Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Sherry smiled. “I guess I should get back to work.”

  I nodded, indicating that I too was a productive and valuable member of the organization who cared about our clients and the betterment of society as a whole.

  NINE TO FIVE IN CHAPTER 9

  When Pram died everything went with him, not to paradise but to a barren place where disabled war-veteran-bums spend eternity thinking about their sins. For many years Bumi had clung to the few people in his life who had managed to support him, and in one day he lost Pram to Syam and Syam to the cumulative unforgiving adolescent anger of a boy who had been betrayed at every turn. He wished he could understand why Syam sicked the police on Pram. He wished he could see that action as an accident caused by defending his own family, or as the result of ignorance of potential consequences and prejudice against those affected. Such an accident would be forgivable. Defensiveness, ignorance and prejudice are very common, and sometimes useful.

  But all that was too rational for one ravaged by physical and emotional scars at a hormonally imbalanced age. He could not even begin to understand Syam’s actions, and he gave up his legitimate efforts to do so in lieu of wishing and longing. And still he feared those bacterial monsters, and suffered nightly rituals with his hands in scalding hot water.

  Having witnessed Pram’s broken face and spilled blood firsthand, anger and regret, and even fear, became far more important survival tools than forgiveness, friendship, or even the precious information that Syam had been providing. This need for information alone may have allowed Bumi to forgive Syam, had Robadise Paradise not stepped in to take Syam’s place as information provider.

  The first thing Robadise did for Bumi was hide him from the headmaster after Bumi beat Daing bloody on the soccer pitch. Robadise knew the headmaster to be a lazy man who generally followed the easiest path before him, and that he’d not bother to look too hard or too long to find and punish the culprit, as long as another resolution was presented. Robadise stashed the younger boy under his bed as a team of Bumi-hunters poured through every room at the school residence. When they came to Robadise’s room asking questions, he told them, “I hope you guys find that jerk. What he did to Daing was awful. You know, I was thinking we should give Daing something special at dinner tonight, poor guy. Maybe a nice helping of shrimp, or an ice cream or something.”

  Robadise was an A student, tall, handsome, funny, and he played well with others (even younger kids). The teachers all loved him. As the bitter search carried on with no success, this sly teachers’ pet and The Hunted played cards under Robadise’s bed. Bumi confided in Robadise, a near stranger, and told him of Pram’s death, which required further explanation of Syam and how Bumi had met him when he used to travel to Makassar with Yusupu.

  “Oh, so that’s why your Indonesian is so good.” It was a great revelation for Robadise, who’d always been perplexed by Bumi’s mastery of the national language when the other islanders sounded like complete foreigners.

  “My mother was a mainlander. I guess I learned from her.”

  “Oh. Is she dead?”

  “Only to me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Even cocooned safely with Robadise under the bed Bumi couldn’t explain what he was feeling, only the events leading up to his current state. “Just that I haven’t seen her since I was a little kid. I’ll probably never see her again.”

  “Why not? Don’t you miss her?”

  “Ya, sure. I think so. But it’s been so long now, and I have no freedom, not really. They don’t want us to go back to life on the island. They want everyone to modernize.”

  “Bumi, I can’t believe the words you use. I don’t even talk like that and I’m two years older than you.”

  It had been a while since anyone had been impressed by Bumi’s intelligence, and he apologized, thinking Robadise would judge the abnormality harshly.

  “It’s okay, man. You’re smart. That’s good. You need to be smart these days.” Robadise already looked up to the younger boy. He prided himself on being grown up ahead of his time, but here was someone displaying the same characteristic without even trying.

  When darkness fell Robadise visited the headmaster and suggested that Bumi would probably show himself and apologize if the search was called off. “Maybe Bumi can even be convinced to present Daing with his special dessert,” Robadise said. Surely Bumi was just frightened and if he wasn’t fearing punishment he’d return and make amends. The headmaster agreed, and Bumi swallowed a large dose of crow. He was confined to his room indefinitely, but at least he wasn’t caned.

