The Good Father (37 page)

Robert was on the sofa in the living room, sitting on a protective layer of newspaper. He was watching
Ice Road Truckers
and eating a bowl of cereal.

“All done,” I said. “Thank you.”

He nodded.

“It’ll get easier,” he said. “You don’t want it to. It just does.”

Outside I felt the need to walk. I went east to Guadalupe. Across the avenue stood the orange-roofed buildings of UT. I was a bloodhound on a trail. Seeing the frat house had only whetted my appetite. I had to find the storefront that had housed Seagram’s campaign headquarters, the place where my son had worked. I walked south a few blocks, then turned back and headed north. I found it next to the Church of Scientology, half a block from the Co-op bookstore. It was a tattoo parlor now, its window filled with sketches and designs. This is the history of cities. What was once one thing is now something else.

I pictured my son standing in this spot, a clipboard in one hand, registering students to vote. He was Oswald in New Orleans handing out flyers. A man with a terrible destiny. Could he imagine at that moment, tying string around a ballpoint pen, that he would one day stare down at the body of the very candidate he was promoting? Can any of us see our future, catch a glimpse of it in the dazzle and sparkle of whitecaps?
Or does it lurk deeper, hiding in black holes under gnarled tree stumps in a boggy swamp?

What were the symptoms? What was the disease?

As I was standing there, my cell phone rang, startling me. I fumbled it out of my pocket, expecting to see Fran’s number come up. Instead the LCD readout read “Blocked.” I pushed Answer, heard a prerecorded message, a woman’s voice telling me I was receiving a call from an inmate at a federal penitentiary. My heart rate tripled. Was something wrong?

“Daniel,” I said.

“Hey, Dad.”

“What’s going on? It’s late there.”

“Yeah, they don’t usually let us use the phone after eight.”

“Are you okay?”

An ambulance drove by, siren screaming. I plugged my ear with my finger to hear his answer.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Where are you?”

“At a medical conference,” I said. “In … Houston.”

Why did I lie? What would my son say if he knew I was retracing his steps?

“Are you sleeping okay?” I asked him.

“Couple hours at a time,” he told me. “I read a lot. They let me have some watercolors. So I try to paint what I remember. The great outdoors. It helps to have a vanishing point to look at.”

I thought of my younger sons asleep in their beds.

“Listen, Pop,” said Daniel. “I just wanted to let you know. They set a date.”

“A date?”

“For the execution. December 14.”

December 14. Six months. I was an astronaut lost in the weightlessness of space.

“December 14 of this year?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s so soon.”

“Yeah.”

He let me absorb it. A recorded voice came on the line to remind me that I was talking to a prisoner at a federal penitentiary. It was a woman’s
voice, and I tried to picture her face. It was a harsh, Nurse Ratched face, a taskmaster’s scowl, a dirty-bitch glare.

“Danny,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to fight, but you have to let us appeal this.”

“No,” he said. “It’s better this way. I can’t do this much longer, live in a box with a toilet, looking at a watercolor horizon.”

“Maybe we could have you transferred.”

“No, Dad. This is where I belong, with the worst of the worst.”

We’re not all put on this Earth to do what’s right
.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Bullshit. You’re a good kid. You made a mistake.”

“Dad,” he said, his voice calm, “we both know the truth.”

“What truth?”

“I should have died in a plane crash,” he said.

A stunned silence. I had no thoughts. No words.

“Well, I just thought you should know,” he said. “Have a good night.”

“No. Daniel. Wait.”

But he was gone. I stood there for a long time holding the phone to my ear, willing him to come back. December 14. Six months. My son had six months to live. The knowledge was a fist squeezing me, a choke hold.

I stood there for a long time, watching the traffic with unseeing eyes. I felt like I was trapped at the bottom of a dry well, dying of thirst in a hole meant to water a village. A teenage girl approached me. She was leading a puppy on a frayed rope leash. Her hair was stringy. She asked if I could spare some change. I took out my wallet and handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

“I’m not gonna blow you, dude,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “I’m a father. Please. Get yourself a meal.”

