Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (35 page)

It did not fit.

“What’s wrong with it?” Collette Snow asked, as if the magician’s trick was about to be revealed. She smiled suddenly, and in the flash of her smile was tension, as if this was a moment twenty-one years in the making. She looked at her husband, who glanced over at her.

“Nothing is wrong,” Markus said. “But this second bullet is a .30-30 calibre, and it will not fit into the chamber of Roger’s beautiful little rifle because Roger’s rifle is a .32 Winchester. A .32 Winchester is almost identical to a .30-30, but it is not one. That was the difference between Dad’s rifle, this beautiful rifle which was given to Roger, and the other rifles around here. Roger had a .32, but almost everyone assumed it to be a .30-30.”

He said this slowly, and looked about. In the corner was the article written by Mr. Max Doran: “Isaac Snow: Profile in Courage.”

“What we need to know is that both a .30-30 shell and a .32 shell will fit into the chamber of a .30-30 rifle,” Markus said. “But the .30-30 shell will not fit into a .32 chamber. That is because the .30-30 shell is ever so slightly larger. Otherwise, both rifles are identical. Roger’s Winchester was damaged, and no one was smart enough to check it. But I have to ask, how could Roger Savage have fired a .30-30 bullet from a .32 Winchester into the stomach of poor Little Joe Barnaby when I have just shown it cannot fit?”

“What does that mean, though?” Mrs. Snow asked.

“Little Joe was killed with a .30-30. bullet.” Markus put his cigarette into the ashtray. “That bullet couldn’t have been fired from Roger Savage’s .32. It had to come from a .30-30,” he said. “It had to come from the back of the house at the same time Roger was firing from the
front of the house—Roger was firing into the air, because he wanted to hurt no one. Joel must have fired your rifle. He was really only trying to scare Roger, I am sure of it. He certainly was not trying to hit Little Joe—and didn’t realize he did. Maybe not for a year or two. Then it came to him suddenly, like a revelation. Though he couldn’t admit it—and within ten years he was dead of misery and shame. For Little Joe was his son.”

He put down the Winchester on the hardwood floor as carefully as he could and picked up the .30-30. He took out a bullet fragment that he had taken from the evidence locker.

“This is the .30-30 rifle that Joel had. Your rifle, Isaac. It killed Joe Barnaby,” he said, looking over at the man. “This is the rifle that killed my little friend—yes, sir! This is the .30-30 bullet that killed him.”

“Why didn’t the dumb-as-dirt RCMP ever figure that out!” Isaac said.

Markus looked at the rifle with a peculiar sense of self-affirmation.

“Well, sir—well, sir—yes, sir, they just have,” Markus answered.

Markus took Roger’s Winchester and went back to his car. He sat for a long time.

Then suddenly he decided to go and visit Roger Savage’s grave because no one ever did.

The grave was overgrown, at the edge of the trees. It didn’t have a tombstone, only a small marker, with the initials and dates: R.F.S October 5, 1962–August 31, 1985. He stared at it for ten minutes or more.

Soon there would be whiteouts and a blizzard. The bay would be making ice.

Milton, Markus Paul remembered from
Paradise Lost
, suggested that politics had started in hell—hell is where it became fashionable. In this hell, such as it was, people cozied up to ideas they didn’t even believe in—wrote columns about things they knew were false to promote an idea of justice they themselves didn’t share.

He didn’t know why that mattered anymore.

Samantha and he maybe even got married because of that—because of it all—because they wanted to prove to each other they could love each other. And they did, but at least for them, not in the way they needed to.

He went back to his car. He took out his makings and put them on his lap, took out a paper and rolled himself a cigarette carefully, so the tobacco wouldn’t be too tight. Then he snapped a match and lit it, and sat there and smoked, listening to Hank Williams sing about a cheatin’ heart.

Yes, he thought, we all have one.

A few days later, Samantha called Markus back about the X-rays.

“It is not good, Markus, love,” she said. “It is not at all good. You have spots on both lungs. I want you back here tonight. I want to schedule biopsies in Saint John.”

