Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  “Betrayal is a form of completion,” she told me, describing the night of the raid on the Higher Purpose Commune. “Death within life is a central theme of the Tarot. When you draw certain cards, you have the opportunity—the obligation actually—to re-create yourself. As long as you do, you keep on living. When you stop and wind up just skating along, you lose your personal power and you might as well be dead.”

  Stardust never went back to the reception desk at Drinker & Sledge. After Chuck was sentenced, she sold the house on Medley Street, collected Lorraine’s pension, and moved to a furnished apartment in the art museum area. Within a few weeks, she got back in touch with Rahim and Ovella, and, that spring, the three of them refurbished the little apartment above the factory. In May, while sifting through receipts, mail, and old phone messages, she came across my name and remembered the inscription I’d written on the inside cover of What Mattered Most. We met on a weekday morning in the back of the Reading Terminal Market. In her khaki skirt, vintage suede jacket, and a baseball cap, she looked like a distracted, impatient, slightly edgier version of her mother. At that time, I really didn’t know what, if anything, I was going to do with what Lorraine had told me.

  As soon as we sat down she told me. “My mother passed away over Christmas.” She put my book on the table and folded her hands. “I want to know everything.” Though she was matter-of-fact about it, I could see how much she hurt. I told her about our meeting at Borders and Lorraine’s interest in Patty Hearst, about whom Stardust knew very little. I outlined the story of the Volcano Bomber and tossed about some conspiracy theories and then excused myself to pick up my niece after school.

  Until then, I’d been sitting around the cottage in Merion wondering what to do next. Until then, I’d considered Lorraine a quirky, colorful character, but my interest in her had been casual. I’d felt more disappointed than anything—discouraged that I’d wasted six months of my life on a project that would go nowhere. But late that night, looking through the boxes, I pictured Stardust, walking around the house by herself, and I felt sad thinking that Lorraine’s life was like so many other peoples’ from the sixties—dramatic, idealistic, passionate, and romantic even, but ultimately incomplete—no big revelations, no payoff, no catharsis, no intimation of meaning or symmetry that one hopes to have at the end.

  Over the next few months, I invited Stardust out to visit as often as she wanted. She listened to her mother’s voice on the tapes. She pored over photographs and mementos that Lorraine left me and tried to match them with events she researched about the sixties, about radicalism, about protests against the war in Vietnam, about the race riots, and about Boston in the late 1960s. She became fascinated by Patty Hearst and the SLA, studying psychological materials available on the Stockholm syndrome. Together, we visited a professor at Penn who specialized in kidnappings and hostage psychology, and Stardust argued, quite eloquently I thought, that everyone, to some extent, was brainwashed by their culture. Gradually, she opened up, and, about a month after we met, she told me Chuck’s version of the events in 1968 and what became of his life after fleeing Boston, which is when it occurred to me that the repercussions of the Volcano bombings—in-deed, the real legacy of the radical movement—weren’t really being felt until now. In a general way, the same things that happened to Chuck Puckman, Lorraine Nadia, and Frederick Keane happened to thousands of other young people who came of age during those years. My interest became an obsession, so when Stardust invited me to meet Rahim and Ovella and to see what they were doing at the factory, I accepted.

  I would like to believe that parents are an irreducible fraction and that, underneath their rage, all children hold a reservoir of forgiveness. Few of us are fortunate enough to hear a parent explain what ignited them and made them feel alive. Most of us are left to puzzle out the meaning of our parents’ and our own lives from their lifestyles, the things they say, or, in rare cases, the things they accomplish. Stardust Nadia looked long and hard at the photograph she took from Chuck’s room and made several decisions.

  She let Rahim continue to run Softpawn, which produced a steady revenue stream and employed several of the neighbors and former employees. Together with Ovella, who’d long felt that what the neighborhood really needed was a day care center, she converted the little office of Puckman Security into a playroom, installing a rubberized floor and a big-screen television with a VCR—a place where young women could leave their small children while they worked. Stardust believed that workers who’d formerly operated punch presses and assembled security guards needed new job skills in order to be employable in the future, and, with Rahim’s help, she refashioned the area of the factory where Gutierrez succumbed to trichloroethylene fumes to a job-retraining lab. While Chuck served his sentence, the old Puckman factory became busy again—with Rahim entering data to Softpawn; infants and toddlers watching videos and napping; and a half dozen men in their forties and fifties learning to repair copiers and computers, read blueprints, and program computer numeric-controlled equipment.

