The Governor of the Northern Province (10 page)

Bokarie's arm sank into his companion's waist. It had the consistency of day-old oatmeal. He was excited by the prospect of firm and shapely woman-flesh. He wondered what the Bride would think of dancing with her slinky wedding-day Driver as he watched her laughing and teary-eyed swig from a bottle and blush and wave and thump up the crowd with the grace of a small-town princess. Having earlier gone to the parking lot, as instructed, to put some pink bows on the Lincoln he had driven for the bridal party, Bokarie knew that the Groom was not guarding his woman. He was standing with his shift-worker cousins and uncles studying the magnificent wedding gift his father-in-law had given him along with a position as Associate Sales Manager on the lot. In fact, these men would spend nearly an hour outside, theorizing about possible decal motifs for the hood and side panels, though taking expected breaks to return inside, of course,
to the open friggin' bar
. The Bride was, for present purposes, wide open.

Bokarie and Jennifer closed in beside Cat and the Engine and began dancing to stage whispers and elbow jabs and Sea Breeze giggles. Bokarie started twisting and twirling around Jennifer as she bobbed methodically in place. He was enjoying the response— whoops and flashes and the Bride's eyes widening and the Engine yelling something from Ecclesiastes over the music and drawling with Great White Father pride at how far this Boy had already come. From driving Quality to dancing beside it! Turning to cut, Bokarie smiled at the Bride and readied to ask her, this beery mound of chiffon and lace, how she liked her licorice whips.

5

BOTTLE RETURN

I.

Though the speakers were bass throbbing and the older men shouting imprecations and their women shrieking lamentations while they took turns trying to putt putt for a loonie in a corner of the reception hall, Bokarie could still hear it, the bright wet clacking sound of the bottle being blunted against the bride's teeth.

It was interfering, this long-ago sound, interfering as he was trying to enjoy slow-dancing with Glenn's beer-brined, crinoline-crushed daughter in the dreamy steam of the wedding deejay's fog machine. She was squashing her
this is my last one I swear
bottle through her lips, swigging and swallowing and nodding to her dance partner's sad, sad tales. Then she mounted her response.

“Listen, I can't do anything about all the stuff that happened to you over in New Whatchamacallitland, but I can at least say sorry, as a concerned Canadian, as a
fellow
Canadian”—here she pulled back and smiled and nodded and Bokarie immediately responded in kind—“I can say sorry for my dad having you dress up like that and drive us to the wedding. It's like it's the States or something and I swear to God sometimes I think he wishes it was. That wasn't my idea, the whole Miss Daisy thing, and it wasn't ever supposed to be a judgment on you and what you're capable of in your new land though you probably think it is and after all that persecution and shit back wherever and now this.”

Bokarie liked this girl. She was more efficient than most in blaring her indignation on his behalf. He nodded for her to say more and asked her to give him the words loudly. So he could hear her better. So that he would not have to bend in and listen to that bottle slide on her teeth.

“Plus I had a friend I never told anyone about when I went to summer camp in Oneonta. That was my high school graduation gift. His name was Jamal, like from
Cosby
, and contrary to what you might have heard he always wore a belt and he had both parents at home but … but …” Here she went a little teary and shook her head, hiccupping a General Arts degree's worth of First World remorse and sucking away at her bottle. Bokarie was enjoying her sweat and pearl-beaded décolletage mashing mournfully against him, but that damned sound, the bottle CLICK-SMACK! against her whites as she sipped and swallowed. It punctuated every other pronouncement. CLICK-SMACK! It was urging him on and bringing him back and screwing up his dance steps.

He thought it best, just now, to unhook his gauze-swaddled pelvis and get away from that bloody noise. He would take some air. He did a deep bow before the gracious bride. Knowing that eyes and apertures were on him, he showily grooved his way out of the hall, leaving anthropological commentaries in his bopping wake from coffee-and-cake-taking onlookers.

“You know how it is. That type always just having that rhythm.”

“Must be from all the drumming you see on those documentaries.”

