Last Night in Twisted River (10 page)

“Why would you get the cast wet?” Dominic asked him. “I’ve never seen you fall in.”

“Maybe I saw enough of the river yesterday, Cookie.”

“There’s venison stew,” one of the kitchen helpers was telling the loggers.

There’d been an accident with one of the horses, and another accident with the tractor-powered jammer. Ketchum said that one of the French Canadians had lost a finger unloading logs from a log brow, too.

“Well, it’s Friday,” Dominic said, as if he expected accidents among fools on a Friday. “There’s chickpea soup for those of you who
care
that it’s Friday,” the cook announced.

Ketchum noted his old friend’s impatience. “What’s the matter, Cookie? What happened?” Ketchum asked him.

“Dot and May were just fooling around,” the cook explained. He told Ketchum what had happened—what May had said about Injun Jane, too.

“Don’t tell me—
tell Jane,”
Ketchum told him. “Jane will tear May a new asshole, if you tell her.”

“I know, Ketchum—that’s why I’m
not
telling her.”

“If Jane had seen Dot holding your hands on her tits, she would have already torn Dot a new asshole, Cookie.”

Dominic Baciagalupo knew that, too. The world was a precarious place; the cook didn’t want to know the statistics regarding how many new assholes were being torn every minute. In his time, Ketchum had torn many; he would think nothing of tearing a few more.

“There’s roast chicken tonight, with stuffing and scalloped potatoes,” Dominic told Ketchum.

Ketchum looked pained to hear it. “I have a date,” the big man said. “Just my luck to miss stuffed chicken.”

“A
date
?” the cook said with disgust. He never thought of Ketchum’s relationships—mainly, with the dance-hall women—as
dates
. And lately Ketchum had been seeing Six-Pack Pam. God only knew how much they could drink
together!
Dominic Baciagalupo thought. Having saved her, the cook had a soft spot for Six-Pack, but he sensed that she didn’t like him much; maybe she resented being saved.

“Are you still seeing Pam?” Dominic asked his hard-drinking friend.

But Ketchum didn’t want to talk about it. “You should be concerned that May knows about you and Jane, Cookie. Don’t you think you should be a little worried?”

Dominic turned his attention to where the kitchen helpers were, and what they were doing; they had set up a folding table by the side of the haul road. There were propane burners in the wanigan; the burners kept the soup and the stew hot. There were big bowls and spoons on the folding table; the loggers went into the wanigan, each with a bowl and a spoon in hand. The women served them in the wanigan.

“You don’t look worried enough, Cookie,” Ketchum told him. “If May knows about Jane, Dot knows. If Dot knows, every woman in your kitchen knows. Even
I
know, but I don’t give a shit about it.”

“I know. I appreciate it,” Dominic said.

“My point is, how long before Constable Carl knows? Speaking of assholes,” Ketchum said. He rested his heavy cast on the cook’s shoulder. “Look at me, Cookie.” With his good hand, Ketchum pointed to his forehead—at the long, livid scar. “My head’s harder than yours, Cookie. You don’t want the cowboy to know about you and Jane—believe me.”

Who’s your date? Dominic Baciagalupo almost asked his old friend, just to change the subject. But the cook didn’t really want to know who Ketchum was screwing—especially if it
wasn’t
Six-Pack Pam.

Most nights, increasingly, when Jane went home, it was so late that Constable Carl had already passed out; the cowboy wouldn’t wake up until after she’d left for work in the morning. There was only the occasional trouble—mostly when Jane went home too early. But even a dumb drunk like the constable would eventually figure it out. Or one of the kitchen helpers would say something to her husband; the sawmill workers were not necessarily as fond of the cook and Injun Jane as the rivermen and the other loggers were.

“I get your point,” the cook said to Ketchum.

“Shit, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “Does
Danny
know about you and Jane?”

“I was going to tell him,” Dominic answered.

“Going to,”
Ketchum said derisively. “Is that like saying you were
going to
wear a condom, or is that like wearing one?”

“I get your point,” the cook said again.

“Nine o’clock, Sunday morning,” Ketchum told him. Dominic could only guess that it was a date of two nights’ duration that Ketchum was having—more like a
spree
or a
bender
, maybe.

