The Good Father (27 page)

The woman turned from her program when he came in. She greeted him cheerfully and asked if there was something she could help him with. He said he was thinking of getting a gun, his first. She asked if he was thinking of a handgun or rifle. He said a handgun. A gun you hold in your hand. He tried to be nonchalant about it. He was a carpenter buying a hammer, a housewife loading up on dishwashing detergent.

It turned out that the bearded man’s name was Jerry. He learned this when the woman told Jerry to
move his damn sandwich so she could help this young fella
.

Jerry gathered his food and went into a back room.

“We’ve got a special on nine-millimeters,” she said. “Glocks. You pay full price up front, but there’s a mail-in rebate.”

He looked down at the rows of revolvers—snub-nosed, long-barreled. Shiny metal instruments with hard wooden handles. He thought about what he wanted, the fantasy of the gun. It wasn’t weight or size that interested him. He didn’t want a gun that made a statement, a .357 with
a titanic barrel. This wasn’t an exercise in bravado. He was looking for a secret.

His eyes moved over the case, taking in the geometry of cylinders and trigger guards. They were hard objects, machine-tooled and hand-finished. The guns in front of him existed outside the automation of modern technology. They were stubborn Luddites, easy to dissect, easy to take apart and reassemble. Easy to clean and oil. Easy to load. Easy to shoot.

“Could I see that one?” he asked, pointing to a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. It was compact and matte black.

The woman opened the case with a key and slid the gun off its pedestal. She put a gray chamois on the glass counter and laid the pistol on top of it.

“Compact forty caliber,” she said. “Very reliable. Good stopping power. It’s a polymer frame with a stainless barrel.”

He touched it with his fingers, slid his thumb under the body, and then the gun was in his hand. It felt light, the polymer just rough enough to give the gun a feeling of grip.

“How many bullets in the clip?” he asked.

“Eleven,” she said.

Standing there, holding the Smith & Wesson, he thought of Bonnie Kirkland. He thought of the Mexicans and the knife in his boot. Iowa seemed like a movie he had watched on a plane. He lifted the pistol and aimed down the sight at one of the targets. He tried to figure out what it meant that every time he had held a gun it had been handed to him by a woman. Could that be just coincidence?

“I also have a Glock compact and a Ruger,” she said. “Like I said, there’s a special on the Glocks right now.”

He stared down the barrel of the gun. The target he was aiming at contained two figures, the silhouette of a man hiding behind the cartoon outline of a woman. The man was a criminal. The woman was his hostage. He stared down the barrel, moving the gun back and forth imperceptibly between the two figures. Criminal, victim. Criminal, victim. He thought about what the cartoon woman had done in her life to bring her here, to this place, to this endless crisis.

“Looks like love,” the woman said.

It was meant to be a joke, but he didn’t so much catch the words as
hear her tone. It implied that another few moments without responding and she would begin to wonder about him. He turned to face her, lowering the gun toward the floor.

“Do you think I could shoot it?” he asked.

The woman smiled, sensing a sale. She asked him which target he wanted. He pointed to the hostage crisis, and she unfolded a stepladder and took it down.

Now, in the library, he thought of the gun in its hiding place in his room at the frat house. He wasn’t brave enough yet to carry it around with him, to walk the streets with a .40-caliber pistol pressed into his spine, but he was getting there. He had taken it to the park the other day, a short walk, fifteen minutes tops, feeling the polymer grip rub against his skin. It felt like an erection, the fevered, insistent wood of a thirteen-year-old boy who has just discovered the meat between his legs, but doesn’t know how to use it yet.

Holding the Russian novelists, talking to the girl in the white pants, he smiled. He had a secret, and the secret was power. Wolf or sheep? The answer was becoming clear. The girl smiled, brushed the hair from her face.

“I’ve seen you in here,” she said. “The last few weeks. Except you’re usually in American History.”

He felt a great heat run through him. She had noticed him.

“I’m taking a trip,” he told her. “I started in New York.”

“Wow. I always wanted to go to New York. I’m from San Antonio.”

“I spent some time in Iowa,” he said. “I like Texas, though. It seems important somehow. Like a place where big things happen.”

