Last Night in Twisted River (64 page)

In the pickup’s bed, nestled together on the woodpile under the tarp—along with the Remington .30-06 Springfield—Danny knew there was also a chainsaw and an ax. In a sheath above the sun visor of the truck, on the driver’s side, was a foot-long Browning knife.

“Why are you always
armed
, Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked the river driver.

Maybe it was the
armed word
that caught Ketchum off-guard, because he
hadn’t
been armed that long-ago night when the logger and the cook and the cook’s cousin Rosie had started out on the ice—do-si-doing their way on the frozen river. Right there—in the bear-stinking truck, in the woodsman’s wild eyes—a vision of Rosie must have appeared to Ketchum. Danny noticed that Ketchum’s fierce beard was once more wet with tears.

“I have made
… mistakes,”
the riverman began; his voice sounded choked, half strangled. “Not only errors of judgment, or simply saying something I couldn’t live up to, but actual
lapses.”

“You don’t have to tell the story, Ketchum,” Danny told him, but there was no stopping the logger now.

“A loving couple will say things to each other—you know, Danny—just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation
isn’t
good, or if they
shouldn’t
feel good about it,” Ketchum said. “A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by—if you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” Danny answered. The writer saw that the haul road to what had been the town of Twisted River was washed out—flooded, years past—and now the rocky road was overgrown with lichen and swamp moss. Only the fork in the road—a left turn, to the cookhouse—had endured, and Ketchum took it.

“My left hand was the one I touched your mom with, Danny. I wouldn’t touch her with my right hand—the one I had touched, and would touch, other women with,” Ketchum said.

“Stop!” Carmella cried. (At least she hadn’t said, “My goodness,” Danny thought; he knew Ketchum wouldn’t stop, now that he had started.)

“That was our first rule—I was her left-handed lover,” the logger explained. “In both our minds, my left hand was
hers—
it was Rosie’s hand, hence my most important hand, my
good
hand. It was my more gentle hand—the hand least like myself,” Ketchum said. It was the hand that had struck fewer blows, Danny was thinking, and Ketchum’s left index finger had never squeezed a trigger.

“I see,” Danny told him.

“Please stop,” Carmella begged. (Was she gagging or crying? the writer wondered. It hadn’t occurred to Danny that it wasn’t the
story
Carmella wanted to stop; it was the
truck.)

“You said there was a
lapse
. So what was the
mistake
?” Danny asked the old woodsman.

But they were cresting the hill where the cookhouse had been. Just then—in the bouncing, vomitous truck—there hove into view the deceptively calm river basin, and below the basin was the bend in the river, where both Rosie and Angel had been swept away. Carmella gasped to see the water. For Danny, the shock was to see nothing there—not a board of the cookhouse remained—and as for the view of the town from where the cookhouse had been, there was no town.

“The
mistake?”
Ketchum shouted. “I’ll say there was a
lapse!
We were all drunk and hollering when we went out on the ice, Danny—you know that much, don’t you?”

“Yes—Jane told me,” Danny said.

“And I said, or I thought I said, to Rosie, ‘Give me your hand.’ I swear that’s what I said to her,” Ketchum declared. “But—being drunk, and being right-handed—I instinctively reached for her with my right hand. I had been carrying your father, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too—so I put him down.” Ketchum finally stopped the truck.

Carmella opened the passenger-side door and vomited in the grass; the poor woman kept retching while Danny surveyed the crumbled chimney of the cookhouse. Nothing taller than two or three feet of the bricks was left standing where once the cook’s pizza oven had been.

“But your mother knew our rules,” Ketchum continued. “Rosie said, ‘Not that hand—that’s the wrong hand.’ And she danced away from me—she wouldn’t take my hand. Then your father slipped and fell down, and I was pushing him across the ice—as if he were a human sled—but I couldn’t close the distance between your mom and me. I didn’t have hold of her hand, Danny, because I’d reached for her with my right one—the
bad
one. Do you see?”

“I see,” Danny said, “but it seems like such a small thing.” Yet the writer could see it, vividly—how the distance between his mom and Ketchum had been insurmountable, especially when the logs tore downstream from the Dummer ponds and onto the ice in the river basin, where they quickly picked up speed.

Carmella, on her knees, appeared to be praying; her view of where her beloved Angelù had been lost was truly the best in Twisted River, which was why the cook had wanted the cookhouse erected there.

