Drive-by Saviours (38 page)

“I had little choice thanks to the likes of you,” Bumi said. He noticed for the first time that Yaty, Beti and Bunga stood by in the adjacent kitchen watching the confrontation.

“Bumi,” Yaty said.

He did not look at her, only at his enemy.

“Bumi,” she repeated. “Please don't do this. Please, why can't you accept what has happened and leave us alone?”

He didn't know how to answer, or where to begin, but he couldn't leave his son in the lurch again. “I didn't want to leave you. I was forced away. Tricked. But now I'm back, and I have a right to be a father to my children.” He pointed a finger at Mathias, “He has no right to punish Baharuddin, who has done nothing wrong. I told you he has a medical condition and needs a doctor.”

“Bumi,” Mathias said. “This is my home, and you have been living off of my hospitality for close to a year now, interfering with our ways. You have been warned once, and if I have to shoot you now no one will hold it against me.”

“Please just go,” Yaty said.

Bumi took a moment to glance at her. He saw a beautiful history, love, sympathy, regret and hope, but no tomorrow.

“I'm his father,” Bumi said to no one in particular, and then to Mathias, “Shoot me then. I won't let you hit him, as long as I'm alive.”

As Mathias considered his options, Bunga took the chance to speak. “Dad,” she said.

Both men answered her, “Yes, Child.”

“Mr. Mathias,” she clarified, “can't we just listen to what he has to say?” That was all she dared offer, but as usual she chose her words and her battle well.

“I love my son,” Bumi said. “And I've gotten to know him well. He is not misbehaving. He just needs some help.”

Mathias pursed his lips and sucked his teeth to show that he was considering Bumi's words. This was the respect due a fellow man. “We can't afford that kind of help,” he said.

“Robadise will help us,” Yaty said.

Mathias looked down to Baharuddin and said, “We'll see about all this,” and then at Bumi. “We'll see. You go ask Robadise. Watch out for your enemies in Makassar.”

IT TOOK ROBADISE JUST A FEW DAYS WITH BUMI TO BECOME
convinced of the effectiveness of the treatment his friend had received. Tied by the binds of family and conscience, and unconfined by religious affiliations, Robadise played peacemaker with a large wad of bills.

Together Bumi and Robadise found a good psychiatrist and a good behavioural therapist in Makassar. He didn't have much experience with
OCD
sufferers, but he was willing to be persuaded for the right price. The behavioural therapist had heard of the exposure with response prevention technique, and agreed to give it a try on Baharuddin. He even threw in a ‘booster session' for Bumi, to ensure that his compulsions did not return. Robadise still had those kinds of connections, even though he wasn't the big shot he used to be.

Once the therapy was set Bumi and Robadise drove to Tana Toraja and picked up Baharuddin, who was coming to live with his uncle and biological father for a while. “You've come back to life my brother,” Robadise said as he and Bumi drove the boy to his new old home. “You're a modern-day Lazarus.”

“Jesus is no friend of mine,” Bumi answered.

“Yep, the old Bumi is back.”

But he wasn't really. All he could think about on the ten-hour drive back to Makassar was Yaty's rejection. He'd begged her to come with them.

“I can't go back there, Bumi,” she had said. “That city will never be home for me again. Anyway, I could never leave Beti, nor take him away from his father. And Mathias would never leave Tana Toraja.”

Bumi swore and spat at the ground as if it were her hypocrisy. His love for her was becoming muddled, his ultimate showdown with his rival had been thwarted and the possibility of family reunification was dimming by the day.

Once back in Makassar with Baharuddin medicated and in school, therapy and art classes, all courtesy of Uncle Rob, Bumi tried to explain exactly how dead inside he felt to his old brother-in-law. Robadise, an always-surprising source of wisdom, said, “You just have to focus on what you do have, which is a son who needs you, and that's definitely something to live for.”

For a blissful month Bumi did just that. Survival was the first priority, and to survive he and Baharuddin travelled incognito, kept a low profile and used aliases. Despite the atmosphere of paranoia, Baharuddin's rituals slowly went away. Without much to do between appointments with the behavioural therapist, Baharuddin drew. His art remained gloriously dark and his animistic fascinations continued unabated.

Bumi even took Baharuddin to see a secretive Buginese
dukun
, a traditional healer. Rodabise gave Bumi the man's address but warned him to be aware of the watchful eyes of the pious. “If any religious authority finds out this man is a
dukun
, and that you consulted with him…” Robadise pulled his index finger over his throat.