  I remember vividly the moment I decided to tell this story. It was early fall, a delightful time in Philadelphia. We were sitting in a used bookstore in the Italian Market, a few blocks from where the Puckman boys grew up. Stardust had put on some weight and had let her natural hair color grow in. The lines in her face had softened, and there was a receptiveness there that I construed as good humor. She was wearing jeans and a beige cashmere sweater. She looked well rested.

  “My mother didn’t seek you out for nothing,” Stardust told me over coffee. “She wanted you to write this.”

  Eddie Palmieri wouldn’t talk, but Wilkie Crackford was a font of information. Lawyers, like writers, are parasites. The best ones are profoundly uninteresting, sucking whatever life experience they can from their clients. Crackford gave me most of the details about the EPA investigation and the charges facing the Puckmans, including many that should probably have remained confidential. In Wilkie Crackford’s opinion, Chuck’s sentence—thirty months—was a masterpiece of legal strategy.

  I found John Russell completely by accident. A writer friend of mine was doing a piece about retired detectives who solved cold cases using psychological profiling and technology. The two of us were having beers with a forensic sculptor who was bragging that the FBI commissioned him to reconstruct victims of crimes from faded photographs and decomposed skulls. As my friend and I were leaving his studio—a gallery of body parts and grisly photographs—I noticed two busts, side by side, one of which looked remarkably like Frederick Keane. The sculptor put me in touch with his FBI contact, Eric Dodson, who, after clearing me with the FBI media department, told me to call retired Special Agent John Russell.

  Russell had been relieved of duty for about six months by then, and he was so sick, our chats didn’t last very long. He told me what he’d told Dodson—how he’d identified and then tracked Keane to the Midwest before losing him, but he professed no awareness of Frederick’s involvement with the SLA or Patty Hearst, the manifesto, or the safe house in Honesdale in the summer of 1974. It could have been his rapidly deteriorating health, or an old G-man being tight-lipped, but Russell didn’t seem the least bit curious about Chuck Puckman, even after I told him what I’d learned from Stardust. When I mentioned Chuck’s current predicament and his brother Arthur’s disappearance, Russell referred me to a retired IRS agent who specialized in international money laundering, tracking U.S. Savings Bonds and Treasuries redeemed in foreign banking centers. A few days before Special Agent John Russell passed away, his friend faxed me a list of suspicious transactions they were looking into, including a flurry of securities that were presented for redemption at a tiny little bank in the town of San Ignacio, Belize.

  In early September, I rode one of those yellow school buses out the Western Highway from Belize City to San Ignacio, a dusty little town of crooked streets jammed with barefoot vendors, locals, and ecotourists. I said I was a reporter for Outside Magazine doing a story on jungle a
dventures. It took the owner of the Internet café a couple days to find me a guide who, for a hundred dollars U.S., agreed to show me around. As we rode back up the Mopan River at the end of a long day of sightseeing, I asked if he knew anything about an American who showed up in Belize with a lot of cash. His face lit up. “Everybody knows about Mr. Alex,” he said.

  When they emerged from the jungle, Carlos spent fifteen thousand dollars in about ten days, paying off his debts, selling the van and buying himself a 1975 Mercury Cougar with leopard-skin seat covers. He put deposits on three adjacent lots—one for his mother, one for his young wife, and one for his girlfriend—and bought a few suits, a pair of field glasses, and a new generator, but it turned out to be a lot harder to cash securities in Belize than he’d expected.

  “The brothers were very happy when Mr. Jim first showed up,” the guide said, paddling. “Mr. Jim told them they’d do much better at the banks in Guatemala. Two days later, they found Carlos in Tikal, hanging upside down, his belly slit. Manny stuck around for a few weeks and then disappeared. He had the shits, waiting for the fat man’s brother. Nobody’s seen Mr. Jim or any of the money since.”

