Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  In the meantime I needed to escape the house and get back to the farm. I could provide late fall harvest labour in exchange for rooming and the opportunity to be a cultural and linguistic liaison for the migrant workers. I was determined to be their ally because they had lit a fire in me and given me a sense of community I’d never known, and because it would show Sarah that though my dream was a new one, it was serious. Even in retrospect I think I would have succeeded if I hadn’t been hit with three shocking emails in less than a week:

  1) My proposal to the Ministry of Labour was rejected because they could not support work that involved lobbying.

  I called Lily as soon as soon as I read the email. “Why then,” I said, “did they give you the money to hire me? Surely they understood what we had in mind.”

  “Well, of course I didn’t mention the lobbying in the initial proposal,” she said. “They wouldn’t have even given me the money to hire you if I had.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked. She should have understood what I’d given up for her chimera. I’d been duped.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  It seemed like a futile argument because she was so obstinate, which was how Lily operated. It was the same with this baby she was trying to adopt. She said the child needed a good home but she didn’t consider where it was coming from, what it might mean to pull a child away from whatever home it might already have in its own country. That was the difference between Lily and me. She was a woman of action and I was a man of thought. It was foolish to think that she would see me or use me any differently than she did a Ministry of Labour bureaucrat.

  “I wanted to do this work so bad,” I said. I wanted to make her see that I really was an ally, not an enemy.

  “I know,” she said. “So did I, believe me. But we can’t quit now. The proposal you wrote was wonderful. I’ve sent the story of Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez around and it’s really got people talking, and I think your presence on the farm got a lot of the migrants inspired to make this happen. The unions have deep pockets and now that we have some initial support they can do the lobbying too. Don’t give up now, okay?”

  “Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez is fictional,” I said.

  “He’s as real as every migrant farm worker in Ontario,” she said. “This is the game, Mark. It’s very real. It’s not easy and the pay is shit, but you can make a real difference. Don’t quit on me, okay.”

  I told her I wouldn’t quit. Now that the house was sold I was more or less free to become impoverished for a good cause anyway. It seemed like the truth until:

  2) I got a long detailed update from Bumi that concluded: You should come to Indonesia. We could use you.

  That would have seemed like a nice but impossible fantasy if not for:

  3) A call I received from a hospital in Vancouver. Mikki had sliced up her wrists with a brand new razorblade and was lucky to be alive. The Portland hospital had stabilized her and shipped her north of the border where Canada could pay for her care. What surprised me even more than the suicide attempt was that she had me listed as her next of kin. Our mother didn’t even know what had happened yet.

  TO THE POWER OF SIXTY IN CHAPTER 26

  We managed to squeeze into the last speedboat of the day as the sun made its final sprint toward the anxious horizon. I was jammed up against a gunwale and Mikki was jammed up against me. She shot me a quick smile. She knew I was a little afraid of the open waters ever since a near-drowning off my grandfather’s sailboat on Lake Ontario, my earliest hazy memory.

  There were about sixteen white people in the boat and one surly driver with a lit cigarette dangling from lips that never moved. The little boat was way too full for my liking, and I gave a quick shout when we jolted from the Makassar dock. I was surrounded by tourist sweat but after forty-eight hours of plane and taxi, and getting hit by that wall of tropical heat at the airport in Jakarta after two months of Canadian cold and snow, I was anxious to reach our destination.

  Everyone on the boat seemed to know each other except for the surly pilot, Mikki and me. They chatted rapidly in some Scandinavian language and snapped photos of our pilot, other boats in the harbour, hawkers waving goods at us in a last-ditch effort and the distant shoreline of a small circular island: Rilaka.

  Mikki threw her arm around me. Either it was a big sisterly gesture or she had nowhere else to put it. I glanced for the hundredth time at the long jagged scar on her wrist, a permanent tattoo that marked the loss of a woman she loved.

  It irked me that at her weakest moment, when I had stepped in and saved my big sister from miserable wallowing, she could still be so goddamned condescending with her reassuring smiles, winks and arms-on-the-shoulder. “Fuck,” I muttered.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Tired. Just fucking tired.”

