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

was absurd. He had never been impartial. But he had a very strong sense that his facts were the legitimate ones, that his posture was moral, that the purity of his notions were liberal and therefore inviolate. He would not lose a story; he would continue until the end. He had been threatened before and was hard to scare. He believed he must try to change the fabric of government. And someday, Max knew, he would write his blockbuster.
    Amos had heard of Max Doran. Amos had read him. This is why Amos feared him.
    A veteran journalist had taken Doran under his wing two years before, a man who had never written anything too memorable but had once drunk with Louis Robichaud and once with Dalton Camp. He told everyone he was Doran’s mentor, and he now lived vicariously through the work the boy did. So this veteran told Doran to take this story and to look at the strain of overt bigotry in the province. He sat in his faded grey suit drinking his fifth gin of the day.
    “You know this has been Canada’s festering sore!” the man pontificated. “You need to get those arrogant, lying bastards—make our government wake up.”
    Max could not detect the envy in the old socialist’s voice. He listened to this advice while his mentor cupped his hands over Max’s hands, leaned close and rasped, “Festering, festering, festering fucking sore! The arrogant bastards, all of them! For once in his fucking life he was kept from a job by an Indian, and the prick kills him—kills him! If that load had dropped from the very top, it might have killed them all.”
    “Don’t worry,” Max said, gently. “I intend to take this all the way!”
    “Yes, yes,” his mentor said, sitting up and finishing off his gin. “I pray you will, for an old man who has been in the fight too long—take it all the fucking way!”
    It made Doran feel good to be considered working class, to go to the press club and drink scotch with older, haggard, alcoholic reporters from the Louis Robichaud years who now looked forward to their pensions, and who spoke of great stories they themselves had never written.
    This story, about a “deeply disturbing” death in the north of the province—a place that had more than 32 percent unemployment at any given time, a place given to bad roads, disputes and violence that you always heard about—would be the catalyst to change his life.
    So in some ways, Doran already believed the allegations against Rogerand was simply finalizing a report that he had been waiting to file most of his life.
    “I had no idea that this plum would be handed to me,” he told a colleague. The younger journalist, Gordon Young, wished him good luck and quietly offered him a piece of advice that his mentor had not: “All kinds of people will say all kinds of things. I would not go on the reserve at the invitation of any one person or group. I would interview only those involved or having some knowledge of what happened in the pulp yard on that day—anything else will lead to a conundrum.”
    Max humbly nodded his thanks.
    He got directions to find Chief Amos Paul, and went to the house and knocked, but no answer came. So he looked in the living-room window and saw right through to the backyard—for the living-room had a window at the front and the back. And there Amos was, a little old man on a lawn chair, whittling on a piece of poplar.
    “Well, once again you’ve had an awful time here,” Max said, holding out his hand.
    “Oh, what an awful time,” Amos said, taking the hand limply and letting go.
    “I’m talking about the killing of Hector Penniac,” Doran said more loudly, as if the old man were deaf.
    “Hector—did you know him?”
    “No, I never had that privilege.”
    “The what?”
    “Privilege.”
    “Ahhh,” old Amos said, holding his whittled stick and looking at the ground. “So many people have not had that.”
    “What do you think happened?” Doran asked.
    “He was killed in the hold up there …”
    “Well,