  I visited Chuck a dozen or so times over the next twenty-four months in a minimum-security prison in rural western Pennsylvania, about eight hours’ drive from Merion. Each time I went, I stayed at a Motel 6, busying myself the night before, reading about white-collar crime, preparing questions, and transcribing notes. The facility was a cluster of sandstone and stucco buildings, a cross between an industrial park and a summer camp, that looked as if it had been dropped into a patch between rolling hills. There were no barbed-wire fences, nothing to keep the inmates from wandering off. After the requisite background checks, pat downs, and bureaucratic delays, I was led inside what looked like one of those old-fashioned sanitariums, the kind that existed in the United States before President Reagan decided to let crazy people fend for themselves on the streets.

  Chuck and I met on Saturdays in a huge common area among the families of other men who’d either flown to Pittsburgh or driven for a long time to see their husbands, sons, or daddies—accountants, embezzlers, stockbrokers, and low-level drug dealers—dressed in khakis or jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. We sat in fake living rooms filled with what looked like rented furniture. The prisoners were educated and cagey, full of contrition and hope—the kind of people you’d see at a country club—except they were dressed down and their skin was loose from having lost weight.

  In a federal prison camp, inmates have certain privileges unavailable to those in the dog-eat-dog world. One of them is the ability to cultivate friendships with other men. Another is time to reflect. Chuck had a buzz cut and a white beard he kept trim, and he looked fit and relaxed. When I told him what Lorraine had said about Frederick’s impotence, he was stunned. Until then, he’d believed that Stardust’s testimony on his behalf was an act of kindness—not quite perjury, but not substantiated, either. He’d never really adjusted to fatherhood the first time, so having another daughter from whom he was estranged, at least initially, was too heavy a burden for him to bear. It’s hard to know what goes through a man’s mind when he learns something like this. As for inviting Stardust to visit, he shook his head and said, “Not yet.”

  His roommate was a seventy-year-old confidence man, in for the third time. Jerry Cosy, a wiry guy with a big nose and a two-hundred-and-fifty-watt smile, had a habit of making aggressive predictions about the businesses he brokered, which induced buyers and sellers to make deals that invariably fell apart. The problem, according to Jerry, was that in his most recent transaction, instead of trying to rectify matters, the buyer brought the matter to the attention of the SEC, who’d investigated Cosy and his partners and found them guilty of fraud. When he got out this time, Jerry Cosy was preparing to enter a completely new business based on a concept he called aggregation.

  “Separately, things have no meaning,” he told Chuck late at night. “Events appear random. We feel isolated. We take things for granted. But when you aggregate them, you see their impact in a new way. Things you wouldn’t normally associate with one another appear linked—climate and regime changes, fundamentalism and sexual deviance, depression and materialism.”

  “As you get older, you need a project without an ending. When this thing is over, when you get out, give me a call. You have a factory and some cheap, dependable labor. With a few computers, we can set up an operation—clipping stories from the news, entering data, and identifying trends. We could publish our findings. Send out one of those high-priced newsletters. Make a fortune.”

  Unlike people who enter prison from the bottom rungs of society—beaten and scared, penniless and addicted, men who read the Koran and accept Allah in a sudden gesture of hope—the changes that occurred in Chuck were slow. The main reason was that, compared to what he’d feared would happen to him, the experience wasn’t too bad. He had a place to sleep, he got three squares, and he was never in any personal danger. Sure, somebody told him when to get up, when to eat, when to exercise, and when it was lights out, which might have been a constant reminder of his transgressions, but everyone around him had fucked up. Humiliation was optional.

  By early fall, Chuck’s thinking, influenced by Jerry Cosy’s ideas about aggregation, had advanced to a philosophical muddle, the kind a couple of sensitive teenagers might find themselves grappling with before collapsing with giddiness or exhaustion. It was as if introspectiveness, useless to his father’s generation, had suddenly overcome Chuck Puckman, thirty-five years after it had blossomed in his peers.

