Last Night in Twisted River (66 page)

She wanted Ketchum to marry her, Six-Pack suddenly realized. But
how?

Just after noon, with Ketchum and the other two having been gone the entire morning—and Pam feeling extremely pissed-off at them, and at the rest of the world—the Immigration and Naturalization Service said that the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico were on the highest state of alert, but that no decision had been made concerning closing the borders.

“The fanatics aren’t
Canadians!”
Six-Pack shouted meaninglessly at the dogs. “The terrorists aren’t
Mexicans!”
she wailed. She’d held herself together all morning, but Six-Pack was losing it now. Hero went out the dog door into the outdoor kennel, no doubt thinking his odds were better with the German shepherd than with Pam.

It was no wonder that when Ketchum
finally
arrived, with Danny and Carmella, the logger saw his long-suffering Hero (“that fine animal”) together with Pam’s dogs in the outdoor kennel—Six-Pack’s untrustworthy German shepherd among them—and took this to mean that Six-Pack had been neglecting his wounded bear hound. “Pam must be farting away her time, watching whatever abomination there is on daytime television,” was how the ever-critical woodsman expressed himself to Danny and Carmella.

“Uh-oh,” Danny said to Carmella. “You should be
nice
to Six-Pack, Ketchum,” Danny told the old logger. “In fact, I think you should
marry
her—or try living with her again, anyway.”

“Constipated Christ!” Ketchum shouted, slamming the door to his truck. Pam’s dogs immediately commenced barking, but not the stoic Hero.

Six-Pack came out the trailer door from her kitchen. “The country is under attack!” Pam screamed. “Bush is flyin’ around in
Air Force One—
the coward must be hidin’! The Israelis have all gone home to defend themselves! It’s the beginnin’ of the end of the world!” Six-Pack shouted at Ketchum. “And
all you
can do, you crotchety asshole, is rile up my dogs!”

“Marry
her?” Ketchum said to Danny. “Why would I want to
live
with her? Can you imagine coming home every day to a deteriorated state of mind like
that?”

“It’s all
true!”
Six-Pack wailed. “Come see for yourself, Ketchum—it’s on
television!”

“On
television!”
Ketchum repeated, winking at Carmella—which doubtless drove Six-Pack around the bend. “Naturally, if it’s on TV, it must be truer than most things.”

But neither Six-Pack nor Ketchum had thought very much about where they
were—
in an orderly, fastidiously neat trailer park, in the Saw Dust Alley campground, where there were many stay-at-home women with young children, and some retired or unemployed older people (both men
and women)
, and a few unattended teenagers who were skipping school while their working parents didn’t have a clue.

It was Ketchum who clearly didn’t have a clue about how many people had overheard him and Pam, and both Ketchum and Six-Pack were unprepared for the diversity of opinion among the trailer-park residents, who had been glued to their television sets all morning. Given that the walls of their trailers were paper-thin, and that many of them had been talking with one another in the course of the day’s unfolding events, they’d expressed quite a variety of views—in regard to what some of them saw as the first installment of the Armageddon they were witnessing—and now this notoriously belligerent intruder had come into their small community
bellowing
, and the famously loudmouthed Ketchum (for the former river driver was indeed famous in Errol) seemed to be unaware of the developing news.

“Ain’t you heard, Ketchum?” an old man asked. He was stooped, almost bent over—wearing red-and-black wool hunting pants on this warm September day—with his suspenders loosely cupping his bony shoulders, and his bare, scrawny arms dangling from a white sleeveless undershirt.

“Is that you, Henry?” the logger asked the old man. Ketchum had not seen the sawyer since they’d shut down the sawmill in Paris—years before they had bulldozed it half-underground.

Henry held up his left hand with the missing thumb and index finger. “Sure it’s me, Ketchum,” the sawyer said. “It’s the war in the Middle East, the war between the Muslims and the Jews—it’s started
here
, Ketchum,” Henry said.

“It started long ago,” Ketchum told the sawyer. “What’s going on?” the logger asked Six-Pack.

“I’ve been
tryin’
to tell ya!” Six-Pack screamed.

There was a young woman with an infant in her arms. “It’s a terrorist attack—no airport is safe. They’ve closed them all down,” she said to Ketchum.

