Out of Order (13 page)

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 arms. 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.

Two messages were from people he didn’t know, the first from a man in Mumbai asking Jason to call when he arrived. Since Mumbai was hundreds of kilometers and many days behind them, he deleted the message. The second unknown sender identified himself as Ketan Jani, the chief computer systems manager for A1 Call Center Services.

“Our mutual friend in Jaipur, Mr. Attar Singh, has forwarded your itinerary and updated me on your journey. Contact me when you arrive here in Bangalore. I can recommend several pleasant accommodations that you and your lovely wife will most enjoy.” Jason printed out the man’s letter and contact information but doubted that he would call. It would be too difficult to explain his lovely wife’s absence.

Two messages remained, the first from Ravi Murty.

“I trust your trip is going well and that you don’t find India to be too overwhelming. When I first arrived in India to attend college I was stunned. I had never seen so many people in my life. And the poverty! It was too much for this Sooner! Well, as long as you keep your sense of humor intact, you’ll do fine.”

Around the small room, touch typists and hunt-and-peckers rapped out emails to all points of the world, the clicking keyboards reminding Jason of the clacking rails of his journey. He thought about his first day in India, sitting on a bus filled with geriatric tourists, with Danny, the fast-talking tour director, assuring everyone that the tour’s minute-by-minute itinerary made India completely hassle-free. He knew that if he had stayed with the tour he wouldn’t be where he was now, waiting for a late-night train out of Goa, a short chain of evidence connecting him to a backpack of drugs and a shit-load of trouble.

No hassles.

No delays.

And no Rachel.

He laughed to himself as he thought about his choice.

“Drop me a line now and then to let me know that you are safe,” Ravi’s email continued. “And be sure to contact my representatives in Bangalore. They know the city inside and out and can save you a lot of headaches. I’m in the midst of finalizing an outsourcing deal with a company there and it’s a nightmare trying to navigate that bureaucracy. I hope to avoid a trip to India, something I’m sure you’ll agree is a good idea!”

When the monkey had swung across the Jaipur streets with his backpack or as he stood on the platform in Ahmadabad, blood spurting onto the dusty concrete, Jason was sure he would have agreed with Ravi. But it wasn’t all thieving fleabags and homicidal attacks, and avoiding India would mean avoiding the other things as well—the sweet taste of masala chai, the faces of the children as they looked up at the tall, white man, Attar, Narvin, Laxmi and the someday-starlet Yashila, the unexpected landscape that flew past the train window, the unimaginable poverty, the unimaginable wealth, the way that, no matter where he was, he saw things he had never seen before and knew he’d never see again. This wasn’t Spring Break in Daytona, and for the first time Jason realized that he was glad. He clicked the little arrow and waited as Ravi’s message inched closed and the next message scrolled open on the screen.

“I trust that you and Rachel enjoyed Goa,” Narvin Kumar’s email began. “It’s a good place to flush the glitzy bullshit of Bollywood out of your system. For your sake I hope she didn’t keep up that silly ‘I’m his sister’ routine. That could make for some tough nights. Tell Rachel that when Laxmi finally runs off to marry some rich Indian ex-pat, I’ll be giving her a call.” There was no little typed symbol but Jason could picture Narvin’s playful wink.

“Drop me a line when you get to Bangalore. I’ve got a project starting there this week and might drop in to see you.”

Under his computer-generated signature and the three-color logo for his company, Narvin added a postscript and Jason felt his stomach roll as he read.

“I called that number the night you left. I figured you might as well get it over with. Lucky for you I was in my car and the call didn’t go through. The next day I saw this on that website and figured you had enough going on without me making it worse. Good luck.” Jason clicked on the small icon and waited fifteen minutes for the attachment to open.

It was a simple Word document, cut and pasted from the chat room Narvin had showed him that afternoon in Mumbai.

“I’m looking for Mr. Jason Talley, traveling through India with female companion named Rachel Moore. I need to find him. I will pay $500 US for valid information and I will honor any requests to remain anonymous.” There was no return email address and no signature, just the phone number that was already burned into his memory.

“It is the time of the closing,” the boy manager of the Beachfront Internet Café said. Jason looked up and noticed that he was the last person in the room, the others slipping past, his attention focused on the screen. Jason signed off and walked to the desk.

“How much?”

“Eight hundred and ten rupees,” the boy said, holding up the calculator as proof.

“The sign says twenty rupees for thirty minutes. I was on, what, an hour?” Jason said, pointing to the list of rates posted above the first terminal.

