Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (21 page)

“What other Roger would it be?” Mrs. Demers said, as if nothing was amiss, and shrugged.

Staying here, and seeing the great kindness of the band toward him by all but a few, made Doran feel deeply humble. And after he took his shower he sat on the edge of the tub with a white towel wrapped about him, his thin shoulders freckled, and listened to the waves beating monotonously out on the shore.

Two nights later, at about seven in the evening, Doran was listening to robins call from the trees. There was a knock on the door and Little Joe and Sky were there, bringing him a blueberry pie, from blueberries they had picked the day before.

They burst out laughing and left it, still warm from the oven, at the door, and turned and ran away.

Then Joel came to Doran the next day before noon. He said, “Did Andy treat you well?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good, for he’s young and mighty impatient. He wants all the changes now,” Joel said, and he laughed as if this was impossible.

Doran nodded and said he understood how that could happen, for in his life he also requested justice for all. “That’s why I write my articles,” he said. “I demand justice too!”

“Noble, noble,” Joel said, looking around as if agitated. “Noble for sure.” He paused, lit a cigarette and added: “I will show you where Roger hayed our nets and washed our livelihood away. You can use that in your next submission. Come with me.”

“Is Isaac mad at me?” Max asked.

“Why?”

“He seemed very angry at me.”

“Don’t worry about Isaac.” Joel smiled his engaging smile. “I never do!”

This struck Doran as a strange comment, even a betrayal, but he said nothing. He went with Joel to see where this haying had occurred. After they looked at where the hay supposedly had been dropped, Doran was going to leave, but Ginnish said, “No, stay with me. You don’t need to tell Isaac’s story—you need to tell mine.”

“What do you mean? I thought—I mean, it’s the band I’m dealing with.”

“Not a bit. People are upset,” Joel said emotionally. “Isaac wants all the publicity for himself. I said let it go, but many people are telling me Isaac’s getting too much attention—that’s what the men are saying, that there’s too much about him in the paper. He is leading you in the wrong direction.” Here Joel whispered, emotional still, “We think he and Roger might have made a deal about the pools. I don’t want to believe it, but other bands are making deals with the government and Isaac won’t. Anyway, everyone is sick to death of Isaac. So you have to tell some other story—about my struggle for independence, even from
Isaac himself! Isaac wanted you back on the reserve to control you, but I am going to put a stop to that. You come with me tonight, and I’ll show you what to write about.”

Doran waited for Joel near a laneway until nearly eight that evening. It was better than having Mrs. Demers tell him innocently that his managing editor was expecting to hear from him. So he stood in the laneway and chain-smoked. Twice he had written a story about the bulldozer’s burning being suspicious—perhaps even the result of “he who is being investigated.” He wrote, “The whites wanted the barricade destroyed. Some whites said they wouldn’t tolerate First Nations men in town.” That was probably true. Yet twice he’d torn it in two.

Then an hour before dark, Ginnish appeared and took Doran to the back cove in a canoe to meet one of the people who had been in the hold. Doran hoped for some firm proof of what had happened. To finally put the story to bed.

T
HEY HID THE CANOE BETWEEN SOME MAPLE SAPLINGS, FOR
Joel was suspicious, and lifted from the shallow water two broad boxes that he had hidden too, and walked the windswept barrens between two roads that cut down through the small pines. Joel was not as big as Isaac but he was very powerful, with longer-than-normal arms and big hands. He helped Doran along, manoeuvring those heavy boxes between fir and pine, and spoke to him quietly about his life. And it was a life that Doran himself couldn’t imagine. Physical violence—the mere idea of which Doran had always shrunk from—was as much a part of Joel’s life as breathing. Being cheated, shot at and thrown from a half-ton were part of a succession of stories Joel told to impress this young white man who wanted to please both him and Isaac, and was trying to do the best story he could.

They were the first there, and waited in the evening with bugs flicking and whining in their ears. Doran was filled with a kind of unease. He realized now that he would have been much better off if he had never heard of this story of his. He thought at this moment that his safety depended on something other than his integrity, and he was confused about what he should do. That is, the trail to the bottom of the lobster trap was complete, and he could not for the life of him back up and walk away.

After a while a man and a boy approached through the darkness, and Max did not see them until they were less than five feet away.

They met with Topper Monk, who had brought the water boy with him. Topper told Doran that he had almost died in the fourth hold of the
Lutheran
because the load was meant to drop on them all, because they had given the Indian a union card.

“It weren’t just meant for the poor little Indian,” he said.

But something else was important. And Joel seemed not only to flaunt this but to want to flaunt it. It was what he had promised Isaac he would not do.

It was the salmon that Ginnish had, and that Doran had unwittingly helped carry through those woods under the dark night sky. And Ginnish was selling them.

