Backward-Facing Man Read online

  We met at an Irish bar on the corner of Second and South. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and when she took off her coat, she seemed thinner and more muscular than when we’d first met. She hoisted her handbag, a colorful knit sack that looked like it was imported from Central America, on the table between us. For a few seconds, she just smiled—there was no awkwardness or impatience in her demeanor—and I remember thinking how, sitting there with her hands folded, she looked beatific. I told her about the UPS incident and Patty’s theory about somebody wanting to ruin her chances for a pardon. I had the feeling she already knew what I was going to say. “Why would Patty freeze up when I mentioned Frederick?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Lorraine said.

  “Who cares whether or not Patty Hearst gets pardoned?”

  “A lot of people, Winnie. The noose is tightening around the surviving SLA members. The Feds finally caught Kathy Soliah, the soccer mom from Minnesota, and a bunch of people who’ve been living free for twenty years are going to trial for murdering a woman during one of the bank robberies. Patty was the only eyewitness.” Lorraine tilted her head.

  “I don’t get it.” It was becoming clear that although I may have been Patty’s childhood friend and coauthor, Lorraine was the real expert on Patty Hearst.

  “Clinton leaves office in two months,” Lorraine said. “For twenty years, Patty and her lawyers have been lobbying to have her name cleared. If she’s busted now, it would fuck up her chances and discredit her testimony.” Lorraine spoke with authority. “That would be very good for certain people.”

  We looked at each other as if to decide whether to take the next step. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.

  “That’s what I want to tell you,” Lorraine said, waving the waitress over.

  Saturday, March 14, 2000

  Stardust took a deep breath and moved her hand to an area above her left eye. There was a raised bump, a little track of scabbing, and a generalized swelling that hurt to touch. Her head throbbed and she had a bad taste in her mouth. Her determination to continue sleeping seemed to push her toward wakefulness. Then she remembered the train, the walk through the ghetto, and the abandoned factory, where she’d smacked into something low and hard. She touched her legs, which were bare. Beneath her, she felt a tight rubberized surface, like a trampoline. She had to pee. Down and to the left, a narrow rectangle of light under the doorjamb shone on linoleum. From another room, she could hear music, jazz maybe, kind of old-fashioned. Within a few moments, she was able to make out the outlines of the wall opposite the door, the edges of the bed she lay on, a small table beside it. The digital clock read twelve thirty; in the bluish glow were a pair of nail clippers, an ashtray, and a photograph. She picked up the frame and examined it. It was an old print, creased in several places. On one side was a man with long hair, a mustache, freckles, and glasses. He had his arm around a smaller man, also thin, with dark kinky hair and a full beard. On one side of the picture was a couch, and on the other, a young woman with dirty blonde hair who seemed to be moving out of the frame.

  Somewhere outside the room, Stardust heard someone laugh and then the music shut off. There was muffled conversation, more laughter, and then footsteps heading toward her, before the knob turned and the door opened slightly. “You got a nasty bump there, honey,” Ovella said, seeing she was awake. Ovella extended a small towel with ice. “I fixed you something to eat.”

  “Bathroom,” Stardust said weakly. Ovella helped her into her skirt, which had been laid neatly at the base of the bed. Then she pointed to a door across the hallway and stepped out of the way.

  “Who undressed me?” Stardust asked.

  “You knocked your head. We carried you upstairs. You slept a long time.” Ovella helped her to the bathroom. Afterward, the two made their way slowly down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Ovella poured coffee and then pointed to a wrought-iron chair next to the table. She held a skillet and spooned out a generous portion of eggs, rice, and beans. Midway through the meal—her first in a long time—Stardust noticed the backward-facing man standing by the aquarium with his hand on his chin, watching.

  Without looking directly at him, she observed what she could. His face was pale, his olive complexion sun-starved, his hands stained yellow from cigarettes. In this light, and in her condition, he looked like someone who had only partially materialized before the transporter malfunctioned. She ran her hands through her hair and took a deep breath. She felt hungover. She might have slept three hours or fifteen. Cautiously, she studied his features—the shape of his face and lips, his bone structure and posture, his body type—in the event she was finally meeting someone of significance to her mother, a mysteriously close friend or a person with important information about the past, perhaps even her father.

