The Governor of the Northern Province (29 page)

When her father came into the mud room to ask her if she needed a personal invitation to sit down to her roast beef, he found Jennifer in a weak-blooded fever, her lips opened, her ankle fish-belly white. He bent down and saw it and shook his head and had a good idea where she got it from and how. He told her she should have known better than to go and play beyond where she was supposed to. She was grounded the rest of the week for not listening or keeping to what was expected and asked of her. Then he told her to turn away while he got his knife out and did what had to be done. He cut and flung out the door, far from them.

She was drowsy, but she heard a splat against a tree trunk. So that was all. But maybe not. Maybe, she thought, as she was carried into the house, it survived the sudden slash across its body and the hurtling through the air. Maybe it had a taste enough of what it liked and wanted more and would come after it. Wounded, rejected, but insistent, implacable, moving against future banishment, already uncurled and crawling, getting back to the getting place.

12

THE PRODIGAL LANDS

I.

The tales he told of his old country!

Last week, Bokarie was transferred into a larger cell. He had an audience again. He was coming back to his old self. Before that, he had been confined to an
oubliette
, a pit low beneath the earth, left over from the French days. Successive regimes cited it when decrying the abuses of their predecessors, and also when processing the odd prisoner.

When Bokarie's hosts needed it for another arrival, he was pulled up by his copper-wire arms, buckling and shuddering from the sudden wash of light. The swelling around his eyes had gone down and his face wasn't as barnacled with bruises as when he'd first touched ground. He had his Bible shoved into his shirt, a tumbling brick against his racked body. This was how he'd held on to it before, after taking it from the bedside drawer in the hotel room. When they'd come for him. When his big blond-headed turtle turned out to be the scorpion and also the fish and also the bird.

The General, now President, had greeted him in a cologne-heavy clinch. They were both wearing pink bracelets. A mutual confirmation of their recent involvements. The President marvelled at how thick and healthy Bokarie looked, how fulfilling his time overseas must have been. The People's Palace, Bokarie thought, seemed to have had a similar effect. The President felt the Bible against the small of Bokarie's back when he embraced him and cawed out, harsh and happy, before explaining loudly that it was so hard to find a good security these days. These young men he'd brought with him to this conference, for instance, were too frisky for local girls and pirate DVDs to remember to frisk someone before bringing him to see their President. Bokarie looked at them. He'd dealt with tougher kids trying to buy cigarettes with fake IDs. But there were only water bottles lying around. Plastic. And piles of documents. Paper cuts. If only he had some ice skates.

He had gone to Africa, had let her bring him, had been brought. He could have run, disappeared somewhere else and been some other town's smiling shuffling newcomer. The country was big and empty enough to allow for that again, and then again if necessary, and again after that. But Bokarie had gone tired and empty just thinking of such a future. Going to Africa was the only way to get out of being Africa. Because she'd promised him help upon their return, to be something less than everyone's poor suffering heavy bag. But he also boarded that plane because, more practically, what were the chances, even if the General had become President and went to such a conference, that he would find his old scorpion among all those beetles and ants at their business? Not thinking that the General would find help from other quarters. That
Prester John
story wasn't a bitter funny lesson on his past, but a portent.

Jennifer had said he only had to say some fine words for the very important audience. If he had it in him. As if she knew that he couldn't say no to this. As if she saw through, just enough. Which also meant, he thought, there was more to her than pink and stomp. She had brought him along and then kept him in his hotel room. Perhaps because her General, that Madame, had ordered it that way. That perfumed hummingbird, that shawl-covered laugh-track. But he hadn't minded the confinement, had been glad for it, even if he was again denied the chance to speak. Because this had kept him out of sight. Only now that wasn't it, that wasn't it at all. She had wanted to box him in and wrap him up.

To stop from shaking a little and showing fear in front of this man who had once ordered him killed, who no doubt would have him killed shortly, Bokarie started imagining himself as Jennifer's confection, swaddled in pink ribbon, floating among pink T-shirts, awash in the cream soda she had served town children when he gave them soccer lessons. He worked up a tart smile while watching the President look through his Bible. Probably expecting a bottle neck in the hollowed-out heart of it.

The President grinned back that he'd found God since they'd last spoken, that a man in his position was sometimes in need of even higher powers than American peace brokers! Bokarie didn't join in the laugh, even if he was a little tempted to. Because, he realized, holding oneself above the Americans had become a natural inclination over the past year for him. Like it was in the drinking water.

After enjoying his own joke while the rest in the room barked along obediently, the President found the passage he wanted to share. Something from Isaiah that would explain to Bokarie what his nation and his old mentor needed of him upon his return.

“‘Through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear. Therefore I will give him his portion among the great, and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty, because he surrendered himself to death and was counted among the wicked; And he shall take away the sins of many, and win pardon for their offences.'” He clamped the book shut and kept on.

“That's going to be quite a task, my friend, and I can think of no one better suited or more deserving to do it than you. I am glad you survived your time in the Upriver, and I'm tickled that your talents were appreciated in Canada, and I am overjoyed you are back with us now. You must be planning to tell anyone who will listen that the General you mentioned in those speeches was me, yes? That I am to be counted among the wicked, no doubt. Well, try it and see what happens. You know the people, you know what words can make them do. Just think of what hearing such things about the beloved new father of their nation will make them
want
to do. Now, who do you think they will then count and make to suffer among the wicked? Oh, and please don't bother telling them that you were in Canada these past few months. That's about as believable as walking across water. Or maybe do tell them, and then no one will trust anything you say!”

