Backward-Facing Man (10 page)

“I know what you're thinking, Pop. None of this would have happened if only you'd been around….” Artie paused. “But we have to face the facts now, Pop. Look at you.” Charlie Puckman kept blinking, unable to focus on the television screen or his son. “Because you're not around anymore, I called Fat Eddie.” Artie was improvising now. “He told me to get Chuck's bail.” Last year, while pretending to nap at his desk, Artie watched his father emerge from the office bathroom, put down his newspaper, and kneel beside the small refrigerator in the pantry. Thinking he was not being observed, the old man slid open the panel in the wall and fidgeted with a dial. Something metallic clicked and there was a rustling of papers. Later that night, after everyone had gone home, with a flashlight and a penknife, Artie lifted the panel and found an old-fashioned safe built into the wall.

Artie moved his face up to his dad's. “You have to give me the combination to the safe,” he whispered. Something akin to hatred passed between them—decades of mutual disdain—a pattern that began when Artie was an infant. “Write it down. I'll take it to Fat Eddie, and he'll take care of everything.” Arthur Puckman picked up the little blackboard and a piece of chalk and held it under his father's hand. He'd waited a lifetime to be in this position. With Artie holding the chalkboard, it took the old man three passes to make it legible. “Don't worry about nothing, Pop,” Artie said, transferring the numbers to a piece of paper. Then he rode the elevator down and ambled through the lobby. He was humming.

 

Fernandez ground his third cigarette out on the asphalt. A fine mist blew steadily toward them from the river. For thirty minutes, the detective had been playing with his radio and listening to fellow cops being dispatched to break up bar fights or domestic squabbles. “What took you so fucking long?” he said when Artie finally appeared.

“He was pretty upset,” Artie said quietly.

“Where's your car?”

“At the factory,” Artie said. It was near eleven, and Fernandez was eager to get home. Rain and the newly minted highway surface under the whitewalls made a sibilant sound as the Impala headed south on I-95 and then snaked through Kensington to the factory.

“This yours?” Fernandez said, as he pulled next to Chuck's Suburban, the only vehicle in the lot.

“Nah.”

“Then where is it?”

“I don't dr-dr-dr-drive.”

“Then what the fuck are we doing here?”

“I gotta pick something up,” Artie said, opening the car door. Strange how the ones who need kindness the most are the ones who piss you off, Fernandez thought. Then he remembered the drains. “We're gonna spend no more than five minutes here,” the detective said, “and then I'm leaving, with or without you.” He intended to see where the tanks emptied so he could finish his report without coming back Monday. Pigeons roosting above the loading dock scattered as the two men approached. The flaps were closed, as was the overhead door. Artie fumbled with the keys.

“I'll just be a minute,” he said to Fernandez.

“Switch on the lights, will you?” Fernandez said, pushing past him.

Artie wobbled past frames that were in various stages of assembly and opened the electrical panel. One at a time, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on throughout the shop, while the offices remained dark. Fernandez looked at the assembly areas. Beat-up plywood tabletops mounted on scissor lifts, stacked parts, bins of hardware, electric drills suspended from hangers, posters of busty women wearing tool belts taped to columns, and partial assemblies gave the appearance of another world, one of organized mayhem in service to production. Fernandez made his way over to the dip tanks.

Artie hurried into the office. From his father's desk with the Plexiglas paperweight, the letter opener in a leather sheaf with his initials, and the Lucite ashtray with the fancy
P
insignia, he looked out across the factory as the old man used to, watching for the movement of workers, monitoring who was working on which projects, calculating how much material they'd scrapped, and who was dogging it. Artie saw Fernandez standing near the tanks. There was something eerie about an outsider in the factory unescorted. The old man would never have allowed it.

