The Governor of the Northern Province (15 page)

The next morning, after cleaning some vomit from his shoes and draining a few coconuts to soothe his head, he presented himself with hot readiness, spotlessly ignoring his old girl setting the tea service while he volunteered, declared to the General that he was the man to lead the first recruitment drive for the National Restitution Campaign. He would supervise the gathering up and training of the gaggles of young men to be found around the capital city, would play a little soccer to bend them his way. His fine words would tempt them away from their roughshod blank lives, because he knew how to shine up promises of money and meals and mayhem. And before heading Upriver, he further guaranteed, he would supplement these forces by grabbing extra fighters. Not just the men he had recently come to rule in his old village, but also boys waiting to be liberated from a nearby orphanage. He knew how to scale the wall, if necessary, or to sweet-talk the good Father.

Listening to this pitch, the General decided to be only partway convinced. He was a bit bitter at Bokarie because the previous night the girl he'd picked off the young man's arm hadn't brought him to nearly as much release as he had expected. He crossed arms and went silent at Bokarie's opening volley. His teeth a little grit, Bokarie bent forward and gave more. He tried out the speech he was planning to give to the recruits, at least what he was going to say to them about the wonder-leader, the peace hawk, the man coming soon who held the nation's salvation in his hands.

Satisfied and reminding Bokarie once more not to use his actual name because of complicated issues best not delved into just yet, the General happily signalled his assent with a kingly flick of his ringed fingers, and then, remembering he wasn't there yet, not yet, gave the boy an immoderate embrace. He awarded Bokarie full command over the Upriver operation, which was to begin immediately with a discreet, hush-hush recruitment drive in the capital. The General also promised to send missives to the other warlords in the northern province, directing them to answer to Bokarie alone. At this further expansion of his power, the young man swooned. While Bokarie sucked away at a sugar cube and marvelled at himself, the General enjoyed the absolution he'd just won in giving the young man this commission. Such a statesman's decision, he thought—the boy was like an overgrown fingernail, something useful for digging out ear and nose dirt, which could be clipped and tossed away. This new girl, the General decided as he slurped up the spillage from his saucer and concluded the meeting, was about the same. A tea bag not worth a second dipping.

II.

Their yelling died down to a happy angry buzz, by which time Bokarie had returned to his front-and-centre position before the recruits. He was ready to continue his address, this time with a prop, a nervous chicken fluttering in a crate at his feet. The rest of the recruiting team, arrayed across the driving range in front of the crowd, were also, to a man, standing before nervous chickens in crates. They'd decided to use chickens as part of training exercises and morale building when, earlier that day, Bokarie's cousin had recalled a popular bachelor's sport from their village wedding feasts and applied its logic to their present purposes. Persuaded, Bokarie waved his arm at his brothers and fowl were liberated from a passing truck on its way to market. Unharmed, the driver was indifferent at the loss. It was just another gunpoint intervention by patriots looking after the greater good, the People, etc.

“But the General can't save our nation alone,” Bokarie continued, “or, as yet, with the army he commands, since many of its officers are fellow tribesmen of the President himself. Like a grub-filled slab of meat, the army crawls with so many greedy little beasts that would only try to take away what belongs to us, and this is why, he has told me, the General cannot look there for support. But to bring our cause to its proper end, for now, he needs to be seen as supporting the government and the rule of law. For now. On this, brothers, we must believe him.”

Which they did, feeling the fresh tug on the heart and trill in the blood that comes from a touch, a promise, a chance to be part of something finer, greater, firmer, fuller than one's cracked little self. This General the speaker was describing was undoubtedly a Great Man. He would be, at last, a proper father for the nation, for each and for all of them. Or so they were expecting, needing, hoping. Because this audience was young enough, sons left fatherless by war and disease and indifference, to still want a good man to watch over them, and also too young, as citizens of a status quo African country stuck with the bruises and bust-ups of its post-independence life, to know any better.

He was persuasive, he knew, but he wanted to be sure they would have no other possibilities to tempt them. He also wanted to let his tongue keep at its business a little longer. So he kept at them.

