Last Night in Twisted River (11 page)

To the cook’s considerable surprise, Ketchum had answered: “I ask them to read out loud to me. It gets me in the mood.”

Or in the mood to take the book to the bathroom and pass out with it, Dominic now thought dryly. Nor did the cook imagine that the literacy level among Ketchum’s dance-hall women was especially high. How did Ketchum know which women could read at all? And what was the book that had put him
out
of the mood with Six-Pack Pam? (Quite possibly, Ketchum simply had needed to go to the bathroom.)

Injun Jane had gone into the kitchen and now returned with a flashlight. “So you can find your way back,” she said to Dominic, handing him the light. “I’ll stay with Danny, and get him ready for bed.”

“Can I go with you?” the boy asked his dad. “I could help you with Ketchum.”

“My place ain’t very suitable for kids, Danny,” Pam told him.

That concept begged a response, but all the cook said was: “You stay with Jane, Daniel. I’ll be right back,” he added, more to Jane than to his son, but the Indian dishwasher had already gone back inside the kitchen.

FROM THE UPSTAIRS OF THE COOKHOUSE
, where the bedrooms were, there was a partial view of the river basin and a better view of the town above the basin. However, the town was so dark at night that one had little sense of the activities in the various saloons and hostelries from the distant cookhouse—nor could Danny and Injun Jane hear the music from the dance hall, where no one was dancing.

For a while, the boy and the Indian dishwasher had watched the two flashlights making their way to town. The cook’s bobbing light was easily identified by his limp—and by his shorter steps, for Dominic needed to take twice as many steps to keep up with the longer strides of Six-Pack Pam. (It was their conversation Jane might have wished she could hear; it was Ketchum naked on the toilet Danny definitely wanted to see.) But soon the flashlights were lost in the fog shrouding the river basin, and in the dimmer lights of the town.

“He’ll be back soon,” the twelve-year-old said, because he must have sensed that Jane hoped so. She made no response, other than to turn down the bed in his father’s room—she also turned the night-table light on.

Danny followed her into the upstairs hall, watching her touch the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as she left the bedroom. Shoulder-high to his dad, the skillet was breast-high to Injun Jane; it was level with Danny’s eyes as he passed by it, touching it, too.

“Thinking about whacking a bear?” Jane asked the boy.

“I guess
you
were thinking about it,” he told her.

“Go brush your teeth, and all that other stuff,” she said.

The boy went into the bathroom he shared with his father. When he’d put on his pajamas and was ready for bed, Jane came into Danny’s bedroom and sat on his bed beside him.

“I’ve never seen you undo your braid,” the boy said. “I wonder what you look like with your hair down.”

“You’re too young to see me with my hair down,” Jane told him. “I wouldn’t want it on my conscience that I frightened you to death.” The boy could see the playfulness in her eyes, under the visor of her Cleveland Indians cap.

There was a shout from the area of the town, and either a corresponding shout or an echo from the nearby river basin, but no words were distinguishable in the shouting, and any interconnected disputes or follow-up shouts were whipped away by the wind.

“It’s dangerous in town on a Saturday night, isn’t it?” Danny asked Injun Jane.

“I know this little fella with a limp—maybe you know who I mean—and he’s always saying how it’s ‘a world of accidents.’ Maybe that sounds familiar to you,” Jane said. Her big hand had sneaked under the covers and found young Dan’s armpit, where she knew he was the most ticklish.

“I know who you mean!” the twelve-year-old cried. “No tickling!”

“Well, the accidents are just more numerous on a Saturday night,” Jane continued, not tickling him but keeping her hand in his armpit. “However, nobody’s going to mess with your dad—not when Six-Pack is with him.”

“There’s the coming-home-alone part,” the boy pointed out.

“Don’t worry about your father, Danny,” Jane told him; she let go of his armpit and straightened up on the bed.

“Could you take Six-Pack?” Danny asked her. It was one of Daniel Baciagalupo’s favorite questions; he was always asking Injun Jane if she could “take” someone, the equivalent of Ketchum tearing an actual or alleged combatant a new asshole. Could Jane
take
Henri Thibeault, or No-Fingers La Fleur, or the Beaudette brothers, or the Beebe twins—or Scotty Fernald, Earl Dinsmore, Charlie Clough, and Frank Bemis?

