Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  “Of course—I’ll think about it.”

  “Please, fly up to Ottawa tomorrow and see me.”

  “Sure—”

  He did not go.

  He sat alone at lunch and went alone to and from anyplace. Those who tried to get close to him were rebuffed. In some ways he spoke to them in the same gruff language that Roger Savage once had. The wounded always do that in the end.

  There were moments when he would recharge like a battery and come together. But for the most part he kept going back to that summer—to those days when he might have acted differently.

  “I blamed a man who maybe should not have been blamed” is all he thought about.

  He tried to write for different papers throughout the Maritimes but was always let go. The last paper was the Bugle. His attention span would suffer—or he would refuse stories he was sent on. Or he would be sent on a story and not come back.

  So after a time, left alone with a child that came from his failed marriage, he took odd jobs.

  The worst job was cleaning septic tanks for Toyne and Toyne out in the small villages. He sometimes sat alone at lunch thinking that if he was wrong and the boy Brice was right, then he, who had gone to get the story, did not get it very well, and had to come forward. He still had a few connections with a few editors—one, of course, was Gordon Young. But was it now possible? Part of the problem was, no one listened to him anymore—and without evidence he would get nowhere now.

  He took OxyContin to sleep, and sleep did come after he took enough. He grew thinner and shakier.

  He took a job at the Saint John call centre in 2001, and he decided that it was for the best if he did not say anything again.

  “There is much falsehood in the world,” a young, sad-eyed blonde prostitute told him one night when he went to her for comfort he could find nowhere else. “And I figure all falsehood is much the same.”

  One day in 2003, as he passed a trash can near Loch Lomond Road, he spied an old paper and the picture of Markus Paul, who had accompanied Prince Edward on a five-day trip to the North. He picked the paper out, and sitting on a bench in the rain, read what had happened to that boy he had once so dismissed, and his lips, blue with cold, trembled.

  “It is not the Conibear trap that kills the beaver, but the drowning that follows.”

  2

  MARKUS GAVE MOST OF HIS MOOSE MEAT AWAY. AND IN October of 2006 he packed his bag and got on a flight in Moncton on a clear day when you might be better off in the hills hunting partridge. He flew out to Toronto, and sat in a departures lounge, wanting a cigarette. He read over the brochures he had with him, telling him that his trip should be fun. He took a plane that night, late, into Arizona. Of course, he went to a hockey game the next day just to see Wayne Gretzky behind the bench. The arena was only half full, and the ice was wet.

  Then he had a drink in a bar, alone; he was always alone.

  “Someday you will meet someone,” he remembered Mrs. Francis saying when he’d asked her about Sky Barnaby the year before.

  He read promotional material the next morning in his hotel room, material about the Petrified Forest.

  He had taken some time off. He wasn’t expected back on duty for a month. He would use the time to do what his grandfather had never had the chance to do.

  He smoked constantly, often rolled his own, like Amos had. It was what had killed Amos eventually. Markus had promised his ex-wife, Samantha Dulse, who was a doctor, that he would get in for an X-ray as soon as he came back.

  “You had better,” she said.

  So he determined to buy her a present to make up to her his own lack of consistency.

  The heat in Arizona, even in October, bothered him. He needed the sound of the bay and the smell of pine. He had not realized how much that was in his blood.

  Markus travelled everywhere he could, carrying brochures and a camera he never seemed able to work. He travelled to many places. He visited the land of the Apache. He walked where the Seminole and Cherokee walked. He did those things his grandfather wanted and never managed to. He visited the museum of the Texas Ranger, stared at the Colts and pistols, the hats and boots and badges.

  Later in the month he went north by plane and bus and visited the land of the Lakota Sioux.

  “A great people,” a young Dutchman with an inquisitive, hopeful face said to him when they were on the bus together.

  “Oh yes,” Markus acknowledged. “Yes.”

  “They were so brave. They hunted the bison,” the man informed him. “Did you know?”

