What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  Once the boys agree on a plan and she lands on a figure, the next step will be to extract contact information from the hostage. She looks at him, huddled with his stupid magazine under his stupid towel, and feels the usual contemptuous fury. She could walk up behind him right now and hit him hard. Then we’ll see how long it takes for him to tell her what she wants to know. She makes a gun of her hand, closes one eye, and shoots him in the back of the head. Many times in the last few days she’s thought how much simpler it would’ve been to let him fall.

  Charlie assumes that the many long conversations his captors have been having are about him, about what to do with him. After all the time those three have spent together, what else can they have left to discuss? For his part, he’s spent the three days since Mystery came alternating between reading magazines and running escape scenarios. He knows it’s been three days because he’s read three magazines. He has five and could’ve read them all in the two hours after Mystery handed him the bag, but he’s rationing himself to one a day because no one has told him when she’ll return or whether she’ll bring him more. He reads one all the way through, very slowly, and then starts over, and then puts himself to the test of memorizing the articles and reciting them under his breath: How many paragraphs can he get through before he makes a mistake? Only once the sun has set and risen can he start a new magazine. He has read an interview with an actress he admires so many times that he’s begun to find a wild complexity of subtexts in her words. He memorized her lines and has said them aloud with a multitude of readings. The picture of Josie with Max he looked at ten, a hundred, a thousand times. He could not stop looking at it. It felt like reading the comments on his big-mistake profile and every article that repeated the things he’d said. It felt like searching Charlie Outlaw asshole and watching the internet oblige. It felt worse than that. He had to tear the page out of the magazine, and then he had to tear it and tear it until it was pieces that he scattered in the sea. After that, loss closing his throat, he searched the other magazines for a picture of Josie, but that was the only one.

  In one of his escape scenarios, Charlie waits until whoever is on guard duty dozes off, then sneaks away into the rain forest. In another, he steals the boat when Mystery comes, while they’re all busy rummaging through the supplies. He also imagines that Mystery rescues him, that she distracts the others somehow, then sneaks him onto the boat, pushes off before they notice. He can picture the three of them splashing after them into the water, yelling at them to stop. Maybe they’ll even shoot, he and Mystery ducking into the hull of the boat until they’re out of range of the bullets, and then there’s just the wake behind them and the wind in their hair. There are other, even less plausible variations in which he grabs a gun and forces Mystery to pilot him out of here or Adan to lead him through the trees. He’s tried to flesh out these plans, but each has a difficulty he can’t surmount: He doesn’t know how to start the boat’s engine; he doesn’t know the way back; someone might shoot him. He rehearses and rehearses but can’t get anything right.

  One of the kidnapping shows Charlie saw with his roommate all those years ago—which he has now had ample time and leisure to remember—involved a couple held hostage in the jungles of the Philippines for nearly two years. When the army came to rescue them, the husband was killed by friendly fire. To survive all that time in his captors’ hands and then be shot by a would-be rescuer! He’s glad he remembered this episode because it eases his tormenting sense that he shouldn’t have followed Adan, should have run back toward the shooting. It eases his torment but doesn’t banish it utterly, because maybe he still could have made it, maybe he could have run another way.

  He wishes he’d watched more episodes of that show, every episode, preparing for the role he has now. He wishes he could remember one where someone escaped, but he can’t, not one. Still, he can’t shake the idea that escape is possible, for which he blames spy movies, fantasy novels, TV, comic books—everything that persuades us that we all might possess a hero’s ingenuity, that we can trick someone out of their power over us, build a rocket out of spare parts. Evade our fates. In life you don’t pick the lock on your handcuffs with a straight pin, swing yourself up from the pipe where you’re chained to kick your tormentor in the face. In life you live for two years in the jungle, getting skinnier and skinnier, fighting dysentery, swallowing your rage when your captors laugh at your drooping pants, dreaming of the end, dreaming of the future—no, dreaming of the past. Then someone finally comes to save you and kills you instead.

  The man who was kidnapped in Colombia, the man who gave a fake name—he pretended illness until his captors let him go. Charlie could try that. Live truthfully in imaginary circumstances, Meisner exhorts and, yes, Charlie has done that, he can do that, it is the only thing he can do. Believe me, when I enter it will rain. If he convinces her he’s sick, will Denise just shoot him? He’s valuable to her only as long as she thinks she can trade him for something. She might shoot him rather than let him go. He looks back at the kidnappers, which he shouldn’t have done, because he catches Denise’s eye.

  Of course she gets up. Of course she comes toward him. Actions have consequences. Even if his only mistake was in glancing behind him, that glance led, a to b, to this result. Charlie sees the urge toward violence that propels Denise’s approach, in her face, in her bearing, in her grip on the gun. If he cowers under his towel, she will hit him. If he stands, she will hit him. If he speaks, she will hit him. There is nothing he can do that will not give her an excuse. “Why are you coming to hit me?” he asks, when she’s close enough to hear.

  It breaks her momentum that he speaks. She stops two feet away.

  “What good will it do?” he asks. “Is there something you want?”