“I cannot do it yet,” he said. “I will be in—I promise.”

“Why the hell did you smoke?” she said, suddenly starting to cry. “Why in Christ did you smoke?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Why be Irish if you can’t be stupid?”

“You stop—you stop what you are doing and get in here—now—or I’ll have you arrested!”

“Sure, love, sure.”

He hung up. Then his cell phone rang. It was her, but when he went to answer it he accidentally pushed the wrong something or other, something he had never figured out, and cut her off.

“Christ she’ll be angry at me now.”

He went in three days later, sheepish for having hung up on her. It was a cold day, and he sat in the small examination room off the outpatient ward, shivering, and she asked how his trip was.

“Fine,” he said. “I bought you a present.”

“Good. Where is it?”

“I left it on the bus at Little Bighorn.”

She looked at him a second.

“I want you to have your left lung looked at in Saint John,” Sam said to him. She had the stethoscope on his chest, just above the tattooed
Sky
. She was looking above his forehead to somewhere. “I want you to see a Dr. Moses—he is a cancer specialist.” She took the stethoscope away and, folding it, said: “There are things we can do now. I think your right lung is okay—it’s the left lung I’m worried about.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“Today?”

“Do you want to live?”

He put his T-shirt back on and picked up his jacket.

“I can’t go today. I have budgies to feed.”

“Cancer rates here are higher than anywhere in the province,” Sam told him. “They are twice as high here as a lot of places in Canada.”

He told her he would quit smoking, but lit one in the parking lot. It was the urge.

The trouble was that Markus knew police officers. They were as susceptible to rumour and ego as everyone else. They would get a lead in a case, and each new piece of information they would try to fit together, like the puzzles Amos used to do, so it would form into what they already believed to be true. Rumours in the office helped as well.

So suddenly the man who was too scared to come out of his house was the man they wanted. But the trouble was, the prosecution couldn’t charge Roger and the police begged off—and finally, in 1987, allowed the case to die. So when Amos went to them with all his information, they did not want to look at it again.

The case had been dead now twenty years.

Markus went back to his apartment and lay down. He listened to “Unchain My Heart” by Joe Cocker. He liked milkshakes and so he had bought himself a strawberry on the way home. Sometimes he would buy vanilla. He had bought them in Texas too, and Arizona, but liked the ones he got at the Kingsway restaurant on the King George Highway in Newcastle best of all. One day long ago he and Sky had
gone to a sock hop and shared a milkshake from the Kingsway and he had been going there ever since, thinking that she would come there just once more to get a milkshake too. She was so innocent then, and so was he, and in love, too, he supposed, for that moment in time.

Today he had no choice. He had to go take care of George Morrissey’s budgies. So he would take care of the budgies.

“What are the names of those birds?” Markus had asked George during the last visit in his quiet Micmac voice.

“They are called Number One and Number Two.”

“Good. Are they easy to tell apart?”

“No, pretty confusing. And you have to clean the cage.”

“Good.”

“And they like their heads patted.”

“Good.”

“But they aren’t half the budgies I had before.”

“I see.”

“Those were good budgies … You take care of the budgies and I will give you the envelope.”

Markus looked at him. “Thank you.”

“I was going to burn it . but that might not be right.”

M
ARKUS WENT DOWN TO
S
AINT
J
OHN AND RENTED A ROOM
near the hospital, and for the next while he came and went through the lanes without meeting many people. He went to the malls, and sat alone in the big common below the library, or wandered through the streets looking at the buildings, or sat near the wharf entertained by seagulls.

This is where his own ancestors came from, those before the Micmac some thirty-five hundred years ago—the Paint. And he thought of this, too.

He had brought the budgies with him, in the big pockets of his coat. Dr. Moses, who was an Iraqi, gave him a series of tests and scheduled a biopsy.

“We will find out how long you have.”

“Good. There is no expiration date stamped on my big toe,” Markus said.

“When did you start smoking?” Dr. Moses asked.

Strange that this question had become incessantly bothersome to Markus now. That is, here he was trying to quit and this Iraqi was trying to remind him when he had started.

