Out of Order

by Charles Benoit

  The black backpack, minus a strap, sat on the floor between his legs. His right hand pressed against his stomach. He angled his hand back from his shirt, ready to slam it down to stem a gushing red stream, but saw nothing. With both hands he lifted his shirt to his chin and saw a baseball-sized red mark where he knew the bullet had hit him, a round welt where there should have been a bloody hole. He took a deep breath and checked again, rubbing both hands across his body, certain he’d find the wound. It was then that he noticed the small hole in the front of the backpack.

  Grabbing the lone strap, Jason pulled the bag onto his lap. Synthetic fibers fused together, creating a ring of tiny black globs around the edge of the hole, too small to push a pencil through. He unzipped the top flap and felt along the inside of the bag, finding the hole with his fingertips, twisted his hand around and pulled a wadded pair of Rachel’s jeans and some other clothes from the bag. The bullet had made seven holes as it tore through the folds of the jeans, two holes through his favorite polo shirt, four in his last pair of clean khakis. He reached back in the pack and lifted out the sari, a tight bundle with an easy-to-spot hole, a ragged black dot on a red background.

  Resting the sari on the top of the backpack, Jason began to unravel the six yards of intricately patterned silk, the hole appearing anew with each turn of the fabric, his hands moving faster, racing to end the damage, when something small and hard dropped from the bundle and bounced onto the floor of the train, rolling under his outstretched leg. With a shaking thumb and forefinger, Jason retrieved the misshapen slug, holding it up to the light for a full minute before leaning his head out the open train door to throw up on the now roaring tracks.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You really should eat something,” Jason said, digging his fork into his third masala dosa, the rolled, potato-filled crepe hanging off both ends of his plate. He tore off a three-inch piece and dunked it in the low metal dish of sambar, the spicy soup doubling as a dipping sauce. Rachel looked up under the bill of her cap, her nose wrinkling.

  “I don’t dare eat anything spicy,” she said.

  Jason pointed to a neighboring table with a dripping hunk of dosa. “Get a couple of idlis. They’re just steamed rice cakes, not spicy at all.”

  He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and took a long drink of water from the metal cup the waiter had brought with his meal. Rachel watched as he downed half the cup, shaking her head, saying, “You really should stick with bottled water.”

  “I’ve been stabbed, shot, nearly died of an infection, and was robbed by a rabid monkey,” he said, raising the cup up to his lips as he spoke. “You think I’m scared of a little microbe?”

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “Be afraid,” she said in a low growl. “Be very afraid.”

  Jason had sat in the doorway of the rail car until the horizon turned pink from the approaching dawn. Rachel was still asleep, her arms wrapped tight around her backpack, the blanket kicked off in her sleep. Jason had sat on the end of the bed, his head throbbing, too many thoughts crossing paths at the same time. Just before five, Rachel woke up with a start, grabbing a roll of toilet paper from her pack and heading to the restroom, returning forty minutes later, digging through her pack for a clear plastic cosmetic bag and a foil-backed card of shrink-wrapped pills.

  A half hour outside the final station, the chai vendors made their last rounds, one stopping to shake Jason’s hand, miming the song and dance from the night before. Jason bought chai for his section of the car, paying the tab with a lone five-dollar bill he had hidden in his wallet. With ten minutes to go, his fellow passengers started hauling their luggage into the aisle and out onto the entranceway where, as they had slept, one man was shot, saved by a balled-up sari, and another fell flailing to his death. When the Matsayagandha Express entered the station, a herd of red-coated porters climbed aboard, forcing their way down the crowded aisles, each man trying to secure the largest load of luggage, ignoring the light-traveling tourists and focusing on the baggage-heavy families, working out the multi-levy charge in their heads faster than he could have done with a calculator. A minute after the train came to a stop, the car was empty.

  They were standing on the platform, shifting their backpacks and getting their bearings, when one of the porters dashed off the train and handed Jason a paperback, turning and running back before Jason could stop him. Inside the battered copy of The Code of the Woosters, Jason found a five-hundred-rupee note and two bus tickets to Bangalore, their names computer-printed in red.

