were—and yet all those children simply made him cry. A little girl with a big hat and huge earrings came over to him and took his hand gently, smiling.
Some nights he had to stay up late, for the Governor General and her entourage were celebrating something, and he would look up at the Chilean sky and count the stars.
“Amos, they aren’t the same stars anymore,” he would say.
He had his black belts in two disciplines. And you could insult him and he would laugh. Or shrug. Or like his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend you could call him a big baby and he would nod and say yes.
He had married young, a white woman—young Samantha Dulse—but that did not last, even though they were still friendly and she probably still loved him, and then he had a native girlfriend, whom he did not love enough. In fact, he did not love either of them enough. He loved Sky Barnaby. He had always loved Sky Barnaby, from the time he was fifteen. But she was wild too, and had knifed a man in a fight downriver in 2000. It didn’t kill the man. But Markus had lost touch with her. It all seemed so long ago.
His own people disliked him. The whites distrusted him too, andlike his grandfather Amos he was morally on his own. So Markus often thought of Amos. On the trip to Chile a man, drunk on too much champagne, tried to intercept Her Excellency—and Markus reached his hand out and grabbed him by the collarbone and quietly caused him some pain for a second. Her Excellency did not notice. It wasn’t much—but it ruined the evening for him. He had been invited to dine with some Chilean native men, but now he felt he could not leave Her Excellency at that time, and so declined.
“I will not leave the building until Her Excellency does,” he said.
He stood near her for three more hours, and got back to his room without having eaten a thing. He took off his shirt and looked at the reflection of the tattoo on his upper chest. It read:
Sky
.
It was the anniversary of Little Joe’s death. He had not thought of it until he looked at the reflection of the tattoo. He blessed himself and said a prayer, and thought of the graveyard in Canada, in the Maritimes, on the Miramichi, so far away.
“I didn’t mean to get Little Joe killed,” he called to Sky one night in 1992, when she was far up the road. “I didn’t—mean to—” It was in the winter and he stood by the trees, snow coming down over him almost all night long.
“You should have joined the military,” a Canadian sergeant, also part of the bodyguard, had said to him that night in Santiago.
“Yes, well, it is something, isn’t it, sir,” he said.
“What is something?”
“That people like you and me will never be liked and almost always be needed.”
After that they did what Canadian men everywhere do. They didn’t speak of racism or the global war—they spoke of hockey. For what in hell else was there, really, except the precarious balance and the fire dance on ice?
1985
1
M ARKUS’S GRANDFATHER A MOS P AUL HAD BEEN A SMALL , wiry, happy-go-lucky man who travelled all over the province to powwows, and had the respect of everyone. He played bingo, and tried to get businesses to donate money and commodities to his reserve. He had started a toys-for-tots program at the supermarkets in Chatham and Newcastle, and made sure three or four native children were sent to camp each summer from the Tim Hortons sponsor. Being chief and wearing the bright vest of the chief was a grand thing. Until now.
Amos was very bothered by the case of Hector Penniac. Something might happen, and he could foresee it. He must take his reserve’s side. Yet he believed that he must protect Roger Savage if Roger had done nothing wrong. But little by little the idea that he
had
done something wrong began to infiltrate the thoughts of his friends and colleagues and made it seem as if the ingrained hatreds of the past were again haunting all of them.
“However,” Amos would answer these people as he