When my cousin Kenny dropped off the face of the earth, he landed in Bukittinggi. His mom (my dad’s sister Gloria) sent me to go retrieve him.
I flew from here to Chicago, and then to Los Angeles, Seoul, Jakarta and Padang. I’m going to have some strong words with Uncle Spence when I get home—Couldn’t he have found me a better routing?
I was supposed to go directly from Padang to Bukittinggi, but when I stumbled out of PDG I looked, felt and smelled about five years older than when I left Minneapolis, so I fell into a taxi and checked myself into the Buruk Malam for the night. There was what sounded like an all-night kick-boxing match in the next room, accompanied by a badly-distorted recording of Toto’s Rosanna on permanent repeat. I showered, dressed and checked out at 5:30 AM local time while this ruckus was still going on. The clerk looked at me sadly and took my money.
For breakfast, I ate a bowl of mind-bogglingly delicious soto padang outside the bus station. I’ve had good luck with bus station food stalls all over the world. Not sure what the magic is.
The bus ride took about two hours. It’s a three thousand foot climb from the ocean up to the highlands, and it’s probably a beautiful drive but I slept through the whole thing and presumably drooled and snored too. It’s a blessing the other passengers didn’t paint my face with lipstick or something. I would never have noticed.
The bus station in Bukittinggi has one of those great pointy hats lots of Indonesian buildings have. You’d know approximately where on earth you were just from the hat. I ate a big serving of nasi goreng (magnificent again, and with a couple of fried eggs on top) and three bottles of Teh Botol before leaving the station. Jet lag comes over me like that sometimes.
I bargained with a guy with a three-wheeled tractor/scooter/car thing to take me to the address we had copied off Kenny’s postcard. (There were regular taxis too, but where’s the fun in that?) He dropped me off in front of a corner convenience store and pointed at the second story. I paid him and he took off in a cloud of blue smoke.
The shopkeeper got a good laugh out of the photo I showed him of Kenny, his sister Angie, their enormous childhood Great Dane Sluggo and me. We all still look enough like we did back then that it got the idea across, that I was a relative of Kenny’s. He sent his son upstairs with me and we knocked on Kenny’s door. No answer. The kid opened the door and we stuck our heads in. It was basically a big closet, with a mat and a blanket on the floor and Kenny’s old duffel bag with some clothes. Clean enough, and had a window. Plenty of people live lots worse places. The kid shrugged and I thanked him and gave him a pack of gum, then went down to the street and found a place to chew betel and drink more Teh Botol. Betel is probably really contraindicated for jet lag, but it helps with boredom and I might be waiting quite a while. The other betel-stand customers thought a red-toothed farang was a pretty good curiosity so pretty soon I was the center of one of those friendly-but -no-language-in-common crowds that happen once in a while. Not a bad way to spend an hour, smiling and spitting and becoming pleasantly hypnotized.
It was early afternoon when a white wraith walked up to Kenny’s building, nylon pants and a ragged T-shirt hanging off its bones. I ran toward it yelling, “Kenny!” It ignored me until it was halfway up the stairs and I was an arm’s length away. Then it turned and stared with surprise verging on terror. “Michael?”
“Hey, Kenny.”
“My mom got my postcard, huh?”
“Yeah. She asked me to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah. Your landlord already showed me your apartment. Sorry about that.”
We reached the top of the stairs and Kenny stalked down the hall past his own door and through a door at the end of the hall. He closed it behind him. I leaned against the opposite wall to wait.
He opened the door a minute later to the sound of a flushing toilet. The bathroom was small, dim and concrete, with a utility sink and a squat toilet. He pulled off his shirt, removed a plastic washboard from the sink and ran water onto a rag he pulled down from a hook on the wall.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Can I buy you lunch?”
He rubbed the rag on a bar of grey laundry soap and scrubbed his armpits. He shrugged.
“We can go wherever you usually eat,” I said. “Or whatever you want.”
He dried his pits on a scrap of towel and pushed past me toward his room. I resumed leaning. Kenny disappeared into his room, his door half-open, and reemerged a few moments later wearing a grey “University of Nowhere” T-shirt I had given him when we were teenagers. I took the choice of shirt as an encouraging sign. He banged his door shut and started down the stairs. I followed him.
