The Flame Tree (7 page)

Bapak Trisno did not make the customary reply of
alaikum as-salam
. Isaac wanted to flee. He forced himself to say, “I came to see Ismail.”

Bapak Trisno still made no response. His face was unyielding. Little butterfly wings of panic began to flutter in Isaac’s stomach. Had Lieutenant Nugroho lied? Had Ismail disappeared while in police custody? He said, his words running together with nervousness, “I saw Ismail on Sunday, the police had him, and I came down here because I wanted to see if Ismail was okay.”

Bapak Trisno stood to the side, motioning someone forward. Into view stepped Ismail, a smaller version of his father, wearing an identically patterned sarong, a black peci, and his Tuan Guru T-shirt, laundered of its Sunday blood.

Isaac felt a smile bubble up onto his face, which withered as it dawned on him that Ismail didn’t look happy to see him. His
father bent and whispered into his son’s ear, nudging him on the back. Ismail stiffly walked down the porch steps and past Isaac without a word. He opened the gate and stood to the side, his hand on the latch. It was an unmistakable order for Isaac to leave.

Isaac walked toward him. “Ismail?” he said softly. “Ismail, what’s going on? Did something happen at the police station?”

“No.”

“So what’s wrong? I know I made a promise to tell your parents, but I couldn’t get away to see them. I really tried, truly I did.” Isaac was speaking as fast as he could, aware of the heavy silence on the porch behind him.

Ismail cut him off. “My father was fired from the sugar mill yesterday, along with half the workforce. Without warning. Against the law. The big bosses think they are above the law, but they are wrong. They’ll see.” He looked at Isaac, really looked at Isaac, as if seeing Isaac for the first time in all the years they had known each other. Isaac became conscious of himself—not of his big bones or blond hair or blue eyes, but of the expensive and well-tailored school clothes he was wearing, which were not the cheap clothes he wore out to play. For a second Ismail’s gaze lingered with naked longing on Isaac’s new Reeboks.

Ismail switched from intimate Javanese to formal Indonesian. “You American bulés will see too. Now it is best that you leave us, please.”

Isaac, bewildered, walked out the gate. This situation was fraught with complexities beyond his depth, but he seized on the one thing that was solid enough to anchor his thoughts on. He
turned around. “Are we still friends?” he asked, in Indonesian.

“Maybe, maybe later,” Ismail said, softening. He switched to Javanese to say, “Please, Isak, don’t come around here.” A pause, then a lifting of brow. “Unless you want to become a Muslim. If you become a Muslim, we could be good friends all the time.”

Ismail was serious. He said this as if it were an obvious solution to a problem. “That’s not possible,” Isaac said. “You know I’m a Christian.”

“No, it’s easy. All you have to do is say the
shahadah
in front of two Muslims, and then you are a Muslim yourself.” Ismail took a breath. “
Ashhadu anna la illaha ilia allah wa ashhadu anna muhammadan rasul allah
,” he intoned, the lilt of prayer creeping into his voice. “Can you say that, Isak? It’s easy.” His eyes lit up with the familiar Ismail current. “You can say it right now, my father and another man can be witnesses, and then we can be best friends again. Right away. Right now.”

“Ismail—”

“Look, you don’t have to be a
strict
Muslim,” Ismail whispered furtively. “You don’t have to tell your parents or anything. You can even still go to church and all that. Please, Isak?”

And God help him, for a moment Isaac was tempted. After all, he couldn’t lose his best friend. He simply couldn’t. Wouldn’t God value true friendship over a faked confession of faith? How could anyone lose his salvation over that?

Ismail added, “Of course, I think you’d have to be circumcised by a cleric, but that’s probably the only ritual you’d have to observe.”

Perhaps that was what brought Isaac to his senses. “I can’t, Ismail. I wish I could, I really do, but I can’t.” The words were wrenched out of him like teeth being pulled without an anesthetic.

Pain flared through Ismail’s eager eyes, and then they dulled. “Better you go, then,” he said, reverting to Indonesian. “And better you don’t come back.” He shut the gate and turned around and walked back to the house without another glance.

The men on the veranda were still coldly watching Isaac. He waited for Ismail to turn around, to give him one last sign of friendship, but Ismail disappeared into the house.

