Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Bumi had little time to worry about how to explain the paradox of the West to his son. It was hard enough to explain, without this new complication, how Canada had granted him no leeway, freedom or status, excluded him at every turn, and yet had supplied him with a white man who brought him to a black doctor who gave him the blue pills to cure his illness. And now it seemed his son suffered the same illness. After six months living as an unwelcome pet and sometimes useful diary, Bumi didn’t get much time to consider what to do about Baharuddin’s potential illness. For the second time in eight years, he was the victim of police brutality.

  The four muscle-headed perpetrators made sure that Bumi could see their faces but could not cry out through the dirty sock they stuffed in his mouth as they dragged him from his nylon cave and kicked and punched for the better part of an hour. Unlike his torture eight years earlier, this time he thought about little other than the pain and the question of why. The experience brought back that other session, and even though they didn’t touch his genitals or anus, those most sensitive parts felt a very realistic phantom of pain. Hearing no call to prayer this time, Bumi could no longer bring himself to blame God, who was increasingly absent and irrelevant the more Bumi learned to embrace the dirt.

  These assassins, despite their thuggish approach, were experts in the administration of pain. Their blows seemed to cut straight to his kidneys, liver, bladder, heart, lungs and veins, until the pain circulated throughout his body. They never touched him from the neck up and they made almost no sound. Despite his low tolerance for pain, consciousness refused to desert him. When they pulled the sock from his mouth he had nothing left with which to scream. He smelled his own urine and feces in his only pair of pants.

  “It is dangerous for you to stay here,” a hoarse voice whispered in his ear. “Some of your old neighbours and friends have heard that you are haunting us, even that other island freak with his island accent like you.”

  Bumi had been thinking up to that point how similar Rilakans and Torajans were. For Bumi, who had been across the ocean, the differences seemed like almost nothing. He hadn’t the energy to argue with this hoarse voice and its harsh Indonesian language, the only one they shared.

  “Since you are a ghost,” the hoarse voice said, “we cannot protect you like we can your widow and her family. Maybe you should haunt somewhere else, for your own safety.”

  Had he been able to respond he would have told the man that he would rather become a real ghost than a fugitive again. Instead he lay still and silent, felt the sting of the cool moonlight on his back and the burn of being dragged on his front, back into his tent. He heard the sound of its zipper closing. The crickets and frogs sang him into a painful sleep, during which he made no movements.

  INTO THE DITCH AT NINETY IN CHAPTER 23

  My failure as a counsellor complete, i jumped onto a grant cycle and rode it out like a gradual downhill, barely having to pedal. I went with forces greater than myself, rather than try to shape anything of my own. I churned out, cut, pasted and edited applications. I spent an hour each morning scanning the newspapers and Internet for new streams and pools of money. I made calls in search of corporate social responsibility leads, but as always the most money came from government and private philanthropic foundations.

  Within three months the social work department of the health centre had more money than ever before in its thirty-year history, and I was home by six every evening. I slipped into my routine with no trace of Bumi and no word from Mikki. She had a funny way of showing that she missed me. Still, order had been established in my little world. I felt more comfortable than bored for the first time in a few years.

  As the stress of the previous few months dissolved, Sarah transformed herself completely. She honoured her remaining few short-term modelling contracts, none of which involved her suddenly marred, but still spectacular legs. She tweaked the business plan to perfection and worked to sell it to potential investors in the industry, and several banks and credit unions.

  I had barely noticed how my girlfriend had faded over the years. It wasn’t just that I paid her less attention. She had become less vibrant, more worn and plain, less imaginative in her vivid explanations of simple things. Long stories were replaced by summaries, the assumption being that I’d heard them all before anyway, which was for the most part true. Once you take shortcuts you cruise through life together, distracted by other things. She took shortcuts because I’d lost patience for the scenery. Now she had reinvented herself and I was the same, but with more free time.

  The first time I read Sarah’s business plan was about two weeks after I returned from Portland. She had done her research, not only of the global and local clothing industry, the competitors that specialized in sweatshop-free garments and higher-end fashion, but also in the art of the business plan. It was tight and it answered all the questions I could imagine an erudite banker asking from the other side of some massive oak table.

  And yet, it lacked something. It lacked a plot. It didn’t tell the story of Sarah. Sure it had the obligatory mission and vision statements. The latter promised a beautiful world of smartly dressed rich people, sufficiently fed Third Worlders looking forward to their work week, and fat-pocketed shareholders, but somehow it failed to connect the beginning to the end, the ambitious young woman to her happy ending.

  She had written herself out of the thing, and she was its protagonist. She was asking them to invest in her. Her ideas, her imagination, her attention to detail, her knowledge and experience, her awareness of a problem and a challenge and an opportunity and a niche. It was her creativity and love of beautiful clothes, and her commitment to children, that would make the financiers’ investments profitable.

