Last Night in Twisted River (70 page)

IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004
, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Danny’s refrigerator, when Lupita—that most loyal and long-suffering Mexican cleaning woman—found the writer in his kitchen, where Danny was actually writing. This disturbed Lupita, who—in her necessary departmentalizing of the household—took a totalitarian approach to what the various rooms in a working writer’s house were
for
.

Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest—if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.

Caring, as she did, for Danny’s house on Cluny Drive had been nothing short of a series of heartbreaks for Lupita. That Mr. Ketchum didn’t come to Toronto for Christmas anymore could make the Mexican cleaning woman cry, especially in that late-December time of year—not to mention that the effort she’d had to expend in restoring the late cook’s bedroom, following that double shooting, had come close to killing her. Naturally, the blood-soaked bed had been taken away, and the wallpaper was replaced, but Lupita had individually wiped clean every blood-spattered snapshot on Dominic’s bulletin boards, and she’d scrubbed the floor until she thought her knees and the heels of her hands were going to bleed. She’d persuaded Danny to replace the curtains, too; otherwise, the smell of gunpowder would have remained in the murderous bedroom.

It is worth noting that, in this period of Danny’s life, the two women he maintained the most constant contact with were both cleaning women, though certainly Lupita exerted more influence on the writer than Tireless did. It was because of Lupita’s prodding that Danny had gotten rid of the couch in his third-floor writing room, and this was entirely the result of Lupita claiming that the imprint of the loathsome deputy sheriff’s body was visible (to
her)
on that couch. “I can still see him lying there, waiting for you and your dad to fall asleep,” Lupita had said to Danny.

Naturally, Danny disposed of the couch—not that the imprint of the cowboy’s fat body had ever been visible to Daniel Baciagalupo, but once the Mexican cleaning woman claimed to have sighted an imprint of Carl on that couch, the writer soon found himself imagining it.

Lupita hadn’t stopped there. It was soon after Hero had come to live with him, Danny was remembering, when Lupita proposed a more monumental change. Those bulletin boards with their collected family history—the hundreds of overlapping snapshots the cook had saved, and there were hundreds more in Dominic’s desk drawers—well, you can imagine what the Mexican cleaning woman thought. It made no sense, Lupita had said, for those special photos to be on display in a room where they were now unseen. “They should be in
your
bedroom, Mr. Writer,” Lupita had told Danny. (She’d spontaneously taken to calling him that, or “Señor Writer.” Danny couldn’t recall exactly when this had started.)

And it followed, of course, that those photographs of Charlotte would have to be moved. “It’s no longer appropriate,” Lupita had told Danny; she meant that he shouldn’t be sleeping with those nostalgic pictures of Charlotte Turner, who was a married woman with a family of her own. (Without a word of resistance from Mr. Writer, Lupita had simply taken charge.)

Now it made sense. The late cook’s bedroom served as a second guest room; it was rarely used, but it was particularly useful if a couple with a child (or children) were visiting the writer. Dominic’s double bed had been replaced with two twins. The homage to Charlotte in this far-removed guest room—at the opposite end of the hall from Danny’s bedroom—seemed more suitable to what Danny’s relationship with Charlotte had become.

It made more sense, too, that Danny now slept with those photographs of the cook’s immediate and extended families—including some snapshots of the writer’s dead son, Joe. Danny had Lupita to thank for this even being possible, and Lupita was the one who maintained the bulletin boards; she chose the new and recycled photographs that she wanted Danny to sleep with. Once or twice a week, Danny looked closely at the pictures on those bulletin boards, just to see what Lupita had rearranged.

Occasionally, there were small glimpses of Charlotte in the snapshots—for the most part, these pictures were of Charlotte with Joe. (They had somehow passed Lupita’s unfathomable radar of approval.) And there were pictures of Ketchum galore, of course—even a few new ones of the woodsman, and of Danny’s young mother with his even younger dad. These long-saved shots of Cousin Rosie had come into Danny’s possession together with Hero, and Ketchum’s guns—not to mention the chainsaw. The old photos had been spared any exposure to sunlight, pressed flat in the pages of Rosie’s beloved books, which had also come into Danny’s possession—now that the old logger could no longer read them. What a lot of books Ketchum had hoarded! How many more might he have read?

