The Governor of the Northern Province (24 page)

A few moments later the man bent beside him, a cup of hot chocolate held forth, a bright red hockey helmet cradled under one arm. Like an Eden apple with a built-in mouthguard.

“Listen, my old pastor told me that every man comes to a Samaritan moment in his life. I've had plenty, but most I passed on by just knocking a fellow out. But it looks to me like you could use a little help, so let's just drop our little bout of sparring and come to it. You're not sure what to make of the fact that we're a couple of coal lumps in a snowbank, right? And I knew this all along, could tell from the look on your face when you first come in—it's a look I'm used to because most folks don't expect to find the likes of me working in a place like this. And I'm guessing you're probably in the same boat, pardon the expression—they just don't know what to make of you, which makes it hard on a man because eventually even an ex-boxer, mind you, gets to thinking what he's to make of himself too. And believe you me, I've tried all the options they give you. So let me take a minute here and tell you about it just so you don't go wasting the middle rounds of your life doing the same. Take all this for what it's worth, it's the sum total of my wisdom. Well, that and how to get past the line for hot chocolate. But that's a tale for another day.” He winked and made grabby and squeezy motions with his big hands for a few moments, and Bokarie could imagine the counter girl's anatomy well enough, but then the man started talking again, in the blustery twang of a folk philosopher.

“The problem with existence, see, is this here: it gets mighty confusing being black in this place. Because you're always seeing the world three different ways. First, there's just how you look out your peepers in the morning. Second, there's how you know white folks think you're looking out. Third, there's how they think you
should
be looking out. By the by, it's okay for me to say ‘they' since I'm one of them too. My mum's people are mutt French Scottish. Though it's always my dad's side that's considered all-important. He's black Acadian. They moved up north and settled in the late 1700s, not so much to stay under the Crown as to get away from all the bullwhips that came with the Declaration of Independence. But let me tell you why I know all this, since that's getting closer to what I think of as the three-eye thing that goes on in Canada, so far as I can see.

“I know my black history because back when I was in seventh grade, me and the other two black kids got pulled out of class one time by a guidance counsellor. Before that, I didn't think too much about anything other than regular twelve-year-old-boy stuff—lifting bottles of communion wine from the vestry, practising tongue-kissing against my palms, convincing Dad to let me stay up past the second period of the hockey game—but then I was told that I had to start thinking about who and what I was. And how to do it, too.

“The guidance counsellor who pulled us out of class says to us how important it is to know our history. I get smart and says shouldn't we get back to our lesson about old Nellie McClung, then? She smiles and says no no
your
history, and then she gives us all some books about black people in Canada and America and apologizes. She says someday these will be accepted as part of the standard—what do you call—curriculum and story of our nation, but until then they were ours to learn from and there was no need to attend the regular history class anymore.

“And so I'm no idiot, I do the math and figure there's something sweet in having a little black magic to play with, and I start thinking it's a pot of gold being Afro-Canadian, even if I wear my hair close-cropped. Soon enough I don't bother much with the books she gave me, but I start working with what I see on the television. O'course everyone else was doing the same back then, the white kids and the black kids and the Natives who came to school regular enough, but I was a big boy and the talking with my fingers shaped like guns and shoving pencils and picks into my grown-out hair—it all just fit better on me than on the rest of them. And so I started talking that way too, all barky and referring to myself in the third person.
Yo Ricky won't be playing this
and
Yo Ricky ain't down with that
. Meanwhile, though, I was standing behind it all, you know what I mean, just giggling at how teachers were suddenly nervous about me coming down the hall when they were alone and at girls boasting that they weren't scared of doing the seven-in-heaven closet game with me at the basement parties that single-parent kids got to throw
even
if their dads found out. Which I took them up on, of course. Soon my classmates were calling me Yoricky, which stuck until I started boxing and my manager decided we'd get more wagers on our side if I had something more patriotic but still a little wink-wink about the race stuff too, so that's where Zebra Muscles come from, and I'm hoping by now even if you know nothing about the fisheries you've at least figured something out about why a kid with parents like mine gets a nickname like that.