The
dukun
told them that Baharuddin's art and his obsessions were part and parcel of the same thing, a gift and a curse from the gods. “Every gift must be counter-balanced,” he said from behind his desk, on which rested a half-crafted buffalo skin drum. “These pills may help the boy think straight, but they may also suppress his gift in the long run. Better for him to conduct the ancient rituals rather than the ones he makes up.” For an apprenticeship fee the
dukun
could train Baharuddin to use his power without it overtaking him.

“He's a con artist,” Bumi said as they left the
dukun
's metal shack. “He just wants our money.”

“You sound like Mathias,” Baharuddin said. In his tenth year he was learning to use his words as weapons. “How is he any different from the other doctors?”

“Their medicine works,” Bumi answered.

“How do we know the
dukun
's won't?”

“I don't,” Bumi said.

“The pills are making me fat and constipated,” Baharuddin said. “What if the
dukun
is right and these pills ruin my gift? Then I'll be fat, constipated and untalented.”

“Your art is beautiful and so are you, with or without medicine,” Bumi said as they walked home. “You won't need the medicine forever. That's why we do the therapy. When the treatment is finished then we can consider your apprenticeship.”

Just before he saw the police cars, Bumi's anus and genitals pulsed with a powerful warning sign. He saw Kartiman's taut-faced scowl, felt the sharp wires poke at him, the jolt of high voltage run through his body. Bumi tensed at the sight of three cop cars in his driveway when there should have been no more than one. Since Robadise had become blacklisted, he never hosted any other cops. Bumi felt his jaw snap sideways, saw Daing's eleven-year-old frame looming over him.

“Let's go,” he told Baharuddin. He pulled the boy's arm hard away from the house.

Robadise hadn't expected his co-workers that day, but they'd heard rumours. He entertained them nervously, invited them to play
gaple
and have coffee. Their target never showed. Robadise had become used to Bumi living an incognito lifestyle. He was not alarmed when Bumi didn't show up that day or the next. He was not even surprised the following week when Yaty, Mathias, Bunga and Beti arrived to reclaim Baharuddin, and neither the boy nor Bumi could be found.

A DOZEN FOR ONE IN CHAPTER 25

F
or a time everything would be on hold. Sarah would
stay in our house. I would work with Lily's migrant farmers and write my grandest proposal yet — a million dollars over five years. I would rework Sarah's business plan in my spare time. This situation was neither easily arranged nor fully satisfactory.

Sarah, who shared my lack of intuition, failed to grasp the depths of my deceit — but she had her suspicions and fears. “I don't understand you,” she said on numerous occasions in the months before I left. “How can you so easily and casually plan for our separation? This is what married couples do before they divorce. Why are you so disinterested in working for us to stay together?”

“We discussed this.”

“You told me you'd quit your job and work on my plan!”

I struggled to restrain myself from throwing one of her glass art pieces against the wall because I knew that wouldn't help her see what I couldn't explain—the sham that was my entire relationship with her.

“I told you I wasn't happy at my job,” I said. “This is the work I want to do—the work that will lead to the work I want to do.”

“I don't understand how you can so easily decide to be apart from me, to sleep in a bunk with fifteen other men instead of being there when I wake up, when I fall asleep, touching me and being with me. A month ago you were proposing!”

The remorse I felt when she told me these things manifested itself as irrational anger. “It's just for a short time! You know this is my dream.”

“Since when is farming your dream? You hate farming. You say agriculture is the root of oppression.”

This statement was a gross oversimplification of drunken philosophy taken completely out of context. She knew me no better than I knew her. I stamped my feet out the front door and went for a run. I had to burn all my excesses somehow.

I knew she was right about the insensitivity of my absence, but that didn't make me any less angry. It was her ignorance of the why that angered me. I wanted her to understand that I was too lost in the mundane and minuscule details of our story to understand the overarching plot. I needed the distance as much as I needed the change.

WHATEVER MY THEORETICAL PROBLEMS WITH FACTORY FARMING,
I loved getting my hands dirty, loved using what few muscles I had, loved feeling them strain as I tilled the earth and planted my seeds, knowing some of them would grow.

Before I left Toronto Lily had enrolled me in a four-week intensive Spanish course, enough to give me the rudiments of verbal communication with the Mexicans. There were twelve of them on the farm and they spent six months of the year as the only brown people in rural Ontario outside the reserves. They competed with each other for economic survival and depended on each other for companionship and shared stories.