  She had the nerve to smile again and say, “We’re almost there L’il Bro,” with that goofy grin under a sandy-haired ball cap. No wonder Toni dumped her.

  I looked over the gunwale into the murky blue. We were deep by then. The waters shimmered, basked in the last of the sunlight as a golden ray scoured like a searchlight. I stared at the moving blue mass and thought of Sarah’s eyes, and cursed myself for missing her body. I was guilty of her worst accusations. For the thousandth time I pulled that paper ring from the sushi joint out of my pocket. It was little more than pulp. I stared straight ahead as I dropped it into the water. Seconds later the pilot tapped me on the shoulder. I looked back and he handed me a wet little mound of paper pulp. He said nothing. I stuffed the remnants into my back pocket and vowed to eat it when I had a moment of privacy.

  A few miles from the sandy shore the sun plunged into the ocean. Water and air pollution mixed; light bounced off all manner of particulate faeces; and CO2 amplified itself into the orangest and most dazzling display Monet could never have painted. All the cameras, including my sister’s, worked overtime to pixelate the moment. I hadn’t brought a camera but I knew I’d never forget that beautiful moment right before we came ashore.

  Bumi pulled us off the boat and onto the white sand, giving us huge Canadian-style hugs while the Scandinavians looked confused. Maybe they wondered where their welcoming party was. Bumi directed them to the three guesthouses and introduced us to Baharuddin, who had been hiding behind Bumi’s leg. “And welcome to my home!” he boomed with his arms spread wide and smiling. “What do you think; is it up to the hype?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, though it wasn’t quite what I’d expected. “Of course I haven’t seen so many white people since I lived in Halifax.”

  Bumi laughed and looked around him. All down the beach were little sun-huts built for two to four drinkers to sit and gawk at the sunset. A few tardy divers staggered back with their rented gear. Bumi had once described for me how snorkelling tourists supplemented the fishing income on Rilaka. This lot was no supplement; they were the visible majority of global minorities, white people with Coronas and nasi goreng. There was not a fishing boat to be seen.

  Bumi smiled and said, “Like I say in my email, things have changed.”

  MICHELLE AND TONI’S STORY RAN A REMARKABLY SYMMETRIC PARALLEL to mine and Sarah’s. Each player was obsessed with his or her own ambitions. My assumption that Michelle and Toni spent ample time together was wrong. Given my lifetime grudge against my sister, I found it horrendously disconcerting to see how alike we’d become in adulthood, and how much we were like our mother and stepfather.

  In the end, Michelle was afflicted with the twenty-first century busy-ness disease. Things fell apart when she couldn’t maintain her usual Sunday rendezvous with Toni. Between her OCD support group, her anti-prescription drug campaign, her day job and her tutoring, she didn’t even have time to call for help.

  I think that when Toni looked at Mikki she must have seen too many of her own workaholic, obsessive tend
encies reflected back at her. Toni probably loved my sister in the same way we love ourselves, with an unshakeable tinge of regret for all the things we decided against, all the times we chose work over pleasure, colleagues over loved ones. Come to think of it, the only adult I know who chose otherwise was Bumi, but when we arrived at Rilaka that wasn’t working out so well either. Perhaps if Bumi had been given more choices in the first place, he would have made the same errors as the rest of us.

  Mikki didn’t handle being dumped very well. Extreme as always, she skipped the threats and cries for help and went straight to the vein. Michelle was lucky that Toni, full of concern and worry, came by that night to check on her. When I hit the scene Michelle was physically all but recovered. She smiled so charmingly in the suicide watch ward, with her scarred wrists strapped down tight. “Hey, Bro,” she said, as if we were home for the holidays, and this time it was obvious even to me that she was as full of shit as a stuffed turkey.

  “Hey Jackass!” I yelled. “What are you trying to pull?”