Two teenage boys, brothers who’d skipped school, were barefoot; they wore jeans and were shirtless in the midday sun. “Hundreds of people are dead—maybe thousands,” one said.

“They were jumpin’ from skyscrapers!” the other boy said.

“The president is missing!” a woman with two small children said.

“Well,
that’s
good news!” Ketchum declared.

“Bush ain’t missin’—he’s just flyin’ around, stayin’ safe. I told ya,” Six-Pack said to the logger.

“Maybe the Jews did it—to make us think it was the Arabs!” a young man on crutches said.

“If it’s your brain that’s addled, you don’t need crutches,” the old woodsman told him. “Constipated Christ—let me have a look at the TV,” Ketchum said to Six-Pack. (The former river driver, now a reader, was possibly the only resident of Errol who didn’t own a television.)

They traipsed into Pam’s kitchen—not just Ketchum, with Danny holding Carmella’s arm, but also Henry, the old sawyer with the stumps instead of a thumb and an index finger, and two of the women with young children.

The young man on crutches had hobbled away. Outside, the teenage boys could be heard by the kennel. After exchanging pleasantries with the dogs, one of the teenagers said, “Look at the tough bastard with one ear—he’s been in a fight.”

“Some fight,” the second boy said. “It musta been with a cat.”

“Some
cat!”
the first boy said appreciatively.

On Pam’s kitchen TV, the media kept replaying that moment when Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center—and of course those moments when first the south tower and then the north tower came down. “How many people were in those towers—how many cops and how many firemen were under those buildings when they fell?” Ketchum asked, but no one answered him; it was too early for those statistics.

At 1:04
P.M.
, speaking from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, President Bush said that all the appropriate security measures were being taken—including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. “Well, that sure as shit makes us all feel safer!” Ketchum said.

“Make no mistake,” Bush said on the TV. “The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

“Oh, boy,” Ketchum said. “It sounds to me like
that’s
what we should be afraid of next!”

“But they attacked us,” the young woman holding the infant said. “Don’t we have to attack them back?”

“They’re suicide bombers,” Ketchum said. “How do you attack them back?”

At 1:48, President Bush left Barksdale aboard
Air Force One
and flew to another base in Nebraska. “More flyin’ around,” Six-Pack commented.

“How many wars will that shit-for-brains start, do you imagine?” Ketchum asked them.

“Come on, Ketchum—he’s the
president,”
the sawyer said.

Ketchum reached out and took the old sawyer’s hand—the one with the missing thumb and index finger. “Did you ever make a mistake, Henry?” the veteran river driver asked.

“A couple,” Henry answered; everyone could see the two stumps.

“Well, you just wait and see, Henry,” Ketchum said. “This ass-wipe in the White House is the wrong man for the job—you just wait and see how many mistakes this
penis-breath
is going to make! On this mouse turd’s watch, there’s going to be a fucking
myriad
of mistakes!”

“A fuckin’
what?”
Six-Pack said; she sounded frightened.

“A
myriad!”
Ketchum shouted.

“An indefinitely large number—countless,” Danny explained to Six-Pack.

Six-Pack looked sick, as if the confidence had been kicked out of her. “Maybe you’d like to watch the moose dancin’ tonight,” she said to Ketchum. “Maybe you and me—and Danny and Carmella, too—could go campin’. It’s gonna be a pretty night up by the cookhouse, and between you and me, Ketchum, we could come up with some extra sleepin’ bags, couldn’t we?”

“Shit,” Ketchum said. “There’s an undeclared war going on, and you want to watch the moose dancing! Not tonight, Six-Pack,” Ketchum told her. “Besides, Danny and I have some serious issues to discuss. I suppose they have a bar and a TV at The Balsams out in Dixville Notch, don’t they?” the logger asked Danny.

“I want to go home,” Carmella said. “I want to go back to Boston.”

“Not tonight,” Ketchum said again. “The terrorists aren’t going to bomb Boston, Carmella. Two of the planes flew out of Boston. If they were going to attack Boston, they would have done it.”

“I’ll drive you back to Boston tomorrow,” Danny told Carmella; he couldn’t look at Six-Pack, who seemed to be in despair.

