Last Night in Twisted River (63 page)

“I never blamed Six-Pack, either,” Danny told him; he tried to read Carmella’s expression, which seemed slightly offended, but she didn’t say anything. There was a bad smell in the cab; maybe the smell had offended Carmella.

“It won’t take too long, anyway—Six-Pack will have Hero to attend to,” Ketchum said to them. “Hero barely tolerates Pam’s dogs when he’s
not
all clawed up. This morning could be interesting.” They drove out the road advertising small engine repairs, though Danny somehow doubted that this was Ketchum’s sign, or that Ketchum had ever been in the business of repairing other people’s small engines; maybe the logger just fixed his own, but Danny didn’t ask. The smell was overpowering; it had to be the bear, but why had the bear been in the cab?

“We met a guy who knows you—a salesman at L. L. Cote,” Danny told Ketchum.

“Is that so?” the riverman said. “Was he a nice fella, or do I take it that you met the one asshole who works there?”

“I believe that’s the one we met, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. The horrible smell traveled with them; definitely the bear had been in the cab.

“Fat fella, always wears camouflage—that asshole?” Ketchum asked.

“That’s the one,” Danny said; the bear smell almost made him gag. “He seems to think you’re half-Indian.”

“Well, I don’t know what I am—or what the missing half of me is, anyway!” Ketchum thundered. “It’s fine with me if I’m half-Injun—or three-quarters-Injun, for that matter! Injuns are all a lost nation, which suits me fine, too!”

“That fella seemed to think your road was no longer called Lost Nation Road,” Danny told the old woodsman.

“I ought to skin that fella and smoke him with my bear!” Ketchum shouted. “But you know what?” he asked Carmella, more flirtatiously.

“What, Mr. Ketchum?” she asked him fearfully.

“That fella wouldn’t taste as good as bear!” Ketchum hollered, laughing. They swerved onto Akers Pond Road and headed to the highway. Danny held the new glass jar with his dad’s ashes tightly in his lap; the old container, now empty, was pinched between his feet on the floor of the cab. The glass jar was bigger; the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, filled it only two-thirds full. It was once an apple-juice jar, Danny saw by the label.

Ketchum drove to that well-kept trailer park on Route 26, just outside Errol—the Saw Dust Alley campground, where Six-Pack Pam had a trailer. Six-Pack’s home, which was no longer mobile—it was set on cinder blocks, and half surrounded by a vegetable garden—was actually two trailers that had been joined together. A kennel kept the dogs out of the garden, and a large, hinged door of the kind cats usually use allowed Pam’s dogs free access between the kennel and the trailers. “I’ve tried to tell Six-Pack that a full-grown
fella
could come through that fucking dog door, though I suspect there’s no fella around here who would dare to,” Ketchum said. Hero had a hostile look about him as Ketchum lifted the dog from the back of the pickup. “Don’t get your balls crossed,” Ketchum told the hound.

Danny and Carmella had not seen Six-Pack, who was kneeling in her garden. On her knees, she was almost as tall as Carmella was standing. Pam got to her feet—unsteadily, and with the help of a rake. Danny only then remembered how big she was—not fat, but big-boned, and nearly as tall as Ketchum. “How’s your hip?” Ketchum asked her. “Getting up off your knees isn’t the best thing for it, I suppose.”

“My hip is better than your poor dog,” Six-Pack told him. “Come here, Hero,” she said to the hound, who went over to her. “Did you kill the bear all by yourself, or did this asshole hunter finally get around to shootin’ it?”

“This asshole bear hound got too far ahead of me. When Hero got to the bear, I wasn’t in range!” Ketchum complained again.

“Old Ketchum ain’t as fast as he used to be, is he, Hero?” Six-Pack said to the dog.

“I shot the damn bear,” Ketchum told her peevishly.

“No shit—of course you did!” Pam said. “If you hadn’t shot the damn bear, your poor dog would be dead!”

“I’m giving Hero an antibiotic for that ear,” the logger said to Six-Pack. “I thought you might put some of that gunk you’ve got on his claw wounds.”

“It ain’t
gunk—
it’s
sulfa,”
Six-Pack told him.

The dogs in the kennel were an overeager-looking lot—mongrels, for the most part, though there was one that appeared to be close to a purebred German shepherd. Hero had his eye on that one, even with a fence between them.

“I’m sorry for your business here, Danny,” Six-Pack Pam said. “I’m sorry for my part in it, however long ago it was,” she added, this time looking directly at Carmella when she spoke.

“It’s okay,” Danny said to Six-Pack. “There was no preventing it, I guess.”

“Everyone loses people,” Carmella told her.