  “I heard as much,” Markus admitted.

  The Dutchman said that no one could do anything like that today. He carried a picture of Sitting Bull that he had bought at a craft store. And he said that his favourite movie was Little Big Man. He said he had seen it five times. The Dutchman said he, too, wrote about the Wild West and asked Markus if he knew about it.

  “Not so much,” Markus admitted.

  The Dutchman studied the picture of Sitting Bull and said that if he were here at that time, he would have sided with the First Nations people. He asked Markus if he would have sided with the First Nations people too—did he think he would stand up for them? Markus said he hoped he might. The Dutchman said that he himself certainly would have. He would have been there. He would have fought to the death to protect all the Indians. Markus told him that was commendable. The Dutchman seemed pleased. He smiled and nodded to himself. Markus’s eyes started to fill with tears. He kept looking out the window so no one would see. The day got dark—there was frost, and Markus was thinking of how the deer would be on the move, up the rut trails in the afternoon. He wanted to speak to the Dutchman about rifles and grains of bullets, and how the deer moved just at dark, with the smell of musk in the air, snow starting to fall and the sound of water before it made ice, but realized there was no point at all.

  He had bought in a gift shop in the Petrified Forest a wicker basket and a baked clay pot for Samantha Dulse, as a kind of token of their divorce maybe, and forgot them in the overhead bin on a bus. He only remembered them when sitting in the terminal in Chicago, ready to fly back to Canada. He looked around for them and they weren’t there.

  Most of his life, he was always losing things. Wives and girlfriends too. It was raining and cold. And as they flew down into Moncton the blinding snow had started.

  “We will have some chop coming in,” the pilot said, and Markus remembered Roger Savage helping him and his grandfather take their boat out of the rough sea the year before Roger died. He remembered when they hit big chop, Roger had put his large hands over Markus’s on the oar.

  “Keep ‘er on, boy,” he had said, and then he smiled a rough smile.

  Now, like magic, Markus’s little Honda was still there in the airport lot, appearing as if it hadn’t moved. Or as if it had gone on a trip itself around the entire world, and had just come back in time.

  He had brought home a poncho for Sky Barnaby. Although, as always, he did not know where she was so as to give it to her.

  And so it was, after all this time, that Markus would solve the case of Hector Penniac and Roger Savage because he saw at a museum in Texas a bullet fragment taken from Billy the Kid.

  “Quien es?” were Billy’s last words when he walked into the adobe kitchen in the dark. “Who is there?” or “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” Markus said, four lifetimes and four time zones away.

  Late at night, long after he’d eaten, Markus went into the RCMP office. The short, blond constable at the front desk looked at him. “You back?”

  Markus walked into the old room that was the command centre of Sergeant Hanover the night he had sent in the men to arrest Isaac Snow. Now it had drawers and filing cabinets of old cases. Once when he’d been busy in here, on a hot day last July—trying to figure out this case, the case of Roger Savage that consumed him—the commissioner from Fredericton had come to visit. As he walked past, this man glanced in and saw Markus, his holster aga
inst his back right hip, holding a sandwich in his teeth and reading over a file.

  “Who is that?” the commissioner asked.

  “Oh, that’s Markus,” the sergeant whispered, “our Indian.”

  Now Markus took the files again, all of them, out of the cabinets and took them home. He spent the next three days looking at them. Everything to do with Hector Penniac, Roger Savage and Little Joe—faded, yellowed and forgotten pages dealing with what most of humanity would think was nothing important at all. He knew what had happened, but without the rifle it would be impossible to prove. He went to bed, thinking it was useless—and then he suddenly realized he had seen an envelope in a file and had left it at the office. He had seen this envelope before and just assumed it was empty. But perhaps it wasn’t.

  But he was too tired. No, he wouldn’t get up. He decided it was nothing. Just an old empty envelope stuffed away for years that no one bothered throwing out. It was nothing, he was sure. Besides, it was three in the morning.