That December morning in 2004, when Lupita caught Danny writing in the kitchen, he was closing in on a couple of scenes he imagined might be near the beginning of his novel—even actual sentences, in some cases. He was definitely getting close to the start of the first chapter, but exactly where to begin—the very first sentence, for example—still eluded him. He was writing in a simple spiral notebook on white lined paper; Lupita knew that the writer had a stack of such notebooks in his third-floor writing room, where (she felt strongly) he should have been writing.

“You’re writing in the kitchen,” the cleaning woman said. It was a straightforward, declarative sentence, but Danny detected an edge to it; from the critical tone of Lupita’s remark, it was as if she’d said, “You’re fornicating in the driveway.” (In broad daylight.) Danny was somewhat taken aback by the Mexican cleaning woman’s meaning.

“I’m not exactly writing, Lupita,” he said defensively. “I’m making a few notes to myself about what I’m
going to
write.”

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it in the
kitchen,”
Lupita insisted.

“Yes,” Danny answered her cautiously.

“I suppose I could start upstairs—like on the third floor, in your writing room, where you’re not writing,” the cleaning woman said.

“That would be fine,” Danny told her.

Lupita sighed, as if the world were an endless source of pain for her—it had been, Danny knew. He tolerated how difficult she could be, and for the most part Danny accepted Lupita’s presumed authority; the writer knew that one had to be more accepting of the authority of someone who’d lost a child, as the cleaning woman had, and more tolerant of her, too. But before Lupita could leave the kitchen—to attend to what she clearly considered her out-of-order (if not altogether wrong) first task of the day—Danny said to her, “Would you please clean the fridge today, Lupita? Just throw everything away.”

The Mexican was not easily surprised, but Lupita stood as if she were in shock. Recovering herself, she opened the door to the fridge, which she had cleaned just the other day; there was practically nothing in it. (Except when Danny was having a dinner party, there almost never was.)

“No, I mean the
door,”
Danny told her. “Please clean it off entirely. Throw all those notes away.”

At this point, Lupita’s disapproval turned to worry.
“¿Enfermo?”
she suddenly asked Danny. Her plump brown hand felt the writer’s forehead; to her practiced touch, Danny didn’t feel as if he had a fever.

“No, I am
not
sick, Lupita,” Danny told the cleaning woman. “I am merely sick of how I’ve been distracting myself.”

It was a tough time of year for the writer, who was no spring chicken, Lupita knew. Christmas was the hardest time for people who’d lost family; of this, the cleaning woman had little doubt. She immediately did what Danny had asked her to do. (She actually welcomed the opportunity to interrupt his writing, since he was doing it in the wrong place.) Lupita gladly ripped the little scraps of paper off the fridge door; the damn Scotch tape would take longer, she knew, digging at the remaining strips with her fingernails. She would also scour the door with an antibacterial fluid, but she could do that later.

It’s not likely that it ever occurred to the cleaning woman that she was throwing away what amounted to Danny’s obsession with what Ketchum would have made of Bush’s blundering in Iraq, but she was. Maybe in Danny’s mind—way in the back, somewhere—the writer was aware that he was, at that moment, letting go of at least a little of the anger he felt at his
former
country.

Ketchum had called America a lost nation, but Danny didn’t know if this was fair to say—or if the accusation was true
yet
. All that mattered to Daniel Baciagalupo, as a writer, was that his former country was a lost nation to
him
. Since Bush’s reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was—from this minute, forward—an outsider living in Canada, till the end of his days.

While Lupita made a fuss over the refrigerator door, Danny went into the gym and called Kiss of the Wolf. He left a fairly detailed message on the answering machine; he said he wanted to make a reservation at the restaurant for every remaining night that Kiss of the Wolf was open—that is, until Patrice and Silvestro closed for the Christmas holiday. Lupita had been right: Christmas was always hard for Danny. First he’d lost Joe, and those Christmases in Colorado; then Danny’s dad had been blown away. And every Christmas since that also-memorable Christmas of 2001, the writer was reminded of how he’d heard about Ketchum, who was lost to him, too.

Danny was not Ketchum; the writer was not even “like” Ketchum, though there’d been times when Danny had tried to be like the old logger. Oh, how he’d tried! But that wasn’t Danny’s job—to use the
job
word as Ketchum had meant it. Danny’s job was to be a writer, and Ketchum had understood that long before Danny did.

“You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine
everything
, Danny,” the veteran river driver had told him. Daniel Baciagalupo was trying; if the writer couldn’t
be
Ketchum, he could at least
heroize
the logger. Really, how hard was it, the writer was thinking, to make Ketchum a hero?

