Detour

by James Siegel

  “No. I’ll be fine.” Paul could feel individual beads of sweat on his forehead. His stomach was rumbling like thunder before a deluge.

  “Well, okay,” the man said. He didn’t look like it was okay.

  Paul tried to lose himself in the movie again. Reese was a lawyer or something. She kept saying cute things and smiled a lot.

  He was going to throw up.

  Paul stood and made his way to the business-class lavatory. Only it was occupied and someone else was waiting to use it. A mother holding her four-year-old boy by the hand. The boy was shuffling his feet and periodically grabbing at the crotch of his pants.

  “He has to go,” the mother said apologetically.

  Paul peered through the half-opened curtain leading to first class. No one was waiting at that lavatory. He went through the curtain toward the front of the plane.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  A flight attendant had materialized out of nowhere. He was slim, young, but very determined-looking. Right now he was determined that Paul, a business-class passenger, not make it into the first-class lavatory.

  “We like you to use the lavatory in your section,” he said.

  “So would I. Only it’s occupied. So—”

  “If you’ll just wait until the lavatory is available,” the man interrupted.

  “I can’t wait. I’m not feeling well.”

  The first-class passengers were all looking at him. Paul could feel their eyes boring into his back. In the hierarchy of planedom, they were Brahmins and he was an Untouchable. This might have embarrassed him in his previous life. But in this life he was a drug smuggler about to upchuck his illicit cargo into the aisle, so he didn’t care. He needed to get to that bathroom.

  The flight attendant, whose name was Roland, was looking him over as if trying to ascertain if he was telling the truth. Was he really sick, or was he attempting to con his way into the glories of the first-class lavatory?

  Paul didn’t wait for him to decide. He moved forward, physically brushing past a defeated-looking Roland. He entered the bathroom and shut the door.

  His nausea had reached a pretty much unendurable level.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pasty and wet.

  He closed his eyes.

  He pictured Joanna shut in that airless room. Sitting on that filthy mattress. Alone. He wondered if she was praying for him, revisiting the faith of her youth, when she’d dutifully gone to confession every Sunday and renounced her girlish sins. He hoped so.

  I will not throw up. He said this not just to himself, but to God. Okay, they weren’t exactly on a first-name basis, but he was willing to give it a shot. He was ready to let bygones be bygones and become friends.

  Don’t let me throw up.

  Rephrased now as an actual prayer, a plea from someone in need of a little godly intervention.

  He took deep breaths. He splashed cold water onto his face. He clenched his hands into fists. He purposely avoided looking at the toilet, which seemed like a visual invitation to upchuck the drugs.

  It worked.

  He felt his nausea subsiding. He was still queasy, but he could actually imagine making it back to his seat without vomiting. Maybe there was something to this religious stuff, after all. Maybe even a jaded God had been moved to pity.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “What’s going on in there?”

  Roland. Still sounding kind of indignant.

  “I’m coming out,” Paul said.

  “Fine.”

  A minute later Paul opened the door and maneuvered past Roland, who smelled strongly of lavender. He made it back to his seat, where the man next to him eyed him suspiciously.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  Paul nodded. He turned onto his side and closed his eyes. He couldn’t sleep, but he’d pretend to.

  He had two hours left till customs.

  THERE WAS A DOG AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ESCALATOR.

  A German shepherd with a thick black harness around it.

  Paul couldn’t see who had hold of that harness, because the ceiling sloped to the angle of the escalator and restricted his vision.

  It could be a blind person, he thought. A beggar with one of those white cups in his hand and a sign that said I am blind. Please help me.

  Or it could be the other kind of person who would be holding a harnessed dog in an international airport. Waiting for a flight from Colombia.

  He thought about turning around and heading back up against the flow. The escalator was packed—he’d never make it.

  The escalator seemed to be moving at SLP speed, the slowest setting on your typical VCR. The person holding the dog was filling in by small increments, as if he were being drawn by a sketch artist in Washington Square Park.

  First the shoes.

  Black, sturdy, thick soles. Not necessarily a blind person’s shoes, but not necessarily not.

  Now the legs.

  Thin and short and covered in dark blue.

  Denim? Or the polyester weave favored by certain government agencies? It was hard to tell. The man’s belt buckle rose into view, something substantial that seemed to serve some greater purpose than merely holding up his pants. The kind of buckle that made a statement.

  The shirt began to materialize.

  Paul was praying it would be a T-shirt.

  Something that said I Love New York.

  Or My son-in-law went to Florida but all I got was THIS. Really praying—like back in the first-class lavatory.

  It was white and buttoned. There was some kind of badge on it.

  A policeman. A customs man.

  When Paul entered the last stage of the slowest escalator on earth, he saw he was right and wrong. It was a customs agent, all right, but a woman. She had dyed-blond hair tied into a tight ponytail, ostensibly to keep it from getting into her diligently steely eyes.

  It didn’t really matter what sex she was. He was focusing on the dog.

  A sniff dog—isn’t that what they called them?

  The officer and dog were set up just to the left of the escalator. Paul tried to edge closer to the right railing. The dog was sitting on his hind legs with his quivering black nose pointed straight into the air.

