What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  “There’s a VIP area. To let us take breaks. But only short breaks.”

  “There is?”

  “The publicist told us when we came in.”

  Josie nods as if she’s already lost interest.

  The VIP area is a large cabana with a small bar and lounge chairs inside. No one in there but the bartender. Max escorts Josie to the chair farthest from the entrance. She sits with an air of just doing what she’s told. “What are you drinking?” he asks her.

  “Water.”

  “Have you tried a Bronwyn?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you want one?” He smiles. “They’re powerful.” Though he hasn’t had one yet.

  “No thanks.”

  So he gets one for himself. It tastes like absinthe and rum. “This will knock me on my ass,” he tells Josie. “Just like you.”

  She summons the faintest glimmer of a smile. She won’t make eye contact, her gaze skittering away every time he tries. His sense of patient effort suddenly gives way and he feels offended, perhaps even grievously. Can’t she see he’s trying to take care of her? Then he registers that she’s struggling not to cry.

  One afternoon, when he was Malachi and she was Bronwyn and they were sitting on set between takes of a passionate scene, waiting for a camera adjustment, he obeyed an impulse to keep touching her. He picked up her hand. They weren’t in private—though they had a privacy between them, belonging as they did to a world no one else in the room inhabited—and if they had been in private, to touch her when they weren’t acting was a complicated thing. So now he’d taken her hand and needed a purpose for having done so. He turned her palm up and wrote HI in it with his finger. She looked at him quizzically so he did it again. She got it and smiled. Then he traced the word SLOW, meaning they were taking forever and he was impatient to get back into the scene, to plug back into that energy before it drained away. She nodded. He turned his hand up so she could reply. Very slowly, her finger tickling his palm, she wrote STAY. She paused and looked at him. He nodded and she went on: WITH. ME. Then even more slowly—his heartbeat rapid now, the cameras forgotten—she wrote MALACHI.

  That’s the real thing between you, Max. She was Bronwyn. You were Malachi.

  He has a pen in his pocket, ready for autographs. He takes it out, picks up her palm, and writes WHAT’S WRONG? across it.

  She closes her fist around the question. She doesn’t look at him. He thinks she’s not going to answer. Then she holds out her hand for the pen, and he gives it to her and opens his palm. She takes his hand and writes, I’M PREGNANT. She allows him a moment to look at it, then takes his wet cocktail napkin and scrubs the words from his palm.

  “Charlie’s?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “You just learned this?”

  “Today.” She smiles ruefully. “I sent my bodyguard to buy a test. Bet that’s a first. Or, who knows, maybe not.” Now she looks at him. “It was that question in the panel. Suddenly I knew it.”

  “You really called it on them wanting us to have babies.”

  “I really did.” Her eyes glisten. She presses a finger to one, then the other.

  “Does Charlie know?” She’s pregnant, he thinks. She’s pregnant. It hits him that he’s tired and a little bit sad.

  “I can’t get hold of him. He won’t call me back. I don’t even know where he is.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  “I don’t think that he wants to be found. At least not by me.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  “If I do find him, what do I say?”

  “Natalia said to me, ‘Guess what?’ and I knew.”

  “You were trying?”

  He nods.

  “Were you happy?”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “Do you think he’ll be happy?”

  His first instinct is to say Of course or Who wouldn’t be? He suppresses it in favor of the truth. “I don’t know the guy.”

  She lets out a long breath. “Shit.”

  “Listen, call him now.”

  “What? Now?”

  “Just get it done. It’ll be better when it’s done.”

  “Oh God. I don’t know if I can.”

  “I’ll stay right with you. We’ll come up with a line and you’ll say it. And just look at me. You can say it to me.”

  “What line?”

  “Say, ‘Hi, it’s me.’”

  “Not ‘Hi, it’s Josie’?”

  “Do you want to be formal or intimate?”

  “I don’t know. What should I be?”

  “Intimate,” he says. “Definitely intimate.”

  “Okay. So I say, ‘Hi, it’s me.’”

  “And then something to prepare him, like, ‘I have some news.’”

