Out of Order

by Charles Benoit

  “When did I say that?” Jason said, careful to keep a laugh in his voice.

  Rachel kept her eyes fixed on his sunglasses. “The other night. You said a lot of things.”

  “Really? Like what?” He tilted his sunglasses back and gave her his best smile.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling her Blue Jays cap tight on her head, “we’re going to be late.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes later they sat in the back of a full-sized cab, looking out opposite windows. Plots of farmland jutted up against dense tropical forests and roadside waterfalls cascaded down the moss-covered rocks. The landscape leveled off and there were more farms and more wandering cows. The driver slowed and turned off the main road, taking them down a winding, rutted trail, the highway disappearing behind stands of palms and broad-leafed ferns.

  Jason was surprised when Rachel climbed into the cab that had pulled up near the hotel, ignoring the offers from a dozen cut-rate auto-rickshaw drivers. He didn’t hear her tell the driver where to go and noticed the driver never dropped the metal arm of his taxi meter, a blatant notice that he was planning on overcharging them.

  Other than a few grunts about luggage and room keys, they hadn’t spoken since the beach.

  The cab bottomed out every fifty yards on the dirt road but the driver kept up the same dust-raising speed. Ahead, a rundown farmhouse—sun-baked red brick with a corrugated tin roof—rose into view and he noticed Rachel shifting in her seat as they got closer.

  “Listen,” she said, turning to face him, her hand light on his arm. “Don’t say anything when we get inside. No matter what. And don’t freak out on me. Promise?”

  “What’s this about….”

  “Just promise me this. Nobody’s gonna get hurt. It’s gonna be all right. I swear I’ll get you on that train and you’ll be in Bangalore before you know it. Now promise me.”

  “What’s going on? I think….”

  She looked into his eyes and he saw they were soft and sad. “Jason. Please.”

  He sighed as the cab pulled up in front of the shack, the dust cloud enveloping the car as it rocked to a halt. “All right,” he said and he saw the corners of her mouth twitch upward.

  The driver kept his seat as they climbed out of the car. The farmhouse sat in a field of crops—something tall and bushy and green—the field bordered by a wall of palm trees and rainforest. His backpack hanging off his shoulder, the pink Hello Kitty strap even brighter in the sun, he walked around the front of the cab to join Rachel. She slung on her backpack and gripped the straps in front of her chest. He heard her take a deep breath before she stepped onto the path that led to the house.

  Jason had thought the building was abandoned, a farmer forced off his land by high debt or bad luck, but as they got closer he saw homemade rakes and hoes propped against the crumbly wall, and a new plastic cooler sat on a wood bench near the door. Inside he could hear the faint strains of music, sounding much like the big blueprint-banner waving dance number he remembered from Yashila’s debut movie. He could also hear the deep rumble of men’s voices and a hacking smoker’s cough.

  “Remember,” Rachel said, stopping at the door, “don’t say a thing,” the look in her eyes underlining every word. She reached out a knuckle but before she could knock the door was pulled open.

  “Grab a Pepsi if you want one,” a voice shouted out from the darkness. “In the cooler.”

  “What? No beer?” Rachel said, standing taller than Jason remembered as she swaggered into the room. She swung off her backpack and tossed her hair around in the same move. “Hold this,” she said, flipping the light bag to Jason, then turned to face the four men who sat around the table.

  Two of the men were Indian. Small and wiry, they grinned blinding white grins at Rachel, their dark skin and black hair intensifying the effect. They wore tee shirts tucked into dress pants and brown leather sandals on their brown, leathery feet. The other two men wore their dirty blonde hair short but were in need of a trim, the younger one sporting a weak beard that was more red than blonde. He kept his lips tight together as he smiled, sitting shirtless in the dark room.

  At the head of the table the older man balanced a cigarette on his lower lip but still managed to give them a welcoming smile. His shirt was unbuttoned and he wore the white sleeves rolled loosely on his forearms. A black string dangled a small gold cross around his neck.

