Backward-Facing Man (34 page)

 

About an hour later, while Alan was in the shower and Judy and Patty were out back cleaning their weapons, Joan tiptoed into the bathroom, removed a wad of keys from Alan's jeans, separating the ring with the First Philadelphia Bank insignia on it, and tossed it to Lorraine, who'd already put Stardust and their bags in the front seat. The Duster wheezed and sputtered, and then started. Lorraine brought it around in a turn that barely missed the corner of the front porch, pulling Stardust in close and accelerating through a patch of hip-high weeds. As she did, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw Alan on the porch waving his pistol, trying to hold a bath towel around his waist. He got off at least one shot, maybe two—neither of which hit—most likely, thanks to Frederick, whose arm came down from behind, knocking the pistol to the ground.

It was just after midnight by the time he made his way from Ivy's backyard to the boulevard and traffic had thinned to an occasional whooshing sound on either side of the median. The big-box retail stores, so garish when lit, seemed lifeless and unwelcoming. Each time a car passed, Chuck felt the air sucked from around his body, drawing him closer to the road. In that split second between future and past, the negative pressure of now, he imagined his legs crumbling beneath him. To do it right, he would need to judge the speed of approaching headlights and calculate his timing against the reflexes of the driver. One, two, three…drop, then roll. It was a simple enough maneuver. There would be a split second of noise, perhaps an explosion of pain, and then nothingness—no returning to Rahim without Ivy, no sentencing hearing Monday, and no trying to survive in a six-by-nine-foot cell with human beings who'd been reduced to animals. Unless he miscalculated.

In certain cities, especially in the Northeast, when you've exhausted your family, baffled your physician, when you have no money for a hotel and the emergency rooms are tired of seeing your sorry ass, when you're sick without symptoms, without job, without spouse, without steady routine or religion, and you want to find a safe place in the middle of the night, you go to a diner. Chuck found an empty booth and sat down. A waitress with teased hair wiped the table with a sopping rag. At the counter, a tall man wearing calf-high boots drummed his fingers on a black motorcycle helmet and stared into the refrigerator case. Chuck took out a pack of Benson & Hedges. As the waitress approached, he was reading a place mat that advertised local businesses no diner customer was likely to patronize—a scrap-metal yard, a shop that rebuilt transmissions, a physical therapist who comes to your home. The clock over the door read twelve forty. It was too late to catch a train home, and a taxi would have cost him at least twenty, maybe twenty-five bucks. An almost unrecognizable version of a Bee Gees song leaked from speakers overhead.

“There's no smoking in this section,” she said, pointing to a small sign on the cash register.

“Cranberry juice,” Chuck said. “And a glass with ice.” Rail-thin, with blonde hair that looked like wire, she wore a plastic pin that said
PENNY
in red letters on white background. There was a small gap between her front teeth. She returned, sliding an ashtray across the table. Something that might have been compassion crossed her face. You learn a lot about humanity serving people all night for two bucks an hour plus tips.

Chuck put a napkin on his saucer and finished his cigarette. The guy at the counter walked bowlegged to the door. From his back pocket, Chuck took the pint bottle out. A minute later, Penny returned with a glass filled with ice. “You got kids?” Chuck asked.

She nodded.

“Reason being, I got these fish.” He lit another cigarette. Penny shifted onto one foot, as if she was going to stand there awhile. Chuck took the bottle out and offered it to her. She shook her head. “It's no big deal. You feed 'em in the morning, you stare at 'em during the day if you want…only have to clean the tank every once in a while….” Chuck's voice trailed off.

“How come you don't want 'em?” Penny asked.

“I'm going away. Got some business to take care of.” She noticed the lines in Chuck's face, the splotches of red on his hands, his eyes rimmed in red, and the skin underneath, dark and wrinkled. A couple of teenagers entered, eyes glazed, zombies. Penny followed them to a booth in the back with menus. An orchestral version of “Yellow Submarine” oozed from the ceiling tiles. Chuck poured. More patrons came and went—an older couple unable to sleep, a couple of cops with radios crackling on their lapels. Chuck thought about his predicament—the sentencing hearing, his estrangement from his daughter, his brother's disappearance with the family jewels.