Artie crossed the office in darkness to a small alcove with a restroom, a microwave, and a refrigerator. The coffeemaker had been left on, and the same burnt smell from the precinct permeated this room. He opened the closet, took out a brown paper bag, and set it on the floor. Low down on the wall next to the refrigerator was the panel. Artie used his penknife to slide it up, revealing the front of the safe Charlie Puckman had built into the Sheetrock. It was too dark to see the paper, so he opened the refrigerator door and read the numbers to himself out loud, spinning the dial first to the left, then to the right, slowing after each turn. Twice he spun the tumbler to the end of the sequence. Both times, the door stayed locked. On the third try, the tumblers clicked, and the door opened.

Artie sat on the floor, out of breath, staring into the darkness. He reached in. There was a layer of grit on top of a thick stack of papers, and it smelled musty. It would have taken him too long to examine everything, so he pulled it out and stuffed it into the bag, one large handful after another, as quickly as he could. Some of it was cash. Several sheets had raised insignias. They were stiff and official-looking. He noticed familiar logos—General Electric, General Motors, Occidental Petroleum. The last stack appeared to be parchment with the U.S. Treasury seal embossed on top. Artie stuffed it all into his bag. At the very bottom of the safe was a leather pouch, the kind businesses used years ago to make bank deposits. Artie turned it upside down and more bills—twenties, fifties, and hundreds—spilled onto the floor. Behind him, he heard a click, a creaking sound, and then Detective Fernandez speaking to him from the doorway.

“Why is it so fucking dark in here?”

“I d-d-d-d-dunno,” Artie said. “I think it's a circuit.”

“What the fuck are you doing, anyway?”

Artie shut the door to the safe as quietly as he could and spun the dial. He slid the panel down and quietly closed the refrigerator. “I was just making sure the coffee machine was off,” he said, folding over the top of the bag.

“How could the coffee machine be on if the circuit breaker's tripped?”

“I d-d-dunno,” Artie said, sweating.

“Let's go,” Fernandez said. He'd seen what he needed to see.

Outside, it had stopped raining, and the streets were slick. The two men rode in silence down Broad Street to Washington Avenue. Fernandez turned left on Eleventh and then stopped. Artie pulled the brown bag to his chest and opened the passenger door. Fernandez watched the fat man shuffle up the block, double back, and then turn into a doorway. Fernandez put the car in reverse and backed onto Washington Avenue, passing cars that were double-parked. He turned left on Ninth Street, passing the empty iron tables where the vendors set up and the trash cans that served as heaters in the Italian Market. He pulled over in front of a row of Asian storefronts, picked up the radio transmitter and called Murphy. “The dip tank drained into the floor,” he told his boss. “These guys have been dumping methyl-ethyl-bad-shit into storm drains in the middle of Fishtown for God knows how many years.”

“Take the rest of the day off, Freddy,” Murphy said. “You done good.”

It was after midnight. Heavy clouds obscured the moon and stars. It had been raining steadily since Gutierrez had been whisked away and the employees of Puckman Security—those who'd been present when he went down and others who'd stayed home, all of them—gathered outside the hospital, whispering to one another in Spanish, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee from plastic cups. After learning that the boy was comatose, with little if any electrical activity being generated in his brain, they felt a crushing sadness, not only for Ramon Gutierrez and his family, but for themselves—as if they realized their lives had been in service to something dangerous but trivial. Chuck Puckman stood among them for a while, shifting uneasily from side to side, trying to make eye contact with the doctors at first, then Johnny Gutierrez, even offering him a cigarette, which Ramon's father declined, before walking home, hands stuffed in his pockets, shivering, imagining the ambulance lights spinning in the quiet living rooms of the little houses that lined the streets. He kept his head down, measuring the approach of cars by the sound of tire treads and the hiss of spray, which made the street surfaces slick, like somebody had applied a layer of varnish. There was a make-believe quality to the night.

