Drive-by Saviours (21 page)

Bumi stretched his mind back to remember all those fishermen's signs of trouble: different colours, cloud formations and temperature swings at unusual times. Sudden changes. He couldn't remember ever feeling this cold on the sea. “It is still calm,” he said.

“Not for long,” Judy answered. “There's rain gear down below. You better put some on.”

By the time Bumi found a pair of over-sized rubber boots and a yellow rain suit the wind had started. It didn't feel like much but as he emerged back onto the deck he noticed the white-capped waves kicking up again. Soon the boat was rocking, whimpering its sad and scared creaks and groans. Black clouds had surrounded it. Trouble.

“Grab everything that's loose up here and put it down in storage,” Judy said.

Bumi obliged, vanquishing his worry to focus on the task he'd been given. He grabbed an armload of life preservers and ran down the steep metal stairs below, almost falling off the last step. He threw them into the room full of boxes and ran back up the steps.

On deck Judy fought the sail. She tried to bring it down as the largest raindrops Bumi had ever seen came from some black hole and launched a heavy assault on the vessel. A gust of wind howled from starboard and whipped at them. It knocked Bumi over onto the already rain-flooded deck.

Judy clung to the main mast. The wind came harder and harder, then eased off as quickly as it had started.

Bumi struggled to find his feet. The boat lurched forward as the wind came back from behind them. The boat plunged head on into an emergent wave that flooded the deck and washed them both backward like landed fish. The wave slammed them into the base around the main mast. Still the wind whipped the sail and the main mast creaked to protest the force.

Again Judy stood to fight the sail and again the boat lurched forward. The sea flooded the deck, soaking them both. The main mast creaked again and Bumi heard the sickening sound of splintering wood.

“Get below!” Judy shouted. She shoved him down the stairs.

He slipped and slid downward. He clutched at the metal just in time to prevent a bad fall.

Judy clambered behind him and shut them in. Bumi heard wood crack and splinter more.

“Fuck!” Judy yelled. She punched the metal stairs with a crack of her knuckles. “Ow! Fuck! If that mast comes down we're so fucked,” Judy said. She sucked her bloody knuckles and paced.

As Judy`s panic rose, Bumi became calmer than he'd been when the sea was just a philosophical piece of glass. “Maybe it is best to die at sea,” he said.

Judy glared at him, parted her lips, closed them again and said, “I always thought so, you know? But I'm not ready yet.” She ran to the storage room and ran back with two axes, handed one to Bumi. “Back up,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the hatch above them.

“What?” he asked.

“We have to chop up that mast, now! If we leave it on deck it'll get whipped around and it'll destroy what's left of my boat.”

“It is very dangerous up there,” he said.

“It'll be worse if we leave it,” Judy said. She mounted the stairs.

Bumi hesitated. But to die at sea was better than to die in Canada. He followed Judy into the wind and rain.

The mast looked unlikely to go anywhere, but just as Bumi opened his mouth to say so the boat lurched to starboard and the mast swung to port. They ducked as it swung around and back, and more water poured in.

Waist deep in water, Judy took four hacks at the splintered base before she accepted the futility of her actions. “We'll never get it out of all these wires,” she said, throwing her axe down.

“You should have more help,” Bumi observed. “Some employee.”

“I work alone,” she barked back as another, gentler wave passed under them. The rain, so furious and quick to anger, was letting up, calming itself. “Believe it or not it's safer not to have a crew in my line of work,” Judy said.

Bumi nodded, wondering what would happen next.

“Back down,” she said. “Gotta wait it out. Looks like the worst is over but you can never be sure.”

Bumi couldn't agree more.

THEY PLAYED CARDS TO PASS THE CHOPPY, NOISY AFTERNOON.
They slept as best they could through a rocky night. The morning sea was pensive, almost remorseful. Together they chopped the mast and cut its ties, heaved it into the sea, their penance paid for dirty deeds. Judy said they'd have to motor it the rest of the way, but luckily they weren't far now. “Otherwise I would have had to call my bosses for help,” she said. “That would have cost extra.”

He didn't ask if he was to somehow pay for the damage to the boat that he had caused, or God had caused in His latest vendetta against Bumi. He killed those last few days with a new mantra. “God doesn't like me,” he repeated in sets of thirty-three, until the morning Judy gave him a new mantra to chill his spine.

“Get in the box!” she shouted, waving him back below deck.

Bumi ran down the spiral steps as fast as his feet could move, pulled the white door open, climbed over several boxes and jumped into the designated crate; scrunched his body virtually into a ball and pulled the lid shut. He breathed in slowly with a silent count of one, and exhaled two, trying to slow his rapidly beating heart and keep the blood from rushing right through his ears. He braced himself as the fear rose in him. “There will be a beating soon,” he thought. “Bright lights, loud music, then electric shocks.” Three, he inhaled and a long four, he exhaled.

Although it was dark already he closed his eyes and fought off his fearful thoughts of more torture, chemical death injected under his skin by coast guard cronies. Five, he inhaled long and slow. He hoped to suffocate before they found him.

