Last Night in Twisted River (13 page)

CHAPTER 4

THE EIGHT-INCH CAST-IRON SKILLET

T
HE COOK COULDN’T ENTIRELY DISPEL THE FEELING THAT
the constable had followed him home. For a while, Dominic Baciagalupo stood at the window in the darkened dining hall, on the lookout for a flashlight coming up the hill from town. But if the cowboy were intent on investigating the goings-on at the cookhouse, not even he would have been dumb enough to use his flashlight.

Dominic left the porch light on by the kitchen door, so that Jane could see the way to her truck; he put his muddy boots beside Jane’s at the foot of the stairs. The cook considered that, perhaps, he had lingered downstairs for another reason. How would he explain his lip injury to Jane, and should he tell her about his meeting with the constable? Shouldn’t Jane know that Dominic had encountered the cowboy, and that both Constable Carl’s behavior and his disposition were as unpredictable and unreadable as ever?

The cook couldn’t even say for certain if the constable somehow
knew
that Jane was Dominic’s “paramour,” as Ketchum might have put it—in reference to the toilet-reader’s list of words from another illicit love story.

Dominic Baciagalupo went quietly upstairs in his socks—though the stairs creaked in a most specific way because of his limp, and he could not manage to creep past his open bedroom door without Jane sitting up in bed and seeing him. (He sneaked enough of a look at her to know she’d let her hair down.) Dominic had wanted to clean up his wounded lower lip before he saw her, but Jane must have sensed he was hiding something from her; she sailed her Cleveland Indians cap into the hall, nearly hitting him. Chief Wahoo landed upside down but still grinning—the chief appearing to stare crazily down the hall, in the direction of the bathroom and young Dan’s bedroom.

In the bathroom mirror, the cook saw that his lower lip probably needed to be stitched; the wound would heal eventually, without stitches, but his lip would heal faster and there would be less of a scar if he had a couple of stitches. For now, after he’d painfully brushed his teeth, he poured some hydrogen peroxide on his lower lip and patted it dry with a clean towel—noting the blood on the towel. It was just bad luck that tomorrow was Sunday; he would rather let Ketchum or Jane stitch up his lip than try to find that moron doctor on a Sunday, in that place Dominic wouldn’t even think of by its ill-fated name.

The cook came out of the bathroom and continued down the hall to Daniel’s room. Dominic Baciagalupo kissed his sleeping son good night, leaving an unnoticed spot of blood on the boy’s forehead. When the cook came out into the hall, there was Chief Wahoo grinning upside down at him—as if to remind him that he better watch his words carefully with Injun Jane.

“Who hit you?” she asked him, as he was getting undressed in the bedroom.

“Ketchum was wild and unruly—you know how he can be when he’s passed out and talking at the same time.”

“If Ketchum had hit you, Cookie, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“It was just an
accident,”
the cook insisted, relying on a favorite word. “Ketchum didn’t mean to hurt me—he just caught me with his cast, by accident.”

“If he’d hit you with his cast, you would be dead,” Jane told him. She was sitting up in bed, with her hair all around her; it hung down below her waist, and she had folded her arms over her breasts, which were hidden by both her hair and her arms.

Whenever she took her hair down, and later went home that way, she could get in real trouble with Constable Carl—if he hadn’t already passed out. It was a night when Jane should stay late and leave early in the morning, if she went home at all, Dominic was thinking.

“I saw Carl tonight,” the cook told her.

“It wasn’t Carl who hit you, either,” Jane said, as he got into bed beside her. “And it doesn’t look as if he shot you,” she added.

“I can’t tell if he knows about us, Jane.”

“I can’t tell, either,” she told him.

“Did Ketchum kill Lucky Pinette?” the cook asked.

“Nobody knows, Cookie. We haven’t known doodley-squat about that for
ages!
Why did Six-Pack hit you?” Jane asked him.

“Because I wouldn’t fool around with her—that’s why.”

“If you had screwed Six-Pack, I would have hit you so hard you wouldn’t ever have
found
your lower lip,” Jane told him.

