Last Night in Twisted River (62 page)

Well, what could he say? Surely no one would think a new novel by Danny Angel was a cookbook! Danny stopped talking about the story; to placate Carmella, he told her what the dedication was. “My father, Dominic Baciagalupo—in memoriam.” This would be his second dedication to his dad, bringing the number of dedications “in memoriam” up to four. Predictably, Carmella burst into tears. There was a certain safety, a familiar kind of comfort, in her tears; Carmella seemed almost happy when she was crying, or at least her disapproval of Danny was somewhat abated by her sorrow.

As he lay awake in bed now, with little confidence that he would fall asleep, Danny wondered why he’d tried so hard to make Carmella understand what he was writing. Why had he bothered? Okay, so she’d
asked
what he was writing—she had even said she was
dying
to know what was next! But he’d been a storyteller forever; Danny had always known how to change the subject.

As he drifted—ever so lightly—to sleep, Danny imagined the son (the tentative sous chef) in the after-hours kitchen, where his father’s ghost instructs him. Similar to Ketchum before the logger learned to read, the son makes lists of words he is struggling to recognize and remember; this night, the son is obsessed with pasta.
“Orecchiette,”
he writes, “means ‘little ears.’ They are small and disk-shaped.” Bit by bit, the sous chef is becoming a cook—if it isn’t too late, if his dead father’s restaurant will only give him more time to learn!
“Farfalle,”
the somewhat retarded son writes, “means ‘butterflies,’ but my dad also called them bow ties.”

In his half-sleep, Danny was up to the chapter where the cook’s ghost speaks very personally to his son. “I had
so wanted
for you to be married, with children of your own. You would be a wonderful father! But you like the kind of woman who is—”

Is
what?
Danny was thinking. A new waitress has been added to the waitstaff in the haunted restaurant; she is precisely “the kind of woman” the cook’s ghost is trying to warn his son about. But at last the writer fell asleep; only then did the story stop.

THE POLICE BUSINESS
concerning the double shooting in Toronto was finished; even the most egregious morons in the media had finally backed off. After all, the bloodbath had happened almost nine months ago—not quite the duration of a pregnancy. Only Danny’s mail had continued to discuss it—the
sympathy
letters, and whatever their opposite was.

That mail about the cook’s murder and the subsequent shooting of his killer had persisted—condolences, for the most part, though not all the letters were kind. Danny read every word of them, but he’d not yet received the letter he was looking for—nor did he seriously expect that he would ever hear from Lady Sky again. This didn’t stop Danny from dreaming about her—that vertical strip of the strawberry blonde’s pubic hair, the bright white scar from her cesarean section, the imagined histories of her unexplained tattoos. Little Joe had given her a superhero’s name, but was Lady Sky an actual warrior—or, in a previous life, had she been one? Danny could only imagine that Amy’s life had been different once. Doesn’t something have to happen to you
before
you jump naked out of an airplane? And
after
you’ve jumped, what more can happen to you? Danny would wonder.

That Amy had written him once, after Joe died, and that she’d also lost a child—well, that was one of life’s missed connections, wasn’t it? Since he’d not written her back, why would she write him again? But Danny read his mail, all of it—answering not a single letter—in the diminishing hope that he would hear from Amy. Danny didn’t even know why he
wanted
to hear from her, but he couldn’t forget her.

“If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky had told little Joe, kissing the two-year-old’s forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy.” So much for the promises of angels who drop naked out of the sky, though—to be fair—Amy had told them she was only an angel “sometimes.” Indeed, most persistently in Danny’s dreams, Lady Sky didn’t always make herself available as an angel—obviously,
not
on that snowy night when Joe and the wild blow-job girl met the blue Mustang going over Berthoud Pass.

“I would like to see you again, Amy,” Danny Angel said aloud, in the writer’s fragile sleep, but there was no one to hear him in the dark—only his father’s silent ashes. Evidently, in the drama enacted that night in that hotel room, the cook’s ashes—at rest in the jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice—had been given a nonspeaking part.

DANNY AWOKE WITH A START;
the early-morning light seemed too bright. He thought he was already late for his meeting with Ketchum, but he wasn’t. Danny called Carmella in her hotel room. He was surprised at how wide awake she sounded, as if she’d been anticipating his call. “The bathtub is much too small, Secondo, but I managed somehow,” Carmella told him. She was waiting for him in the vast and almost empty dining hall when he went downstairs for breakfast.

Ketchum had been right about visiting in September; it was going to be quite a beautiful day in the northeastern United States. Even as Danny and Carmella drove away from The Balsams at that early-morning hour, the sun was bright, the sky a vivid and cloudless blue. A few fallen maple leaves dotted Akers Pond Road with reds and yellows. Danny and Carmella had told the resort hotel that they would be staying a second night in Dixville Notch. “Maybe Mr. Ketchum will join us for dinner tonight,” Carmella said to Danny in the car.

“Maybe,” Danny answered her; he doubted that The Balsams was Ketchum’s kind of place. The hotel had an oversize appearance, an ambience that possibly catered to conventions; Ketchum wasn’t the conventioneer type.

They quickly came upon the sign that said
SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS
, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. “I’m at the end of the road,” was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering)
BEWARE OF THE DOG.
But there was no dog—no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality—namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.

“I think I know the dog,” Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. “His name is Hero, and he’s not really a bad dog—not that I’ve seen.”

The road went on, growing narrower—till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he’d definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.