  With her permission I translated her personal story into business-ease. It was much the same as writing a grant proposal. The guys with the money and silk ties love their money too much to throw it into some vacuum where it is said good ideas come to play. They want facts, figures, proof of problems and untapped solutions. They want to know that the people handling the money are capable of basic math, at least, and punctuation. But they also want to hear a good story. They want to be convinced and inspired. They want a believable plot and a happy ending. A successful proposal must have all of these elements.

  I was about halfway through my revisions when I got a call from Lily. “So I hear you’re a rising star,” she said.

  “Am I?”

  “I hear your health centre’s never done better.”

  I made some show of humility, but probably came off less humble than I intended about my fundraising genius. I reluctantly conceded that, indeed, I was born to write proposals.

  “Ever think about switching industries?” Lily asked.

  “Only about eight hours a day.”

  Lily came off as unassuming but she was a wildcat opportunist, quick to pounce and not one to let go of the jugular when she got close to her goal. I learned this lesson the hard way, when she offered me a dream opportunity to use my money gift in a brand new way.

  She had scraped together a small pot of money. It was enough to pay me for a few months. I was to write a large-scale proposal to the Ministry of Labour to support the wages of a full-time migrant farm workers union organizer. If I could convince an anti-labour Labour Department to fund the most powerless workers in the province, I could turn a temporary grant-writing assignment into a full-time job. I’d be able to work with migrant farm labourers, people kind of like Bumi, but in their case legalized slaves. I would help them fight for their rights. And like a lame gazelle I fell backwards into her wildcat grip. Unable to think of any other options I succumbed, accepted the offer without negotiation or consideration of consequence. I didn’t even ask her how she was doing.

  OF COURSE SARAH DIDN’T WANT TO SELL OUR HOUSE AND MOVE up north to Cauldron. Of course Sherry was unimpressed that so soon after I invented a ne
w position for myself and negotiated a considerable raise I wanted to leave. Of course my mother worried that I would fail to raise the money needed to keep myself employed, especially with Sarah unemployed.

  My generally absentee sister came closest to being supportive of my plan. “Are you really unhappy with your work?” she asked.

  “Bored out of my fucking mind,” I said.

  “Really? I had the impression that you were doing quite well.” This response was quintessential Mikki. I complained incessantly to her about the bureaucracy, the brain-freeze, the routine, the backbiting in the guise of friendship at the ‘community’ health centre. I had even told her about the recurring dream I had that I was a chicken running around stamping out fires with my chicken feet and the fuel for the fires was an important grant proposal I’d written in my human form. As a chicken I couldn’t seem to keep up and the dream ended with a sense of relief when one of the fires engulfed me and a swarm of hungry relatives surrounded my roasting carcass.

  Somehow this all registered with Mikki as ‘doing quite well.’

  “I guess many people consider me a success,” I said. “But I’m miserable.”

  “I just thought you got what you wanted,” she said, “based on what you said when you were out here, how you were such a good grant writer.”

  “Maybe being good at something and enjoying aren’t always the same,” I said.

  “Then why would you want to write proposals at all? Why leave one grant-writing job for another?”

  She had a point, but I tried to explain that this new grant-writing job was a means to an end.

  She didn’t get it. She wasn’t much of a compromiser, not one to separate process from product. I thought maybe that was the secret to her recent success. “You could always skip that step,” she said, “and come out here and be an English tutor with me. We can start our own school together when we raise enough money—you might find tutoring more rewarding than all that grant writing.”

  Of all the responses to my lapse into the lion’s jaws Sarah’s should have been the most predictable. “If you don’t want to work at the health centre any more, why not use those skills to help my business?” she said.

  My response was total, unprecedented collapse — her question was like starch remover and I crumbled into a malleable ball on our living room floor. Sarah, totally confused, put her arms around me from behind and clutched my chest. She could think of no other response, and I couldn’t either.

  DISAPPEARANCE JUST NORTH OF ZERO IN CHAPTER 24

  It never occurred to Bumi to leave. he had no desire to be beaten again, but giving up on his children was no option. He knew staying in Tana Toraja could cost him his life, but he could no longer imagine a life that didn’t include them anyway. The Sunday after he was beaten he took revenge, of a sort, on his nemesis.

  Bumi watched Mathias pull the two reluctant boys from the house toward the church. Yaty walked two steps behind him. Baharuddin walked with Mathias. The boy rolled back his head, the same motion Bumi had witnessed earlier.

  “Stop twitching!” Mathias snapped. He swatted the child hard on the back of the head, snapped his face forward. The boy cried out in surprised pain.

  Bumi, still stiff and sore everywhere, was on his adversary like a left tackle before anyone could react, his hands around Mathias’s throat. Bumi screamed insults and profanities as if Mathias were a lifetime of undefeated rivals. Yaty and Baharuddin tried but failed to pull Bumi off.

  Red-faced, Mathias clasped Bumi’s wrists and tried to pull the angry hands from his neck, tried to kick the angry body from atop his own.

  Bunga saved Mathias’s life and Bumi’s too when she ran from the house and looked her biological father in the eyes, pleading, “Please don’t do this, Dad. Please. It’s wrong.”