Put the past behind you, his father used to say. No matter what you've done, forget about it. Move on. It's pointless and painful to try to true up what happened with what should have been. In time, your feelings fade, and whatever you felt guilty about gets replaced by what you do next. At the other end of the counter, Penny ran water through the coffeemaker. Though he thought about Lorraine on occasion, Chuck had never contacted her. Her disappearance from his life after that afternoon in Brighton was so complete and his transgression against Frederick so egregious, he followed his father's advice to the letter, forgetting about his foray into the counterculture, blotting out his failed attempt at college, obliterating memories of his first love. Until he read Lorraine's obituary, he'd forgotten about the child.

“Ya ever hear of the Volcano Bomber?” Chuck asked the waitress after she'd set the teenagers up with menus and drinks. Penny was standing at the end of the counter waiting for them to decide what to order. In the kitchen, the chef had turned his own radio up. Chuck looked up at the clock over the door to the kitchen. It was just past one.

“Can't say that I have,” she said, walking toward him, filling the condiment jars.

“Yeah, well, like they say, if you can remember the sixties,” Chuck said, “you weren't there.” He mixed himself another drink, blew out a cloud of smoke, and squinted. “We had a thing for the same girl,” he said, and then winced. “He was a radical. The real thing. He knew how to make bombs.” Chuck narrowed his eyes. The muscles around his jaw twitched. It occurred to him that, until then, he hadn't spoken to anybody—even Rahim—about Frederick and Lorraine. “We had a thing for the same girl,” he said again. For some reason, he pictured Gutierrez standing next to a mailbox holding a brown box.

After the kids left, Penny sat on a stool across from Chuck and, for the next several hours, his back up against the window, his feet dangling over the seat, Chuck told her everything—the Fenway Park fizzle, the scene at Lorraine's the blast in Oneonta, his near bust, and the relief he felt steering the FBI to the commune in exchange for his own freedom. It felt good to unburden himself—uncommonly good—better almost than any buzz he'd put on since the accident. “I double-crossed him,” he said finally. “And he's been a fugitive ever since.”

“What happened to Lorraine?”

“She was killed in some kind of mountain-climbing accident.” Outside, tiny flecks of snow appeared under the parking lights.

“And the kid?”

“What kid?”

“You said she was pregnant.”

“It was a girl,” he said wistfully.

Penny walked to the cash register and reached underneath. “Interesting,” she said. “Like a soap opera.” She handed him a telephone book.

 

Chuck already had a vague idea in what section of the city Lorraine had lived, thanks to many hours he'd spent online since starting Softpawn. Just after four
A.M.,
he made note of the address, pulled his jacket tight around his neck, and gave Penny a peck on the cheek. By then, the cars that remained in the parking lot were covered with a thin coating of white, which made them look pristine. After a while, he flagged down a cab, which followed a delivery truck on the boulevard, past the Nabisco plant that made everyone sentimental with the smell of shortening and vanilla. By the time they got to Street Road, the snow had turned to rain.

“Here's fine,” Chuck said, in front of a 7-Eleven. He shuffled out, looking clownish in the plaid jacket, sneakers, and Mariner's cap Penny had given him. Inside, Chuck took a ham sandwich from the warmer, a package of vanilla wafers, and a bottle of Arizona iced tea. At the cash register, he bought a soft pack of Benson & Hedges and the Friday
Inquirer
and handed the clerk a ten spot. The radio was playing the reggae song about redemption.

The houses on Medley Street were functional, drab, well-maintained brick twins, like those inhabited by many hardworking Philadelphians carrying too much debt to be concerned with aesthetics. Inexpensive cars were parked tight against both sides of the street. As Chuck rounded the corner, second-floor lights were switching on. Soon, people would be showering, brewing coffee, and rushing off to work, ordinary people leading ordinary lives. For the second time in twelve hours, Chuck scanned mailboxes for an address.

Number 1456 was easy to find: It had a
FOR SALE
sign planted on the front lawn. Next door, an overweight woman in a terry-cloth robe hobbled down the driveway to pick up her paper. A man in a maintenance uniform walked to his car. From behind an SUV, Chuck tucked his newspaper under his arm, unwrapped his sandwich, and waited. At six thirty, the light in the Nadia house switched on. A scrim of daylight appeared over a row of houses toward the east. Just before seven, Lorraine's front door opened.

Stardust Nadia was wearing a blue skirt, light stockings, and a waist-length jacket that opened as she locked the door behind her. Her hair, still wet, was much shorter than her mother's. She was carrying a small handbag. The resemblance was striking—her stride, the way her hips swayed, her hands, the little twist of her neck to shake the hair out of her face. Chuck knelt between two cars, pretending to tie his shoes. He struggled to think of something to say before she got in her car and drove off. Fortunately for him, she kept walking.

