Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  DRIVE-BY SAVIOURS

  DRIVE-BY SAVIOURS

  CHRIS BENJAMIN

  Roseway Publishing

  an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

  Copyright © 2010 Chris Benjamin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Editing: Sandra McIntyre

  Design: John van der Woude

  eBook Development: Wild Element www.WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Published in Canada by Roseway Publishing

  an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  32 Oceanvista Lane

  Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

  and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

  www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway

  Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Benjamin, Chris, 1975-

  Drive-by saviours / Chris Benjamin.

  ISBN 978-1-55266-369-1

  I. Title.

  PS8603.E5578D75 2010–C813’.6–C2010-902859-7

  For Miia, Kevin, Liz and Dave, without whom this wouldn’t be.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With gratitude to York University, Hasanuddin University, Tim Babcock, the Toronto Arts Council, the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, Beverley Rach and Sandra McIntyre.

  100 MILLION LOVE SONGS, ALL RIGHT HERE IN THE FIRST CHAPTER

  The fantastic voyage began on a sandy paradise for fishers and their children in 1973. This is where and when Bumi was born, his face all small and crinkly, brown and wide-eyed wonder at the implausibility of being plucked from his mother’s womb while she lay bleeding on a dirt floor silently and stubbornly refusing to cry out at the pain of birth. He was the Bugis boy with a Javanese name chosen by his Javanese mother. She had, for the most part, let her own traditions slip away as the years and the island colluded to make her their own. Rilaka became her new motherland, its Buginese language her lingua franca. Her firstborn’s name was a tribute to that natal part of her, and because it meant ‘earth’ in her faraway mother-tongue, it honoured the place of his birth in a multicultural chorus.

  From the beginning Bumi’s eyes pierced harder than any other’s, glowering while his father forced him to try football, glowing brightly at the chance to help the man count market money from mainland fish sales. By age four he’d humbled his father by becoming a faster and more accurate bookkeeper. He also spoke better Indonesian, a skill his father exploited for price negotiations with mainlanders. By age five he was bored with accounting and took to engineering.

  Bumi’s father, a wiry man with surprising strength and audaciously self-granted authority, went looking for the boy late one evening after he failed to come home for supper. On their tiny island of a hundred people, any lost child not found in five minutes was assumed drowned. Yusupu was not worried. Bumi was no likely drowning victim, the first five-year-old potentially smarter than the sea.

  Yusupu found Bumi on the far, sloping side of the island where no one had ever bothered to build or settle. It was simply too far away from the others. In recent years it had become a place where the women gathered to make clothing when they wanted to get away from the tourists.

  Bumi was there cursing a foul black streak the likes of which Yusupu hadn’t heard in all his years on boats, not from his father or grandfather, nor any other man he’d known.

  “Bumi! What’s wrong?” he shouted, half in anger and half in concern.

  “I can’t get it tied!” Bumi retorted, pointing in frustration at a small tangle of netting and thirty empty plastic pop bottles. “My fingers are too small!”

  “Why do you want to tie them?” Yusupu asked. The sharpness in his voice was all but gone.

  “You tie them at one end to make it float. Then you can leave it and go play,” Bumi explained. “Then you come back and you have fish. So you have more time to play with me, Daddy.”

  Yusupu was not an exceptionally hard-working man, but he did spend six hours a day at sea — six hours Bumi felt would be better spent playing with him. While flotation nets have existed in fishing cultures for centuries, Rilaka’s more labour-intensive methods worked to keep the men out of the women’s hair for six hours a day, and vice versa, and to make physically strong, hardy men for an island left naked in the exposure of rain and merciless sun.

  Like most human innovations Bumi’s idea had unforeseen impacts. The lighter workload and greater cash flow that came their way (once Yusupu caught on and got to tying what Bumi’s little fingers couldn’t) resulted not in more play time with his father, but less. And the time he did spend with the man became much less pleasant.

  Though Yusupu and the other Rilakan fishers had never before felt any need for alcohol, which was taboo, it was free time, and the rum that helped pass it, that changed Bumi’s father. On finding themselves with unprecedented time on their hands, and not having any particular desire to return to their families, Rilaka’s fishers began visiting a little bar with a live musician near the seaport after the catch was sold. The toxins in the liquor put the inexperienced drinkers in a collectively ill mood, and most of them disliked the numbing effect of too many drinks. Only Yusupu’s stubbornness pushed him forward until he had drunk more than his fill several nights in a row. His cohorts would keep him company and switch to coffee after just one glass of strong rum. Yusupu drank every night, long after the others had tired of alcohol.

  It seemed to Bumi that when Yusupu drank, all the man’s frustrations bubbled to the surface. The first time Yusupu hit him forever changed his understanding of pain. There was no desire in it at all, just deep disappointment.