Bokarie was such a better speaker. The President had missed the roll and cadence of the lines from Isaiah, too concerned with making sure Bokarie understood that
he
was the one being referred to. As subtle as a sledgehammer. He had missed the Old Testament God's greatness, whose sayings Bokarie had heard and memorized as a boy at the orphanage. The gift of angry gab that the grand old man had, always so raging and jealous, and wording his promises of violence with such dash and wit. Bokarie had tried to do likewise in his own career, if not as well or with as much success, but certainly better than the two-bit pulpit bully in front of him. He smiled more now, feeling quietly superior. The President ignored this and gave back the Bible and said he hoped Bokarie would be able to find lines of consolation in it as well. And also that he was off to get freshened up for yet another reception. He understood now why his predecessor had signed his consultancy deals with Nike and Evian—to stay in shape from all the food and drink on the Davos and Doha circuit!

The President left Bokarie in the very capable hands of his assistant Charles—assuming no introductions were needed, that the two must have remembered each other from their beer-bar days. On his way out, the President reminded Charles that Bokarie would have much guilt to bear in the days and weeks to come. Giving him a little portion and spoil now, though, would be fine. Perhaps it could involve a more energetic frisking by the boys? Beginning with his smiling face?

Before the pummels and kicks came at him, Bokarie had to admit that the President had done better by the Bible in that final command, even if it still couldn't compare with what he'd done himself, back in, back in— That was as far as he got before he was concussed into a pulpy lump for his return, finally, to the capital city. For his short flight back to justice.

II.

The tales he told them of his old country.

I have come to you from far off, but please listen to the words of my mouth. I have heard of the tragic loss this community has suffered. Little Caitlin. I have taken courage from her story. I invite you to do the same with me. Listen, then. Because in my country— in my old country, my own mother, my own woman, my own child, were lost to heavy rains, and also to heavy boots. So much suffering between my world and yours. And yet they are no longer apart, but together. And do you wonder why? Because that is the promise of this great land! We are not so different, I tell you. We ask for the same things. That lives may be lived well and easy from sea to shiny sea. This Little Caitlin reminds me of my past, of what I said to my God when I lost everything along a mighty river once. I looked upwards and said, Why? For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice. We have lost Little Caitlin to the high waters, and something must be done so that this can never happen again. In my old country, pink was the colour of the dawn. I am proud to be here with you, to think pink, to make that mean a new beginning, a new hope. Let us together, as a community, raise awareness. My fellow Canadians! For our Caitlin, for our country, for our values!

Bokarie remembered his old speeches while the other prisoners asked him to tell more about Canada. After a couple of days with them—opposition leaders and other accused pederasts, assorted thugs who'd fallen out of favour, unsubtle newspaper cartoonists and their editors and publishers—they were ravenous for his stories. He offered his Little Caitlin speech once, but it did very little. They couldn't understand why all that noise for just one drowning, and not even a boy-child. So he kept his speeches to himself. He never gave them the ice-skating either. But he was free and creative and persuasive with the rest of it, his memories of that promised land of milk and money. Soon a few of the guards were listening as well, taking their smoke breaks nearby and imagining paradise along with the prisoners. They all knew he was the so-called Grin Reaper, the man accused and thus guilty of leading the Upriver Massacres, but they had no interest in hearing boasts or denials of what he had done up there. They were locals, after all; Bokarie was just another fallen warlord waiting to be sprung or punished. It was also known from guard gossip that Bokarie was awaiting a transfer to a court prison outside the capital city, up to the main village of the northern province, where he was to stand trial. There was a holdup because The Hague had recently called with an opening and now the President and the governor were arguing over their options.

When one of his fellow prisoners had asked him where he'd been hiding before he was caught, and he answered, they laughed and called him crazy. So he showed them. He started spinning and weaving around the room, telling fantastic stories. And even if they weren't true, how wonderful still to hear! Of all that wide-open space, of free money from scratch cards and from the government too if you filled out the right forms, of a machine that made ice and syrup into bright thick nectar from the gods. All sounded heavenly to them, crammed into the thick stench and bug fuzz of their cell. “Tell again about the women, how they want it over there!” one of the younger men asked, a one-time government enforcer who had been imprisoned because he couldn't read and had nodded at a sheet of directions and then guessed and roughed up the wrong set of lawyers before some trial.

Bokarie went through it once more, rehashing the storylines of the programs he had watched at night in his old apartment, about the heavy-chested, tight-shirted women with their husbands always at work and their fine gardens that needed pruning. For mutual elevation, he always spoke in the swaggering first-person triumphant.

They loved hearing this from him. It was corroboration. Satellite television was in even the poorest bars in the capital city these days, and so all of them had seen
Desperate Housewives
and wondered if this was what the West was really like. And now, confirmed. Oh, if only they could catch a taste of it for themselves!

But Bokarie wanted to say more this time. He could tell that from his stories they had come to feel as if they knew what Canada was like, what Canadians were like, what their women were like. They had no idea.

“I should tell you,” he went on, cutting off their mental fondling, “that the women over there don't just want it from the men. They want more than that. I met two other women while I was there, and you won't believe what they wanted, what they got. And no, not from each other, like that. But power. Real power. Not
Daddy, do this for me and I'll do that on you
power like women who get it over here have it, but people who listened and followed and obeyed and trusted them. But none of you are listening to me. Fine. You cannot understand that place unless you have been there.”

They were all too lean for any bellyfuls of giggle, but they still had a good throaty time with his proud declarations about his advanced knowledge of Canada and the extraordinary powers of their women over there. It was then explained to Bokarie that he was the one who didn't understand. His first country, the people who ran it, had changed some since he had gone and come back. He'd find out. Bokarie nodded and thought of the General now being the President. He knew better than they what they meant. Thought he did.