  Then he sat up in bed, coughed and lit a cigarette. He left his apartment and went back to the office. Some poor drunk hollered at him from one of the cells. He went to the filing cabinet, opened it angrily and found the envelope. Inside was a piece of yellowed RCMP paper, with nothing on one side. He turned it over.

  “Rifle damaged in fire—.30-30—owned by Roger Savage. 0-3-9.”

  He went to 0: the basement. He went to 3: room 3. He went to 9: an unlocked wooden cabinet he had never known existed that had two old toilets and a sink torn out of old cells placed in front of it. He put them aside.

  He opened the door. There was a mop, a broom, a rifle.

  While Markus was away in Arizona a letter had arrived from the hospital, signed by his ex-wife, Samantha Dulse, reminding him of an X-ray he had promised to get.

  That evening, when he went to the hospital for his X-ray, Markus wandered into the east wing and found himself in the palliative care unit. He was hoping to see Samantha and say hello. But she was not on duty. She had scheduled the X-ray for him when she knew she would not be there. He heard there was a lawyer she was dating. They owned a little sloop called Raison d’être. “Good for her,” he thought.

  He went back along the naked corridor with its soft lights and the stifled sounds of people in agony. He glanced into a room and saw a man withered down to nothing, lying in bed with a blue monitor against the darkness, and the smell of urine.

  Alone.

  The man looked familiar. So Markus, just on the off chance he knew him, went to the nurses’ desk and asked about him.

  “Yes, dear, he has prostate,” the nurse said, with a sweet Miramichi accent. “He may have two weeks—or a month.”

  Markus started to leave, then came back and asked the man’s name.

  The nurse looked at the chart. “George Morrissey.”

  It took him ten minutes to compose himself. He sat on the chair in the hallway outside the room and tried to breathe. Then he finished his coffee and went in to visit George. He sat for a long time beside him without saying much.

  “You like some ice cream?” Markus went down to the cafeteria about ten that night, just before it closed, and bought some ice cream. When he got back George was awake, and as he fed him the ice cream with a plastic spoon, Markus asked, “Do you think Roger hooked good?”

  George looked at him and nodded. He had a bib on like a child. There was a pause and Markus tried to breathe, but he found it difficult.

  “Did you tell him to hook?”

  George, a shadow of the man he once was, trembled. “Yes—I asked him to hook,” he said, managing to wipe his mouth.

  “Do you have anyone to visit you—anyone—any relative?”

  George shook his head.

  “Well, then, I’ll visit you,” Markus said.

  “Okay, pal?” “Okay.” George managed a little smile.

  Markus phoned Samantha that night. He asked her about her lawyer friend, although inside he felt heartbroken. He told her he thought he might solve the case now.

  “Oh—the case,” she said. It was, in fact, what had broken up their marriage. That and his love for Sky. He had never really been off the case. Even when he was attached to the Governor General’s office. Or when he was a bodyguard for Prince Edward of England on a trip to see the Inuit villages. Or when that author complained that they only sent one man to protect him, while in England he had four. The author, very famous and wise, complained that his hamburger might be poisoned, and how would Markus tell? So Markus had picked it up and taken a bite, chewed and swallowed. “No,” Markus said. “I believe it’s okay.” Markus did not know he had done anything wrong, until the author lodged a complaint through his embassy to the RCMP.

  “I’m looking at your X-rays tomorrow,” Sam scolded him, just as her mother, Pamela, had done years before to his own grandfather. “You take care of yourself, please!”

  They had killed old Amos’s dog. Sometimes Markus would go for days and not think of that. Then it would all come back. He would shiver and even now, so much later, tears would come to his eyes. He remembered running along the ditch in his bare feet and picking the dog up in his arms.

  “It was your best friend Andy Francis who did it,” he would whisper. “Long time ago.”

  In the ball field where Roger Savage’s house had once been, there was a memorial to Little Joe Barnaby. There was a picture of him in his Braves uniform and the hat that made his ears turn down.