  He had stayed up late, determined to see his father before dream time. He had refused to come home, afraid that sleep would overtake him if he got too comfortable. Instead he stayed by the shore playing long after the tourists had returned to the mainland and the other children had gone to sleep. He drew pictures in the sand with a stick to pass the hours after sunset, past midnight even, bleary-eyed and obsessed with the single thought of his father. When the boats finally returned Bumi ran to them and watched open-mouthed as the other men helped his father over the gunwale. Yusupu retched and spit into the sea he’d always told Bumi was sacred.

  “Daddy!” Bumi cried, thinking Yusupu was hurt. He ran to him, pushing through the other men to offer a hand.

  Yusupu looked down at Bumi and sneered. “What are you doing up?”

  Bumi swallowed and looked up at Yusupu, who pulled back his matted salt-and-pepper hair. Even hunched over, Yusupu towered over the boy like a giant sea creature lurching onto the land. “Waiting for you,” Bumi said.

  The men laughed and one tussled Bumi’s hair. “He misses you,” one of them told Yusupu, who smiled a bemused smile, took the boy up into his arms, and carried him home.

  Yusupu kept smiling until he had crouched in through the door of their little house. Then he put Bumi down and took him by the arm, looked the boy in the eyes, and said, “Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again.”

  He gave a half-smile and slapped Bumi’s face. Bumi’s lips quivered and a t
ear came to his eye. “Are you going to cry now, Son?” Yusupu asked. “Are you going to embarrass me further?”

  Bumi swallowed hard, sucking a head full of tension down his throat. His body was shaking, but he didn’t cry. He shook his head solemnly ‘no.’

  “Good,” Yusupu said, jerking his head to the side. “Go to sleep.”

  WHEN THE RECEPTION FADES TO ZERO IN CHAPTER 2, TURNING UP THE VOLUME WON’T HELP

  Toronto is everything good and everything bad about a city. It is everything intense, frenetic, and exciting, everything dull, drab and dreary. Everything fun and everything frightening can be experienced here. It is a place you can do anything you could do anywhere else: eat the food, dance the dance, hear the language of any culture in the world. It is segregated, sanctioned and compartmentalized. It is all things to everyone and it is fully satisfactory to no one. It is not exactly my home but it is where I was born and it is where I live.

  I was awed and fascinated by the human scars on the streets of my city when I was wide-eyed and small, pre-cynical and innocent. I wondered at the filth of homeless people, asked my mother why it was I had to bathe and they didn’t. She told me, “Because I said so,” or, “Because their mothers didn’t care enough about them to make them have a bath and look how they turned out.”

  I was never given free rein anywhere in the city, but was reined in and kept close at all times, hand-held walking, lap-sat on public transit. I was taught scepticism of strangers, not to talk to them. My very survival depended on this rule, yet I couldn’t follow it and often engaged in idle chit-chat with random conventioneers on the sidewalk. My memory of what was said is murky, broken by a large, clearly feminine hand gripping my shoulder and pulling me back to the safety of my mother’s Great Worry. And so, under the vice-grip of fierce protection, I learned to fear strangers and admire their fearful forms from afar. I fit in perfectly in Toronto.

  Having never lost my fascination for humans, I studied social work. The ones who looked at me with a weird mix of longing and anger were the ones I admired most. I graduated summa cum laude and landed a job at a community health centre. I was quickly put to task compiling quantitative reports on clients served, and writing fundraising proposals promising grandiosity beyond human connection. No one would fall through the cracks thanks to a five-year strategic plan drafted by professional consultants. I had a knack for it and the more I wrote about clients the less I saw of them. When I did see them it was fleeting. They gave me the Coles Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by saviour.

  I climbed the salary scale right to the ceiling in only four years, at which point I’d need a new career or a promotion to Executive Director to improve my financial status. I enacted creativity with language and numbers, and thanks to me we hired health promoters, nutritionists and social workers to help keep track of the stream of needy people who flowed rapidly and powerfully in and out of our doors each day. I was content when I was twenty-five years old.

  It helped that I met Sarah that year. She was a dark-eyed intelligent fashion model—if you can believe my luck—who looked like she’d stepped straight off the cover of a Rolling Stones album. Actually she did mostly department store catalogues, but she was attractive enough that all my friends seriously wondered if I were blackmailing her.

  I met her in an antique store where our perception, attention and gaze slowly shifted from the same set of plates to each other. “What do you know about these?” she asked me.

  “They’re Acton,” I told her. “Mid-nineteenth century, hand painted with oil. Great colour, medium condition; I wouldn’t pay this price for them.” There is a meticulous and rigorous part of me that acquires and hoards these facts like precious stones, and keeps them at the ready to be shared in order to impress a devastatingly attractive woman.

  “Really?” she said nonchalantly, holding the question in the space between us with her soft, studious brown eyes, wide as the plates in question. They compelled me to say more.

  “Yes, really,” I said.

  “Interesting,” she answered. She was unconvinced.

  “They’d be from Cornwall originally,” I offered, unable to stop the mundane things exiting my mouth.

