Free Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul by David Adams Richards

with men standing beside the door, he had excused himself as he passed them. There in their midst, with Amos in his seat as chief, Roger said, “I have nothing against anyone here, and have never had. I will tell you, if you come upriver to net my pools, I will hay yours.” That is, he meant he’d put hay in the water, which would carry downriver and sweep the Indian gillnets.
    The silence was unbearable. Old Amos nodded but said nothing. Isaac, taller than Roger but probably no stronger, simply looked at him and did not speak.
    This was not out of fear, of course, but out of respect for the band meeting. From 1755, from the time of the first band meeting held here with people from other races, everyone was allowed to have their say.
    Later, Roger continued working on his house after dark using two propane lanterns, for he had a large propane tank, so that he himself appeared only in shadow and the saw-cuts of dust fell like warm grace.
    But soon after that, Max Doran, with his shiny eyes and straw hat and terrible earnestness to get at the truth, which he believed he had already arrived at, started to attract notice. And then the papers started their stories.
    Suddenly. Like a hailstorm.



SEPTEMBER 6, 2006
    M ARKUS LIKED J OHN W AYNE MOVIES AND OFTEN WALKED to the store late at night to get them, coming back through side lanes to his apartment. Yet he could never get used to his VCR and always seemed to push the wrong buttons. He had heard that now VCRs were almost obsolete.
    So if he had never learned to use what was obsolete, how could he learn to use what was coming? He had a cell phone, but it was almost never charged. He no longer drove a squad car, but his old red Honda. He was an insomniac and would wake up at night and walk, sometimes for miles, along the road. He had pain now and again in his chest.
    In 1998, he’d been to London and had sat near the fountain in Trafalgar Square, where Nelson viewed the sky. He’d flown someone back across the ocean—he’d been the bodyguard of a famous author who had come to Canada and was very distressed that people would want him killed. The RCMP had given him Markus.
    “What will happen if the assassins get through the door?” the author asked.
    “I am sure they never will.”
    “But if they do—if and when they do?”
    “If they do, you will not be here, and I will face them alone.”
    Markus had wanted to get the author’s autograph, but never did.

    He had watched John Wayne’s last movie,
The Shootist
, four times. Each time tears came to his eyes. Lauren Bacall was still beautiful in that movie.
    Then he would write in his notebooks, which were piled helter-skelter in the corner of the room.
    “Where is Roger Savage’s rifle?” he wrote in 1998, after that trip to England.
    Now, in the early fall of 2006, he would come home from work and stare at his bookshelf. He had a good two thousand books stashed everywhere, packed in boxes and on shelves. He was looking for the book that would define that summer long ago when Hector Penniac had died. For himself and Max Doran. He believed he might find it. That one book.
    When the time was right.

1985
1
    L ATE ONE AFTERNOON IN EARLY J ULY OF 1985, AS A MOS sat out on his old couch behind the shed and looked down over the small lot to the great bay and his few crabapple trees that never seemed to have a reasonable crabapple, a newspaperman, Max Doran, came to see him. The reporter was about twenty-five with reddish blond hair tied in a ponytail. He had done a good job on several labour disputes and a case about pollution in the last year. It was his dogged determination to hold others accountable that had made him a hero. He gave up on nothing and intimated some terrible things. He had his own slogan: “Viewer discretion is advised.”
    Like many who believed in sedition, he’d had, from youth, a deep puritanical strain.
    The whole nature of investigative reporting was to expose—and to say Doran was impartial