Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  But with reports due to the government funders that hold our existence in their godly palms, it was my lot and my time allotment to appease them with sacrificial reports and proposals, occasionally taking the communion of workshops on budget development, and doing the ceremonial dance of regulatory lingo. I had but thirty minutes available for Abdul, during which I referred him to several volunteer agencies, none of which were likely to have anything for a geneticist.

  If I were a Christian, a true Christian, I’d have taken Abdul out and about in my free time, or given him some money at least. But my personal budget was carefully and strictly allocated to loan payments, rent, RRSPs, and scrupulously pre-selected registered charities benefiting from my benevolence. There was little left for handouts.

  My time was equally regimented: forty hours for work, softball on Mondays, volunteer board meetings on Tuesdays, art class on Wednesdays, Thursdays were for writing a weekly piece I do for the social workers’ newsletter, and Fridays were for Sarah. It was her insistence on quality time—during which we played cards or watched movies, though when we started we used to sing each other love songs until it got so hot we were naked on the floor, exhausted, with all the heat rising above us as sleep ensued.

  My weekends were dedicated to the never-ending task of fixing up our fixer-upper house, the only one we could afford in Toronto despite renting the upstairs to students. It was an ongoing process of drywall, primer, paint, rewiring, re-shingling, spackle, tar, glue, hammer, sixteen different kinds of wrenches, 112 kinds of screws and drivers, a drill for tough jobs, re-spackle the mistakes, sanding through dust and fumes.

  What time did I have for clients? Besides, you take one to a ballgame you gotta take ‘em all, which is well beyond my allotted charity budget.

  Abdul left my cubicle with his head hanging as always, and as always I wondered if there was more I could have done. I put it out of my mind and returned to my budget analysis. Someone was spending too much on long distance phone calls.

  At 4:30, as I was drafting a memo outlining a new policy on long distance calls, the power went out. There was a collective groan from the cellblock at the interruption. Technical difficulties again? As if the computers weren’t slow enough.

  A strange silence set in, as if time had frozen. The steady hum of the computers and florescent lights had ceased. Now what?

  One by one we staggered into the hallways, overwhelmed by the frightening possibilities of our newfound freedom. It was the freedom of nothing to do, or the relative freedom of plenty to do but no tools with which to do it.

  “Power’s out?”

  “Look’s like it.”

  “Well, let’s see.”

  My manager, Sherry, and I strolled around the maze asking intermittently, “Your power out too?”

  “Yep, should someone check with maintenance?”

  Bill, our maintenance guy, fumbled around with the fuse box for a while as we stood around wondering aloud what could have caused a complete power outage.

  “Anyone got a battery-operated radio?”

  Mabel, our receptionist, had a battery-operated radio in her drawer, which was filled with gadgets and elastic bands, paper clips and candles, just-in-cases. The radio explained that a central generator Somewhere-in-America had gone down. The reasons were as yet unclear.

  “Okay Bill, you can stop pretending to problem-solve,” Mabel shouted to the broom closet.

  “What now?” I asked Mabel, Sherry, and two other social workers, Connie and Maria.

  Sherry told me, “If you didn’t think you could go home at 4:30, now you can.”

  EIGHT BOYS AND SEVEN GIRLS GET LONG-DISTANCE SAVED IN CHAPTER 3

  Once he started drinking, Yusupu’s transformation from strict but loving father to dangerous and unpredictable man was quick and complete. All that sprightly energy he had once expended at sea was transferred into late nights on the mainland or long nights playing his favourite card game, gaple, back on the island. Bumi’s father always seemed to find a few men to accompany him to a mainland bar. When he came home he blamed Bumi for everything.

  “My son Bumi,” he would say, “who is smarter than the gods and all the men who ever walked the surface of Rilaka. Sure he can barely run or kick a football, but he can add and he can speak the mainland language perfectly. Why would someone like that ever need to be humble?”