  With her vision still hazy, Stardust made comparisons. Chuck was taut, tightly wound, bony, wiry even. She was big boned, Rubenesque, prone to being overweight if she let herself. He seemed shorter than she remembered from the train; his shoulders sloped as though he was backpacking and his head angled slightly forward from his neck. She considered herself average height and her posture good, perhaps thanks to constant reminders from her mother. Instead of laying flat and soft like hers, his hair—salt and pepper, now—extended from his head like bristles on a wire brush. All told, it was difficult to come to any conclusion.

  Taking another tack, Stardust tried to assess whether he was her mother’s type. Lorraine liked confident, lackadaisical, easygoing guys: the divorced dad who coached her softball team; the general contractor who was always doing projects in their neighborhood; Carl, her boss from the bank. Chuck seemed cautious and restrained, inhibited, impatient in an aggressive way, like someone continually bracing himself for bad news. He lacked authority. It seemed unlikely that he could have run a business that employed people, even less likely that he’d ever had a family. If this man and Lorraine had once been lovers, it would have had to have been a long time ago and under some pretty strange circumstances. She felt relief and disappointment.

  Along the wall of the kitchen were sleek, brushed aluminum cabinets with concealed handles. Underneath them, a microwave blinked SET CLOCK and next to that, a Plexiglas pot sat on a matte black coffeemaker. The refrigerator had a couple small photographs and three eleven-by-fourteen papers attached by magnets. Stardust squinted. “Notice of Preliminary Hearing.” “Federal Indictment.” “Request to Appear Before Grand Jury.” There was a picture of a young girl wearing an equestrian helmet, her face in shadow.

  Across a yellowed Formica counter that curled around the edges was a small sitting area with a beat-up leather couch. For a second, it seemed as though the backward-facing man was walking toward her, then he turned and headed down the hallway. A gray upholstered recliner backed up against the aquarium he had been standing beside. Stardust could see a sleek barracuda-shaped minnow with mottled skin, and a little school of silver fish with paste-on eyes darting through the bubbles. Before they were renovated, the complex of rooms they were in might have been offices. She imagined metal desks, filing cabinets, typewriters, and women with piled-on hairdos answering phones and drinking coffee; faded circles where posters or calendars once covered the paneling, absorbing smoke and tired exhalations. Somehow, it seemed even uglier now, like a hideout. There were no plants, no artwork, no decorations on the walls—nothing ornamental save a giant fish that was stuffed and mounted over a tiny bronze plaque whose inscription she couldn’t read. An absurdly bright shade of turquoise, it was stuck in a frozen leap over paneling where a window once had been.

  Stardust felt better after drinking coffee. A toilet flushed down the hall, and she felt the pressure change, the way it does when a door opens somewhere in an air-conditioned building. From the bedroom, there was the sound of drawers opening, then footsteps. Chuck had changed into jeans and a flannel shirt. He made his way back into the living room, around piles of books, his eyes downcast, then he took a seat under a Ple
xiglas skylight, which was black either because it was evening or from paint or soot that had accumulated over time. He made a motion for Stardust to come sit beside him on the couch, which she pretended not to see. Her head throbbed, and she was still very shaky.

  He opened a pack of Benson & Hedges and set an ashtray on his lap. Stardust finished her meal and pushed away the plate, deciding for now at least to reserve judgment, and to project apathy. Memorize him, she told herself—his nuances and quirks. Try to match whatever he says against some measure of authenticity. Light from the lamp spread itself over the carpeting and then diffused, stirring and igniting dust particles around him. Elbow on the armrest, chin in one hand, he was staring at the floor not seeing, his knees bouncing rhythmically, like Rodin’s Thinker between a shit and a sweat. Occasionally, he shrugged his shoulders. The skin on his face was stretched thin, fixed in a kind of grimace, as though relaxing might lead him to say things he would regret. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he spoke.

