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

any work to be had. They were taken on as bouncers and dishwashers in exchange for a place to sleep and the right to finish any drink left by a man who picked out their girl for a go. They were instructed to keep the red, white and blue iceboxes full of beer and cool with river water. Now and then they thought about the orphanage, even saw a few of the boys around town. Out of guilt and charity and laziness, they would leave empty bottles at the back of the bar’s dish hut and turn away when the darting, snatching hands came.
    Bokarie soon progressed from dishwasher to whore’s tout. Uncle had noticed a surge of interest in Bokarie’s girl, Elizabeth, after they had been dancing together on another of her breaks. This, Uncle realized, was a very successful way of advertising particular flexibilities. Uncle had him dance the talent in front of the men who came in each night. Each morning, when the last of the customers had gone off, the girls would limp and laugh over to the river to wash themselves off and the boys would sweep and sponge off the dance floor. Uncle let them sleep and fumble and giggle there together until the first men came in the afternoon from their hangovers, their marching, their surveying, their recruitments, their peacekeeping.
    IV.
    When Bokarie later returned to the orphanage to liberate its holdings on behalf of the General’s National Restitution Campaign, he had men waiting in a nearby and idling truck, which was driven by his cousin. The Bangladeshi quartet lowered their weapons at the sight of so many machine guns and machetes, and Bokarie marched in. Father Alvaro threw holy water in his face while Bokarie finished off a bottle and then broke it over his head. When the current collection of orphans had been assembled in the courtyard, Bokarie pointed at the crack-pate double-bent priest and in the general direction of the Upriver people to the north, the target for the General’s National Restitution Campaign. He informed the boys that those were the men responsible for killing their parents and leaving them in this white prison, this shark’s belly.
    â€œLike the jaws of highway robbers, they conspire with the priests who murder in the way those that pass out of Sichem: for they have wrought wickedness. And I say to you, my little brothers, suffer an eye for an eye! Make a Father suffer for your fathers!”
    Returning outside the orphanage’s walls after a few more broken bottles and other such things, Bokarie offered the Bangladeshis certain compensations for maintaining their services. Then the truck chugged and gutted into the orphanage and he had the gate shut after it. The priest’s body was wrapped in a bedsheet and left with the rest of the soiled laundry. Bokarie kicked around a soccer ball with the younger boys and added to the force he was leading Upriver for the General, for the nation, for possibilities.
    The following year, three U.S. congressmen were empanelled by a special congressional committee to conduct an open, honest, fair and balanced study of the UN’s peacekeeping activities in Africa. Among other interests, there were spending cuts to be justified. The troubling actions of the Bangladeshi contingent in the northern province of Atwenty received special attention. The orphanage there was designated non-sectarian and to be guarded as such. But when Bokarie had taken it for the General and the People, the Bangladeshis had maintained their posts and the international community had guarded a child-soldier training facility for a few weeks, until the Bangladeshis, overcome by the compensation package Bokarie provided them—gin and syphilis—failed to submit one too many weekly action reports to mission headquarters in a timely fashion.
    Shock and awe were expressed on behalf of the American people at learning that a series of wholesome Christian picnic coolers, once used by orphans for ice cream, had ended up in brothels. And also