“I was three,” he said.

“Pardon me—you were thirty?”

“No sir, I was not thirty—I was smart enough by thirty to try to quit. I was three.”

“How could you smoke at three?”

“I didn’t inhale until I was eight,” Markus said, as a compromise of some sort.

A blizzard had come in from the bay.

He walked back to his room, with his jean jacket on. No one would ever know by looking at him that he was an RCMP officer who had been a bodyguard to Prince Edward, or that he could stifle the attack of five men in fifteen seconds. In fact he rarely thought of that himself.

He lay down in the dark, in the half grey of a Saint John blizzard. He didn’t feel sick. He felt stronger now than ever. He wanted to get back to work and solve it all. But he had to go for the biopsy, and that wouldn’t be for a while.

Markus was now very sorry he had once knocked Joel Ginnish out. Ginnish had wanted to prove something after he lost all his money. He had said he was going to turn pro.

He remembered how Ginnish had slapped some boys around when they were trying to be brave. Perhaps this is what he remembered most. And Markus had finally stepped into the ring with him.

“You’re in my office now,” Ginnish said.

Markus moved his head and hit him once and knocked him out. And now he was sorry he had done this.

Ginnish had started saying he was going to murder everyone on the reserve after the money was gone. Markus couldn’t bring himself to arrest him and sent a white officer instead.

Ginnish had smiled and shrugged.

“They all betrayed me,” he had said. “That Markus especially—he betrays everyone.”

Markus had looked at the pictures of Roger’s old house, and he knew what had happened. Joel Ginnish had wanted to hit the propane tank, or the sign Roger had planted in defiance. He couldn’t fire straight. Markus knew that. Joel Ginnish never hit a thing on the first shot. And he had fired high and to the right just as Little Joe was running toward the house.

This is what Markus had suspected since September, when he had sighted in his .306.

“Someday you will figure it all out,” Amos had said. For he himself, as an old man, had already done so.

Both had sighted enough rifles to know.

Old George had not opened the envelope. He was too frightened. But he did not destroy it either. He was too frightened.

Brice still sent George free birdseed for his budgies.

“Why?” asked Markus.

“Well, first of all he likes budgies, and second, I am his mother’s brother—and was the one who cared for him.”

George Morrissey could not bring himself to turn this envelope over to the police. But since both Brice and Morrissey always believed that Roger had killed Little Joe Barnaby, why open this letter and put others
in trouble? So the letter, which was never supposed to be in Markus’s possession when Brice was alive, came into his possession now.

In his room in Saint John, Markus had nine hours without a cigarette, and began to pace the floor. He paced the floor for a long time, until his cell phone rang. It was Sam Dulse, who had promised to phone him every night to see if he was smoking, and to come down to visit him on the weekend.

He didn’t pick it up.

“One more cigarette more or less won’t kill me,” he said instead.

He lit a cigarette and lay back on the couch and watched the hockey game on the small black-and-white TV provided. He knew poor Sam had been having an affair long before he and she had broken up. He was never home, he supposed—and the Savage case had consumed most of his life without his knowing. He had heard from friends about this fellow doctor whom she drove back and forth to work with. This self-aggrandizing doctor who believed those in his care were in his control.

Markus shrugged and said to himself, “Forget it.”

It had taken him six months to mention it to her. They were in the living room, and she had just come home from work. He remembered it was raining, in July, just before they were to go on vacation. He stared at the flowers out in the box as rain came and laced the window.

He simply mentioned the man’s name. She jumped up from the couch and ran to the bathroom and locked the door. It was as if he had hit her—although he never would.

He left the next day, with a little suitcase, and found the apartment near his reserve. She tried to make it up.

“It was over long ago,” she kept saying. “He never mattered to me. You do. It was a mistake!”

“Mistakes happen, for sure,” Markus said. At any rate he did not go home.

Everyone goes away.

He was supposed to go to a support group about his smoking. Samantha had registered him. It was held in the palliative care unit in Saint John Regional Hospital. He didn’t get around to it.

George had given him the letter—if he promised to feed the budgies. So what else could he do?