They were paid by the hour, but come harvest time their individual picks were closely monitored—the least productive among them would not be invited back. Berry picking aged them two years a season as they bent double, all day every day, arthritic fingers seeking small fruit. To be slow meant a season back home, surrounded by loved ones but living in abject poverty, working as hard but for less under local conquistadors who lusted for profit and power.

Our sympathetic farmer was aware of their plight but he wouldn't change his system unless every other large landowner did the same. “If I paid these boys what they deserved I'd be priced right out a business,” he told me.

He was sympathetic to a degree but he was nobody's fool and, without consulting his pool of cheap labour, he automated his payroll system so he could deposit the men's cheques into accounts they didn't have. “It can't be helped,” he said. “I don't have time to write out cheques every month anymore. Everything's got to be automated now.”

At a time when I should have been writing, I drove a van-load of Mexicans to the local Corporate Interest Banking Company to sign the men up with their first accounts. To a man they lacked Canadian driver's licenses, health cards, birth certificates or any of the usual acceptable documentation.

All but Enrique had seasonal work passes and visas. Enrique had lost his work pass and had his visa confiscated by an overzealous Ontario police officer, which for me meant another series of trips to local offices to fill out forms and translate as best I could with my pidgin Spanish.

Such distractions and the breakdown of my stiffened, rusty, under-used body in the face of an unprecedented degree of physical labour (even at half-time) forced me to request a deadline extension from the Ministry. They granted it because they had already invested the money to support the proposal's development.

Despite the hardship of the labour I preferred it to the writing half of my assignment, which was effectively blocked by distractions and the sudden disappearance of my talent for narrative. Just as with Sarah's business plan, I couldn't seem to find the thread to tie all the pieces together: Lily's vision; these men and their families; the conditions of Mexico; the proud if muddled history of unions in Canada; the needs of farmers; and the trap of under-valued food that our culture of dominion has set for those farmers.

Lily's ideas and the concept of unionizing these workers made total sense to me, but I couldn't get it down on paper or pixel. It felt better to grab at berries and sweat with the men whose labour I hindered more than I helped. At least I made them look that much more productive by comparison, and I lost a few pounds I didn't need.

The work was physically more strenuous and rewarding than anything else I'd done. In a way it was also more stimulating, intellectually. All morning long as I picked with them, I learned a whole new mode of communication, the singsong of the work. Its rhythm and cadence seduced me. Sometimes they sang a song, a haunting a cappella work melody. More often they told stories, mostly about sexual conquests, or jokes or teased each other for being slow, fat, lazy—or worse, bourgeois. Whatever filled their voices and my ears at any given time, be it song, story, taunt or laughter, there were never any spaces left between words or
compañeros
. To leave a space would be to separate, and to separate would be suicide.

At first my only participation was to listen, as I had always listened so analytically to the world. And I was relieved no one ever asked me for a song or, worse, teased me, even though it was obvious that I was the most deserving of insult, the fattest and most bourgeois. In my own circles, as a non-profit worker in middle-class society, I always felt so radically poor. With the Mexicans I was little more than a tourist worker or an anthropological researcher. I struggled on through my own plots and offered little more than an occasional pained whimper, the sound of a weak back's betrayal.

But I listened. I learned.

I learned that Enrique, who had struck me as so absent-minded and foolish, was also among the kindest and most sensitive, the most likely to notice when someone had had enough of being teased and could offer a subtle saying of wisdom at the right time, to steer the gentle insults his way. He was the most respected and the easiest to make fun of among them, and he could take better than he could give. They called him Neruda.

I learned that while Juan Ramon left the most prodigious trail of broken hearts, usually among slumming middle-class housewives in town, almost all the men carried on affairs while far away from home, and most carried their guilt home with them in one form or another.

The three more puritan exceptions were Enrique, Gorge and Fernando Ignacio, who countered teasing for their chastity with teasing of the wrath of God. Among these dozen committed Catholics, invoking the name of God always met with the hardiest laughter of all.

What I took most to heart were the subtle clues left between jokes and songs that their laughter betrayed pain and longing. I knew from experience of the likeness between laughter and lament.

