Last Night in Twisted River (15 page)

Please, God, give me
time
, the cook was thinking, as he saw his boy’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. Young Dan was waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from Constable Carl’s and be their driver.

By
time
, that dogged companion, Dominic Baciagalupo meant more than the time needed for this most immediate getaway. He meant the necessary time to be a good father to his precious child, the time to watch his boy become a man; the cook prayed he would have
that
much time, though he had no idea how he might arrange such an unlikely luxury.

He got into the driver’s seat of the station wagon without receiving the .45-caliber bullet he’d been expecting. Young Dan began to cry. “I kept listening for the gunshot,” the twelve-year-old said.

“One day, Daniel, you may hear it,” his dad told him, hugging him before he started the Pontiac.

“Aren’t we going to tell Ketchum?” Danny asked.

All the cook could say might one day be in danger of sounding like a mantra, but Dominic would say it nonetheless: “We haven’t time.”

Like a long, slowly moving hearse, the maroon semiwoodie took the haul road out of the settlement. As they drove south-southeast, sometimes within sight of Twisted River, the dawn was fast approaching. There would be the dam to deal with, when they reached the Pontook Reservoir; then, wherever they went next, they would be on Route 16, which ran north and south along the Androscoggin.

Exactly how
much
time remained to them, in their more immediate future, would be determined by what they found at Dead Woman Dam—and how long they would need to linger there. (Not too long, Dominic would hope as he drove.)

“Are we
ever
going to tell Ketchum?” young Dan asked his dad.

“Sure we are,” his father answered, though the cook had no idea how he might get the necessary message to Ketchum—one that would be safe yet somehow manage to be clear.

For now, the wind had dropped and the rain was letting up. Ahead of them, the haul road was slick with tire-rutted mud, but the sun was rising; it shone in the driver’s-side window, giving Dominic Baciagalupo a bright (albeit unrealistic) view of the future.

Only hours ago, the cook had been worried about finding Angel’s body—specifically, how the sight of the dead Canadian youth might affect his beloved Daniel. Since then, the twelve-year-old had killed his favorite babysitter, and both father and son had wrestled with her body—bringing Injun Jane the not-inconsiderable distance from the upstairs of the cookhouse to her near-final resting place at Constable Carl’s.

Whatever the cook and his dear boy would find at Dead Woman Dam, Dominic was optimistically thinking, how bad could it really be? (Under stress, as he was, the cook had uncharacteristically thought of the place by its ill-gotten name.)

AS THE CHIEFTAIN CAME CLOSER
to the Pontook Reservoir, the boy and his dad could see the seagulls. Although the Pontook was more than one hundred miles from the ocean, there were always sea gulls around the Androscoggin—it was such big water.

“There’s a kid in my class named Halsted,” Danny was saying worriedly.

“I think I know his father,” the cook said.

“His dad kicked him in the face with his caulk boots on—the kid has holes in his forehead,” young Dan reported.

“That would definitely be the Halsted I know,” Dominic replied.

“Ketchum says someone should stick a sawdust blower up Halsted’s ass, and see if the fat bastard can be inflated—Ketchum means the dad,” Danny explained.

“Ketchum recommends the sawdust blower for no small number of assholes,” the cook said.

“I’ll bet you we’re going to miss Ketchum wicked,” the boy said obsessively.

“I’ll bet you we do,” his father agreed. “Wickedl
y
.”

“Ketchum says you can’t ever dry out hemlock.” Danny talked on and on. The twelve-year-old was clearly nervous about where they were going—not just Dead Woman Dam, but where they might go after that.

“Hemlock beams are good for bridges,” Dominic countered.

“Hook your whiffletree as close to the load as possible,” young Dan recited, from memory—for no apparent reason. “Success Pond has the biggest fucking beaver pond there is,” Danny continued.

“Are you going to quote Ketchum the whole way?” his dad asked him.

“The whole way
where?”
the twelve-year-old asked anxiously.

“I don’t know yet, Daniel.”

“Hardwoods don’t float very well,” the boy replied, apropos of nothing.

