Last Night in Twisted River (55 page)

“Yes, he
did!”
Charlotte said, impressed.

“Probably after deer season, when the bay was frozen,” Ketchum considered. “I’m guessing that when he shot a deer—and your Mounties would have known when someone was shooting, given how quiet it would be here in the winter, with all the snow—and when the Mounties came and asked him what he was shooting, I expect your granddaddy told them some story. Like he was shooting over a red squirrel’s head, because the squirrel’s chattering was driving him crazy, or that a herd of deer had been feeding on his favorite cedars, and he shot over
their
heads so they would go eat all the cedars on someone else’s island—when the whole time he was talking, the deer, which Granddaddy would have gutted over this hole, so there wouldn’t be any blood in the snow, and where he was keeping the meat cold … well, do you see what I’m getting at, Charlotte?” Ketchum asked her. “This here hole is a
poacher’s
meat locker! I told you—there’s lots of deer around here, I’ll bet.”

Ketchum and Hero had stayed in that run-down log cabin, haunted or not. (“Hell, most places I’ve lived are haunted,” Ketchum had remarked.) The newer sleeping cabins were not to the old woodsman’s liking; as for the torn screens in Granddaddy’s cabin, Ketchum said, “If you don’t get bitten by a mosquito or two, you can hardly tell you’re in the woods.” And there was more loon activity in that back bay, because there were fewer boats; Ketchum had figured that out on the first day, too. He liked the sound of loons. “Besides, Hero farts something awful—you wouldn’t want him stinking up your sleeping cabins, Charlotte!”

At the end of the day, Charlotte wasn’t shocked by the idea that her granddaddy had been a poacher. He’d died destitute and alcoholic; gambling debts and whiskey had done him in. Now, at least, the trapdoor in the floor had been given a reason for its existence, and this rather quickly led Ketchum to his suggested
improvements
. It never occurred to the old river driver that Charlotte had not once been interested in living on her beloved island in the frigid winter months, when the prevailing wind had permanently bent the trees—when the bay was frozen and piled high with snow, and there wasn’t a human soul around, except the occasional ice fisherman and those madmen who rode their snowmobiles over the lake.

“It wouldn’t take a whole lot to winterize the main cottage,” Ketchum began. “When you put in your flush toilets, you just want to be sure you install two septic systems—the main one, and a smaller one that nobody has to know about. Forget about using the sleeping cabins; it would be too expensive to heat them. Just stick to the main cottage. A little electric heat will be enough to keep the toilet and the sink—and the big bathtub you want, Charlotte—from freezing. You just have to heat-wrap the pipes to the small septic tank. That way, you can flush the toilet and drain the dishwater out of the sink—and empty the bathtub, too. You just can’t pump water up from the lake, or heat any water—not in a propane hot-water heater, anyway. You’ll have to cut a hole in the ice, and bring your water up by bucket; you heat the water on the gas stove for your baths, and for washing the dishes. You would sleep in the main cottage, of course—and most of your heat would come from the woodstove. You’ll need a woodstove in your writing shack, too, Danny—but that’s all you’ll need. The back bay nearest the mainland will freeze first; you can haul in your groceries on a sled towed by a snowmobile, and take your trash to town the same way. Hell, you could ski or snowshoe here from the mainland,” Ketchum said. “You just might be better off staying away from the main channel out of Pointe au Baril Station. I don’t imagine that channel freezes over too safely.”

“But why would we want to come here in the
winter?”
Danny asked the old woodsman; Charlotte just stared at Ketchum, uncomprehending.

“Well, why don’t we come up here this winter, Danny?” Ketchum asked the writer. “I’ll show you why you might like it.”

Ketchum didn’t mean “winter”—not exactly. He meant deer season, which was in November. The first deer season that Danny met up with Ketchum at Pointe au Baril Station, the ice hadn’t thickened sufficiently for them to cross the back bay from the mainland to Turner Island; not even snowshoes or cross-country skis would have been safe, and Ketchum’s snowmobile surely would have sunk. In addition to the snowmobile, and a vast array of foul-weather gear, Ketchum had brought the guns, but he’d left Hero at home—actually, he’d left that fine animal with Six-Pack Pam. Six-Pack had dogs, and Hero “tolerated” her dogs, Ketchum said. (Deer hunting was “unsuitable” for dogs, Ketchum also said.)