“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” Ketchum had told him when it had taken Danny three shots to drop his first deer.

Shit, I should have known
then
what Ketchum meant, the writer was thinking on that day when Lupita was madly cleaning all around him. (Yes, he should have.)

CHAPTER 17

KETCHUM EXCEPTED

D
ANNY DID HAVE SOME GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING IN
regard to what Ketchum was up to—this had happened around the time of American Thanksgiving, in November 2001. The writer was having dinner one evening—naturally, at Kiss of the Wolf—and Danny’s dinner date was his own doctor. Their relationship wasn’t sexual, but they had a serious friendship; she’d been Danny’s medical-expert reader for a number of his novels. She’d once written him a fan letter, and they’d begun a correspondence—long before he came to Canada. Now they were close friends.

The doctor’s name was Erin Reilly. She was almost Danny’s age—with two grown children, who had children of their own—and, not long ago, her husband had left her for her receptionist. “I should have seen it coming,” Erin had told Danny philosophically. “They both kept asking me, repeatedly—I mean about a hundred times a day—if I was
all right.”

Erin had become the friend in his Toronto life that Armando DeSimone had been to Danny in Vermont. Danny still corresponded with Armando, but Armando and Mary didn’t come to Toronto anymore; the drive from Vermont was too long, and airplane travel had become too inconvenient for people their age, and of their disposition. “The airport-security goons have taken every Swiss Army knife I ever owned,” Armando had complained to Danny.

Erin Reilly was a real reader, and when Danny asked her a medical question—whether this was a concern he had for himself, or when he was doing research for a character in a novel—Danny appreciated that the doctor gave long, detailed answers. Erin liked to read long, detailed novels, too.

That night, in Kiss of the Wolf, Danny had said to his doctor: “I have a friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand; his left hand failed him somehow. Will he bleed to death, if he actually does it?”

Erin was a gangling, heron-like woman with closely cut gray hair and steely hazel eyes. She was intensely absorbed in her work, and in whatever novel or novels she was reading—to a flaw, Danny knew, and maybe the flaw was why he loved her. She could be blind to the world around her to an alarming degree—the way, with the passage of time, the cook had managed to convince himself that the cowboy wasn’t really coming after him. Erin could joke that she should have “seen it coming”—meaning her husband’s involvement with her receptionist—but the fact that they’d both kept asking Erin if she was
all right
, was not (in Danny’s opinion) what his dear friend Erin
should
have noticed. Erin had written her husband’s Viagra prescriptions; she had to have known how much of that stuff he was taking! But Danny loved this about Erin—her acute innocence, which reminded him of everything his father had been blind to, which Danny had also loved.

“This
… friend who
has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand,” Dr. Reilly slowly said. “Is it
you
, Danny, or is this a character you’re writing about?”

“Neither. It’s an old friend,” Danny told her. “I would tell you the story, Erin, but it’s too long, even for you.”

Danny remembered what he and Erin had to eat that night. They’d ordered the prawns with coconut milk and green curry broth; they’d both had the Malpeque oysters, with Silvestro’s Champagne-shallot mignonette, to start.

“Tell me
everything
, Erin,” he’d told her. “Spare me no detail.” (The writer was always saying this to her.) Erin smiled and took a tiny sip of her wine. She was in the habit of ordering an expensive bottle of white wine; she never drank more than a glass or two, donating the remainder of the bottle to Patrice, who then sold it by the glass. For his part, Patrice every so often paid for Erin’s wine. Patrice Arnaud was Dr. Reilly’s patient, too.

“Well, Danny, here goes,” Erin had begun that night in November 2001. “Your friend probably would
not
bleed to death—not if he cut his hand off at the wrist, with a clean swipe and a sharp blade.” Danny didn’t doubt that whatever instrument Ketchum might use would be sharp—be it the Browning knife, an ax, or even the old logger’s chain-saw. “But your friend would bleed a lot—a real spurting mess out of the radial and ulnar arteries, which are the two main vessels he would have severed. Yet this unfortunate friend of yours would have a few problems—that is, if he
wanted
to die.” Here Erin paused; at first, Danny didn’t know why. “Does your friend want to die, or does he just want to be rid of the hand?” the doctor asked him.

“I don’t know,” Danny answered her. “I always thought it was just about the hand.”