  “‘Hi, it’s me, I have some news.’ He’ll probably think I got a part.”

  “Or another guy.”

  “So, something after ‘I have news’?”

  “How about, ‘I’m sorry not to tell you this in person’?”

  “Then he’ll think I’m sick. I’ve got cancer or an STD.”

  “Or another guy.”

  “He’ll be prepped for bad news. Do I want him prepped for bad news?”

  “If the pregnancy’s bad news, you prepared him. If it’s good news, he’s extra thrilled. If it’s okay news, it’ll seem better because he’ll be relieved.”

  She’s nodding intently. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” She snaps open her clutch and extracts her phone, presses the screen, then abruptly loses her air of authoritative certainty. She looks at Max with fear.

  “Say it to me.”

  She lifts the phone to her ear, grips his hand tightly with her free one. She keeps her eyes on him. She says the line.

  “Good,” he says. “Good.”

  She’s looking at the phone in her hands. “What do I do if he still doesn’t call me back?”

  He puts his arm around her. He does this instead of saying he doesn’t know. This is a moment, for Max, of piercing regret. Not because he won’t be sleeping with her, or not only because of that. Because it occurs to him that this is as close as he’s ever come in his real-life time with Josie to the intimacy they had when they were not themselves, to the way he felt about her on the show.

  VI.

  What happens to a human being when he, for some reason, undergoes tragic (or heroic) experiences? We will stress only one feature of such a state of mind: he feels as if the average boundaries of his ego are broken; he feels that psychologically as well as physically he is exposed to certain forces which are much stronger, much more powerful than he himself. His tragic experience comes, takes possession of him and shakes his entire being . . . This sensation remains the same whether it is caused by an inner tragic conflict, as in the case of Hamlet’s main conflicts, or whether the blow comes from outside and is brought about by destiny, as in the instance of King Lear.

  —MICHAEL CHEKHOV, To the Actor

  One.

  The hike is a trudging misery—step, step, slip, step, step. Charlie knows the thud of a boot on rock; the squelch of a boot in mud; the slide of a boot down a damp rock; the wet clunk of a boot slipping off a rock into water; the crackle of a boot on a dead leaf; the crisping of a boot on a live leaf; the snap of a boot on a twig; the scrape of one boot brushing the other; the susurration of a boot on sand; the grinding of a boot on gravel; the woodblock skitter of a boot on a nut or a fat stick, too tough to break, shooting backward, and jerking him forward. He knows the twinge beneath his right kneecap and the aching stiffness on the inside of his left one. The blistered heel, the cramping toes, the sore ankle that turns when he steps funny on a rock. How it feels to trudge uphill watching your feet, finding purchase on roots and rocks and indentations in the mud, and look up h
oping to see an end to the incline and see no end. Small insects gather near his eyes and nose and mouth, and sometimes he closes an eye as one flies too close and catches its wet soft body between his eyelids. Sometimes he picks one off his tongue. He kills mosquito after mosquito and still wakes in his hammock itching from the bites, his legs reshaped by a multiplicity of swellings.

  What if he hadn’t followed Adan? Would he be free? Would he be dead?

  What does it matter? He followed him.

  Given a map and all the time in the world, Charlie could never re-create their route. They never stay long on any well-maintained trail—though Adan told him at the beginning, “They can’t look for us on the trails, Ben. Not enough police,” as though Charlie would find this reassuring. Often they walk straight into the jungle, Adan and Thomas leading the way, slashing with machetes in a haphazard manner that leads Charlie to believe they haven’t had much practice at this. How do they know where they’re going? He asks Adan, and the younger man shrugs and points behind him at Denise. Denise gives Charlie a hard stare. “We will get there,” she says. Where is there? He doesn’t ask. Does she know, or is she waiting for the thunderclap of inspiration? He can’t decide whether it’s more frightening to believe that Denise doesn’t have a plan, or that she does.