Kenny’s local turned out to be the soup stand next to the betel vendor. Kenny looked over in mild surprise when the betel guy and I greeted each other, but then turned back to the soup guy. “Dua,” he said, holding up two fingers.
The soup guy put a platter of condiments on his one low table and dished up two bowls of soup. Kenny and I each took one and squatted down on stools by the table. Kenny dropped noodles into his bowl, shredded some herbs on top, and squeezed in half a lime. Then he shook the whole bowl of hot sauce into the soup, mashed everything together with his spoon and started shoveling. I looked over at the vendor and held up the hot sauce bowl for a refill. By the time I had my soup garnished and the refill had appeared Kenny was already finished and had his eyes shut. I added a quarter of the chile Kenny had used and took a bite. Beads of sweat broke out on my scalp.
Kenny opened his eyes. “I need to do some errands,” he said. He stood up, handed some bills to the soup man and walked off.
I ate another mouthful of soup.
The soup man set a bottle of Fanta on the table beside me. I looked up at him gratefully. He cocked his head in the direction of Kenny’s retreating frame and rolled his eyes. I laughed, and the soup man grinned.
I had the bowl up in the air and was pouring the last of the soup down my throat when a truck pulled up way too close and belched black smoke in my face. The truck was an ancient relative of those tiny Suzuki Carry pickups you see all over the world. A toy, by American standards. Sounded like an extra-loud leaf-blower. Kenny stuck his head out the driver’s window. “Come on,” he said. “Soup’s paid for.”
I gulped the last of the Fanta and tilted the bottle toward the soup man in salute. He smiled and shook his head. I trotted around the truck and squeezed myself inside. Kenny was hunched over the wheel and looked ready for action. “Potatoes,” he said. We pulled away in a murk of exhaust.
We shuddered through a bunch of disorienting turns and out past the edge of town. Down a narrow dirt road Kenny stopped the truck in front of a low cinderblock house with an overgrown front garden. He slammed his door and jogged up to the house. I climbed out of the truck, took a deep breath and tried to enjoy the green mountains.
“Hey,” Kenny yelled. A tiny woman was disappearing back into the house and Kenny was shouldering an enormous lumpy sack. He pointed down at a second sack on the ground and walked toward the truck. I went and lifted the other sack, which must have weighed fifty pounds. By the time I heaved it into the back of the truck Kenny had the engine running again and the truck was starting to coast. I had to comedy-jump into the moving truck, and I frowned at Kenny. “Dog food,” he said.
We retraced our route back into town, took a hard left and pulled up outside an apartment block. Kenny again dashed from the truck and I followed him, walking. I had just hit the third-floor landing when I heard his footsteps running back toward me. He had a big sack of dog food over his shoulder and he took the steps down two at a time. “Back there,” he said, jerking a thumb. I walked down the hallway and found the other bag of dog food leaning against a door frame. It was a fifty pound sack of Ol’ Roy, the Walmart house brand. I hadn’t realized Walmart had stores in Indonesia.
The truck was rolling again as I approached it with the heavy sack. This time, I set the sack on the ground and folded my arms. Kenny drove about fifty feet and then reversed back to me and paused. I heaved the dog food into the bed and climbed in. “You have a dog?” I asked.
He ignored me. “Cheese,” he said.
We drove to a supermarket. Kenny dashed out and I sat in the cab making a mental list: Potato, cheese and Ol’ Roy casserole. Potato, cheese and Ol’ Roy kebab. Potato, cheese and Ol’ Roy chowder. Potato, cheese and Ol’ Roy mousse…
Kenny threw two packages of Velveeta at me and had the truck rolling before he had even closed his door. “They eat Velveeta in Bukittinggi?” I asked.
The truck backfired and we sped back to Kenny’s apartment. Kenny darted out the door and up to his building. I found him in a closet at the foot of the stairs backhanding mops against the opposite wall. “Kenny?” I asked. He continued monkey-chucking brooms and pails and brushes out of the closet. I put a hand on his shoulder and took a bucket in the temple. I backed off.
Soon the closet was completely empty and Kenny stood, fists clenched, leaning his head against the back wall. “Kenny?” I said again.