“Don’t cut off your left hand, Ketchum,” Danny told him.

“Please don’t, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella begged the old woodsman.

“We’ll see,” was all Ketchum would tell them. “We’ll see.”

IN THE LATE FALL
of the same year he’d set fire to Twisted River, Ketchum came back to the site of the cookhouse with a hoe and some grass seed. He didn’t bother to sow any of it in what had been the town of Twisted River, but in the area of the cookhouse—and everywhere on the hillside above the river basin, where the ashes from the fire had settled into the ground—Ketchum hoed the ashes and the earth together, and he scattered the grass seed. He’d picked a day when he knew it was going to rain; by the next morning, the rain had turned to sleet, and all winter long the grass seed lay under the snow. There was grass the next spring, and now there was a meadow where the cookhouse had been. No one had ever mowed the grass, which was tall and wavy.

Ketchum took Carmella by the arm, and they walked down the hill through the tall grass to where the town had been. Danny followed them, carrying his dad’s ashes and—at Ketchum’s insistence—the Remington carbine. There was nothing left standing in the town of Twisted River, save the onetime lone sentinel that had stood watch in the muddy lane alongside what had been the dance hall—namely, the old steam-engine Lombard log hauler. The fire must have burned so hot that the Lombard was permanently blackened—impervious to rust but not to bird shit, yet otherwise perfectly black. The strong sled runners were intact, but the bulldozer-type tracks were gone—taken as a souvenir, maybe, if not consumed in the fire. Where the helmsman had sat—at the front of the Lombard, perched over the sled runners—the long-untouched steering wheel looked ready to use (had there been a helmsman still alive who knew how to steer it). As the cook once predicted, the ancient log hauler had outlasted the town.

Ketchum guided Carmella closer to the riverbank, but even on a dry and sunny September morning, they couldn’t get within six feet of the water’s edge; the riverbank was treacherously slippery, the ground spongy underfoot. They didn’t dam up the Dummer ponds anymore, but the water upstream of the river basin nonetheless ran fast—even in the fall—and Twisted River often overflowed its banks. Closer to the river, Danny felt the wind in his face; it came off the water in the basin, as if blown downstream from the Dummer ponds.

“As I suspected,” Ketchum said. “If we try to scatter Cookie’s ashes in the river, we can’t get close enough to the water. The wind will blow the ashes back in our faces.”

“Hence the rifle?” Danny asked.

The woodsman nodded. “Hence the glass jar, too,” Ketchum said; he took Carmella’s hand and pointed her index finger for her. “Not quite halfway to the far shore, but almost in the middle of the basin—that’s where I saw your boy slip under the logs,” the riverman told her. “I swear to you, Danny, it wasn’t more than an arm’s length from where your mom went through the ice.”

The three of them looked out across the water. On the far shore of Twisted River, they could see a coyote watching them. “Give me the carbine, Danny,” Ketchum said. The coyote took a long, delirious drink from the river; the animal still watched them, but not furtively. Something was the matter with it.

“Please don’t shoot it, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said.

“It must be sick, if it’s out in the daytime and not running away from us,” the woodsman told her. Danny handed him the Remington .30-06 Springfield. The coyote sat on the opposite riverbank, watching them with increasing indifference; it was almost as if the animal were talking to itself.

“Let’s not kill anything today, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. Lowering the gun, Ketchum picked up a rock and threw it into the river in the coyote’s direction, but the animal didn’t flinch. It seemed dazed.

“That critter is definitely sick,” Ketchum said. The coyote took another long drink from the river; now it didn’t even watch them. “Look how thirsty it is—it’s dying of something,” Ketchum told them.

“Is it the season for shooting coyotes?” Danny asked the old logger.

“It’s always open season for coyotes,” Ketchum said. “They’re worse than woodchucks—they’re
varmints
. They’re not good for anything at all. There’s no bag limit on coyotes. You can even hunt them at night, from the first of January till the end of March. That’s how much the state wants to get rid of the critters.”

But Carmella wasn’t persuaded. “I don’t want to see anything die today,” she said to Ketchum; he saw she was blowing kisses across the water, either to bless the spot where her Angelù had perished or to bestow long life on the coyote.

“Make your peace with those ashes, Danny,” the woodsman said. “You know where to throw that jar in the river, don’t you?”