“Leave me the dog—let me look after Hero,” Pam said to Ketchum. “They don’t take dogs at The Balsams—and you should stay the night there, Ketchum, ’cause you’ll be drinkin’.”

“Just so you’re paying,” Ketchum said to Danny.

“Of course I’m paying,” Danny said.

All the dogs had come in the dog door and were huddled in the kitchen. There’d been no more hollering—not since Ketchum had shouted, “A
myriad!”
—and the dogs were anxious about so many humans standing around in Six-Pack’s small kitchen without any yelling.

“Don’t get your balls crossed, Hero—I’ll be back tomorrow,” Ketchum told the bear hound. “You don’t have to work at the hospital tonight?” the former river driver asked Six-Pack.

“I can get out of it,” she told him disinterestedly. “They like me at the hospital.”

“Well, shit—I like you, too,” Ketchum told her awkwardly, but Six-Pack didn’t say anything; she’d seen her opportunity pass. All Pam could do was position her aching body between the two children (belonging to one of the young women) and that unreliable German shepherd; the dog was just plain bonkers. Six-Pack knew that her odds of preventing the shepherd from biting the kids were far better than the possibility that she could ever persuade Ketchum to live with her again. He’d even offered to pay for her hip replacement—at that fancy fucking hospital near Dartmouth—but Pam speculated that Ketchum’s generosity toward her damaged hip had more to do with the logger’s infinite regret that he’d not killed the cowboy than it served as a testimony to Ketchum’s enduring affection for her.

“Everybody out. I want my kitchen back—everybody out,
now,”
Six-Pack suddenly said; she didn’t want to break down in front of a bunch of strangers. All but one of Pam’s mutts, as Ketchum called them, sidled out the dog door before Six-Pack could say to them, “Not you.” But the dogs were used to the everybody-out command, and they moved more quickly than the two women with young children or old Henry, the former sawyer and double-digit amputee.

Paying no heed to Pam’s command, the lunatic German shepherd and Hero stood their ground; the dogs were engaged in a macho standoff, in opposite corners of the kitchen. “No more trouble from you two,” Pam said to them, “or I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you.” But she’d already started to cry, and her voice lacked its customary firepower. The two dogs weren’t afraid of Six-Pack anymore; the dogs could sense when a fellow creature was defeated.

—

THE THREE OF THEM WERE RIDING
in the bear-fouled truck again—Danny once more in the middle, and Carmella as close to the open passenger-side window as she could get—when Ketchum turned on the radio in the stinking cab. It wasn’t yet three o’clock in the afternoon, but Mayor Giuliani was having a press conference. Someone asked the mayor about the number of people killed, and Giuliani answered: “I don’t think we want to speculate about that—more than any of us can bear.”

“That sounds like a good guess,” Danny said.

“And you’re thinking about moving back here—isn’t that right?” Ketchum asked Danny suddenly. “Didn’t I hear you say that there was no real
reason
for you to stay in Canada—not anymore—and that you were inclined to come back to your own country? Weren’t you recently complaining to me that you didn’t really
feel
like a Canadian—and, after all, you were born here, you really
are
an American, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Danny answered; the writer knew enough to be careful with Ketchum’s line of questioning. “I
was
born here—I
am
an American. Becoming a Canadian citizen didn’t make me a Canadian,” Danny said more assertively.

“Well, that shows you how stupid I am—I’m just one of those slow fellas who believes what he reads,” the old riverman said slyly. “You know, Danny, I may have been a long time learning to read, but I read pretty well—and quite a lot—nowadays.”

“What are you driving at, Ketchum?” Danny asked him.

“I thought you were a
writer,”
Ketchum told him. “I read somewhere that you thought nationalism was ‘limiting.’ I believe you said something about all writers being ‘outsiders,’ and that you saw yourself as someone standing on the outside, looking in.”

“I
did say
that,” Danny admitted. “Of course, it was an interview—there was a
context—
”

“Fuck
the context!” Ketchum shouted. “Who cares if you don’t
feel
like a Canadian? Who cares if you’re an American? If you’re a
writer
, you
should
be an outsider—you should
stay
on the outside, looking in.”