Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “Bumi.” Syam’s deep voice resonated from behind him, reminding him of the emptiness left by the globe’s absence.

  “Yes, Pak?” Bumi squeaked, disconcerted by the tone in that resonance. It was the familiar tone of authority.

  “Is it true that you failed your grammar test?” the voice wanted to know.

  Shame. Bumi lowered his head and affirmed his failure to the dirt. “Yes, Pak.”

  Syam’s hand found the boy’s shoulder. “How can that be, Child? You have near-perfect grammar. A little too street maybe, but you know the rules.”

  “Sorry, Pak. I have trouble paying attention in class.”

  “Why is that? Is there a cute girl?”

  Bumi laughed in spite of himself. “No, Pak.” How ridiculous.

  “Well, what is distracting you then?”

  Bumi considered this question a moment, thinking it a good one, a difficult one, one to be answered correctly, unlike the trivia of school quizzes. He almost answered ‘boredom’ but realized boredom was no distraction. It was just that there were more interesting things to think about than the subject matter of class. He finally answered, “Imagination.”

  “What?”

  Bumi recalled the question aloud. “You wanna know what’s distracting me. It’s my imagination.”

  Syam laughed. “Well, that’s better than girls, I guess. At least at your age. Even Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge.”

  “Pram says Einstein was a fascist,” Bumi said glumly.

  The skin around Syam’s eyes went so taut Bumi thought his eyeballs would fall out. “Who in hell is Pram?” Syam said the name with vulgar disgust, like he was incanting Satan’s creed.

  “He’s my friend from the market. He fought in World War II.”

  “Well he’s a fool then, and lucky to be alive. Einstein was no fascist. Only a crazy person could think that. Be careful of this Pram.”

  “Yes, Pak.”

  “Anyway, what is it your imagination is doing to distract you?”

  Bumi had told many stories in his time, mostly to Alfi, some to his friends back on Rilaka, and some to Pram and Arum on the market sidewalks. These stories were all either true, or retellings of fictions told to him. He’d even fantasized about being a novelist until he learned from Arum that that required living either in prison or in the anus of a politician. Still, with the pressure of Syam’s interrogation, the imagined stories of his classroom, time seemed a private space, and he remained silent under the probing spotlight.

  “So, nothing too important I guess,” Syam deduced aloud.

  “I guess not,” Bumi said, testing the relativity of truth with unsatisfying results.

  “Well then, young Mr. Bumi, let us begin your complete focus on the rules of Indonesian grammar, which should prove quite easy for a young man with your mental capacity and focus.”

  “I’m sorry, Pak. Thank you greatly for sacrificing your globe, and saving me from the Peace and Order Officer, but I really must go now.”

  “Go? Where are you going?”

  “Tana Toraja.”

  Syam nearly choked. “Tana Toraja? What the hell for?”

  “Pak, you don’t understand. They took me from my family and I can’t go home. I hate the teacher! She canes me. I’m going to Tana Toraja to start over.”

  Syam nearly choked again, this time with laughter. To Bumi’s offended gaze he replied, “I’m sorry Bumi, I think sometimes you forget you’re a child, and I forget you’re in many ways an adult. But, tell me, Child, how does an eight year old start over? You’ve barely started the first time yet.” Syam broke into raucous laughter.

  Bumi’s flattened lips said he didn’t get it, so Syam swallowed his laughter and managed to calm himself by saying flatly, but with twitching shoulders, “Bumi, I’m sorry but you cannot go to Tana Toraja either. If you disappear, your parents will still be punished, regardless of where you go, and there is no worse form of punishment than what will be done to them, believe me.”

  Bumi slumped his shoulders and hung his head low, looking like an inflatable boy in need of more air.

  “I don’t mean to laugh at you,” Syamsuddin added. “You know it really saddens me to see the child who wanted so badly to go to school now hate it because of the manner in which it came to pass. This whole scheme was well-intentioned, I guess, but with that idiot McNamara giving out loans based on who dots the right i’s – and Suharto is nothing if not technocratic.”