  We had it out properly that night, and though I told her then that I knew she was a phoney, she wore the same clownish veneer to Indonesia that she wore in Portland. She admitted only that the stress had become too much and that she was saddened by Toni’s departure. For Michelle that was a deep revelation.

  “Saddened,” I repeated.

  Mikki even apologized for the worry she put me through, telling me that she hadn’t let the doctors tell anyone else what happened. She begged me not to tell Mother.

  “I won’t tell her if you come to Indonesia with me,” I said.

  ABOUT FORTY TOURISTS GATHERED AROUND THE MIDNIGHT FIREplace, taking seats in plastic folding chairs borrowed from the community centre. “The tale I’m about to tell is an old one, but don’t let its age fool you,” Bumi said. His voice was amplified over the crowd by the still night. “It is more frightening and more real than any Hollywood horror flick. It is an ancient story of my people that, if forgotten, will become truer than global warming or warfare. Or, maybe it is because the world is already forgetting that these scourges have come upon us.”

  Some in the crowd giggled, some nodded, many sipped their margaritas. Bumi told an abridged version of the seven-hundred-year-old Bugis Sureq Galigo, the epic poem of creation, catastrophe and rebirth. He wove in tales of a man who bought a turtle that could make gold; of the early Rilakans who spurned the Goddess of Rice and doomed generations to fish for a living; of a pirate who was tricked out of his gold-making turtle by a false-woman; and of how the great Sawerigading taught his ancestors how to build boats.

  This was Bumi’s new line of work, to entertain tourists and act as a symbolic token of his culture. The work came to him as a new dream, no less real for its novelty. He was born to tell these tales of the sea, as he once had to his baby sister, as his uncle once had to the fishermen, as his father once had to him.

  THOSE TOURISTS HAD NO IDEA HOW TRUE HIS STORY WAS. HIS father had died in 1994, before Bumi even left the archipelago, before Baharuddin was even born. Yusupu keeled over in the marketplace and a friend took his body home for a sea burial.

  His sister Alfi died a year later. She never learned how to speak properly or even emit much of a range of noises. Her body was found tangled in a heap of fishing nets early one morning, washed up on the shore.

  Bumi thanked God, as he’d recently learned to do, that his mother was alive, thriving without her husband. She was a well-respected village elder, a dukun of sorts herself, though nobody called her that. She was credited with having saved the island economy when the fish started disappearing. She started the first two guesthouses and had a knack for word-of-mouth marketing back on the mainland, which she visited frequently. True to the island culture Win had adopted as her own, she was generous with the profits of her business, sealing her place in island folklore.

  The day Bumi walked off a motorboat with a group of tourists towing a ten-year-old mirror image of himself by the hand, Win fell on her knees before him and hugged his feet. “I’ve seen a lot of things from all sorts of worlds,” she said to his knees, “but I’ve never seen a ghost walk right off a boat and say hello to its mother. Why do my hands not go right through your feet?”

  Bumi fell to his knees too, kissed her face and hugged her. “I’m so sorry I never returned to you,” he said. “I was too filled with fear and shame. Now I am grown and I bring you my son. If my father wants to beat him he must first come through me.”

  Even grown man talk is no match for death, and the news of what he’d lost crippled Bumi for days. While his mother giggled, tickled and fed his son, Bumi lay in bed and read anthropological studies of the ‘tribes of Indonesia,’ which he’d stolen from the Makassar library. All he took with him were those books and three years’ worth of little blue pills supplied by Baharuddin’s psychiatrist and paid for by Robadise. Whenever anyone entered his room he asked, “Why is God so cruel and spiteful to me? All he has brought me is death and loss. There is no love in God, just cruelty.”

  Ibu Win came to her son one day with a surprise, the only letter he had ever written home from school, when he was eight years old. Win was unable to read, and she was too embarrassed to ask anyone in Makassar to decode the document. She had saved it for twenty-four years, hoping that Bumi would one day read it to her.