  Daing was sufficiently frightened of Bumi that he didn’t bother him anymore. Bumi felt anaesthetized and his new calmness pleased his teachers, who credited Robadise for this breakthrough in taming the problem child. The same night Robadise kept a promise he’d made Bumi under the bed. He went to the market in search of Bumi’s friends.

  When he returned he brought bad news. He had learned from family friends, who were all well connected cops or criminals or both, that the police had ransacked the market and cracked down on all the bums. They broke the heads of anyone who fought back and threw the rest in jail.

  For months Bumi tried to will himself to go back and see if Arum had been released from jail, but he feared seeing Syam, feared the raging fiery wounds under his exterior scar tissue, that he would do himself in by crossing the wrong authority figure in some random fit. Though he claimed to be dead inside, he was still a survivor, and his every instinct told him to keep a safe distance from the market. Months became years and he never went back.

  BUMI AND HIS COHORTS GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL IN 1990, THE only Rilaka children to have grown up in Makassar. Government’s work was done and Rilaka could take or leave the proffered gift of civilization. For Rilaka, the gift had not been given so much as thrust into the heart of the island, and the damage was done.

  Having barely passed the majority of his courses, Bumi attended his convocation and received hearty congratulations from his teachers, headmaster and classmates. He wore white gloves to cover his reddened raw hands on this special day and to avoid any bacterial contact with other hand-shakers without public embarrassment.

  Free from school, the graduating children of Rilaka went their separate ways. Most returned home as full-grown adults to help their families as literate bilingual fishers and homemakers. Some found their families had suffered or even died off in their absence and without their labour. It was particularly difficult for these young adults to re-integrate into life on the island, and most of them eventually returned to Makassar to live on the street. Jobs were hard to come by without connections. Daing stayed in Makassar, where he borrowed a large sum of money from a city friend’s family to open a fish processing plant in town. None of Rilaka’s most educated went on to university.

  In nine years Bumi had gone from a knowledge-hungry child who brought joy and prosperity to many adults around him to an adult who wished he could give back the knowledge he’d acquired and re-attach the pieces of the heart he’d voluntarily severed so long ago. Once again the very thing Bumi longed for, freedom from school, arrived as an unwelcome shock.

  His only city connections were with a few young and foolish intellectuals, including Robadise, from middle-class urban families. Their idealism sprung from a fertile well of connections and security, as long as they kept their mouths shut publicly and didn’t try to practise what they preached privately to each other. Robadise Paradise had followed in his father’s footsteps two years earlier and become a policeman, using all his guile and charm to secure financial gains by keeping tabs on the corruption of his father’s business partners, making sure they stayed out of jail.

  As disgusted as Bumi was by his friend’s career choice, he came into company with the corrupt businessmen in his indebtedness to Robadise, who gave the younger man a place to stay when no jobs were a
vailable. Robadise went so far as to offer Bumi the service of getting him a job ‘on the force.’ Bumi’s survival instincts were strong enough to keep him off the street and out of the police force. Both options were suicide.

  Robadise, like most unmarried men in Makassar, still lived with his parents and siblings, including a sister, Yaty. Charmed by Bumi’s ritualistic quirks, she laid claim to what was left of his heart. Some women love a lifelong project, a man in progress, and Robadise’s sister was one of them.

  Having grown up insulated by local government Peace and Order Officers, teachers and tutors in a lockless prison, with raw reddened hands from scalding purifications, bleary reddened eyes from sleepless nights checking and re-checking the alarm, and an aura of anger from deep emotional wounds, worries and other obsessions, Bumi had only once attracted the sexual attention of a woman, and that had been a case of mistaken identity. When he was twelve he had been snared, kissed sloppily, and groped down below by a teenage prostitute who subsequently demanded five hundred rupiah for her efforts. Bumi had bolted all the way to Syam’s house and was too embarrassed to explain why he was out of breath.

