3

ROAD APPLES

I.

Into the bins behind his store, Bokarie tossed the bottles that his new countrymen called recycling. Often they knocked and slid and broke, and this gave him a mixed-up feeling. He didn’t like this sound, this having to think again on his past, this incursion from over there.

Mostly children brought the bottles to his counter, and by the armload during the summer months. As instructed by his manager, he dispensed to each clutching, grabby hand a predetermined catch of coins in accord with however many bottles were presented. There was such precise largesse in Canada. Bokarie also thought this while palming the monstrous apples at the grocery store and studying the Bible-thick channels guide for the television.

Some of the bottles that were given to him in his new country had busted-up cigarettes at the bottom; others, the sweet ones, usually had a few ants. There were also muddy bottles, which were brought in by the older boys. Bokarie learned that they had fearlessly gone by Little Caitlin’s Creek and snatched them by their floating, idling necks. That’s what it was called now. Little Caitlin’s Creek. And, encouraged by its reputation, they had even come back once with a rusted-out shopping cart, as they now boasted to Bokarie. But the owner of the greengrocery had been too suspicious of starting an epidemic of theft and recovery to offer anything in return.

A band of town children and a few of the younger teenagers who frequented his store adopted Bokarie as something of a mascot during his first summer in Canada. Having studied his schedule, they would meet him around back in the alley with the Dumpsters and recycling bins when he was tossing the bottles. He had a sense of how it would look if such ice-cream-sticky, mustard-crusted hands got cut up, so he wouldn’t let them throw any of the bottles despite their offers of help. Instead, he occasionally made a show of flipping a bottle into a high spinning arc, and received impressed noises in recompense. He liked that.

II.

Bokarie’s first Canadian picture, not including his asylum and refugee identification shots, appeared on the front page of the local newspaper on the Monday after the Little Caitlin memorial rally. It was pleasing to carry this stack into his store. The picture was taken just after he concluded his inaugural speech to his new fellow countrymen, and the accompanying caption reprinted what was arguably the most emotive bit of his remarks. For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice. Many in the crowd assumed he had been addressing some ancient river god, to whom he was lamenting the unfairness of Little Caitlin’s loss. He was smiling and showed jagged teeth and grape-black gums. Large, blond and sort of smiling as well, Jennifer was close beside him. Her presence in the town was growing of late. She was now the mobilizing force behind the successful Little Caitlin Fund. Yet she still received little in the way of further consideration. She remained a Thickson whose heavy ankles and small farm family were reinforcing barriers against greater success. For Bokarie, however, the newspaper photo was evidence he was becoming one of them.

An African in the Ottawa Valley! This was a sign taken for the wonders of twenty-first-century living, on the same order as city buses that lowered for elderly riders and the availability of cappuccino at the Tim Hortons. These strange, fancy things, previously seen on hockey tournament trips to Toronto and cable television. There was, of course, some resistance, from a few retirees who took their morning news over black coffee and cigarettes, thank you very much. And none of these new buses better treat them like the G-D Holy of Holies, that’s for sure. This rheumatic rabble spoke out against Bokarie to their wives and chiropractors. One or two chose the familiar parable of the road apple in the snow to argue for the danger this new fellow posed to the rest of us.

You find a road apple in December and you curse the cow that crapped it but you don’t do anything because hell, what’s the harm? It’s frozen, right? Just stuck there day in and day out—you know you can keep an eye out for it. So what do you do then? Well, you keep clear, of course, shovelling around it, and on the way to get a Christmas tree from the city park with the grandkids, and you tell them to keep clear too and maybe you even toss a pylon in its general vicinity before one of the February storms. Always you got these plans to get rid of it, but not just now, an old Beachcombers is on. Or maybe your arms are full of kindling. But right when you get around to it, you’re gonna turf that patty into the woods. Then next thing you know, spring comes up and out you go to take down the Christmas lights and tarp up the snowmobile and maybe put out the cardboard Easter bunny for the squirts and oh yeah, you really should get rid of that old black turd. Now’s the time and it’s got to be done. But you can’t find it, though you catch something right ripe in the air. And you know what that is? That’s the smell of everything gone to shit.

Jennifer heard this at Sunday dinner with her parents, a couple of weeks after she first met Bokarie and directed him to speak at the Little Caitlin Event. This was when she first informed Gus and Barb Thickson of her plan to run as an independent in the next federal election. Undaunted by what had happened back at the end of high school and more recently, embarrassingly, against an alderman, she was confident of her chances this time, she explained, having found a potential global dimension for her local drainage security campaign. Think Pink. In addition to Little Caitlin, she could now have Bokarie’s children, lost to floods over in Africa. Her mother crimped her face a little at the wording but didn’t say anything just yet, not just yet.

