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Authors: Noah Hawley

The Good Father (3 page)

BOOK: The Good Father
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We ate pizza in separate rooms, everyone glued to their TVs. Fran sat at the kitchen table, typing on her laptop, scouring the Web for the latest rumors. In the living room the kids watched Disney pirates seeking adventure on the high seas, the whimsy of the score offsetting our hawkish watching of the news. Every few minutes I would wander in and make sure they were okay. This is what you do when crisis strikes, check on the people you love.

On TV a witness said, “I was watching and then, suddenly, blam blam blam.”

Three shots? The news anchors had mentioned only two.

“Two hours,” said Fran. “But you’ll have to connect through Dallas.” She was sitting at her computer trying to do two different things at once. Her Bluetooth earpiece was glowing. On her computer screen I could see the airline’s website side by side with a real-time political blog.

“Turn on MSNBC,” Fran told me, looking up from the computer monitor. I changed the channel. We arrived in time to see the event filmed from a new angle. Camcorder quality, shot from the far right of the stage.

“The footage you are about to see,” said the anchor, “is quite graphic, and may be disturbing to younger viewers.”

I checked to make sure the kids were in the living room. On-screen the camcorder zoomed in on Seagram’s face as he spoke. The audio was shaky, homemade. This time the sound of the first shot made us jump. It sounded like the gunman was standing right next to the camera.
Onstage the senator stumbled, blood spurting from his chest. The cameraman turned, and for a split second we saw the gun elevated above the crowd. The gunman was wearing a white button-down shirt. His face was blurred by motion and chaos. People were screaming in the background, running. As we watched, the gunman turned and started pushing his way toward the door. A Secret Service agent jumped into the crowd, trying to reach him.

“Who does he look like?” said Fran. “An actor, maybe. Do you ever get that? That feeling that you’ve seen people before? Is it that they remind you of someone? Or maybe just déjà vu.”

The camera swung wildly. Spectators grabbed the gunman. Agents and police reached him. They were lost to the camera.

I got closer to the TV, but rather than make things clearer it made them harder to identify.

“We are getting word,” said the anchor, “that police have identified the gunman.”

The doorbell rang.

Fran and I looked at each other. I reviewed in my head all the disasters of my life. The death of my father, a car crash in high school that required three separate surgeries, the demise of my first marriage, the deaths of every patient I had ever lost. I weighed them against one another. It was a warm spring night, and I was a man who had found contentment in life, happiness. A lucky man, who had come to expect good things. I wiped my hands on my napkin and moved toward the hall.

There were two men in suits at the door, several others on the lawn. I saw a series of SUVs parked at the curb, blue-and-red lights flashing silently.

“Paul Allen,” said one of the men. He was tall, a white man with an impossibly close shave. There was a plastic-coated wire winding from his collar to his left ear. The man next to him was black, broad shouldered. He may have been a linebacker in a former life.

“I’m Agent Moyers,” said the white man. “This is Agent Green. We’re with the Secret Service. We need you to come with us.”

The image I was seeing didn’t make sense. The words he spoke.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you sure you have the right house?”

Fran crept up behind me and stood wide-eyed in the foyer. She had taken the Bluetooth from her ear. The orchestral narrative of Captain Jack Sparrow reached us from the living room.

“They’re saying it’s Daniel,” said Fran. “The TV. They’re saying he did it.”

I looked at the Secret Service agents. They were affectless, steel-eyed.

“Mr. Allen,” said Moyers, “we need you to come with us.”

I felt like a boxer who had taken an uppercut he never even saw.

“Let me get my coat,” I said.

I walked back into the kitchen, each step taken as if through water. I thought about the beers I’d had, the train ride home. I thought about the fences and the lawns and the neighbors I had known for years. How would they look at me now?

On television I saw a photo of my son. This is the speed of the world. Before you can even think, an action has occurred. It had been less than an hour since the shooting. Where had they gotten a photograph? It was one I didn’t recognize. Daniel stood on a wide lawn in a sweatshirt and jeans. He was squinting against the sunlight, one hand raised to shield his eyes. He looked about eighteen. A college photo maybe. I remembered the day I dropped him off at Vassar, a skinny kid with all his belongings in a footlocker. A boy who had tried to grow a mustache at fourteen but ended up with only a few whiskers on each side of his mouth like a cat.