He smiled, which the lip didn’t like. When he winced at the pain, Jane said, “Poor baby—no kissing for you tonight.”

The cook lay down next to her. “There are other things besides kissing,” he said to her.

She pushed him to his back and lay on top of him, the sheer weight of her pressing him into the bed and taking his breath away. If the cook had closed his eyes, he would have seen himself in Six-Pack’s suffocating headlock again, so he kept his eyes wide open. When Injun Jane straddled his hips and firmly seated herself in his lap, Dominic felt a sudden intake of air fill his lungs. With an urgency possibly prompted by Six-Pack having assaulted him, Jane mounted the cook; she wasted no time in slipping him inside her.

“I’ll show you
other things,”
the Indian dishwasher said, rocking herself back and forth; her breasts fell on his chest, her mouth brushed his face, carefully
not
touching his lower lip, while her long hair cascaded forward, forming a tent around the two of them.

The cook could breathe, but he couldn’t move. Jane’s weight was too great for him to budge her. Besides, Dominic Baciagalupo wouldn’t have wanted to change a single element of the way she was rocking back and forth on top of him—or her gathering momentum. (Not even if Injun Jane had been as light as Dominic’s late wife, Rosie, and the cook himself were as big as Ketchum.) It was a little like riding a train, Dominic imagined—except all he could do was hold tightly to the train that was, in reality, riding
him
.

IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW
that Danny was certain he’d heard water running in the bathroom, or that the kiss on his forehead—either his father’s kiss or a second good-night kiss from Jane—had been real. It didn’t matter, either, that the boy had incorporated the kiss into a dream he was having about Six-Pack Pam, who’d been ardently kissing him—not necessarily on his forehead. Nor did it matter that the twelve-year-old knew the odd creak his dad’s limp made on the stairs, because he’d heard the limp a while ago and there was a different, unfamiliar creaking now. (On stairs, his father always put his good foot forward; the lame foot followed, more lightly, after it.)

What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn’t only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Danny had heard and felt the wind in every season. The frightened boy quietly got out of bed, and—holding his breath—tiptoed to his partially open bedroom door and into the upstairs hall.

There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to
Jane?
young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her
head?
Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane—either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a
human
predator) with a bush hook?

As he made his cautious way down the hall, Danny half expected to see Jane’s severed head in the bathtub; as he passed the open bathroom door, without spotting her head, the twelve-year-old could only imagine that the intruder was a bear, not a man, and that the bear had
eaten
Jane and was now attacking his dad. For there was no denying where the violent creaks and moans were coming from—his father’s bedroom—and that was definitely moaning (or worse,
whimpering)
that the boy could hear as he came closer. When he passed the Cleveland Indians cap, the recognition that Chief Wahoo had landed upside down only heightened the twelve-year-old’s fears.

What Danny Baciagalupo would see (more accurately, what he
thought
he saw), upon entering his dad’s bedroom, was everything the twelve-year-old had feared, and worse—that is, both bigger and
hairier
than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be. Only his father’s knees and feet were visible beneath the bear; more frightening still, his dad’s lower legs weren’t moving. Maybe the boy had arrived too late to save him! Only the bear was moving—the rounded, humpbacked beast (its head not discernible) was rocking the entire bed, its glossy-black hair both longer and more luxuriant than Danny had ever imagined a black bear’s hair would be.

The bear was
consuming
his father, or so it appeared to the twelve-year-old. With no weapon at hand, one might have expected the boy to throw himself on the animal attacking his dad in such a savage or frenzied manner—if only to be hurled into a bedroom wall, or raked to death by the beast’s claws. But family histories—chiefly, perhaps, the stories we are told as children—invade our most basic instincts and inform our deepest memories, especially in an emergency. Young Dan reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as if it were
his
weapon of choice, not his father’s. That skillet was a legend, and Danny knew exactly where it was.

