The Flame Tree (2 page)

A public transport
bemo
, a tinny box on tiny wheels, avoided a minor traffic jam by driving up onto the sidewalk, nearly running the boys over.

“Another thing about America is that drivers will actually stop and let you cross the street,” Isaac said as they started walking again.

Ismail’s off-centered brows tilted even more in surprise. “Why would they do that?”

“Maybe because pedestrians are so rare, the drivers stop to stare at them.”

Ismail laughed. “Like white bulés in Java. See, that driver is staring at you. Hey, by the way, I had my circumcision ceremony when you were in America.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” Isaac said. “I would have loved hearing you crying and wailing.”

Ismail looked offended. “I didn’t make a sound.” His expression turned sly. “So when are you going to have the blanket taken off your worm?”

Isaac said loftily, “Worms with blankets grow to be bigger snakes.”

“Infidel,” Ismail said, flashing his grin and punching Isaac’s arm.

They came to a weary, wrought-iron fence. Beyond, ancient
frangipani trees sheltered the graves of the old Muslim cemetery. The boys squeezed through a rusted gap in the fence and began to run again through this silent, shadow-shrouded world. Isaac, who had a college vocabulary in his head, flipped through it.
Crepuscular, caliginous, tenebrous:
Fancy words to keep less fancy fears away, but not altogether successfully. The frangipani trees twisted up from the ground like skeletons rising from the graves. Isaac ran faster yet. At the far end of the cemetery he swung over the fence on a stout frangipani branch and dropped down onto the weedy verge of a narrow residential lane beside Ismail. They bent over with hands on knees, panting and laughing. Isaac wiped fat drops of sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

They hurried on, jumping over the lane’s potholes. All the houses along this lane were square-planked and raised on stilts, with narrow front verandas and clay-tiled roofs. Ibu Hajjah Wida sat as usual in her veranda’s rocking chair, a gilt-edged Qur’an open on her robed lap. A green herbal mask covered her face. Her head was swathed with the incorruptibly white scarf she’d brought back from Mecca three years previously. She read aloud, deaf to the quarreling of her three grandchildren around her feet, but she must have heard the boys, for she stopped reading and glanced up at them. She granted Isaac a benedictory smile. “
Al-salamu alaikum
, Isak,” she called out. “Welcome home.”

He dipped his chin. “
Alaikum as-salam
, Ibu Hajjah. It is good to be back.”

She waved him toward her. Isaac glanced at Ismail, who made an impatient face. But Isaac was a polite Javanese bulé who
respected his elders, so he opened the gate and stood at the foot of the veranda steps, keeping his gaze downcast, as was proper.

“How are your parents, young Isak?”

“They are fine, thank you.”

“Good.” She rocked some more, rubbing her gnarled, arthritic fingers across the gilt-embossed cover of the Qur’an. “They are people of the Book, doctors who help the poor. Tell your kind mother and your father they are safe. Tell them not to worry. Most people know they are good people.”

Isaac looked up at her in surprise. Behind the green herbal mask her black eyes twinkled kindly. He cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Ibu Hajjah, I will.”

“It’s black magicians like Adi the tofu maker who should worry,” she said, and returned to her Qur’an.

Isaac rejoined Ismail. What had that been about? What had she meant, that his parents were not to worry, that they were safe? When somebody said something like that, the first thing you did was to start worrying when there had been no worry in the first place.

Ismail’s house looked like it had too much of the local
arak
to drink. The whole of it leaned slightly to the right. Ismail, who was playing hooky, peered through the neighbor’s hibiscus hedge to make sure his mother was not around and then darted into the yard to get the metal detector, which was behind the chicken coop. The detector was a battered metal spade with a cracked wooden handle. Ismail claimed that Adi the tofu maker had charmed the spade, putting a metal-detecting jinn into the iron scoop. Adi lived in this neighborhood and made charms and sold
amulets to ward off evil influences. Isaac didn’t see what was so black about his magic.

Several men, one in robes and turban, squatted on the veranda of Ismail’s house, staring at Isaac without expression. He did not recognize them. Through the open door, Isaac saw, on a stand beside the small television, a framed picture of Tuan Guru Haji Abdullah Abubakar. He pointed the picture out to Ismail. “Who is that old guy?”

