The Governor of the Northern Province (8 page)

“Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, this is a red alert. I repeat: this is a red HOT alert! For the next hour, anyone who wants real savings on already low low prices is directed to visit the Home and Garden Department on the lower level. As part of our end-of-summer sale, all mulch and lawn ornaments on clearance are an additional fifty percent off! Hurry!”

Jennifer was standing outside the tailor's room where Bokarie was getting fitted for a new suit. He needed one for the prominent wedding he had been invited to attend later that summer. The Father of the Bride, who had met Bokarie at the car dealership he owned, had encouraged him to find a cap as well, if possible. Bokarie and Jennifer were going to the wedding together, in a manner of speaking. Since Bokarie had an official capacity in the proceedings, Jennifer would be arriving separately. He was the Driver.

She nodded at the announcement and stomped off, leaving him in the men's section of the department store they had come to as their first stop in Ottawa. This was a few weeks after Jennifer had organized the well-received soccer tutorial that Bokarie had conducted for the town's children. In addition to getting the materials necessary to attend the wedding, Jennifer made this trip so that she could give Bokarie a look at what she had earlier promised to show him, what she was now promising to share with him if he helped her get elected. And also so she could take a few pictures—Bokarie in front of the Peace Tower, Bokarie beside a diversity mural, Bokarie with a seniors' tour group, etc.

But before all of this, he needed a wedding suit and she needed to see about wedding gifts. So Jennifer left Bokarie in the capable hands of Vince, the Italian Canadian who was measuring him. When he finished, Vince chuckled as he noted the figures on the seamstress's card. Twenty-eight-inch waist, 36-inch inseam, black as licorice. He crossed out the last part; the seamstress was new, a Filipino woman, and he wasn't so sure about her yet. Instead he satisfied himself with more immediate amusement.

“Just a quick cut in the back and your pants will be ready. Come by in about twenty minutes or so. Hey there, you like Twizzlers, buddy?” he asked with the xenophobic confidence of a second-generation immigrant. The newcomer didn't seem to hear or understand. Bokarie was fingering through a fantail of neckties in search of something to match his new clothes. But he had heard the question, and was familiar with this item from his shifts at Gary's Milk and Lotto, and had a good enough sense of what was implied. He also knew that a necktie could, in a pinch, serve as a garrotte. But he thought better of it. There were finer opportunities becoming available to him than such easy greasy revenge, so he crooked his back and did his best slinky innocent African instead. This had been working well in his new country. He looked up and smiled and nodded with vacant happiness, like a marionette being tugged around by a cat.

The stub-fingered Calabrian's superiority was thus reinforced, but feeling a little ex–altar boy remorse Vince decided to waive the fee for having the suit pants taken in around the waist. He gave them to the seamstress and went to the Home and Garden Department to spend his break searching for a ceramic owl. Damned squirrels were raiding the birdfeeder every night.

Because he didn't know where Jennifer went, and because he had to kill twenty minutes anyway, Bokarie decided to entertain himself a little. He started wandering through the aisles of the men's section, aware that two sales associates were trailing him with open, friendly suspicion. Bokarie picked up a tie and turned on them. Close on his heels, they hopped back a little, smiling and buckling. He recalled a bit from a song he had heard on the car radio on the drive in. He continued his practice of gaining Canadians' trust with a brand of ancient African wisdom they could easily ingest. Holding the tie up like a limp rope, he explained in his slow, stumpy English way that in his old country, “great hunters and priests killed snakes and dried their skin and painted it just like this. They hung the snakes from their necks. Cobra snake for necktie. Many brave men had these.” The associates nodded, respectfully, and pulled back their cuffs to show off their white plastic knowledge of his people's suffering.

When they left the store, Bokarie had a slippery plastic suit bag swinging across his shoulders and Jennifer had a squat grinning garden gnome headlocked under each arm. Their shopping necessities having been filled, the next stop on the expedition to Ottawa was a look at Parliament Hill. At possibilities.