  The next day—that is, the day after he saw George Morrissey—Markus went to the ball field to look at it. It was something he had never in his life managed to do before.

  “Well, Little Joe,” he said, “look how old and ugly I managed to get—while you remain the same.”

  Over the years, Markus had kept tabs on the Monk brothers. He had done this for over fifteen years. Their fights and arrests for poaching, etc.

  The anger of the stevedores over the pension fund had long passed—that is, the stevedores who were angry that Bill Monk cheated them when everything closed down. But nothing at all could be proved. It was just one more case, a little uproar with vague details.

  “No sir, no one came out of it rich” was all Bill could say.

  Topper sold milk up and down the long roadway. Sometimes he came to Markus’s apartment and left a quart at the door. Sometimes when he saw Markus he gave a hurt but understanding smile.

  Bill was retired from everything but had a fishing camp where he took sports fishers. He owned a glider too, which was seen on occasion out over the bay. He was one of those angular tough men, still wiry at sixty-two and had never gained a pound, determined to keep himself solid and thin as a rail. His eyes stared out at you with a coldness he could not hide. Perhaps it was not his fault—compassion and everything associated with it had eluded him. Sometimes when he spoke or laughed, Markus caught in his inflection that he was trying to denote those things humanity had instructed us to have, but couldn’t seem to.

  Bill had spoken to Markus about his camp, how it was being broken into. Bill was going to set up a bear trap and mangle whoever it was.

  “I think it’s some Indians,” he said.

  “Yes, perhaps. But what if it’s only a boy—say, like that Indian boy Hector Penniac a long, long time ago? Would you injure him too?” Markus asked.

  There was a long pause. Sometimes Markus would have liked to say, “Swing at me,” but he never did.

  “You guys have to do something—can’t you solve crimes?” Monk said, walking away.

  “We are trying, sir,” Markus said after him.

  A week after he got back from the States, Markus went to the co-op and bought gun polish and cleanser. Then he went back to his apartment and spent the night cleaning and refitting the old rifle of Roger Savage that had lain away in a closet at the RCMP building for twenty-one years. He took off the stock and cleaned it out, and took gun polish to the barrel, took a scrub to the inside, re-tapped the screws and made it sound. Then he went out
side, walked a quarter mile to the gravel pit, adjusted the sights, and took a new bullet from a box of shells and tried to insert it.

  He knew it wouldn’t fit.

  So he took another bullet from a different box and fired it at a pumpkin at a hundred yards.

  He believed he knew exactly what had happened now, probably in both cases, both the death of Hector Penniac and that of Little Joe.

  He had promised George Morrissey that Roger Savage had done nothing, not even accidentally, so if Morrissey had something to say, he should say it now.

  “Clear your conscience,” he had said quite simply.

  He had not told the Monk brothers what he knew yet.

  Markus polished the bullets Amos had picked up in the soot twenty-one years ago until they were pristine. He had found them in the desk drawer, after moose season. They had been in his mind all through Texas, right to the Little Bighorn. And now he knew why. Strange how easy it all was once you knew why.

  Markus went to Morrissey’s hospital room, and there among the neutral colours of death would read the sports pages to him, pages with the bylines of Stephen Brunt or the local boys. George would sit up in bed, sometimes shakily holding a cup of yogurt, listening to it all.

  “How is the Leafs gonna do this year?” he would rasp. “I lost my shirt to friends on them—except,” he said, “as you see, I have no friends.”

  “Well,” Markus would say, smiling, “here I am.”

  The only thing George had, over his life, was his sports pool. It was where he could, if he wanted, pick and choose multimillionaire hockey players to work for him in the small room he lived in with his two yellow budgie birds. But he hadn’t picked the right multimillion-dollar hockey players after all. He had lost his pension in the dispute between the stevedores and Bill Monk, and been forced into a room at the hotel.