“The Tuan Guru? A strict Muslim. If he had his way, we wouldn’t be able to watch any more
wayang kulit
shows, don’t even mention Hollywood movies.”

“Is your father a follower?”

Ismail frowned, his brows twisted with discomfort and embarrassment, an unusual expression on his normally vivacious face. “It gets easy to like a Tuan Guru who preaches against corruption when corrupt bosses steal your land. At least my father still has his job at the sugar mill, or we’d be really hurting.” His face cleared and he smiled. “But maybe we’ll find some treasure down by the river. Come on.”

Several hours later all that the metal-detecting jinn in the magic spade had uncovered in the baked clay and moist muck of the nearly dry Brantas River was a rusted hubcap and an engine block. Isaac’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. A swim would have been nice, but because of the prolonged drought, the river was nothing more than scummy-looking ponds and a sluggish brown stream. A worm of guilt wriggled across his conscience—not only had his
parents laid down a new rule that he had to ask permission before leaving the compound, they had specifically told him not to play down by the river because of mosquitoes and malaria. But Isaac wasn’t really disobeying. The State Department warnings that had alarmed his parents were for stupid Americans who didn’t know what they were doing, blundering around the country and ignorantly offending people. As for the river rule, that really applied only at sunset, when the mosquitoes swarmed.

“You’d think with the water this low, we’d find lots of things,” Isaac said. “Like the Strangs are finding.”

Ismail began strolling along the bank, spade extended to the ground. They’d walked far enough out of town that sugarcane fields lined both sides of the river. “The who?”

“The archaeologists.”

“Oh, them. But they’re still not finding any gold.” The local villagers, not to mention government authorities, kept close watch on what the Strangs were finding.

Picar Strang and Mary Williams were good friends, which baffled Isaac. Imagine a weird New Ager yakking about work and family with his mother during their Saturday coffee klatches. His mother was not nearly so generous with her private time with anyone else outside the family.

Ismail halted. “The jinn sensed something here,” he said, and began to dig furiously.

Despite repeated failures, hope always rises triumphant on treasure hunts, so Isaac got down on his knees to dig with his hands. “There!” he cried, and snatched out an octagonal coin with raised
Chinese letters around a square hole in the center. These
kepengs
were common, but the jinn had at last found them some money! They inspected the find, excitedly wondering whether they were standing upon real treasure. Ismail put the coin in his pocket. The boys dug for another hour, ending up with a wide, knee-deep hole, their spirits lagging when all the spade turned over was stinky muck. They soon recovered, flinging mud balls at each other, until Isaac realized that the sun was a reddish smudge close to the horizon.

“
Aduh
, look at the time. I got to get home before I get into trouble,” he said.

Ismail glanced up at the setting sun. “
lyallah
, if I miss
magrib
prayers, my father will be furious.”

They began to run the mile back to town. Ismail outpaced a panting, overheated Isaac, who stopped for a moment to take off his muddy T-shirt. By the time Ismail reached the irrigation road by the first bridge, Isaac was still lumbering along the riverbed. Mosquitoes swarmed from the ponds and attacked him in clouds. He ran faster, flailing his T-shirt around his body. Ismail doubled over with laughter, slapping his knobby knees.

“You should have seen yourself,” he said when Isaac climbed up out of the culvert. “You could be a circus clown.”

“Funny,” Isaac growled. Ismail slapped him on the back, a hard smack that stung. Isaac yelped. Ismail showed his palm, with a squished mosquito in the center of a crimson smear. “Wow,” Ismail said in mock amazement, using the English exclamation before switching to Javanese, “your American blood is just as red as mine!”

Isaac entered the compound by the secret gate. His stomach growled. He wondered what his chances were of talking his parents into going out to eat at the Hai Shin restaurant. The restaurant occupied the ground floor of an old trading warehouse down in the small riverside intestines of Wonobo. Two generations of Chinese Buddhist women ran the restaurant—three, if you included fifteen-year-old Meimei, who helped in the kitchen cooking her migrant grandmother’s old Chinese recipes. Isaac drooled over images of frog’s legs fried in garlic butter sauce and pork dumplings. The Hai Shin was the only place in Wonobo where the Americans could eat pork, since the mission forbade it anywhere on the hospital grounds out of respect for the Muslim patients.

