Out of Order

by Charles Benoit

  He knew it was coming but he still flinched when the officer told him to undress. They turned his clothes inside out, yanked the padded instep from his Nikes and removed the laces. He stood naked, not knowing where to put his hands, shaking even though it was hot in the windowless room, and listened as the Matsayagandha Express pulled into the station.

  The man behind the desk picked up Jason’s green rail pass and printed ticket from the pile of papers he had built next to a pair of Rachel’s jeans.

  “You have a ticket for this train.” It wasn’t a question but Jason still said yes. The man said something to the others, which made them laugh, but he kept the same flat, cryptic look.

  “Do you always sing in public?”

  “No sir, th-this was the first time I ever did anything like that,” Jason stammered and he realized as he said it that it was the truth.

  The officer looked back at the pile of papers and thumbed through his passport for the tenth time. “I have one last question for you, Mr. Jason Talley,” he said, looking right into Jason’s eyes. “What did you do with the money?”

  Streams of cold sweat ran down his sides and his stomach muscles cramped. He held his hands tight against his crotch to keep them from shaking. “Money?” he said, his voice dry, and he thought about the packages in Rachel’s bag, small bundles that could be anything.

  “Yes. The money.”

  Jason swallowed and focused on his words. “What money?”

  “The money your mother gave you for singing lessons,” the officer said as he stood up and placed his cap on his head. “You had better hurry if you are going to make your train.”

  Through the closed door he could hear the three men laughing as they left the station.

  ***

  The train was already moving when Jason sprinted out of the stationmaster’s office, jumping through the door of the last passenger car with ten feet of platform to spare, his swinging backpack pinballing him into the narrow passage. An old man stood looking out the opposite door. He gave a friendly nod as Jason, panting, leaned against the wall by the restroom door.

  His rail pass guaranteed him a berth in a first-class sleeper. If the Matsayagandha Express was like the other trains he had seen in India, he would have to pass through twenty third-class cars and cut through the kitchen car before he reached the air-conditioned portion of the train, three or four cars with cushioned seats and reading lights and hefty price tags. Unlike the first-class cars, there was no heavy, soundproof door separating this entrance area from the wooden benches that served as seats and, now, as beds. He took his pack off, held it by the good strap, and started down the aisle.

  The seating arrangement was the same in third class as it was in first, the car subdivided into a dozen alcoves, each with forward and rear-facing benches. In first class the thick, padded backrest swung up to create a second tier bed—in third the hard beds were bolted into place, three tiers high. Each alcove in first class offered dark blue privacy curtains, third class making do with saris knotted to support poles or nothing at all. People slept three to a berth, their luggage chained to the bench frame to deter on-board thieves or crammed in the corner, serving as rough pillows. There had been close to a hundred people waiting for the train at Goa station and he spotted a few who were trying to settle in among the passengers, most of whom had been aboard for hours. They smiled and stepped out of the way as he passed, the train’s movement adding some strange steps to the dance.

  The car ended in an entrance area that was the mirror image of the one he had climbed aboard, complete with two restrooms, a child-sized sink and twin doors that stood open to let in the cool night air, the roar of the train a small price to pay. Two long steps took him through the passage that linked the cars, and he was glad that it was too dark to see the tracks that raced below.

  The pattern repeated for the next twenty-four cars—dark passageway, entrance area, crowded benches, entrance area, dark passageway. Sometimes there were men standing in the open doorways, watching the night go by, smoking little joint-like cigarettes under the No Smoking signs, sometimes he bumped into people going in or coming out of the restroom, a single-seater that lacked a seat, just an aluminum basin low on the floor that flushed onto the tracks. In every car there were snores that drowned out the train, a crying baby that drowned out the snores, and someone in the middle of the aisle, bags open, driven by an insomniac urge to repack his luggage.

  The white-coated chai vendors and the teeshirt-wearing cooks were enjoying a late-night snack in the kitchen when Jason walked through. One of the cooks held out a wrapped sandwich and motioned for Jason to take it, shrugging his shoulders to say it wasn’t a big deal, another setting a cup of milky chai on the box that served as their makeshift table. Jason thanked him and took a seat, not realizing how hungry he was until he held the sandwich in his hands.