What have you done?
I thought. But even as I thought it I didn’t know if the question was meant for Daniel or for me.

 

I rode alone in the backseat of the SUV. The new-car smell fed my underlying nausea. Ahead of us was a lead car. A third SUV tailed close behind. We drove fast, sirens on, lights flashing. Agent Moyers and Agent Green sat in front. Moyers was driving. They said nothing for the first few minutes as we hauled ass through residential streets, taking the bumps at full speed, the SUV bucking like a horse.

I pictured Daniel the last time I’d seen him, the long hair, the bear hug, the final wave, and the feeling I’d had—like a man who is watching a movie he doesn’t understand. Why did I let go? I should have dragged him to my hotel. I should have forced him to come home with me. A shower, a hair cut, a good meal. To be surrounded by family, people who love you, isn’t that the deepest human need? Instead I’d watched him disappear.

“Is my son okay?” I wanted to know.

They didn’t respond. I watched the houses of my neighbors recede in the fading light, lit warmly from inside. Families in their dens, feet up, listening to music, watching TV. Had they seen Daniel’s picture yet? Had they made the connection?

“My son,” I said. “Is he okay?”

“Your son has a bullet in his leg,” said Agent Moyers.

“Which leg? Did it hit the femoral artery? Please. I’m a doctor.”

Green turned in the passenger seat. I could see the earbud in his ear. It was colored to match the flesh of a white man. I wondered if this bothered him, that the world did not believe technological advances needed to be made available to people of his race.

“When Secret Service agents hear shots,” said Green, “we stand up tall to try to make ourselves bigger targets.”

The words didn’t make sense to me, and for a moment I wasn’t even sure he was speaking English.

“We attempt to draw fire away from our protectee,” he continued. “If you watch the tape again, you’ll see that this is what the agents were doing in Los Angeles. They ran
toward
the gunfire.”

“Unfortunately,” said Moyers, “your son was a good shot.”

“Please,” I said. “There must be some mistake.”

Green turned away.

“We have been told to take you to a secure facility for questioning,” he said. “This is the extent of our involvement.”

“He’s my son.”

“Dr. Allen, your son killed the next president of the United States.”

The words flared around me. I heard a steady droning sound, blood rushing in my ears.

“He’s dead?” I asked.

Green looked out the passenger window, the blue-and-red lights of the lead car strobing cold, hot, cold, hot.

“We’re taking you to a secure facility,” he repeated.

“My family.”

“Your family is safe,” said Moyers. “Agents have been assigned to your house. In situations like these people are upset. They act without thinking.”

“Situations like what?”

“Assassinations. Elections are about hope.”

We were on the highway now, the blare of sirens drowning out the growl of the engine. The speedometer read 106 miles per hour.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “did you just say elections are about hope?”

He didn’t answer. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. From my years in emergency medicine I knew that in order to think clearly in hectic circumstances, I needed to slow things down. Approach the problem in stages. As a scientist I had to stay clear, to put the facts together. I couldn’t afford to get emotional. Emotions cloud the mind. They make you careless. I tried to review the facts. My son was in Los Angeles. He’d been arrested at a political rally and accused of shooting a senator. There was videotape, but none so far that showed his face. The gunman
had fired two shots, maybe three, and then disappeared into the crowd. It was possible the police had made a mistake. That they’d captured the wrong man.

Racing down the highway I thought about the congresswoman in Phoenix. The one who’d been shot outside a supermarket. What was her name? Giffords? A sunny day in January. Card tables have been set up.
Come meet your representative
. A crowd builds. The congresswoman steps out into the sun, smiles and waves. She shakes hands with her constituents, and then a pale, moon-faced man steps up beside her and opens fire with a semiautomatic pistol, one bullet passing through the congresswoman’s head at point-blank range. Six were killed. Thirteen injured by a Glock 9-mm that held more than thirty bullets.