“After all,” as Jennifer knew from her reading and then informed the table, “FDR distinguished himself by combining the domestic accomplishment of that New Deal with the overseas success of World War II, while LBJ had initiated his Great Society and increased America’s intervention against the Communists in Vietnam. In both cases,” she had learned, “domestic success wasn’t enough to be a beloved leader,” and a three-letter acronym was vital.

Her father put his fork down for added effect and warned Jennifer that bookworms hooked no men and that learning from Americans was like lending to Jews. Then, to sum up his case, he told the parable of the road apple in the snow, which had been proclaimed to him by the man who ran the gas station. Having done his fatherly duty, he picked up his fork and went back to his mashed and wondered why it hadn’t been a boy. At least that would have made more sense of the shoulders and ambition.

III.

A Spanish priest ran the white-walled orphanage where Bokarie lived until a better possibility came up. After many beds went empty one night and the younger children said men who smelled like smoke and bottles had come into their rooms, the priest had decided to line the orphanage’s walls with row on row of cut red and green glass. Father Alvaro gave a soccer ball to the boy who collected the most bottles per month, tallying on each boy’s rosary how many were brought back from their excursions to the surrounding town. These bottles were shattered under the priest’s supervision, and the shards were collected into the orphanage’s red, white and blue camping coolers by children who had more calluses than cavities. The priest would then choose one of the older boys to sink the jigsaw pieces of glass into the mud-and-dung-filled trench that was grooved across the top of the orphanage’s white walls.

Using his gravest Ash Wednesday voice, occasional sprays of holy water and flashes of a Santiago de Compostela medal, the priest was able to hold off evening recruitment visits to the front gate by the frequently drunk and always superstitious representatives of the national army, and by the various local rebel groups, and by the occasional roving militia from one of the neighbouring countries. But that wasn’t enough to stop those agile and desperate enough from scaling the orphanage wall in the middle of the night. So the glass-shard wall was maintained, at least up to when the blue helmets came. (At which point a quartet of nervous Bangladeshis was stationed in front of the building with a military Jeep loudly donated by the French, who had salvaged it from what was left of their Algiers tackle. The Bangladeshis displayed bayonets on rifles that dated from 1971. They were considered quaint by local warlords.)

Bokarie liked to imagine that the orphanage was a giant shark, having seen a picture in one of the National Geographics that had come to the orphanage with the coolers. He thought its walls were like open jaws, with all those sharp teeth ready to snap down. He told this to the younger boys at night under the mosquito nets, and the idea was quickly taken up and spread, with attribution coming his way. He liked that. He wanted more. This was before he was chosen to mount the wall and fix the few teeth pulled out and blotted and flattened every five days or so, according to troop cycles and the state of supply lines and recruitment efforts elsewhere.

The National Geographics and the red, white and blue coolers had been donated to the orphanage by an evangelical millionaire from Texas named Bayard Jellyby, who presided over the largest sporting goods and camping equipment chain in the Southwest. He had seen something on one of those television specials they do on empty Sundays after football’s done and the spring recruiting camps haven’t started up yet, about the modern history of Atwenty, Bokarie’s first country.

Jellyby learned from this documentary that the nation’s post-independence history was punctured and potholed by corruption and shifts in governance so frequent that the power grids left in place by the exiting English at the end of World War II were long since defunct. As were the basic mannerisms of civil society that the Empire had exported to the dark corners of the Royal Society’s maps. Things had turned rather carnal rather quickly.

This wasn’t surprising to the nation’s last viceroy, a Sir Basil Seal, who was interviewed in his palsied paisley splendour for the documentary. Upon returning to the Home Country after his stint in Africa, he confessed that his time in Africa had killed what merry old Kipling had been in him since boyhood about life in the colonies, and brought him over to that nasty Conrad chap.

One story he especially liked to tell when he was back in London, at sherry receptions and old headmasters’ funerals and now for this documentary that Bayard Jellyby was watching, described his last time with the natives. To his always captive audience, Sir Basil explained that before leaving, he had listened to the local bureaucrats, whose colouring and capabilities were modelled after Macaulay’s minute fiats for Bombay middle managers, flub those famous lips of theirs to express what a pity it was he and the British were leaving. They were a spot nervous over this exit and what the new power portended for them and their country. This came up during a melancholic farewell reception Sir Basil had held for them in the gingerly upright British barracks, though he knew some of the invitees had bloody well agitated for his going, dancing and clapping alongside the scruffier natives at their passionate, incoherent independence rallies. In response to their doe-sad eyes, he had loudly wished he could just stuff all of them in his steamer trunk and take them home with him, but of course this was right around the time that ugly Enoch Powell and his lot were bloodying up the streets. They were more worrisome, he assured them, than what life under the nation’s first homegrown prime minister would be like.