  Spring 1968

  It was a sunny Saturday morning. A sooty mixture of car exhaust and litter fossilized against the curb of Memorial Drive, and the trees along the stone retaining wall stretched toward the sky like starving prisoners. On a thin sliver of lawn between MIT and the river, dozens of students walked or sat, in singles, pairs, and clusters—freaks in turtlenecks and bell-bottoms, engineers in tight Farah slacks, young Republicans in white, buttoned-down oxfords—smoking cigarettes, sipping from plastic cups, moving their hands in conversation. A long-haired kid made a strumming motion across a guitar. Music wafted across the quadrangle from speakers propped in windows.

  Chuck leaned against the cinder block wall in the hallway of his dormitory, the pay telephone pressed to his ear; in the background, Tony Bennett, the sound of slippers shuffling across linoleum, and the achingly familiar rat-a-tat cadence of his mother’s raspy cough. Even though she could hardly afford a lengthy long-distance call, Regina Puckman wanted her son to know she was offended by his being away, even though he was in college, learning a profession, avoiding a certain fate in the draft lottery. After a minute or two, he heard footsteps, fumbling, and then his mother’s voice. “Do you know where your brother is?”

  Arthur Puckman was a problem child almost from birth. In Chuck’s earliest memories, his brother’s face was swollen and red from holding his breath, or wiggling to get out from under furniture, getting stung, burned, pinched, or squished, having hurt himself for the sympathy it evoked from their mother, who ran after him with a towel or Band-Aid in her hand and a look of concern across her face. She dressed the boy in heavy fabrics, even in summer—wool pants, tentlike shirts, heavy sweaters—that accentuated his girth and inhibited his clumsy movements. He wore thick-framed glasses in a failed attempt to correct a lazy eye and breathed heavily from his mouth, which he held open in a kind of stupor, or half pout. It seemed to Chuck that his mother ran her mouth at Arthur nonstop, cautioning or admonishing him for everything he did, while praising him excessively for ordinary things like eating dinner and taking a crap. To Chuck, his mother’s entire existence seemed committed to reinforcing Arthur’s incompetence and dependence.

  In the years the boys lived together, there was perpetual trouble. In third grade, Artie started a fire in a trash can in the plaza outside school. The following year, he made up variants of Bible stories with deviant acts and twisted outcomes and told them emphatically to his younger brother, who repeated them in school. Arthur wasn’t just ostracized, he was ridiculed—at home by his father, at school, and in the neighborhood, where he was like a pin cushion, a magnet for derision, a receptacle for trash talk. His last name became an insult heaped by one kid on another. And the worse it was for Artie, the more he antagonized Chuck. When the brothers were nine and twelve, Pasquale De Vita heard screams behind a shed at Southport Metal. De Vita found Chuck facedown on the ground, with Artie sitting on him, cutting into the younger boy’s butt cheek with a nine-inch piece of angle iron. In a move that surprised no one, Charlie Puckman came by one afternoon and spirited his younger son away.

  Unlike many fathers, who soften at the sight of their firstborn, Charlie Puckman bristled with enmity toward Arthur from the very beginning, even before the little boy manifested his grossness and his emotional dependence on his mother. The old man mimicked him when he whined. He teased and yelled at Artie when he cried, and he hit his son, hard, every chance he got. The more Charlie humiliated Artie, the more Artie tortured Chuck. Nobody understood why Charlie Puckman took even a momentary break from philandering to marry Regina Puckman, much less sire a son. They were of two different worlds: Regina, long-suffering and bitter, even at twenty-one, resigned to a life of disappointment, and fast-talking Charlie Puckman, the opportunist always looking for a scam. To their friends and family in South Philly, Charlie’s disdain for his oldest boy seemed inversely proportional to Regina’s love for him; everything about the boy was an example of Regina’s damaged bloodline. Before they separated, the neighbors heard Charlie screaming every night. The next day, Regina would emerge, her eyes red-rimmed, a handkerchief in her fist, casting about for sympathy. Three years later, in a move that mystified everyone, Charlie and Regina reunited to produce a second son.