  By our third meeting, Chuck was clear of his dependence on alcohol and various medications and was applying a familiar logic to his predicament. He told me his life to date had been meaningless—at best, an instinctual shuffle—rather like his tropical fish swimming to the surface for food before returning to the depths of their tank to absently poke about for any little scraps that had fallen to the bottom. He knew that times when something should have stirred inside him, he felt nothing, but that understanding, in and of itself, was not the same as the experience of emotion. He had developed various theories for this. One in particular I remember him telling me was that everything lives side by side within us—irritability and calm, virtue and vanity, good and evil, piousness and lust, love and hatred—and that one of the costs of rationality is that one urge cancels another.

  “The problem,” he said, “is that we want to love ourselves, yet we’re fundamentally unlovable, so we convert our disappointment into aggression toward other people, usually the ones we love.” At the time, I wondered whether this was a revelation—the identification of the cause for our primordial ambivalence—or some kind of rationale for what Artie had done, and for how far Chuck had fallen. Near the end of his sentence, Chuck had accepted aggregation as if it was a kind of belief system, and he began applying it in a more personal way.

  The last time I saw him, he told me he believed if he could roll up the events of his life—the things he’d said and done; the way he lived and loved, or didn’t love—they would form some pattern, or significance, he just didn’t know what. This realization appeared as a light someone had switched on inside his head, visible as a glow behind his gray eyes. It manifested itself in plans he made with Jerry Cosy, in conversations he had with Rahim and me, and in letters he began writing to Stardust, which chronicled his deeds and misdeeds in different-colored ink—a map of the inner workings of his mind—connecting Gutierrez with the boy in Oneonta, the civil rights movement with the EPA and OSHA, and his brother, Arthur, with Frederick. It was as though, in the solitude of his cell, Chuck embraced aggregation as a metric for spirituality, a blend of commerce and karma, carefully calculated to balance like an equation, more like a diet than a religion, except for the relief it appeared to provide him as he served his time. I stopped visiting him when I had enough to tell this story and because of my hesitancy to tell him what I am about to reveal.

  In January 1999, as Ramon
Gutierrez was being wheeled from the Puckman factory, a dozen young radicals sat on a disguised fishing trawler listening to environmental news releases and plotting upcoming actions. Over the years, to an ever-dwindling audience, members of the ecoterrorist revolutionary splinter group Greenspace pierced the hulls of tuna fishing boats, sabotaged corporations they believed polluted the oceans and rivers by appropriating the airwaves, destroying and subverting press releases, maligning government agencies, and jamming cultural and political messages using a combination of computer hacking, art, mischief, and guerrilla semiotics. When the Gutierrez–Puckman Security story broke, Fergus Keane, commander emeritus, decided to enter the United States and travel to Philadelphia to look for his old nemesis.

  Late Sunday night, Frederick wandered into one of a half-dozen bars in Kensington where Coleman Porter was celebrating his good fortune by playing Artie’s videotaped confession. It was Frederick Keane who showed up in Regina Puckman’s house the night Artie disappeared, Frederick Keane who inspired and arranged Artie’s escape, and Frederick Keane, aka Mr. Jim, who left Guatemala with the Puckman fortune.

  It’s anybody’s guess where he is now. Maybe, for the first time in almost thirty-five years, he listens for waves lapping against his houseboat instead of jolting awake at the sound of car doors, police sirens, or dogs barking. Perhaps he visits his fortune the way Artie did rather than sleeping with a pistol under his pillow. I doubt he worries about setting up his perimeter, establishing aliases and elaborate warning systems, or keeping hunters like Eric Dodson at bay. Frederick’s bank might be a cave in the jungle, a safe deposit box in Luxembourg, or a computer terminal in an Internet café somewhere. Where he is now, it could be early morning or the middle of the night. I imagine him swimming, water skiing, spear fishing, playing pool, napping, riding a four-wheeler, unhooking the nylon cable connecting the trap to the boat and winding it in a circular motion, elbow to hand, elbow to hand, warm seawater splashing over the polished rail.