Injun Jane generally answered: “I suppose so.” (When Danny had asked her if she could take Ketchum, she’d said: “If he were drunk enough, maybe.”)

But when the imaginary opponent was Six-Pack Pam, Jane hesitated. Danny had not known her to hesitate a whole lot. “Six-Pack is a lost soul,” Jane finally said.

“But could you take her?” young Dan insisted.

Jane leaned over the boy as she got up from the bed; squeezing his shoulders with her strong hands, she kissed him on his forehead. “I suppose so,” said Injun Jane.

“Why wasn’t Six-Pack wearing a bra?” Danny asked her.

“She looked like she got dressed in a hurry,” Jane told him; she blew him another kiss from the doorway of his bedroom, closing the door only halfway behind her. The light from the hall was Danny’s night-light—for as long as he could remember.

He heard the wind shake the loose-fitting outer door to the kitchen; there was a rattling sound as the wind tugged at that bothersome door. The twelve-year-old knew it wasn’t his dad coming home, or another night visitor.

“Just the wind!” Injun Jane called to him, from down the hall. Ever since the bear story, she knew the boy had been apprehensive about intruders.

Jane always left her shoes or boots downstairs, and came upstairs in her socks. If she had gone downstairs, Danny would have heard the stairs creak under her weight, but Jane must have stayed upstairs, as silent in her socks as a nocturnal animal. Later, young Dan heard water running in the bathroom; he wondered if his father had come home, but the boy was too sleepy to get up and go see. Danny lay listening to the wind and the omnipresent turmoil of the river. When someone kissed him on his forehead again, the twelve-year-old was too deeply asleep to know if it was his dad or Injun Jane—or else he was dreaming about being kissed, and it was Six-Pack Pam who was kissing him.

—

STRIDING THROUGH TOWN
—with the cook limping after her like a loyal but damaged dog—Pam was too formidable and purposeful a figure to inspire anyone to dream of kissing her, or of being kissed by her. Certainly, the cook was dreaming of no such thing—not consciously.

“Slow down, Six-Pack,” Dominic said, but either the wind carried his words beyond her hearing or Pam willfully lengthened her stride.

The wind tunneled furrows in the three-story tower of sawdust outside the sawmill, and the dust blew into their eyes. It was very flammable, what Ketchum called a “potential inferno”—at this time of year, especially. The winter-long pile wouldn’t be trucked out of town until the haul roads hardened up at the end of mud season; only then would they truck it away, and sell it to the farmers in the Androscoggin Valley. (Of course, there was more inside the mill.) A fire in the sawdust would ignite the whole town; not even the cookhouse on the hill nearest the river bend would be spared, because the hill and the cookhouse bore the brunt of the wind off the river. The bigger, more brightly burning embers would be blown uphill from the town to the cookhouse.

Yet the building the cook had insisted upon was the most substantial in the settlement of Twisted River. The hostelries and saloons—even the sawmill itself, and the so-called dance hall—were mere kindling for the sawdust fire Ketchum imagined in his doomsayer dreams of ever-impending calamities.

Possibly, Ketchum was even dreaming now—on the toilet. Or so Dominic Baciagalupo considered, as he struggled to keep pace with Six-Pack Pam. They passed the bar near the hostelry favored by the French Canadian itinerants. In the muddy lane alongside the dance hall was a 1912 Lombard steam log hauler; it had been parked there so long that the dance hall had been torn down and rebuilt around it. (They’d used gasoline-powered log haulers to pull the loaded sleds of logs through the woods since the 1930s.)

If the town burned, Dominic was thinking, maybe the old Lombard forwarder would be the only surviving remains. To the cook’s surprise, when he regarded the Lombard now, he saw the Beaudette brothers asleep or dead in the front seat over the sled runners. Perhaps they’d been evicted from the dance hall and had passed out (or been deposited) there.

Dominic slowed as he limped by the slumped-over brothers, but Pam had seen them, too, and she wasn’t stopping. “They won’t freeze—it ain’t even snowin’,” Six-Pack said.