  On this particular Saturday morning in 1968, Regina Puckman was upset, not only because she’d been robbed, but because her house, her only asset, the single repository of her life’s dreams and an extension of her psychological being, had been thoroughly ransacked. “Animals,” she told Chuck on the phone, coughing. “They took my cash, my silver, my jewelry. They emptied the cupboards and ruined the furniture. They defecated on my photo albums!” Chuck rolled his eyes. He knew what was coming next. “If they didn’t kill Arthur, they probably scared him to death. You must help me find him, Charles. Please.”

  Theirs was a volatile family, even by South Philly standards, and the consensus was that given his temperament, his father, and the way he was treated by everyone, Arthur would someday explode. That he would rip off his mother and deface his own home was, in some ways, mild compared to expectation. Still, Regina Puckman was in a bind. If she called the cops, they’d announce to the world what everyone but she acknowledged.

  After the incident behind Southport Metal, Charlie converted the offices above his factory into an apartment and enrolled Chuck in private school, where he thrived. Chuck Puckman was a sturdy little kid, hardened by his brother’s provocations and indifferent to his mother’s histrionics. In this industrial neighborhood, a curious kid could explore the barren lots between factories and the abandoned railroad spurs as long as he kept a low profile or curried favor with the neighborhood toughs. Chuck spent his weekends downstairs in his father’s shop, wiring buzzers and alarm systems and putting together stereo systems. Weeknights, he did his homework in the little apartment and steered clear of his father and his girlfriends. In junior high, Chuck did well in school, particularly in math and science. He won second prize in a statewide science competition by building a radio that operated on a cell that stored static electricity. When he was fifteen, he got a job taking inventory in a pharmacy, where he learned the concept of shrinkage by siphoning pharmaceutical cocaine, quaaludes, and Benadryl for making speed. Chuck finished Central with high enough grades to earn automatic admission to MIT. With the war in Vietnam escalating, the summer of 1967 seemed a particularly good time to go to college. It was also an especially good year for the security business, and Chuck Puckman was one of the few students to pay tuition in cash.

  That Saturday morning, the phone conversation between Chuck Puckman and his mother was brief. Chuck was fuzzy from having smoked a particularly strong chunk of hashish the night before, and he had no interest in or idea where his brother was. Like he’d seen his father do many times before, he held the receiver a foot away from his ear and waited for his mother to exhaust herself, then told her he was busy with exams and hung up. Regina Puckman savored her suffering, he told himself as he put the phone back in its cradle;
she compressed it into its purest form, crushing it like a diamond. “ ’Bye, Mom,” he said into the air.

  Along the path, buds were still tight on the bushes and traffic along Memorial Drive was sparse. Sharp sunlight cast strange shadows of the Latin letters carved along the tops and sides of old classrooms and bounced off the brand-new office buildings across the Charles River on the Boston side. Chuck was walking north along a row of bushes when he first saw her bare arms reaching up like someone climbing an imaginary rope. They were white and fleshy and they swayed from side to side like a belly dancer’s. He pulled aside the branches and leaned in, admiring the nape of her neck from behind, blonde hair, soft shoulders, bare back. When she turned, the sun was in her eyes, which picked up specks of sky and ambient light. Her lips pressed together in a combination of concentration and pleasure. Without planning or forethought, Chuck Puckman pushed aside the bushes and entered the clearing. As he did, the young woman burst into laughter and collapsed onto a blanket beside a scruffy-looking guy who, until then, had been obscured by foliage. The young man touched the neck of his beer that rested against his belly.

  “You’re not gonna bust me for drinking in public, are you?” He was stretched out on his side, his shaggy head propped up on his hand, his face full of freckles, wire-frame glasses, mustache, a tiny tuft of reddish hair growing under his lower lip.

  “I was on my way…I mean, I didn’t see you….”