by Don Silver
December 1999
“Unless you plead guilty,” Wilkie said to Chuck six weeks later, “this trial’s going to be a disaster. We have no money for resources and no time to prepare.” Chuck was standing at a pay phone near Aramingo Avenue, trucks on their way to and from the steel distributor rumbling by. “As it stands now, we can’t really mount an adequate defense, and the prosecutor is going for the maximum penalty.”
“Which is what?” Chuck said feebly.
Crackford ignored him. “I tried for a delay, but the judge denied it. I was hoping as the trial got closer, the prosecutor would offer up a deal.”
Chuck reached in his pocket for a pint of Seagram’s and took a nip. “Maybe Rahim can gather the research and you can just read it.”
“It’s not like I want to get rich off this case, Chuck,” Crackford said patiently. “But without money, I can’t get any help, I can’t prepare arguments of law, rules of evidence.”
“I just don’t have it,” Chuck said.
“I know you don’t. I just don’t want to go to trial and lose,” Crackford said. A bus rolled by, its transmission obliterating part of what Crackford said next. “…in exchange for a lesser sentence.”
“I’m a dead man,” Chuck said thickly.
“I’m just saying—”
“Enter the plea.”
“I want to be sure you understand the implications.”
“I give up.”
“The sentencing guidelines are clear. If the judge wants to stick it to you, it’s between nine and twenty—”
“What happens to Artie?”
Crackford paused. “He’s a wanted man. If he shows his face, he’s looking at the same thing.”
“If I plead guilty, will they let him off?”
Wilkie Crackford said nothing. He’d seen Porter’s tape on the Internet. He’d heard all about the family from Fat Eddie. “You want me to ask?”
“Might as well,” Chuck said.
“If we go ahead with the plea, there’ll be a sentencing hearing in about a month. It’ll be very important for you to line up what we call character witnesses. Credible people who’ll say something good about you—an ailing relative, a dependent child, a key business employee—even better, somebody who could plead hardship as a result of your prolonged absence.” Chuck didn’t say anything. “Think about it,” Crackford said.
Thursday, March 12, 2000
In addition to being his best friend and confidante, after the accident, Rahim Rodriguez became Chuck Puckman’s shithouse lawyer, financial manager, and public relations agent; he helped Chuck manage cash flow, keep creditors and tax authorities at bay; he got Coleman Porter to send the Daily News pictures of Chuck in a playground surrounded by Latino kids. He even talked the Gutierrez family out of filing civil charges against him, citing, as evidence of Chuck’s intention to do right, monthly statements of the trust account he’d suggested his friend set up for the benefit of the widow and her kids. When Rahim heard Crackford’s suggestion to get character witnesses to testify on Chuck’s behalf, Rahim began a series of inquiries that resulted in his locating Chuck’s daughter, Ivy. The Thursday before the sentencing hearing, he presented Chuck with a hand-drawn map with her address on it.
“But I haven’t talked to her in seven years,” Chuck said, running his hands through his hair.
“She’s a human being, and she’s your daughter.”
“She’s her mother’s daughter. I’m not sure about the human being part.”
“She has nothing to lose.”
“She has nothing to gain.”
Nonetheless, the next afternoon, Chuck put on a sweater, a pair of sweatpants, and sneakers, and left the factory with Rahim’s map wedged in his back pocket. He walked four long blocks east, past a yard with giant spools of wire crated and stacked for shipment, past a strip mall with a thrift shop, a dollar store, and an upscale Italian restaurant, where he’d made deals with pawnshop owners and suppliers, surviving the silent assessments and the big lies they told each other over rich meals—people he didn’t like and who didn’t like him, alternately sucking up and then slinking down in their seats, knowing none of them would deliver what they were promising.
Along Aramingo Avenue, a bus rumbled by, spraying pebbles and diesel fumes over his shoes. He imagined God as a cameraman, recording every move, monitoring his thoughts. What makes a human defective is in his soul. Not cell phone radiation, not chemicals in his carpeting or vapors from his air-conditioning system, not nicotine or a lifetime of bad habits. As he walked, Chuck counted cars, slid coins from his pocket into parking meters, and avoided stepping on cracks, little rituals of contrition—rhythmic, soothing, nervous gestures—tonic for a lifetime of betrayals.