  He was wondering. He believed these dogs were capable of sniffing out drugs inside gas tanks, plastic dolls, even concrete canisters. What about people? Through layers of intestines and fat and condoms and skin?

  Seriously sweating skin. Skin that had broken out in a veritable rash of sweat that threatened to turn him into a walking dishrag.

  He stepped off the escalator. He could sense the customs woman staring straight at him. He could only sense this, because he was trying not to look at her. He was trying instead to look bored, blasé, nonchalant—to look this way in a direction that wouldn’t bring his gaze in the vicinity of hers.

  She must’ve been wondering what might cause a passenger from Colombia to be sweating bullets. No, more like an actual fusillade.

  Paul could actually hear the dog sniffing; it sounded like someone with a bad cold. His chest tightened into a single painful knot. There were three supposed warning signs of a heart attack—excessive sweating, chest pain, and numbness—and he currently had all three. Only his numbness was more of the mental variety. He was so scared he couldn’t think.

  And then he did a very strange thing.

  He petted the dog.

  The shepherd had begun emitting a series of nervous whines, and Paul was convinced that in one second the officer would be asking him to step out of the line and accompany her to a special room where she’d X-ray him and then arrest him for drug smuggling.

  He was facing his fear head-on. The way his father had once advised him to do when a seven-year-old Paul had confided his terror of roller coasters in the middle of Hershey Park. His father put him on the cloud-scraping Evil Twister, where Paul had promptly thrown up all over him.

  Maybe blatant hubris would actually work th
is time.

  The dog went stock-still and stared up at him with an eerily focused expression. His ears flattened—his educated nose quivered.

  It was the customs woman who actually barked at him.

  “Sir!”

  Everything stopped. Other passengers turned around to stare at him—a teen with backpack, a family of four lugging loot from Disneyland, an elderly couple attempting to catch up with the rest of their tour group. Another customs officer began walking over from further down the terminal.

  “Sir!” the customs woman repeated.

  “Yes?” Paul felt as if he’d left his own body. As if he were looking down on this ridiculous if horrifying confrontation, which could only end with Paul Breidbart being led away in handcuffs. And disgrace.

  “Sir. Please refrain from petting the dog, sir.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not a pet, sir. She’s a working animal.”

  “Yes, of course. Sorry.” He took his hand away—it was clearly shaking.

  Paul turned and walked toward the sign that said Baggage This Way. He silently counted his steps, thinking if he made it to ten, he would have gotten away with it.

  He made it to eleven.

  Twelve.

  Thirteen.

  The dog hadn’t smelled the cocaine. He was okay.

  SEVENTEEN

  He took a cab.

  The driver was Indian and spoke only broken English. Still, he had no trouble conveying his joy at getting a fare that would make his day. All the way to New Jersey would be double rate.

  He took the Grand Central Parkway to the Triborough Bridge, while Paul looked at his watch approximately every ten minutes. Like a distance runner in the New York City marathon—so much real estate traversed in so much time.

  So far, he was more or less on pace.

  You’re doing fine, the cheerleader in his head kept urging him on.

  You’re doing fine.

  He was attempting to focus on the finish line. FARC’s contacts in Jersey City would soon be clapping him on the back for a job well done and placing that call to Colombia. He’d be waiting by the gate the next day for Joanna and Joelle to disembark at Kennedy Airport to begin their new lives together.

  Just an hour away.

  Then the taxi slowed, crawled, stopped.

  They were in a sudden bumper-to-bumper logjam, with no discernible movement up ahead.

  Paul needed to get to a bathroom.

  This feeling had been intensifying since he walked off the plane. At first just a slighter sense of fullness than he’d felt all day—exactly what you’d expect with thirty-six stuffed condoms sitting inside you. But then a growing and unmistakable need to void, every bit as ferocious as the need to vomit.

  For the second time in a space of hours, Paul tried to will his body to listen up and desist. A simple case of mind over matter. His body, however, refused to pay attention; it was having none of it now. It had its own agenda, and it was demanding to be heard.

  They hadn’t moved an inch in five minutes.

  The taxi driver was shaking his head and channel surfing through a sea of foreign-sounding radio stations. The resultant cacophony was harsh and physically grating. It was seriously hindering Paul’s ability to concentrate on not going to the bathroom in the backseat of the taxi.

  “Could you not do that?” he said.

  “Eh?”

  “The radio. Could you just pick one station?”

  The taxi driver turned around as if he’d just been asked an astounding question. He peered at Paul through heavy-lidded eyes sunk into charcoal caverns of despair.

  “What you say?”

  “It’s annoying,” Paul said. His stomach was beginning to seriously scream at him.

  Find a bathroom. Any bathroom.

  “My radio,” the taxi driver said.

  “Yes, but—”

  “My radio,” he repeated for emphasis. “I play what I like. Okay.”

  Okay. There was a boundary between taxi driver and passenger, and Paul had evidently crossed it.

  His stomach was one unending cramp. Something was in there that desperately wanted to get out.

  Hold it in.