“As for bringing about some kind of good change for ourselves through ‘blessed are the peacemakers and their peacekeepers,' we should know by now that this will never come. What we render to all those Caesars that feed on us just makes them want more. And from the outside? The Americans only look our way when their cars need gas or when they want to find the Mohammeds and Alis who steal their planes. And the rest of the world? Any money they send just goes to more brass toilets and German washing machines for the People's Palace.

“As for the inside, do I really need to explain this? You already know about the men we have chosen from our own villages and families to take our case to the capital, how they leave us promising to battle the evildoers and then become their perfume merchants and diamond jockeys. Who never return home, only hole up in the capital and come out to pose for pictures with the rock gods and beg for adoption by the tit-flaring movie stars that jet in every other week. They have not helped you yet, and they never will. And they won't help the General either, to pick that scab off the People's throne. Because what if then they lose their airplane vouchers and hot plates and their daily rations of whoreflesh? But they don't matter. Their support isn't wanted anyway, nor does the General need it. But he needs you, he needs all of us, because what must be done to bring healing and peace to our nation only ends with a justice done in the palace! It begins, everything begins, my brothers, Upriver!”

No plant was needed to get them roaring this time. Bokarie let them go on awhile, enjoying it, enjoying what it let him forget and who it let him replace as the grounds for his goodness, his greatness. He bent down to the box and took the chicken by its wing joints, bending them backwards enough to keep the bird from moving but without snapping its breastbone. He had learned this hold as a boy, had watched others do it, others who had talked and laughed and read together from a book at night while he was lying beside them, officially sleeping. They were gone now. Had been for a long while. But this was no time to be thinking of back then. He brought the good hard rage around him back under his spell and readied it for action.

“No doubt you've noticed the chicken I have here. And you've seen the others with them up and down the line. In a few moments we're going to release these onto the plain behind me, and as your first act of training and a taste of your future rewards, you will try to catch them and kill them. I needn't tell you which of our beloved national leaders this chicken most resembles, but we couldn't find pigs fat and wheezy enough to do the part, so this is the next best thing!”

By this point the young men had gone delirious with the wreck and wildness they were soon to make, and Bokarie was himself inebriated with the sound of so many cheering and gnashing at his words.

“All of you, in some way or another, have suffered under the President's rule because you were not fated, thank your stars, to be born into his pig trough of a tribe. And this is why you were chosen to come here today. Like your fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, you have all gone hungry on this our native land because of the chicken cock that sits high and mighty above us, a man who has let his own tribe, for oh so very long, peck away on maize and fatten up on mealy soil while we've dug at dry dirt and found only vipers and dead seed. And so”—here he gave a signal to his men to get ready with their birds—“as a flavour of what's to come, my brothers, go after these chickens. Any man who returns with one of them limp in his hands will be toasted for glory and honour and praise by myself and his mates. He will also get the bird, all of it, roasted for his dinner. My brothers, my patriots, this begins your mission to the nation! Catch them, kill them, catch them and kill them, catch them kill them, catchthemkillthem catchthemkillthem catchthemkillthem catchthemcatchthemkillthemcatchthemkillthem!”

They chanted along and sprinted past him, their stomachs and throats growling as they poured out across the abandoned golf course. The chickens squawked in terror and darted around in confusion, losing a few feathers with their every duck and dive, and then a few more, and then a few more, with each pass under all the mad hungry hands.

III.

“When a dog has gone and shat where he's not supposed to, what's to be done with the stupid beast?”

The phone connection was shot through with static, so Bokarie asked the speaker to repeat himself. He refused to believe that this was how the General was advising him after receiving news of the first raid. Their opening incursion into the Upriver region, to take a border village, had been a poor showing. The boys had enthusiastically, straightforwardly applied their on-the-links training, which meant that they raided the village's chicken coops and copped and groped for grabs of its women and girls until their men came at them swinging rifle butts and drove them off. This choice of defence cut Bokarie to the marrow—that this first group of Upriver men were so little scared of his fighters that they didn't even bother wasting bullets on what they regarded as a bunch of teeny bashers. Only one straggler, who turned up a day later at their makeshift camp downriver, returned with harder evidence of the lesson the rest were meant to have about challenging the mighty Upriver people. His ears were a little dog-chewed and his foot had been clubbed against a cinder block. Also, an arm had been machete-dropped into a burlap bag and hung round his bashful neck.

