Last Night in Twisted River (59 page)

The Winchester Ranger had a birch-wood forestock and butt-stock, with a rubber recoil pad that the writer now rested against his shoulder. Danny had to admit that he loved listening to his dad and Ketchum going at it.

“God damn you, Ketchum,” the cook was saying. “One night I’ll get up to pee, and my son will shoot me—thinking I’m the cowboy!”

Danny laughed. “Come on, you two—it’s
Christmas!
Let’s try to have a Merry Christmas,” the writer said.

But Ketchum wasn’t in a merry mood. “Danny’s not going to shoot you, Cookie,” the logger said. “I just want you fucking fellas to be
ready!”

“IN-UK-SHUK,”
Danny sometimes said in his sleep. Charlotte had taught him how to pronounce the Indian word; or, in Canada, was one supposed to say the
Inuit
word? (An
Inuk
word, Danny had also heard; he had no idea what was correct.) Danny had heard Charlotte say the
inuksuk
word many times.

When he woke up the morning after Christmas, Danny wondered if he should move the photograph of Charlotte from above the headboard of his bed—or perhaps exchange it for a different picture. In the photo in question, Charlotte is standing, wet and dripping, in a bathing suit, with her arms wrapped around herself; she’s smiling, but she looks cold. In the distance, one can see the island’s main dock—Charlotte was just swimming there—but nearer to her tall figure, between her and the dock, stands the unreadable
inuksuk
. This particular stone cairn was somewhat man-shaped but not really a human likeness. From the water, it might have been mistaken for a mark of navigation; some
inuksuit
(that was the plural form) were navigational markers, but not this one.

Two large rocks atop each other composed each manlike leg; a kind of shelf or tabletop possibly represented the figure’s hips or waist. Four smaller rocks composed a potbellied upper body. The creature, if it was intended to have human features, had absurdly truncated arms; its arms were as disproportionately short as its legs were overlong. The head, if it was meant to be a head, suggested permanently windswept hair. The stone cairn was as stunted as the winter-beaten pines on the Georgian Bay islands. The cairn stood only as tall as Charlotte’s hips, and given the perspective of the photograph above the headboard of Danny’s bed—that is, with Charlotte in the foreground of the frame—the
inuksuk
looked even shorter than it was. Yet it also appeared to be indestructible; maybe that’s why the word was on Danny’s lips when he woke up.

There were countless
inuksuit
on those islands—and many more out on Route 69, between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, where Danny remembered a sign that said
FIRST NATION, OJIBWAY TERRITORY.
Not far from those summer cottages around Moonlight Bay, where Danny had driven in the boat with Charlotte one scorching day, there were some striking
inuksuit
near the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.

But what
were
they, exactly? the writer now wondered, as he lay in bed the morning after Christmas. Not even Charlotte knew who had built the
inuksuk
on her island.

There’d been a carpenter from the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve on Andy Grant’s crew, the summer the two sleeping cabins were under construction. Another summer, Danny remembered, one of the guys who brought the propane tanks to the island had a boat named
First Nation
. He’d told Danny he was a pure-blooded Ojibway, but Charlotte said it was “unlikely;” Danny hadn’t asked her why she was skeptical.

“Maybe Granddaddy built your
inuksuk
,” Danny had said to Charlotte. Perhaps, he’d thought, the various Indians who’d worked on Turner Island over the years had rebuilt the stone cairn whenever the rocks had fallen down.

“The rocks don’t fall down,” Charlotte said. “Granddaddy had nothing to do with our
inuksuk
. A native built it—it won’t ever fall down.”

“But what do they
mean
, exactly?” Danny asked her.

“They imply origins, respect, endurance,” Charlotte answered, but this was too vague to satisfy the writer in Danny Angel; he remembered being surprised that Charlotte seemed satisfied with such a nonspecific description.

As for what an individual
inuksuk
meant—“Well, shit,” as Ketchum had said, “it seems to matter which Injun you ask.” (Ketchum believed that some
inuksuit
were nothing but meaningless heaps of rocks.)

Danny peered under his bed at the Winchester. Per Ketchum’s instructions, the loaded shotgun lay in an open case; according to Ketchum, the case should remain unzipped, “because any fool intruder can hear a zipper.”

