What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  On the beach, Denise is in a quandary. She shouldn’t be because where can Charlie go? She doesn’t for a second believe he’ll drown himself. She saw his face after he fell. She saw him scrabbling back up the cliff face. She knows he wants to live. All she needs to do is wait here on the beach, turn a withering gaze on him when he comes dripping back from his pointless defiance. But Denise cannot abide defiance. As Charlie has already noted, she makes bad decisions in the face of it. She carries a gun. Will she lift it and shoot him and ruin her own plans? Or will she wait? She herself doesn’t know. Once more she yells for him to return and still he keeps on walking—then the pattern changes again. Out on the ocean, Mystery comes into view.

  Mystery! Thank God for her.

  Charlie stops. He pictures a movie in which a man—a castaway, a long-bearded castaway—watches a boat approach, the first boat he’s seen in years. The imaginary man waves his arms. He yells. Does the boat come closer? Does the boat keep going? What is that boat bringing him, rescue or despair? What is in the goddamn boat? He is up to his hipbones in the ocean.

  He waits for Mystery to reach him. She looks at him quizzically, killing the engine. He smiles at her like it was his intent all along to escort her in. Then he tows the boat to shore.

  After that, things unfold as they did the last time Mystery arrived, except that Charlie walks up the beach away from the rest of them into the edge of the jungle. No one tries to stop him. He climbs into the string hammock he’s come to think of as his. His wet pants cling to his skin. Above him a flowering tree, a pattern of leaves and branches and bright red blossoms imprinted on the sky. What is he to make of beauty right now? One worldview suggests it’s there to comfort him. Have hope is its message. Even on the darkest days . . . Look, a rainbow! Or it’s torture by way of ironic contrast, making a bad thing worse. Or it’s indifferent. Let it be indifferent. He can’t be made to feel worse. He doesn’t want to have hope.

  After a while—How long? Who knows? Who cares?—he hears footsteps approaching. He closes his eyes against the urge to lift his head and find out whose footsteps they are. He knows anyway, can tell by the sounds, even before fingertips brush his forehead. It’s Mystery. “I have something to show you,” she says.

  He opens his eyes. “What?”

  “You don’t want the others to see.”

  He sits up, swaying in the hammock. “What?”

  She steps back farther into the trees out of view, Charlie assumes, of the three on the beach. She’s holding another bag of magazines.

  “What?” he asks again, his heart starting up in defiance of his commitment to numbness. He is so weary of dread.

  “I will show you.”

  He climbs out of the hammock. Ben Phillips is having a panic attack. Charlie breathes. He breathes.

  Mystery pulls out a magazine. She opens it to a dog-eared page. Then she holds it open. He moves closer to see. She points at a photo. The photo is of a man wheeling a suitcase toward the entrance to LAX. The man wears form-fitting jeans and a baseball cap and a jacket that fits so well you can tell it was expensive. “That is you,” she says.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She shakes her head in quick, firm dismissal. “That is you.”

  The caption reads: Is Charlie Outlaw pulling a Dave Chappelle? No one’s seen Charlie since this photo taken in the international terminal at LAX. The TV star has been silent on social media since he told a reporter he doesn’t really like his own show. “The fans really turned on him,” says a source from the set. “That really stung. He’ll need some time to get over it—and so will the fans.” Is that controversy all that’s got Charlie on the run, or could it have something to do with the rumors about ex-girlfriend Josie Lamar? (page 5)

  What rumors? About Max? What rumors? “Can I have that?” Charlie reaches, but Mystery pulls the magazine back. He fights the urge to snatch it from her. He doesn’t want the others to notice anything going on.

  “Who is Dave Chappelle?” Mystery asks. She pronounces it chapel.

  “He’s a comedian who got very famous and then disappeared for a while. He went to Africa.”

  “Are you very famous?”

  “No. I don’t know. It depends who you ask.”

  “But that is you.”

  He looks at the picture again. He is about to agree—the jig is up—but what rises in him is refusal. He wants to deny that it’s him, and not just because he’s been claiming a different name. That guy looks nothing like he feels. That guy has every faith that he’ll get where he’s going. He has no idea of the shit he’s about to get Charlie into. Charlie hates that guy.

  “I don’t understand,” Mystery says. “You tell Denise you are rich. You give her money and you can go.”

  “I’m not rich. I’m not as rich as you probably think.”

  Mystery frowns in puzzlement. She shakes the picture at him. “But that is you. You give her money and you can go.”

  He won’t tell Denise. He already decided not to tell Denise. He doesn’t know the right thing to do. He doesn’t know what got him here. He doesn’t know what will get him out. He only knows he decided not to tell Denise. “That is not me,” he says, and he sells it, he can hear that he sells it, he can see it by the way her expression morphs toward doubt.

  “That is you.”

  “That is not me.”

  “But the lady . . .” She jabs her finger at the caption.

  “What lady?”

  She huffs with frustration, flips the pages of the magazine, shows him a picture of Josie striking a pose at a staged photo op. Her hand is on her stomach. “Page five,” she says. “I ask the front-desk man to read the English. He say this lady is ex-girlfriend of that man. You say you love that lady.” She looks at him in triumph.