  The bus station was at the foot of a gently sloping hill, the two-lane street lined with shops and movie theaters, bold letters on one marquee advertising Mera Bhai, Meri Jaan. In a restaurant halfway down the hill, Jason filled in the blanks about Sriram and Vidya, the sari, the computer stalker and the two dead men.

  “If you want me to go on alone,” he had said as they watched the waiter navigate through the breakfast crowd with his serving tray, “I understand completely.”

  “Sure,” she had said, “trying to get rid of me just as it’s getting interesting.”

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting on a cement retaining wall outside the restaurant, watching the traffic go by, waiting to board the ten a.m. bus for the six-hour ride to Bangalore. Bicycle-rickshaws filled the street, the drivers joking with their passengers, coasting down the hill or, standing on the pedals, grunting, struggling back up to the train station. Waves of young school children, their blue uniforms clean and pressed, scurried past, while, lolling behind, their high school brothers and sisters exchanged copied homework papers and sticks of gum.

  “I used to love going to school,” Rachel said, waving to a giggling pack of pre-teens who noticed the roll of toilet paper in her hand. “Especially geography. I had an aunt—Helen—she was a missionary with our church. Lived for years in South Africa. Soweto. This was during apartheid. She had this Zulu spear, called an umkhonto,” she said, hefting the imaginary weapon to her shoulder. “Anyway, I brought it to school, thought the teacher would love it.”

  “I take it she didn’t.”

  “Oh, she loved it all right. It was the principal who had issues. He started ripping into the teacher right there in front of the class, telling her how stupid and irresponsible she was, and I could see she was starting to cry and that pissed me off, so I gave it to him.”

  “The spear?”

  “Just the point,” Rachel said. “Right in the ass. You’d be surprised at all the blood. Anyway, that’s when my mom started home schooling me.”

  Ten yards away, a barber set up shop on the sidewalk, propping a rectangular mirror in a niche on the low wall, setting out his gleaming razors on a dull gray towel. “That really happen, that thing with the spear?” he said.

  “Depends. Do I look heroic or just crazy?”

  Jason watched the barber as he passed the blade back and forth across the leather strop, testing the edge with his calloused thumb, rubbing the blood off on his trousers. “More heroic I think.”

  “Good,” Rachel said, jumping off the wall and slapping the dust off the seat of her baggy jeans. “Then it really happened. Now let me see this infamous sari again.”

  “Here? Out in the open?” Jason said, looking up and down the street.

  Rachel stopped and looked at him. “You think it makes a difference?”

  He thought for a moment and gave a shrug, throwing open the top flap and pulling out the red and gold bundle.

  “Jesus, it’s a wreck,” Rachel said, taking it from him, stuffing her toilet paper in her pocket. “Here. Hold the end.”

  Twisting and turning, the sari unrolled in clumps, drooping to the sidewalk. He knew there’d be holes, he had seen them that morning as he tried to figure out why he wasn’t dead, but he didn’t think there would be this many. Folded and doubled up against itself, the bullet hole multiplied symmetrically, leaving four holes across the yard-wide fabric. The four-hole pattern repeated every foot down the six yards of the fabric, with a f
our-foot space in the middle left intact. “I guess that’s where the bullet got stopped,” Jason said, rubbing the thin silk between his fingers.

  “You sure you only got shot once?” Rachel said, poking her finger through one of the holes. “There’s gotta be fifty holes in this thing.”

  “It’s the way it was wrapped up. It’s just one bullet.”

  “Check it out,” she said, accordion-folding the hole-less middle section, pinching the fabric together until it was no thicker than a magazine. “You were this close to being dead.”

  Jason rolled up the sari from the far end, leaving the embroidered section draped along the wall. “What’s this look like to you?” he asked.

  “You mean besides a bullet hole-ridden sari that smells like cheap cologne?”

  “It wasn’t cheap, and yeah, what’s this pattern, the embroidery, look like?”