“The eyes, the face, all chipped up,” Bokarie observed, a little annoyed as he pointed out the clearance table bruises while Jennifer set the pair down in the back seat. (With part of the proceeds from the Little Caitlin Fund, she had purchased a used Mary Kay car to help raise further awareness, and had also, given her efforts, accepted a modest salary. Whenever someone in town made a fuss about it, she made them a member of the executive board, non-voting. It was during one such exchange, with one of those always-tousled Gallagher daughters, that Jennifer heard about the grand wedding planned for later that summer. Jennifer wasn't invited, but she knew that a good showing with that guest list was crucial to future plans.)

Bokarie was willing to bring her along to the wedding, and pleased that she had agreed to pay for the gift. This seemed a good trade. But he was wary of her promise that the suit “could be written off,” whatever that meant. It represented the better part of two weeks' convenience clerk pay, but he was very pleased with it. Professionally dark, black-lined and blended, he was told, from the best Indonesian polycotton. He looked very dignified in it. Unlike the grinning, cracked-up men in loud costumery who ran things back home, or the ones Jennifer had just bought as wedding gifts.

With all the shiny whirring blades and fancy button machines this Canada had, he sourly wondered, why choose such ugliness? The same, he could imagine his dead brothers and cousin pointing out, might be said about his pick for a wedding date. He missed them, now and then, and he regretted what had been done, what the General had made them do to him and also the reverse. He also missed his woman, Elizabeth, though that was another matter. He didn't think as much about the other woman, Marigold. There was no need for any of that to reach him in this here and now.

“You don't understand these ways yet,” Jennifer lectured. The calibrated admiration that had been in her voice back when she first brought him under her wing was now chiding and exasperation, as the situation warranted. At other times it held out a little more promise. Speak down to them and they have to look up to you. LBJ in the Senate cloakroom. “This is the type of gift that people of distinction, like the bride and her father and other invited guests, will appreciate. The groom's side won't, but that doesn't matter. They're all about football with no helmets, red necks and blue collars. Plus, they're from a different riding, some mullet town over near Toronto, and they vote whatever the Auto Workers' union says. Such people have no interest in drainage security. Think Pink. But the bride's father, now, he's a man of real influence. His support, for Little Caitlin and our election bid, is necessary for our advance.”

Our,
Bokarie thought. She had no idea.

“Anyway,” she continued, “the salesman said that the chipped ones were a better choice when I described these people to him. These could be considered
objets trouvés
, he told me. That means objects of true vain, only in French, which is even better. I know we can't really understand it, and it seems unfair maybe that you have to buy a brand new suit and I have to buy older items, but that's just how it's done.” She smiled, her thick lips chapped even in the latish August heat from all her licking and smacking as she told him her plans for future success.

Bokarie was stone-faced. He knew a little French from back home, which was one of the nation's many master tongues, and he was suspicious of Jennifer's gloss on
objets trouvés
. Either she had been duped or she was trying to dupe him. Regardless, he had to play as long as was necessary at this
our
business. Until she got him down into the capital city, where he would do so much, just like he should have once before. Could have.

The car buckled once and then wheezed a little when she got in. This woman wouldn't be much for dancing with. He was glad that they would be arriving at the wedding separately. But the prospect of having to move around with her later, this was disappointing. He hadn't danced in a long time, not since his own woman had gone on from the beer bar to the campaign headquarters and beyond. Wrapping up with this Canadian woman would be like pressing against a big boiled yam. But this was what had to be done if he was to get on, just as had been the case before. Because he had given her the second of two wedding invitations he had been provided with. Because this woman, Jennifer, was planning to get elected to the national parliament and had promised him a position with her in the capital city, if he performed in a manner conducive to her developing campaign. So he might have to press up a little against her on the dance floor. Not the worst thing. After all, his woman Elizabeth had done pretty much the same, back in Atwenty, when they were taken to meet the General. Who was a big round laughing man with jewellery-clotted hands. Who liked dancing. Who had been informed that Bokarie and his woman danced in a beer bar. Who— Bokarie clenched against this unnecessary raid from the past. It did no good. But things kept coming together.