  “I heard it is offensive not to offer a Canadian a beer,” the man said to Rachel, “but you’ll have to make do with what we have, I’m afraid.” There was a halting rhythm to his words, and his accent and sky-blue eyes reminded Jason of a Nordic hockey player. “Is this your brother?”

  Rachel chuckled, a sound that surprised Jason. “No. He’s just some guy. You want to get this over or what?” She walked up to the table and pulled out the last empty chair with her foot. It was then that Jason noticed the two men who sat on the bed behind him, pistols held across their laps.

  The older man looked at Rachel, leaning back in his chair as he drew on his cigarette. Despite the tin roof it was cool, the open windows channeling a breeze through the room. The man blew out a plume of smoke and it drifted into the face of his shirtless companion, who coughed into his hand. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, turned and yelled something over his shoulder, Hindi with a Swedish cadence. A door opened in a dark corner and a chocolate-skinned Indian brought out a cardboard box big enough to store the cooler. He set it down on the table and the older man stood up and opened the flaps.

  “A man will meet you in Bangalore. He will say his name is Sarosh Mehta and offer you a cab to the gardens at Lal Bagh.” The man looked up from the box. “What do you have to carry this in?”

  Rachel half-turned to Jason. “Take everything out of my backpack and put it in yours. Leave the towel out.”

  Jason paused for a moment, then, sensing her impatience, he stooped down and unzipped their backpacks. He noticed that half of her clothes and her thick guidebook were missing.

  “You ride in the cab until he pulls over,” the man said. “Get out and leave your bag.”

  “Then what?” Rachel said.

  The man shrugged and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “As you wish.”

  Jason was checking the last side pouch when he looked up to see the man lift two flour bag-size packages from the box. Wrapped in tan packing tape, the packages bulged unevenly, thudding on the wooden table as he set them down. Rachel turned again to Jason, snapping her fingers for the bag, which he tossed to her without standing, his hands blindly stuffing toothpaste and underwear into his full backpack.

  Rachel stood up and set the empty bag on the table. “So that’s it?”

  “It’s enough,” the man said, which made his companion laugh and the other men smile.

  “I know you are not a stupid woman,” the man said as Rachel placed the packages in her backpack, “but people sometimes do stupid things. There will be a man on the train, maybe two. They will watch to be sure that you are not tempted.”

  Rachel shook her head as she shifted the tan bags in the backpack, stepping back to pick up the towel from the floor. “You don’t have to worry.” She stuffed the towel in around the packages and zippered the bag shut.

  “But I must worry. You are a determined woman,” the man said to Rachel. “A strong woman. A resourceful woman.” He waited until she looked up at him before continuing. “A passionate woman.”

  The men at the table exchanged dark grins, the shirtless European displaying a row of chipped and tobacco-stained teeth. The way they looked at him as he crouched on the floor made Jason’s chest tighten, and he could feel his face grow hot.

  “Really? That’s sweet, thanks,” Rachel said, her voice carefree and light. “By the way, I’m also one hell of an actress.”

  The older man’s smile held for a moment before leveling out, the men in the room, heads bowed, smirking in the darkness. “Do not fuck this up,” the man said and flicked his fingers toward
s the door.

  Two minutes later they were in the waiting cab, bouncing back down the rutted road.

  “Hold it,” Rachel said when he opened his mouth to speak. “Don’t say a word.” She nodded at the driver and Jason was left to sort out his emotions, the anger that made his clenched fists shake and the fear that tore apart his stomach.

  The driver gunned the engine to get the cab up onto the paved road, turning the car back in the direction they had come. They drove in silence for ten minutes before the driver slowed down to let them off by the side of the road. “Atcha. Twenty minute. Train station,” the man said through the open window, pointing down the road, his head weaving side to side in the hypnotic gesture that Jason had come to realize meant everything from a definite yes to one chance in a million. He sped off without mentioning the fare. Jason waited until the car was a mile down the road before he spoke.