Earlier, there had been a few noises about how close the bride seemed to have been dancing with that Thickson girl's African. The more sexually frustrated invitees were openly bitter that the new guy got first crack at every small town's summer grail—the courtly bachelor's allotted four minutes of rhythmic squish against the
bella figura
of the tipsy, hugsy new bride. These Tip Top Tailored Iagos circulated through the tables, loudly wondering whether the next song was going to be “The Jungle Bunny Hop.” When this cleverness dissipated, their discussion returned to the relative weights and merits of older, budding and jiggling teenaged cousins for Last Call use, in the aftermath of the pending garter-belt brawl.

Meanwhile the Bride, flush, stumblish, makeup moulting in the African's absence, was primly escorted to the ladies' dressing room by her girlfriends for a little touch-up, and maybe for just a giggly smidge of dish about how it felt, that hard-body black number moving against her. But this request only occasioned new, too-late dirges about the bride's portentous first dance with her new husband, Gary, and also knowing evocations and simulations of his pillow-soft man-flesh and his beat-timed, head-nodding overbite. And so that was to be her future, since she'd gone and married him and all because, well, whatever. It was just total bullshit. The girls agreed her back to happier times and then finished up by bringing out, for the umpteenth time that day, the whole town's necessary fiction. That she wasn't even showing yet.

After the bride had been tanked up with some coffee, she was returned to the festivities, waving and laughing and hiccupping. Those still in the powder room checked each other for dangling slip swatches and spurting thong strings. They were preparing to shriek and claw and present in the pending bouquet toss. After one last check in the mirror for bits of iceberg and peppercorn in their teeth, they took envy and glee in chorusing about their first-trimester girlfriend's fate. Having married in haste, she would repent during labour.

The Father of the Bride missed all of this. Glenn and Jennifer were orbiting far from the bride and Bokarie's double-backed beast waltz. To fill in the cogitating pauses in their conversation, the car dealer and would-be federal candidate passed billowy bon mots back and forth about their friend-in-common.

“Ham couldn't be prouder!”

“Caliban can't compare!”

Eventually they came to agreeable terms for the pending election race and then exchanged offers to be driven home by the eloquent linchpin of the coming campaign.

In the meantime Bokarie had gone outside, intent upon securing some space away from the teeth against the bottle, from that too-recollecting sound. But for such a wide open country, it could be hard at times to find a little patch of one's own. He was immediately surrounded by smoke and barricaded in by the brisk flicks of chin that young men give each other while waiting for the start of the hunt. They were all in their late twenties and early thirties and magnificently single and just looking to have a good time, no head games. They went quiet at Bokarie's appearance. The new African in town. They found him just too hard to figure because he was more than the convenience store counterwork and always smiling at everyone. There was something else there that didn't sit right.

It wasn't so much how he looked or even how he made them feel, but just being here. It was what he did to their place and their stuff. The African wore a heavy chain that attached his wallet to his belt-line, just like the rest of the stylish young men about town. But the brushed steel links clanging against his clover-boned hips gave off something less than transplanted Leeds tough. More Goree Island redux. None of this was ever said or even thought outright, but it was in the air. Bokarie was the one too many.

The older immigrants around town, for all their ripeness and silly sounds, could at least provide linebackers for the high school and cabbage rolls for the church hall. They could rice-paddy over the strip malls with all-in-one dry cleaner and computer stores. They could bindi-dot intersections with their incense-drenched video outlets. But the new guy from Africa? He brought nothing with him except untold suffering embodied, the back pages of the newspaper made flesh.

Bokarie sensed something of this in the suspended air when he walked out. He accepted that Canadian men his own age were tougher marks than their elders and their women. But he was a practised manager of men's passions since his orphanage days, and also a close study of which words and signs mattered in his new land, and of where the stresses should fall with each group. And of picking his moments. This wasn't one, and so he did a perfunctory grin and cut past them. And so the young men left off any further thinking about what it meant for this new African to be in their town, living beside them. This soft collision of incompatible realities. Because more immediate needs presented. This was the last wedding of the summer and it was getting late and more beer goggles were needed before Last Call. They wandered back in, wondering what was left for talent on the dance floor.