The native mandarins weren’t naive; they expected the new Big Man to clean house and bring in assorted cousins-in-law and other village baboons to run the nation, just as the British had done to the French and the French to the Germans and the Germans to the first tribal leaders they had met. The first post-independence leader, a man of the People as they all are, was rather brutish. While he had been educated partially in England as a young man, he had spent more time at Oxford thrusting and grunting as all-school Eight Man and midnight caller for the dons’ girlfriends than he had spent studying gunpowder plots and suffrage politics.

Sir Basil knew all of this, as he told the documentary’s host, but he also knew that he was only a week’s voyage away from trustable clotted cream and the glorious freedom to see a man about a dog without having to check the bowl for a scorpion first. So he did less than his best to buck up the black spirits around him at that goodbye get-together. But he concluded in full Britannic style, of course. On behalf of Her Majesty, he raised a toast to the newly independent nation and to its grand new leadership. To Kong and country! His gin-soaked slip of the tongue was neither copied nor corrected. It was taken as a closing colonial wisecrack and regarded, with false hope, as false prophecy.

As the documentary then recounted, the new man burst through mere expectations of gluttonous vice and implacable incompetence. His inaugural act as prime minister was to neuter the parliamentary system into a self-appointed National Assembly, proclaim a democratic republic, and accept the title of President-for-life. He was the first of many in the decades that followed.

Meanwhile, the majority of the nation’s people, including its many orphans, had been in straits since this magnificent independence, rarely provided with light at night or refrigeration for what food they had, both of which compounded already high levels of malnutrition and illiteracy. This juxtaposition, along with a closing photo montage set to an Elton John–Peabo Bryson duet, and a 1-800 number branded on the screen, got Bayard Jellyby to thinking.

“It is just plain un-Christian for these young boys to be without my two favourites way back when I was just a little trigger myself, bedtime reading and ice cream. These things transcend all cultures, all religions and both races, which is why my family and I are sending them along to the African nation of Atwenty. God Bless America, and may theirs bless them.”

Jellyby made this speech to the San Antonio news crew he arranged to profile him and his family as they packed up and sent along his personal collection of National Geographic back issues to the orphanage. The magazine’s famous yellow borders and exciting, informative pictures were bright enough to be read at night regardless of light bulbs, he reasoned, which was important, since young African minds could be more than terrible wastes. He explained all of this at the swelling close to the local NBC affiliate’s Community Hero spot for that week.

The Texan knew that it was no good sending over ice cream, let alone refrigerators. Instead, he cleared his Harlingen warehouses of the previous season’s Fourth of July Freedom coolers and hired a cargo plane from a private security firm. He added a monetary donation and listed in the cheque’s memo “Rocky Road, Tin Roof, etc.” He also threw in some soccer balls, having been convinced that baseball bats might be misused and pigskin possibly offensive on religious grounds. Practicalities required the priest to modify the Texan’s requests, which were detailed in an accompanying letter. Because ice cream, like red meat and disease-free prostitutes, was only to be found on embassy row in the capital city, Father Alvaro bought some chocolate with what money was left over from the Texan’s donation. After, that is, the conversion fees and processing charges and national surtaxes were variously assessed. He also sold most of the coolers that were left after customs and port inspections to the beer bars that squatted around the orphanage. He reserved a couple to hold and haul the broken-up bottles—a far safer method than using doubled-up soiled pillowcases—and also for six to eight quality four-by-six photos of the boys smiling and reaching into the coolers. This had been the only particular request from the Texan. The priest did as best he could to oblige, and a Tucson graphic design firm was later commissioned to airbrush ice cream cones into the little black hands. Pamphlets were eventually available beside in-store credit card applications at registers in each of the Texan’s stores.

Father Alvaro gave out a soccer ball for best bottle retrieval once a month. He awarded the yellowy National Geographics and mushy chocolates for best elocution and memorization of a Bible reading from the series he offered every morning after their breakfast of rice pap and mashed banana. When he was eighteen, Bokarie won for both speaking and memory on a selection from Hosea, which the priest had read to the boys in hopes of getting them to forswear violence and the other temptations and dangers outside the orphanage. Bokarie would draw on it again.

For this reason have I hewed them by the prophets, I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments shall go forth as the light. For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice: and the knowledge of God more than holocausts. But they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant, there have they dealt treacherously against me. Galaad is a city of workers of idols, supplanted with blood. And like 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.

