Backward-Facing Man Read online

  Reluctantly, Fernandez took Frankford north a few miles into the Great Northeast, and then pulled the patrol car into the circular drive. Elysian Fields was a squat nursing home consisting of three brick rectangles, joined at odd angles to fit a footprint of land carved around the interstate. There was an odd slope to the parking lot. Had it been a putting green, Fernandez thought, getting to the glass front doors in a straight shot would have been a challenge. “Five minutes,” Fernandez said, tapping his watch. Artie walked slowly, his head tilted at an absurd angle.

  At the front desk, Artie announced his father’s name. The receptionist typed something into the computer. Artie stared at the watercolors on the walls, amateurishly simple paintings of ducks, geese, and other waterfowl. They seemed perfectly useless, devoid of any cheer that might have been intended. “Orange. Second floor. Room 210.” She motioned down a hallway to a bank of elevators. An acrid smell, a mixture of urine and disinfectant, wafted toward him.

  Artie’s father had been assigned to a floor for stroke victims who were frozen in a perpetual fluorescence that illuminated the physical world they were denied. There, men and women sat in wheelchairs along the corridor, their hands folded in their laps, their heads lolling from side to side, mouths suspended over wet bibs, looking sideways at each other. Behind the buzz of the lights, Artie heard canned laughter erupting from the TVs.

  It had been a year since his father had been moved from Northeastern Hospital to Elysian Fields, and, in that time, the old man had lost most of his body mass. Each day, a therapist visited him, but the extent of his daily workout was using the fingers of his right hand to shoo her away. Charlie Puckman took his meals through a bag attached to his arm and breathed through a tube in his nose. He watched television all day and all night. He slept in jags. When he felt himself drifting off, he woke with a start. Mute, except for a little chalkboard that rested on his sunken chest, he had no choice on this night but to accept a visit from the son he despised.

  Artie was not there out of compassion or curiosity. He had not come to reminisce about the childhood he wished he’d had, or to talk to his father about declining sales or problems with the bank, or to complain about Puckman Security since his brother, Chuck, had taken over. Every family business has its mysteries. Offspring wonder what they could have accomplished on their own, whether what they had was earned or given, whether after being mollycoddled and spoon-fed at the table of plenty, they could survive the trials and tribulations of the real world. Where there’s a family business, there are brutal comparisons between siblings; rivalries between cousins; animosity between spouses; that reflect slights, real and perceived, grudges, past and present, hatred and hurt, gnarly, emotional wounds exaggerated by secrecy.

  For his part, over the years, Charlie Puckman had offered opinions and judgments to anyone who’d listen. He complained about his unreliable workers, his thieving bankers, his miserable customers, and his good-for-nothing sons. He sulked and loafed and paraded around, assigning shit jobs to those around him, sucking whatever cash and satisfaction he could as though he alone was entitled to it. And like many of his generation, he never planned for the fate of the business after he was gone. By avoiding this single task and refusing to delineate responsibilities beyond doing what needed to be done, and by hoarding shares of stock, he’d made it clear that there’d be nothing to inherit when he died. In his mind, this prevented his sons from wishing for his demise. So as Artie approached his father’s room that night, he had a gleeful feeling seeing his father propped up in bed, thin as a rail.

  “Can I help you?” a night-shift nurse holding a tray of medication asked.

  “I’m Arthur. Ch-Ch-Charlie Puckman’s son…”

  “Your father is very agitated tonight,” she said, pressing her lips together and arching her eyebrows.

  The room was dark except for the flicker of the television. Artie stood in the doorway and looked at the shriveled form in the bed, which was jackknifed so the old man could see the television without moving his neck. There were two lumps under the blankets where knees would be. “Hello, Pop,” Artie said, twisting his mouth.

  Charlie Puckman Sr. stared straight ahead. If he was aware of his son in the room, he gave no indication. Artie moved a chair from against the wall and the two of them sat there in silence, watching commercials. A few minutes later, Artie heard the Action News theme, its staccato beat signaling something lurid and unimportant. A male newscaster appeared in a trench coat, live from Kensington. “Unsafe conditions and an industrial accident in Fishtown has left one worker in a coma and…”

  Artie moved forward and turned the volume up. “That’s us, Pop!” he said excitedly. They were showing Coleman Porter’s footage now on all three networks. You could see the Puckman factory in muted daylight, the fence up, the garage like a gaping mouth. In the parking lot, off to one side, was Chuck’s black Suburban. Charlie Puckman began to moan, soft and low. His head slumped forward, his eyes turned as far to the side as they could, and the fingers of his right hand pointed toward the television.

  “The police are blaming Chuck…”

  “…in critical condition,” the reporter said.

  The old man blinked repeatedly and stared ahead. His cheeks were flush, in contrast with his neck and forehead, which had gone flabby since the stroke. His lips were grayish blue and they quivered, and he struggled to moisten them every few seconds.

  “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.”

  Sunday, January 24, 1999

  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 wr
apped 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.

  Puckman Security