Arriving at the factory, soaked to his skin, Chuck entered the open gate and crossed the yard, passing the brick wall with the placard that reserved his parking space, then climbed the fire escape steps to the enclosed landing outside his red apartment door. Inside, he stripped, tossed his shirt and shoes onto the floor, limped down a short hallway in the dark, and collapsed on his waterbed. He made no attempt to organize his thoughts. Moments later, these images visited him: He was lying on a bed of cement, unable to move, twenty, maybe thirty stories below a high-rise apartment building. Filtering down from above, he could hear sounds from a cocktail party or reception he'd attended, along with a cross section of everyone he ever knew—his high school guidance counselor, the grizzled alcoholic barker from the vegetable stand at the corner of Washington and Ninth, his brother, Artie, his father, and several of his father's friends. Only moments ago, while Chuck had been having a drink, his father's mood had darkened and an argument erupted. With a crazed look on his face, Charlie Puckman was poking his son in the chest, berating him for ruining the business and squandering the family's fortune. Chuck defended himself as best he could, backing up so he was pressed up against the balcony, when, in a moment of clarity and courage, Chuck eased himself up over the railing and tumbled, feet over head, head over feet, until, unable to control his rate of descent or body position, he landed on his back with a thud. Minutes passed, maybe hours. He had to remind himself to breathe.

 

When he woke a few hours later, he made his way across the hallway into the bathroom, where he spilled three white pills into his palm and formed a cup with the other. He leaned down and swallowed them in one gulp, then shut the cabinet and stared in the mirror until his ashen face and sullen expression spooked him. He put the radio on and lay down on the couch, where he slept fitfully until dawn.

Sunday was clear and windy. After dressing, he went back down the fire escape steps and started walking. He passed a young man with a wispy beard who looked directly at him. “The heat is on, my brother,” the man said, shaking his head. Chuck wrapped his arms around his body. The wind blew through him. A block ahead, the giant chain drugstore gleamed like a temple amid the blighted buildings under the El, which seemed to shrink in shame.

The store was laid out with the least important items in the front, forcing patrons to pass by acres of candy and snacks, expensive hair dye, greeting cards, nail clippers, wart cream, and adult diapers to get their prescriptions filled. A spinning display rack held security devices: Mace, whistles, flashlights. Chuck waited in line, surrounded by men and women of all sizes and types—the diabetics, the hyper-tense, the overweight, the overwrought with their baskets—all of them exposed to the mightiness of the health-care sector, the maw of modern medicine—until a pharmacist in training finally filled his prescription. On his way out, he saw it—or at least he perceived it in the way that an image comes before words and feelings, before thoughts. It was a photograph of the Puckman factory, shot at a wide angle from across the street—the faded sign, the hinged gate, the squat buildings, indifferent to the years, his Suburban parked at the same odd angle it had been yesterday. By instinct, his shoulders tensed, and he veered away from the stack of newspapers with the headline “Fumes Fell Worker in Fishtown.” He lurched toward the automatic doors and took off across the parking lot, dropping the bag and the receipt and wrestling with the safety cap before spilling a little white pill into his hand and swallowing it dry. By the time he got home, the lorazepam had provided a buffer between the stunning reality of his life now, postaccident, and the past. In a daze, he lifted the phone and pressed the numbers of the foreman of Puckman Security, his only friend, Rahim Rodriguez.

In the mid-1960s, Charlie Puckman was a sinewy little guy with close-cropped black hair and dark little eyes set close together. He was a coarse man with a short fuse and a propensity for swearing and also a way of charming people with what appeared to be plainspokenness. He had a vast store of patience, perseverance, and a salesman's tolerance for rejection. By the time he was thirty, he'd tried a dozen different schemes to get rich, one after another, including marrying a Sicilian girl for what he hoped would become blood ties to certain successful South Philly entrepreneurs.

Around the same time, with Cuba's Communist government in its infancy, Jose Rodriguez was a professor of engineering who made a risky move by petitioning Castro for an exit visa. After five years of harassment, a government official finally delivered it to him, giving the family four hours to pack up their belongings and leave. Two days later, Jose, his wife, and their two children—Rafael and Ovella—were huddling, exhausted, in a church off North Fifth Street in Philadelphia, listening to hymns in a language their father had dreamed about.

