  “You guys have met Nancy, right? Anybody wanna see what color her thong is?”

  The frat boys laughed and slapped him on the ass. He could feel his face burning, something ugly filling his mouth with the taste of metal.

  “See if he’s got any money on him,” somebody said. “We’re out of booze.”

  He felt hands going through his pocket. The frat boy’s armpit smelled like beef and cheese. They found a fifty in his back pocket. Carter threw a horse kick, connecting with something soft. Somebody punched him in the spine.

  “Calm yourself, Susan,” the frat boy told him, increasing the pressure on Carter’s neck until he thought he might black out. Together the frat boys bum-rushed their hostage to the bathroom, tossed him inside. He heard them lock the door. His face was red, temples throbbing with trapped blood. They laughed and grunted. He banged on the door, but they just turned up the music. Carter looked around for another means of escape. The clear, plastic shower curtain was caked with so many years of mildew it looked, for all intents and purposes, like a green shower curtain. He tried the small window over the toilet. Its swollen frame creaked but yielded. He put his head out and studied the two-story drop.

  The frat boys were huddled around a bong when he came out of his room with the gun. They thought it was a joke at first, but then he slid the action back, priming the Smith & Wesson, and suddenly they were all on their feet, hands up, telling him to “calm the fuck down.” But he was calm. The fury that had filled him in the bathroom was gone, replaced by a flat certainty. He could see the fear on their faces, except for the fat guy passed out on the sofa, who slept through the shouting and the thunder of feet, as he had through the riot that preceded it.

  Carter showed them the gun, forcing them backward. There were six boys, big and dumb and drunk. Five were residents. They were the ones who called him Chief and Sport. They were the lummoxes who broke the toilet with their beer-soaked logs, who grilled cheese sandwiches directly on the burners of the stove, until the stovetop itself had become a Tolkienesque mountain range of fly-encrusted dairy. They were the ham-fisted troglodytes who butt-fucked wasted coeds on the wall-to-wall carpeting of their rooms, and then chased them out with rug burns on their knees.

  He told them his name wasn’t Susan. It wasn’t Nancy. He didn’t go by Chief or Sport or Jefe or Jeeves. The gun was his name. They should remember that. When they talked to him they were talking to the gun. On-screen, a white woman with hard round boobs flinched when some faceless fat man’s money shot nailed her in the eye.

  The frat boys told him to put the gun down. They said they were just kidding around. He told them they needed to understand that there were consequences to their actions. He said their daddies should have taught them that, but clearly their daddies were assholes, so he was going to teach them. He said their mommies should have taught them not to rape women, not to spit on their drunken, roofied bodies, but clearly their mothers were whores, so he was going to teach them. He asked how many of them had a sister. Half of them raised their hands. He wanted to know how they would like it if he slipped a pill into their sister’s drink and then took pictures of her unconscious body with his dick in her mouth. They intimated that they wouldn’t like that very much, but he suspected that it was the gun that was making them so compliant. Without the gun they wouldn’t be so agreeable. Without the gun he would in the middle of a foot-storm.

  He put the gun up to the frat boy’s forehead, the one who’d noogied him.

  “From now on you are going to flush the toilet,” he told him. “You are not gonna knock on my door at two in the morning and ask if I want to see the biggest shit you ever took. I don’t. Nobody does. And you are going to stop puking in the shower and peeing on the wall. We are human beings. This isn’t a barn.”

  “Sure thing, Sport,” the guy said, going cross-eyed trying to keep sight of the gun.

  Carter stepped back, keeping them all in sight.

  “Now I’m going in my room and going to bed,” he told them, “and anyone who wakes me up is going to talk to the gun again. Understand?”

  They all nodded. Sobriety comes quickly when weapons are pulled. Carter backed into his room and closed the door. He could hear them outside whispering furiously, trying to figure out what to do. He went over to the window and out onto the lip of the roof and slid down a drainpipe. He walked three blocks to the park and hid the gun in a culvert, then walked back through the lamplight and climbed up to his room.

  He thought about how it had felt to point the gun at those frat boys. The power of it, like a potion you drink that makes you fifty feet tall. He imagined that he’d had the gun with him earlier, when he’d taken Natalie to the rally. He pictured the feel of it, hidden in the small of his back, then imagined himself pu
lling it, imagined showing it to Seagram, the change in the man’s expression—from lechery to fear, respect, awe.