As the sun climbed over the row houses, Chuck followed Stardust precisely as he had followed Lorraine on the campus of Boston College. Down Medley to Appleberry, left at the corner, and then left again. He paused under a bridge and watched her skitter up the steps two at a time as the train arrived. The conductor called, “All aboard,” just as Chuck hit the platform. With what remaining strength he had, he pulled himself into the second car as it began to move. Inside, he doubled over. It took him a long time to catch his breath.

“I get it,” Stardust said, sitting up. “I'm here because you have no one else.” It was dark. She could sense Chuck in the room with her, smoking.

“No.” He was near the door.

“I'm here because you're scared and you can't think of anyone besides my mother to call, and now she's gone.” It was the end of the third day, or perhaps the beginning of the fourth—longer than she'd ever dreamed she could spend with a man who might be her father and still not be sure. He'd talked exhaustively about the past, yet he'd revealed nothing of himself. So she was trying to provoke him.

“No,” he said, louder.

“I'm here because—”

“Stop!” Chuck was thinking about the agents in his dorm room, the little particles of smoke and dust suspended in the stale air. “It's much more complicated than that.”

“What could be more complicated than this?” Stardust said, opening her arms to include the two of them, the tiny windowless rooms, the not-quite-converted factory. The weekend had been more like a history lesson than a reunion.

“After the raid on Higher Purpose, I meant to square things up with your mother. To help her out if I could.” He sounded petulant. He'd betrayed Frederick and Lorraine just as Artie had betrayed him. They hadn't meant for the boy in Oneonta to be holding the package when it went off, any more than he'd intended for Gutierrez to be in the tank that day. “You do certain things,” he said, “then everything around you turns to shit….” It wasn't a confession. It wasn't an apology. “I gave him up. I made a deal for myself. I sold him out. I gave the FBI Frederick's name. I told them where to find him.” Stardust saw him wince when his cigarette glowed. “The truth is, I wanted them to get caught.”

So you betrayed somebody, Stardust wanted to say. Big fucking deal. You wouldn't be the first person in the world. But she didn't. She held her tongue. A strange, familiar feeling rose up in her chest.

“All my life, I've done what's best for me,” Chuck said. “Everything you see around you—everything I have—I got off somebody else's back.”

To Stardust, betrayal and contrition were ancient and animal drives, like fucking or hunting, neither evil nor righteous. You do the things you do, and you get over them. Plain and simple. She imagined the sun outside rising, commuters on the early-morning trains. From the other room, she smelled bacon, something spicy, coffee maybe, with cinnamon. “Why didn't you come for me?” she asked.

For this, Chuck Puckman had no answer—just an ache in the pit of his stomach and a slightly sickening feeling that would crystallize much later in thought—after he'd had hours upon hours to reflect. The weekend had imposed a kind of wakefulness on him that was more painful than anything he'd ever experienced. It was then, only hours before his sentencing hearing, in the dim light and the moist, close air that he began to acknowledge his responsibility for separating a young woman from her father. “I'm sorry,” he said, unable to swallow.

There was the sound of clothes rustling, and then the door opened. Stardust watched his silhouette appear and disappear against the light in the hallway. From the bathroom, she heard a roiling, choking sound that seemed to come from the bottom of the ocean. A toilet flushed. Stardust let her head fall back against the pillow. It flushed again. She found the lamp switch and put her clothes on. Then she made her way down the hall into the kitchen, where she poured herself coffee.

 

A half hour later, when Chuck emerged, his face was clean-shaven, and his hair was slicked back. For a long time, he stood beside the fish tank, tapping cylinders against the glass, watching the fish swim up, one species at a time. He was wearing dress slacks and a clean shirt, and, in the light of the tank, Stardust saw a soul-less man, not unlike the lawyers she rode the elevators with every day. In the kitchen, Rahim wiped down the surfaces with a towel, scouring the toaster oven, the refrigerator door, then the oven top; glancing nervously at the two of them. “Technology is destroying our quality of life,” he said randomly, as Ovella began serving breakfast.

Stardust put a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. Chuck walked in from the living room, holding up a bright orange cylinder. “Twice a day,” he said to Rahim, jiggling the plankton.