  Bumi’s bruisings became so frequent that he resorted to playing football just to get out of the house. On the pitch, a white strip of sand on the south side, Bumi displayed the same ingenuity that had changed the way his island fished. Under Bumi’s leadership football became ‘Monsters of the Deep,’ a complex game of dodge-ball played with the feet, in which two of ten players are monsters, and rolls of dice determine who is kicking the ball at whom and which boys are under suspicion of having eaten their fathers. The boys had been playing this game every day for a week when word got back to Yusupu. Bumi’s mother, Win, chose that very moment to seduce Yusupu, thus saving Bumi, and in the process conceiving Bumi’s sister, Alfi. She was his only sibling and it was plain to all that Yusupu had drowned the best swimmers among his sperm long before her birth.

  Alfi was born as crinkly and brown as Bumi, with wider eyes and a thin third lip. She didn’t speak until she was three, and very little after that. She didn’t speak, but she was an excellent listener. Bumi liked to tell her everything he knew about the world, which was a lot.

  His favourite topic was the mainland market. There Bumi went from failed boy genius at the centre of a father’s anger to a face in the crowd of wheeler-dealers. There the boardroom tables turned so Bumi could chair and his father follow his lead.

  Yusupu, not understanding the language of business, knew that all means of survival—clothing, fuel, medicine, food and drink—depended on his son’s mind for numbers and his instinct for measuring the weaknesses of men. And it wasn’t just Yusupu’s success at stake. If he could ride Bumi’s mind to a good market day, he could afford to be more generous with his profits and all of Rilaka’s families would benefit. In return, they would be more generous with one another, and with Yusupu when he had a poor catch.

  All the rituals and rhythms of life on Rilaka depended on fish and on the islanders’ ability to catch and market it. To a Rilakan, fish is more than food. Fish is survival. It is health. It is justice. It is ceremony and celebration. It is sustainability. It is life. Fish was Bumi’s ticket to the marketplace, and the marketplace was his gateway to the sprawling city of Makassar, his first discovery of life on another planet.

  In Makassar Bumi became Yusupu’s pride again. With big hand on little shoulder Yusupu would say proudly, in broken Indonesian, “Smart boy, my boy,” to other fishers in the market. To buyers he would chastise the boy for selling the fish so cheaply, but Bumi knew this was for show. Shoppers could walk away with the feeling of having out-capitalized the capitalist.

  In Makassar Bumi also began a love affair with buses. He and his father would scramble from the docks to the road and hail a small blue bus—with a motor! The first time, Bumi relentlessly pressed the driver on the mechanics of the fast-moving vehicle—as fast as forty miles per hour through cross-town traffic.

  “How’s it work, Sir?” he asked.

  Everyone in the cramped bus gazed at the wide-eyed child in anticipation. In the eerie silence the driver became listless, looked back and finally realized the child was addressing him.

  “Wha?” he asked. The passengers tsk tsked and shook their heads at the oblivious brute.

  “How does it work, Sir? The bus,” Bumi asked again, patiently, as the fair-weather smiles returned to the passengers’ faces.

  “Oh-ho,” the driver said, amused by Bumi’s pomposity. As if a small child could understand such big things. “The wheels turn,” the driver said, “and that makes it go.” The passengers groaned.

&nbs
p; “What makes the wheels turn?” Bumi asked. “How’s that make it go? Why’s there smoke? Why’s it stink?” The passengers laughed. “And why so many busses and where’d they come from? Where’d the trees go?”

  The passengers’ heads slowly pivoted in unison to gauge the driver, whose eyes were fixed to the side of the road while people signalled for a ride unheeded. He was completely silent. The passengers stared at him from every angle of the bus.

  Finally Pak Syamsuddin, a young schoolteacher, broke the silence. “Have you never been on a bus before?” he asked.

  “No, Sir,” Bumi said. “Boats only.”

  “Motorboats?” Syamsuddin asked.

  “Ya. Fishing boats.”

  “Well, the principle is not so different.”

  It was the first time anyone had used a word as big and weighty as ‘principle’ when addressing Bumi, and he had never fully considered the principle on which a boat worked before. They were just there and moving away from one shore and toward another endlessly, since his birth, and surely forever before that. He finally asked, “What principle is that?” Syamsuddin explained briefly about Newton’s laws, friction and the energy generated from combustion. Bumi’s eyes grew even wider. Syamsuddin asked Bumi if he understood.