By the slow count of twenty-six he heard footsteps and muffled male voices, both of which became gradually louder. He began counting again. He forced his breath to come slow.

“What's your cargo?” a now comprehensible deep voice said in English.

“Just personal effects,” Judy answered. “Let me get you a list. It was all checked when I left Indonesia.”

Bumi heard the sounds of several sets of footsteps as they shuffled around then faded away, like a giant typist running out of caffeine. He strained to hear more. Nothing greeted his ears but the sound of his own heart and the blood rushing too fast again.

“BUMI?”

Judy's voice hit him with a gust of fresh air that easily found his lungs as he sucked it in and opened his eyes. The dusty light struck his pupils hard and he squinted and rubbed his eyes.

“Bumi,” Judy repeated. “We made it. Those guys were hard to get rid of. They went into knights-in-shining-armour mode when they saw this damsel in distress, and the damage to my boat. They wanted to escort me in. Assholes. And when I say I'm fine they give me a hard time about not having a crew. Don't they know the thrill of solo?”

She offered her hand but Bumi declined. He wanted to test his legs. He stood to his full height and climbed out of the trunk into a clear space on the floor, where someone had cleared away the surrounding boxes.

“Come on up on deck,” Judy said.

He followed her swaying white denim bottom up the spiral stairs onto the deck, and then a path to the horizon marked by Judy's pointing finger. “There it is. Canada,” she said.

In the distance he could see an amorphous green, the beauty of which made him weep.

Judy smiled.

“How longer?” Bumi asked.

“Couple hours or so, maybe a bit more.”

Four more thirty-three-minute periods. He went below and heated some water.

JUDY LEFT HIM WITH A FINAL MANTRA, SHOUTED FROM HER DECK
after Bumi disembarked onto a long dock. “We made it,” she shouted. “Could have been worse.”

He watched her pull away and a sense of panic struck him. He turned and saw a large open green lawn and a giant house. Two men ran down from the house to meet him. They shouted Indonesian welcomes, “
Selemat
!”

The first to arrive on the dock wore a designer suit. He smiled and extended his hand. He was offering not a handshake but a five-page form, in English, and a pen. “Sign this,” he said.

Bumi took the form and read the first line.

The other man, who wore polyester slacks and a short-sleeved uniform with a nametag that read ‘Ben,' flipped to page five, pointed to a line at the bottom and said, “Sign here.”

Bumi signed and incanted Robadise's name in his head.

“Okay, Sir, we have kept our end of the bargain,” the shorter man said. “Don't forget to keep your end too, heh? Remember we know where your family lives back home, so don't forget what you owe us, heh?”

They led him to a five-tonne transport truck and helped him into the back, where he joined a load of one-litre tubs of Indonesian peanut sauce. Without another word, Ben pulled down the sliding door and Bumi was alone with the dirt and the peanut sauce.

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CULTURE SHOCK IN CHAPTER 16

B
umi started regular English classes in his first year
of senior school. On paper he excelled, but it wasn't until he arrived in Canada that the awkward English words became comfortable on his tongue. In Makassar his paper knowledge of English was good enough to quickly quadruple the library of books at his disposal.

Syam's personal library of banned books included over one hundred English titles, hidden away like treasure behind a wall of fool's gold. Bumi ripped through the classics to find answers, sweet answers, but of course always more questions, especially from the great convoluted philosophers. From Homer to Nietzsche the words of dead white men cascaded warmly through Bumi's young, impressionable brain, sometimes lodging themselves in random synaptic bubbles as something like facts. But he always questioned, always sought new angles.

Despite his English reading excellence, Bumi's conversational English was merely slightly better than average in his class, and dipped down to average in higher grades. After high school, in the factory and in his everyday life, Bumi never found much use for spoken English. He read as many English-language books as he found, most of them non-fiction and several of them banned. It was a forbidden delight better than pornography, alcohol or any other piece of dirty child's play, because it stimulated not the body but the control centre, the mind, where the reality that imprisons the body is created.

Reading books, especially in that foreign tongue of lands with great wealth and apparent freedom, made Bumi giddy and gave him, oh so temporarily, the most precious of illusions: that of knowing, and that of control. Only when he put a book down did he realize that no knowledge had been gained, only questions, challenges. His doubt remained amplified until the next book.

Still his spoken English stagnated until his next opportunity to use it, standing sea-legged on a sturdy deck, his tongue wobbly as he forced circular words through squared teeth. They slipped on his saliva and didn't feel right. Nothing felt right in that moment.

In the back of a transport truck with five tonnes of peanut sauce and twice the darkness from Vancouver to Toronto, a journey just under three times thirty-three hours, in a vast isolation unlike anything he'd known in Indonesia, Bumi practiced speaking English aloud.

“Hi, how are you?” Thirty-three times.

“I'm fine, thank you.” Thirty-three times.

It beat thinking about home, thinking about all he'd left behind, the intimacy of Rilaka, of his and Yaty's family, of his neighbours and what they'd done to him—about all that time he'd wasted worrying about the danger of strangers.

