Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (32 page)

The first day of the hunt was warm. At noon on the first day, he sat in his small tent and peeled an apple, and looked out over the barrens. He had used his grandfather’s old birch moose call; calling the short huffs of a mature bull, he got no answer. He followed this with the long moan of the cow.

“Unhhg,” he would call, for the bull.

Then “Ohhhnnooooooouuuuoohhhooouuu,” he would trail off for the cow. And then a chipmunk would scold him. And he would shrug and go back and sit down. And wait. Of course, both calls were to attract a bull.

The first was the call of a bull moose challenging a bull, the second of a receptive cow. But the woods were silent and did not stir. In the late part of the afternoon it was warm enough to have a beer sitting in his shirtsleeves and playing solitaire on an upside-down box.

Later the wind picked up just a little. It was sharper, so perhaps it might cool. Far, far above him, planes travelling the route between Toronto and London, England, made their way across the great blue sky.

“A sky-blue life,” he thought, looking up, saying the name of a Maxim Gorky story.

He flipped the last card over and found he did not have a match.

He had gone into the woods with his father, too, years ago. And every time he did, his grandfather Amos would show up at eight or nine at night, no matter what Amos was doing. After supper at home, Amos would get his things together and make his way to the bog to see Markus and his own son, David. For a few years Markus did not understand this, and then one night he woke up with his father’s knife at his throat.

“The bastards are coming,” his father said. “Who are you?”

“David,” came the sudden voice of his grandfather, who was sitting on his haunches in the corner. “That’s your son, so you can go back to sleep, please.”

After solitaire and the solitary meal he ate of beans and wieners, Markus heard the distinctive snap, snap down in the valley of a bull walking slowly toward him, toward the smell of cow urine he had placed near an old bed a cow had dug up the year before. It was snapping the branches of birch and poplar with its great rack. Each snap had the reverberations of a .22 bullet. But he was no fool, this big bull. He came cautiously. Markus called twice more. Just at evening Markus heard the bleat of a young bull. Knowing the big bull was coming, he was choosing to back away.

Leaving Markus and the big bull alone.

As he lay down he thought of rifles and bullets and all kinds of things. He remembered that once his father, David, got so angry at his rifle that he was going to smash it against a tree. They were far away on the river hunting deer. Markus never knew what was wrong. But it was something to do with the shells a friend had given him. They were the wrong shells—though to Markus they looked the same as the shells his father had used before. But there was a mistake of some sort, and he had brought the wrong ones. He remembered this incident as one of the most important between him and his father—brooding, melancholy and holding the almost glittering brass shells in his hand. How could they be the wrong ones?

Then later David awoke, and thinking Markus was someone else, took a knife and put it to his throat. That was the night Amos said: “That’s your son.”

So after that they took the rifle and gave it to Roger Savage.

Markus slept just in a tarp and sleeping bag. The fire died down, and the rain started about three in the morning. He pulled the tarp over his head and waited until dawn. Then he stood, had a leak and picked up
his rifle to check it—see if it was wet or the scope fogged. He heard a sudden grunt, and turned. In the fallow dawn light a nineteen-point bull was staring at him, no more than seventy-five yards away. He had time to put one 180-grain bullet into the chamber, aim and fire before the bull ran over him. The bull stopped, turned slightly, staggered and fell over on the tarp Markus had just left.

Nothing in the woods was as dangerous as a bull moose in rut.

He usually quartered the animal himself—and he managed to do this now, after the animal was opened and staked out. Then he moved a pulley line to the hindquarters and got them lifted off the ground. It took him most of the day to get the hide off it, get it sawed and quartered. He removed the rack at the crown of the head and placed it in the back of the truck.

Late that night, some time way after dark, he was able to hang the four quarters down in the cold cellar in his grandfather’s house.

Here were old
Saturday Night
and
Star Weekly
magazines—Canadian magazines that his own father had grown up with. In this house his grandfather had given him one thing, a love for reading. That is why Amos had tried to start the school, and had finally gotten it built. In one magazine, from August 1985, was a small article, on page 15. “A Reserve’s Anguish,” it said. It had a picture of Hector Penniac. When Markus looked at it, it seemed almost crisp and brand new—as if the article had been written the day before.

He was exhausted, and went upstairs. He sat in his room staring at a TV game show,
Wheel of Fortune
. It revolved. Yes, he thought, there would be a time when he would kill no more, and perhaps this was the time.

He then emptied his pockets and laid out his cartridges on the table. Then he thought of how he used to hunt deer with a small .30-30.