  “I have found the secret to surviving school life: play dumb,” the letter began. The letter was a long lament, and he couldn’t believe he had written such heartache to the very people who struggled to go on without him, hoping he was better off elsewhere. He also couldn’t believe the school had sent it, but then they must have known it could never be read.

  Bumi looked at his mother through adult eyes, unable to hurt her with the childish words he had written. “My dear mother,” he said, pretending to read from the letter, “all is well here at school, and I am learning more than I thought possible.”

  “You were such a good boy,” she said. “And a strong one too. Please, Bumi, for your old mother who you haven’t seen since before the birth of your son, please leave this bed now. The time for mourning has passed. No amount of crying or reading will bring the years back. We must live on.”

  It was hard for Bumi live on and not think about poor Alfi, the greatest of listeners with no one to hear her cries. He did his best. He read the words of white men who loved brown people so much that they lived amongst them and kept detailed notes of their habits. There must have been something good in how his people lived if all these whites wanted to learn it.

  The idea to share his island’s wisdom with the drive-by tourists, through stories in the oral tradition, pulled Bumi from his bed and furthered his family’s legend. His idea gave Rilaka, of all the islands scattered around Makassar, a Unique Selling Point (USP).

  He’d learned about USP from the Changs. “You gotta have USP or why they choose us over any other Indo-joint,” the youngest had told him in a rare calm moment. “That’s why we deliver. That’s why we have a karaoke machine, a slot machine, a cigarette machine.”

  With the storytelling USP, Rilaka became the most frequented little island off Makassar despite being nowhere near the closest. All those new tourists had necessitated more Rilakan English speakers, and that was to be our job.

  BUMI’S MOTHER, IBU WIN, DEVELOPED AN INSTANT RAPPORT WITH her grandson. Like Bumi, she fell in love with his artistic gifts, and her healing bent was a great source of fascination for Baharuddin. Win had never been properly trained as a healer and the underground dukun on the mainland would have considered her a quack, but Baharuddin didn’t know that. In his innocence he saw that she had remarkable powers. She knew every cure and treatment for every illness on the island, except the drunken stupidity of tourists — though she did have a good hangover concoction.

  After he witnessed his grandmother’s healing gifts, Baharuddin made her his new behavioural therapist. He
explained the treatment he had received on the mainland, whereby he had been made to sort garbage at the doctor’s office every day and was not allowed to wash his hands afterward. Robadise interrogated the boy for numerous unsolved murders. Baharuddin’s job was to firmly deny every one, using alibis and facts, no matter how badly it felt like he was guilty.

  Ibu Win had him manage the ample garbage created by the tourists and load it onto the boats to be returned to the mainland for disposal or burning. She played good cop and bad cop, interrogated him for every crime on the island, from the disappearance of bottles of expensive Scotch down to a fist fight between two drunk Russian military officers on leave from service in Jakarta. She knew the boy wasn’t responsible for any of these, that he was a good boy with an over-active conscience.

  Win also threw in her own special remedies. She left gifts for sea gods at the most energetic beaches on the island, appropriate things like bars of fancy soap usually reserved for the tourists and occasionally rough sketches by Baharuddin that didn’t meet his high standards.

  She also showed the boy new kinds of dances to replace his twitches: the ancient dances done to a buffalo drum, gifts from their Bugis brothers on the mainland. These dances were patterned just right to keep away evil spirits, the kinds that put obsessions in a vulnerable boy’s mind and drive him to compulsive and wasteful rituals of self-destruction.

  Lastly, because she feared his little blue pills, she had Rilaka’s best young swimmer, Ibrahim, dive to the corals and come back with a certain blue-green sea plant. “Not too much,” she told Ibrahim. “Just a handful is plenty.”

  She dried the plant and crushed it into powder. Every night she steeped just a little into a seaweed tea for Baharuddin. This medicine had cured a very similar illness, the dancing sickness, in Baharuddin’s elders years ago. She hoped Baharuddin’s affliction would be as responsive so that he could stop using the pills from the mainland. Ibu Win had come to Rilaka a Javanese city girl, but there were few traces of that girl left in her.