He also practised counting in English. It slowed the process, but it killed the hours and kept the claustrophobia and other fears at bay, and it seemed likely to pay off in the long run. He tried reading some scraps of newspaper lining the floors but, even once his eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through cracks in the truck's casing, he couldn't stay focused on the words in front of him. He got stuck on them and had to look away.

In Toronto, Bumi was brought directly to one of four brothers who owned an Indonesian restaurant. Like Bumi's delivery driver this owner was a Chinese man who said very little and, when he did speak, took little time in getting to his point. “Don't worry,” the owner said. “All the staff are Indonesian illegals, just like you. We'll give you a place to stay, cheap, and spending money. The rest goes to pay off your debt.”

It was only when Bumi heard the word ‘illegals' that he realized he was one. He had broken the law ever since he left Rilaka, but he had never thought of himself as
an
illegal. In Indonesia he read illegal books. But in Canada his very existence was a crime. So much for being himself. Robadise was a dubious fiend.

The place to stay turned out to be a decent mid-town rooming house shared by never less than eight Indonesian men at a time, all employees at the same restaurant. The old Chinese landlady lived alone in the basement, and took good care of her male residents. She cooked them Chinese food on their rare off-days. On workdays they were fed combo meals from the restaurant, the cost of which came from their pay.

Bumi's roommates took him under their wings and gave him whatever knowledge he needed to perform his duties on the job. They didn't mind giving him sharp reminders of his duties when he became distracted. At work he washed dishes, chopped vegetables, and cleared tables.

Bang, a man about Bumi's age, informed him that he was a friend of Robadise and Yaty's family. “I put in a good word for you at the restaurant,” Bang said. “Don't make me look bad,
Mas.
” Bang repeated these words every time Bumi was slow with the dishes, when he rewashed them after the industrial-strength, pressurized, high-temperature dishwasher missed a spot.

Bang showed Bumi how to use the bus and subway system and where to buy food and clothing that was a bit more familiar to him, how to send letters home (always with a fake name, altered handwriting, no return address and written in vagaries that only his family would understand). Bumi couldn't bring himself to write home in those early weeks, but he promised himself that when the time came he would follow Bang's advice for the sake of their safety.

Bumi developed a love-hate relationship with the Toronto Transit Commission (the
TTC
). It seemed impossibly efficient, clean and spacious compared to the little blue bus system of home, where sixteen or more boisterous bodies could be crammed into a tiny minibus. There, conversation was expected and essential for survival. Yet on any given bus in Toronto he could watch twenty people sit far apart and not talk to one another or make eye contact. The only spontaneous conversations that ever erupted were always between immigrants from more collectivist countries, where public conversation was part of life.

The first time Bumi rode a bus alone he walked up and down the aisle and introduced himself to everyone, asked their names and purposes for being on the bus, notebook at the ready like some ace reporter. He received dirty looks, insults, threats and outright shoves, and he knew his mission was impossible. He could never know such people. Refusal to share, a rarity back home, was the norm in Toronto.

Bumi sat down rejected, forlorn and afraid of everyone on the bus. They all sat and stared like glue addicts into the vacant space a nose length in front of them. Some read, which seemed to him a reasonable compromise. If he couldn't learn about these people directly, he could read about them in the convenient and free newspapers left lying on the seats. This pricing point was essential because he hadn't yet received any paycheques. He didn't even know if he would get any pay after room and board. He had been given a bus pass and some work and casual clothes, the cost of which would also come from his paycheque. He had no money to buy the books and magazines that populated the shelves of so many stores throughout the city. In Toronto, Bumi was like a teenaged boy looking through the glass at a peepshow. The first discarded newspaper he found seemed godsent.

Bumi got through the first few lines of a front-page article about a trade dispute between Canada and the United States when he got stuck on a quotation from the Minister of Trade, who had said, “I concur.”

He never learned with what the minister concurred. ‘I concur' became his new mantra. It replaced the names of loved ones, jingoistic slogans of hope for the future and simple English-language small talk. Thirty-three sets of thirty-three ‘I concurs,' with three-count rests in between, every time he picked up anything written in English.

Bumi considered learning Spanish or Chinese so that he could read some of the other print media in Toronto, but he knew he would just get stuck on other phrases. His suspicions were confirmed when he tried to write home and found himself unable to write a single word in Indonesian or any other language, other than ‘I concur,' over and over again.

He worked eighty-five hours a week anyway. There was no time to read or write in a known language, let alone learn a new one. There was no time for friends or to learn the names of strangers.

His great love of reading and knowledge had survived the oppression of a brutal dictatorship, but the Toronto Transit Commission killed it. Bumi, the sceptical outsider since birth who had always held dear to a few close friends, found none in Toronto. He found no enemies either, and that was a welcome change. His old fears of the rattan cane and the cynical eyes of his bosses and neighbours didn't seem real anymore. They were replaced by an unsettling fear of people in general. His compulsion for accosting strangers disappeared in a blink, while every other one of his rituals intensified with time.