The Good Father (32 page)

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 with 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.

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 pulling 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.