“I don't know, Monsieur le Général, do you give the dog a kick in the ribs?”

On the other end the General laughed, his tongue rich with rue and, it being late in the afternoon, maybe a daub of rum. The static of the poor connection syncopated the sound into something like a song, one that Bokarie might have been dancing to these days, had he kept his elbows to himself. He clenched at this warm gurring, wondering whether the General was laughing at him for being such a dunce as to not know how to deal with a dog, let alone a collection of men, or laughing at himself for believing that Bokarie was capable of the duties and capacities he'd been granted.

“If you kick a dog in the ribs, my boy, the dog will slink away, but that doesn't tell it where it's supposed to shit or why. So it'll do it again and again, shitting the wrong way, because it can only learn from what you put in front of it. Which is why, when a dog has gone and shat, as I said, you don't just kick the dog and hope it does better next time. You bag the shit and shove its face in it and then it'll know, it'll learn, it'll feel, what it means to make such a mistake. Men are the same way, Bokarie. When they dirty something, shove their faces in it, roll their noses around in it for a while, make them smell and touch their wrong. And I tell you, it won't happen a second time. Do you understand my meaning now? Yes? Then get to work. Chop-chop!”

Of course he understood the General's meaning, though he jumped a little at the General's bark. Or at least Bokarie told him he understood, at which point he was floridly reassured of the General's absolute faith in him and his men. Then Bokarie was reminded, once more, of the roles to be had in the future, were present events to go as originally planned. The General wished him luck and Godspeed in advance of the next progress report he was to give, which was to occur after they had another go at the first village and then, immediately afterwards, a push farther north along the river. It was vital to keep to schedule, Bokarie was reminded. The General had deadlines of his own in mind.

Thinking of which, he cut Bokarie off, midway through a striving rehearsal of the remarks he was planning to give to any survivors of their next, their
sure to be more successful
second effort to take the border village. Looking too far ahead in our country usually gets your head cut off, the General warned. Bokarie just needed to get his dogs shitting in the right places and leave it at that for now. “Because,” the General said, draining his tumbler, “then all would be right as rain, good as gold, red as red as red can be.”

He then thanked Bokarie once more for his support and guaranteed the young man that he still had much confidence in him. He clicked the receiver down and harrumphed, looking out his window across the stumpy baobabs and over at the paint-peeled grandeur of the People's Palace. All of his plans were as straw, the General thought, if this jitterbugging butcher boy turned out to be nothing more than a one-hit wonder.

IV.

“For now at least, your name will be Jesse, is that understood?”

The man shrugged and asked for more pills and then clutched once more at the scabrous knob where his arm had recently been. Phantom pain. What was left felt like an avocado seed, hard and slippery smooth and dangling some pulpy bits of blacked-up meat. A long day after his chat with the General, Bokarie hit upon a plan to prepare his men for a second putsch, which he drew in part from Foday and Father Alvaro, in addition to the Almighty. His arm-twisting tactics and stump-pumping word spinning proved successful, though they seeded doubt in his cousin and brothers, for the very first time, about their head man. Who, since the time he had had them line the orphanage wall's trench for his bottle-shard thrusts, was always, if nothing else, a dazzling original. They had basked, by devoted association, in his singular talents. But with the first raid a failure and now Bokarie stealing material from others, they questioned their loyalty and his ability to get them the DVDs and local virgins he kept promising once the General named him governor. But was he even worthy of such a title? In time, because one of them was responsible for communications operations, they started sharing these concerns, via a static phone connection, with a generous would-be benefactor in the capital city. Quietly of course. Very hush-hush.