Holding the handle in both hands, the boy stepped up to the bed and took aim at where he thought the bear’s head ought to be. He’d already started his two-handed swing—as Ketchum had once shown him, with an ax, being sure to get his hips behind the swinging motion—when he noticed the bare soles of two clearly human feet. The feet were in a prayerful position, just beside his dad’s bare knees, and Danny thought that the feet looked a lot like
Jane’s
. The Indian dishwasher was on her feet all day, and—for such a heavy woman—it was only natural that her feet often hurt her. She liked nothing better, she’d told young Dan, than a foot rub, which Danny had more than once given her.

“Jane?” Danny asked—in a small, doubting voice—but nothing slowed the forward momentum of the cast-iron skillet.

Jane must have heard the boy utter her name, because she raised her head and turned to face him. That was why the skillet caught her full-force on her right temple. The ringing sound, a dull but deep
gong
, was followed by a stinging sensation young Dan first felt in his hands; a reverberant tingle passed through both wrists and up his forearms. For the rest of his life, or as long as his memory endured, it would be small consolation to Danny Baciagalupo that he didn’t see the expression on Jane’s pretty face when the skillet struck her. (Her hair was so long that it simply covered everything.)

Jane’s massive body shuddered. She was
too
massive, and her hair was too sleekly beautiful, for her ever to have been a black bear—not in this life or the next, where she most assuredly was going. Jane rolled off the cook and crashed to the floor.

There was no mistaking her for a bear now. Her hair had fanned out—flung wide as wings, to both sides of her inert, colossal torso. Her big, beautiful breasts had slumped into the hollows of her armpits; her motionless arms reached over her head, as if (even in death) Jane sought to hold aloft a heavy, descending universe. But as astonishing as her nakedness must have been to an innocent twelve-year-old, Danny Baciagalupo would best remember the faraway gaze in Jane’s wide-open eyes. Something more than the final, split-second recognition of her fate lingered in Injun Jane’s dead eyes. What had she suddenly seen in the immeasurable distance? Danny would wonder. Whatever Jane had glimpsed of the unforeseeable future had clearly terrified her—not just
her
fate but
all
their fates, maybe.

“Jane,” Danny said again; this time it wasn’t a question, though the boy’s heart was racing and he must have had many questions on his mind. Nor did Danny more than glance at his dad. Was it his father’s nakedness that made the boy so quickly look away? (Perhaps it was what Ketchum had called the
little-fella
aspect of the cook; the latter aspect was greatly enhanced by how near Dominic now was to the dead dishwasher.) “Jane!” Danny cried, as if the boy needed a third utterance of the Indian’s name to finally register what he had done to her.

The cook quickly covered her private parts with a pillow. He knelt in the vast expanse of her far-flung hair, putting his ear to her quiet heart. Young Dan held the skillet in both hands, as if the reverberation still stung his palms; possibly, the ongoing tingle in his forearms would last forever. Though he was only twelve, Danny Baciagalupo surely knew that the rest of his life had just begun. “I thought she was a bear,” the boy told his dad.

Dominic could not have looked more shocked if, at that moment, the dead dishwasher had turned herself into a bear; yet the cook could see for himself that it was his beloved Daniel who needed some consoling. Trembling, the boy stood clutching the murder weapon as if he believed a
real
bear would be the next thing to assail them.

“It’s understandable that you thought Jane was a bear,” his father said, hugging him. The cook took the skillet from his shaking son, hugging him again. “It’s not your fault, Daniel. It was an accident. It’s
nobody’s
fault.”

“How can it be
nobody’s
fault?” the twelve-year-old asked.

“It’s
my
fault, then,” his dad told him. “It will never be your fault, Daniel. It’s all mine.
And
it was an accident.”

Of course the cook was thinking about Constable Carl; in the constable’s world, there was no such thing as a no-fault accident. In the cowboy’s mind, if you could call it that, good intentions didn’t count. You can’t save yourself, but you can save your son, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. (And for how many years might the cook manage to save them both?)

For so long, Danny had wanted to see Jane undo her braid and let down her hair—not to mention how he had dreamed of seeing her enormous breasts. Now he couldn’t look at her. “I loved Jane!” the boy blurted out.