  “So, you make a spark, light the fuel to turn a wheel or propeller, which makes friction, and a force in one direction. It sends the bus the other way?”

  “More or less,” Syamsuddin said, duly impressed but not wanting to give the tiny child a bigger head than he could carry on his small shoulders. “Eventually you’ll learn all this in school.”

  HERE WAS THE ONLY INDONESIAN WORD YUSUPU KNEW AND BUMI didn’t: ‘school.’ Yusupu had never been there, but he had heard rumours in the market about other Indonesian villagers that had been taken there against their will. Government officials, he was told, would come to town and take away the children so that they could go to school and become more civilized.

  Yusupu, who had been proudly and quietly listening until this point, interjected. “No school for Bumi,” he said. “He’s smart enough. We need this boy. He sells fish. He counts money.”

  “What’s school, Daddy?” Bumi asked his father in Indonesian, a language he had learned from his mother. Win had grown up on the mainland, met Yusupu in the market as a teenager, moved to Rilaka, and had never gone back. She painstakingly shared her Indonesian language skill with Yusupu to help him communicate better in the market. Those in Makassar who were of Makassarese or Javanese descent could not clearly understand his own language, Buginese. But since Indonesian became the language of unity in 1929, it was the one common language that everyone was supposed to know.

  With his young wife’s help, Yusupu learned to get by in a second language when he was seventeen years old. But with the addition of the boy wonder he rarely used that uncomfortable, awkward language, which somehow flowed like saliva from the boy’s tongue in ongoing conversations with his mother.

  But with Yusupu and Bumi, Buginese was the language, and there on that bus was the first time Bumi had spoken to his father in Indonesian—in front of Syamsuddin the Teacher, a befuddled driver, and twelve other passengers gaping at the brilliant little boy with an insatiable intellectual appetite who didn’t know what school was.

  “School,” Yusupu explained in Buginese, “is where children go to learn how the world works, so they can have a job in the city, pay taxes, read books and drive in cars.”

  BUMI DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TAXES WERE, BUT SCHOOL SOUNDED like paradise. No one he knew in all Creation knew how to read. His father had a fine collection of encyclopedias he had received—with every intention of learning how to read—in exchange for a large load of fish. Bumi had looked through all the pictures from Z to A. He loved looking at pictures of alien shores and foreign sands, but on each new examination the unbreakable code before him frustrated his hungry mind.

  Imagine the opportunity to crack that code and uncover the secrets to the clockwork of the world. Imagine driving in one of these magical vehicles, mastering and exploiting the mystical forces of combustion, friction and inertia. Driving endlessly through this alien experience, in this city. Living in this city with great geniuses like Pak Syamsuddin the Science Teacher, and great animated characters like the driver with the misfortune of finding himself the target of Bumi’s rapid-fire questions.

  AS BUMI REGALED L’IL SISTER WITH STORIES OF THE SITES OF Makassar he imagined what it would be like to live there. He especially loved telling tales of the disenchanted—the raggedy poor and their wounded eyes. People in such dishevelled states didn’t exist in Bumi’s regular world, and his novel mind absorbed it all, the hurt, the awe, and he started seeking solutions.

  On the streets of the market were always men with missing limbs, or large open burns that never healed or cuts to their faces, arms, torsos or legs. Bumi would often approach them with his little-boy curiosity. He didn’t know he was supposed to fear cripples and hate pain. “What happened to your head?” he asked.

  “A Japanese soldier’s sword,” Pram answered. It had actually been an Indonesian soldier’s kitchen knife, on an upward trajectory, that entered his head under the right ear, removing the ear and destroying part of his brain stem as he fled the scene of an adulterous affair. The assassin was his close friend Ananta, the husband of the love of his life.

  “It was a miracle I survived at all. Sword went right in here.” He pressed the tender spot between his jaw and where his right ear used to be. “Took out my ear and a piece of my brain.”