The General enjoyed song and dance, as he had explained to Bokarie while they toured the National Restitution Campaign's offices. As future Father of the Nation, he had rights and responsibilities towards his daughters. Once they'd reached the church hall that had been converted into a rally and staging room, the General had had his aide-de-camp turn on a little music and then had cupped Bokarie's woman around the waist while he and his brothers and cousin and the other woman, Marigold, waited. And watched. Soon the General was holding her close to his shuffling thighs, bending her at the waist and twirling round to an American pop song. Bokarie had no choice but to assent to this, that much was plain, but he'd still made a fist while his woman giggled and the General tongued patriotic messages into her ear.

When the General had finished with Bokarie's woman, he brought her back to him, arm in courtly arm, and then squeezed Bokarie's shoulder to draw him close to speak of private matters. The General told him his plans for the northern province and suggested Bokarie's possible role. He could feel the hot hungry breath close in on his neck, the hand vise-gripped on his frame. He kept wondering what the General's other hand was doing. But he knew well enough. Could tell his woman's hips were buckling and turning on the General's gold-ringed fingers while he poured grandeur and governorships into Bokarie's ear.

He spat and put his suit in the trunk.

Getting into the car, he put down this insurrection from over there by thinking instead of the wedding he was going to. Would he remember some of his own hot fast moves from the beer bar? And it was no matter if the cracked-up little men were found dishonourable, he could blame the woman Jennifer anyway. He was smiling again. The bride, whom he met in passing at her father's car dealership once, was fine in the face and fruit-firm in other places. He hoped he could dance with her if the father and the husband granted it, especially once she, once they all, saw what he could do.

II.

Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Hollerwatty

cordially request the honour of your attendance

at the nuptials of their daughter,

Catherine “Cat” Hollerwatty,

to

Glenn Gary Kane

~

St. Mark's Anglican Church

Saturday, August 27, 2005

2:00 PM

Reception to follow,

Orleans Golf and Country Club

~

Gift information:
www.weddings.com/~catandgare

A favour of a reply is requested before July 15.

You steal my sunshine

C&G XOXO

Many invitees to the wedding thought that Glenn the Engine and his family were showing off with these invitations, which even had blue ink for the Internet part. A few expressed surprise that the bride had successfully resisted her father's request for a Biblical quotation at the bottom of the card, given his love of quoting Scripture when closing car deals.

To the bride's daily logged-in disappointment, most stayed away from the specially designed website. The few who did visit went only in search of hair salon and coffee shop grist, to see the bride's list of things she just absolutely had to have. Which no one could afford to buy her anyway. Instead, the wedding gifts were on the more expensive side of small-town finery, being for the only daughter of the town's richest family: ornate ceramic angel mugs, discontinued French quality cookware collections, various back massage devices, advanced kitchen gadgetry from the As Seen On TV store that had recently opened up in a local strip mall, a set of mermaid-and-seahorse-crowned cheese utensils, a pair of bright splattered garden gnomes.

Bokarie came to be invited to Catherine and Gary's wedding because the town-famous Father of the Bride had a black man for a lawn ornament and didn't want some wet-headed Greek ogling his daughter on her special day as he opened the limo door for her and goosed her onto the seat. During his first summer in Canada, Bokarie went to Prime Mover Ford on Sunday afternoons after his shifts at the convenience store. He liked to visit with the bold-coloured cars lined up row on row unto the horizon. In the July haze they were waxy and shiny and many, like the bright fat candies that lined the lower shelves of his counter. He wanted one very much, having never driven anything in his old country except stolen aid trucks and commandeered school buses.