—

IN TWISTED RIVER
, if there were nights the cook could have concealed from his son, they would have been Saturday nights, when the whoring around and drinking to excess were endemic to a community staking an improbable claim to permanence in such close proximity to a violent river—not to mention the people, who made a plainly perilous living and looked upon their Saturday nights as an indulgence they deserved.

Dominic Baciagalupo, who was both a teetotaler and a widower
not
in the habit of whoring around, was nonetheless sympathetic to the various self-destructions-in-progress he would witness on an average Saturday night. Maybe the cook revealed more disapproval for Ketchum’s behavior than he would ever show toward Twisted River’s other louts and miscreants. Because Ketchum was no fool, perhaps the cook had less patience for Ketchum’s foolishness, but to a smart twelve-year-old—and Danny was both observant and smart—there appeared to be more than impatience motivating his father’s everlasting disappointment in Ketchum. And if Injun Jane didn’t defend Ketchum from the cook’s condemnation, young Dan did.

That Saturday night, when Angel had possibly arrived at Dead Woman Dam—where, because people float lower than logs, the boy’s battered body might already have passed under the containment boom, in which case the young Canadian would be eddying in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction to the right or left of the main dam and the sluice spillway—Danny Baciagalupo was helping his dad wipe down the tables after supper had been served in the cookhouse. The kitchen help had gone home, leaving Injun Jane to scour the last of the pots and pans while she waited for the washing cycles to end, so she could put all the towels and other linens in the dryers.

Whole families came to the cookhouse for Saturday-night supper; some of the men were already drunk and fighting with their wives, and a few of the women (in turn) lashed out at their children. One of the sawmill men had puked in the washroom, and two drunken loggers had shown up late for supper—naturally, they’d insisted on being fed. The spaghetti and meatballs, which the cook made every Saturday night—for the kids—was congealed and growing cold and was so beneath Dominic Baciagalupo’s standards that he fixed the men some fresh penne with a little ricotta and the perpetual parsley.

“This is fuckin’ delicious!” one of the drunks had declared.

“What’s it called, Cookie?” the other hammered logger asked.

“Prezzémolo,”
Dominic said importantly, the sheer exoticness of the word washing over the drunken loggers like another round of beer. The cook had made them repeat the word until they could say it correctly
—prets-ZAY-mo-loh
.

Jane was disgusted; she knew it was nothing more exotic than the Italian word for
parsley
. “For two drunks who were
born
late!” Jane complained.

“You would let Ketchum go hungry, if it was Ketchum,” Danny said to his father. “You’re wicked harsh on Ketchum.”

But the two drunks had been given a special supper and sent on their contented way. Danny and his dad and Jane were at the tail end of their Saturday-night chores when the wind from the suddenly kicked-open door to the dining room heralded another late arrival at the cookhouse.

From the kitchen, Jane couldn’t see the visitor. She shouted in the direction of the rushing wind at the dining-room door. “You’re too late! Supper is
over!”

“I ain’t hungry,” said Six-Pack Pam.

Indeed, there was nothing hunger-driven in Pam’s appearance; what little flesh she had hung loosely from her big bones, and her lean, feral-looking face, tight-lipped and drawn, suggested more of a mostly-beer diet than a penchant for overeating. Yet she was tall and broad-shouldered enough to wear Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt without looking lost in it, and her lank blond hair, which was streaked with gray, appeared to be clean but uncared for—like the rest of her. She held a flashlight as big as a billy club. (Twisted River was not a well-lit town.) Not even the sleeves of Ketchum’s shirt were too long for her.

“So I guess you’ve killed him and claimed his clothes for your own,” the cook said, watching her warily.

“I ain’t chokin’, either, Cookie,” Pam told him.

“Not
this
time, Six-Pack!” Jane called from the kitchen. Danny guessed that the ladies must have known each other well enough for Jane to have recognized Pam’s voice.

“It’s kinda late for the hired help to still be here, ain’t it?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic recognized Six-Pack’s special drunkenness with an envy and nostalgia that surprised him—the big woman could hold her beer and bourbon, better than Ketchum. Jane had come out of the kitchen with a pasta pot under her arm; the open end of the pot was leveled at Pam like the mouth of a cannon.