II.

Because he could already sense the greatness and power that would come to him after he was named governor of the northern province, Foday had refused to budge from his spot in front of the dance floor when Uncle had sent over the first pair of girls, compliments of the house. Foday, the new area warlord, and Charles, his visiting grandee, had come to Uncle's beer bar to celebrate their recent agreement in regards to the reorganization of the nearby Upriver lands and sanitization of its swinish peoples. All of which was part of a National Restitution Campaign quietly being organized by one of the nation's most patriotic generals. This clientele, Uncle knew, were well above using the partially converted Port-A-John stalls that were made available for standard customers (left over from a recent NGO reconstruction effort). He offered them use of his private next-door flat, which featured both a flower-faded chesterfield that still had a little thrum in its cushions and a three-position, Union-Made With American Pride recliner that held self-evident virtues (Left Behind, along with books by the same title, by a family of Iowa missionaries). But Foday dismissed this offer with a wave of his hand, dictating over the music that he would drink his drink and root his root there and then. With his men and the General's man watching, he had decided that if he were going to be the future governor of these lands—the promise given for services rendered in the Upriver—he had better start acting like it.

The girls initially assumed this was merely a more exaggerated form of conventional tent-pole impatience, the hungry patron looking to get a little tasting plate before consulting the full menu or inquiring about that night's prix fixe. So they stroked a little and tugged a little and then went farther into their thigh-rubbing, crotch-cradling cajolery to get the men moving and efficiently processed. Charles was ready enough to go, feeling mostly tired and looking for a good draining and then some sleep before returning to the capital the next morning. But he realized plans were otherwise, and rather vulgar even for a provincial, when Foday grabbed his mitt by her bangled wrist and twisted her twiggy arm until she was turned to the point where an elbow in the small of the back and a categorical shove from behind suggested his forthcoming plans. At which point the girl bucked for her dignity.

Finding herself crammed into the ready position for a manful flogging, in front of her few friends and co-workers, and in public no less, was too much, was beyond the furthest limits of respectability and decorum that Foday's girl was willing to ignore for steady meals and pills and a few hours of quiet, man-free earth at the end of every night. Though expecting no Magdalene redemption, Marigold nevertheless wanted to serve notice. She tried to pull away, which Foday found very amusing as he grabbed and squeezed her back to him while his guards, a passel of teenagers floating on bottles of test-market cough syrup they'd liberated from a multinational health clinic, half-consciously cheered him on. At which point Uncle saw Foday rest his palm on his knife hilt, struggling to get the girl back in place. Feeling less intervention-minded than pragmatic, Uncle decided that if Marigold were cut up, she could still go at discount and better that than a spitfire new warlord and his men razing the whole bar in protest at one little request being denied.

Dancing with his Elizabeth and focused on keeping their steps in time with the disco-tangy beats of the Boney M. classic that was playing, Bokarie didn't notice any of this happening. Until he collided with the half-naked body that came shrieking and blundering across the dance floor with its dress pulled up over its head, its arms snared in a bunched-up, sequin-dangling span of rayon and polyester. The new warlord lurched over and knocked her down and flicked his chin at Bokarie, waiting to see if there was to be a challenge. But Bokarie, because what did he care, turned back to his dance partner and to “Ra Ra Rasputin.”

But then something happened.

He reached the bouquet-pocked wedding gazebo. He listened to the sound of Canadian summer, the cricket chirps and metronomic crank and triple flick! of the country club's in-ground sprinkler system. Nearby, some preteens were passing a bottle of peach schnapps back and forth and then spinning it around and giggling behind a riding mower. This was a place empty enough to admit it, the something that had happened at the beer bar.

He was feeling undone, incapable of holding everything in check from back then. After so much else, why did this one thing come up in his new country and crack through his winning smiles and long faces for his fellow Canadians? Why did it matter as it did?