  “I don’t know that lady,” he says.

  “You cry about her.”

  “No.” He shakes his head.

  “You do.”

  “I’m upset. I’ve been kidnapped.”

  “You say you know her.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  Mystery purses her lips, considering. “She is pregnant.”

  “What? That’s not true.” He reaches for the magazine again, and again she pulls it back. A corner of a page comes away between his thumb and finger.

  “Is true.”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “You don’t know her. So how do you know?”

  “I just know. Can I look at that, please?”

  “You tell the truth and I give it to you.”

  “I am telling the truth. She’s not pregnant.”

  “She is. It is in the magazine.”

  “She would have told me!”

  “No, no,” Mystery says. “The baby not yours.”

  “If she’s pregnant, then it’s my baby.”

  “This say she has the other man’s baby.”

  He shakes his head spastically. “This is a tabloid!” he says. “It’s full of shit! And how would you know? How could you possibly know?”

  “Shhhh,” she hisses, reaching as if to clap her hand over his mouth. She stops just short of touching him.

  “Why are you saying all this? Why are you showing me this? Why didn’t you just take it to Denise?” From the look on her face, he’d guess Mystery doesn’t know the answer.

  She shrugs. “I wanted to ask you.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to know.”

  “You wanted to know what? If I’m famous? If you know somebody famous? If I’ll take a selfie? If I’ll sign that photo? The autograph’s not for you, it’s for your teenage daughter, right? You wanted to know if I was really dating Josie? If I really loved her? If she left me for Max Hammons? Max Hammons! If she—” She is staring at him—frightened? stunned? confused?—and in her hands the magazine goes slac
k, tilting toward him to display its picture of Josie. He stops abruptly and snatches it. He steps back too far with his prize, out of the trees into visibility, and then even farther onto the beach, putting distance between himself and Mystery. He doesn’t realize his mistake, too busy reading. Reading over and over without absorbing any of the words.

  And then the magazine is gone, because Denise has snatched it from his hands. She looks at the page, then assesses Charlie. She can see he’s upset but why? “You like this lady?” she asks mockingly. “You have love for her?”

  Charlie stands there shaking.

  Denise doesn’t read English any more than Mystery does. She barks at Mystery, summoning her from the trees with rapid questions. Mystery gives a short reply. What did she say? What did she say? What did she say?

  “So the lady is pregnant,” Denise says. “So?” She seems genuinely curious. This is the first time she’s expressed any curiosity about him. Everybody gets more interested when your picture’s in a magazine.

  “She’s not pregnant.”

  Denise looks pleased by his vehemence. She leans in and enunciates. “She is.”

  “You don’t know! You don’t know anything! You don’t even know what you’re doing!” He snatches the magazine back.

  Denise looks at him openmouthed for a moment, her hand flexing around her gun. Then she laughs. She turns to the boys and speaks rapidly and loudly, gesturing at him, and they laugh, too. She pooches out her belly like she’s pregnant and pouts in his direction. More words he doesn’t understand, and their laughter grows more uproarious. He is hilarious. He is ridiculous. He is a fool. He wants that baby to be his. Denise turns back to him, the smile lingering on her face, and hits him in the stomach with the butt of her gun. He doubles over, and then she grabs his hair and drives her knee up and his face down so they collide in the gruesome crunch of his nose breaking. He drops the magazine to catch his blood in his hands. Denise leans over and swipes it up, then casually pushes on his shoulder until he is on his knees. She puts her own knee hard into his back as she flips the pages. “Clothes, clothes, clothes,” she says. “Pretty ladies. Pretty men. You would die for this magazine?” She plays to her audience, making more jokes. His nose throbs. Adan and Thomas laugh but Mystery doesn’t. He’s never heard Mystery laugh. He tries not to vomit, wiping his bloody hands on the sand. Her knee is sharp in his back.

  She stops talking. He feels her go still. He closes his eyes against what’s coming. Thomas says something to continue the hilarity, and she snaps a command. She takes the knee from his back and steps to the boys. He doesn’t have to speak her language to know what’s happening. She’s showing them the picture of him. He crawls away, as far as he can get before a foot connects with his side and he goes down. He looks up at Denise and winces against the sun. “You are Charlie Outlaw,” she says.

  He shakes his head.

  “You are rich. You are famous. You are a liar.”

  “That is not me.”

  “We do not need to e-mail your family. We will send a picture to the news and your family will see.”

  “No.”

  “I will ask for two million dollars.”

  “That is not me.”

  She kicks him again. “Lie.” Again. “Lie.” Again. “Lie.”

  He curls up on his side, gasping.

  Abruptly she stops. She says conversationally, “You take a rest. Then we talk.”

  She broke Charlie’s nose. She cracked one of his ribs. There is sand in his eyes, sand on his tongue, sand sticking to the blood coagulating on his face. He swallows grit and iron. The sun finds him like a spotlight.

  Josie.

  Fingers on his broken nose, and as light a touch as it is, he cries out. “No ice,” says Mystery’s voice. “She say take care of you. How can I take care of you?”