  She calls him some names in her own language for the satisfaction of insulting him in a way he won’t understand and can’t respond to. He is a weakling; he is worthless; she has all the power. Then, in English: “How much money can your family pay?”

  “Not much. They don’t have much.”

  She considers him for so long he begins to feel as though she sees numbers multiplying on his face. “I will ask for a million dollars.”

  “What? They can’t pay that. They can’t possibly pay that.” A million dollars! If this is what she expects from the family of a waiter, what would she want if he told the truth?

  “How much then?”

  “I don’t know! A thousand? Two thousand? You have to be reasonable.”

  She smiles. “I do not have to be reasonable.” She taps her finger against her gun. “You have to be reasonable.”

  “I will be reasonable. Take me back to where I’m staying and I’ll give you my credit cards. I’ll tell you my PIN number. Then you can go. You can let me go.”

  “We did not do all this to steal a wallet.”

  “You’d get money.”

  “You would call. You would stop your cards.”

  “I wouldn’t. I promise. I wouldn’t.”

  Denise scoffs. “Cash,” she says. “Cash only.”

  “The cash machine—”

  “There is a limit.”

  “But you could get money today. Today. This would be over. You could go back to your lives.”

  “No,” she says, with finality. “We will contact your family.”

  “Let me be the one to call them then. I will ask them what they can pay.” If he could gain access to a phone, he could call Josie. She could hire a K & R person, a negotiator, whatever they’re called. He could pay her back. They wouldn’t need to worry his parents at all.

  “Ha!” So great is her scornful amusement that it carries her a few steps away from him. She circles back. “You tell me what they can pay.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the details of their finances. If you just let me call them—”

  “No calls here. The phones do not work here.”


  “There’s no service?”

  “I said the phones do not work!”

  “Mystery could take me in her boat somewhere I could call.”

  “No. You will not call.”

  “Then how will they know they can believe you? How will they know I’m alive?”

  She lets out a long hiss of exasperation and drops to a crouch in front of him. She presses the barrel of her gun under his chin. “Maybe you won’t be alive.” She jerks back to her feet, wrenching the gun with her in a way that leaves a long scrape along his jawline. She stalks out of his view. Having learned his lesson, he doesn’t turn to watch her go.

  He is shaking. But she did that because she knows he’s right. If she’s planning to get a ransom, she has to provide proof of life. The advantage he has over Denise is that she lets her temper get the best of her. She behaves rashly. Does she realize that she didn’t get an answer to her question? She is so easily provoked into abandoning her mission. He thinks again of the man who pretended to be sick.

  But he has completed another circle. The advantage is a disadvantage: Denise behaves rashly. That is why Darius is dead.

  Still, he considers what he’d do if he followed that man’s lead, what performance he’d give. Remember what he learned back when he was sawing at his chain with a pocketknife: Even the pretense of agency helps to stave off despair. Scientists could prove beyond a doubt that our brains are programmed like computers, genetics and environment predetermining every infinitesimal choice, and we would still insist on free will. He could fake flu, but that might not be convincing without a fever. Appendicitis? He could refuse to eat. He could pretend madness, stage a panic attack. Or shock. He can summon what that feels like readily enough. Could he fake a panic attack without giving himself one? He remembers telling Adan he has asthma. Maybe he could convince them he needs treatment for it. They’d have to take him to the hospital. Appendicitis would do that, too. It seems like the performance of appendicitis would be easier to maintain. He should do it in front of Mystery, whose apparent sympathy for him might work to his advantage. (What exactly does she feel about him? What did their last encounter mean?) Mystery could insist on taking him to the doctor, insist they put him in her boat. Adan would want that, too, would want to help him. Mystery and Adan versus Denise and Thomas on the subject of Charlie’s life.

  Would Denise kill him rather than take him to a doctor?

  His mind rounds the track again. Again. Again. There’s an acting exercise in which each person in a pair repeats the same phrase over and over. “You looked at me.” “Yes, I looked at you.” “You looked at me.” “Yes, I looked at you.” The repetition goes on until an irrepressible urge arises in one partner to say something different, so that partner does, and the dialogue changes, and the real gives life to its facsimile. Thus the participants learn the importance of reacting rather than acting, the importance of obeying instinct. Charlie is playing this game with himself, waiting for the moment when he knows without thinking what to do.

  Meanwhile, he has already changed the kidnappers’ pattern. Denise went from Charlie to pace circles around the two boys. They are arguing like idiots about some idiotic movie. (What’s interesting about this conversation is that they identify with the hero of the movie, who rescues a bunch of hostages, rather than the people he rescues them from. But Denise doesn’t take note of that because she doesn’t care.) As she continues to pace, their conversation grows uncertain. They eye her as she passes them, glance at each other nervously. Abruptly she stops. “We’ll have to prove to his parents that we have him.”

  “Yes,” Adan says. “Proof of life.”

  “You already thought of that?”

  They exchange a quick glance. “No,” they say.

  “He wants me to let him call them.”

  “Well, sometimes they do that,” Adan says.