“I’ve made my peace,” the writer said. He kissed the cook’s ashes and the apple-juice jar good-bye. “Ready?” Danny asked the shooter.

“Just throw it,” Ketchum told him. Carmella covered her ears with her hands, and Danny threw the jar—to almost midstream in the river basin. Ketchum leveled the carbine and waited for the jar to bob back to the surface of the water; one shot from the Remington shattered the apple-juice jar, effectively scattering Dominic Baciagalupo’s ashes in Twisted River.

On the far shore, at the sound of the shot, the coyote crouched lower to the riverbank but insanely held its ground. “You miserable fucker,” Ketchum said to the animal. “If you don’t know enough to run, you’re definitely dying. Sorry,” the old logger said—this was spoken as an aside, to Carmella. It was a smooth-working rifle—Ketchum’s “old-reliable, bolt-action sucker.” The woodsman shot the coyote on top of its skull, just as the sick animal was bending down to drink again.

“That’s what I should have done to Carl,” Ketchum told them, not looking at Carmella. “I could have done it anytime. I should have shot the cowboy down, like any varmint. I’m sorry I didn’t do it, Danny.”

“It’s okay, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I always understood why you couldn’t just kill him.”

“But I
should
have!” the logger shouted furiously. “There was nothing but bullshit morality preventing me!”

“Morality isn’t bullshit, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella began to lecture him, but when she looked at the dead coyote, she stopped whatever else she was going to say; the coyote lay still on the riverbank with the tip of its nose touching the running water.

“Good-bye, Pop,” Danny said to the flowing river. He turned away from the water and looked up at the grassy hill, where the cookhouse had been—where he’d disastrously mistaken Injun Jane for a bear, when all along she’d been his father’s lover.

“Good-bye, Cookie!” Ketchum called out, over the water.

“Dormi pur,”
Carmella sang, crossing herself; then she abruptly turned her back on the river, where Angel had gone under the logs. “I need a head start on you two,” she told Danny and Ketchum, and she started slowly up the hill through the tall grass—not once looking back.

“What was she singing?” the woodsman asked the writer.

It was from an old Caruso recording, Danny remembered. “Quartetto Notturno,” it was called—a lullaby from an opera. Danny couldn’t remember the opera, but the lullaby must have been what Carmella sang to her Angelù, when he’d been a little boy and she was putting him to bed.
“Dormi pur,”
Danny repeated for Ketchum. “‘Sleep clean.’”

“Clean?”
Ketchum asked.

“Meaning, ‘Sleep tight,’ I guess,” Danny told him.

“Shit,” was all Ketchum said, kicking the ground. “Shit,” the logger said again.

The two men watched Carmella’s arduous ascent of the hill. The tall, waving grass was waist-high to her truncated, bearlike body, and the wind was behind her, off the river; the wind blew her hair to both sides of her lowered head. When Carmella reached the crown of the hill, where the cookhouse had been, she bowed her head and rested her hands on her knees. For just a second or two—for no longer than it took Carmella to catch her breath—Danny saw in her broad, bent-over body a ghostly likeness to Injun Jane. It was as if Jane had returned to the scene of her death to say good-bye to the cook’s ashes.

Ketchum had lifted his face to the sun. He’d closed his eyes but was moving his feet—just the smallest steps, in no apparent direction, as if he were walking on floating logs. “Say it again, Danny,” the old riverman said.

“Sleep tight,” Danny said.

“No, no—in
Italian
!” Ketchum commanded him. The river driver’s eyes were still closed, and he kept moving his feet; Danny knew that the veteran logger was just trying to stay afloat.

“Dormi pur,”
Danny said.

“Shit
, Angel!” Ketchum cried. “I said, ‘Move your feet, Angel. You have to keep moving your
feet!’
Oh, shit.”

IT HAD BEEN
a bitterly confusing morning for Six-Pack Pam, who liked to work in her garden early—even earlier than she fed the dogs or made coffee for herself, and while her hip lasted. First Ketchum had come and disrupted everything, in his inimitable fashion, and she’d put the sulfa powder on Hero’s wounds—all this before she fed her own dear dogs and made the coffee. It was because of Ketchum’s willful disruption of her day, and treating the wretched dog who’d been mauled by a bear, that Six-Pack had turned her television on a little later than usual, but she still turned the TV on soon enough.