Backward-Facing Man (7 page)

It was a typical Saturday in the factory. A transistor radio hanging from a coat hanger blasted salsa music. Men in soiled work clothes stood at large tables cutting, then whacking, angle iron so it fit snugly into homemade welding fixtures; mitering corners, then tack-welding frames—tasks that bore little relationship to the gleaming Plexiglas security guards that sat stacked and crated near the entrance. Beneath the patter of the DJ, you could hear air hissing, the whir of a motor idling, the occasional report of a staple gun.

The man in the dip tank swooned. One of his fellow workers, hearing the scrub brush and the bucket fall, called out his name, “Gutierrez! Gutierrez!” When it became clear that the young man wasn't responding, two of them scrambled up the steps to a catwalk that ran alongside the tanks, their work shoes causing the scaffolding to shake and shudder, their bodies silhouetted against the giant windows. For a few seconds, everyone froze. Time stood still. Then abruptly, the factory transformed itself from calm to anxious, then hysterical.

Beneath the windows, four large tanks—eight feet long, eight feet high, and two feet wide, set close together, parallel and at a slight angle to the wall—were mounted on legs that straddled two large gas heaters that, in turn, were set above a pan that drained into a pipe that disappeared in the floor. The rig was homemade, and it looked to have been patched over the years with steel plates that formed a kind of pattern, quiltlike and mottled. Overhead, a heavy steel chain with a huge iron hook dangled from a pulley so that it took only one gloved hand to guide a 150-pound welded steel guard from the first tank to the last.

In the old days, before the environmentalists and the class-action lawyers, the Puckmans dipped every guard they built. In this way, rust and grease along with any imperfections were eaten away by acid that etched the metal, making it easier for paint to adhere. In the old days, you had to clean metal before painting it, whether it was for fireplace screens, radiator covers, outdoor furniture, or patio supports. It was the standard of quality. But gradually, with safety and removal requirements imposed by the alphabet agencies, only the premium product manufacturers could afford to keep doing it. Hazardous materials equaled expensive.

Until recently, the tanks had been empty. Years ago, to cut costs, Charlie Puckman Sr. decided to skip the process and spray-paint instead. He had the tanks drained of chemicals and cut off the heat and water supply, reducing payroll and putting an extra $30,000 a year in his pocket.

A few months ago, when their largest customer, Powerplex, started rejecting units because of shoddy workmanship, the brothers decided they had no choice but to strip and repaint the metal as they'd done before. In mid-November, as the first snow settled over the neighborhood and kids tossed snowballs at one another, a funky-looking flatbed with two fifty-gallon drums painted with skulls and crossbones pulled into the Puckman Security parking lot. The next day, while Chuck and his brother were busy in the office, workers poured caustic etch, water, and the chemical that arrived by truck, the same chemical that Ramon Gutierrez had been scrubbing from tank number four on this Saturday morning: TCE, trichloroethylene, a particularly noxious vapor degreaser.

One by one, workers shut off their machines and dropped their tools, drifting, then rushing, to the foreman's desk. Someone called 911. Somebody else ripped through the supply closet looking for a first-aid kit, or a gas mask, reading in accented English the medical instructions mounted inside the door. Rahim Rodriguez and the other worker who saw Gutierrez sprawled facedown on the bottom of the tank held their breath and lifted the young man under his bony arms and his chinos. The smell, acrid and intense, caused their eyes to burn. Together, they hoisted him up the steel ladder and carried him to an area near the foreman's desk. In the back of the shop, an older man wearing headphones piloted a forklift with a large wooden crate balanced precariously on its prongs, unaware that his son was losing consciousness. Toxic fumes had entered Ramon Gutierrez's lungs, and he was in spasm.

After what seemed like forever, an ambulance made its way down the narrow street into the factory parking lot. As the siren stopped, dispatchers barked coded commands from radios the paramedics wore strapped across their shoulders. They unfolded a stretcher and pushed it through the loading dock door, the wheels echoing on the concrete sounding like God's thunderous will. It was the second time in a little over a year that spinning red and white lights reflected off the Puckman windows.