  The taxi driver honked his horn. He obviously meant it as a kind of protest, as opposed to something that might actually accomplish anything. It wasn’t as if the cars directly in front of him could do something about it—they were as trapped as he was. He honked his horn again anyway—leaning on it this time, a long wail of frustration and anger.

  The taxi driver seemed to enjoy letting off steam in this way. He smiled as if he’d told himself a good joke.

  Until someone got out of the car in front of them—a Lincoln with a license plate that said BGCHEZE.

  The man who walked over to the cabdriver’s window seemed constrained by his own clothing, tight maroon sweatpants with a simple T-shirt that appeared more like a straitjacket.

  He made a motion with his hand—roll down the window.

  The taxi driver was in no mood to comply. He’d lost his smile, he was muttering in Indian.

  “Roll down your fucking window,” the man said, now that his hand motions had gotten him nowhere.

  The taxi driver now made a hand motion of his own. A wave of dismissal—go away and leave me alone.

  The man didn’t react well to this.

  “Who you fucking waving at, huh? You like to blow your fucking horn at people? Open your window. I got something for you, you fuck!”

  The taxi driver was not going to do that. No. He waved his hand at the man again and turned his head, banishing him from his presence.

  “Hey, you fucking towel-head! You understand fucking English? You don’t, do you? You don’t understand a fucking word I’m saying. Here, I’ll make it easy for you. Roll. Down. Your. Goddamn. Window.” He pounded the window on each word with a hand that appeared to be the size of Lower Manhattan.

  The taxi driver had locked the doors. Paul realized this when the man began pulling on the door handle and it didn’t open. This only seemed to make him angrier.

  He began kicking the driver’s door.

  Paul couldn’t tell whether the man had noticed that there was a passenger in the backseat. Even if he had, Paul didn’t think it would’ve deterred him.

  “Open the fucking door, you pussy!” he was screaming at a now seriously alarmed-looking taxi driver. The taxi driver in fact seemed to be looking around for help—first left, then right, then finally, inexorably, behind him.

  “Maybe he’ll just stop,” Paul said, staring into twin eyes of pure panic.

  “He’s goddamn crazy,” the taxi driver said.

  Paul had to agree with him there. Two thoughts were racing through his brain. One: He was not going to be able to hold it in. Two: If the crazy man made it into his car, he was going to kill the taxi driver and Paul would not make it to Jersey City in time. Even if he could hold it in.

  Paul rolled down his window.

  “Look, could we just calm down?” he said to the man. His words sounded pained and filled with anguish—even to him.

  His tone seemed to momentarily mollify the man. He looked at Paul as if he’d just come across an interesting artifact worthy of his attention.

  “Tell him to open his door,” he said.

  “Look, I’m sure he didn’t mean to blow his horn. He was frustrated. All this traffic. Can we just forget it?”

  The man smiled at him. “Sure,” he said.

  Then he reached into Paul’s window and pulled the door lock up. He pulled the door open—accomplishing this in a matter of seconds. Before Paul could actually react, the man yanked Paul out of the taxi by his arm.

  Paul stumbled, almost fell.

  “Hey, come on, stop this,” he said.

  Somewhere between stop and this, the man’s fist connected with his chin.

  Paul fell straight back onto the pavement. Smack. That wasn’t the worst part. No.

  He’d just spent hours fighting to
keep the drugs inside of him, battling with his own body over this unwelcome and unnatural intrusion.

  In one humiliating moment, he lost.

  EIGHTEEN

  They found an Exxon station somewhere in the Bronx.

  A Middle Eastern man pumping gas pointed to the back of the station when Paul asked for the bathroom.

  Paul had made it back into the taxi in the middle of the Triborough Bridge, with the assistance of a middle-aged woman who’d magically materialized from a white minivan. He’d refused the woman’s offer to obtain medical assistance. He’d told the taxi driver, who’d remained snugly in his front seat, that he wasn’t interested in going to the police. No. Just 1346 Ganet Street in Jersey City.

  First he’d needed a bathroom.

  The taxi driver closed the plastic partition between driver and passenger as Paul sat half on his hip the entire way.

  When he got into the stifling gas station bathroom—which wasn’t so much a bathroom as a hole with toilet—he discovered pretty much what he’d expected.

  Everything he’d swallowed back in Bogotá had come out. The condoms were still intact.

  He dumped them into the filthy sink, washed them off with warm rusty water. He took off his pants and slathered them with the yellowish gunk that came out of the soap dispenser, then soaked them under the faucet. He cleaned himself up as best he could.

  He wasn’t going to swallow the condoms again. He couldn’t. He would get to the house in Jersey City and tell them what happened—that they’d come out just a few miles from delivery.

  He carefully placed the drugs in the overnight bag he’d dragged into the bathroom with him. He went back out to the taxi and crawled into the backseat. The driver had aired it out during his bathroom break. Both doors were wide open, both windows rolled down.

  At least the driver didn’t say anything to him. Paul had taken one on the chin for him.

  His gratitude must have outweighed his disgust.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER THEY ENTERED JERSEY CITY.

  Paul was looking on the bright side. Yes, there was a bright side. He’d made it this far. Consider the percentages.

  He was blocks from delivering his cargo. From fulfilling his part of the bargain.