“That’s what we like to think,” she said. “But personally, I wish I’d lived in Moscow at the turn of the century. The twentieth century. Or St. Petersburg. Before the Revolution. All those passionate Russians, the long winters, the big hats.”

“You have big hats here, too,” he said.

She laughed. “It’s true.”

“I think it’s normal,” he said, “to want to be from someplace else. To glamorize another time. I think everybody feels like their lives would be better if they were someone else.”

She studied him.

“What kind of trip?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you in school? Did you run away from home?” He didn’t know how to describe it, what to say. When she looked at him, he felt like a tape measure respooling back into its case, disappearing by inches.

“I find it interesting,” he said, “that the word for journey is the same word you use to describe a fall.”

He smiled to show her it was a joke. She smiled back. In her eyes he could see something click.

“I’m Natalie,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Carter,” he told her. “Carter Allen Cash.”

Spring came early to the American West. That’s what the locals said anyway, in the streets and shops of Colorado Springs. They clucked their tongues and talked about global warming. Some nodded their heads in a southerly direction and talked about how it was all “their” doing. The “them” in this case being the military men of NORAD, whose bunker lurked deep in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain just outside town. The Allen family had become residents of Colorado Springs in January, blowing into town with the brunt of winter. We had left the East Coast in the dark of the night just after New Year’s, detaching like an iceberg and drifting west. After the privileged, urbane lives we’d enjoyed in the wealthy suburbs of New York City, it was strange to find ourselves in the tumbleweed sprawl of the work-boot West, surrounded by cowboy iconography and strip malls.

Gone were the local bagel shops with their overstuffed Sunday papers and house-smoked fish. Gone were the hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants with their thin-crust pizza, Thai noodles, and Szechuan takeout. We said goodbye to sophisticated French cuisine and the regional menus of southern Italy. Now we lived in a region of chain restaurants and barbecue huts, where Italian food meant a fried, breaded chop smothered in cheese, and Chinese food was served with frozen peas and carrots. Ordering “a large” here meant something different than it did back east, as was evidenced by the bucket of ice tea the waitress brought me that first day at Applebee’s. These details were startling, not just because it felt as if we had moved to a different region of the country but because it felt as if we had relocated to another country entirely.
A country of obese women and men with mustaches. A country of cheap cars, snowmobiles, and Jet Skis. In short, Walmart country. For the first few weeks the boys mocked everyone they saw, mimicking their accents in low-slung
Sling Blade
voices. Their mother and I scolded them for it. In the past I might have shown similar prejudice, but my experiences of the last year had humbled me. As backward as I may have thought some of the characters we encountered, none of them were parent to an infamous murderer.

We tried to settle in, getting used to a new house, a new climate, a new life. The kids started public school, climbing onto a bright yellow school bus, book bags stuffed with oversized geometry and history textbooks. Three days a week I drove a used Jeep Cherokee an hour north to the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, where I had accepted a position as a guest lecturer. Despite my recent notoriety, the president of the medical school jumped at the opportunity to bring me on staff. We agreed it would be part-time at first, but with an eye toward making me a full professor and head of the rheumatology department by the end of the year.

The drive to school took me from the rust-colored flatland of southern Colorado, through the foothills of the Rockies, and into the smoggy valley surrounding Denver. It was my first real experience with the emptiness of western states. To harbor this much land undeveloped—miles of scrub grass and rolling hillocks stretched out as far as the eye could see—seemed criminal. Every day I thought of the hungry millions crammed into third world cities. We had more space in this country than we could ever use; deep canyons and impossible mountain ranges, remote riverside acreage and volcanic lake beds. I was used to the narrow, cluttered highways of the East, where in the span of eight hours you could drive from New York to Maine, passing through four states. But here, in the massive sprawl of the West, eight hours wouldn’t even get you across the state.

Of us all, Fran seemed the least affected by the move. She continued her virtual assistant work, uninterrupted. That was the benefit of being virtual. To her clients she was just a voice on the phone, an e-mail address. It mattered not whether she was in Connecticut or Calcutta.

We had moved to Colorado Springs two months to the day after Danny was sentenced to death in a Los Angeles courtroom. In the weeks before,
his attorneys had fought to get his guilty plea thrown out. They’d filed motions and briefs, had appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in the end, the judges were unmoved.