“Speaking of which, you know my dad used to cuff me good on the head when I went all big black and bad and he kept asking who the hell was running that school if it let me go on pretending I'm some Uncle Sambo and then he said that if I keep that up instead of my grades he'll just toss me down into the melting pot. Mum just didn't know what to make of me anymore, poor girl, and I didn't help matters much when we'd go over to her side's for Boxing Day breakfast and I'd call Granny my nigger when she made those butter tarts I liked with the chocolate chips in 'em instead of raisins. And even if Granny couldn't even hear me, I knew everyone else could.

“School wasn't going so hot around then. The papers and tests I handed in were whiter and whiter the blacker I got, but I'm not going to sit here and say it gotta be the shoes that made me flunk tenth grade science. Problem was, I was too happy just yessing along with the guidance counsellors and the music videos. They just set it all up and I could walk right into a pretty good situation easy enough. But after a while it starts to get to me, because soon I can tell that, sure, while I'm getting away with everything I want by playing the roles they give me, like the Underserved Youth, that's
all
I'm getting, you know? My every move already explained and taken care of and excused away. So I start hitting out at it, in a manner of speaking, trying to make a break with it all, but it's no better than a few rounds of shadow boxing. Because they got me there too, saying that Black Male Rage is also culturally understandable. This gets me even more pissed off, and eventually I get into a little ugliness at a mall one day and now I'm a Troubled Youth and eventually it's a Hip-Hop skip school and jump an old man to your standard Unidentified Black Male. That's when I meet my court-appointed buddy Mr. Damariscotta Jr., who tells me that if I want to go on embracing my heritage, I should make a little money doing it and stay out of jail to boot, and the best way was to take up boxing, which I did under his management after he got me off on the assault charges.

“And I'm not about to bore you with all my fights stories from the Maritimes circuit, but suffice to say I'm not doing commercials for orange juice and french fries like the really successful athletes in this country, and when the gloves didn't work no more I did what the rest of the East Coast does at least once in each life. Like the Muslims to their Mecca, I came west looking for work and damned near got trampled by everybody else doing the same. Actually, my situation was easier than that, truth be told, since I'm telling the rest anyway. My old lawyer and boxing manager, Mr. Damariscotta, he just got some work up on Parliament and he made some calls to Parks and Rec for me, which is how I got set up here. But anyway, I know I've been going on and I apologize, but it's rare you get to talk shop like this, if you're catching what I'm throwing.

“But before I let you go, I will tell you one more thing I've figured out. It has to do with something in common between years in the ring and a lifetime looking at yourself three ways. They both make you punch-drunk. Because after all the fighting you tend to forget things, and then when you go to figure out, say, which one of Yoricky and Zebra Muscles and Uncle Sambo and the Underserved and the Unidentified you really are when the rounds are up and the decision comes in, you get right dizzy just from the trying and all the masks become part of the actor's face, as the old saying goes. You need to sit down and take a sip of water and some smelling salts and then you wonder why you ever went into the ring in the first place. You ask whether it really was worth it to get out of second-period history to spend the rest of your time working away at this lead punching bag they keep in front of us. Identity.”

Then he held up the hockey helmet, gazed on it.

“Alas, poor Yoricky, mediocre Zebra Muscles and the mixed-up rest, not to mention sad yours truly, Ricky Rhinehart. If only we had some kind of helmet to get through all this jiving and infinite jesting we've been doing, it might have made it easier to get past all the stories this place wants to give me about myself. Because all the court jestering I did for others and all the giggling it gave me just left me feeling socked in the gut and worked over on the ribs, and that's why I wanted done with it. That's why nowadays I'm just another regular Ottawa guy, working hard and living in a basement apartment, nice and invisible. But I wish I had one of these helmets a while back. And I'm giving it to you right now, not to keep in who knows how many stories they've already given you, but to keep out as many more as you can.