Crossing the street, he climbed a steel staircase and stood next to shift workers, women on their way home from work, and high school students wearing headphones and feigning nonchalance while checking out one another’s clothes and piercings. He shoved his hands in his pockets. The membrane separating Chuck’s most private self from the world was stretched so thin that every ding, every noise, every slight, every violation of his nature, was transmitted to his brain as an out-and-out assault. He knew when he stopped medicating, all his misdeeds, his secret life, his entire past, would lay raw and open before him. He faced the hearing Monday with dread, but also with relief. Deep down, he believed that no penance, no humiliation, and no authority could punish him adequately for the sin of living a false life.
When the El terminated at Frankford Avenue, he transferred to a bus. A trio of teenage boys in cargo pants and long black coats walked past him toward the back. A large black man with a huge belly moved down the aisle, grabbing the seat backs to steady himself. The bus lurched forward, passing newsstands, Laundromats, convenience stores, bowling alleys, and pedestrians standing in intersections governed by complex traffic light sequences that were impossible to anticipate. He ran his tongue over his front teeth, fingered the little bottle in his pocket—Xanax, the palindrome that calms—then swallowed a pill dry. He looked at his watch. How would he ever survive without medication?
In the seat next to him, a bookish man with a wooly comb-over was reading the obituaries. Miniature characters from Chuck’s past dangled from an imaginary mobile—corporate weenies and cheek squeezers in pin-striped suits, union men with braided arm muscles and angry eyes, the aging secretary prattling around the office with her bruised feelings and her fallow womb. Since the arraignment, Chuck had stayed in a sixteen-square-block area that occasionally extended down to the Union League, focusing on simple tasks—buying food and booze, picking up his prescription refills. It was a shock to his system to be out, passing Holmesburg with its guard towers and imposing brick walls—the place where, years ago, doctors had inflicted harrowing medical procedures on hapless cons. Chuck closed his eyes and pictured a bare cell with a small window high up, vans with metal cages, porcelain bowls in the middle of dank cells. He imagined himself in lineup or in the yard, being forced to the ground. He had no illusions about his past. What was happening to him now had been set in motion a long time ago. He checked the map and moved toward the aisle, passing a woman holding a brown bag, squeezing out a small gesture of arrogance.
Once, a long time ago when he was a kid, he fantasized that he was Mighty Mouse, the cartoon hero who puffed out his little chest and flew into harm’s way to save the world. Human beings begin life too hopeful, he thought. A man carrying a large Panasonic carton maneuvered his way down the aisle. You’re born, and, almost immediately, you start making concessions. All his life, Chuck had guessed what kind of person he needed to be to get by or to get over on others. Obligations, possessions, and promises piled up in a museum of detritus and debris. Over the course of fifty-five years, his life had become a catalogue of betrayals, large and small.
It was getting cold. Dusk settled over the Great Northeast like gray soot. Across the street was a hotel—a Sheraton or a Doubletree with a glass rotunda ove
r a swimming pool that nobody used. Roosevelt Boulevard was eight lanes across, impossible to cross in a single cycle. Standing on the median strip, waiting for the light to change, Chuck felt a momentary kinship with humanity. How exquisite to be among regular people—not exactly free—but not in prison either. He crossed the lobby with its worn carpets, bad art, and signs welcoming forensic accountants and small-aircraft pilots.
The bar was an alcove—not even a separate room—with a television suspended over a cash register. A sullen woman sat at a small table in the corner, smoking. On a television, tiny hockey players slid back and forth across a white surface. A couple of guys in suits called out the names of microbrews, none of which the bartender seemed to recognize. Chuck ordered a double shot of vodka, knocked it back with another Xanax, and slid off the stool.
At the front desk, he asked the clerk if they maintained a lost and found. From a large cardboard box, Chuck pulled a plaid jacket and carried it into the men’s room. He looked himself up and down in the mirror. His hair was matted like a toupee. Earlier in the week, he’d cut it himself in short uneven clumps. He had dark creases around his eyes, and the jacket made his shoulders look even thinner. It was at least one size too small. He walked back through the lobby, past a man in a suit who was arguing about a room upgrade. Chuck imagined himself suspended in liquid—petroleum jelly—heavy, translucent, vague, inchoate.