  “That’s drugs in there, isn’t it?” He pointed at her backpack, his hand as shaky as his voice, and fought to keep from yelling.

  Rachel shifted the pack on her back, yanking her Blue Jays cap out of her back pocket. She slapped it open on her thigh and set it on her head, pulling her auburn hair through the opening in the back. She turned away to look down the road. “I have no idea what it is. All I know is that we’ve got to get it to Bangalore.”

  “We?” Jason said, his voice cracking, the shouting ready to start. “We? Where’d you get that idea from? I didn’t ask to be dragged into some drug deal….”

  “You don’t know it’s drugs.”

  “Well, it sure as hell isn’t somebody’s laundry. Those men back there had guns, they all but said they’d kill us if you screw this up.”

  “We’re not going to screw it up,” she said, her voice soft but confident.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Jason said, high-pitched, leaning in as he shouted. “Because there’s no ‘we’ in it.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go alone.”

  “Damn straight. Whatever it is you’ve got in there it could get me thrown in some prison for the rest of my life, which given the fact that we’re in India would probably only be a few days anyway. What were you thinking?”

  “We needed money,” she said, turning around to look at him. “We’re broke.”

  Jason felt his jaw drop open as he thought about her words, then reached back and tore his wallet out of his khaki Dockers. “There was over five hundred dollars in here,” he said, fanning open the empty wallet. “Where are my credit cards? The airline tickets?”

  “They got those, too. But I got the passports back,” she said, patting the security purse she wore under her shirt.

  Jason stood with his mouth open, dizziness mixing in with the nausea. “Who?”

  “The people in Goa.”

  “Who?” he repeated, shouting again.

  “Jason, I don’t know, okay? We got ripped off. Deal with it.” She turned back around and started walking towards the distant station.

  “What do you mean ‘deal with it’? I had five hundred dollars in here.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation I lost everything I had, too.”

  Jason ran a few steps to keep up but stayed behind her on the narrow path on the side of the road. Inches away, an overcrowded bus and a pair of beeping passenger cars raced by, three abreast.

  “And now you’re carrying forty pounds of something that can get us thrown in jail or worse. What the hell, Rachel, what did you do? How could you be so damn stupid?”

  Rachel spun around fast and Jason stumbled to keep from running into her. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was doing, I don’t know how I could have been so damn stupid. I had no fucking clue what to do, is that what you want to hear? That I screwed up? Fine. It’s all my fault. I screwed up. But tell me this, Mr. Perfect.” She jammed a finger into his chest, tapping it in with every syllable, the rapid-fire words hotter than the steaming blacktop. “You have any idea how easy it is to rip off a hysterical woman dragging a delirious, ungrateful bastard down the street, how much she will believe anything—anything—people tell her, especially people who look like her and swear they can help, swear they can get a doctor to look at a friend’s bloody arm, swear that they know a guy who knows a guy who can get his hands on some brand-name antibiotics, no questions asked? How she’ll let them talk her into doing crazy shit just to save this stupid-ass so-called friend? And then leave her with nothing and the guy still dying on the street? And then when you’re crying so hard you can’t fucking breathe somebody all of a sudden comes to the rescue, takes care of everything, gets your friend in to see a real doctor, gets you your passports back and loans you fifty bucks. And all you’ve got to do is deliver a package. You tell me Jason, what would you do?”

  She stared at him, her finger pressed white against his ribs. “I…I…” he stammered.

  Rachel smirked and blew a half-breath out from her dry lips. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” She turned back around and started down the road.

  She was twenty yards away before he moved.

  “Rachel, wait up.” He ran towards her, his backpack swinging him off balance with the extra weight. “Hold on a second, we gotta talk.”

  “There’s no ‘we,’ remember?” she said, walking backwards as she spoke.

  “I didn’t know,” he shouted, a passing truck blasting apart his words with its air horn. “I didn’t know,” he shouted again.