  Who was the great man now?

  In his mind certain ideas had solidified into fact: The candidate was a hypocrite, a liar. The gun was the truth. The gun could not lie. It said what it meant, every time. Using the gun, Carter would show the candidate how to be truthful. He would teach him about honesty, the way falling from a great height teaches a man about gravity.

  As quietly as he could, Carter closed his bedroom window, picturing the look on Natalie’s face when she saw him with the gun. When she saw that he, too, was a powerful man, not just another sucker pawn. He pictured the arousal in her eyes, the blue dress falling from her shoulders. She would be naked underneath, but where her dark triangle had been there would now be a blinding yellow sun.

  He was lying in bed reading Gogol when the cops came in, kicking the door open, guns drawn. He sat up slowly, showing them he wasn’t armed. A black police officer grabbed him by the wrist and maneuvered him onto the floor, putting a knee in the small of his back. He asked them what the problem was, and they wanted to know where he’d put the gun. He said, What gun? He didn’t own a gun.

  The cops pulled him out into the living room while they tore apart his room. He could hear things breaking in there, the rip of sheets, clothes being pulled from their hangers. When it became clear there was no gun in his room, the cops mellowed slightly. They offered him the opportunity to tell his side of the story. He affected an irate but civilized tone, and explained that he had come home, yet again, to find his roommates drunk and loud and watching porn. He explained how, unlike them and their rich daddies who paid tens of thousands of dollars so their pampered children could sleep it off in class, he was a workingman who needed his sleep. But when he’d asked them to turn it down they’d gotten aggressive. One of them had put him in a headlock and another had punched him in the back. He lifted his shirt to show them. The area had already started to bruise. He told the cops that he had threatened to call the landlord in the morning and have them thrown out. And then he’d gone to bed. And the frat boys must have decided to teach him a lesson. So they called the cops and said he’d threatened them with a gun. But he didn’t own a gun. He was a doctor’s son working on the presidential campaign of a man who had sponsored six gun-control bills. He hated guns. And if they didn’t take these fucking cuffs off him right now he was going to sue them for wrongful arrest.

  The cuffs came off in a hurry. Worried he’d gone too far, Carter assured them that he understood they were only doing their jobs. He asked them if they would wait while he packed up his things. He said he didn’t feel safe sleeping under the same roof with those guys, not after this. They gave him fifteen minutes to throw his stuff in a suitcase. He didn’t have much. Just some clothes and books. The frat boys were outside, smoking cigarettes on the curb, casting nervous glances at the windows. They started yelling when they saw the cops lead him out, not in cuffs but a free man, carrying all his worldly goods.

  One of the officers took the frat boys aside and gave them a talking to. He could see them protesting, pointing. There was a heated conversation, which ended with a cop putting a finger in one frat boy’s face and telling him to shut the fuck up. The frat boys stood stunned in the middle of the street and watched as the cops put Carter’s suitcase and book box in the trunk of a prowler, followed by his bike. A uniform asked him where he wanted to go, and he said it would be dawn in an hour. Maybe they could just take him over to the Seagram campaign headquarters. He’d get some coffee at Austin Java and wait for the doors to open. And by the way, did the officer know of any available apartments?

  And it was in this way that Carter Allen Cash came to relocate, waving from the back of the police car as the frat boys stood openmouthed on the curb.

  That April, Ellen Shapiro called me from the parking lot of ADMAX. It had been five months since Danny was sentenced to death, ten months since the assassination. For Ellen, this worked out to eight haircuts, three hundred and six showers, eleven hundred daydreams, sixteen thousand waves of remorse and regret. This is how she saw it, she told me, the way your nails and hair continue to grow after death. As if each commute, each meal and troubled night’s sleep added bricks to the one-way street of her life.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I came to see Danny. He looks awful. I told him I’d come back tomorrow, but I don’t even know where this is. I don’t have a motel. I’m driving a rental car.”

  I gave her directions and told her I’d meet her halfway. An hour later I found my ex-wife sitting in a landlocked country diner, staring at a cup of coffee. Her hair had turned entirely gray in the months since Danny’s conviction. She wore it up now, loosely fitted with a clip. Her lips, which had always been thin, were pursed to the point of near invisibility.

  “He looks bad,” she said.