Isaac wheeled and ran. He was stunned into a blank, emotionless state, not feeling a thing, knowing only that he had now to get back to the compound without getting caught. He had turned the corner at the Friendship Store when, down the street, he noticed that the tips of the bamboo in front of the secret gate were quivering and shaking. Out of the bamboo popped his father, in his white clinic coat, looking around him with the confusion of someone who has found himself in another universe.

Just then, a group of hospital visitors descended from a bemo. Isaac used them as cover to pass through the hospital gates.

A few moments later he slinked around his house. A somber-looking group of men and one boy—Graham Williams; the hospital business manager, Mr. Ali; the chief of security, Mr. Theophilus; and Rhyan Strang—were gathered by the wall, watching as a work crew finished chopping down the hibiscus hedge to more clearly reveal the secret gate.

Two security guards, Frengky and Petrus, burly Ambonese
with the size and carriage of heavyweight boxers, stood with Tanto between them as though he were a felon. His red-veined eyes were the only ones to notice Isaac.

Graham Williams said grimly, “A wall is only as secure as its weakest gate. Thank you, Rhyan. You’d best head to school now.”

“Yes, sir,” Rhyan said.

Isaac waited for Rhyan on the school side of the hedge. “You told,” he said as soon as Rhyan came through the wicket gate. Isaac’s eyes pricked. This minor betrayal penetrated his numbness over Ismail’s greater one. “You said you wouldn’t and you told.”

“This isn’t some Peter Pan fairy tale with enchanted gates for kids to play with,” Rhyan said. “This is serious business. Your dad had to know and right away. Period. End of fairy tale. I didn’t tell him it was you who showed me, though.” He sped up on his long teenage legs, leaving Isaac behind.

A chain saw began to buzz with an earsplitting whine, startling Isaac. He looked up. Standing on a branch up in the flame tree was a worker in overalls, wearing earmuffs and a safety belt, holding the chain saw. He put the whirring blade to the lowest branch over the wall. Wood chips began to fly.

“No!” Isaac screamed, and kept screaming as he ran for the tree. He scampered up the trunk and swung on the branch where the oblivious worker stood, chain saw biting deep into the wood in front of him. Isaac grabbed the man’s safety rope. Tugged off balance, the worker fell from the branch with a cry, but the harness jerked him to a safe stop above the ground. The jar dislodged his earmuffs. The
chain saw automatically cut off, clattering to the ground.

Isaac was still shouting in a mixed-up jumble of English, Indonesian, and Javanese, screaming at the worker not to touch the tree, not to dare touch the tree. Blood flooded back into the worker’s pale brown face, turning his skin dark chocolate. He yelled back at Isaac as he dangled on the rope, cursing him in an unknown dialect.

Mr. Theophilus and Graham Williams raced to the tree. “What happened, what happened?” Graham said to Isaac, his upturned face an oval of consternation.

“He was cutting the tree down,” Isaac said, trembling. He held tightly to the trunk to keep from falling. “He was cutting the tree down!”

The worker began to climb back up the rope, hand over hand. “Your fool son pushed me off the branch,” he said to Graham. “He could have killed me.”

Graham exclaimed, “Isaac, for heaven’s sake. Isaac, get down here, please.”

Isaac did so, not to obey his father, but to get to the chain saw and stomp all over it, break it, smash it. His heart banged away in his chest, feeling as if it were about to break loose. His dad grabbed him. “What the heck’s the matter?”

“He was cutting down the tree,” Isaac babbled.

The worker hauled himself up to the branch. Mr. Theophilus picked up the chain saw and handed it to him. Isaac lunged. His father clamped his hands down tight and said, “Isaac, he’s not cutting down the tree. He’s only trimming those branches over the
wall. So nobody can use them to climb over. Are you listening? Do you hear me? What the heck is the matter with you? If you don’t calm down right now, I’m taking you to the ER.”

Isaac stopped struggling, aware of faces around the auditorium window, watching the commotion. The little kids were practicing a play. To his utter embarrassment, he began to sob. His dad knelt and pulled him to his chest, patting the back of his head, saying, “Hush now, hush.”

Isaac struggled and gulped and finally got his weeping under control. He unresistingly let his father lead him by the hand back to their house and sit him down on the living-room sofa. “Now, what’s the matter?”