  From a metal kitchen drawer one of the cooks pulled a boom box, setting it on the floor by his feet as he hit the play button. He skipped the first few tracks on the CD to reach a slow ballad, the woman singing in an impossibly high voice. The men around the tabled bobbed their heads in time with the music, and although he didn’t know the words, Jason sensed she sang of lost love and missed opportunities. When the song ended the man skipped back to play it again.

  The sandwich was good, chicken maybe, or some deep-fried vegetable. One of the chai vendors, a sleepy-eyed adolescent working the midnight shift, pointed to Jason’s sneakers and laughed, and Jason held up a leg for the others to see the missed eyelets and huge bows of a ten-second lace-up, laughing along with the boy. One of the chai vendors tapped Jason on the arm. “Policeman?” he asked, pointing back down the tracks, and Jason nodded, drawing sympathetic grunts around the table.

  The CD moved on to a bouncy number built around a call and response refrain. By the second verse they were all clapping and singing along. He’d had enough singing for the night, but Jason kept the beat on the bottom of an overturned plastic bucket. The third time through the song, Jason added polyrhythmic flourishes to the backbeat, finishing up with a double-handed drum roll and a geographically incorrect Olé. He left the kitchen a half-hour later, the cook handing him two more sandwiches, adding the same no-big-deal shrug.

  Although it had the same basic layout as its third-class cousins, the entrance area of the first-class car was cleaner and, with a fifteen-watt bulb in the ceiling-mounted fixture, better lit. The parallel restrooms—one featuring the aluminum hole, the other a chipped and stained porcelain toilet—jogged out of the walls, narrowing the passage further. The car’s doors stood open, held in place by the train’s momentum, and through the doors the lights of distant villages and the more distant stars stood out against the black night. Jason opened the heavy, soundproof door to first class and shook as a blast of mechanically chilled air swept down his shirt. The door closed with a muffled thump behind him and he started down the passage, looking for his assigned berth. He was halfway down the car when a hand reached out from behind a blue curtain and caught his pant leg.

  “So, Santa,” Rachel’s voice said in the darkness, “am I back on your nice list?”

  Jason pulled back the curtain. She was sitting alone on the cushioned bench, the backrest still in place. On the two bunks across from her he could see the sprawled-out bodies of a pair of travelers, mouths open, drooling, decorum lost to sleep. She slid over and patted the seat next to her. He sat down and fished the sandwiches out of his pack, handing her both. “I think it’s chicken,” he said.

  Rachel peeled back the corner of the white paper and nibbled at the bread. “You eat?” she asked.

  “Back in the kitchen,” Jason said, his thumb pointing the direction.

  Rachel nodded and re-wrapped the sandwich. “I’m not hungry,” she said and handed it back.

  He leaned over and lowered his voice. “Listen, Rachel, what I said back there on the road…well, what I didn’t say…hell, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” she said, ju
st as soft. “Jason, you’re not sorry. You’re fucking amazing.” In the darkness he felt her reach over and squeeze his hand. “But I’m still not hungry.”

  “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I know. I should be starved, but I’m not. Maybe it’s nerves.”

  Jason chuckled. “Nerves? What do you have to be nervous about?”

  “I’m afraid,” she said, cuddling up next to him, resting her head on his sloping shoulder, “you might start singing again.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The train made three different sounds as it headed south towards Mangalore.

  There was the low rumbling sound of hard earth beneath the thick foundation of crushed stone and cement sleepers, half buried in the red clay, a never-ending roll of thunder that boomed up through the open door. When they blew through a village station or over an improved roadway the rumble jumped an octave, the sound thinner as it echoed off the concrete runners, there and gone as fast as a speeding train through a no-name town.