  “Who does that?” Denise snaps.

  “The people asking for ransom. They call the family, and then they let the hostage talk, to tell them he’s okay.” Adan uses the word hostage because it’s the term Denise prefers. In his own mind, he says guest, like Darius did.

  Denise looks at Thomas. “You agree?”

  “Yes, in the movies—”

  “In the movies,” Denise says. “In the movies.” She regards them both with contempt. “I won’t let him call. He’ll play some trick. We need to send a photo.”

  “Mystery can take it when she gets here,” Adan offers.

  “And then we can send it by e-mail,” Thomas chimes in. “We need an e-mail address.”

  Denise looks at Adan. “Go get it.”

  “Now?”

  “We need to have it when Mystery comes. You start asking now. So there’s time if you fail.” She says this as if she expects him to fail, and if he does, he’ll be sorry. Or Charlie will be.

  Panic attack, Charlie is thinking. Or not exactly a panic attack, because he can’t keep that up indefinitely. Panic attack segueing into psychotic break. Refusing to speak or speaking nonsense. Unhinged laughter. Moving in a jerky, unsettling way, darting his eyes. Crying, maybe, but not peaceful tears. Wild sobbing. He imagines it would be harder to shoot someone who was crying, but he’s not sure that applies to Denise. He needs to frustrate Denise just enough for her to walk away, not enough for her to fire. He thinks he has a sense of how to do that. The preparation for this scene will not be hard. Every emotion he needs is ready at hand. If he can’t get there otherwise, all he needs is to remember that picture of Josie, which he’s trying not to think about so as not to provoke the very emotional experience he’s now imagining provoking.

  “Hello, Ben,” says Adan. Something about the way he’s standing reminds Charlie of PAs coming to his trailer to tell him he’s needed on set. He is both tentative and determined.

  “Hi,” Charlie says. He sweeps an arm out to the side. “Have a seat.”

  Adan drops to the sand, crosses his legs like a child or a yogi. Crisscross applesauce. What teacher used to say that? “Ben,” Adan says. “Ben.” He reaches out and pats Charlie on the shoulder. “You are okay, Ben?”

  Charlie shrugs. “Sure. I could use a cup of coffee. Cream, no sugar.”

  Adan looks worried. “We have no coffee, Ben.”

  “I know. I was kidding. It was . . . never mind.”

  Adan nods like all is forgiven, all is understood. “Now, Ben. When Mystery comes, we take picture.”

  “Of me?”

  “Yes, Ben. To send your family.”

  “Ah.”

  “Proof of life.”

  “So you can ask for money.”

  “Yes, Ben!” Adan seems encouraged. “We send picture and we ask. You tell me e-mail for your family, please.”

  Charlie shakes his head.

  Adan looks at him with earnest patience. “Yes, you need to tell me. You tell me, Ben.”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Ben, you need to tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Ben.” Adan takes a deep breath, considers. “Ben, you want to go home?”

  “Of course.”

  “You want to see your mother? Ben, you have girlfriend, Ben?”

  Charlie feels tears in his eyes, clenches his jaw against them.

  “Yes, Ben. You want to see them. You want to go home.”

  Charlie shakes his head.

  “You do, Ben. I know. I want to go home. You want to go home.”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Ben, it is not hard.”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “You must. You must.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But, Ben, if you not tell me, then Denise will come to ask.”

  “Adan.” Charlie lifts his face. He makes eye contact. His eyes fill and he doesn’t try to stop them. He blinks and feels a tear r
un down his cheek. “Do you remember how you saved me?”

  Adan nods solemnly. “I saved you, Ben.”

  “Denise might kill me, Adan. Like she killed Darius. Would you let her do that? After you saved me?”

  Adan swallows. He glances back at Denise.

  “Don’t look at her; don’t look at her. She’ll come over here.”

  Adan obeys, but he doesn’t look at Charlie either. Charlie leans in, trying to compel his gaze. “Can’t you help me, Adan? Can’t you get me away from her?”

  “I can’t, Ben. I can’t. She . . .”

  “Please, Adan.”

  “She is my sister, Ben.”

  “Your sister?” Charlie didn’t know that. How did Charlie not know that?

  “Yes, Ben. My older sister. I must do what she says. I am sorry.”

  “Well, fuck,” Charlie says. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck it all. I won’t tell you the e-mail. I won’t tell her.”

  “Shhh, Ben,” Adan says, but he’s too late, because here comes Denise, certain of Adan’s failure and not at all sorry to intervene. Charlie gets to his feet, putting a hand on Adan’s shoulder to propel himself upward. He walks away from Denise toward the water. Ben Phillips can’t take it anymore. Ben Phillips is headed for a meltdown. Charlie doesn’t know what he—Ben—will say when Denise reaches him, but something will come, something will come. His sister! Is she Mystery’s sister, too? He hears Denise shouting behind him, but he doesn’t turn around. He keeps walking past the edge of the world into the water. The water laps against his ankles, then his calves, and he thinks of a shot from a movie—What movie was it?—in which a man walks steadily into the ocean until he’s gone.