“I kinda fancied Cookie, once,” Six-Pack said, now looking at Danny. “But he wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with me. I suppose that was part of what provoked me.”

“You had the hots for
Cookie?”
Ketchum asked her. “High time I heard of it, I guess!”

“I ain’t tellin’
you—
I’m tellin’
him!”
Six-Pack said, pointing at Danny. “I ain’t sayin’ I’m sorry to you, either,” Pam told Ketchum.

Ketchum kicked the ground with his boot. “Well, shit, we’ll be back for the dog later this morning—or maybe not till this afternoon,” he said to Six-Pack.

“It don’t matter when you come back,” Pam told him. “Hero will be fine with me—I ain’t plannin’ on huntin’ any bears with him!”

“I’ll have some bear meat for you shortly,” Ketchum said sullenly. “If you don’t like it, you can always feed those mutts with it.” Ketchum made a sudden gesture to the kennel when he uttered the
mutts
word, and Six-Pack’s dogs commenced barking at him.

“Ain’t it just like you, Ketchum, to get me in trouble with my neighbors?” Pam turned to Carmella and Danny when she said, “Would you believe he’s the only asshole who can be counted upon to drive my dogs crazy?”

“I can believe it,” Danny said, smiling.

“Shut up, all of you!” Six-Pack yelled at her dogs; they stopped barking and slunk away from the fence, all but the German shepherd, who kept his muzzle pressed against the fence and continued to stare at Hero, who stared back.

“I’d keep those two fellas separated, if I were you,” Ketchum said to Pam, pointing to his bear hound and the shepherd.

“Like I
need you
to tell me that!” Six-Pack said.

“Shit,” the logger said to her. “I’ll be in the truck,” Ketchum told Danny. “Stay!” he said to Hero, without looking in the hound’s direction; thus again, Ketchum managed to make Carmella turn to stone.

—

OLD AGE HADN’T BEEN GENTLE
to Six-Pack, who was Ketchum’s age, though she was still a scary-looking bleached blonde. There was a scar on her upper lip—one Danny didn’t remember. In all likelihood, the new scar was one the cowboy had given her, the writer thought. (What was wrong with her hip might have been something the deputy had done to her, too.)

When the woodsman had shut himself in the cab of his truck and turned the radio on, Six-Pack said to Danny and Carmella: “I still love Ketchum, you know, though he don’t forgive me much—and he can be an awful asshole, when he’s judgin’ you for your faults, or for what you can’t help about yourself.”

Danny could only nod, and Carmella had been turned to stone; there was a momentary silence before Pam continued. “Talk to him, Danny. Tell him not to do somethin’ stupid to himself—to his left hand, for starters.”

“What about Ketchum’s left hand?” Danny asked her.

“Ask Ketchum about it,” Six-Pack said. “It ain’t my favorite subject. That left hand ain’t the one he ever touched
me
with!” she suddenly cried.

The old logger rolled down the window on the driver’s side of his truck. “Just shut up, Six-Pack, and let them leave for Christ’s sake!” he shouted; Pam’s dogs started barking again. “You already got to say you were sorry, didn’t you?” Ketchum called to her.

“Come on, Hero,” Six-Pack said to the bear hound. Pam turned and went into the trailer, with Hero limping stiffly after her.

It was still only a little after seven in the morning, and once Danny and Carmella had joined Ketchum in the truck, Six-Pack’s dogs stopped barking. There was half a cord of firewood in the bed of the pickup; the wood was covered by a durable-looking tarpaulin, and Ketchum had put his rifle under the tarp. Anyone following behind the pickup truck wouldn’t have seen the old bolt-action Remington, which was hidden in the woodpile. There was no hiding the bear smell in the cab, however.

A Kris Kristofferson song from the seventies was playing on the radio. Danny had always liked the song, and the singer-songwriter, but not even Kris Kristofferson on a beautiful morning could distract the writer from the powerful stench in Ketchum’s truck.

This could be our last good night together; We may never pass this way again
.

When Ketchum steered the truck south on Route 16, with the Androscoggin now running parallel to them on the driver’s side of the vehicle, Danny reached across Carmella’s lap and turned off the radio. “What’s this I hear about your left hand?” the writer asked the old logger. “You’re not still thinking about cutting it off, are you?”

“Shit, Danny,” Ketchum said. “There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about it.”

“My goodness, Mr. Ketchum—” Carmella started to say, but Danny wouldn’t let her go on.

“Why the
left
hand, Ketchum?” Danny asked the woodsman. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

“Shit, Danny—I promised your dad I would never tell you!” Ketchum said. “Even though, I suspect, Cookie probably forgot all about it.”