It was obvious, of course,
which
fool intruder Ketchum meant—an eighty-three-year-old retired deputy sheriff, all the way from fucking New Hampshire! “And the safety?” Danny had asked Ketchum. “Do I leave the safety off, too?” It made a sound, a soft click, when you pushed the button for the safety, which was slightly forward of the trigger housing, but Ketchum had told Danny to leave the safety on.

The way the old logger put it was: “If the cowboy can hear the safety click off, he’s already too close to you.”

Danny looked first at the photograph of Charlotte with the
inuksuk
standing behind her, then at the 20-gauge shotgun under his bed. Perhaps the stone cairn and the Winchester Ranger both represented protection—the 20-gauge of a more specific kind. He was not unhappy to have the gun, Danny was thinking, though it seemed to him that every Christmas ushered in a morbid preoccupation—sometimes initiated by Ketchum (such as the Winchester) but at other times inspired by Danny or his dad. This Christmas Eve, for example, the cook could be blamed for beginning a downward spiral of gloominess.

“Just think of it,” Dominic had said to his son and Ketchum. “If Joe were alive, he would be in his mid-thirties—probably with a couple of kids of his own.”

“Joe would be older than Charlotte was when I first met her,” Danny chimed in.

“Actually, Daniel,” his father said, “Joe would be only a decade younger than
you
were—I mean, at the time Joe died.”

“Whoa! Stop this shit!” Ketchum cried. “And if Injun Jane were still alive, she’d be eighty-fucking-eight! I doubt she’d even be speaking to any of us—not unless we somehow managed to elevate our conversation.”

But the very next day, Ketchum had presented Danny with the 20-gauge shotgun—not exactly an
elevation
of their prevailing conversation, or their overriding fixation—and the cook had, seemingly out of the blue, begun to complain about “the sheer morbidity” of Daniel’s book dedications.

True,
Baby in the Road
(as might be expected) was dedicated as follows: “My son, Joe—in memoriam.” It was the second dedication to Joe—the third, overall, in memoriam. Dominic found this depressing.

“I can’t help it if the people I know keep dying, Pop,” Danny had said.

All the while, Ketchum had continued to demonstrate the sliding action of the Winchester, the ejected shotgun shells flying all around. One of the live shells (a deer slug) would be lost for a time in the discarded wrapping paper for other Christmas presents, but Ketchum kept loading and unloading the weapon as if he were mowing down a
horde
of attackers.

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves,” Danny said aloud to himself—as if he were writing this down, which he wasn’t. The writer was still contorting himself in bed, where he was transfixed by the photo of Charlotte with the mysterious
inuksuk—
that is, when he
wasn’t
drawn to the dangerous but thrilling sight of the loaded shotgun under his bed.

IT WAS BOXING DAY
in Canada. A writer Danny knew always had a party. Every Christmas, the cook bought Ketchum some outdoor clothing—at either Eddie Bauer or Roots—and Ketchum wore his new gear to the Boxing Day party. Dominic never failed to help out in the kitchen; the kitchen, anybody’s kitchen, was ever the cook’s home away from home. Danny mingled with his friends at the party; he tried to remain unembarrassed by Ketchum’s political outbursts. There was never any need for Danny to feel embarrassed—not in Canada, where the old logger’s anti-American ranting was very popular.

“Some fella from the CBC wanted me to go on a radio show,” Ketchum told Danny and his dad, when the cook was driving them home from the Boxing Day party.

“Dear God,” Dominic said again.

“Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie—you best let Danny and me handle the conversation while you pay attention to the mayhem in the streets.”

The cowboy could have killed them all that night, but Carl was a coward; he wouldn’t risk it, not with Ketchum in the house. The deputy didn’t know that the youth-model 20-gauge was under Danny’s bed, not Ketchum’s, nor could Carl have guessed how much the old logger had had to drink at the party. The cowboy could have
shot
his way into the house; it’s doubtful that Ketchum would have woken up. Danny wouldn’t have woken up, either. It had been one of those nights when the supposed one or two glasses of red wine with his dinner had, in reality, turned out to be four or five. Danny woke once in the night, thinking he should look under his bed to be sure that the shotgun was still there; he fell out of bed in the process, making a resounding
thump
, which neither his dad nor the snoring logger heard.