  Bumi’s harsh breath calmed and slowed as his fingers loosened their grip on flesh and vein. He pushed himself off of Mathias, stood and looked down at what he hoped was a broken man. He prepared himself for a retaliation that didn’t come.

  Mathias stood, dusted himself off, reclaimed Baharuddin and Beti’s hands, and continued his stroll to church, head aloft. He breathed a bit heavily but otherwise seemed content with the world. His wife followed a few paces behind him, saying nothing.

  Bunga took Bumi’s hand and led him back to his tent. He sat heavily on his sleeping mat in front of the tent. He spread his elbows over his knees and pressed forehead against forearm. He felt old, as if an intense desire to restore his youth had flowed from his angry fingers into Mathias’s stupid neck.

  Bunga squeezed her own forehead against his, nudging his arms aside.

  He reached up with one tired hand and stroked her hair.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Everything. Except maybe what I did just now. He shouldn’t have slapped Baharuddin.”

  “So what? Every kid gets slapped sometime.”

  Bumi raised his head from his arms and she raised her face to meet his eyes. “A very Indonesian statement,” he said. “Parents who slap their children need help.’”

  “Were you helping Mathias?” she asked in a flat voice that left Bumi unsure if she was being funny or earnest. Sarcasm wasn’t really her way.

  “I don’t like how he makes you do so much housework,” Bumi said. “Like he’s training you for the domicile. You are too smart to be some Big Man’s servant.”

  “Tell Mom that,” she said.

  “You can tell her I said so. And you can also tell her that her son is sick. Baharuddin needs medical treatment, not slaps.” He decided to finish the attack he had started, enough living like a dog or a ghost or a creep in the night.

  “I’ll tell her,” Bunga said. “What’s wrong with Baharuddin?”

  “He’s got what I’ve got, what I’ve had since I was his age,” he said. He told her about OCD, that it’s a genetic disorder. He asked her if she’d noticed a change in her brother.

  “He’s always been weird,” she said.

  “Does he wash a lot?”

  “All the time,” she said. “With buckets of hot water. He wastes so much time heating pots of water, puts it in the bucket, and there’s only one he’ll use. He scrubs like crazy.”

  “How long has that been going on?”

  “Maybe a few months.”

  “Tell your mother it’s very serious and I need to talk to her,” he said.

  Yaty had sworn loyalty to Mathias and that she would never again talk to Bumi. Her true loyalties were with her children. It took nothing less than the possible grave illness of her child, however remote that possibility, to convince her to break her promises to Mathias.

  She visited his tent that night and made it clear that Canada had polluted his mind, and Torajans wouldn’t see things like he did. “You lived off my labour for years,” she said. “You left me alone to clean up for you, to protect you from germs or spirits or whatever. You left me completely alone to fight your cause. And now you dare criticize Mathias for making Bunga do housework?”

  “I was sick,” he said. “I didn’t understand what I was doing. How much you put up with. How much I was hurting you.”

  She didn’t relent. “You must still be sick to attack my husband like that. What did he do wrong but enact a little discipline?”

  “It was that same discipline my father used to enact,” Bumi said.

  “It was just a little slap,” she said. “Not even a proper beating.”

  “A proper beating? What is that?” he asked.

  “You know what I mean,” Yaty said.

  “No, I don’t,” he said.

  “Then your mind is definitely polluted.”

  “My mind is clearer than it ever was before,” he sa
id. “Listen, you don’t understand. Baharuddin doesn’t need any beating and it has nothing to do with my mind pollution.”

  Yaty fidgeted from her crouched position but declined Bumi’s offer to join him on his camping mattress.

  “Remember how I used to be, Yaty?” Bumi said. “So uptight, so easily disturbed by any disruption to our space. My fidgeting, my routines, my washing? How I couldn’t sleep at night?”

  “Of course I remember,” she said. “Who do you think carried that burden?”

  “You did,” he said. “And I’m sorry for that.”

  “It was my pleasure as your wife, my duty and my honour.”

  “It was too great a burden. I had no idea then, but in Canada I learned.”

  “You learned corrupt Western ideas,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “I was corrupted by western ideas long before I left. We all were. It was revealed to me in Canada that I have been afflicted with something called obsessive-compulsive disorder.” He explained the nature of his obsessive fears of germs, failure and evil, and the compulsions designed to ward off such frightening outcomes, just as he had explained it to Bunga. He showed her his little blue miracle pills, told her how they, along with some self-awareness, therapy and discipline, had changed his life. “Haven’t you seen how Baharuddin is developing these same behaviours?”

  “I have noticed that he has become more like you since you returned to haunt my backyard,” she said.

  Bumi smiled and bowed a little, knowing they had reached an impasse. “I humbly posit that Baharuddin can be treated by a modern medical doctor, and that slapping him will do no good because there is no deterrent strong enough to stop what is going through his mind. Nothing will scare him more than the perceived consequences of stopping his rituals.

  “You can see for yourself the change in me, that I am more at ease, even living here in this dirt. Please, take the boy to see a head doctor.”