Yes, but softwoods float pretty
high
, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Those had been softwoods in the river drive, when Angel went under the logs. And with the wind last night, some of the topmost logs might have been blown outside the containment boom; those logs would be eddying in the overflow spillway to either side of the sluice dam. The stray logs, mostly spruce and pine, would make it hard to get Angel out of the circling water. Both the high-water shoreline and the more slowly moving water in the millpond had been formed by the dam; with any luck, they might find Angel’s body there, in the shallows.

“Who would kick his own kid in the face with a caulk boot?” the distraught boy asked his dad.

“No one we’ll ever see again,” Dominic told his son. The sawmill at Dead Woman Dam looked abandoned, but that was just because it was Sunday.

“Tell me once more why they call it Dead Woman Dam,” Danny said to his father.

“You know perfectly well why they call it that, Daniel.”

“I know why you don’t like to call it that,” the boy quickly rejoined.
“Mom
was the dead woman—that’s why, right?”

The cook parked the ’52 Pontiac next to the loading dock at the mill. Dominic wouldn’t answer his son, but the twelve-year-old knew the whole history—“perfectly well,” as his dad had said. Both Jane and Ketchum had told the boy the story. Dead Woman Dam was named for his mother, but Danny never ceased wanting his father to talk about it—more than his father ever would.

“Why does Ketchum have a white finger? What does the chainsaw have to do with it?” young Dan started up; he simply couldn’t stop talking.

“Ketchum has more than one white finger, and you
know
what the chainsaw has to do with it,” his father said. “The vibration, remember?”

“Oh, right,” the boy said.

“Daniel, please relax. Let’s just try to get through this, and move on.”

“Move on
where?”
the twelve-year-old shouted.

“Daniel, please—I’m as upset as you are,” his father said. “Let’s look for Angel. Let’s just see what we find, okay?”

“We can’t do anything about Jane, can we?” Danny asked.

“No, we can’t,” his dad said.

“What will Ketchum think of us?” the boy asked.

Dominic wished he knew. “That’s enough about Ketchum,” was all the cook could say. Ketchum will know what to do, his old friend was hoping.

But how would they manage to tell Ketchum what had happened? They couldn’t wait at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. If it took half that long to find Angel, they couldn’t even wait until they found him!

It all depended on when Constable Carl woke up and discovered Jane’s body. At first, the cowboy would surely think he was the culprit. And the cookhouse never served breakfast on a Sunday morning; an early supper was the only meal served on Sundays. It would be midafternoon before the kitchen helpers arrived at the cookhouse; when they learned that the cook and his son were gone, they wouldn’t necessarily tell the constable. (Not right away.) The cowboy would have no immediate reason to go looking for Ketchum, either.

Dominic was beginning to think that it might be all right to wait for Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. From what the cook knew about Constable Carl, it would be just like him to
bury
Jane’s body and forget about her—that is, until the cowboy heard that the cook and his son were gone. Most people in Twisted River would conclude that Injun Jane had left town with them! Only the constable would know where Jane was, and, under the circumstances (the guilty-looking, premature burial), the cowboy wouldn’t be likely to dig up Jane’s body just to prove what he knew.

Or was this wishful thinking on Dominic Baciagalupo’s part? Constable Carl wouldn’t hesitate to bury Injun Jane,
if he
believed he killed her. What
would
be wishful thinking on the cook’s part was to imagine that the cowboy might feel contrite about killing Jane—enough to blow his brains out, one could only hope.
(That
would be wishful thinking—to dream of a
penitent
Constable Carl, as if the cowboy could even conceive of contrition!)

To the right of the flashboards and the sluice spillway, outside the containment boom, the water was eddying against the dam in a clockwise direction, a few windblown logs (some stray red pine and tamarack among the spruce) circling in the open water. Young Dan and his dad couldn’t spot a body there. Where the main water passed through the sluice spillway, the containment boom bulged with tangled logs, but nothing stood out from the wet-bark, dark-water tones.

The cook and his son carefully crossed the dam to the open water on the left side of the boom; here the water and some stray logs were eddying in a counterclockwise direction. A deerskin glove was twirling in the water, but they both knew Angel hadn’t been wearing gloves. The water was deep and black, with floating slabs of bark; to Dominic’s disappointment
and
relief, they didn’t see a body there, either.

