Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Read Online Free

stood and took the Skilsaw and began to cut the two-by-four for the last section of the back room he was redoing. When he stopped cutting, with the fine sawdust on his arms he sat and thought: “They are already thinking—I mean some—that it was set up. How could I ever do that to anyone?”
    “Why did I hook on?” he said bitterly. “Everything was all right before.”
    From his youth he had prosecuted the world only on his own terms and had learned no talent to solve problems when the world turned against him. He was a loner, and most often those who turned against him were not alone.
    He washed his arms and face with turpentine and water, removing the paint and sawdust, and went along the back road with the high pines, all the way to the grave. The gate seemed to swing along its arc too fast when he opened it, and Roger stopped for a moment and tightened the hinge with his powerful fingers. Then he went down and stood before the mound of dirt. He was in the little Micmac graveyard with old graves crumbling from the 1840s.
    He had never been off the river in his life and probably had never thought that he would have a crisis placed before him like the mound of dirt. Like many boys he had thought that his life would be very exciting by being like everyone else’s. And what in the world was wrong with that? Many people who labelled him old-fashioned ended up doing what he had done to begin with.
    He went back home and the night was sweet, but the trees blew in the wind and the smell of cold sand came up from the bay and the twizzle-shaped seeds fell from those trees in front of his yard—the one he had been so proud of in the years gone by.
    Perhaps Roger loaded it there and then. That is, his rifle.



SEPTEMBER 1, 2006
    M ARKUS P AUL HAD NEVER FORGOTTEN THE CASE, HAD NEVER solved it.
    He had been a policeman since 1992. And people told him he surmised too much. Certainly he drank too much. In late August, wherever he was, he would begin to think of things that had happened that summer of 1985 and he would long to go back to his reserve.
    He remembered that day he and Little Joe Barnaby had gone fishing. He had put the biggest worm on the smallest boy’s hook and set the line down in the best rip, and Little Joe took his shoes off and wiggled the line up and down, waiting for the trout to strike. Markus went up on a limb of the spruce above him and watched the shadows of the pool.
    “There there there,” Markus would whisper, “it’s coming it’s coming—now!”
    But the trout would pass by, or skim away, and the water would become still. There was a smell of spruce gum in the trees, and the pulpy smell of warm air travelling in the branches. Little birds hopped on small dead twigs a few feet away.
    “Will I ever never ever be able to catch a trout?” Little Joe said later.
    “Sure you will,” Markus said as they walked back up the road in the white twilight with bugs flitting over their heads. “Here, do you want to carry mine for a while?”
    “I don’t want to kill them,” Little Joe said, holding the trout, his socks sticking out of his pockets. “I want to catch them and eat them.”
    “That’s the best policy,” Markus had said. He still remembered the warm air, and the scent of warm spruce gum, and the birds hopping.
    Behind them Markus’s girlfriend, Sky Barnaby, was listening to the older girls talking—they whispered about Much Fun. It was a fine and dreamy night. The waves washed on the shore when they got down to the bay, and someone saw a shooting star.
    Once, when Markus was in South America as part of the bodyguard for the Governor General and her entourage, he found himself visiting the adobe villages of the natives in the hills outside Santiago and crying. He did not know why, and would never be able to tell you why. But he sat on a stump in a yard filled with children and broke into tears. A strange thing to see, this man, six foot three, who was a native man like the villagers