“Looks like a dead end ahead,” Carmella said; she put her plump hands on the dashboard, as if to ward off a pending collision. But the road ended at a clearing, one that could have been mistaken for a dump—or perhaps it was a graveyard for abandoned trucks and trailers. Many of the trucks had been dissected for their parts. Several outbuildings were scattered throughout the premises; one weather-beaten shack had the appearance of a log-cabin smokehouse, from which so much smoke seeped through the cracks between the logs that the entire building looked as if it were about to burst into flames. A smaller, more focused column of smoke rose from a stovepipe atop a trailer—a former wanigan, Danny recognized. Probably, a woodstove was in the wanigan.

Danny shut off the car and listened for the dog. (He had forgotten that Hero didn’t bark.) Carmella rolled down her window. “Mr. Ketchum must be cooking something,” she said, sniffing the air. From the bearskin, stretched taut on a clothesline between two trailers, Danny assumed that the skinned bear was in the smokehouse—not exactly “cooking.”

“A fella I know butchers my bears for me, if I give him some of the meat,” Ketchum had told Danny, “but, especially in warm weather, I always smoke the bears first.” From the aroma in the air, it was definitely a bear that was smoking, Danny thought. He opened the driver’s-side door cautiously—on the lookout for Hero, assuming that the hound might see his designated role as that of guarding the smoking bear. But no dog emerged from one of the outbuildings, or from behind any of several sheltering piles of wreckage.

“Ketchum!” Danny called.

“Who wants to know?” they heard Ketchum shout, before the door opened to the wanigan with the smoking stovepipe. Ketchum quickly put the rifle away.

“Well, you aren’t as late as you thought you would be!” he hailed them, in a friendly fashion. “It’s nice to see you again, Carmella,” he told her, almost flirtatiously.

“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Ketchum,” she said.

“Come on in and have some coffee,” Ketchum told them. “Bring Cookie’s ashes with you, Danny—I want to see what you’ve got them in.”

Carmella was curious to see the container, too. They had to pass the strong-smelling bearskin on the clothesline before entering the wanigan, and Carmella looked away from the bear’s severed head; it was still attached to the pelt, but the head hung nose-down, almost touching the ground, and a bright globe of blood had bubbled and congealed. Where the blood had once dripped from the bear’s nostrils, it now resembled a Christmas ornament attached to the dead animal’s nose.

“‘Amos’ New York Steak Spice,’” Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. “Well, that’s a fine choice. If you don’t mind, Danny, I’m going to put the ashes in a glass jar—you’ll see why when we get there.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he’d been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.

Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He’d put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not—strong and sweet, and a little silty, “like Turkish coffee,” Carmella commented.

She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept—surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn’t see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal—as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.

Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound’s wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear’s claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero’s hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.

“I didn’t realize that Hero had lost half an ear,” Ketchum told them. “There was so much blood yesterday, I thought the whole ear was still there. It was only when the ear stopped bleeding a bit that I could see it was half gone!”

“My goodness—” Carmella started to say.

“Shouldn’t you take him to a vet?” Danny asked.

“Hero isn’t friendly to the vet,” Ketchum said. “We’ll take Hero to Six-Pack on our way to the river. Pam’s got some gunk that works good for claw wounds, and I’ve got an antibiotic for the ear—while what’s left of it is healing. Doesn’t it serve you right, Hero?” Ketchum asked the dog. “I told you—you were too far ahead of me! The fool dog got to the bear while I was out of range!” Ketchum explained to Carmella.

“The poor creature,” was all she could say.

“Oh, he’ll be fine—I’ll just feed him some of the bear meat!” Ketchum told her. “Let’s get going,” he said to Danny, taking the Remington .30-06 Springfield down from two pegs on the wall; he lowered the carbine across one forearm and headed for the wanigan’s door. “Come on, Hero,” he called to the hound, who rose stiffly from the dog bed and limped after him.

“What’s the gun for? It looks like you got your bear,” Danny said.

“You’ll see,” Ketchum told him.

“You’re not going to shoot anything, are you, Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked him.

“Only if there’s a critter in need of shooting,” Ketchum answered her. Then, as if to change the subject, Ketchum said to Danny: “I don’t imagine you’ve seen a skinned bear without its head. In that condition, a bear resembles a man. Not something
for you
to see, I think,” the logger added quickly, to Carmella.

“Stay!” Ketchum said suddenly, to Hero, and the dog froze alongside Carmella, who had stopped in her tracks, too.

In the smokehouse, the skinned bear was suspended above the smoldering fire pit like a giant bat. Without a head, the bear indeed resembled a hulking man—not that the writer had ever seen a skinned man before. “Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Ketchum said to Danny, who was speechless.

They went out of the smokehouse and saw Carmella and the bear hound, standing transfixed exactly where they’d left them—as if only a violent change in the weather would have persuaded the woman and the dog to rethink their positions. “Come on, Hero,” Ketchum said, and Carmella dutifully followed the hound to the truck—as if the old river driver had also spoken to her. Ketchum lifted Hero, putting the injured dog in the back of the pickup.

“You’ll have to indulge Six-Pack, Danny,” Ketchum was saying, as they got into the cab of his truck—Carmella taking up more than her share of room, in the middle. “Pam has something she wants to say to you both,” Ketchum told them. “Six-Pack’s not a
bad
person, and I suspect she just wants to say she’s sorry. It was my fault that I couldn’t read, remember. I never blamed Pam for telling Carl what really happened to Injun Jane. It was the only thing Six-Pack had over the cowboy, and he must have made her use it.”