Last Night in Twisted River (9 page)

“But he didn’t cut his hand off?” Danny always interrupted her.

“Well, no—he didn’t,” Jane told the boy, with some impatience. “You’ve noticed that Ketchum still has a left hand, haven’t you?”

Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way he’d stared at his cast last night. If Injun Jane had seen Ketchum staring at his cast, she might have taken this as a sign that Ketchum
still
thought about cutting off his hand. (But why the
left
one? Danny Baciagalupo would wonder. Ketchum was right-handed. If you hated yourself, if you were
really
taking yourself to task or holding yourself accountable, wouldn’t you want to cut off your
good
hand?)

THEY WERE BUSTLING
about the kitchen—all the fat women, and the lean cook with his leaner son. You didn’t pass behind someone without saying, “Behind you!” or putting your hand on the person’s back. When the sawmill workers’ wives passed behind Danny, they often patted the boy on his bum. One or two of them would pat the cook on his bum, too, but not if Injun Jane was watching. Danny had noticed how Jane often placed herself between his father and the kitchen helpers—especially in the narrow gauntlet between the stove and the countertop, which got narrower whenever the oven doors needed to be opened. There were other tight quarters in the cookhouse kitchen, challenging the cooks and the servers, but that passage between the stove and the countertop was the tightest.

Ketchum had gone outside to pee—a seemingly unbreakable habit from the wanigan days—while Injun Jane went into the dining room to set the tables. In those “good old days” in the portable logging camps, Ketchum liked to wake up the rivermen and the other loggers by pissing on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans. “There’s a wanigan in the river!” he was fond of hollering. “Oh, sweet Jesus—it’s floating away!” A cacophony of swearing followed, from inside the portables.

Ketchum also liked to beat on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans with one of the river drivers’ pike poles. “Don’t let the bear in!” he would holler. “Oh, Lord—it’s got one of the women! Oh, Lord—dear God,
no!”

Danny was ladling the warm maple syrup from the big saucepan on the back burner into the pitchers. One of the sawmill workers’ wives was breathing down the back of the boy’s neck. “Behind you, cutie!” the woman said hoarsely. His dad was dipping the banana bread in the egg mixture; one of the kitchen helpers was putting the banana-bread French toast on the griddle, while another kept turning the lamb hash with a spatula.

Before he went outside for an apparently never-ending piss, Ketchum had spoken to the twelve-year-old. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning—don’t let your dad forget, Danny.”

“We’ll be there,” the boy had said.

“What plans are you making with Ketchum?” Injun Jane whispered in the twelve-year-old’s ear. Big as she was, the boy hadn’t noticed her behind him; he first mistook her for the sawmill worker’s wife who’d been breathing down his neck, but Jane had returned from the dining room.

“Dad and I are meeting Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam on Sunday morning,” Danny told her.

Jane shook her head, her long braid, longer than a horse’s tail, swishing above her big rump. “So Ketchum talked him into it,” she said disapprovingly; the boy couldn’t see her eyes above the pulled-down visor of her Cleveland Indians cap. As always, Chief Wahoo was grinning insanely at the twelve-year-old.

The near-perfect choreography in the kitchen would have been imperceptible to a stranger, but Danny and the Indian dishwasher were used to it. They saw that everything was always the same, right down to the cook holding the hot tray of scones with the oven mitts while the sawmill workers’ wives deftly got out of his way—one of them knocking the corn muffins out of the muffin tins into a big china bowl as she did so. No one bumped into anyone, big as they all were—save Danny and his dad, who were (in the present company) noticeably small.

In the cramped aisle between the countertop and the stove, where there was a pan or a pot on six of the eight burners, the cook and the Indian dishwasher passed back-to-back. This wasn’t new—it happened all the time—but Danny caught a nuance in their dance, and he overheard (as he previously hadn’t) the brief but distinct dialogue between them. As they passed, back-to-back, Jane deliberately bumped Dominic—she just touched her big rump to the middle of his back, because the top of the cook’s head came up only to Jane’s shoulders.

“Do-si-do your partner,” the dishwasher said.

Despite his limp, the cook caught his balance; not one scone slid off the hot tray. “Do-si-do,” Dominic Baciagalupo softly said. Injun Jane had already passed behind him. No one but Danny had noticed the contact, though if Ketchum had been there—drunk or sober—Ketchum surely would have noticed. (But Ketchum, of course, was outside—presumably, still pissing.)