  “Brought back on a trip,” she told me with more authority than my facts. It was the kind of authority that can be granted only by the imagination. “For a woman’s collection of things that were kept in medium condition, just for spite.”

  “Spite?”

  “Spite. Every day she cleaned the house for him and made all his favourites for dinner from carefully selected and purchased ingredients. Little did he care. She laundered and pressed his clothing, took his messages, and typed his letters. Little did he notice her hard work. All he noticed was her decline.

  “So what was her revenge? She didn’t vacuum all the way to the edge of the carpet. She didn’t wash the dishes right away. She didn’t maintain the prize possessions.”

  “Like plates.”

  “Exactly. She neglected all the little things she knew he wouldn’t notice anyway, but never the things he would. Never would she under-salt the sauce or overcook the pasta.”

  “Not much of a revenge.”

  “Vengeance wasn’t her specialty. She left that to God and outlived her no-good husband by thirty years. They were the best of her life. Well, mostly. Those last few years when she was alone and too sick to clean at all, and her family plate collection sat gathering dust, they were difficult years. Poor woman died just last month during the ice storm. Here it wasn’t as bad as in Montreal but it was bad enough for a ninety-four-year-old shut-in.

  “So, the grandchildren swarmed the tiny apartment. They were amazed at the acres of junk stored in one tiny space where a small elderly woman had spent the last eight years of her living existence.

  “They picked and nabbed and claimed bits and pieces here and there, some for sentimental value, some for kitsch and some for hopelessly optimistic financial value. As if.

  “But most of an entire lifetime of acquired little materials ended up jammed into a Goodwill slot.”

  “So, how did this plate get here?” I asked, captivated by her mind’s wanderings.

  “A keen-eyed collector saw it at the Goodwill,” she continued. “Bought it for a buck, and brought it here so it could enter another collection of random acquisitions in someone else’s struggle with a mundane mortality, where material things are a temporary comfort.”

  She smiled and gazed at me.

  “That’s the saddest plate I’ve ever seen,” I told her.

  “No,” she said. “It’s no sadder than any other plate.”

  She was the saddest girl I’d ever met.

  By the time of the power outage the ice storm’s stories of heroism, tragedy, triumph and conception had been replaced with the myriad stories of September 11, the retaliatory oil wars, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and West Nile virus. These were the plagues of a vengeful God. Furthermore, Sarah and I had fallen in love, moved in together in an East End flat, and settled into a routine struggle with a mundane mortality without even the financial resources to maintain the mediocre comfort of material things.

  I wasn’t miserable mind you. Had I been truly miserable I wouldn’t have needed the power outage to free me. I was monotonous to other people, and a little bored myself, that’s all.

  THE CRUSH BEGAN AT 7:30AM ON A SOUTHBOUND BUS; STANDING room only, glazed eyes on forlorn faces, shipped to our pens on the other side of the city. The crush got tighter at 7:45, all colours and classes of crowded multicultural sounds and odours, all absorbed in a short series of words strewn across a long piece of paper: the Metro Daily News-bites for people on the go. Torontonians. West we went with more filing into the cargo box at each stop and people shuffling and sliding in the hopes of avoiding touch and conversation, while our engine
er tried to keep us awake with alliterations on the names of the stops: “Swingin’ Sherbourne is the next stop! Swingin’ Sherbourne is next!”

  An accidental touch here drew a glass-eyed glare, returned with a mumbled apology.

  I stepped onto the northbound train where I could breathe and sit and read part of the paper, drink from my thermos, power nap or daydream of something other than report-writing and the needy people I can’t help even though it’s my vocation and occupies half my waking time.

  I stepped off the train and onto a long ride on a long bus, from which I’ve watched the city develop over the past four years, through a long corridor of tall buildings, from the bottom of which I never see the sun. It is only visible there from 11:00 AM until 1:00 PM, when I’m in my office.

  Eventually I reached my little health centre, situated by a pretty creek where dragonflies, birds and even deer can be seen in the summer. I went inside and sat at my computer with my coffee and began an eight-hour typing shift: social work.

  My only client that day was Abdul, a Sri Lankan refugee claimant and a geneticist who was not allowed to work or attend school until his refugee hearing, to be held sometime in the next twenty months. Every time I met with Abdul he sighed deeply, shook his head, and told me the same thing: “I’m a hard worker, a very hard worker, and I can’t even find volunteer work.”

  That week, like every other week, I had tried and failed to find volunteer work for a geneticist. Every lab I asked told me about union troubles. Volunteer workers take away paid work. Besides, they wondered, how could they tell if a guy with three Sri Lankan degrees knows how to work in a Canadian lab?

  I dreaded breaking the same bad news to him every week. Every week he sighed and shook his head and asked me what he should do. Every week I had no answer.

  I wished I could spend the whole day with Abdul, show him the framed art in our galleries and the graffiti art in our streets, take him to hockey games, show him the urban expanse below the CN Tower, give him the therapy of doing something, anything, which he couldn’t do alone on his ‘material-needs-only’ welfare allowance.