The Good Father (36 page)

Too many things happened in that instant to recount here. I was at once stunned by HIS appearance, and aware that I must not falter or show any chink in my disguise—as that of the friendly local.

I forced myself to finish the wave, and to turn my eyes back to the street. I thought of the gun hidden inside the toilet tank in my room, the bullets stored in the bottom of my duffel. Was this it? The moment? Had I misread the day? From my peripheral vision I saw HIM and the family climb into the SUV. I noticed for the first time the advance car in the driveway, and also—looking ahead—a third car, this an unmarked sedan, inside of which sat two more Secret Service agents in long black coats—also looking at me.

I nodded to them in a way I hoped was casual, as behind me the two SUVs pulled out of the driveway and sped away. Now the forgotten gun felt like luck.

After a moment, the third car started its engine, executed a U-turn, and sped off in pursuit.

I stood there in the silence afterward, half bent at the knees, trying to catch my breath. I was dizzy over what had just happened. I had gone to HIS house and HE had appeared. It couldn’t be simple coincidence. In my memory, the blinding warmth of the sun blended with HIS appearance. It was as if HE had been conjured up by the sun itself.

Overhead, the sun went behind a cloud, and I saw spots, floating bubbles of cloudy gray, gliding across the snow.

The Great Man was home, perpetuating the lie, reinforcing it like a stack of sandbags by a river. But where were the camera crews? The photo ops staged to sell the lie? Or was this lie personal this time? Told just for the benefit of the family?

I pictured them now in my memory. The father and mother, and their two children. How happy they seemed—I thought of Rachel’s friendly wave. How happy to be whole, complete. And yet in that moment, as the sun reemerged from behind the clouds, I realized that there was an even bigger lie at work here.

Because they weren’t a complete family. There was a crack, a missing piece. There had been a First Son, had there not? The Drowned Boy. He was a ghost, a shadow that followed them. He was gone, physically absent, but his shadow haunted them.

And then I saw
my own shadow
on the ground. It stretched out toward HIS house, an elongated silhouette cast by the morning sun. Seeing it, I felt dizzy and had to sit down, right there on the icy concrete. The shadow was that of the missing boy. I was sure of it. But at the same time, I could see that it was
my own shadow
. Somehow it belonged to both of us. The shadow stretching toward HIS house connected me to HIM, to HIS family.

I was overwhelmed momentarily by a landslide of thoughts. Coincidences? Synchronicities? Wasn’t I, too, a missing son? A lie? My own father had left, had moved to New York and remarried, had fathered two children. He had his own complete family now, his own
happy family to stand in the driveway and wave to the neighbors. And yet they also had a ghost (me) that haunted them, a shadow son.

Ahead, a dog trotted across the quiet street. (A wolf?) I was the link. THE LINK. That was clear to me all of a sudden. HIS lie was my lie. Picture three numbers side by side: 2 2 4. They are just a series of numbers until you add a + and an =.

Suddenly, they become an equation, a conclusion (2+2=4), irrefutable.

This is how these realizations felt to me. Like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

I am the shadow son.

Son/Sun??

Alpha/Omega

Wolf/Sheep

[Editor’s Note: The remaining pages of this section have been torn out.]

I finished reading, and lay back on the bed. The pages of Danny’s journal were arranged in a neat pile on the bedspread next to me. After Montana, the entries had gotten sparser, the details more mundane—miles driven, meals eaten, as if Danny had started keeping secrets from himself. There was barely any mention of Senator Seagram. No more talk of shadow sons, of the revelations that had come to him on a sunny street in Helena.

Why? What did it mean?

Maybe the thoughts in his head had frightened him too much. Maybe after Montana, the journal started to feel like a nosy traveling companion, someone from whom he needed privacy. Or maybe what happened in Montana had humbled him, had driven the thoughts of Seagram from his head. Maybe that dark moment in the snowbound north had shocked Danny, put him back on a saner path.

And yet the words haunted me.

I am the shadow son
.

Looking over the pages, it was hard to argue that Danny hadn’t had some kind of break with reality. The logic of his thoughts, especially those revolving around his time in Montana and his run-in with Seagram, was misshapen and troubling.

