Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  The door to the bedroom was open. Joan had her shirt off and she was leaning over Frederick, who was lying on his back with his hands behind his head. Moonlight fell across her shoulders, which were smooth and brown. She said something that caused them both to laugh. Lorraine was in the bathroom directly across from them, the faucet on, leaning over the sink, splashing water on her face. When she turned around, Frederick called to her. “Lorrie, c’m here.”

  Joan crossed her arms. “Looks like you’re doing well, Jim,” Lorraine said, smiling.

  “If you think this is what life on the run is like, you’re wrong.” He was smiling, too. “How long have you been stuck with these lunatics?” It was unclear whether he was talking to Joan or Lorraine.

  Joan answered. “All summer. My boyfriend’s in the slammer. Jack and Mikki invited me out last spring, but these people are nuts with their push-ups and jumping jacks and cleaning their weapons like there’s gonna be a revolution out here any minute.” Lorraine liked Joan. She was real.

  “Lorrie,” Frederick said, patting the bed. “Sit down.” Joan stood up, her small breasts brown from sunbathing. “Talk to me,” Frederick said. “Tell me everything.” Joan put her shirt on and said she was going downstairs.

  “I need to listen for Stardust,” Lorraine said, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

  “Cathy and Hash told me you were still in Philly,” he said.

  She felt her pulse quicken. “That fucker almost killed us!”

  “He’s an asshole,” Frederick said quietly. A cloud passed in front of the moon, darkening the room. Six years of separation settled over them. Downstairs, a woman laughed, a tight little peal, and somebody dropped something heavy. Lorraine’s fingers moved down his cheek, tracing him. She remembered nights trying to wake his passion—Walden Pond, Cambridge, Chicago. Sounds rose from inside her, muffled. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

  “So tell me,” Frederick said softly. Lorraine closed her eyes.

  “Tell you what?” Everything about him was familiar—his smell, the feel of his skin, her hunger for him, which always went unsatisfied. Letting her finger enter his mouth, he surrounded it with his lips, pulling in as she pulled it out, barely accommodating, but not resisting.

  “You married yet?”

  She let her face drop against his neck; the rest of her weight pressed against his torso. “Nope.”

  He let his head fall back. She leaned in. He pulled away. It was the game they’d always played. She moved her hand down his chest to his torso, and down lower until he pushed it away. The one with no ending.

  “How about Puckman?” His upper lip curled. “The little fucker.”

  She shook her head. After Frederick, Lorraine had a succession of lovers, who, deep down, were unaccustomed to getting what they needed; who, for whatever reasons, were invested in feeling undeserving and ashamed; and whose frailty seemed designed to elicit nurturing. Men who felt trapped or weighed down with grief, who relied on women to feel their feelings. She slid her cheek down until it rested on his belly and began humming an old song, a jazz standard, a melody that seemed to her as if it could have gone back to the beginning of time—something her father may have played on the saxophone, or her mother may have sung to her late at night.

  From far away, he let his fingers rest on her neck, the side of her face, her hair. She held her face just above him, touching his belly with her breath. He was still as stone. “‘I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood…I know I could…always be good…to someone who’ll watch over me.’” She held that position for a long time, feeling him resist, react, and then resist again, this moment as much a part of their story as any other.

  “Weren’t you two together?” Frederick asked, his voice higher now, constricted. “After the kid?”

  “He’s never even met her.”

  “He coulda made you an honest woman.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Frederick,” Lorraine said. “What your father did to your mother. That isn’t love. It’s not what has to happen between a man and a woman.”

  When Frederick spoke again, his voice seemed to come from an entirely different part of his body. “Fuck these people,” he said suddenly, motioning toward the door. “I don’t know whether they lucked into her or somebody powerful is calling the plays from the sidelines.” He rolled over and sat up. “Either way, it’s a fucking waste to have Patty Hearst and not know what to do with her.” The noise from downstairs had stopped, and the sound of crickets filled the room.

  “What are you doing here, Frederick?” Lorraine said softly.

  “They want me to drive her back to California.” Frederick stood up and walked to the window. “So they can rob banks. It’s a fucking waste.”

  “Frederick?”

  “She should be in a safe place, and they should be issuing communiqués that’ll really shake things up.”

  “Why did you send for me?”

  “Calling for economic sanctions against big corporations—massive boycotts and picket lines, that kind of thing.” From behind, Lorraine noticed his hairline, the skin behind his ears, which sagged, and the slope of his shoulders.

  “Do you ever think about coming in?” Lorraine asked, touching his arm.

  “Nah,” he said, looking into the dark. She could see his reflection in the window. “Out here, I’m king.” He closed his eyes. “They’d lock me up and throw away the key.” For a moment, Lorraine thought she saw him wince, as if he was going to cry. “Lorraine.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “Maybe we could do this thing together. Nobody’d be looking for a straight couple driving cross-country. We could set her up someplace and make tapes. You could get them delivered, do the shopping….”

  “Frederick,” Lorraine said. “You chose this life as much as I chose mine. Don’t ask me this. Don’t ask me to give up my little girl’s safety—”

  “It’s not just about giving up, Lorraine.” He got up and walked to the window. “It’s about getting something, too.” He put his hands on his hips.

  “Don’t,” she said, bracing herself.

  “You don’t have to feel like you ran away, Lorraine.”

  “Fuck you, Frederick. You ran away. I had a child—a living, breathing human being with moods and desires and a future that is completely dependent on me. Did you even see her, Frederick? Did you notice how beautiful she is? Would you like me to bring her along? Pull her out of school? Hide her from kids her own age?”

  “What happened to you, Lorrie?” he said, shaking his head.

  “Life happened to me.” Lorraine had a feeling that every moment, something vital was passing between her daughter and her—a medicine that had to run its course for it to be effective—to interrupt it now for a cause or a man was unthinkable.

  “How can you just forget?”

  Lorraine reached for his hands. “That’s the problem, Frederick. We remember things that no longer serve us. What you saw between your father and your mother. Oneonta. What the two of us had.” She drew herself up on her toes and kissed him on the back of his neck. Then she slipped into the room filled with the fragrance of her little girl.

  When she woke Sunday, the farmhouse was wrapped in a gauzy shroud. Out back, the soldiers were drilling. Lorraine gathered their clothes and Stardust’s toys and stuffed them in a bag. She folded the papers with the story into a tiny square and put it in her pocket. From the front window, Lorraine confirmed that her car was parked where she’d left it—at an angle facing the house. Quietly, she woke her daughter, walked her to the bathroom, and then led her downstairs into the kitchen. Joan was scraping the bottom of a jar of instant coffee.

  “How come you stay?” Lorraine asked. Joan shrugged. A saucepan with water had started to boil. “Where am I gonna go?”

  “When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. A year, maybe more. I don’t even know if we’re on anymore.” Joan offered Stardust a bowl of cereal. I see other guys n
ow and then.” And then, remembering, “What about you and Jim? Are you together?”

  “A long time ago,” Lorraine said. They looked out the window at Alan and Judy, who were crouching behind a tree.

  Joan ran her fingers along the countertop. “Well, I hope I didn’t—”

  “No, no,” Lorraine said quickly. “He’s all yours. I mean, you can’t be in two worlds at the same time, can you?” They laughed. Joan held her hair back while she sipped her coffee.

  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.

  Friday Morning, March 13, 2000

  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.