  Rachel stepped back to get a better look, her head tilting from side to side, squinting to focus on the pattern alone.

  “Don’t you think it looks like a circuit board?” Jason said. “Like a computer program chip up close?”

  Arms outstretched, Rachel examined the sari. “No.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “It’s just a pattern.” She held the sari by the corner button as Jason rolled up the design.

  “These lines, they could be circuits. And these rounded things, I don’t know, they could be some other kind of computer thing.”

  “You’re reading way too much into it.”

  “Well, there’s something to this sari. That guy last night was going to shoot me to get it.”

  Rachel tilted her head to the side, her ponytail swinging to the side through the opening in the back of her cap. “Is that what you think? That he was after this?” She gave the fabric a final shake.

  “My friend said it was really valuable.”

  “Jason, look at it. The alcohol in the cologne made the colors run, there’s these faded lines where it was folded, and now it’s all full of holes. Even the embroidery is unraveling.”

  “Still, that guy was….”

  “That guy was looking for my backpack,” Rachel said, cutting him off. “But he couldn’t have known I was using it as a pillow. He saw yours—where you left it, on the edge of the bed—thought it was mine, and took it. I mean, what guy has a pink shoulder strap?”

  “What about that man that’s looking for me, the guy on the chat room pages. And there was that guy that gave me this,” he said, holding up his bandaged arm. “That was a week before you even had that crap.” He gestured with his chin at her backpack.

  “You don’t know what he wants. He may just want to meet you. You say this Sriram guy had lots of friends. Okay, so maybe he’s an old friend. You got the number. Call him.”

  Jason shook his head. “He also had a lot of enemies.”

  “Oh god,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You have something more important to worry about than some computer hacker.”

  “You mean going with you to drop off those packages?”

  “Worse,” she said, pulling the roll of toilet paper out of her baggy cargo pocket. “You’ve got to explain to your friend’s mother why you ruined her son’s last gift. Now wish me luck. I’m going to try using that public bathroom.”

  Chapter Twenty

  In a single, perfected move, Mukund Chaudhary checked his mirrors, downshifted to second gear, singled his intention, and swung the fifty-passenger bus around the slow-moving flatbed that was itself overtaking an even slower tractor-trailer on the two-lane road that wound uphill into a blind curve. It was almost noon and he was ten minutes behind schedule, not that anyone at Mangalore Transport would care. He could pull his bus in four hours late and no one would say a word, but after five years driving the same route, hitting the target landmarks on time was a personal, if not professional, goal.

  The engine revved hard and he felt the tires on his side of the bus slip off the paved highway and onto the hard-packed shoulder, a tactile signal that he was an inch or two from sliding along the metal guardrail. Fortunately, the guardrail on this section of the highway had been taken out a year ago by a doomed lorry driver from Madras as his flaming truck tumbled down the mountain side, so Mukund didn’t have to worry about scratching the paint on the company-owned bus.

  For a moment, the three vehicles ran abreast, spanning the entire width of National Highway Forty-Eight. Foot to the floor, the bus moved ahead of the flatbed that was struggling to pass the creeping tractor-trailer. After flicking on his directional, he cut in front of both vehicles, just in time to give the horn a friendly toot, waving hello to a rival bus company driver who came full-speed around the bend. Behind him, Mukund heard the two tourists suck in their breath and he could picture them, eyes-wide, gripping onto the arm rests or onto each other, certain they were about to die. Mukund made a mental note to cut it a little closer next time.

  There wasn’t a ten-meter stretch of the route that Mukund didn’t know as well as he knew his own home. The crumbling pavement outside of Bantval, the traffic-choked area around Sakaleshpur with its busloads of pious Jain pilgrims, the constant road work between Hassan and Channarayaptna, the thousands of bends and twists of the blacktop as it snaked through the mountain passes—he could close his eyes and see all of it. The six-hour morning run to Bangalore he could do in his sleep. The run back to Mangalore—the last two dead-tired hours coming in the dark jungle foothills—well, that was different. He didn’t just drive his bus, an air-conditioned Tata that wasn’t even three years old yet, he controlled it, dominated it, like an expert rider controlling a fiery thoroughbred. And yet they gasped as if he didn’t see the bus coming headlong at them. Damn tourists.