It didn’t seem to matter that Frederick Cobb’s autopsy had shown fourteen separate stab wounds, that a former Special Forces operative who’d been arrested riding a freight train with my son a month before the assassination had been murdered in cold blood just weeks after. The details of Cobb’s last day were sketchy at best. He may or may not have bought a lottery ticket from a 7-Eleven in Glendale. We know that, at some point, in the early evening he had eaten a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. His stomach was full of half-digested French fries. Somewhere around ten that night, Cobb found himself in a culvert under an overpass, where he was stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds to both hands. The police quickly assessed it as a transient murder, possibly drug related, and made little effort to solve the case, despite a considerable amount of pressure from Daniel’s legal team. To the police, Cobb was just another army vet who had come back from the war and fallen on hard times.

Murray and I had taken what we knew to every newspaper and magazine we could think of, but other than a small article in
The Sacramento Bee
about Cobb’s “coincidental connection” to Daniel, the press was unresponsive.

Marvin Hoopler, the other veteran from the train, proved impossible to locate. After he was arrested with Daniel and Cobb last May, Hoopler seemed to have disappeared without a trace. His past turned out to be just as hard to analyze. The government rejected numerous Freedom of Information Act requests for Hoopler’s service record, saying it was classified. I took their letters and put them in the file. No detail was too small, no idea too preposterous not to catalog. A presidential candidate had been assassinated. We had a dead veteran who’d been a sniper in Special Forces, and another, service record unknown, who had vanished into the abyss, and my son, a college dropout with no history of violence.

When I wrote the facts on a piece of paper I found I couldn’t make them fit together. They were like a man with a limp stumbling into an emergency room. The initial exam reveals a deep gash in the calf that requires seventeen stitches, but rather than treat the wound, the doctor on call diagnoses the problem as neurological. Looking at Cobb’s
autopsy photos and the letters from the army denying our requests for Hoopler’s service record, I couldn’t help but see the truth as a wound no one wanted to acknowledge.

My son had confessed to murder, and there were three possible explanations. The first was that he was, in fact, guilty. That he had, of his own free will, smuggled a handgun into Royce Hall and, standing a few feet from the stage, fired two bullets into another human being. The second was that he had shot Seagram as part of a larger conspiracy, in which Cobb and Hoopler were involved. And the third, which I had to admit seemed far less likely, was that he truly was a patsy, that he had been a bystander to the assassination, that Cobb or Hoopler had been the trigger man and had somehow planted the gun on Daniel after the shots were fired.

So putting aside the third option for the moment, the question became either (1) why had my son allowed himself to become involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Senator Seagram, or (2) why had he, of his own free will, pulled the trigger, a lone gunman standing in a crowd, expressing his dysfunction with a gun?

On November 6, three days after Daniel’s guilty plea was formally accepted, the Republicans won the presidential election by a narrow but decisive margin. Seagram’s death had left a void in the Democratic leadership that a dozen candidates had rushed to fill. They had succeeded only in cluttering the landscape. Meanwhile, the Republicans had used the assassination as a wedge, calling for tougher antiterrorism laws. They had spun themselves as the party that would stop at nothing to protect the country, and though they did not win by a landslide, they had received enough electoral votes to announce that they’d been given a mandate by the American people.

Two weeks later, on November 17, after a short sentencing phase, my son Daniel Allen was sentenced to death. Both his mother and I had testified on his behalf, taking the stand to beg for his life. It was a moment beyond description. We had done everything in our power to prove to the jury that Danny was a warm and thoughtful human being. We had shown pictures and told stories, had shared our brightest memories, our hearts sickened by love and regret. Ellen wept so much during the hearing that the court had to break three times so she could finish her statement. There are no words to convey the feeling you have as a parent as
you plead for the life of your child. No words to describe the unmoved expressions of the jury, the judgment and cold detachment in the eyes of the prosecutor. There are no words to describe the feeling that comes over you when the judge announces his verdict, when he tells a crowded courtroom, and a national audience, that he is ordering the death of your son. It is a deep, sucking blackness. Another form of death. And that is all I’m going to say about that.