“Well, then, he may get what he wants,” Erin said. “You see, the arteries are very elastic. After they were cut, they would retract back into the arm, where the surrounding tissues would compress them, at least to a degree. The muscles in the arterial walls would immediately contract, narrowing the diameter of the arteries and slowing the blood loss. Our bodies are resourceful at trying to stay alive; your friend would have many mechanisms coming into play, all making an effort to save him from bleeding to death.” Here Erin paused again. “What’s wrong?” she asked Danny.

Daniel Baciagalupo was still thinking about whether or not Ketchum
wanted
to kill himself; over all those years with the incessant talk about the left hand, it hadn’t occurred to the writer that Ketchum might have been harboring more serious intentions.

“Are you feeling sick, or something?” Dr. Reilly asked Danny.

“No, it’s not that,” Danny said. “So he
wouldn’t
bleed to death—that’s what you’re saying?”

“The platelets would save him,” Erin answered. “Platelets are tiny blood particles, which aren’t even large enough to be real cells; they’re actually flakes that fall off a cell and then circulate in the bloodstream. Under normal circumstances, platelets are tiny, smooth-walled, non-adherent flecks. But when your friend cuts off his hand, he exposes the endothelium, or inner arterial wall, which would cause a spill of a protein called collagen—the same stuff plastic surgeons use. When the platelets encounter the exposed collagen, they undergo a drastic transformation—a metamorphosis. The platelets become sticky, spiculated particles. They aggregate and adhere to one another—they form a plug.”

“Like a clot?” Danny asked; his voice sounded funny. He couldn’t eat because he couldn’t swallow. He was somehow certain that Ketchum intended to kill himself; cutting off his left hand was just the logger’s way of doing it, and of course Ketchum held his left hand responsible for letting Rosie slip away. But Rosie had been gone for years. Danny realized that Ketchum must have been holding himself accountable for not killing Carl. For his friend Dominic’s death, Ketchum faulted himself—meaning
all
of himself. Ketchum’s left hand couldn’t be blamed for the cowboy killing the cook.

“Too much detail while you’re eating?” Erin asked. “I’ll stop. The clotting comes a little later; there are a couple of other proteins involved. Suffice it to say, there
is
an artery-plugging clot; this would stem the tide of your friend’s bleeding, and save his life. Cutting off your hand won’t kill you.”

But Danny felt that he was drowning; he was sinking fast. (“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” the old logger had told him.)

“Okay, Erin,” Danny said, but his voice wasn’t his own; neither he nor Erin recognized it. “Let’s say that my friend
wanted
to die. Let’s assume that he wants to cut off his left hand in the process, but what he
really
wants is to die. What then?”

The doctor was eating ravenously; she had to chew and swallow for a few seconds while Danny waited. “Easy,” Erin said, after another small sip of wine. “Does your friend know what aspirin is? He just takes some aspirin.”

“Aspirin,” Danny repeated numbly. He could see the contents of the glove compartment in Ketchum’s truck, as if the door were still open and Danny had never reached out and closed it—the small handgun and the big bottle of aspirin.

“Painkillers, both of them,” Ketchum had called them, casually. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon,” he’d said.

“Aspirin blocks certain parts of the process that activates the platelets,” Dr. Reilly was saying. “If you wanted to get technical, you could say that aspirin prevents blood from clotting—only two aspirin tablets in your friend’s system, and very possibly the clotting wouldn’t kick in quickly enough to save him. And if he
really
wanted to die, he could wash the aspirin down with some booze; through a completely different mechanism, alcohol also prevents platelet activation and aggregation. There would be a real synergy between the alcohol and the aspirin, rendering the platelets impotent—they wouldn’t stick to one another. No clot, in other words. Your hand-deprived friend would die.”

Erin finally stopped talking when she saw that Danny was staring at his food, not eating. It’s also worth noting that Daniel Baciaglupo had hardly touched his beer. “Danny?” his doctor said. “I didn’t know he was a
real
friend. I thought that he was probably a character in a novel, and you were using the
friend
word loosely. I’m sorry.”

DANNY HAD RUN HOME
from Kiss of the Wolf that November night. He’d wanted to call Ketchum right away, but privately. It was a cold night in Toronto. That late in the fall, it would have already snowed a bunch of times in Coos County, New Hampshire.

Ketchum didn’t fax much anymore. He didn’t call Danny very frequently, either—not nearly as often as Danny called him. That night, the phone had rung and rung; there’d been no answer. Danny would have called Six-Pack, but he didn’t have her phone number and he’d never known her last name—no more than he knew Ketchum’s first name, if the old logger had ever had one.