Ginnish took some ten salmon out of the two large cooler boxes and laid them out on the grass, and counted them. They were beautiful fish, the smell still wonderfully fresh. They had just entered the river pools from the sea a few nights before. Each fish was over eight pounds and under twenty.

Topper complained about the two smaller fish, saying they were grilse—that is, the smaller two-year-old salmon, which almost never go over five pounds. But this argument was dispensed with on the other side, when Joel said the twenty-pound salmon weighed twenty-five. So finally after twenty minutes everything was arrived at. The wind came up slightly, which was a blessing because of the whine of the flies. They put the fish in cooler boxes Topper had brought and covered them with grass and ice.

Then Topper paid Joel two hundred dollars.

“This is how we make money for our struggle.” Joel smiled at Doran, waving the money quickly for some reason before tucking it into his shirt. “So thanks for helping me.” Joel was happy with Doran now and spoke to him like a brother. He took out a bag of marijuana and began to roll it in with tobacco.

“Pretty good stuff, this,” he said. “I call it ‘my reserve,’ ” and he
smiled at this and shrugged when Doran did not smile. “You take things too serious,” he said.

“I do?”

“Sure—too serious. Have some fun—slap some pussy, get drunk, steal a car, go for a milkshake—do something! And stop wearing shorts!” And he laughed hilariously. “No one gives a fuck about this. Why do you write so much about it? I think you want to make a name for yourself with all those concerned fuckers in Upper Canada who always write about the Indians every summer, their faces all as pinched as weasels. They can’t shit without their wives’ permission.”

“That’s not the reason,” Doran began. “I came here to do a story and to get it right.”

“Well, let me tell you a secret—you’ll never get it right. Not with us. And you arrived here just to pretend. But Roger is in that house up there all alone … Sometimes, oh oh oh—sometimes I feel bad for Roger because of you. Because you have the big pretend going.”

“Pretend?”

“Sure, the big pretend. You can smell any white man who has it. The big pretend—pretend to know Indians and to like us. You don’t know us, and you certainly don’t like us.”

“Of course I do.”

But here Joel just held up his finger over his lips and said, “Shh,” and smiled sadly.

Then they were silent a moment. An owl fluttered by and scared Doran. Joel looked at him, smiling delightfully, and shrugged.

“Well, then, do you like me?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, tell my story,” he said. “Tell what I’ve been through—I have been the one who had to deal with this. Tell about me—how my brother was Hector. Take my picture for the paper!”

“Sure I will,” Doran said, hoping that they would leave to go back.

But they did not go back. They sat on the bank and smoked some grass, and drank a little from a bottle, and Doran found himself
becoming a part of the story he was writing. He suddenly blurted this out. It surprised even him that he did.

But when he said this, Joel simply shrugged.

“Haven’t you always been? I know exactly how Isaac thinks. Now you stay here until this is resolved—please, for my sake.” And he put his arm around Doran and handed him the bottle of rum. “You said you like us, prove it. Later you can write a book about me. I’ll give you all the information—about Amos and the whites—Isaac too—and how much he has against me. Now we’ll do things my way. No more Isaac. Isaac is a dead man. And when the movie is made I can be a consultant—or play a small part!”

Of course he was drunk and falling sideways—but Doran was drunk too.

“Who’s the only one willing to do something?” Joel said. “Wait and see, and it will be me!”

About an hour later the wind came up much stronger. There was the smell of the enclosed trees and the rushing water. Doran was unfamiliar with the woods. If Joel left him, he would never find his way out.

He went to the trees to relieve himself and there suddenly the young water boy, Brice Peel, tugged at his arm and whispered to him these words:

“Roger Savage didn’t do nothing. The load didn’t fall on anyone—tell them at the paper.”

“What?” Doran said.

The boy said nothing else, because Topper was coming toward them, and he moved away quickly, grabbing on to the grasses so as not to fall into the water. But he fell in anyway. Joel laughed and rushed down and helped him out.

“There you go, my little white poky-dot friend.”

Topper smiled and slapped at some flies, and asked Doran if he liked it here and was everyone nice to him? Doran nodded, listened to the wind
rising. He tried to be comfortable and sit like Joel did. Joel, who seemed to be impervious to wind and flies, and simply stared into the dark.

There were real tears now in Joel’s eyes. “You have not done enough to promote our cause,” he said, “so maybe I’ll have to kill you someday. How would that be?”

Doran now knew he had compromised himself, even though it was not intentional.

He decided to take his typewriter and leave the next day. He was surprised at how relieved he was to have come to this decision. Because if he did write a story, how much different would it now be from the one Joel wanted?

Topper and Joel began to sing; then they had an argument. Then the talk filtered out into a diatribe in the drunken evening, about the marijuana and when Joel could get it to them, and how to get it off the reserve, and that Isaac wanted him to destroy the crop before the press found out about it. Joel said this and winked at Doran.