When Jose showed up at the factory, Charlie was two months into a venture he called the Puckman Security Company. He'd gotten the idea to make wrought-iron cages while driving by a pawnshop that was being robbed in broad daylight. In the mid-sixties, the need for security in urban areas was growing, and the economy was good, so Charlie Puckman was up to his ears in orders. He hired Jose on the spot, even though Jose barely spoke English and didn't have his own tools. Charlie Puckman pointed to the seven on his watch and then to the cement floor, and the two men had an understanding.

Charlie had won the building in a card game. During the Korean War, he and his friends invited young men—graduates of one of the Friends' schools who'd drawn deferments or were conscientious objectors—to play poker with them. Through a combination of distractions, deceptions, and an elaborate set of signals, Charlie and his buddies managed to win and win big, including one particular time when Charlie and a fellow from the Main Line squared off and the fellow made a foolish bet near the end of the evening for a pot worth almost $5,000. Rather than pay up, the loser convinced his father, an industrialist, to part with a cluster of run-down factories in Kensington.

Six months later, Puckman Security had enough orders to keep Jose and his friends from church employed full-time. Jose was a tireless worker and a fastidious organizer; however, his greatest talent was being able to build what Charlie sold, without drawings or specifications. From orders written on place mats, the backs of envelopes, and traffic tickets, Jose cut, welded, stripped, painted, built, and delivered completed units to pawnbrokers all over the city. He was the perfect foil for his boss: focused, humble, detail-oriented, and quiet. He worked fast, using no more materials than were necessary, and he generated little if any scrap. In less than a year, Puckman Security was shipping security guards to Atlantic City and Harrisburg, and Charlie was fielding inquiries from pawnbrokers in Trenton, Wilmington, even Baltimore. The only thing Jose Rodriguez couldn't do was answer the phone, which is in part why Charlie agreed to hire his oldest son, Arthur.

Arthur Puckman had been in and out of mental institutions at least a half dozen times by the time he was twenty. In between, he held a succession of short-lived, dead-end jobs, mooching off his mother in South Philly. By the late sixties, when Chuck suddenly and mysteriously quit college, Jose was running the shop, Charlie Puckman was on the road, and Artie was working in the office. Initially, Artie's job was to answer the phone, make out payroll checks for his father to sign, and source supplies. From the get-go, Artie developed sly methods of duping people—making out checks that were slightly less than they were supposed to be, and setting the clocks in the shop back so as to extract extra labor for free. Indeed, Arthur had a mean streak, and when Charlie was away, he directed it toward the trio of laborers making iron barriers and brackets for banks, taxicab companies, and pawnshops.

 

Although Jose's son, Rafael, was a bright kid, he'd had a rough paper route. Philadelphia was a difficult place to grow up in the late sixties, especially Kensington, where the Italians and the Irish watched angrily as Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Guatemalans, and blacks moved in. Being Cuban was the worst of all worlds, set apart not only from blacks and whites but, because of politics and their affinity and nostalgia for a burgeoning capitalist economy, from other Latinos, too. Rafael was a skinny kid with jet black hair, a beguiling smile, and a wicked wit. He was asthmatic and slight in stature, and therefore uninterested in fighting and sports. Fortunately, he was blessed with street smarts and a sharp sense of humor. He did impersonations of his teachers, talking in heavily accented English and joking his way out of fights.