  Bumi looked blankly at Pak Syam.

  “Basically, Bumi,” Syam explained, “the reason you’re at this new school is that someone across the ocean got the idea that everybody in the world should be literate, and Suharto saw a chance to get some easy money from the World Bank. See, the World Bank seems to think everyone should live the same way they do in Washington, DC. They want to make you civilized, Bumi. The only surprise is that the government actually followed through with a school, but I’m sure Suharto got his share somehow.

  “It is unfortunate that the government knows only force though, considering you actually wanted to go to school until someone forced you to do it. This government is incapable of recognizing friends.”

  “You sound like my friend, Arum,” Bumi informed him.

  “Another market friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful of people in the market, Bumi.”

  Bumi wondered if Syam was as blind to friends as the government.

  Syam continued, “As much as you hate school, it is your only option right now, if you want to ensure your family’s safety. You have to do what the government wants. You might as well make the best of it.”

  A deep, unhappy silence fell over the little house. Hafied had slipped back outside unnoticed during their conversation. Bumi hoped a plane would crash through the ceiling and straight through his skull. He looked to Syam, wondering if something from the man’s depths might somehow be provoked into beating him to death. Somehow. Failing to think of any provocation he could offer, he asked, “What about my freedom?”

  “Your freedom?”

  “You said the globe was to buy my freedom. Where is this freedom?”

  “Freedom resides in your mind, Bumi. Your mind then controls your body. If your mind is free, so shall be your body.”

  Bumi let Syam’s words linger in the air, though they stunk to him like side-street perfume. After what seemed a respectful time he said, “But my mind is not free, Pak. It is bored. It wants to learn but it’s not allowed. When I let it wander I fail and the other kids make fun of me.”

  Only the clock answered, counting what Bumi hoped would somehow be the last seconds of a life of unfulfilled promise.

  “Would you like some tea, Bumi?” Syam asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Bumi answered with automatic manners, wishing he’d sounded sulkier as the words jumped out.

  Syam put a small pot of water on the gas range in the kitchen, which was the same room as the living room with no doors or wall separating them, only chipped linoleum instead of thin carpet. “Tell me about where your mind takes you wandering when you’re supposed to be learning grammar,” Syam said, his voice low and inviting.

  Bumi explained about the powerful novels he’d read, their ultimate collective redundancy, and his subsequent attempts to make up his own stories.

  “So you can read novels but you can’t pass a basic grammar quiz?”

  “Too much has been made of this grammar quiz,” Bumi said.

  “Maybe so, but it seems your future, along with your present, depends greatly on this matter. So let me ask you, were you passing grammar quizzes when you were still allowed to read these books?”

  “Ten on ten every time.”

  “Follow me.” Syam turned the gas off and abandone
d the tea, strolled across the kitchen/living room, crouched in front of his desk, and waved Bumi over. Bumi joined him and peered under the desk to see a row of physics textbooks. Syam put one large hand at each end of the row and pulled the whole thing toward him in one swift movement, revealing a sliding wooden door, which he opened to reveal still more books: novels.

  “These are banned,” he said. “So you must read them in secrecy, and you can’t take them outside. Even my wife is unaware of their presence. She thinks I burned them all with the rest of the mania-driven sycophants when Suharto killed all the communists. I’ve little sympathy for those ideologues, Bumi, but these are national treasures constructed by the best minds of my generation.” Syam paused and rubbed his moustache with one index finger. “Bumi, I hope you understand that giving my globe to that turd Pak Anwar was a very large sacrifice for me.”

  Bumi searched Syam’s eyes for meaning. What did this kind teacher want from him? “Yes, Pak,” he said with his eyes cast downward.

  “Well, perhaps in exchange you can stay in school, and let me tutor you, share with you my knowledge. I’ve lived alone with the secrets of these books for a very long time, Bumi. Now, these jewels of imagination can be yours to consume. New worlds are at your fingertips. But you must stay in school and let me share with you what I know. That’s the deal.”