Outside the next saloon, four or five men had gathered to watch a desultory fight. Earl Dinsmore and one of the Beebe twins had been brawling so long that they’d exhausted their best punches, or maybe the men were too inebriated to be fighting in the first place. They seemed beyond hurting each other—at least, intentionally. The other Beebe twin, out of either boredom or sheer embarrassment for his brother, suddenly started fighting with Charlie Clough. In passing, Six-Pack Pam knocked Charlie down; then she leveled Earl Dinsmore with a forearm to his ear, leaving the Beebe twins to aimlessly regard each other, the recognition slowly dawning on them that there was no one to fight—not unless they dared to take on Pam.

“It’s Cookie with Six-Pack,” No-Fingers La Fleur observed.

“I’m surprised you can tell us apart,” Pam told him, shoving him out of her way.

They reached the flat-roofed row houses—the newer hostelries, where the truckers and donkey-engine men stayed. As Ketchum said, any contractor who would construct a flat-roofed, two-story building in northern New Hampshire was enough of a moron to not know how many assholes a human being had. Just then, the dance-hall door blew (or was shoved) open and the miserable music reached them—Perry Como singing “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”

There was an outside flight of stairs to the nearest hostelry, and Pam turned, catching Dominic by his shirtsleeve and pulling him after her.

“Watch the next-to-last step, Cookie,” she told him, tugging him up the stairs.

Stairs had never worked well with his limp—especially not at the pace Six-Pack led him. The next-to-last step from the top was missing. The cook stumbled forward, catching his balance against Pam’s broad back. She simply turned again and lifted him under both arms—hoisting him to the topmost step, where the bridge of his nose collided with her collarbone. There was a womanly smell at her throat, if not exactly perfume, but the cook was confused by whatever odors of maleness clung to Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt.

The music from the dance hall was louder at the top of the stairs—Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No wonder no one dances anymore, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, just as Six-Pack lowered her shoulder and forced open the door. “Shit, I
hate
this song,” she was saying, dragging the cook inside. “Ketchum!” she shouted, but there was no answer. Thankfully, the awful music stopped when Pam closed the door.

The cook couldn’t comprehend where the kitchen, which they had entered, ended and the bedroom began; scattered pots and pans and bottles gave way to strewn undergarments and the giant, unmade bed, the only light on which was cast by a greenish aquarium. Who knew that Six-Pack Pam was a fish person, or that she liked pets of any species? (If fish were what was in the aquarium—Dominic couldn’t see anything swimming around in the algae. Maybe Six-Pack was an
algae
person.)

They navigated the bedroom; it was hard, even without a limp, to get around the enormous bed. And while it was easy for Dominic to imagine the extreme situation and awkward location of Ketchum’s collapse, and why this might have made it necessary for Pam to hastily dress herself without a bra, they passed
three
bras en route to the bathroom—any one of which, even in a hurry, surely would have been opportune.

Six-Pack now scratched her breast under Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt. Dominic wasn’t immediately worried that she was fondling herself suggestively, or otherwise flirting with him; it was as unplanned a gesture as her knocking Charlie Clough to the muddy ground, or the spontaneous forearm to the ear that had dropped Earl Dinsmore. The cook knew that if Six-Pack were to
suggest
anything, she would be far less ambiguous about it than to merely touch her breast in passing. Besides, Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt must have been itchy against her bare skin.

They found Ketchum on the toilet, more or less as Pam must have discovered him—with the paperback he’d been reading pinned by his cast, and held open on one of his bare thighs, and with both knees splayed wide apart. The water in the toilet was laced with bright bloodred streaks—as if Ketchum had been slowly bleeding to death.

“He’s gotta be bleedin’
internally
!” Six-Pack exclaimed, but the cook realized that Ketchum had dropped a pen with red ink into the toilet; he must have been using the pen to circle certain words. “I already flushed, before leavin’ him,” Pam was saying, as Dominic rolled up his sleeve and (reaching between Ketchum’s knees) picked the pen out of the toilet bowl—flushing again. Dominic washed his hands and the pen in the sink, drying them with a towel.

It was only then that he noticed Ketchum’s erection. One of the cook’s most fervent hopes—namely, to never see Ketchum with an erection—may have caused him to first overlook the obvious. Naturally, Six-Pack hadn’t overlooked it. “Well, I wonder what he thinks he’s goin’ to do with
that!”
she was saying, as she lifted Ketchum under his heavy arms. She was able to prop him more upright on the toilet seat, rescuing him from his wedged position. “If you take hold of his ankles, Cookie, I can handle the rest.”