  But it was when they crossed over a trestle bridge and sound dropped off to a whisper that the train was most frightening. The first time it happened Jason felt his grip tighten on the vertical handrails that ran outside the train’s east-facing door, a split-second of terror as he imagined the car flying off the tracks and hurtling down into the sliver of moon reflected in the wide, shallow river. It was a silence that hinted at long drops and pointed rocks.

  Jason tried standing like Rachel had stood on that first train trip to Jaipur, one hand on the rail, the other in his pants’ pocket, but the darkness and the unfamiliar sensation of leaning out an open doorway of a speeding train compelled both hands into place.

  He had left Rachel asleep in the berth, wrapped in a thick blanket the purser had set on the end of the bed when he saw how she was shaking. She had made a quick dash back to the restrooms, then a second trip, not so rushed, before falling asleep. Jason had sat by the aisle, Rachel’s feet against his leg, and eaten one of the sandwiches, the caffeine from all that chai holding open his eyes. Other than the rumbling thunder of the train, it was quiet when he eased down the length of the car and passed through the soundproof door to stand with his toes hanging out into the warm, black Indian night, a giddy charge running up his spine.

  On the ground by the tracks he could see his shadow cast from the weak bulb that lit the entrance area, jumping up to face him as they cut through an embankment, stretching flat again when they hit the open plains, falling away when they flew across a bridge, nothing but air between him and whatever lay below. Lights a mile away stayed in view for minutes while trackside images blurred past. Men with kerosene lamps leading elephant-drawn carts, a mob of late-night bicyclists lined up at an unguarded crossing, a lean-to convenience store with a flickering Coca-Cola sign, miles and miles and miles of farmland or forest, he couldn’t tell which, and in the distance, hills that rose and rolled like those around Corning, his mind suddenly filled with images of his hometown, his job, his street, his apartment, his dead neighbors.

  There was no reason why it couldn’t have been a murder-suicide. It seemed that the news was filled with stories of husbands or boyfriends or brothers unloading their anger into a loved one before taking their own lives. To the victims’ families it always came as a shock, no one seeing it coming, the couple appearing so happy, so in love. The psychologists explained to the viewers at home that the men who committed these acts—it was always men—had suppressed their true emotions for so long that they were—again always—“ticking time bombs.” But the authorities were quick to reassure the public that these incidences were “rare,” saying the same comforting lines the next time it happened. Men snapped, Jason reasoned, it happened. But not Sriram.

  Sriram loved to talk about computers, about technology and the “magic” that was this frickin’ close to being commonplace, his eyes sparkling as he threw out acronym-laced examples and Asimovian applications. Sure, there were complaints about the job, but it was all the usual crap—co-workers who didn’t pull their weight, supervisors who didn’t know heads from holes in the ground, copiers that jammed in sync with deadlines, all for a paycheck that wasn’t worth the trouble. But Jason knew that Sriram had loved it. He never complained about the long hours or the stress and Jason never heard a bad word about Raj-Tech’s owner.

  “It must be nice to work for a friend,” Jason said one night as they sipped beers on the front porch of the apartment building, and he remembered how Sriram had sighed.

  “I can never forget what Ravi did,” Sriram had said. “Someday I hope to pay him back.” Jason sighed now as he recalled the line, wondering how many things he would leave undone if he died.

  Not a hell of a lot.

  His work at the mortgage company had been divvied up before he left—if he never returned they’d either hire someone to fill his cubicle or, more likely, tell the others the increased workload was now the norm. His parents lived less than ten miles away, but it was different now. No traumatic blowups for the Talleys, just a steady, comfortable slide apart, a neat and predictable relationship, uncomplicated by any real emotions. They were willing to watch Bindi—his cat by default—but he knew enough not to ask for more.

  He had a few friends in town, none as close as Mike Myles, his best friend since fourth grade. Mike who showed him how to talk to girls, Mike who helped him get a fake ID, Mike who got him to skip school once in their senior year, Mike who made a special late-night trip to drop him off at the Syracuse airport the first time he flew to Daytona, Mike who went and fell asleep as he drove back home. No one knew how to get in touch with Jason in Florida, and when his return flight landed and Mike was not at the airport as planned and he was forced to pay close to two hundred bucks to rent a car to get home, he had left a long and angry message on Mike’s machine, Mike’s mom calling him the next day to apologize for her dead son’s irresponsibility. You only get so many best friends, Jason knew, and he’d used up his allotment, owing them both more than he ever gave.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his mind back into his office cubicle.