Danny held the cook’s ashes in both hands and shook them. “What do you say, Pop?” Danny asked the silent ashes. “I’m not hearing Dad raise an objection, Ketchum,” Danny told the logger.

“Shit—I promised your
mom
, too!” Ketchum shouted.

Danny remembered what Injun Jane had told him. On the night his mother disappeared under the ice, Ketchum got hold of a cleaver in the cookhouse. He’d just stood in the kitchen with his left hand on a cutting board, holding the cleaver in his right hand. “Don’t,” Jane had told the river driver, but Ketchum kept staring at his left hand on the cutting board—imagining it gone, maybe. Jane had left Ketchum there; she’d needed to take care of Danny and his dad. Later, when Jane came back to the kitchen, Ketchum was gone. Jane had looked everywhere for the logger’s left hand; she’d been sure she was going to find it somewhere. “I didn’t want you or your father finding it,” she’d told young Dan.

Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way the riverman had stared at the cast on his right wrist, after Angel went under the logs.

Now they drove alongside the Androscoggin in silence, before Danny finally said: “I don’t care what you promised my dad
or
my mom, Ketchum. What I’m wondering is, 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?”

“My left hand
is
my good hand!” Ketchum cried.

Carmella cleared her throat; it might have been the awful bear smell. Without turning her head to look at either of them, but speaking instead to the dashboard of the truck—or perhaps to the silent radio—Carmella said: “Please tell us the story, Mr. Ketchum.”

CHAPTER 15

MOOSE DANCING

I
T WAS NO SURPRISE TO DANNY THAT THE STORY OF KETCHUM’S
left hand was not immediately forthcoming. By the time the truck passed the Pontook Reservoir—and Danny noted the familiar drain age into the fields, as they drove down Dummer Pond Road—it was obvious that Ketchum had his own agenda. The story revealing whatever curious logic had persuaded the old logger to consider his left hand his “good” one would have to wait. Danny also noticed that Ketchum drove past the former haul road to Twisted River.

“Are we going to Paris, for some reason?” the writer asked.

“West Dummer,” Ketchum corrected him, “or what’s left of it.”

“Does anyone call it West Dummer anymore?” Danny asked.

“I do,” Ketchum answered.

Crossing the new bridge over Phillips Brook, they went the way young Dan had gone to school when Injun Jane was driving him. Long ago, it had seemed a never-ending trip from Twisted River to Paris; now the time and the road flew by, but not the bear smell.

“Don’t get your balls crossed about it, Danny, but the Paris Manufacturing Company School—the actual schoolhouse—is still standing,” Ketchum warned him. “Where the young writer-to-be spent a few of his formative years—getting the shit beat out of him, for the most part,” the woodsman explained to Carmella, who seemed to be struggling with the concept of crossed balls.

It’s probable that Carmella was simply fighting nausea; the combination of the rough surface of the dirt road with the rank smell in the truck’s cab must have made her feel sick. Danny, who was definitely nauseated, tried to ignore the bear hair drifting at their feet, blown about by the air from the open driver’s-side window of the lurching truck.

Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver’s-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the long, bent stick shift—in the area of Carmella’s knees. Ketchum’s left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.

Ketchum’s driving was a fairly fluid process, as seemingly natural and unplanned as the way his beard blew in the wind from the open driver’s-side window. (Had the window not been open, Danny was thinking, he and Carmella almost certainly would have thrown up.)

“Why didn’t you put the bear in the back of the pickup?” Danny asked Ketchum. The writer wondered if some essential hunting ritual were the reason for the slain bear riding in the cab of the truck.

“I was in Maine, remember?” Ketchum said. “I shot the bear in New Hampshire, but I had to drive in and out of Maine. I have New Hampshire plates on my truck. If the bear had been in the back of my pickup, some game warden or a Maine state trooper would have stopped me. I have a New Hampshire hunting license,” Ketchum explained.

“Where was Hero?” Danny asked.

“Hero was in the back of the pickup—he was bleeding all over,” Ketchum said. “Live critters bleed more than dead ones, because their hearts are still pumping,” the old logger told Carmella, who appeared to be suppressing a gag reflex. “I just buckled the bear in your seat belt, Danny, and pulled a hat over his ears. The beast’s head looked like it was stuffed between his shoulders—bears don’t have much in the way of necks—but I suppose we looked like two bearded fellas out driving around!”