  “Well, now you do. So leave me alone. I can do this myself.” She turned her back to him and started walking faster.

  “For cryin’ out loud, hold on a second,” he said and grabbed a swaying strap of her backpack.

  “Let go,” she said, twisting around far enough to swing a quick right at his head. He leaned back and she missed but followed through with a kick to his shins. “Just leave me alone,” she shouted, yanking the strap from his grip. She reached down the front of her shirt and pulled out the black travel wallet that hung around her neck. She ripped open the Velcro and removed her blue Canadian passport before throwing the wallet at his feet. “Here. Now leave me alone.”

  He watched her for five minutes, until she disappeared around a bend in the road, before he picked up his passport and started walking.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Victoria Terminus was a picture-book example of late nineteenth-century excess, the station at Goa stood for the bland, utilitarian construction of the nineteen-eighties. Other than the flashing lights of a weight & fortune machine by the entrance and the chalkboard listing of the day’s specials at the Veg/Non-Veg Restaurant, the flat, lead-paint white walls were bare. A quarter mile of poured concrete platform stretched out equally in both directions, and overhead steel rafters supported a football field of corrugated tin and dangling fluorescent lights. A cast-iron bridge took travelers across the rail lines for the northbound trains while below, a half-dozen dogs sniffed around the trash-strewn tracks, their sense of smell deadened by generations of over-stimulation.

  Jason had arrived at the station just as the setting sun was touching the tops of the palm trees that lined the entrance for a train that was scheduled to depart at seven minutes after midnight. According to the schedule taped up by the ticket window, this was where the Konkan Kanya Express had dropped them off a few days ago, but when he looked around the open-air, tropical station, he didn’t remember any of it. It had taken the man behind the desk only a few moments to call up the schedules of the various trains that would pass through that night, punch in Jason’s rail pass numbers and print out his berth assignment. It had taken the man’s assistant five minutes to transcribe the laser-printed ticket information into the yard-wide station master’s log in a graceful Palmer-perfect cursive, a bureaucratic tradition computers were not about to change.

  Jason had set up camp parallel to Rachel’s position, just in front of the book vendor’s stand. From where he was now standing he could see Rachel, still slouched down against a support beam, her backpack still hanging around her a
rms. Her eyes seemed fixed on some point miles away, straight across the tracks, the same position she had held for the past two hours.

  He filled the first hour thinking about the stupid, stupid, stupid things he had said, playing them back again and again, amazed at what an asshole he was. He took a break for twenty minutes and tried blaming everything on Rachel, but when that line of reasoning collapsed he returned to his original theme with a renewed sense of certainty. He’d glance down the long platform at the tiny form, growing dim in the early evening light, and think about what was in her backpack and what was in her heart.

  Whatever it was she was carrying—it didn’t have to be drugs but he knew that it was—it was clear from the way the European man spoke it was worth a lot of money and that people would be willing to kill for it. Just like whatever it was he was carrying in his own backpack.

  He wanted to eat something, the smells from the kitchen making his stomach growl with desire, but then he’d think about Rachel and how she had given him the last of the money—money that she had somehow earned when they were broke—and he didn’t feel quite as hungry anymore.

  Walking back from a trip to the men’s room—two rupees to piss down a hole in the cement floor—Jason spotted the Beachfront Internet Café tucked in a dark recess of the station wall, just five miles from the ocean. It was hot and muggy, the room smelling of the herbal shampoos and hemp, the glowing computer stations filled with dreadlock-wearing Europeans and mousy Japanese college students. The boy in charge—fifteen, twenty or thirty-five, depending on how the light hit him—pointed Jason to an open seat. The creeping dial-up connection gave him time to memorize every message in his email account, waiting as each page cleared before the next was called up.

  There were ten real messages and one hundred and fifty pieces of electronic junk. Six of the ten messages were from women he worked with, each one asking when he’d be back, each one telling him how Marcy was fired for stealing money from the coffee kitty, each one swearing him to secrecy.