  Yaty, on the other hand, had not grown up witnessing Bumi as a pariah. Besides which, she shared Robadise’s interest in the underdog and respected Bumi’s disconnection from the bad economy of a developmentally challenged nation. They were all naïve enough to think staying out of such an economy was an option.

  Bumi liked being liked, and he felt genuine joy when Yaty gave him a guided tour of her body’s flesh (except one forbidden zone). She was large for an Indonesian, with a pear-shaped bottom, hinting of some non-Austronesian heritage, which may have explained her father’s tendency to pretend she wasn’t there. She was unlike any woman Bumi’d met before, but he couldn’t place his finger on the difference, other than that she liked him for the very freakishness that turned others off. Where most Makassar women, even the most idealistic among them, were practical survivors, Yaty seemed more concerned with discovery than survival. Her curiosity was her undoing and Bumi could think of no better suicide than making discoveries with her.

  Robadise had always kept his sister away from his intellectual buddies. He was all too aware of the dangers of their ideologies and naiveté, and equally unconfident in his sister’s abilities to resist their charms or understand their ideas. Bumi lacked this sense of protection and scepticism, and generally had more faith in the abilities of women. Early in their courtship he brought Yaty to Warung Bali, a hole in the wall that served nothing but nasi goreng and coffee with condensed milk. Its name was meant to invoke the small tourist restaurants in Bali, with their warmth and openness.

  Bumi and his gang, who called themselves Pink Penetration (a self-mocking reference to their pinko political impotence and general virginity), met every Sunday at the Bali. Robadise didn’t come around much once he joined the force, so that left Datuk and Razak, who sat around with Bumi drinking coffee and smoking clove-spiced cigarettes. Bumi never took to that compulsion. He tried once and stayed up all night swallowing small doses of dish-soap to clean his lungs out. He suffered the habit of the others and tried to breathe in as little of their second-hand carcinogens as possible.

  Datuk was the youngest of the coffee shop revolutionaries and his sixteen years were marked by pimple trails on either side of his face. Yet aside from Bumi, he had the oldest soul, and was the only one with a girlfriend. He told Bumi, “All I ever wanted in a woman was someone who saw me in the same perfect light I tend to see myself. Having come to accept the impossibility of my fantasy, I settled for someone whose narcissism matched my own.” By Pink Penetration standards, Datuk was the moderate. Like the others, he believed that Indonesia had become a puppet of the international community. But unlike them, he refused to write off market economics completely, arguing for small-scale, local enterprise.

  Datuk had learned most of his beliefs from his father, a faithful civil servant in various South Sulawesi Departments of the Government of Indonesia. Datuk’s father’s ability to see multiple perspectives and sides of stories left him so unsure of what to believe that he became the perfect bureaucrat, expertly following orders from the very top and delegating tasks with specific implementation instructions to those below, down to the very bottom. To maintain his paralysis he acquired and read books of the left right and middle, including many banned by Suharto—his one act of insubordination. It was from his forbidden library that Datuk gleaned his education.

  Razak was Datuk’s opposite, the elder of the group at the age of twenty years, and a dangerously radical thinker who believed capitalism was developed specifically as a new and easier way to control and disenfranchise the masses, and that Suharto was the worst case of a capitalist. When Datuk pointed out that worse tyrants had emerged from the far left, like Stalin, Razak responded that Stalin was the best option for ‘the people’ because he was one of them, a commoner. Such statements sparked heated debates which Bumi listened to keenly, absorbing factoids and meshing them with his knowledge of his own country, province and city, until he was able to jump on inconsistencies in argument with his usual incisive questions. Like so many before them, the boys responded defensively.

  Datuk finally lent Bumi his father’s books on mercantilism in the Mid-East and the classic political theory of Marx and Engels. “Maybe this will satisfy your curiosity, Bumi,” he said. Rather than look for work, Bumi immersed himself in the giant brains of Marxist and then post-modern writers. For one who rarely slept because of his compulsions, this was the most productive and exciting of times.