Isaac sniffled and rubbed his nose. “Nothing.”

“Nothing my ass.” His dad made an intercom call. A minute later Mary Williams swept through the front door.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

Graham raised his hands. “I don’t know. Isaac threw this fit.” He briefly told her what had happened, clearly perplexed and worried. “The guy was only cutting the branches. That’s all, only cutting branches, and Isaac went crazy. He won’t talk to me.”

Mary sat down beside Isaac and put her arm around him. “You want to tell me about it?”

Isaac, staring at his new Reeboks, now dirty from the cemetery and scruffed a bit from scrambling up the flame tree, shook his head. “No.”

She studied him. She said, “It’s not about the flame tree at all, is it?”

She waited for an answer. He took a deep, quavering breath and shook his head. “No.”

“It might help to talk about it.”

“I can’t…it’s…I’ll be all right.”

“You certainly weren’t all right a few minutes ago,” Graham said.

“I feel like such a stupid idiot.”

Mary squeezed his shoulders. “Honey—”

“There’s nothing for you to worry about. Honest.” He took another, stronger breath and stood. “I’m way late for class.”

After school Isaac climbed the tree to his perch. Even though these branches had not been harmed, the mutilation below made him feel uncomfortably exposed. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the Al-Furqon Mosque across from the compound. To his relief, Imam Ali was not in sight.

What had the gate been there for? Nobody would know now what Tanto had been planning. The word had already gotten out that Mr. Ali, the business manager, had fired him.

A great yellow haze rose from the earth, the vapory heaves of a land being tortured under an oven sky. The edges of rooftops a mere hundred yards away were smudged and blurred.

Isaac suddenly realized how ominous the whole idea of a secret gate in the wall really was. He really should have told his dad about it straightaway, instead of seeking reassurance from Tanto that a sour-faced old Muslim cleric in a turban wasn’t going to go around beheading infidels. How stupid he’d been;
when Tanto had patted him on the back, right there where his neck joined his shoulders, he’d probably been calculating the size of blade needed, the force of the strike that would be required.

Below and across the street Imam Ali stepped out of the mosque’s prayer room. He slipped into his sandals, lifting the hem of his dun-colored robe to do so. He crossed the dusty yard and stood on the sidewalk, looking toward the hospital gates. He stared at them for a long time, taking in the workers placing barbed wire on top of the compound’s wall, before sweeping his gaze along the wall to the bamboo stand. There his attention lingered, before moving on the few yards to the flame tree. His gaze rose along the stumps of the cut branches and higher yet until he was looking straight at Isaac. Under his beaked nose his thin lips spread into a curve sharp as a scimitar’s blade. He put his hands together in front of his chest and bowed in a salaam. He straightened, now smiling fully, as though his Lord had granted him a pleasing vision of Isaac’s fate. He strolled down the street toward the Friendship Store.

Isaac watched him until he turned the corner. He relaxed for a second, then stiffened again, sensing something stir beyond his left peripheral vision. He turned his head. A shriek stuck in his clogged throat. A large crow was perched on a nearby branch, close enough that Isaac could see the individual feathers of its glossy, folded wings. The crow stared without fear at Isaac, contemplating his blue eyes as though they were trophies to be plucked. Isaac shouted again and flapped his left arm. The bird at
once flew away above his head, the powerful beat of its wings causing a draft of air that stirred his hair.

During Spiritual Emphasis Week, Tuesday evening was Singspiration night, a favorite service of the local Christians. The church was packed, all seats taken. Even Ruth and her son, Jon, were present, Jon still looking sluggish from the flu. He had on a JCPenny shirt that Isaac had outgrown two years ago. Ruth wore her finest blue dress, the one with the beads, which glittered with reflected light. She had on a thick gold necklace Isaac hadn’t seen before and new dangling earrings that she touched from time to time.

Isaac sat on a spare stool in the engineering balcony, where Herdi, the technician, sometimes allowed him to sit during midweek services. His mother strode into view below him, with two guests, May and her daughter, Meimei, from the Hai Shin restaurant. They sat down in the pew that Graham had reserved for them.

From up here, Isaac could see every head in the main sanctuary, although not the overflow crowd in the back. There were at least three hundred people present. For Wonobo this was an extraordinary turnout. Isaac figured that every Christian in the area was in attendance tonight.