He burst into motion and pushed past me back out to his truck. He drove off so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to jump into the cab: I had to sprint behind and vault into the bed. I’m too old for this. I was always too old for this. I squatted down and gripped the potato sacks by their strings, hoping they would lower my center of gravity.
We drove an incomprehensible high-speed zigzag for a mile or two, then screeched to a stop in front of a glass-fronted shop that appeared to be a hardware store. When I got inside I could hear Kenny jabbering maniacally at the salesman, who was gently fanning his hands and trying to calm Kenny down. The one word they appeared to agree on was “perejang,” and the salesman was shaking his head. I wondered what perejang was. War paint? Amphetamines? Kenny streaked back out the door but this time I was quick enough to get into the cab before he peeled out. We drove in a straight line toward what looked like a different edge of town than we had visited before. Kenny bolted into a low-rise shed that looked like a snowdrift of steel parts and scrap. It looked more like something you’d see on the outskirts of Lincoln. I hadn’t yet seen anything in Indonesia quite that untidy. I rolled down the window and entertained a vision of Kenny dashing down the gullet of a giant Japanese movie monster made entirely of garbage. I was undecided whether I wanted him to survive the encounter.
Kenny came running back out, empty-handed. At this point I wanted to provide him a soundtrack of bongo drums, or double-speed circus music. All he was missing was extra-large shoes. We kicked up a dust cloud U-turning and zooming back into town. I blessed Suzuki for building a vehicle that could survive this abuse. We returned to Kenny’s neighborhood and he darted through the doors of a restaurant. I found him at a corner table, slumped in his chair like an unstrung puppet. The waiter set a glass of Bintang in front of him. I met the waiter’s eye and pointed at the beer. Kenny’s arm pulled the beer to his bowed head and he drained half the glass. I leaned back in my seat and let the adrenaline from the truck race drain away. The waiter brought my beer and set a bowl of rice in front of each of us, then began to fill the table with fried fish, salads and unrecognizable curries. I served myself half of the most sinister-looking curry (incandescent glow, flames dancing on the surface, lightning strikes, etc.), made myself a bite that was nine-tenths rice and put it in my mouth. It didn’t disappoint. I drained my beer, wiped tears and snot off my face with my napkin and took another bite. The waiter hurried over with more beer for both of us and a large stack of paper napkins for me. I nodded at him in thanks. Kenny was drinking beer in the same hunched-over way, but hadn’t reached for any food. I tried to say, “Here, try this,” but it came out like the call of a seabird so I laughed and took another bite. I had made it through three beers, two bowls of rice, six plates of (mercifully milder) food and my entire stack of napkins before Kenny finally sat up. He looked like he was in a deep state of grief. I was sick of silence and single-word sentences so I stared at him but didn’t ask what was wrong. He worked his way through his own half-dozen plates of food silently and robotically, then belched and sat back with his arms crossed. It was a childish silence contest. I was sure he would win eventually but was determined not to cave too soon. We sat and drank beer.
The door bell jingled and a boy around ten years old walked in carrying a crowbar. He walked quickly toward us. Kenny knocked over his chair standing up and rushed toward the boy. I wondered whether there was a Sumatran crowbar-based martial art I hadn’t heard about. I couldn’t see how Kenny was going to stand up against a ten-year-old crowbar ninja. But they waved their hands at each other for a few seconds, Kenny gave the kid a couple of bills and the kid gave Kenny the crowbar. Kenny, now smiling broadly, strode out of the restaurant. I looked over in panic at the waiter but he just smiled and waved at me to follow Kenny. I guessed Kenny was maybe running a standing tab.
I stood up and swayed toward the door, feeling the jet lag and the beer. The sky had grown dark, but the street was bright with streetlights and the light from shops. Kenny was kneeling in the street next to his truck, using the crowbar to pry at a manhole cover. Motorbikes zoomed around him. I looked around at the shoppers and street-food customers to see whether anyone else found his behavior unusual. A few people were looking but nobody appeared excited.
Kenny had the manhole open and had wrestled one of the potato sacks out of the truck. He dropped it down the manhole and scrambled down after it. I peered down after him. Light was playing around at the bottom and Kenny’s voice said, “Come on! Drop the rest of it down!”