Crossing back over the boulevard, he entered a maze of streets with names like Robin’s Way, Carole Circle, and Steven Drive, after the sons and daughters of developers who’d gambled fifty years ago that someday this farmland would become commuter territory. He tried to orient himself to the map. The houses, with their aluminum siding, bay windows, lawn ornaments, minivans, and fences were identical. Occasionally, headlights forced him to cower on the sidewalk. He followed a street to the end, then turned, when, from out of nowhere, a blur of fur tore across a little patch of lawn yapping at his ankles, coming within inches before it miraculously stopped, its hind legs lifting, its torso spinning, as it reached the end of its tether. He lit a cigarette and looked up at the sign. Sharon Court. Ivy’s street. Squinting at the curb, he steadied himself: 13658, 13644. 13630.
Chuck paused to catch his breath and let his eyes adjust. Smoke curled from a line of chimneys. An electric garage door engaged and then shut off. The house next to Ivy’s was dark, and Chuck tiptoed down the driveway and into the backyard before crouching behind a doghouse set next to a clump of bushes. Behind Ivy’s house, a spotlight shone on the back patio, giving the air a bluish tint. Someone drew the shades. After a few minutes, a light clicked on behind the second-floor window. Chuck crawled over to the fence and stood up. The metal felt cold. A swing set for a toddler trembled in the breeze. He put both hands on the fence that separated the yards, swung one leg up, and put his face next to the rail. His brain conducted a series of calculations. Then he put his weight on one leg and swung the other up, lifting his torso until it was on top of the fence, parallel to the ground. As he rolled, his pant leg snared. At that moment, the bushes and the doghouse flipped skyward. When Chuck opened his eyes, he was looking up at the stars. An alarm sounded in the distance. The little terrier started barking again.
For what seemed like a very long time, he lay on the ground, unable to breathe. For a split second or perhaps an hour, he had the cognition, beautiful and clear, that unless he forced himself to inhale, he would die. In that moment, Chuck experienced a complete release from anxiety. Just before the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S. immigration eased up, and this part of Philadelphia had flooded with Russians. Ethnic supermarkets replaced the record shops in strip malls; PhD electrical engineers took jobs as janitors; doctors operated cash registers in all-night markets; and symphony violinists became data-entry clerks. Seconds passed. He considered what it would be like to disappear into another country, to start over as a laborer, inarticulate, oddly dressed—a worker in a factory. He groped at the dirt with his fingers, indifferent to outcome. Then he was aware of the ground beneath his head—cold and hard—and the sound of his own blood pulsing. He thought about Ivy, the equestrian; Ivy, the yellow-haired girl; his little girl, Ivy, once so clear and pure and defenseless and guileless.
The last time he saw her was the week his marriage ended. He’d gone home after work to pick up his clothing, papers, photographs, antique wooden jewelry box, and audio equipment, all of which Eileen had seen fit to toss out of the second-story window. After loading what he could into his truck, he stopped for a drink at a nearby hotel. At around eight, the bartender told him about an outdoor concert being held at the township municipal complex, a half mile from his old house. By the time he arrived, the music had already started, and he was righteously buzzed.
He followed a manicured pathway through a playground with intricately assembled equipment toward the stage. A paunchy guitarist, an accordion player, and a stand-up bass player struggled through a cheesy arrangement of a Jim Croce song. In the distance, a small covered bridge extended over a man-made pond with a huge, extravagantly lit fountain. To this misappropriation of tax dollars, Chuck ascribed everything that was wrong with the suburbs—a furious falseness, vainglorious and virtueless—the ceaseless march from Norman Rockwell to the Toll brothers.
Soon, it was intermission and a balding emcee with a scraggly ponytail dispatched a dozen boys and girls in green Day-Glo shirts with buckets to canvass the crowd for donations to the township soccer program. One hundred thousand dollars for stadium lights was all they needed. People started reaching in their pockets. Chuck took a swig from a pint bottle of vodka and lit another cigarette, one of several delicious vices he could fully indulge now that he and Eileen were through. All around him, people stared. Yes, I have been drinking, he thought, and, no, I will not be buying a raffle ticket. He was rehearsing his tirade—lamenting the fact that for all the money he paid in taxes, the ground was too muddy to sit on—when a fat man in a green shirt approached him.