No charging bull moose would have been stopped by a .30-30. Markus would have surely been injured, or dead. He shook slightly thinking of
this. Amos had taken the rifle from his father, David, after he had flashbacks of Vietnam, and given it to Roger.

So it was his father’s rifle Roger had used that terrible night long ago.

“Fuck you,” Roger had said at the last.

Markus went up to the back room to sleep. But he could not, so he got up, made himself a cup of tea and went back up to the attic and opened the gun cabinet. He took the two bullets Amos had found in the soot at the back of Roger’s house and placed them on the table—looking at them as if he thought they might dance.

“Y
OU DON’T LIKE PEOPLE,”
M
ARKUS’S
I
NDIAN GIRLFRIEND
had said to him once, just before they broke up in 2005. “That’s why Samantha left you—you don’t like people.”

“I do,” he protested. “I do, I do—I do like people.”

Then he added: “On occasion.”

But there was something he was trying to figure out. He got so angry over it that he threw a telephone against the wall. What’s wrong? his Indian girlfriend asked.

“I know who is innocent and who is guilty and I can’t for the life of me prove it,” Markus answered.

She took the blankets away; she was naked except for small panties.

“Come back to bed. We are all guilty,” she said.

After the final inquest into the deaths of Hector Penniac and Little Joe Barnaby, Amos had taken all his information to the police in three envelopes. But the case was not active then. It was July 1987.

Sergeant Hanover said: “Roger Savage killed Hector Penniac and Little Joe Barnaby, and you are here—bothering me—trying to clear his name to save your own reputation. You are a disgrace, even for an Indian.
Now go home!”

So the old man took the envelopes and went home. And he never spoke of it again.

When he was a teenager, Brice Peel started to have seizures. Bill Monk gave him drugs. Brice began to like the drugs. He went to Bill to get more. He learned how to get the most out of them. He liked cocaine. He went to dances. He began to step-dance on a table, all by himself.

Most of the time he was “right out of her,” as they say here. He lost his teeth in a fight. He was down to 122 pounds. He liked things that would give him adrenalin.

He quit school in grade eleven and worked at the carpet ranch but was caught robbing money. The Monks paid his bail. This was written down on a file that Markus now had. The Monks always paid.

Brice lived in town. He had no telephone numbers of girls. He had no happy memories of home. He kept some budgie birds and a rabbit, and picked up stray cats to feed. He had milk bowls outside his little apartment door.

He read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. The books allowed him to vanish into space gullies and dragons in the sky.

Though Markus tried to keep tabs on him, by 1996 Brice seemed to have disappeared.

Brice Peel worked at the pet store in Saint John for eight years. He never told anyone where he was from. The seizures continued, as long as he drank and took medication, and yet he drank and took medication because of the seizures. After a time no one paid any attention to him, so he was a lost soul, no longer a bother or a problem to anyone. Bill Monk told him he was a disgrace and not to come back.

In the autumn of 2004, he left the pet shop and walked out into the sterile parking lot with bread for the pigeons. Then, as always, he walked along the empty streets, the trees uniformly naked and the windows
as dark and oppressive as a Sunday afternoon. He had been drunk for a week, and the owner of the pet store told him, for the last time, not to come back until he got help because he was upsetting the guppies.

His room was small, and he had two hamsters and a guinea pig. He brought home their food in a big brown bag. Outside on the street he could hear children. He had newspaper over his window so no one could see in.

His father was dead, so he would not have to go to jail. He turned the television on and sat down and wrote out his story.

Then, after he wrote his story, he wrote a letter to George Morrissey:

“Dear George—I am sending you over the story—I am telling you not to open it until my death—and then take it to Markus Paul, who is now an RCMP—but not until I die—and am good and dead—as dead as a doornail—please—I have sent you along that new budgie food with the 3 kinds of vitamins for healthy beaks and polished feathers—Brice Peel.”

He mailed the letter the next morning.

Then he lay down and sliced his wrists. He bled a lot, but unfortunately, it seemed to him, he did not die.

Doran worked at many odd jobs. He was, as he knew, provoking his own death, in subtle ways, mysterious to those who do not know. He drank, and used OxyContin to sleep, and Benadryl over the counter, was in his own way providing for a hatred of himself. He knew as much about journalism as anyone in the country, yet did not write a word, even when the young journalist Gordon Young switched papers and phoned him, asking him aboard.

“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.”

M
ARKUS GAVE MOST OF HIS MOOSE MEAT AWAY
. A
ND 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.