  “Did he getcha from behind?” Bumi asked, knowing of the Japanese invasion from his grandfather, who was put to work for the foreign soldiers and given very little to eat. He had survived starvation, torture, extreme physical labour and disease to tell the tale.

  Pram was, like most adults, taken aback by Bumi’s astute power of deduction. “Uhh, yes, he attacked from behind. That’s what Japs are like, you see. You can’t trust ’em! I was guarding my post late at night. Little did I know that on the other side of the base my friend Ananta had fallen asleep. The Japs snuck in there. But just to be cruel, one of them snuck up on me from behind my post and slashed my ear with his samurai sword.”

  Bumi cocked what was known on Rilaka as his ‘eyebrow of scepticism.’ Something about this story didn’t jibe with the reality Bumi knew.

  “Why didn’t he kill you? Wasn’t he afraid you’d run and tell your friends?”

  Pram was smart enough to know when he was outsmarted. “That’s exactly what I did,” he said, dodging the question the way he should have dodged Ananta’s kitchen knife.

  And, as anticipated, Bumi was on to the next question, all old inconsistencies forgotten as new ones were created in their wide wake. “How’d you outrun him with no ear? Weren’t you dizzy?”

  “Adrenaline,” Pram answered smartly.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s something your body makes when you’re in danger, so you can outrun your enemies.”

  Bumi sucked his teeth and shivered at this exciting new tidbit, as a passing Chinese woman, big and dressed as the sun, dropped a coin into Pram’s grateful cup.

  Bumi’s next question was temporarily annihilated by this replacement: “Why’d she give you money?”

  Pram’s braggart joy faded. His current stream of reality had slapped him out of the clutches of an altered memory—of how it could have been. “She helps me because I can’t work.”

  “How come?”

  Pram paused, thinking things through, the way he never used to when he was young. Finally he explained it like this: “Because the adrenaline has worn off, and now I’m dizzy. And forgetful. I don’t hear so good unless you shout the way you do, Little Boy. Most people don’t have the patience. There’s just nothing left but old stories.”

  “You could be a pro storyteller,” Bumi sai
d, thinking of his Uncle Karsi, who was such a good storyteller that he was no longer expected to fish. Yet he still told the best fishing stories, and no one minded his eccentricity, his constant twitching and extreme superstition.

  Pram laughed at the suggestion. “No one wants to hear my stories,” he said. “Only young children with no money to pay.”

  As it happened Bumi had several hundred rupiah in his pocket from the afternoon’s fish sales, the better part of a day’s income. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two hundred rupiah, as much as he dared deny his father, and gave it to Pram. “I wanna pay you for your story,” he said.

  AS MUCH FUN AS MAKASSAR WAS, THE TELLING OF THE CITY TO L’IL sister, who grew still and attentive when he spoke to her, was even more fun. Holding Alfi’s attention was a gift Bumi alone possessed. Even Uncle Karsi the great storyteller couldn’t do it.

  By the time Alfi was old enough to properly absorb the nuances of Bumi’s stories, he was an old market pro. He had befriended every bus driver who travelled the short trip from the docks to the market.

  He visited Pram regularly, and paid small sums for his stories. On one occasion, Bumi was surprised to find Pram had brought a friend. “This is my girlfriend,” Pram said. “Arum.” Arum’s feet had been irreparably mangled by police officers during a protest against the elimination of milk subsidies for young mothers. Unable to keep her fabric-sewing job afterward, she had to give the children to her ex-husband and his new wife.

  Bumi surrendered two hundred rupiah for each story the couple told him, rationalizing the guilt away with this equation: more money for his new friends equalled less money for Yusupu’s liquid diet.

  ONCE BUMI WAS BIG ENOUGH TO TIE THE FLOTATION NETS HE HAD designed years earlier his childhood was effectively over, and his days were spent shoulder to shoulder with Yusupu. Bumi’s invention hadn’t granted him his wish for more time with his father, but a little size, strength and coordination had. When granted, the wish came with the usual fine print of the fates.