Last Christmas morning, Charlie Puckman Sr., the founder and chairman of Puckman Security and the patriarch of the Puckman family, pulled his aquamarine Lincoln Town Car into the parking lot of his factory as he'd done every morning for forty years and fell forward, his grizzled face slumped against the steering wheel, smacking the wall directly in front of him, which detonated the air bag, which, in turn, depressed the car horn. The night before, after dinner with his girlfriend, a small blood clot broke loose from the wall of his heart and traveled through his arteries into the ever-narrowing vessels to the left side of his brain so that by the time the paramedics extracted him from his vehicle, he'd lost the ability to walk unassisted, to dress and bathe unaided, to understand, insult, endear himself to, and alienate himself from others.

The street in front of Puckman Security filled with neighbors. Because it was Saturday, those who would have been at work were home, and hearing the ambulance, they came outside in their bathrobes and sweatsuits, unshaven, ungroomed. They spoke in hushed tones reserved for the direst of circumstances. It was cold. Word spread quickly that one of the Gutierrez boys was down, barely breathing, and that another tragedy had befallen the little Puckman dynasty.

“They been here since the beginning of time, and nothing's ever happened,” a woman in a housedress marveled.

“It's like the Kennedys,” an old man with a hearing aid said.

“I didn't know they were Catholic.”

“What do they make in there?” a girl mumbled from beneath a castle of hair.

“Security cages,” the woman answered. “Like you see in them check-cashing places.”

“Car armor, too,” a teenage boy said. “Bulletproof. I saw them test one once.”

“Hush,” his mother said, as a man approached aiming a beat-up video camera at them.

Coleman Porter wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but because in this neighborhood he was usually first on the scene, he was something of an authority. Three years ago, he broke the Kensington cockfights. Last spring, he was the photographer who found a hooker's mangled corpse under I-95. He owed his good fortune to three things: a police scanner he kept under the seat of his pickup, a penchant for wandering and sticking his nose into other people's business, and a girlfriend whose apartment and Internet connection he persistently, and without permission, shared.

Immediately, people invoked the mannerisms of bystanders.

“Can someone tell me what happened?” Porter asked, angling his rig to get a shot of the factory in the background.

“I think somebody's hurt.”

“These things come in threes.”

“After Charlie's stroke, I knew something bad was gonna happen,” the old man wheezed.

Porter turned his camera off and slid through the gate toward the front entrance. Red and white lights from the ambulance spun eerily across the factory walls, highlighting bare insulation, old tools, and boarded-up windows. A cluster of workers gathered around the boy, who was lying on the floor near the foreman's station. From the perimeter, Coleman watched them—short, chunky, dark-haired men, Hispanic and black, young and old, wearing chinos and sweatshirts, watching desperately as a gray-haired, middle-aged guy in stylish black slacks and a black turtleneck knelt over the collapsed worker.

Porter walked past some wooden crates that were pressed against one another. Completed, the security apparatuses looked like giant thick-framed glasses. Staying in the background, he climbed up on one and squinted to determine his best angle, his best light, and then zoomed in tight and let the tape roll. He was hoping he would catch the guy on the floor twitching involuntarily, gasping for air, writhing a little, anything that would improve the shot, but all he got was a crowd of people and the man in the turtleneck waving to the paramedics.

Dismayed, Porter turned the camera off again and looked around. In the back of the shop, next to the welding booth, was a wood-paneled office with large windows and fluorescent lights. Framed in the glass door was the silhouette of a man. Porter trained the camera on him and zoomed in. He was fat and bald, and the top of his head was slick with perspiration. Ridges were visible on his splotchy scalp, which from a distance resembled the surface of the moon. His lips were thick and rubbery, and he kept licking them, his tongue darting out like a little garden snake. He blinked repeatedly behind his thick-framed glasses, which resembled miniature versions of the Plexiglas guards being assembled in the shop. Porter could tell even through the viewfinder that the man's right eye wandered. The cameraman slid off the wooden crate and made his way toward the office in the center of the shop.