The boy’s head started swaying. “
Ahcha
. Just fifty minutes.”

“So it should only be forty rupees.”

“It is thirty-five rupees for the Internet,” the boy said, “and seven hundred seventy-five rupees for the printings.” He hefted an inch-thick stack of papers out of the wire basket next to the printer.

“I didn’t print those. Okay, maybe a few, but not all that.”

“You are the last one here. The columns must balance at the end of my shift.” He ran his finger down a long list of numbers in the ancient register book.

Jason shrugged his shoulders. “That’s not my problem, pal. I’ll pay for mine but….”

“The rules are most clear on this point,” the boy said and flipped open a three-ring binder on the desk to reveal a single typed sheet encased in plastic. He spun the book around, his index finger pointing to the relevant bullet.

“Look, I don’t care what it says. I didn’t print these out.”

The boy gave a sympathetic smile. “These must be paid for.”

Jason pulled a paper from the bottom of the pile. “Here,” he said, holding the sheet out for the boy to see. “This says it was printed at fourteen hundred hours. That’s what? Two in the afternoon? And how long did you say I was here?”

“Fifty minutes.”

“Right. So how can I have printed these?”

“But the rules….”

“The hell with the rules,” Jason said, his voice rising above the hum of the worthless ceiling fans. “The rules are just stupid. And I’m not paying. What does your rule say about that?”

The boy gave his head another side-to-side waggle. “The rules must be followed. As such, the rules state that I must now report you to the station master who will then notify the local police….”

“The police?” Jason said as he thought about all it meant.

“This is the rule.” The boy tapped the laminated sheet as proof.

Jason paused long enough to sigh before handing over the money. He scooped up the papers and headed for the door.

“No sir,” the boy said, blocking the door with his arm. “You can not yet go.”

“But I paid. You can’t call the police now.”

“You must wait for your receipt. It is the rule.”

***

It was eleven-thirty when the police arrived at the station.

Jason had been sitting alone on a wooden bench reading and grouping the papers he had bought. A third were in French or German or Spanish or some other language that used the same alphabet, none of which he could read. Another third were printed in a font he had never seen before, tiny circles and boxes and dashes that gave him a headache to look at. He made separate piles for each assumed language, tapping even the edges of the stacks on the back of the bench before tossing them in the trash.

The printouts in English were mostly hardcopies of email letters—important reminders of the things people had come to Goa to forget. Updates on family members in Helsinki, reminders about college registration deadlines and syrupy notes from pining lovers, counting the days till this “finding yourself” bullshit was over. There were papers that Jason was certain someone would be tearing backpacks apart later to find—an invitation to a full-moon party on Ko Samui, complete with a detailed map and stock drawings of pot leaves, a list of phone numbers of reputable escort services in Athens, the address of an Australian abortionist in Madras who took credit cards, names of pawn shops in Calcutta that didn’t ask a lot of questions. He subdivided the money-from-home letters into three piles—ones that promised to wire funds to a Western Union office, ones that said they would not, and ones that said that this was absolutely the last and final time money would be sent, noting in capital letters or italicized type or both that they meant it this time.

There were a handful of “hilarious” forwards that “you
have
to read”—fifty reasons why a beer is better than a woman, fifty reasons why a cucumber is better than a man, two pages of light bulb jokes, ten pages of lawyer jokes, a list of stupid laws in Texas and the same list of laws, this time from Alberta. He was re-reading a piece downloaded from a London comedy club’s website—a “wafty crank of a monologue” that took on the way Americans “try” to speak and write in English—when he thought about Mrs. Maxwell.

Every student agreed that Mrs. Maxwell was the best teacher at West Corning High School. Her classes watched whole episodes of
Cheers
so they could learn about character development, they could rap out their evaluations of stories instead of writing essays, they read the comic book version of
Mice and Men
, they did collages, they held parties, they played Pictionary. You can’t cage the learner, she liked to say. Jason was never late for her class, never jerked around and, as the ninth grade standardized test at the end of the year proved, never learned a thing.

Every student agreed that Mr. Switzer was the worst teacher at West Corning High School. His classes were painful, nothing but sheet after sheet of equations and questions, the word problems lacking so much as a single damn train leaving a station. Correct answers on wrinkled papers were marked wrong, stray marks lowered test scores, and don’t even think about cheating. A disciplined mind starts with a disciplined desk, he said. No one was late, no one misbehaved, and no one scored less than a ninety on the standardized test.