Did my son really see himself as a ghost who haunted his own family? Or was this just a symptom of some kind of depression? Had he, in a moment of delusional clarity, connected himself to Seagram through a series of warped insights, like a man who handcuffs himself to a corpse?

I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, careful not
to look myself in the eye. Though I knew that Danny had gotten lost during his time on the road—physically, spiritually, emotionally—it still hurt to read the words. Why hadn’t he called? Why hadn’t he asked for help? And why hadn’t I, his father, known in some unnameable part of my heart that he’d needed it?

The room felt claustrophobic to me now. Not knowing what else to do, I changed my clothes and went downstairs to join the opening-night cocktail party, pasting the label with my name on it onto the breast of my suit jacket. I needed to be with people, to talk about the weather. I needed to feel grounded.

Men in suits held champagne flutes and made small talk with women in sensible dresses. Their voices were a senseless buzz, punctured by the occasional shriek of laughter.

Murray was right. There had been no murder confession in the journal. No smoking gun. This was not the journal of Sirhan Sirhan, who wrote
R.F.K. must die. R.F.K. must be killed
. It was something harder, more mysterious. Though Danny wrote about his time in Sacramento, there was no mention of his arrest, no mention of two men in a boxcar, the things they may have said.

Where the journal answered certain questions, it left others maddeningly open. Would I ever know for sure the real truth, step by step, fact by fact? Or was it a fool’s exercise to even try? Were the factors involved—physical, psychological—too complex? At the end of the day, if a man chooses to lose himself in a wormhole of his own making, how can any of us reconstruct his path? The actions he took? The thoughts in his head?

Wandering through the crowd, the world seemed surreal to me now, as if Danny’s mental unbalance had been contagious. I felt like I was having my own break with reality. I had traveled hundreds of miles from home to read his journal, and now I too was alone, reeling from the flashlight I’d just shined into the dark recesses of his brain.

I struck up a conversation with doctors from Portland and Nebraska. We made small talk about new technology. An anesthesiologist from Providence told me I should really get out and hear some music while I was here. She said Austin was her favorite city. They even had live music at the supermarket. I told her I would be sure to do that, and excused myself to get another drink.

I looked at the faces of strangers, and thought about the people in my son’s life: Ted and Bonnie Kirkland, the Mexicans who got him drunk and gave him a knife for his boot, the beautiful librarian. He had described them all in the journal. Good people, kind and smart. Why hadn’t he grabbed on to them? Why hadn’t he asked for help? And why hadn’t they volunteered it?

I went into the hall and called Fran, needing to hear her voice and talk to the kids.

“Are you okay?” she said. “You sound weird.”

“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’ve just had a few drinks.”

“Good,” she said. “You need to unwind. I want you to get shitfaced. Go to a strip club or, I don’t know, go streaking. Have some fun.”

“I miss you,” I said.

“We miss you, too,” she said. “We had spaghetti and meatballs and watched some movie with superheroes. The kids are brushing their teeth now. I didn’t even have to ask.”

After we hung up, I walked through the lobby and out onto the street. I needed air. The temperature was around eighty degrees. I took off my tie and put it in my pocket. It was eight o’clock and only a glimmer of daylight remained. A man peddling a rickshaw approached me. Did I need a ride? I thought about it. Where would I go? And then it hit me. I gave him an address in the university district, just off Guadalupe. He quoted me a price, and I stepped into the back of his cart.

We must have made a strange sight, an older man in a suit being peddled through the streets of the city by a hippie in flip-flops. We rode up Congress toward the capitol and turned left on Eleventh Street. I pictured my son on his bicycle, dressed all in black, riding through the moonless night. What made a person want to be invisible?

I am the shadow son
.

I thought about what a shadow was, a trail of darkness left by an object in bright light. In Daniel’s mind was I the object or the light? Had I overshadowed him, my success? Had I somehow, in my drive for accomplishment, pushed him to fail?

I wracked my brain looking for the truth, but deep down I worried that the answer, when I found it, would make little sense. If Danny had set off on his journey because of an underlying mental illness, or if somewhere in the wilds of this sprawling, friendless nation, he had
suffered a break from reality, how was I to understand the ideas and motives that drove him?