CHAPTER 3

A WORLD OF ACCIDENTS

A
NGEL POPE HAD GONE UNDER THE LOGS ON THURSDAY
. After breakfast on Friday, Injun Jane drove Danny in her truck to the Paris Manufacturing Company School, on Phillips Brook, and then drove back to the cookhouse in Twisted River.

The river-driving crew would be prodding logs on a site just upstream of Dead Woman Dam. The cook and his kitchen helpers would prepare four midday meals; they would backpack two meals to the rivermen, and drive two meals to the loggers loading the trucks along the haul road between the town of Twisted River and the Pontook Reservoir.

Fridays were hard enough without the woe of losing Angel. Everyone was in too much of a hurry for the weekend to start, although weekends in Twisted River (in the cook’s opinion) amounted to little more than drinking too much and the usual sexual missteps—“not to mention the subsequent embarrassment or shame,” as Danny Baciagalupo had heard his dad say (repeatedly). And from Dominic’s point of view, the Friday-night meal in the cookhouse was the week’s most demanding. For the practicing Catholics among the French Canadians, the cook made his renowned meatless pizzas, but for the
“non-
mackerel-snappers”—as Ketchum was fond of describing himself, and most of the loggers and sawmill workers—a meatless pizza on a Friday night wouldn’t suffice.

When Injun Jane dropped Danny at the Paris school, she punched him lightly on his upper arm; it was where the older boys at school would hit him, if he was lucky. Naturally, the older boys hit him harder than Jane did—whether they hit him on the upper arm or somewhere else. “Keep your chin down, your shoulders relaxed, your elbows in, and your hands up around your face,” Jane told him. “You want to look like you’re going to throw a punch—then you kick the bastard in the balls.”

“I know,” the twelve-year-old told her. He had never thrown a punch at anyone—nor had he ever kicked someone in the balls. Jane’s instructions to the boy bewildered him; he thought that her directions must have been based on some advice Constable Carl had given her, but Jane only had to worry about the
constable
hitting her. Young Dan believed that nobody else would have dared to confront her—maybe not even Ketchum.

While Jane would kiss Danny good-bye at the cookhouse, or virtually anywhere in Twisted River, she never kissed him when she dropped him at the Paris Manufacturing Company School—or when she picked him up in the vicinity of Phillips Brook, where those West Dummer kids might be hanging out. If the older boys saw Injun Jane kiss Danny, they would give him more trouble than usual. On this particular Friday, the twelve-year-old just sat beside Jane in the truck, not moving. Young Dan might have momentarily forgotten where they were—in which case, he was expecting her to kiss him—or else he’d thought of a question to ask Jane about his mother.

“What is it, Danny?” the dishwasher said.

“Do you do-si-do my dad?” the boy asked her.

Jane smiled at him, but it was a more measured smile than he was used to seeing on her pretty face; that she didn’t answer made him anxious. “Don’t tell me to ask Ketchum,” the boy blurted out. This made Injun Jane laugh; her smile was more natural, and more immediately forthcoming. (As always, Chief Wahoo was madly grinning.)

“I was going to say that you should ask your father,” the dishwasher said. “Don’t be anxious,” she added, punching his upper arm again—this time a little harder. “Danny?” Jane said, as the twelve-year-old was climbing out of the truck cab.
“Don’t
ask Ketchum.”

IT WAS A WORLD
of accidents, the cook was thinking. In the kitchen, he was cooking up a storm. The lamb hash, which he’d served for breakfast, would be good for a midday meal, too; he’d also made a chickpea soup (for the Catholics) and a venison stew with carrots and pearl onions. Yes, there was the infernal pot of baked beans, and the omnipresent pea soup with parsley. But there was little else that was standard logging-camp fare.

One of the sawmill workers’ wives was cooking some Italian sweet sausage on the griddle. The cook kept telling her to break up the sausage meat as she cooked it—whereupon another of the sawmill workers’ wives started singing. “Try beatin’ your meat with a spatula!” she sang to the unlikely but overfamiliar tune of “Vaya con Dios;” the other women joined in.