  The gray fabric partition walls. The Far Side cartoons. A plastic Spiderman scaling the side of his monitor. The quarter-inch thick stack of pre-printed, gold-bordered certificates, thumbtacked next to the phone extension list. Most Third-Quarter, Non-Government Loans Prepared Within Mandatory State Guidelines. Quickest Turnaround in Post-Closing Deviation to Correction. Fewest Errors in Calculating APR Rate (Final Copy). Most Festive Desk Decoration, Halloween. There was no aspect of his job he didn’t know, no documentation process he hadn’t mastered. He was twenty-seven years old and the thing he did better than anyone else was file forms.

  You can be anything you want, the guidance counselors had said, paralyzing him with limitless options. He had fallen into his job, a vague position, difficult to explain, impossible to justify. He could walk away any time he wanted to, something that made him more depressed than the thought of staying.

  The train sped on, fewer towns, no lights, the conductor sounding the horn now and then to keep him company, the train whistling in the dark. He was leaning back, legs crossed, one hand white on the handrail, when the man came out of the first-class car carrying his backpack.

  For the five seconds it took the man to push the heavy door shut behind him, the chilled air from the car whooshing around the backpack dangling by the man’s legs and out the open doors on both sides of the train, Jason tried to place where he had seen that backpack before. He could see where someone had stitched up a nasty tear on the top flap, the kind of tear a monkey might make as it searched for tasty toiletries, and there was a bit of red thong poking out of a side pocket that he thought he recognized. But it was the Hello Kitty pink padded replacement shoulder strap that made his brain snap awake.

  The man was turning around, heading across the entrance area for the passageway that would lead down the train to third class, when Jason grabbed at his wrist, the green fabric of the man’s
windbreaker bunching up under his fingers, Jason’s hand wrapping around the bony forearm.

  “What the hell are you doing with my bag?” Jason said, knowing the answer, knowing it was a stupid thing to say.

  The man’s eyes widened as connections were made and he jerked his arm free, pulling the backpack up and away as he swung a fist into Jason’s jaw. Jason didn’t notice the hit as he stepped forward and grabbed the black shoulder strap, yanking the bag and the man towards him. A second punch, hard on his cheek, made Jason wince but he held tight to the strap, opening his eyes, things now in slow-motion, watching as the man jerked a black pistol out of his waist band, fumbling to get his finger around the guard and onto the trigger, the roar of the train gone as they crossed a trestle bridge. With both hands on the strap, Jason pushed forward, the backpack crushed between them, the pistol, trapped, held flat against the man’s stomach. The man’s face was inches away, his breath smelling of ginger and tobacco, both men focused on the bag and their balance. Jason pushed, his sneakers slipping on the dusty linoleum floor, the man pushing back, somehow stronger, his arm rising as he worked the pistol free. Jason gripped the strap and gave one final push, his knee snapping up, slamming into the man’s groin, the man gasping, holding tight to the pink strap as Jason rocked back and kicked, his heel thrust into the man’s gut, launching the man backwards, the pack now suspended between them, the gun, free, leveling, the twin cracks as the pink snaps broke free, the man a foot above the cabin floor, the bright flash in his hands, a moment in midair, pink strap waving, the train’s whistle covering any scream, then the dark Indian night, high above an unseen river.

  With the flash and the faint pop, Jason doubled over, the pack in the way, a sharp jab catching him just below the ribs. He slumped, sliding down the wall, the backpack flopping against his legs. Eyes closed, his breath came in half-gasps and he ran a hand down the front of his shirt, feeling for the warm dampness. When his hand, still dry, reached the top of his jeans, he moved it back up to where it hurt and rubbed, feeling for the hole in his shirt. When he didn’t find it, he opened his eyes and looked down.