  He’s thirsty. He’s always thirsty. But he tries not to ask for water too often. He tries to limit the number of times he gets told no. Behind the decrepit shelter that was their meeting place, under a tarp and a pile of branches, the kidnappers had stashed supplies. Everyone has a backpack with a water pouch and drinking tube except Charlie, so when Denise does allow him water, he has to bend and sip it from Adan’s pack like a baby cow. There are extra packs, but she wouldn’t give him one. The others carry the extras in their hands.

  Off trail, they walk through plants so tall that Charlie has to raise his arms high not to be snagged by them. As his calf brushes against the plants, it connects with something that gives him a sharp stinging pain that endures and endures. At every pause, he touches it to see if he can find something to extract—a stinger, a thorn, a needle—but there is nothing. They pass boulders so large they seem alien, or the fossils of enormous beasts, a great ridged rock like the spine of a dinosaur. Atop the boulders, gardens of small plants, parasites of the larger creature. Cascading down one boulder is a plant Charlie recognizes as a succulent. His father gardens. His father grew succulents around the fish pond in their backyard, in their neat, ordered backyard, all the plants contained in beds. In this jungle are fragrant squashed fruits, sweet and rotting, large thick vines grown into braids and loops, the remains of spindly trees tangled in a pile, as if they’d died grappling. Trees whose roots swell out above the ground, fat and fantastically shaped. Pregnant trees. Trees like creatures that go still when a human passes. Mud and shit-brown streams of mud.

  The terrain is uneven. Denise sets a rapid pace. Charlie sometimes makes the mistake of looking up from his feet and stumbles over a rock or a root. He’s been weakened by confinement. The others are sure-footed, and more than once he thinks of the barefoot girls in bikinis who passed him early on his voluntary hike, their feet practically folding over the rocks, toes gripping. Their smiles, their braided hair, their casual athleticism and easy grace. Sometimes Denise calls a halt to stop and listen for pursuers, and in the absence of their noise, Charlie hears birds and water and once, far above, the muted roar of an airplane—Down here! he thinks. So many different qualities of water sound: the dripping off the cliff face behind him, the burbling over one section of rocks below, the rushing over another, almost indistinguishable from wind. The call and repeat of sweet cartoon birdsong always seems far away, the birds nearby peeping shrilly or uttering harsh guttural clacks of remonstrance or warning. Sometimes there’s a crashing through the foliage, and Charlie looks to see only the plants moving in something’s wake. What is the something? Once he sees a spider as big as his hand crawling up a tree. Once they hear a thunderous crack and watch a tree fall.

  It’s dark under the tree canopy, and he misses the sun, until those moments when the canopy gives way and the sun shoots in with eager ferocity, and then he wishes it away again. From time to time, a sudden deeper darkness comes, and then rain percussive on the leaves. At first the rain is a relief and then it becomes a misery. His clothes are always either wet or damp. He is a human swamp.

  Sometime in the second day, Charlie sees the remains of a path beneath his feet and looks up just in time to see a sign that reads, in multiple languages, WARNING. TRAIL CLOSED. CONDITIONS PERILOUS. RISK OF SEVERE INJURY OR DEATH. “Severe injury or death,” he says, stopping so abruptly that Adan bumps him from behind. He turns to Adan, pointing at the sign. “Severe injury or death,” he says again.

  Adan leans forward to read the sign, squinting in a way that makes Charlie wonder if he needs glasses. Perhaps he’s doing all this to earn the money for glasses. That is his object. What’s my motivation? Charlie imagines Adan asking Denise. Denise is the director, of course, though not the sort who wants to discuss motivation. The sort who tenses with exasperation—the actor is being pretentious again, the actor thinks he matters—and tells you to hit your mark and say the line. Adan squints for such a long time that Denise and Thomas, not realizing they’ve stopped, disappear around a bend. Charlie looks at his concerned, uncertain face. We could escape now, Adan, he thinks, but, of course, Adan has no interest in escape. Adan is the one who brought him here. “I will ask, Ben,” he says, finally. And then, as if he read Charlie’s mind, he nudges him gently forward with the barrel of his gun.

