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 townâs 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 theyâd 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
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 townâs 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 theyâd 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
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