The frat house was on Rio Grande Street three blocks west of Guadalupe. It was a two-story structure of indiscernible style, with a white picket fence and large bay window in the front, in which what looked like a bedsheet had been hung for privacy. The orange-and-white Longhorn logo my son had written about had faded to a barely visible smear on the otherwise brown grass. I paid the rickshaw driver and stood looking up at the house. The low bass krump of a nearby party rumbled through the trees. The house was dark except for one window. I could see no movement inside. The rickshaw driver asked if I would need a ride back. I told him I would be fine, and he rode off, jingling his bell. It had been nearly two years since my son had lived at this address. Would any of the boys he wrote about still be here? I tried to imagine what their faces must have looked like when they saw those first images of my son on TV after Seagram’s assassination. Did they remember the gun in their faces? Did they think about how close they themselves had come to death? Did they understand that they had become a part of history?

My mouth was dry but so were my palms. It had always been a strength of mine, this grace under pressure. A pickup truck cruised by, local boys looking for the party. I crossed to the door and rang the bell. Silence. I rang again.

A young man answered, maybe nineteen. He was slim, with sandy brown hair.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” I said.

“Am I in trouble?” he wanted to know.

It was the suit. Boys his age did not talk to men in suits, except under exigent circumstance. “You’re not in trouble,” I told him. “Everyone else is at a party.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I just—I have a favor to ask. I’m a doctor. I’m in town for a conference, and my son—he used to live here.”

“Your son.”

“He died last year, and I thought I would be able to come back here without doing this, but I’m afraid I need to see his room.”

The boy studied me. His parents had taught him to be skeptical of strangers who come to the house at night.

“Your son,” he said.

“He drowned,” I said, “in a boating accident on Lake Travis. There was alcohol involved. His mother and I, we’re from Michigan, and we buried him there, but, well, I’m in town for a conference and—”

“What was his name?”

“Jeremy,” I said. “But we used to call him Jerry.”

“Do you know which room was his?” he asked.

I took a step forward, using my momentum to move him back out of the doorway. Rather than let me bump into him, he stepped aside. I walked through the front door. The place was as my son had described it, a sty. I smelled stale beer and moldy wall-to-wall carpeting. Empty beer cans lay crushed on the floor.

“Upstairs,” I said. “Next to the bathroom.”

“That’s my room now,” he said. “I moved in last month.”

He lowered his voice, as if to convey confidentiality.

“I don’t really like it. It’s kind of gross.”

The wallpaper was discolored, peeling. What had my son felt, living in a place like this? He had always been a neat boy, orderly.

“Do you mind if I …”

I pointed to the stairs. He led me upstairs to his room, then offered to wait outside.

“I just need a minute,” I said. “I promise I won’t cry or do anything embarrassing.”

He shook his head.

“My mom died when I was seven,” he said. “My dad’s new wife is a total bitch. You take your time. I’m gonna go downstairs and watch TV. Just come down when you’re done.”

“Thank you …”

“Robert. But around here they call me
Chief
or
Sport
.” He turned and descended the stairs. I stood in the hall for a moment, trying to picture my son here, in this context. His dorm room at Vassar had been in a stately brick building, imbued with a century of dignity. This house was rotting from the inside, like a melon. The ceilings were low. There were stains on the carpet and a smell coming from the bathroom that could only be described as bovine. I toed open the door to Daniel’s old room. It was small, somewhere between square and rectangular.

On the walls were posters for rock bands and maps from various foreign
destinations—Germany, Vietnam, Australia. Unlike the clutter of the rest of the house, the room was neat, with no clothing or trash visible. A computer sat on the desk. The room was only big enough for a twin-size bed, which had been set on the one wall without a door or window. It was there that my son would have set his bed. I tried to imagine him on it, not yet a murderer but instead just a boy on the road. I tried to picture him reading Russian novelists to impress a girl. But the picture would not come. Instead I pictured him at the desk reading computer printouts about famous lunatics. I pictured him opening the closet door and pulling a handgun from the bottom of a laundry hamper. I saw him check the chamber to make sure it was loaded and stride purposefully to the door, intent on showing these oversized Texas boys that they couldn’t bully Daniel Allen. Or should I say Carter Allen Cash. He was the man with the gun. But the room was just a room. There were no ghosts to capture, no shadows to mine. I had come looking for answers but had found only furniture. I turned off the light and went downstairs.