A couple years after they arrived, Jose's wife, Rafael's mother, died, and Rafael changed his name to Rahim. He bought himself a pair of four-inch-high platform shoes and some eyeliner, and he started running with the pretty boys and the glam rockers under the El; once or twice, even climbing in cars with men on their way home from Center City for money. A few times, he fell in love—with a trash sculptor living in an abandoned warehouse, a PhD historian who worked nights in a hospital, and a mechanic who, for some reason, could perform only in his car. The relationships were exciting, and Rahim was always head over heels, but they didn't last. In the summer of 1974, after an especially rough breakup, Rahim lost interest in the scene and began playing chess with men in a nearby shelter, and building radios and TV sets with his father on weekends. Soon after, he started hanging around at the shop, where he befriended Chuck.

Long after the day's work was done—after the trash was emptied and the wooden skids were ripped apart and stored in bins, after the mail had been carried to the post office, the shop floors swept, and the bins of soaked rags and cigarette butts had been taken out back and burned—Chuck and Rahim got buzzed on hashish and swapped stories. Rahim made his father out to be a hero—part revolutionary, part Communist, part refugee. Chuck exaggerated his sexual escapades at MIT, telling stories about dangerous drug deals he'd done, demonstrations he'd led, deliberately confusing his past with that of others he admired. Sitting on the hill behind the railroad spur, with The Doors and Cream playing on Chuck's transistor radio, they absorbed each other's pasts.

Around the same time, Charlie Puckman found himself in a jam. The business was growing, which required his workers to be more productive. Tasks like taking trash to the Dumpsters, refilling the supply closets, sweeping up metal shavings, and filling out bills of lading weren't getting done. Meanwhile, Arthur Puckman, looking for areas of the company where he could wield influence, started interacting with workers. When he began taking meticulous interest in workers' arrival and departure times, their efficiency at their individual tasks, and even their grooming habits, several announced they were quitting. In response, Charlie hired Rahim to keep the shop going and assigned the more mundane tasks to Artie.

Charlie's younger son, Chuck, showed up at his father's factory in the middle of the first semester of his sophomore year of college, owing a New England rock band over $1,500 for a drug deal that went bad. When he first arrived, he carried himself like a man on the run—in trouble so deep, he couldn't hold his head up or meet someone's eye. With no money, no way of avoiding the draft, and no prospects for work, he took a position in his father's firm—something he swore he'd never do. In time, he proved an able salesman, and with Rahim's and Jose Rodriguez's help, he learned the ins and outs of the security guard business. Within a year, Chuck had himself a Datsun 240Z and a fancy apartment overlooking Rittenhouse Square. He learned to scuba dive at the YMCA and started traveling—to the Florida Keys, Mexico, Belize. An oral surgeon who lived in his building kept him supplied with Darvon and phenobarbital, which he used to take the edge off the black beauties he used during the week. Socially, he kept a low profile. His friends from high school had established themselves in marriages. Chuck preferred brief encounters and superficial affairs, ones he could make and break easily. In matters of the heart, he said he preferred leasing to making a purchase.

When Chuck turned thirty, he started dating one of his customer's daughters. Eileen Borowitz was a good-looking girl—tall, thin, well built, with a glossy made-up face and an impish smile that she used to deflect genuine conversation. She had a superficial notion of love, which revolved around using nicknames, purchasing trinkets, and reading rhyming poems on sentimental occasions like birthdays and odd anniversaries. She had a shrill, inappropriate laugh, which Chuck mistook for good nature, and she demonstrated an eagerness in bed that he confused with passion. In the fall of 1980, for the simple reason that he was tired of doing his own laundry, Chuck married her. A year later, before he could do anything to correct his mistake, they had Ivy.

For certain men, in certain phases of life, having a child can be a magnificent event, allowing them access to what is soft and vulnerable and nurturing inside them. The smell of an infant, the way she looks up at her parent, helpless, but without fear, often quiets the spirit of even the most troubled adult. Not so with Chuck Puckman. Ivy's arrival was an event that required massive changes to the way the two of them lived at a time when things at work were changing dramatically for the worse. For starters, Eileen decided that Chuck's apartment in Center City was completely inappropriate for a young family, and her constant badgering convinced him to buy an obscenely expensive center-hall Colonial in Villanova. And as if the mortgage wasn't big enough, Eileen racked up credit card charges and committed the couple to ongoing debt by furnishing the nursery, buying clothes, and making donations to private schools in which she expected their progeny to be enrolled. Finally, the baby's arrival seemed to mark the end of any genuine feeling Eileen had for her husband, and although Chuck tried, at least initially, to get to know Ivy, Eileen wouldn't let him near her.