  Bumi cocked his ‘eyebrow of scepticism,’ but he knew Syam was right about Tana Toraja. His escape to freedom would be the death of his family. Once again, written words were his only hope for joy, the only escape route available. He nodded to Syam and the deal was done.

  ONE HUNDRED PAINFUL MEMORIES IN CHAPTER 6

  In 1984 my life changed in subtle ways. at least, the changes seemed subtle then, but nothing seems like a big deal when you’re nine. Friends of mine with children tell me their kids love repetition and hate change. I loved wandering over new territory. Maybe it was just an early rebellion against my mother’s fear of the unfamiliar, or that I was just a boy raised on too many adventure novels. I was not seeking answers or even information, just experience.

  When my mother gently broke the news that we were chasing a chance at a bigger salary for my stepfather over a thousand miles away, I celebrated the idea of living somewhere new, even though I was perfectly happy in Toronto. Our big move of 1984 was exhilarating because it happened at the start of the new year. We drove right to the edge of the country. The new place had a backyard with enough snow in it to build a whole family of snowmen. I had no idea we had crossed so many provincial borders or entered something called the have-not culture. As soon as we were unpacked I threw on the yellow rain-suit and black rubber boots my mother had bought me—what she usually called my Newfie uniform—and I got to work out back.

  In thirty minutes I proudly showed my first Nova Scotian snowman to my older sister, Michelle. “Nice,” she muttered, and she skulked into the house. I knew she was headed to the bathroom. Skulking to the bathroom had become her thing. She spent hours in there, steam pouring out the cracks in the door frame while the rest of us held our bladders. My stepfather cried ‘freak’ while my mother fretted that it was just a teenaged thing.

  I imagined the scene while I put some finishing touches on my snowman. On close inspection I realized he needed a pipe if he was to look like Frosty of the Christmas special. I remembered my mother bragging about how she got her second husband to quit pipe-smoking after cigarettes had killed our father. I ran inside and asked Mother if he still had a pipe.

  “Ask him,” she said. “But take your boots off first, for heaven’s sake.”

  I took off my rubbers and slowly approached the door to my stepfather’s office, which was where he spent most weekends watching basketball. I knocked softly. No answer. I knocked again, a little bit louder and faster. “Is somebody there?” he shouted.

  I tried to answer but I could only cough. He never liked to be disturbed in his ‘office.’ The door flew open and he looked down at me. I looked at his corduroy house slippers. “Yes?” he demanded.

  “Do you still have a pipe?” I squeaked.

  “Who wants to know?” he demanded, rapidly tapping his foot.

  “Me, your son.”

  Although Michelle and I only ever thought of him as our stepfather, he insisted that he was our dad and we were his son and daughter. I couldn’t remember my biological father but Michelle had made it clear that he was the only person worthy of the title of ‘Dad.’

  “It’s in the basement,” he told me, closing the door, leaving an image of his corduroy house slippers etched in my mind along with an exasperatingly vague piece of information. The pipe was in the basement. But where among my mother’s, my biological father’s, and my stepfather’s history of discards might it be?

  I was vaulting down the stairs to begin what was to be an epic search when my eyes caught hold of a dark sheen across the floor. A sploosh proved that my eyes had been too slow, and I ran back upstairs with wet feet, hollering excitedly to my parents. My stepfather turned blood red when he saw the foot of water covering his new basement. He stood there for a good long minute in his red and black checkerboard robe and those corduroy house slippers, silently moving his lips and getting redder. All the while we could hear the white noise of Michelle showering above us, and one slow, steady stream of drip from a ceiling pipe into the basement’s new pool. The deep red of my stepfather’s face told me that Michelle was a dead woman.

  I couldn’t stand the silence any more, and I didn’t want to be there when he broke it with a verbal assault on Michelle. Without a word I turned and fled back up the stairs and shoved my rubber boots back on. I ran out the front door and into the forest surrounding our new faulty-piped house.