I checked the crowd again. I didn’t spot any cops, hostility or people furtively dialing their phones, so I manhandled the other potato sack and dropped it down the hole, thinking my relationship with Aunt Gloria was going to be frosty if I killed her son with potatoes.
“Dog food,” Kenny shouted up.
No way were the dog food sacks not going to burst when they hit the bottom of that hole. The rats would have a field day.
I dropped the hundred pounds of Ol’ Roy down the hole, expecting my back to give out any minute. “Easy Cheese?” I yelled down.
Kenny didn’t answer.
I got the Velveeta out of the cab, tossed it down the hole, and started down the ladder. “Shut the lid,” Kenny yelled.
I grabbed the crowbar and hung it on the top rung of the ladder, then ducked down and muscled the lid a few inches. As the crescent waned, I reflected on my lifetime of mild claustrophobia and considered whether to welcome it or fight it.
I fought it and closed the cover. It fit snugly, and I said a brief atheist’s prayer to Saint Christopher.
Kenny was wearing a miner’s helmet with a lamp. He had a hand cart loaded with the potato-dog-cheese and he was shoving it toward a steel door at the end of the short tunnel. I slid around the cart to open the door for him. He dug a spiky wad of keys from his pocket and held one out. I unlocked the door and pulled it open. In the light from his helmet I could only see a few feet into the next space, which appeared to be another narrow tunnel, this one roughly hewn out of rock. “Japanese,” Kenny said. “Slave labor.”
I dug through my sketchy knowledge of local history. Surely the Japanese hadn’t occupied this area for more than a couple of years. Was that long enough to dig tunnels through rock?
Kenny had the cart squeaking and echoing through the tunnel. I followed his bobbing light, hoping those freaking-huge Sumatran fruit bats didn’t live in tunnels as well as trees. The tunnel descended for a long time. I was woozy and dehydrated, cursing the caffeine and the betel and the beer. Then I switched my cursing to Kenny, reserving some to share with Gloria and Spence. What was I doing down in this tunnel?
Kenny’s light shone on another steel door. He pulled out his keys and opened this one, then pushed the cart in a few feet. He looked back at me. “Push the cart in farther,” I said. “I won’t fit.”
“Can’t,” Kenny said.
There was a sharp stench emanating from the door. I looked at the blackness behind me, then stuck my head through the door. I could see prison bars to my left. Behind them was a soft snuffling sound.
“Kenny?” I said. “What the hell?”
Kenny swung his head so the light shone into the cell. A huge animal was pacing in there, twisting and rustling. “Feeding time,” Kenny said.
“What is it?” I asked, backing away.
“Rat,” Kenny said, and he clanged open the door of the cell. The rat (if that’s what it was) stuck its nose out and sniffed him. It was larger than the largest dog. Kenny gave it a pat.
“Kenny?” I said. “Why do you have a rat?”
“Won it,” he said. He tugged loose the string on one of the potato sacks and held out a potato in his palm. The rat took it and munched it down in a couple of bites. Kenny walked into the cell and kicked a couple of large feed tubs out into the hall. I hung back. The rat stood alert, looking pretty much like Sluggo had, waiting for his chow. Kenny tossed potatoes into one tub and dumped half a sack of Ol’ Roy into the other. He took a penknife from his pocket, cut open a Velveeta package, and sliced orange globs onto the Ol’ Roy. Then he kicked the tubs back into the cell.
“What’s it, uh, drink?” I asked.
Kenny kicked a metal drum I hadn’t noticed. It gonged dully. Kenny opened a tap on the side of the drum and ran a tub full of water, then took down a curry comb from a shelf and started to comb the rat while it ate. I stood in numb silence and watched.
“Jesus it stinks in here,” I said finally.
Kenny exchanged the comb for a brush and began to brush the rat. I felt ill. My head was pounding and my belly was on fire. I was trapped in a tunnel with a monster, a madman and years-old rat stench. Time to go home.
“Time to go,” Kenny said, replacing the brush on the shelf. He unlocked a low door on the far side of the cell and the rat bustled through it. Kenny ducked under and disappeared, and I crossed despondently through the giant turds and reeking piss-pools and squeezed through the door.