The lead singer among the sawmill workers’ wives was the woman the cook had put in charge of proofing the yeast for the pizza dough—he was keeping an eye on her. Dominic wanted to mix the pizza dough and start it rising before they drove off on the haul road to deliver the midday meals. (On a Friday night, there would be a bunch of pissed-off French Canadians if there weren’t enough meatless pizzas for the mackerel-snappers.)

The cook was making cornbread, too. He wanted to start the stuffing for the roast chickens he was also serving in the cookhouse Friday night; he would mix the sausage with the cornbread and some celery and sage, adding the eggs and butter when he got back to his kitchen from the river site and wherever they were loading the trucks. In a large saucepan, in which Danny had warmed the maple syrup, Dominic was boiling the butternut squash; he would mash it up and mix it with maple syrup, and add the butter when he returned to town. On Friday night, together with the stuffed roast chickens, he would serve scalloped potatoes with the whipped squash. This was arguably Ketchum’s favorite meal; most Fridays, Ketchum ate some of the meatless pizza, too.

Dominic was feeling sorry for Ketchum. The cook didn’t know if Ketchum truly believed they would find Angel in the spillway of the upper dam Sunday morning, or if Ketchum hoped they would never find the boy’s body. All the cook had determined was that he didn’t want young Daniel to see Angel’s body. Dominic Baciagalupo wasn’t sure if
he
wanted to see Angel’s body—or ever find the boy, either.

The pot of water—in which the cook had poured a couple of ounces of vinegar, for the poached eggs—was coming to a boil again. For breakfast, he’d served the lamb hash with poached eggs, but when he served the hash as a midday meal, he would just have lots of ketchup handy; poached eggs didn’t travel well. When the water and vinegar came to a boil, Dominic poured it over the cutting boards to sterilize them.

One of the sawmill workers’ wives had made about fifty bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with the leftover breakfast bacon. She was eating one of the sandwiches while she eyed the cook—some mischief was on her mind, Dominic could tell. Her name was Dot; she was far too large to be a Dot, and she’d had so many children that she seemed to be a woman who had abandoned every other capacity she’d ever conceivably possessed, except her appetite, which the cook didn’t like to think about at all. (She had too
many
appetites, Dominic imagined.)

The sawmill worker’s wife with the spatula—the one who needed to be reminded to break up the sausage on the griddle—appeared to be in on the mischief, because she had her eye on the cook, too. Since the woman eating the BLT had her mouth full, the one with the spatula spoke first. Her name was May; she was bigger than Dot and had been married twice. May’s children with her second husband were the same age as her grandchildren—that is, the children of her children from her first marriage—and this unnatural phenomenon had completely unhinged May
and
her second husband, to the degree that they couldn’t recover sufficiently to console each other concerning the sheer strangeness of their lives.

What Dominic found unnatural was May’s ceaseless need to lament the fact that she had children the age of her grandchildren. Why was it such a big deal? the cook had wondered.

“Just
look
at her,” Ketchum had said, meaning May. “For her,
everything
is a big fucking deal.”

Maybe so, the cook considered, as May pointed the spatula at him. Wiggling her hips in a seductive manner, she said in a purring voice: “Oh, Cookie, I would leave my miserable life behind—if only you would marry me, and cook for me, too!”

Dominic was using the long-handled dish scrubber on the cutting boards, which were soaking in boiling water; the vinegar in the hot water made his eyes tear. “You’re married already, May,” he said. “If you married me, and we had children, you’d have kids
younger
than your grandchildren. I dare not guess how
that
would make you feel.”

May looked genuinely stricken by the idea; maybe he shouldn’t have raised the dreaded subject, the cook was thinking. But Dot, who was still eating the BLT, spasmodically laughed with her mouth full—whereupon she commenced to choke. The kitchen helpers, May among them, stood waiting for the cook to do something.

Dominic Baciagalupo was no stranger to choking. He’d seen a lot of loggers and mill workers choke—he knew what to do. Years ago, he’d saved one of the dance-hall women; she was drunk, and she was choking on her own vomit, but the cook had known how to handle her. It was a famous story—Ketchum had even
titled
it, “How Cookie Saved Six-Pack Pam.” The woman was as tall and rawboned as Ketchum, and Dominic had needed Ketchum’s help to knock her to her knees, and then wrestle her to all fours, where the cook could apply a makeshift Heimlich maneuver. (Six-Pack Pam was so named because this was Ketchum’s estimate of the woman’s nightly quota, before she started on the bourbon.)