Isaac scratched at the mosquito bites within reach. His mother had a radar sense for him, so he sneaked through the back garden of his house and into the outdoor laundry washroom for a quick rinse there. He’d just turned on the water tap to fill a bucket when the overhead fluorescent bulb hummed and flared into harsh light.

Behind him his mom said, “For heaven’s sake, what did you get into?”

Isaac put on a smile and turned around. “Oh, hi, Mom. I was out playing with Ismail.”

His mother’s limp blond strands were pulled back and held in place by a fake tortoiseshell barrette, and the smudges under her soft blue eyes had deepened with another day’s hard work. She sniffed. “That smells like river mud. Were you playing in the river?”

“No, not exactly—”

“Isaac, that river is filthy with disease. And what’s this?” She grabbed his arm and looked at his upper shoulder. She turned him around and inspected his back. “You’re covered with mosquito bites.”

“There was a swarm, it wasn’t even sunset—”

His mother overrode him. “Since we’ve been back, I’ve already seen five shantytown children die of malaria,” she said in a low, dense voice that did not bode any good for Isaac. “That’s why we have the rule that you stay away from the river.”

“I know, but—”

“No buts. You shower out here; I’ll get some clothes for you.”

Fifteen minutes later Isaac, clean but still itchy, was being hauled away by his mother to the hospital clinic. They crossed the front lawn, big enough to be used for helicopter landings when high government dignitaries came to visit the hospital. Robert the Slobert stood on the porch of his house. His dad, Dr. Higgenbotham, was an oncologist, and his mother was the head nurse trainer. Slobert was thirteen years old, the closest in age to Isaac of all the school students, and the meanest.

“What’s up, Dr. Williams?” he called out to Isaac’s mother.

“Don’t answer,” Isaac muttered, but his mom replied that Isaac had been eaten alive by mosquitoes and that she was taking him to the clinic for some medicine.

Isaac kept his gaze on the ground.
Great, now Slobert’s going to tease me about malaria and think of a stupid trick to pull on me.

She added, “You boys remember to stay away from the river.”

Slobert laughed and said, “Only Isaac ever goes to that stupid river.”

Mr. Theophilus, on compound duty this evening, opened the grilled gate for them. They crossed Doctors’ Alley. The narrow lane separated the hospital from the rest of the compound and dead-ended in a large empty lot slated for future hospital expansion. Mary took Isaac into the bright dispensary, its walls painted a canary yellow, the air rich with the smell of alcohol and antiseptic. She gave Isaac some chloroquine tablets and a cup of water. Isaac dutifully swallowed them without comment, although he knew that the bad malarial strains were chloroquine-resistant. She handed him another tablet. Lariam. The nuclear-bomb pill.

“Oh, Mom, please not that,” Isaac begged. “That makes me sicker than a dog.”

“Better sick for a night than dead forever,” she said grimly. “Drink it down.”

Isaac did. The Lariam started to erode his hunger with an ache that later would turn nauseous.

It happened quickly. By the time he got back to the house, he was gagging. His mom told him to keep it down, or he’d have to have another Lariam pill. She escorted him into his bedroom and helped him onto his bed. “Just stay still and think of something nice,” she said.

The Lariam’s radioactive fallout overwhelmed all thoughts, whether nice or not, and he groaned with misery. He finally couldn’t take it anymore. He got up and raced to the bathroom, where he retched as quietly as he could. He didn’t want his
mother to hear and make him take another pill. The nausea subsided to a tolerable level, and he crawled back to bed. His dad came in to check up on him, a dark, lanky shadow smelling of germicide detergent.

“How are you feeling?”

“Terrible. Lariam should be outlawed.”

Graham Williams chuckled. “That’s what you get for breaking the rules. We’re going to have a little talk about that tomorrow.”

“I didn’t do anything
wrong
wrong—”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Your mother asked me to see if you want to eat something.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Okay.” His father moved to the door.

“Oh, Dad, wait.”

Graham Williams paused. “Yes?”

Isaac closed his eyes, seeing again the cunningly made secret gate in the compound wall. If he got grounded, it might come in handy. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”