The three of us were squeezed into a pen barely large enough to contain the rat alone. Electric lights shone above us and a large crowd moved on the other side of the bars. Kenny shut the door behind us and climbed up and out. I was right behind him. We were in a high-ceilinged cave which had been turned into an arena: fencing had been rigged around the central area and the crowd—a couple hundred at least, and all men&mdashstood outside chewing betel and drinking and waving wads of money at each other. There was another pen on the far side with something large and indistinct bristling around inside. A group of spectators broke off when they saw Kenny, surrounded him, and pressed a beer into his hand. He smiled wanly and took a sip. A bow-legged young guy was walking the perimeter, waving his arms and shouting. He appeared to be the ringmaster. I wondered whether two giant rats would fight each other&mdashor whether they would just run off in the caves together and make more rats. The crowd was quieting, so I was about to find out.
There were two men up on the fence, reaching down to the latch of Kenny’s rat’s pen, and two men at the opposite pen. The ringmaster threw his arms in the air and the men opened the pens. Out of the far pen raced not a rat but a tiger, equal in size to Kenny’s rat and moving much faster. The rat and the tiger circled each other, tails lashing. They bared their teeth, and I found myself laughing and holding onto the cage for support. I had gone over some kind of edge. The betting was frenzied. The tiger twitched and paced, looking for an opportunity. The rat snapped at the air. Suddenly the tiger sprang and sank its teeth and claws into the rat’s neck and shoulders. The rat bent itself double and bit into the tiger’s hind legs. The crowd was seething in near-combat, as bettors screamed to be heard and chased the moving odds. The rat and tiger rolled over and over and crashed into the fence a few feet from me. I jumped back. The tiger appeared to have the advantage, pinning the rat and raking it with all four paws. But then the tiger screamed, leaped off the rat and began to run and roll in a circle around the arena. Half the crowd cheered. The tiger was being assailed by a cloud of golf-ball-sized, fast-moving dots that moved like the fleas that attacked me one rough night in Kenya. The rat was lying still, dazed or in shock. The tiger was nipping at its own coat, smacking itself with the backs of its paws, licking and tumbling in an unhappy squealing whirlwind. The rat had dragged itself to its feet and was waddling toward the howling tiger. The tiger was on its back, flailing and twisting and batting at the dots. The rat stepped forward and dispassionately bit the tiger on the throat. A fountain of blood shot through the fence and silenced several dozen spectators. The tiger twitched and lay still. The rat flopped down and blinked, and the dots left the tiger and disappeared into the rat’s coat.
I pressed myself back against the wall to avoid a couple of fistfights that had broken out. Around the arena a blizzard of rupiah was changing hands. Kenny was pale and sweating. The ringmaster kid had a medic’s bag and was out suturing the rat. I went down a side tunnel and used the bucket that was serving the crowd as a urinal. When I got back the rat was bloodstained and greased with ointment, but seemed to have the use of all its limbs. Kenny had a Garuda airline bag slung over his shoulder, and he was herding the rat back into its chute. If I had been that rat I would have bitten his arm off at the very least. But the rat was docile and waddled through the chute into its cell. I was nervous and bug-eyed, watching its coat for any sign of the monster fleas, but saw none. Kenny gave the rat another round of water and chow—this time with extra cheese, patted it on its head, locked the cell and began to walk up the tunnel, leaving me in the dark, watching his helmet-light bobbing away.
I pulled myself together and jogged after him. His light was swaying. He seemed almost jaunty. After an impossibly long return walk, he climbed up the ladder and muscled the manhole cover aside. We emerged into the street. A few people were out walking, and a few vendors were sweeping up. Cars rumbled on some other street. Kenny was in his truck. “Jesus, Kenny, I’m dead tired,” I said, looking over at his building.
He ignored me and I dragged myself into the cab. We drove through the quiet streets to the deserted bus station. “Come on, Kenny, it won’t open for hours,” I said.
Kenny stared at me. I climbed down out of the truck. Kenny patted the Garuda bag beside him. “Tell my mom I’m staying,” he said. He sped off, and the passenger door banged itself shut.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Afitz Ismail Photography
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