And if that weren't enough, they painted me a clearer picture. When evening descended over our bunkhouse, when they prayed out loud for their families and prayed for forgiveness for their betrayals, begged for some small break, like just enough money for an important operation or school fees, I felt the tears they would not shed. They didn't want Jesus to think them greedy or materialistic. They knew what awaited the rich in the time of reckoning. It was they, the poor, intrepid ones, for whom paradise was open.

Honoured as I was to catch these glimpses of their lives, I wondered why I was never teased—if maybe it had more to do with pity or even contempt than with respect for how I helped them, as I thought at first. This worry germinated in my brain, which was equipped with far too much freedom to wander and think while my body worked.

Despite my best efforts to follow the rapid, unbroken stream of profanity-laced Spanish, sometimes my fatigued frontal lobe simply took a nap and let my imagination run wild with insecure fantasies of betrayal. Sometimes I worried that Bumi was back in Indonesia laughing at my pathetic attempts to counsel him, when all he needed was cold hard cash. Sometimes I worried that Sarah was taking sweet vengeance on my absence in the arms of someone smarter, better looking, more stable and more exciting.

I never gave voice to my fears, or anything much at all, at first. To speak would have only accentuated my class difference and I knew, from their discussions of their burning class awareness, they hated my class, and were sceptical of allies from within it. Yes they wanted to unionize, but they preferred to do so from within.

As much as they abhorred wealthier people, they wanted a piece of that world. Quite literally, they lusted for their share in the form of hot women with power and money. Lily, with her Latina roots and socialist tendencies, was of particular interest to the men. During one conversation, Jose Ramon raised the subject of Lily with particular vigour, and to my surprise they all, even the three most chaste, agreed that “having” her would be an experience as close to supreme divinity as possible in the material world. But mixed with that lust was genuine love. They had guilty crushes on her. As Guillermo put it, to great laughter, “Senorita Lily is looking out for us. She's like a mother I'd like to fuck, only younger.”

Fernando Ignacio added, “She cares because her parents are true revolutionaries. They know what it's like.”

“But she herself only knows second-hand. She is unscarred by the poverty in her true homeland, or the battles we've fought,” Guillermo said.

What, I wondered, did they make of me? I was unscarred by poverty, my parents were unscarred by poverty, centuries of my family had in fact profited from other people's poverty. Yet I too wanted to help. Did that make me just a strange ally or an impostor?

To find out I laughed. I took my cues from their own laughter. The first time I laughed too loud, too suddenly, they stared and laughed back at me. Juan Jesus, the quietest man among them, shouted something to the effect of, “Hey look, you made the gringo laugh!”

They all laughed harder because Juan Jesus was almost as quiet as I had been.

I smiled at the men, who stood back from their work and stayed silent for once. “Well, it was a good one,” I said.

“We thought you had no sense of humour,” Juan Ramon said.

I smiled again. “I have a sense of humour but my Spanish is bad.”

They erupted with laughter and returned to their toil.

From there, my participation escalated. Soon I could add the occasional quip. A week later I told a raunchy story about how I lost my virginity in high school. It brought the field down. My self-deprecating remarks about my poor picking skills were invariably popular, as were stories I told about self-important bureaucrats who thought they were saving the world from inside their cubicles. In the evenings, when tearjerkers were the norm, I talked of my friend Bumi, shamelessly whoring his plight so they could see that I understood.

And they saw what I wanted them to see. They opened up to me in ways they never had before. Julio told me of how he, desperate to save his children from his own fate of poverty, had smuggled cheap merchandise, and later heroin, into Texas. He had convinced his wife to sell her body to tourists in the cheaper motels in Mexico City, and even in backpacker hostels. She agreed and made a steady stream of tortuous revenue until she was caught by Julio's brother, who enjoyed the same services from other desperate women whenever his wife was pregnant.

Julio could only show outrage toward his wife when his brother told him the news, as if he'd been unaware. He beat her publicly, divorced her and left the next year to spend his first of many summers in Ontario. His ex-wife raised their children in the slums of Mexico City. He sent them money every month via Western Union, minus thirty percent for administration, but he hadn't spoken with woman or children for many years.

Edwin told me that he did much the same labour in Mexico that he did in Canada, but in Mexico they used pesticides that were banned by the United Nations. “My first two years, as the new guy, I had to spray them,” he told me. “And six months after I stopped, my son was born a jelly baby. He was missing a whole bunch of important bones and he can't walk or move around on his own. I don't think we'll ever be able to buy him the kind of wheelchair he needs—the kind you control with your breath.”