  “He doesn’t look that bad.”

  “He seems vague to me now, like he’s already fading away.”

  I unzipped my windbreaker. Ellen and I hadn’t spoken since Danny’s sentencing. Seeing her now brought back feelings from that day, an unwanted glimpse of all the hysteria and fatigue, like the view of the abyss from space.

  “Did you talk to him about appealing?” I asked.

  “He won’t have it,” she said. “I begged him, but he says no. I told him I was going to hire a lawyer. He said if I did he’d never talk to me again.”

  I nodded. It was the same conversation I’d had with him.

  “Don’t give up,” I told her. But I could see that she already had. It seemed I was the only one crazy enough to hold out hope for my son’s salvation in the face of all that had happened.

  “I’m forty-eight years old,” she said. “And I never got a handle on things. I never figured out how to have a career. I never figured out how to make a relationship work. I never got my body back after the birth or learned to multitask. And now it’s too late. Danny was the only thing I ever did that I was proud of. And then he did this.”

  “He didn’t do it,” I said.

  “How can you say that?” she asked. “He confessed. They sentenced him.”

  I considered telling her what I knew—Cobb and Hoopler on the train, the possibility that our son hadn’t been the trigger man at all, or that he had been brainwashed into doing it—but the leap was too great. I could see from her face that what she was looking for was forgiveness, not information. She needed to know that she was not the cause of Danny’s destruction. That giving birth to a murderer would not be the only lasting mark she would leave on the world. “I think he’s covering for someone,” I said.

  She gave me a look, exasperated, pissed, like I was a con man who had fleeced her once then come back for more.

  “But how do you prove that?” she wanted to know.

  I shrugged. Ellen stared out the window for a long moment. A lock of hair fell across her face. I found myself feeling a tenderness toward her I hadn’t felt in more than a decade. We had loved each other once, had walked down the aisle, had made promises about forever, in sickness and health. We’d had a child together, had raised him in tandem for years, rising in shifts to handle his late-night needs. And then, when the fighting became too much, we split and started new lives.

  “We were so young when we met,” I said. “It’s hard to believe.”

  It had started to rain, and streaks of water ran through her reflection in the glass.

  “You were a cute doctor at a party,” she said. “I was in town ten minutes. I thought everybody I met was going to be a movie star.”

  “I was wearing scrubs and you asked if it was a costume.”

  She smiled wistfully.

  “I’m dingy. My brain gets things wrong. Danny would ask me to help him with his homework and I would tell him that is not a good idea.”

  After a pause, I said, “I know we’ve been through it and over it a hundred times, but was there anything? When you think back, was there anything th
at we could have done? Anything we missed? A warning sign?”

  She thought about it.

  “He never really seemed that into girls,” she said. “I mean he had girlfriends, but he never seemed invested.”

  I thought about this.

  “What else?”

  “I caught him a few times,” she said, “smoking pot with his friends. He was thirteen, fourteen. I picked up the phone to call you, but then I stopped because I knew you’d blame me. You’d make it my fault somehow.”

  “Was I really that awful?” I asked her, strangely hurt that that was what she thought, the impression she had of me, her ex-husband, as some kind of punitive ogre.

  “You judged people,” she said. “Me especially. I think you were embarrassed by me. You were this successful doctor and I was the ditz who didn’t graduate from college. And then we had a kid and you thought you knew better. All your complex theories about child rearing. But do you know what the most important part of being a parent is, Mr. Fancy Pants Doctor? Showing up. And I was there for that kid every day. So say what you want, but I did it. It’s not my fault.”

  I reached out and took her hand. She pulled back instinctively, but I didn’t let go.

  “I know you did,” I said. “And I want to thank you for doing that, for being there. I left. I admit it. I moved away and left you. I left him. And it is my one great regret.”

  She looked away.

  “Who’s going to take care of me when I’m old?” she said. “That’s what I keep thinking. I should have had another. I should have had girls.”

  Not for the first time I wished that I could go back in time, make different choices. I wish that I could have helped her more with the transition. That I’d stayed in L.A., helped her raise our son. I wish I could have found a way to share the burden, to free Ellen somehow so she could find some kind of happiness. But what would my life have been like if I’d done that? Would I be married now? Would I have children? At the end of the day was I really ready to sacrifice my other children so that my firstborn son could be whole?