Ketchum would have sat up taller in the cab than the dead bear, Danny realized. From a distance, the woodsman’s beard and long hair were as black as a black bear’s; you had to look closely at Ketchum to see the gray. Through the windshield of Ketchum’s approaching truck, especially if you’d been passing with any speed, probably Ketchum and the bear had looked like two
young
men with heavy beards—younger than Ketchum really was, anyway.

“Hell, I wiped the bear blood off the seat,” the river driver was saying, as the truck pulled into Paris. “I do wonder, though, how long the critter’s
reek
will last. Bears do smell something awful, don’t they?”

Ketchum dropped the truck down to first gear, his rough right hand briefly brushing one of Carmella’s knees. “I’m not trying to feel you up, Carmella,” the logger said to her. “I didn’t plan on my stick shift ending up between your legs! We’ll put Danny in the middle next time.”

Danny was looking all around for the steam-powered sawmill, but he couldn’t see it. Hardwood sawlogs had once been driven down Phillips Brook to Paris; the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine, had made toboggans, the writer remembered. But where was the old sawmill? What had happened to the horse hovel and the tool shops? There’d been a mess hall and a hostelry—a seventy-five-man bunkhouse, as Danny recalled—and what had appeared to be (at the time) a rather fancy-looking house for the mill manager. Now, as Ketchum stopped the truck, Danny saw that only the schoolhouse remained. The logging camp was gone.

“What happened to Paris?” Danny asked, getting out of the truck. He could hear Phillips Brook; it sounded just the same.

“West Dummer!” Ketchum barked. He was striding toward the knoll where the mess hall had been. “Why they waited till ninety-six to take it down, I couldn’t tell you—and they did a piss-poor job of it, when they finally got around to the bulldozing!” the logger yelled. He bent down and picked up a rusted pot and pan, clanging them together. Danny followed him, leaving Carmella behind.

“They
bulldozed
it?” the writer asked. He could now see sharp shards of metal, from the sawmill, poking out of the ground like severed bones. The horse hovel had collapsed and was left in a pile; the seventy-five-man bunkhouse or hostelry had been churned half-underground, with the childlike remains of bunk beds scattered in the low-lying juniper. An old washstand stood like a scooped-out skeleton; there was an empty, circular hole where the washbasin had been. There was even the rusted hulk of a steam-engine Lombard log hauler—rolled on its side, with its boiler dented, by the destructive but ineffectual force of the bulldozer. The Lombard rose out of a patch of raspberry bushes; it resembled the violated carcass of a dinosaur, or some other extinct species.

“You want to get rid of a place, you should
burn
it!” Ketchum railed. Carmella traipsed far behind them, pausing to pluck the burrs and the milkweed off her city slacks. “I wanted you to see this ass-wipe place first, Danny—it’s a fucking disgrace that they couldn’t even dispose of it properly! They were always dumber than dog shit in West Dummer!” the old logger hollered.

“Why is the schoolhouse still standing?” Danny asked. (Given how those West Dummer kids had abused him, Danny would have liked to burn the Paris Manufacturing Company School to the ground.)

“I don’t know,” Ketchum told him. “That schoolhouse has some frigging recreational use, I suppose. I see cross-country skiers here, now and again—and snowmobilers all the time, of course. I hear from those
energy
assholes that they’re going to put these fucking windmills on the high ridges, all around. Three-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high turbines—they have one-hundred-and-fifty-foot blades! They’ll build and service them with a thirty-two-foot-wide gravel-surfaced access road—which, as any fool knows, means they’ll have to clear about a seventy-five-foot-wide path just to build the road! These towers will make a whorehouse of noise and throw a shitload of ice; they’ll have to shut them down when there’s too much snow or sleet, or freezing fog. And after the piss-poor weather has passed, and they start the stupid windmills up again, the ice that has frozen on the blades will get thrown eight hundred fucking feet! The ice comes off in sheets, several feet long but less than an inch thick. Those sheets could slice right through a fella, or a whole moose! And of course there’s the flashing red lights to warn the airplanes away. It’s wicked ironic that these
energy
assholes are the same sorry bunch of fuck-headed environmentalists who said that
river driving
wrecked the rivers and the forests, or they’re the environmentalists’ asshole
children
!”

Ketchum suddenly stopped shouting, because he could see that Carmella was crying. She had not progressed very far from the truck; either the raspberry bushes had blocked her way, or the debris from the bulldozed logging camp had impeded her. With the uproar Ketchum had been making, Carmella couldn’t have heard Phillips Brook—nor could she see the water. The toppled Lombard log hauler, which was an utter unknown and, as such, forbiddingly foreign to her, appeared to have frightened her.

“Please, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said, “could we see where my Angelù lost his life?”