“Take the gross national product,” Rahim said. “What economists would like us to believe is a numerical representation of the value of all goods and services manufactured and performed in the U.S.” Rahim looked at Chuck for some kind of acknowledgment, but he was just staring into space. Ovella passed around a plate with bread and muffins. Rahim continued. “Most people cite the rise in GNP as evidence that technology and free-market capitalism are improving quality of life. But it's a fallacy. Sure, people suffer from violence, disease, and social ills, but on the whole, they say, our standard of living is higher than it's ever been. Well, that may be, but our quality of living sucks, and we can prove it. If you were to measure GNP with all the waste taken out—if you added up the cost of things people buy that get lost or that don't get used…”

Rahim was agitated now. His neck extended forward over his breakfast plate, and they could see little beads of sweat above his mustache. “Religious relics, bookmarks, lawn chairs, pressure cookers, electric toothbrushes, back scratchers, gift subscriptions, dictionaries, diet food, not to mention doubles of things people buy, forgetting what they already own—clothes that sit in closets, stuff that gets sold on Softpawn, everything that's returned to manufacturers, dumped in landfills, or dumped in foreign markets—along with what people buy, but later admit they didn't enjoy—bad movies, lousy books, shitty meals, impossible self-help regimens, failed medical procedures, outfits that look better in the store windows than they do on our bodies, well, shit! Our gross national product is shrinking! Our mental metabolism is so fucked-up, we don't even notice this!” He was on his feet now, pacing.

Stardust had an urge to laugh. It wasn't just the tension around Chuck's sentencing, or hearing a bone-thin ghetto guy make a speech about macroeconomics. It was the incongruity of everything.

Ovella got up and put Coltrane on. Rahim returned to his seat, dejected. The four of them poked at their food. For a long time, nobody said anything. When they finished, Rahim started clearing the dishes.

“Whatever happens…” Ovella started, but Chuck held up his hand.

 

In the bathroom, Stardust applied makeup, covering the bump on her forehead. A cloud of moisture hung in the air, and she smelled shaving cream and hair tonic. Chuck's towel was balled up on the floor, as if he'd be home soon. In the bedroom, she folded the sweatpants and sweatshirt she'd worn all weekend and then slipped into her skirt.

“Taxi's here,” Ovella called from the other room.

Stardust took a last look around, which is when she noticed the picture. The frizzy-black-haired boy with the beard and the unfocused expression and the loopy grin was Chuck. Frederick, taller by almost a head, was holding a beer and looking directly into the lens, a menacing expression behind his glasses. Lorraine was almost outside the frame, staring away, ever hopeful and distracted. Stardust flipped it over and pried the little prongs back, then slipped the photo in her purse beside the flashlight, toothbrush, and panties.

 

In the cab, Chuck emptied a prescription bottle into his hand, leaned his head back, and swallowed. Stardust looked at him carefully. It was the first time she'd seen him in daylight since the walk from the train; his face seemed translucent and his body even smaller than before. She imagined him younger—his hair black, his lips full and moist, his nose and eyebrows less prominent, the skin around his eyes and mouth tighter and much smoother.

Stardust Nadia had been born in June 1969, the summer of love—Shelly, until a few months after Woodstock and the Joni Mitchell song from which she was renamed. Now, thirty years later, wrestling with the issue of paternity, less than an hour before Chuck would be lifted by the talons of justice and locked up, far from where he could provide answers she was unwilling and unable to let it go. This was her shot. The cab turned south on Broad Street. In the distance, they could see William Penn on top of City Hall. “Maybe your mother was right,” he said finally. “Maybe we keep coming back after we die until we get it right.” He wasn't ready for this either.

“I wish
my
generation had something to push up against,” Stardust said softly. The western entrance of City Hall was surrounded by city workers picketing. Sunlight bounced off the scaffolding. A pigeon arched toward them and descended, landing on a trash can. The driver turned off the meter and looked in his rearview mirror. Commuters were streaming out of Suburban Station, umbrellas and newspapers tucked under their arms, an occasional gust of smoke wafting toward them from vents in the sidewalk. Chuck pulled a manila envelope from his shopping bag.

“In case something happens,” he said, staring straight ahead. “This is the deed to the factory. Let Softpawn run. Rahim knows what to do. It'll pay the bills. It'll keep people working.” He asked the driver if he could borrow a pen, then scribbled the name “Eddie Palmieri” on the outside of the envelope. “If you have questions, call Eddie. He knows where most of the skeletons are.” Chuck slid a twenty through the Plexiglas partition and opened the side door. For the second time in four days, Stardust Nadia followed him of her own volition.