  Safely sheltered in the home of two policemen, Robadise and his father, Bumi learned how over the years the men in power had maintained control through brutal force, market imperatives, legal and linguistic manipulation and rigged elections. Fascinating as each new insight was, new questions arose at far greater frequency than they got answered. Most pressing was this: who was responsible for this mess? None of the books Datuk lent him answered this overriding question, nor could any of his friends.

  Once Bumi began burning through all Datuk’s father’s books he began to argue more fiercely than even Razak, yet he had the fewest conclusions. He was just exploring. They found him argumentative and stubborn, unwilling to admit his mistakes. Yet upon careful reflection on his words in their homes at night, Razak and Datuk were able to gain new insights, and raise more questions on their own. Datuk was so impressed that he introduced Bumi to his father, who quickly surmised that the boy, unlike Datuk’s other loony friends, was a dangerous threat to their safety.

  Datuk’s father’s disapproval ensured Bumi’s place of honour at the Bali, and this place of honour entrenched him more deeply into Yaty’s heart. She could sit and listen to him speak for hours, saying little, saving her own answers to his many questions for their in-house passion.

  On a humid Saturday night Bumi found himself mostly naked and looking heavenward at the full height of Robadise’s burly physique. According to Yaty, as long as their underwear stayed on Allah didn’t mind them messing around a little. She hadn’t factored Robadise’s opinion into the equation until he stumbled into her bedroom, where Bumi had started out reading to her from one of Datuk’s father’s texts and ended up in a groping session, with the explicit intent of warning her away from Bumi. Robadise’s brown skin reddened in rage on the sight of his panty-clad sibling, her petite breasts in full view of both him and Allah.

  It took Bumi’s full strength to hold Yaty’s older brother back from her. “Slut! Whore!” Robadise screamed.

  “It’s my fault,” Bumi told Robadise, “I corrupted her.” He felt absurd saying these words. Robadise had been the one to arouse Bumi like never before with descriptions of female underwear and the bountiful treasure hidden beneath, back in their last years of school. Robadise had shared all his own experiences with Bumi, with descriptions that went far beyond textbook versions of sex. Robadise’s stories were the Har
lequin Playboy variety, and they did more to drive Bumi to Robadise’s sister than all his own hormones and insecurities. Yet Bumi was not surprised by his friend’s rage. It was to be expected, it was what Bumi would do if some punk put his nude lewd body next to Alfi and groped her.

  Robadise’s rage was for his slutty sister, not for his friend who, as a male, simply succumbed to natural urges and a siren’s seductions, and was even doing the honourable thing in trying to protect her. But, because Bumi came between Robadise and his target, there was some collateral damage. Robadise’s hands wrapped around Bumi’s throat and squeezed. As Bumi’s face turned red he wondered what bacteria were marching from his friend’s hands onto his neck, maybe into his mouth as he gasped for breath, unable to use the words he needed to beg or reason his way safe.

  It was Yaty who saved him, as she would many times again. She grabbed the book Bumi had been reading when she’d jumped him and brought it down heavily on her brother’s head. This was a particularly large hardcover book, called Genesis of Trotskyism. Robadise dropped to the floor, his hands slipping off Bumi’s neck, leaving deep-red finger marks. Yaty quickly cut a half-circle around her brother and hid behind Bumi again.

  “Forgive me, Brother,” she shouted over Bumi’s shoulder. “I would not have let myself go so easily, but Bumi has asked me to marry him and I was so excited, I could not wait to… you know, be with him. But you stopped us, Brother, you stopped us in time. My virginity is intact.”

  The hot breath of her lies landed on the back of Bumi’s neck. The burn of Robadise’s fingers lay on the front. He could feel the nine-headed bacteria eating at the inside of his tonsils. He clutched his throat and croaked like a bullfrog, dropping to his knees.

  “Is it true?” Robadise said.

  Bumi looked up again at the hulking police-friend in front of him. Robadise was so quick to protect his sister’s honour by beating it into her, so quick to salvage his father’s freedom by taking bribes of his own.