“Sure we can, Carmella—I was just showing Danny a part of his
history,”
the old river driver said gruffly. “Writers have to know their history, don’t they, Danny?” With a sudden wave of his hand, the woodsman exploded again: “The mess hall, the mill manager’s house—all bulldozed! And there was a small graveyard around here somewhere. They even bulldozed the graveyard!”

“I see they left the apple orchard,” Danny said, pointing to the scraggly trees—untended for years now.

“For no good reason,” Ketchum said, not even looking at the orchard. “Only the deer eat those apples. I’ve killed my fair share of deer here.” (Doubtless, even the deer were dumber than dog shit in West Dummer, Danny was thinking. Probably, the dumb deer just stood around eating apples, waiting to be shot.)

They got back in the truck, which Ketchum turned around; this time Danny took the middle seat in the cab, straddling the gearshift. Carmella rolled down the passenger-side window, gulping the incoming air. The truck had sat in the sun, unmoving, and the morning was warming up; the stench from the dead bear was as oppressive as a heavy, rank blanket. Danny held his dad’s ashes in his lap. (The writer would have liked to
smell
hi
s
father’s ashes, knowing that they smelled like steak spice—a possible antidote to the bear—but Danny restrained himself.)

On the road between Paris and Twisted River—at the height of land where Phillips Brook ran southwest to the Ammonoosuc and into the Connecticut, and where Twisted River ran southeast to the Pontook and into the Androscoggin—Ketchum stopped his foul-smelling truck again. The woodsman pointed out the window, far off, to what looked like a long, level field. Perhaps it was a swamp in the spring of the year, but it was dry land in September—with tall grasses and a few scrub pine, and young maple suckers taking root in the flat ground.

“When they used to dam up Phillips Brook,” the river driver began, “this was a pond, but they haven’t dammed up the brook in years. There hasn’t been a pond—not for a long time—though it’s still called Moose-Watch Pond. When there was a pond, the moose would gather here; the woodsmen came to watch them. Now the moose come out at night, and they dance where the pond was. And those of us who are still alive—there aren’t many—we come to watch the moose dance.”

“They
dance?”
Danny said.

“They do. It’s some kind of dance. I’ve seen them,” the old logger said. “And these moose—the ones who are dancing—they’re too young to remember when there was a pond! They just know it, somehow. The moose look like they’re trying to make the pond come back,” Ketchum told them. “I come out here some nights—just to watch them dance. Sometimes, I can talk Six-Pack into coming with me.”

There were no moose now—not on a bright and sunny September morning—but there was no reason not to believe Ketchum, Danny was thinking. “Your mom was a good dancer, Danny—as I know you know. I suppose the Injun told you,” Ketchum added.

When the old logger drove on, all Carmella said was: “My goodness—moose dancing!”

“If I had seen nothing else, in my whole life—only the moose dancing—I would have been happier,” Ketchum told them. Danny looked at him; the logger’s tears were soon lost in his beard, but Danny had seen them.

Here comes the left-hand story, the writer predicted. The mere mention of Danny’s mother, or her dancing, had triggered something in Ketchum.

Up close, the old riverman’s beard was more grizzled than it appeared from farther away; Danny couldn’t take his eyes off him. He’d thought that Ketchum was reaching for the gearshift when the logger’s strong right hand grabbed Danny’s left knee and squeezed it painfully. “What are you looking at?” Ketchum asked him sharply. “I wouldn’t break a promise I made to your mom
or
your dad, but for the fucking fact that some promises you make in your miserable life contradict some others—like I also promised Rosie that I would love you forever, and look after you if there came a day when your dad couldn’t. Like
that
one!” Ketchum cried; his reluctant left hand gripped the steering wheel, both harder and for longer than he allowed his left hand to hold the wheel when he was merely shifting gears.

Finally, the big right hand released Danny’s knee—Ketchum was once more driving right-handed. The logger’s left elbow pointed out the driver’s-side window, as if it were permanently affixed to the truck’s cab; the now-relaxed fingers of Ketchum’s left hand only indifferently grazed the steering wheel as he turned onto the old haul road to Twisted River.

Immediately, the road surface worsened. There was little traffic to a ghost town, and Twisted River wasn’t on the way to anywhere else; the haul road hadn’t been maintained. The first pothole the truck hit caused the glove-compartment door to spring open. The soothing smell of gun oil washed over them, momentarily relieving them from the unrelenting reek of the bear. When Danny reached to close the door of the glove compartment, he saw the contents: a big bottle of aspirin and a small handgun in a shoulder holster.

“Painkillers, both of them,” Ketchum remarked casually, as Danny closed the glove compartment. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon.”