  Josie, I am sorry.

  Fingers push his hair back, carefully pulling strands from the blood. Mystery tsks. “Charlie,” she whispers. “I worry for you.”

  He cracks open his eyes. “Take me away from here then,” he whispers. He’s too hurt and frightened and the sun is too bright for him to read the microexpressions that succeed one another with rapidity on her face. All he knows is that she feels, all at once, multiple things.

  “You tell her what she wants. Please, please, Charlie. I worry for you.”

  “My name is Ben Phillips.”

  “You are Charlie Outlaw,” she says, pleadingly.

  He closes his eyes.

  Time’s up. Adan and Thomas appear on either side of him. They haul him up, not to his feet but his knees so he must still look up at Denise, who stands before him with arms folded. “We will clean your face before we take a photo,” she says. “Or they will not recognize you, Charlie Outlaw. Pretty man.”

  “You can take a photo,” he says. “But you can’t get two million dollars.”

  “I can. You are rich. It will be easy. Everyone will send money to save you. You are famous.”

  “They won’t believe you. All kinds of people take pictures of me. They take pictures everywhere I go. They put them on the internet. They make things up. They’ll think you just saw me on a beach. You have to let me call my family.”

  “No calls.”

  “They won’t believe you.”

  “They will see the photo and they will believe.”

  “They won’t. You won’t get two million dollars.”

  Denise is not a patient person, and what patience she had for this exercise in prolonged frustration was exhausted by the time she shot Darius. In her hand there is a pistol. She has exchanged her usual rifle for it, doubtless for the purpose to which she now puts it. She presses the muzzle to his forehead. “We will take a picture of this, Charlie Outlaw. Will they believe this? Will they believe this, Charlie Outlaw? Will they believe this? I think they will believe this.” She removes the pistol, takes the safety off, replaces it at his head. “They will believe you are dead, Charlie Outlaw, when they see the photo. I will kill you now. Will they believe you are dead?”

  Charlie thinks, I should’ve— The gun goes off. He doesn’t finish the thought. He just dies. Then he takes a breath and discovers he didn’t.

  Denise did not shoot him.

  Denise shot over his head.

  He puts his face in his hands. Denise did not shoot him.

  She drops to a crouch beside him. “Now, Charlie Outlaw,” she says, “you will tell me everything I ask.”

  “That is not me,” he says. He rocks front and back with his knees in the sand, cradling his broken nose, his fingertips pressed so hard against his eyelids that he sees spots. Is this real? Is he acting? He couldn’t tell you now, will never be able to tell you. He and the character are one. “That is not me,” he says, and keeps saying it. It is his only line. “That is not me. That is not me.”

  VIII.

  In life we often act unconsciously, unaware of the causes that determine our behavior, and the aims which our actions pursue—but on the stage we must always know what we are doing and why.

  I. RAPOPORT, “The Work of the Actor”

  One.

  There are two paths to success. You can believe that you can succeed. You can stop caring if you fail. Picture the scene in which our heroine, four bad guys at her feet, turns her gaze on the one who remains. Moments ago, he and his fellow villains mocked her, certain of her easy defeat. Now, as the camera pushes in for a close-up, her eyes say Run, and that is what the last bad guy does, he turns and runs. Which path did she take to that victory? Within Run, we can make out both I will win and I do not give a shit.

  Picture Josie descending the stairs from a plane to a tarmac, striding past slow-moving disembarkers on her way into an airport. On the plane, to Josie’s amused and rueful astonishment, they showed an episode of Alter Ego. That was a first: Never before has she seen her tiny sel
f replicated on all those tiny screens. They showed it because of the show’s anniversary, an episode in which Bronwyn almost gives up, almost walks away, so from her seat on the plane, Josie got to watch her own face morph from fear and desperation into resolution. Despite this, none of the passengers recognized Josie on the plane, and they still don’t, even the ones who might if she weren’t walking by them so fast. The airport is a small one, not air-conditioned, with three bars offering tropical cocktails and racks bristling with colorful brochures and a metal fence instead of walls around two sides of the baggage claim.

  Josie has not told anyone, not even Cecelia, where she is, because she didn’t want anyone to try to dissuade her. She knew, for instance, that if she told her agent or manager, the other voice on the line would immediately take on that careful, don’t-poke-the-bear tone, which she hates and doesn’t think she deserves. In the face of the assumption that actresses are hysterical narcissists, Josie has striven to behave as a reasonable, competent adult. In the last two decades, she’s put a lot of effort into not seeming fragile or crazy to people determined to treat actresses as fragile and crazy, and what has been the point of her reasonableness and competency? They treat her that way anyway. Imagine all the temper tantrums she might have thrown. Imagine all the times she might have gotten what she wanted.

  For Josie, the world has contracted to a singular certainty. She’d forgotten the power of that. Find Charlie. That is the beginning and the end. To a certain point, her plan is made: rental car, hotel, shower, all prelude to the real quest. Find Charlie. She’ll go to the address she got from Charlie’s mother. There she will succeed or fail.