Several years passed. Chuck went on the road, partly to expand the business and partly to get away from his wife. By day, he worked for his misanthropic father, selling a product for which he had no real interest, correcting his brother's mistakes, and enduring Arthur's not-so-subtle resentment. By night, Eileen harangued him for not earning enough to provide her with an adequate lifestyle. When he objected, she freaked, professing to be too sweet and accepting for his kind, a claim she'd make in the nastiest of ways, like a vicious little animal trapped in a cage. Over time, Chuck seemed to shrink in his own skin—coming to work, going home, disappearing with a drink onto the couch, and opting out of the franchise of fatherhood.

During this time, Rahim settled down, sharing an apartment with his sister, who worked across the street at Northeastern Hospital. At Chuck's urging, Charlie increased Rahim's responsibilities at Puckman Security, and, before long, he was creating a complicated build schedule every week and apportioning work to the various tradesmen and outside contractors, coordinating everything so that units could be shipped and billed to customers.

Early on, Charlie Puckman had told his boys that the security guard business would someday disappear and that the Puckman designs would become commodities, easily copied, imported for pennies from low-cost overseas suppliers. With three family members on the draw and a shop full of ancient equipment, he warned that no one would ever be interested in buying the business. Yet year after year, they kept cranking out product and meeting their obligations. By the early nineties, the old man was losing energy. He still swept cash from company accounts and drew a large salary, but he actually did very little. When Chuck petitioned his father for commissions on sales or an increase in salary, Artie threw a fit and demanded the same. When Chuck mentioned quitting, the old man reminded him that if he did, he would get nothing. They fought like dogs. Meanwhile, the business underperformed, drawing bank debt in excess of its asset value.

Chuck and Eileen's marriage died the long death of relationships that never should have been. By the time Ivy was in grade school, Eileen was a fastidious chronicler of Chuck's inadequacies, his self-absorption, his dalliances with drugs and alcohol, his bitterness, and his tendency to withdraw. They avoided each other in the house. They seldom ate together, and when they did, it was in silence. Sex, when it occurred, was perfunctory. Eileen blamed Chuck for every bad choice, every piece of bad luck, every mistake she had ever made; he froze inside at the sight and sound of her. There were glimmers of hope now and then—at home, after dinner in a fancy restaurant, or, when stoked with vodka, they danced for several hours at a black-tie affair. One night, Eileen professed to understand how badly Chuck needed to strike out on his own, to get away from his brother and father, how Puckman Security had become a toxic environment; but in the end, she refused to dial down her spending. “Anything that would lighten your load,” she said curtly, “would by definition increase mine.”

To the outside world, Chuck was distant, expressionless, and mysteriously unhappy, and when other people considered his situation, his station in life, they were baffled. He was the vice president of a successful business; he was married to an attractive woman; he was the father of an adorable preteen—an equestrian with trophies and pictures of herself standing next to beautiful horses and stern-looking instructors—yet something was dead and rotting inside him. One therapist guessed anhedonia, an inability to experience joy; and then acedia, an absence of feeling altogether. Chuck's mother recommended he suck it up and will himself to feel better. A marriage counselor suggested that Chuck and Eileen sign a contract, promising to date each other as if they were still courting. Reading a battery of tests he'd taken—a depression inventory, a suicide scale, a hopefulness index—a psychiatrist quietly nodded her head. The last summer they spent together as a family was made possible at least in large part by several vials full of mood enhancers and anxiety-reducing medication Chuck began taking. A biochemical orchestra in his brain began tuning up.