It didn’t matter that they couldn’t get to Charlotte’s island that first year, anyway. The builder wouldn’t be finished with all the improvements before the following summer; Ketchum’s clever winterizing would have to wait until then, too. The builder, Andy Grant, was what Ketchum affectionately called “a local fella.” In fact, Charlotte had grown up with him—they’d been childhood friends. Andy had not only renovated the main cottage for Charlotte’s parents a few years ago; he’d more recently restored the two sleeping cabins to Charlotte’s specifications.

Andy Grant told Ketchum and Danny where the deer were in the Bayfield area, and Ketchum already knew a fella named LaBlanc, who called himself a hunting guide; LaBlanc showed Ketchum and Danny an area north of Pointe au Baril, in the vicinity of Byng Inlet and Still River. But, in Ketchum’s case, it didn’t matter where he hunted; the deer were all around.

At first, Danny was a little insulted by the weapon Ketchum had selected for him—a Winchester Ranger, which was manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, in the mid-eighties, and then discontinued. It was a 20-gauge, repeating shotgun with a slide action—what Ketchum called “a pump.” What initially insulted Danny was that the shotgun was a
youth
model.

“Don’t get your balls crossed about it,” Ketchum told the writer. “It’s a fine gun for a beginner. You better keep things simple when you start hunting. I’ve seen some fellas blow their toes off.”

For the sake of his toes, Danny guessed, Ketchum instructed the beginner to always have three rounds in the Winchester—one in the chamber and two more in the tubular magazine. “Don’t forget how many shots you’re carrying,” Ketchum said.

Danny knew that the first two rounds were buckshot; the third was a deer slug, what Ketchum called the “kill-shot.” It made no sense to load more than three rounds, no matter what the shotgun’s capacity was. “If you need a fourth or a fifth shot, you’ve already missed,” Ketchum told Danny. “The deer’s long gone.”

At night, Danny had trouble keeping Ketchum out of the bar at Larry’s Tavern, which was also a motel—south of Pointe au Baril Station, on Route 69. The motel’s walls were so thin, they could hear whoever was humping in the room next door. “Some asshole trucker and a hooker,” Ketchum declared the first night.

“I don’t think there are any hookers in Pointe au Baril,” Danny said.

“It’s a one-night stand, then,” Ketchum replied. “They sure don’t sound
married.”

Another night, there was a prolonged caterwauling of a certain female kind. “This one sounds different from the night before, and the night before that,” Ketchum said.

Whoever the woman was, she went on and on. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” she kept repeating.

“Are you timing this, Danny? It might be a record,” Ketchum said, but he walked naked into the hall and beat on the door of the longest orgasm in the world. “Listen up, fella,” the old river driver said. “She’s obviously
lying.”

The young man who opened the door was menacing, and in a mood to fight, but the fight—if you could call it that—was over in a hurry. Ketchum put the guy in a choke hold before the fella had managed to throw more than a punch or two. “I
wasn’t
lying,” the woman called from the dark room, but by then not even the young man believed her.

It was not how Danny had imagined he and Ketchum would be camping out, or otherwise roughing it, while they were hunting deer. As for the deer, the first buck Danny dropped in Bayfield required all three rounds—including the kill-shot. “Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” was all Ketchum told him.

Ketchum got his buck near Byng Inlet, with one shot from his 12-gauge. The next deer season in Ontario, they shot two more bucks—both of them at Still River—and by then the so-called improvements on Charlotte’s island were complete, including the winterizing. Ketchum and Danny returned to Pointe au Baril Station in early February, when the ice on the bay nearest the mainland was two feet thick. They followed the snowmobile portage from Payne’s Road, out of Pointe au Baril, and went across the ice and drifting snow to the back dock and Granddaddy’s cabin.

Deer season was over, but Ketchum had brought his 12-gauge. “Just in case,” he told Danny.

“In case
what
?” Danny asked him. “We’re not poaching deer, Ketchum.”

“In case there’s some other
critter,”
Ketchum replied.

Later, Danny saw Ketchum grilling a couple of venison steaks on the barbecue, which Andy had hooked up to the propane inside Charlotte’s new screened-in verandah; the verandah was boarded up in winter to keep out the snow, because the outdoor summer furniture and two canoes were stored there. Unbeknownst to Danny, Ketchum had also brought his bow.