I asked her if she was in school. She told me she was working on it, but right now she just needed something to eat.

“You have someplace to sleep tonight?”

She shrugged. Without hesitation I handed her the key card to my hotel room.

“This is to a room at the Intercontinental. The room is paid up through Thursday. Take a bath, order room service. No one will bother you.”

She looked dubious.

“I came in for a conference,” I told her, “but I’m not staying. I can’t. I have someplace else I have to be.”

“Where?” she asked.

I thought of all the clothes I had shed in the move, the hair I’d cut, the weight I’d lost. I thought of my three sons, the wife who loved me, the ex-wife who only loved herself. I thought of the chemicals they would inject in my boy, the toxins that would paralyze his muscles and stop his heart. The man I’d been for fifty years had ceased to exist. This was something new.

“Iowa,” I said. “I’m going to Iowa.”

He decided to ride the trains for a while. It was May 20, 20__, three months after his exodus from Montana, his epic escape from winter. The journey between there and here was a study in rootlessness. He drove quickly from town to town, never staying anywhere for more than a few days. Yakima, Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Klamath, Eureka, Ukiah, San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis. He had seen enough redwood trees to last a lifetime, had slept on the beaches of Northern California and woken with his feet in the ocean. After the year he’d spent inland, the endless waves felt like a relief. Along the way, rain forests had given way to Pacific cliffs, then arid hills and vineyards. The men were shaggy, then clean-cut, then fat. Women of indeterminate age eyeballed him from trailers and campsites. They winked at him in diners and gave him the finger from the backs of their daddy’s motorcycles.

He spoke to no one, except to put twenty dollars in pump six or order a hamburger. He was warier now, suspicious of strangers and more furtive. His smile had been lost somewhere in the snowdrifts of the northern plains. He laughed now only in anger.

He had stayed too long in Montana. He knew that. Trapped in the suicide funk of a rural motel. It was the fault of the weather and his broken car. After the incident at the senator’s house, the revelation, he had spent six more weeks holed up at the Derbyshire, socked in by storms that barreled through the great north like freight trains. The sun was only out for a few hours a day, and under it everything looked cold, sterile. In daylight everything turned blue. His own skin looked mottled and deathly, as if he was a zombie in a town full of the undead.

Things that had seemed clear to him that day on the senator’s street became murky in the moldy coffin of his room. Whiteness surrounded him, and yet everything he touched was gray. He found himself sleeping for hours at a time, entire days. His thoughts darkened. It felt as if he were being punished for his Moment of Understanding, like a man who has flown too close to the sun. The energy that had coursed through his veins in the days directly after seeing the senator turned to sludge, suddenly and inexplicably. He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard a woman laugh. His muscles were lead. He no longer felt worthy of love. All he wanted to do was sleep. With the TV on he became familiar with the oily metallic taste of his gun barrel. Death, in those moments, felt welcoming. He could not, for the life of him, figure out how he had fallen so low. Was this who Carter Allen Cash was? A burrowing animal? Gollum in his cave?

On TV he watched Senator Seagram ascend the stage. He listened to him speak, sitting across from Leno, from Letterman, from Conan. He watched the smile. They had been so close, he and the senator—words away, a smile, a friendly wave—and yet now there was this gash between them. A sprawling, wounded nation of other people’s need. They had been so close. He had seen himself in the bright sunlight—a part of something bigger, a being of love connected to other beings of love—and yet here he was, alone. He felt abandoned. This was nothing new. He had been there before, unwanted, the boy you left behind. The recognition of this—the coldness that came from having felt the warmth of connection and then lost it to solitude—turned him first on himself in that musty roadside grave, and then on the world.