  He kept his foot on the gas pedal, slowing down just as he came up to the back end of a truck hauling burlap bags of rice, the words Horn Please ornately painted on the tailgate. Mukund hit the horn twice as he shot by, staying in the wrong lane even after he was well past the truck. He glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure the tourist couple was watching.

  The first thing he had noticed about the man when he climbed aboard the bus was the long gauze bandage on his left arm. He had been watching as the man had replaced an older, dirty bandage with a smaller one, doing the whole thing one-handed, easy, biting the white medical tape from the roll with his teeth like he’d been wearing the thing his whole life. From where he had been sitting, Mukund didn’t think it was much of a cut, but he knew that it was the small cuts that were most trouble. The man needed a shave and his clothes looked like he’d slept in them, but overall he didn’t look like the typical scruffy western tourists that took the bus, anyone with money hiring a car, cutting an hour at least from the trip.

  Mukund tried not to stare too much at the woman. Her hair was dark but when the light caught it right it seemed red—not a henna-based red, something richer, more natural—but for some reason she bunched it all up under a grimy, long-billed cap. She smiled at him when she had climbed aboard the bus, asking if the bus had a restroom, him pretending he didn’t understand just to draw out the conversation, captivated by her bright eyes and beautiful smile, that lean, hard build. She had to be the one from the note.

  In the mirror, Mukund watched as the man closed his eyes and looked away from the front window. It was that kind of disrespect, that open lack of confidence in his driving ability, that questioning of his skills, that Mukund hated most. He yanked the bus back in his lane, waving to the cement truck driver who didn’t wave back, too busy screaming as he stood on his brakes, long, smoking black lines appearing under his locked-up rear tires.

  The other passengers rode in proper silence, eyes glued to the TV monitors, Shah Rukh Khan lip-synching the title track to a tear-jerker film. Two movies, a clean toilet on board, reclining seats and a fifteen-minute rest stop at the halfway point—what more could you ask for?

  But Mukund knew what they were asking for. A rail line. For decades there had been talk about connecting the
two cities, politicians proclaiming that, if elected, they would drive the final stake themselves, one more promise forgotten the day after the voting, the geography blamed for the delay. It was all hills and sharp bends and swamps. Maybe—someday—a narrow gauge line like the one they had up in Simla, a toy train that would take three times as long as the bus. But a proper rail line? Not possible.

  Then the computer boom. Bangalore—sleepy little garden-city Bangalore—suddenly the Silicon Valley of the East, whatever the hell that meant, everybody moving there, all those high-tech companies starting up, failing, starting up again, money everywhere, pensioners forced out of their hometown by the high rents, those young guppies or puppies, whatever you call them, driving brand-new cars, not content with Ambassadors, no, demanding Toyotas and Hondas and Mercedes. Demanding a rail line, a real one, getting it from a New Delhi government cowed by their success. The line would be complete in a year, maybe two. The smaller bus companies were selling out already, the bigger ones scaling back. He had four years at most before he would be out of a job, already thinking about the money he’d be missing. A thousand rupees to see that the backpack stays on the bus? Easy money.

  Ahead, an overturned truck, its lights still on, its wheels still spinning, had dumped a load of stone in the street. He downshifted and stopped, waiting for his turn to move around the wreck, the dazed truck driver clearing a path with a broken-handled shovel. Mukund looked back into his mirror, wondering what the hell they were doing now, the cute girl holding up part of a ratty old sari, sticking her fingers through little round holes, holding the fabric up to her nose and laughing, punching the man in his shoulder, the man rubbing the spot like it actually hurt, the girl leaning over, kissing him on the cheek, then the mouth, again, right in public, the guy making a veil out of the fabric, covering their faces, probably kissing under the red sari.