  True to his word, when they catch up, Adan asks, or at least Charlie assumes he does, not speaking the language. Denise turns and fires a rat-a-tat-tat of words that Charlie can’t understand but can readily translate. Hit your mark. Say the line. Charlie knew that would happen. Charlie knows human behavior, which is a kind of prophetic power. Why does he try to fight prophecy? Up ahead, somewhere he can’t yet see, a possible death crouches in a thicket of perilous conditions. He goes on trudging toward it, because that is what helplessness is. The director doesn’t care about your motivation. The reporter’s loyalty is to the magazine, not to you. The paparazzi take your picture whether or not you wave. The people who love you don’t really know you. The person who knows you says she has to try not to love you anymore. You can’t control the rapid snare drum of your heartbeat or the bass thump of your dread. Your own legs walk you forward, but even that is not in your control. Your body is not your own, has never been your own, at least not since you began to offer it up for possession. You always have a choice. How many characters have uttered this line, wearing the appropriate face of grim, judgmental resolution? Bullshit! Bullshit! And yet, if he’s ever given this line to say, ever given the chance to say a line again, he might have to convince himself he believes it. He might not have the power to refuse.

  Is it because he’s afraid that it happens? Does he bring it on himself? Did he bring all of this on himself? Yes or no, here is what happens: He is working his way along a trail that hugs the cliff face 3,000 feet up, barely wider than his foot, and then slants steeply down. He has passed more warning signs doing this, the final one reading STOP. HIGH RISK OF FALLING. He has his hands on the dirt above him, his body pressed into it as much as possible. His palms and fingers are coated with reddish mud. He reaches for a branch to help him around a curve, and the branch gives way when he puts weight on it, and he slips. He slips, and he slides, scrabbling frantically. He slides forever. This is not true—he slides for a few seconds—except that it is true. He slides forever. He doesn’t make a sound, but his whole body screams. Then—he doesn’t know how, will never know how—his toe finds a rock and his hand finds a root, and he is not falling anymore. He is not falling anymore. He is not falling anymore.

  After the scream, silence. Except Charlie’s breathing, which is loud. His right hand grips the root. His left toes press down on the rock. He pats gi
ngerly at the dirt with his left hand, finds nothing to hold on to. He can find nothing with his right foot, either, but when he presses his leg forward, his knee slides into an indentation, for which he is so grateful. He shifts some weight onto his knee. Then he looks up. He sees their three faces looking down, a halo of sunlight behind them. They look terrified, even Denise, a fact he registers with a mild, distant surprise. They are closer than he expected. He didn’t fall very far—ten feet, to be precise—but to fall at all 3,000 feet above sea level with no discernible way to climb back up is to fall very far. “I told you,” he says. “I told you. I told you. I told you.”

  He hears them consulting, but even if he spoke their language, he wouldn’t be able to understand them. His mind is a whirring blankness. It spins and throws out this thought—I told you—and then spins and throws it out again. Beyond that, there is only his knee, his toes, his fingers, imploring dirt and rock and root to hold.

  Above him, Adan is terrified. He just watched Charlie—or Ben, as he knows him—slip and slide and fall, and he could do nothing to stop it. He doesn’t know if Ben screamed because he could only hear his own scream, which stopped when he saw Ben’s hands catch the root. But now Ben is dangling there and he looks so scared, and he says, “I told you,” which is true. Adan has enormous capacity for empathy, though this situation has required him to block off certain channels down which it might run. To do so, he’s told himself a story: Ben is his guest and his friend; he treats him well and takes care of him, and when this is over, Ben will go back to his privileged American life none the worse for his time with Adan, and yet what a gift his time will have given them! Money for all the many things Adan and his family need—school uniforms and decent mattresses and dental care. It is nothing for Ben to do this for them.

  But if Ben dies now, if Ben plunges all that long way screaming, this story will be hard to tell. It will not have a happy ending for any of them. Adan will be complicit in snatching a man from his life and flinging him to his death. Also, Denise will almost certainly blame him because he is the one who was walking behind Ben. He is the one who was supposed to be watching him. He is responsible.