Because the boy had already won a soccer ball and now had both elocution prizes and was long known to be a voracious, even gluttonous consumer of any Bible passage that came his way, the priest judged Bokarie ready for further advancement. Also, he was more than old enough to be subject to whatever mandatory conscription law seized him if he was found roaming the town’s streets with the younger boys.

The priest instructed Bokarie to maintain the broken-bottle perimeter against the government and the rebel recruiters, and also to pick assistants. Bokarie chose his two brothers and his cousin, the only other members of his family to have survived a tribal dispute from a few years earlier, as the government in the capital city had called it. (Alas, there was no time for questions at the press briefing that morning, so no one had to account for why one tribe in this particular conflict had air support and machine-gun-turreted Jeeps, while the other had dull machetes and comparatively unsuccessful chicken-bone curses.) In the aftermath, Bokarie and his brothers had been picked up by Father Alvaro on a pass through the village ruins. He had found them, like so many of their contemporaries, wandering through various heaps in search of food, the odd toy, an interesting bauble, their mothers. They were vaguely feral, shut-mouthed about recent events out of mistrust and sheer incomprehension at the things they had seen and heard and been spattered by. They had gone with him into the van out of boredom and belly pang. Their foraging skills were put to use once they’d been acclimated to the orphanage. When they stopped crying out in their sleep and shitting themselves at half-remembered outrages and relived threats.

Bokarie had been good at the bottle-getting game, but he liked this new duty a great deal more than crawling around behind the canteens for discards and beating the gutter brush for empties tossed from the overcrowded pickup trucks. Teamed up with his blood men, as he took to calling his brothers and cousin from then on, Bokarie would often get chased by bartenders and dishwashers smoking their cigarettes, and by truck drivers and ticket touts on piss breaks, and also by the hungrier and more desperate dogs. He was fast enough to get away from these wheezing, barking predators, and just because he could, he would mock them from a little more than near at hand, by slowing down and fancying up some footwork before catching up with the other boys already hauling back to the orphanage.

But with this promotion, he was now allowed to hang back when the other boys were sent out. After a time he would play soccer with his brothers and cousin, but first there was the unwelcome job of breaking apart cow dung and mixing it up with the water left over from the morning washing, to form the paste that held in place the pieces of glass the younger boys returned with. In those years when he ruled the orphanage wall, Bokarie persuaded the others to do the work, though two were bigger and the other older, while he supervised, the dirt-specked soccer ball cradled under one arm like an Eden apple. The dung-and-mud mixing was not only their duty-bound honour to their fellow orphans, Bokarie suggested, but also a way to get a few kicks at the ball. He liked how well he could bend them.

Bokarie also enjoyed the views and sounds that came his way from both sides of the orphanage walls when he was on top, holding himself above and between these two worlds. His presence up there was unprecedented. Before him, boys would smidge and sweat their way across the wall, purse-lipped and vibrating on their haunches as they leaned in to replace a missing piece of glass. Eventually they would shimmy and dangle back down and get a little rubbing alcohol into the pink 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 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.

“Like 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 that a few had been used by street urchins and scavengers to collect broken gin and beer bottles for a priest reported to have been killed by a local warlord in a drunken brawl. This was a place that needed America’s prayers and investment. There were rumoured drilling possibilities. Natural resources were a terrible thing to waste.

V.

In time, the boys from town got their mascot to play soccer with them after his shifts. Bokarie proved to be very quick on the ball and had the footwork of a dancer. They delighted that he could knife between them, faking one way and darting the other, and then score with ease. Their fathers gutted and chugged their way around slopitch diamonds with beer coolers for bases. And Bokarie climbed up and over an infamously high retirement-home wall and returned an errant Frisbee one Saturday. He reached summer legend status.

A week after this feat and elevation, Jennifer took Bokarie to tea. He detailed his recent activities. His options for further community involvement were discussed and he was also given an overview of parliamentary democracy and campaign cycles. A soccer workshop was announced after their meeting, to be held in conjunction with a Little Caitlin Bottle Drive. Jennifer decided that it was still too early, too traumatic, for a full creek cleanup. Better to wait until the coming election date was set and then count back from there. Recycling would be a fit response to the tragedy.

The day was a great success and Jennifer took many pictures of the pink-shirted Bokarie bouncing soccer balls on his knees as he deked and danced the children around the pylons, shouting instructions and adjusting postures. Every child was given a set of pink wristbands for bringing a bottle. Parents wore proud seamed faces and inquired about personal soccer tutorials and cursed themselves for forgetting to charge video camera batteries. Cream soda was served. The town was starting to froth and overflow with its recent excitements. First that little girl, so tragically gone, and now this twisting, this turning, this chocolate-skinned newcomer. Dropped in from nowhere and kicking around town as if he’s always been here. A few of the old-timers even conceded that road apples could make for good fertilizer.