  The forest wasn’t virgin to Nova Scotia’s forestry industry but it was virgin to me, with its vast expanses of unexplored trees and maybe rabbits or foxes, bears or, God forbid, stray dogs.

  Dogs were my greatest fear when I was nine years old, worse even than my stepfather’s quiet anger. His loud anger was easier. Within thirty minutes I had forgotten about both. There was so much to discover here. I stumbled over rocks and clambered up trees, found my way into a marsh and decided I had better get home to dry myself off. My feet were still wet from the basement and had gone numb. What I didn’t know was in which direction the house might be found. I tried them all without success and completed a few more one-mile circles for good measure. The sun was sinking over the pines and I was afraid to stop moving lest shivering get the best of me. I thought about Adrian Hall, the kid around my age who had gone to Nova Scotia to visit his aunt and uncle from Ontario the year before and never returned. His body was found in the woods after a three-day boy-hunt. Exposure was the cause of death and my mother explained that he died of heat and cold and bugs and sunburn. Still not as bad as dogs.

  My missing persons case was never filed. I was lost for about six hours but my family was too preoccupied to notice. My stepfather was spitting anger, insults and profanities at Michelle. Michelle was spitting right back and blaming my stepfather for purchasing such a shitty house in the sticks and being swindled by real estate bumpkins to boot. My mother was trying to keep them apart and remind them that there was a mess to clean up and that somebody should perhaps call a plumber.

  Fortunately I was able to find my own way home, with the help of a middle-aged man who lived off beer and whatever fish he could catch in the swamp. He slept in a tent held together by duct tape. He pointed me in the general direction of the road, took a swig from a can of Bud Light, and told me to go left once I hit the road. “But don’t stop for a swim in the lake there because it’s polluted,” he added. I thought better of reminding him it was winter and trod off on my frostbitten feet.

  The front door was locked when I finally found it. I rang the bell. My mother answered, scooped me up and squeezed my freezing muddy form in her arms. I remembered then why I had run away, a
nd mentally prepared myself for the shit I was about to catch. “Where have you been?” my mother asked, and by her tone I could tell I wasn’t in trouble, which meant something else had gone wrong.

  “Is Michelle dead?” I asked.

  My mother laughed and put me down roughly, squatted and looked into my grimy face. “Why would you think that? Of course she’s not dead. She’s in her room.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved but wondering why no one had come looking for me. “Where’s my stepfather?”

  “He went into town,” Mother told me. She could be as infuriatingly vague as her husband. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said. “You’re so filthy you look like a street person.”

  “I can just take a shower,” I said, but the water had been turned off. Mother had managed to fill a few large jugs before the plumber cut the water and she boiled some up for me to scrub with. I was given a couple hot dogs for supper and sent to bed wearing two pairs of wool socks. Still no sign of my stepfather.

  On my way to bed I knocked on Michelle’s door and she taught me some new swear-words from inside her fortress. I went to bed missing the girl who had, in the temporary absence of any kind of father, taught me how not to throw like a girl. I lay awake in my new room, remembering the make-believe games we used to play, how we travelled together through time and space, saving the universe from Nazi warlords and other of history’s miscreants. She recruited all the neighbourhood kids and assigned them roles to play. Our amphitheatre was the scrap-yard on the lakeshore. There were rusted iron beams there from condemned buildings, and if you scuffed the sole of your foot down on one hard it made a sound like a laser being fired. Our best battle scenes took place on the beams, until my friend Sharmila slipped and spread-eagled her legs over the beam with a dull thud. She scraped up the insides of her legs and cried all the way back to her house. My sister voluntarily took the blame.

  Our plumbing problems were quickly superseded by difficult times, particularly the death of my biological father’s eldest brother, Trev, a behemoth force for good in the universe. Michelle told me all about how Uncle Trev had single-handedly, in the dark of night, smuggled all thirteen of his younger siblings as far away as necessary from their dangerous drunkard father. Across town turned out to be far enough to seal his legend as a walking, talking, chain-smoking saint in his own time.