“Maybe Angel
got out,”
Danny said, but his dad knew better; no one that young slipped under moving logs and
got out
.

It was already past seven in the morning, but they had to keep looking; even the family Angel had run away from would want to know about their boy. It would take longer to search the broader reaches of the millpond—at some distance from the dam—although the footing would be safer there. The closer they were to the dam and the containment boom, the more the cook and his son worried about each other. (They weren’t wearing caulk boots, they weren’t Ketchum—they weren’t even rivermen of the greenest kind. They simply weren’t loggers.)

It would be half past eight before they found Angel’s body. The long-haired boy, in his red, white, and green plaid shirt, was floating facedown in the shallows, close to shore—not one log was anywhere around him. Danny didn’t even get his feet wet bringing the body ashore. The twelve-year-old used a fallen branch to hook Angel’s Royal Stewart shirt; young Dan called to his dad while he towed the Canadian youth to within his grasp. Together they got Angel to higher ground on the riverbank; lifting and dragging the body was light work compared to toting Injun Jane.

They unlaced the young logger’s caulk boots and converted one of the boots to a pail, to bring fresh water ashore. They used the water to wipe the mud and pieces of bark from Angel’s face and hands, which were a pale pearl color tinged with blue. Danny did his best to run his fingers like a comb through the dead youth’s hair.

The twelve-year-old was the first to find a leech. As long and thick as Ketchum’s oddly bent index finger, it was what the locals called a northern bloodsucker—it was attached to Angel’s throat. The cook knew it wouldn’t be the only leech on Angel. Dominic Baciagalupo also knew how Ketchum hated leeches. The way things were working out, Dominic might not be able to spare his old friend the sight of Angel’s body, but—with Daniel’s help—they might spare Ketchum the bloodsuckers.

By nine o’clock, they had moved Angel to the loading dock at the sawmill, where the platform was at least dry and partly sunny—and in view of the parking lot. They had stripped the body and removed almost twenty leeches; they’d wiped Angel clean with his wet plaid shirt, and had managed to re-dress the dead boy in an anonymous combination of the cook’s and his son’s unrecognizable clothes. A T-shirt that had always been too big for Danny fit Angel fine; an old pair of Dominic’s dungarees completed the picture. For Ketchum’s sake, if Ketchum ever showed up, at least the clothes were clean and dry. There was nothing they could do about the pearl-gray, bluish tint to Angel’s skin; it was unreasonable to hope that the weak April sun would return the natural color to the dead youth, but somehow Angel
looked
warm.

“Are we waiting for Ketchum?” Danny asked his dad.

“For just a little while longer,” the cook replied. His dad was the anxious one now, young Dan realized. (The thing about time, Dominic knew, was that it was relentless.)

The cook was wringing out Angel’s soaking-wet and dirty clothes when he felt the wallet in the left-front pocket of the Canadian’s dungarees—just a cheap, imitation-leather wallet with a photo of a pretty, heavy-looking woman under a plastic window, which was now fogged by its immersion in the cold water. Dominic rubbed the plastic on his shirtsleeve; when he could see the woman more clearly, her resemblance to Angel was apparent. Surely, she was the dead boy’s mother—a woman a little older than the cook but younger than Injun Jane.

There wasn’t much money in the wallet—just some small bills, only American dollars (Dominic had expected to find some Canadian dollars, too), and what appeared to be a business card from a restaurant with an Italian name. This confirmed the cook’s earliest impression that Angel was no stranger to working in a kitchen, though it might not have been the boy’s foremost career choice.

However, something else was
not
as Dominic Baciagalupo had expected: The restaurant wasn’t in Toronto, or anywhere else in Ontario; it was an Italian restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts, and the name of the restaurant was an even bigger surprise. It was a phrase that the illegitimate son of Annunziata Saetta knew well, because he’d heard his mother utter it with a bitterness born of rejection.
“Vicino di Napoli,”
Nunzi had said—in reference to where Dominic’s absconding father had gone—and the boy had thought of those hill towns and provinces “in the vicinity of Naples,” where his dad had come from (and, allegedly, gone back to). The names of those towns and provinces that Annunziata had said in her sleep—Benevento and Avellino—came to Dominic’s mind.