Danny forgot that Ketchum was a bow hunter, too, and that the archery season for deer in New Hampshire was three months long; Ketchum had had a lot of practice.

“That’s poaching,” Danny told the logger.

“The Mounties didn’t hear any shots, did they?” Ketchum asked.

“It’s still poaching, Ketchum.”

“If you don’t hear anything, it’s more like nothing, Danny. I know Cookie’s not a fan of venison, but I think it tastes pretty good this way.”

Danny didn’t really like deer hunting—not the killing part, anyway—but he enjoyed spending time with Ketchum, and that February of ’86, when they stayed for a few nights in the main cottage on Turner Island, Danny discovered that the winter on Georgian Bay was wonderful.

From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When new snow was falling, and there were near whiteout conditions—so that where the rocks on shore ended and the frozen bay began were all
one—
it struck Danny Angel that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival.

Danny sat transfixed in his writing shack, looking at that wind-bent pine; he was actually imagining what it might be like to
live
on the island in Lake Huron for a whole winter. (Of course he knew that Charlotte wouldn’t have tolerated it for longer than one weekend.)

Ketchum had come into the writing shack; he’d been hauling water from the lake, and had brought some pasta pots to a near boil on the gas stove. He’d come to inquire if Danny wanted to take the first bath or the next one.

“Do you see that tree, Ketchum?” Danny asked him, pointing to the little pine.

“I suppose you mean the one the wind has fucked over,” Ketchum said.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Danny answered. “What does it remind you of?”

“Your dad,” Ketchum told him, without hesitation. “That tree’s got Cookie written all over it, but it’ll be fine, Danny—like your dad. Cookie’s going to be fine.”

KETCHUM AND DANNY
went deer hunting around Pointe au Baril in November of ’86—their third and last deer season together—and they went “camping,” as they called it, on Turner Island in late January of ’87, too. At Danny’s insistence, and to Ketchum’s considerable consternation, there was no more bow hunting out of season. Instead of his bow and the hunting arrows, Ketchum brought Hero along—together with the just-in-case 12-gauge, which was never fired.

Danny believed that the bear hound’s reputation for farting was exaggerated; that January, Ketchum again used the dog as an excuse to sleep in Granddaddy’s log cabin, which was unheated. With all the winterizing, the main cottage was a little too warm (and too comfortable) for the old woodsman, who said he liked to see his breath at night—when he could see at all. Danny couldn’t imagine what Ketchum could see at night in Granddaddy’s cabin, because there was no electricity or propane lamps there. The logger took a flashlight with him when he went off to bed, but he carried it like a club; Danny never saw him turn it on.

Ketchum had come to Charlotte’s island only one time in summer, the same time when the cook had also come and gone. Charlotte never knew that Ketchum had the 12-gauge with him then, but Danny did. He’d heard Ketchum shooting a rattlesnake down at the back dock. Charlotte had taken the boat into Pointe au Baril Station; she didn’t hear the shot.

“The rattlesnakes are protected—an endangered species, I think,” Danny told the river driver. Ketchum had already skinned the snake and cut off its rattles.

In the summer, Charlotte had her boat serviced at Desmasdon’s, the boat works where they dry-docked boats in the winter. Now, when Danny watched Ketchum skinning the snake, he was reminded of a poster on the ice cream freezer at Desmasdon’s—it displayed the various snakes of Ontario, the Eastern Massasauga rattler among them. Those rattlesnakes really
were
protected, Danny was trying to make Ketchum understand, but the woodsman cut him off.

“Hero’s smart enough not to get bitten by a fucking snake, Danny—I don’t need to protect
him,”
Ketchum started in. “But I’m not so sure about you and Charlotte. You walk all over this island—I’ve seen you!—just talking to each other and not looking where you’re stepping. People in love aren’t looking for rattlers; they’re not listening for them, either. And you and Charlotte are going to have a
baby
, isn’t that right? It’s not the
rattlesnakes
that need protection, Danny.” With that, Ketchum cut off the snake’s head with his Browning knife. He drained the venom from the fangs on a rock; then he hurled the head off the back dock, into the bay. “Fish food,” he said. “I’m a regular environmentalist, sometimes.” He tossed the snakeskin up on the roof of Granddaddy’s cabin, where the sun would dry it out, he said—adding, “If the seagulls and the crows don’t get it first.”