“There’s no smoking near the crowd, sir,” the man said calmly. Chuck looked around. They were outside. There was a nice breeze coming from the gazebo, where an elderly couple slow-danced in the declining light. Chuck took a long drag and exhaled into the man’s face. He felt a little tingle rising up his neck. The man recoiled, then recovered. “Excuse me, sir, would you mind leaving the concert grounds”—he paused—“to smoke.”
“As a matter of fact,” Chuck said slowly, staring at the man in the green shirt, “I would mind. We’re standing in the open air. The last time I checked, the township ordinances require me to smoke outside. So how about you leave if it’s bothering you.” The man in the green shirt disappeared. Chuck was pleased. It had been a stressful week. He’d lost an account to a competitor; he’d ended his marriage; and, only hours ago, he’d picked up pieces of an old Gibson hollow-body from his former front lawn. He continued smoking, and, with each inhalation, the cells in his body rejoiced. Early in every confrontation, his anger energized him.
A minute or two later, the guy in the green shirt returned. This time, he brought the emcee with the ponytail, a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “Enter the King of Prussia,” Chuck said, bowing. A small crowd gathered now. A second later, a uniformed cop who had been standing off to the side approached and said something about not wanting any trouble.
“Then go hassle the geezers on the fucking gazebo.”
“Sir,” the emcee said, putting his hands out in front of him, “this is a family concert.” He seemed mildly disappointed, as if he were talking to a child. “We don’t think it’s such a big deal to let the kids breathe clean air.”
Around them, people had turned in their lawn chairs. Why were people always invoking the health and moral purity of their kids? “I think it is,” Chuck said defiantly. “I pay my taxes. Show me the law I’m violating.” The man with the ponytail gave him a doleful look. A boy and a girl in identical green shirts approached them with their buckets, but they were shooed away by the emcee. The speakers pl
ayed a smarmy melody over a polka beat. “All my life assholes like you have been telling me how to live,” Chuck said, much louder now. The emcee’s walkie-talkie emitted a frothy static. Chuck reached in his jacket pocket for another cigarette. It was the principle of the thing.
The officer lunged forward, thinking Chuck was going for a weapon. Chuck put his fists out preparing to fight, but two concertgoers dropped their sodas and grabbed him from behind. There was a gasp from the crowd, heaving sounds, and then a brief struggle among four overweight middle-aged men.
At the same time, a group of teenage girls, barefoot, wearing long skirts and halter tops, their navels pierced with silver studs, gathered around one of their own, who appeared to be in severe pain, her tail of auburn hair in one hand, bent over like she was vomiting, or, at the very least, severely cramping. “Stop it!” she screamed. “Please, Dad, stop it!” Chuck didn’t recognize her until well after he’d been carried off by his shoulders, his legs kicking the air. That was it. Thirteen years of parenthood—whatever good he’d done, however loving and generous he’d been—down the toilet over one twenty-minute encounter.
Ivy refused to take his calls. She returned his letters, unopened. It was the event Eileen was waiting for so she could banish him from their lives forever.
With a pop, his throat opened, and he took a gulp of cold air, and then another. Soon, his chest was heaving up and down, and his daughter’s house was as distant and unapproachable as the moon above.
PART III
Belize City, 2000
The heavyset man with thick glasses and olive-colored skin made his way through this once-upon-a-shanty-town toward the docks. On his way, he crossed and recrossed the crowded streets, avoiding pushcarts, bicycles, barefoot children, and stray animals looking for food; he paused in the shade of a store awning and again under a scrawny palm tree. In this part of town, the streets are narrow and oriented toward or away from the water. From almost anywhere, you can feel the pull of the river with its marshes and mangroves, mosquito bogs, canoes and log rafts, and you can sense the presence of the ocean, which has pounded this peninsula since before the British came with their quinine and their man-made reefs. Scowling, he removed a misshapen fedora and pressed a stained handkerchief to his face. Although it was only nine thirty in the morning, the rayon shirt he’d bought in one of the shops that cater to the cruise lines was ringed with perspiration. In front of the Bank of Belize, he paused beside a fruit stand, where he bought a container full of papaya slices. He closed his eyes and sucked the pieces down as the sun rose over the squat buildings, juice dripping onto his chest.