Young Dan, in a presexual state of one-third arousal and two-thirds premonition, remembered Ketchum’s remark about women losing their looks, and how the various degrees of lost looks registered with Constable Carl. To the twelve-year-old, Jane
hadn’t
lost her looks—not quite yet. Her face was still pretty, her long braid was striking, and more radiant to imagine was all that coal-black hair when she undid the braid. There were her stupendous breasts to contemplate, too.

Yet seeing Six-Pack Pam unhinged Danny in a different but similar way: She was as handsome (in the category of strong-looking) as a man, and what was womanly about her came with a rawness—how she had insouciantly thrown on Ketchum’s shirt, without a bra, so that her loose breasts swelled the shirt—and now her eyes darted from Jane to Danny, and then fixed upon the cook with the venturesome but nervous daring of a young girl.

“I need your help with Ketchum, Cookie,” Pam said. Dominic was fearful that Ketchum had had a heart attack, or worse; he hoped that Six-Pack would spare young Daniel the gruesome details.

“
I
can help you with Ketchum,” Injun Jane told Pam. “I suppose he’s passed out somewhere—if so, I can carry him easier than Cookie can.”

“He’s passed out naked on the toilet, and I ain’t got but one toilet,” Pam said to Dominic, not looking at Jane.

“I hope he was just reading,” the cook replied.

Ketchum appeared to be making his dogged way through Dominic Baciagalupo’s books, which were really Dominic’s mother’s books and Rosie’s beloved novels. For someone who’d left school when he was younger than Danny, Ketchum read the books he borrowed with a determination bordering on lunacy. He returned the books to the cook with words circled on almost every page—not underlined passages, or even complete sentences, but just isolated words. (Danny wondered if his mom had taught Ketchum to read that way.)

Once young Dan had made a list of the words Ketchum had circled in his mother’s copy of Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
. Collectively, the words made no sense at all.

symbolize
whipping-post
sex
malefactresses
pang
bosom
embroidered
writhing
ignominious
matronly
tremulous
punishment
salvation
plaintive
wailings
possessed
misbegotten
sinless
innermost
retribution
paramour
besmirches
hideous

And these were only the words Ketchum had circled in the first four chapters!

“What do you suppose he’s thinking?” Danny had asked his dad. The cook had held his tongue, though it was hard to resist the temptation to reply. Surely “sex” and “bosom” were much on Ketchum’s mind; as for “malefactresses,” Ketchum had known some. (Six-Pack Pam among them!) Regarding the “paramour,” Dominic Baciagalupo was more of an authority than he wanted to be—the hell with what Ketchum made of the word! And considering “whippingpost” and “writhing”—not to mention “wailings,” “misbegotten,” “besmirches,” and “hideous”—the cook had no desire to investigate Ketchum’s prurient interest in those words.

The “matronly,” the “sinless,” the “innermost,” and above all “symbolize,” were mild surprises; nor would Dominic have imagined that Ketchum gave much thought to what was “embroidered” or “ignominious” or “tremulous” or “plaintive.” The cook believed that “retribution” (especially the “punishment” part) was as much up his old friend’s alley as the “possessed” factor, because Ketchum surely was possessed—to the degree that the “salvation” ingredient seemed highly unlikely. (And did Ketchum regularly feel a “pang”—a pang for whom or what? Dominic wondered.)

“Maybe they’re just words,” young Dan had reasoned.

“What do you mean, Daniel?”

Was Ketchum trying to improve his vocabulary? For an uneducated man, he was very well spoken—and he kept borrowing books!

“It’s a list of kind of
fancy
words, most of them,” Danny had speculated.

Yes, the cook concurred—“sex” and “bosom,” and perhaps “pang,” excluded.

“All I know is, I was readin’ out loud to him, and then he took the fuckin’ book and went into the bathroom and passed out,” Six-Pack was saying. “He’s got himself wedged in a corner, but he’s still on the toilet,” she added.

Dominic didn’t want to know about the reading out loud. His impression of Ketchum’s dance-hall women did not include an element of literary interest or curiosity; it was the cook’s opinion that Ketchum rarely spoke to these women, or listened to them. But Dominic had once asked Ketchum (insincerely) what he did for “foreplay.”