It was a curious little room. The outside walls were made of mismatched paneling, which terminated fifteen feet below the roof. There was an air conditioner that spewed moisture-laden air into a factory that must have already been intolerably hot in summer. Above the doorway was a wrought-iron sculpture of a man fishing. Coleman Porter stepped on a doormat that said
PUCKMAN SECURITY
. Behind him handsets crackled, and there was the generalized hum that seems to accompany disaster. The fat man was mumbling, oblivious to Porter, who tapped lightly on the glass. Getting no response, he turned the knob and pulled the door open so that the two men stood face-to-face.

“I c-c-can't believe th-th-this. I can't f-f-fucking believe this,” he stuttered. “I can't believe this is h-h-happening.” Porter looked down. The man was making rhythmic little circles with one of his orthopedic shoes.

“Can you tell me what's going on?” Porter asked, flipping his camera on.

“I knew it,” the fat man said. “I knew something bad was going to happen!” His nose was running, and under his glasses his eyes were red from being rubbed.

Porter put his hand on the man's shoulder, then walked around him so he could get footage of the paramedics lifting a stretcher with Gutierrez on it into the ambulance. “I'm Coleman Porter,” he said, undaunted. “Independent photographer and freelance journalist. I'm from A and Erie. I was driving past when I heard the sirens.” He took the fat man's limp hand in his and shook it.

The fat man groaned.

“Can I get your name, sir?” Porter asked.

“Ar-r-thur Puckman,” the fat man stuttered.

“Who's hurt, Mr. Puckman?”

“G-Gutierrez,” the fat man said as if he was holding his breath. “Ramon Gutierrez. Do you think he's going to d-d-die…?”

“Can you tell me what happened?” Coleman held his camera at waist level, angling it up toward the man's face. For once, he was in the right place at the right time. Even better, nobody else would be allowed in once the police arrived.

“I don't really know.”

“Is this your business?” Porter asked.

“It's my dad's,” Arthur Puckman said, “but he's in a n-n-nursing home, so now it's just me and my b-b-brother, Chuck.” Porter's shoulders sagged. Everything was perfect, except the stutter.

“What do you guys do?”

“We make custom defense barriers and security guards for taxicabs, police cruisers, check-cashing kiosks, and—”

The photographer feigned a short coughing fit to interrupt the fat man. It was strange to see a guy sobbing into his handkerchief one minute, then pitching his company's products the next.

“What do
you
do?” Coleman asked, looking for an angle.

“I'm the bookkeeper. Payables, receivables, and payroll…”

“How about out there?” Porter said, motioning with his free hand toward the factory.

Arthur Puckman followed Coleman Porter's hand to an area in the shop. “That's where we c-c-cut black iron….”

“So tell me, Mr. Puck Man,” Porter said, interrupting again. “If out there is where you cut iron, how come a guy looks like he's choking to death?” As many times as he'd been told by Philly news editors that he needed to have a lighter touch, Coleman Porter was not a tactful man. Shifting from one foot to the other, Arthur Puckman seemed alternately to panic and then to compose himself.

“Gutierrez should never have been in the t-t-t-t-tank,” the fat man announced. “I told him we shouldn't even be using that stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“The degreaser.”

“Why's that?” Porter said.

“TCE is toxic,” the fat man said, arching his eyebrows. “It's against the r-r-regs.” Arthur Puckman wiped his face with the handkerchief.

“So who told him to do it?” Coleman asked warily.

“Same guy who makes all the d-d-decisions around here.”

“Who's that?” Porter kept the camera trained on him.

“My b-b-brother.”

Coleman Porter confirmed that the record light was still on, and he moved the camera to be sure the fat man was in the viewfinder. “You're saying your brother knew he was breaking the rules?” he asked.

“He didn't p-p-post MSDS sheets, or use respirators, or b-b-buy safety gloves,” the fat man said, raising his voice now. “I kept t-t-telling him this kind of thing would happen someday.” Arthur Puckman wiped his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Why didn't he do something about it?”

With weariness akin to remorse, Arthur Puckman answered into the camera. “He's the o-o-o-one who makes the decisions. He's the one who writes the checks—the b-b-big shot—the one who always h-has to be in charge, the one my father trusts. Over the years, I told him a l-l-lot of things. But he ignored me.”