“Because—and stay with me if you can because I'm really talking about life here—when you're out skating and you got your helmet on, nobody's gonna see you for what they want to see you as, which means nobody's gonna tell you what you should see yourself as. And more important, when you hit some bumpy ice and you go down— and everybody, buddy, everybody goes down at some point, don't forget that—this way you won't crack your head open. So here you go and good luck to you out there. It can feel mighty crowded sometimes and everybody knows what they're doing and they're going to want to give you pointers on this and advice on that because that's what polite Canadians do, but do your best to duck and weave and remember that you didn't sign no papers saying you had to spend the rest of your life figuring out who and what you are. End of the day, it don't really matter, does it? Because”—here he stood up and his face recomposed into its grinning easygoing mask—“you know as well as I do, we're all from Africa. Right, chief?”

Bokarie finished the rest of his hot chocolate and then accepted the helmet and shook hands and let himself be pulled up. He smiled awkwardly, nodded jerkily. He had nothing to say. And gratefully so.

He left the hut, the skates dangling once more from a shoulder and the blades now sharp and scissoring against each other. He enjoyed how his boots, grinding for tread into the snow, made a backbeat. He liked the back-and-forth music of it, for itself. His head was free territory as he stepped over to a bench to lace up. He would try this ice-skating.

III.

Before he had his boots off, he was surrounded, jammed in with the schoolchildren from the riding, who had been looking for him all this time and wondering, in between games of tag and pantsing each other on the ice, why he was gone so long at the rental counter. There were little ice picks of snot freeze-dried and hanging down and flashsmeared across their upper lips. He didn't say much in response, but that was no matter—they were delirious with anticipation at getting their African onto the ice and teaching and pulling him around with the beginner's rope they'd found. One of the bigger boys was dangling it in front of him, the bulbous knotted end in his face. Waiting for him. As Bokarie tightened the skates and then waited while they were tested and tightened by a succession of the waist-high experts, things grew heavier. All the while the children argued back and forth loudly about who was going to pull him around first and what was the best approach to teaching him how to stop and whether he should be expected to do crossovers his first time out and what was fairer, culturally speaking, expecting him to be able to do crossovers this first time out or not. Some of them were in intermediate social studies.

For all manner of safety Bokarie donned the helmet and readied to move. The crowd around him slumped a little at the concealment and banality, knowing that he had done the right thing in wearing the headgear but feeling a little underwhelmed by this evident lack of daring from their beloved summer mascot, the mad tosser of empty bottles, the flashy climber of retirement home walls, the quicksilver footman of the soccer ball. All this, but now, standing up and moving, he was teetering towards the ice like a baby sister. The disappointment was corrected for very quickly when a weight of fluttering hands came to his rescue, landing on his wrists and taking him at the small of the back, urging and encouraging and compelling him forward.

Crouched at the edge of the ice, his haunches balanced on the heels of his skates and gripping the rope and feeling a little tug across his old scar from this strange low tight posture, Bokarie waited on as the children continued to debate the
who first
and the
how exactly
of their plan to tug him around a little corner of the Rideau Canal. He didn't like the vinegar smell inside the cage of his helmet and couldn't understand why he was sweating around his temples in the whip and rack of Canadian winter. But still, he was enjoying this just-waiting-to-be-moved, watching the others out there bump and tumble along while the long-legged daddies and mommies loped and looped around, laughing and coming to ice-shaving stops in front of their bawling icebound bundles.

Of course, if he wanted to, he could be bitter at Jennifer for getting to attend some fancy reception for new members of Parliament that afternoon while he meeted and greeted these riding visitors, but after chatting with that confident man Rhinehart, Bokarie knew he'd rather not be there smiling and thanking them for any number of their attempts to adjust his vision.