Dr. Heimlich was born in 1920, but his now-famous maneuver hadn’t been introduced in Coos County in 1954. Dominic Baciagalupo had been cooking for big eaters for fourteen years. Countless people had choked in front of him; three of them had died. The cook had observed that pounding someone on the back didn’t always work. Ketchum’s original maneuver, which entailed holding the chokers upside down and vigorously shaking them, had been known to fail, too.

But once Ketchum had been forced to improvise, and Dominic had witnessed the astonishingly successful result. A drunken logger had been too pugnacious and too big for Ketchum to shake upside down. Ketchum kept dropping the man, who was not only choking to death—he was trying to kill Ketchum, too.

Ketchum repeatedly punched the madman in the upper abdomen—all uppercuts. Upon the fourth or fifth uppercut, the choker expectorated a large, unchewed piece of lamb, which he had inadvertently inhaled.

Over the years, the cook had modified Ketchum’s improvisational method to suit his own smaller size and less violent nature. Dominic would slip under the flailing arms of the choker and get behind him or her. He would hold the victim around the upper abdomen and apply sudden, upward pressure with his locked hands—just under the rib cage. This had worked every time.

In the kitchen, when Dot began to flail her arms, Dominic quickly ducked behind her. “Oh, my God, Cookie
—save
her!” May cried; the children-grandchildren crisis was momentarily off her mind, if not entirely forgotten.

With his nose in the warm, sweaty area at the back of Dot’s neck, the cook could barely join his hands together as he reached around her. Dot’s breasts were too big and low; Dominic needed to lift them out of the way to locate where Dot’s rib cage ended and her upper abdomen began. But when he held her breasts, albeit briefly, Dot covered his hands with her own and forcefully shoved her butt into his stomach. She was laughing hysterically, not choking at all; crazy May and the rest of the kitchen helpers were laughing with her. “Oh, Cookie—how did you know that’s how I like it?” Dot moaned.

“I always thought that Cookie was a do-it-from-behind kind of guy,” May said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, you little
dog!”
Dot cried, grinding against the cook. “I just love how you always say, ‘Behind you!’”

Dominic finally freed his hands from her breasts; he lightly pushed himself away from her.

“I guess we’re not
big
enough for him, Dot,” May said sorrowfully. Something mean had entered her voice; the cook could hear it. I’m going to pay for the children-grandchildren remark, Dominic was thinking. “Or maybe we’re just not
Injun
enough,” May said.

The cook didn’t so much as look at her; the other kitchen helpers, even Dot, had turned away. May was defiantly patting the lamb hash flat against the griddle with the spatula. Dominic reached around her and turned the griddle off. He touched his fingers to the small of her back as he passed behind her. “Let’s pack up, ladies,” he said, almost the same way he usually said it. “You and May can pack the meals to the river-men,” the cook told Dot. “The rest of us will drive till we find the loggers on the haul road.” He didn’t speak to May,
or
look at her.

“So Dot and I do all the walkin’?” May asked him.

“You should walk more than you do,” Dominic said, still not looking at her. “Walking’s good for you.”

“Well, I made the damn BLTs—I guess I can carry them,” Dot said.

“Take the lamb hash with you, too,” the cook told her.

Someone asked if there were any “ultra-Catholic” French Canadians among the river drivers; maybe Dot and May should pack some of the chickpea soup to the river site, too.

“I’m not carryin’
soup
on my back,” May said.

“The mackerel-snappers can pick the bacon out of the BLTs,” Dot suggested.

“I don’t think there are any mackerel-snappers among these river-men,” Dominic said. “We’ll take the chickpea soup and the venison stew to the loggers on the haul road. If there are any angry Catholics among the river drivers, tell them to blame me.”

“Oh, I’ll tell them to blame you, all right,” May told him. She kept staring at him, but he wouldn’t once look at her. When they were going their separate ways, May said: “I’m too big for you to ignore me, Cookie.”

“Just be glad I’m ignoring you, May,” he told her.

THE COOK HAD NOT
expected to see Ketchum among the loggers loading the trucks on the haul road; even injured, Ketchum was a better river driver than any of the men on the river site. “That moron doctor told me not to get the cast wet,” Ketchum explained.