Who was HE to say the boy was unworthy? To exclude him from the fold? The boy would prove his worthiness. He would show the world he mattered, that he was not just trash to be discarded. The feeling, the bright hot lightning of it, shot him out of bed. It opened the curtains and forced him out of his stupor. He started showering again, started exercising, eating right. He had a mission now, a cause. He had come to the wilderness to get lost so that he could find himself, could figure out his purpose, and here it was.

Wolf or sheep?

The answer was clear.

It had been good to get back to the car, to climb inside its protective
shell. He had been on the road for almost a year now since leaving school. In that time the Honda had molded to him, like a pair of shoes breaking in. He knew every nuance of its handling, how it listed slightly to the left on straightaways, the way the tires would spin without gripping for a moment after he drove through a puddle. He knew every sound intimately, the rattle of the air conditioner as it struggled to cool the interior, the hard clunk of the transmission slipping into reverse. He knew that after it rained the car smelled like an old gym bag, that the passenger window didn’t shut squarely and as a result there was always a thin whistle of wind pestering the cabin.

He considered the car a friend. Maybe his only true friend. They had been through a lot together. Sometimes, when he was on the road for more than two weeks at a time, he found himself talking to the car. At least he supposed he was talking to the car. He wasn’t talking to himself, he didn’t think, not that he ever addressed the car by name or title. He just needed to hear his voice from time to time to remind himself that he was real. Besides, he found the car worked better when he spoke to it. He could coax the radio to find an electrical connection and turn on. He could coach the starter to ignite. On cold nights, lying in the backseat in the empty parking lots of chain stores, he would find himself humming, a low, melodic tone, like a piece of industrial machinery warming up.

Now he stood in a park in Sacramento and stared up at the capitol dome. Spring was everywhere, a warm breeze, a burst of color. Life. Shadows from the palm trees fell across the capitol steps. He had read that rats liked to live in palm trees, and he was careful not to walk beneath them in case one fell.

He thought about Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who on September 5, 1975, in this very park, had pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford. The gun was a .45 Colt semiautomatic, which had only been loaded with four rounds. Later Fromme would tell reporters that she had deliberately ejected a bullet from the chamber before leaving her hotel room. Investigators would find it in the bathroom, lying next to the tub. At the time of the assassination attempt, Squeaky was dressed in red robes that witnesses described as “nun-like.”

She was already a famous woman in this country, given her ties to the man who was arguably the most famous murderer of the modern age—Charles Manson.

Two weeks later, in San Francisco, another woman, Sara J. Moore,
would fire a single shot at Ford outside the Post Street door of the St. Francis Hotel. She would be wrestled to the ground by the man next to her, and arrested. Which raises the question, what was it about President Ford that made women want to kill him?

At her trial, the U.S. attorney recommended Fromme receive the maximum possible sentence. He said she was “full of hate and violence.” Fromme threw an apple at him, hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses.

The next day, Fromme stood before the judge. She said, “Am I sorry I tried? Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life. And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.”

Carter Allen Cash stood under ancient oak trees and tried to picture her face as she’d lifted the gun. It had started to rain, and the sound of raindrops on the leaves around him was like a mother saying
Shush
. He thought about calling home. It had been a long time since he had spoken to anyone who knew him. A long time since someone had spoken to him with love in their voice. When you are a stranger in the world, the voices become impersonal, detached. People say things like
Don’t forget your change
. Or
Do you want cheese on that?
Nobody ever says your name with affection.

The event was close now. The distance could be measured in terms of weeks. He couldn’t see it yet, not entirely. It loomed at the edge of his vision like an iceberg. He’d had a glimpse the other day when he’d purchased the gun at a gun show out in Woodland. The show was held in the gymnasium of the high school. Dealers had trucked in folding tables and covered them with lethal black steel. A once-famous wrestler signed autographs, and surgically altered women posed in swimsuits holding semiautomatic weapons like action stars. He wandered the aisles, looking at cases of pistols and shotguns and rifles. Men with mustaches asked him what he was looking for. They demonstrated the action on weapons with names like
The Bulldog
and
The Street Sweeper
. They talked about recoil ratios and magazine capacity.