I thought of the mug shot. Jared Loughner, twenty-two years old. It was everywhere in the weeks after the shooting. An eerie grin on the suspect’s puffy face, like a fat kid who just won first prize at the state fair. There was something chilling about the image. The yellow glare of the camera flash giving his skin the jaundiced hue of an old bruise. His nearly bald head read unnatural, cancerous, misshapen. And on his face, an unblinking stare, one eye darkened by shadow, hovering over a Joker’s grin. From the photo alone you could tell. This was not a sane person. He was a madman, a droog from
A Clockwork Orange
.

I tried to see my son in that way—a deranged assassin with a maniacal scheme—but my brain literally refused to make the connection. Danny was a normal kid from a normal home. Okay. The product of divorce, but isn’t that considered normal these days? Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, and you don’t see all those kids growing up to be lone gunmen. No. This was a mistake. And I would put it right.

“Listen,” I said. “I demand that my son get medical attention immediately.”

“With all due respect, sir,” said Green, “fuck you and your son.”

Those were the last words we spoke until we arrived at the secure facility.

Twenty-eight minutes later we pulled up outside a nondescript office tower in Stamford, Connecticut. A guard with a machine gun waved us through a gate. We came to a fast stop beside a rear entrance. Armed
agents climbed out of all three SUVs, slamming doors with a sound like gunshots. The night was warm. The air smelled like French fries, the aroma wafting from a fast-food restaurant on the other side of the highway. Entering the lobby, we passed men in suits carrying assault rifles. We rode the elevator in silence, six men watching the LED numbers rise. Arriving on the fifth floor, I saw a mechanized hub, men and women in suits manning telephones, hunched over keyboards, navigating online chatter, collating data. There was an air of controlled panic. Men walked quickly, ties flapping. Women on cell phones hustled down hallways, carrying urgent faxes.

The agents steered me down the hall. Passing a conference room I saw a white board pasted with details of my son’s life; all the information federal agents could draw together in two hours. The story of my family as cataloged by banks and federal databases. How surreal to see them there. Dates and events that, when we lived them, we called our lives, but to these men now, putting together the pieces, were just facts, data collected forensically. Anniversaries to be studied; decisions we had made, the places we had lived, the people we had known.

I saw pictures of Daniel, an arrest report, the black whorl of fingerprints. There were stills of the video images taken from the auditorium. Later I’d learn that this was how they’d identified him. Fingerprints had yielded a name, a recent arrest for vagrancy, an alias. A timeline had been started: my son’s birthday, the dates of his schooling. There were yearbook photos, copied and enlarged. I saw all this in the time it took to walk ten feet.

From the command center I heard somebody say, “I don’t care who her father is. Nobody leaves the hall without a thorough screening.”

I was led into a windowless room and told to wait. There was synthetic tan carpeting on the floor and a sink hanging on the far wall. It was a strange thing to see in an office. A sink.
Was this where confessions were beaten out of men?
I wondered. It seemed silly to put carpet in a room that might see blood.

Sitting there I tried to assemble what I knew about the kinds of young men who took shots at public figures. Hinckley, Chapman, Oswald. The details of their crimes were fuzzy in my mind. Loughner was the clearest, being the most recent. I’d been as shocked as everyone else by the violence, had read the articles and watched the endless coverage. A
twenty-two-year-old high-school dropout with a 9-mm bullet tattooed on his right shoulder, a burgeoning crackpot who railed against our currency. This was not my Danny. Loughner was a kid who once showed up at his high school so drunk they had to take him to the emergency room. A kid who wrote on Facebook that his favorite books were
Mein Kampf
and
The Communist Manifesto
. As a teenager he made people nervous by smiling when there wasn’t anything to smile about. He was an angry young man who tried to enlist in the army but failed the drug test.

Sitting there I tried to find similarities between Loughner and my son. Did the kids at Vassar think Danny was creepy? Did my son make strange outbursts in the middle of class or verbally threaten the teachers who critiqued his schoolwork? If he did, I had never heard anything about it. I had visited the school several times, had met the dean. Danny’s grades were average, his attendance adequate. Everything I knew told me that Danny was a normal student, hardly an overachiever but not a nut case.

BOOK: The Good Father
3.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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