Read Online The Governor of the Northern Province by Randy Boyagoda - Free Book Online

cracks that had opened up on their arms and legs, and only then boast to the younger ones about snapping fat dung beetles in half with well-placed stabs and about snatched looks at the working girls on their way to the beer bars.
    Now the younger boys, upon returning from their raids, gathered and marvelled at Bokarie’s ever more daring dances across the top of the wall. They also listened to him. As he grew longer and lankier and cockier still, a few women on the other side started to notice. They would laugh and clap and make loud predictions of his future talents. The drunker ones, on their way to and from work or the odd public hygiene clinic, would even swing their hips in unison with his movements as Bokarie threaded his way along the blocks, darting here and striking there to shove a cracked bottle neck into the trench his blood men had prepared.
    From up there, he could see a few cooking fires in what settlements remained after the latest raids. Now and then, he longed to be close by one of them. He could remember one childhood time when someone like a grandmother re-boiling something like sheep bones had given him a palm’s worth of the brownish foamy runoff to drink when the others weren’t looking. But he stopped himself from remembering like that again. Nothing good could come to him from back there.
    But he liked the rest of it, of being so high above the earth, with faces watching him from below, waiting to hear from him. Father Alvaro had encouraged the boys to select a line or two from the Bible as private credos, God’s words to them to live by. Bokarie found his in Isaiah. Thus saith the Lord GOD: Cry out full-throated and unsparingly, lift up your voice like a trumpet blast . Bokarie did like that from his Hosea passage while stretching his back between glass refittings. He liked how the words bounced and jumped off his tongue, and also that he could make the women below him dance, that he could turn a hip and some would turn theirs. In time there was one girl in particular who started keeping time with him. She had a heavy chest and three friends. She looked riper than the African girls he had come across in those old yellow magazines. Meanwhile, Father Alvaro thought the boy a bit flamboyant in the hips but gifted in the tongue. If he could be made to stay and settle down some, perhaps there was a vocation here.
    When Bokarie left the orphanage, he did it by scrambling up and across and down the wall at an opening he had prepared in advance, by sinking some of that week’s glass to only a shallow depth. It was not difficult to press the pieces into the still-damp mud and slide across. He had the others go first and smooth out the path, having given effective descriptions of his woman’s bouncy friends just waiting with jiggling on the other side. Later their first night out, nervous and aggressive and hungry, they tracked them to one of the beer bars. As rare as it was providential, all were on break. While Bokarie and the girl finally danced up close together, knees and then higher parts knocking and sliding, his brothers and cousin raised up their shirts to the girl’s fey friends and plumed for them, arcing their backs to bare the glass specks that had nicked into their skin during their courageous escape from the shark’s belly, as they had taken to calling the orphanage. The boys buckled at the waist when their stomachs and points nearby were inspected by the girls’ hands, which were nimble and efficient like seamstresses’. Claims of possession, if vaguely conflicting, were quickly and showily established.
    It had to be accepted that the girls made what they did for the man who ran the bar by doing and letting have done to them as was required. After being introduced later that first night and assuring the owner that he’d never chased after him before for stealing bottles, Bokarie told Uncle, as he was called, that he and his blood men were looking for