Ketchum never lingered long in Toronto once Christmas was over. A pity he hadn’t brought Hero with him and then—for some reason—left the dog with the cook and his son
after
Ketchum went back across the border. Carl couldn’t have entered the house on Cluny Drive, or hidden himself in the third-floor writing room, if Hero, that fine animal, had been there. But the dog was in Coos County, staying with Six-Pack Pam—terrorizing her dogs, as it would turn out—and Ketchum left early the next morning for New Hampshire.

When Danny got up (before his dad), he found the note Ketchum had left on the kitchen table. To Danny’s surprise, it was neatly typed. Ketchum had gone up to the third-floor writing room and used the typewriter there, but Danny hadn’t heard the creaking of the floor above his bedroom—he hadn’t heard the stairs creak, either. Both he and the cook had slept through the sound of the typewriter, too—not a good sign, the old logger could have told them. But Ketchum’s note said nothing about that.

I’VE SEEN ENOUGH OF YOU FELLAS FOR A TIME! I MISS MY DOG, AND I’M GOING TO SEE HIM. BY THE TIME I’M BACK HOME, I’LL BE MISSING YOU, TOO! EASY ON THE RED WINE, DANNY. KETCHUM.

Carl was happy to see Ketchum’s truck leave. The cowboy must have been growing impatient, but he waited for the Mexican cleaning woman to come and go; that way, the deputy had no doubt. With the guest bedroom empty—Lupita had made it up as good as new—Carl was convinced that Ketchum wasn’t coming back. Yet the cowboy had to wait another night.

The cook and his son ate their dinner at home on the evening of December 27. Dominic had found a kielbasa sausage in the meat market and had browned it in olive oil, and then stewed it with chopped fennel and onions and cauliflower in a tomato sauce with crushed fennel seeds. The cook served the stew with a warm, fresh loaf of rosemary-and-olive bread, and a green salad.

“Ketchum would have liked this, Pop,” Danny said.

“Ah, well—Ketchum is a good man,” Dominic said, to his son’s amazement.

Not knowing how to respond, Danny attempted to further compliment the kielbasa stew; he suggested it might make a suitable addition to the more bistro-like or low-key menu at Kiss of the Wolf.

“No, no,” the cook said dismissively. “Kielbasa is too rustic—even for Kiss of the Wolf.”

All Danny said was: “It’s a good dish, Dad. You could serve it to royalty, I think.”

“I should have made it for Ketchum—I never made it for him,” was all Dominic said.

THE COOK’S LAST NIGHT ALIVE
, he ate with his beloved Daniel at a Portuguese place near Little Italy. The restaurant was called Chiado; it was one of Dominic’s favorites in Toronto. Arnaud had introduced him to it when they’d both been working downtown on Queen Street West. That Thursday night, December 28, both Danny and his dad had the rabbit.

During Ketchum’s Christmas visit, it had snowed and it had rained—everything had frozen and thawed, and then it all froze again. By the time the cook and his son took a taxi home from Chiado, it had started to snow once more. (Dominic didn’t like to drive downtown.) The imprints of the cowboy’s footsteps in the crusty old snow on the outdoor fire escape were faint and hard to see in the daylight; now that it was dark, and snowing, Carl’s tracks were completely covered. The ex-cop had taken off his parka and his boots. He’d stretched out on the couch in Danny’s third-floor writing room with the Colt .45 revolver clasped to his chest—in the scenario he’d imagined, the old sheriff had no need of a holster.

The voices of the cook and his writer son reached Carl from the kitchen, though we’ll never know if the cowboy understood their conversation.

“At fifty-eight, you should be married, Daniel. You should be living with your wife, not your father,” the cook was saying.

“And what about you, Pop? Wouldn’t a wife be good for you?” Danny asked.

“I’ve had my opportunities, Daniel. At seventy-six, I would embarrass myself with a wife—I would always be apologizing to her!” Dominic said.

“For
what?”
Danny asked his dad.

“Occasional incontinence, perhaps. Farting, certainly—not to mention talking in my sleep,” the cook confided to his son.

“You should find a wife who’s hard of hearing—like Ketchum,” Danny suggested. They both laughed; the cowboy had to have heard their laughter.

“I was being serious, Daniel—you should at least have a regular girlfriend, a true companion,” Dominic was saying, as they came up the stairs to the second-floor hall. Even from the third floor, Carl could have singled out the distinguishing sounds of the cook’s limp on the stairs.