He decided to fax Ketchum some evidently transparent bullshit—to the effect that Danny thought he should have Six-Pack’s phone number, in case there was ever an emergency and Danny couldn’t reach Ketchum.

I DON’T NEED ANYBODY CHECKING UP ON ME!

Ketchum had faxed back, before Danny was awake and downstairs in the morning. But, after a few more faxes and an awkward phone conversation, Ketchum provided Danny with Pam’s number.

It was December of that same year, 2001, before Danny got up the nerve to call Six-Pack, and she wasn’t much of a communicator on the phone. Yes, she and Ketchum had gone a couple of times that fall to Moose-Watch Pond and seen the moose dancing—or “millin’ around,” as Six-Pack said. Yes, she’d gone “campin’” with Ketchum, too—but only once, in a snowstorm, and if her hip hadn’t kept her awake the whole night, Ketchum’s snoring would have.

Nor did Danny have any luck in persuading Ketchum to come to Toronto for Christmas that year. “I may show up, I more likely won’t,” was how Ketchum had left it—as independent as ever.

All too soon, it was that time of year Daniel Baciagalupo had learned to dread—just a few days before Christmas 2001, coming up on what would be the first anniversary of his dad’s murder—and the writer was eating dinner alone at Kiss of the Wolf. His thoughts were unfocused, wandering, when Patrice—that ever-suave and graceful presence—approached Danny’s table. “Someone has come to see you, Daniel,” Patrice said with unusual solemnity. “But, strangely, at the kitchen door.”

“To see
me?
In the
kitchen
?” Danny asked.

“A tall, strong-looking person,” Patrice intoned, with an air of foreboding. “Doesn’t look like a big reader—might not be what you call a fan.”

“But why the
kitchen
door?” Danny asked.

“She said she didn’t think she was well-enough dressed to come in the front door,” Patrice told the writer.

“She?”
Danny said. How he hoped it was Lady Sky!

“I had to look twice to be sure,” Patrice said, with a shrug. “But she’s definitely a she.”

In that Crown’s Lane alleyway behind the restaurant, one-eyed Pedro had spotted the tall woman; he’d graciously shown her to the service entrance to the kitchen. The former Ramsay Farnham had said to Six-Pack Pam: “Even if it’s not on the menu, they often have cassoulet at this time of year—I recommend it.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for a handout,” Six-Pack told him. “I’m lookin’ for a fella, name of Danny—a famous writer.”

“Danny doesn’t work in the kitchen—his dad did,” one-eyed Pedro told her.

“I know that—I’m just a back-door kinda person,” Pam said. “It’s a fuckin’ fancy-lookin’ place.”

The former Ramsay Farnham appeared momentarily disdainful; he must have suffered a flashback to his previous life. “It’s not
that
fancy,” he said. In addition to whatever snobbishness was in his genes, Ramsay still resented his favorite restaurant’s change of name; though no one had ever seen it,
Kiss of the Wolf would
always be a porn film to one-eyed Pedro.

There were other homeless people in the alleyway; Six-Pack could see them, but they kept their distance from her. It was perhaps fair to say that one-eyed Pedro was only a
half-homeless
person. The others in the alley were wary of Pam. Six-Pack’s rough north-woods attire notwithstanding, she didn’t look like a homeless person.

Even one-eyed Pedro could see the difference. He knocked at the service entrance to Kiss of the Wolf, and Joyce—one of the female sous chefs—opened the door. Before Joyce could greet him, Pedro pushed Six-Pack ahead of him into the kitchen.

“She’s looking for Danny,” one-eyed Pedro said. “Don’t worry—she’s not one of us.”

“I know Danny, and he knows me,” Six-Pack quickly said to Joyce. “I ain’t some kinda groupie, or anythin’ like that.” (At the time, Pam was eighty-four. It’s not likely that Joyce mistook her for a groupie—not even a
writer’s
groupie.)

Kristine ran to get Patrice, while Joyce and Silvestro welcomed Six-Pack inside. By the time Patrice brought Danny back to the kitchen, Silvestro had already persuaded Pam to try the duo of foie gras and duck confit with a glass of Champagne. When Danny saw Six-Pack, his heart sank; Six-Pack Pam was no Lady Sky, and Danny guessed that something had to be wrong.