Last Night in Twisted River (72 page)

Six-Pack had also made some long-standing friendships at the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she still worked nights as a cleaning person; she’d called her friends at the hospital when she found Ketchum’s body at the cookhouse site. Six-Pack wanted Danny to know that she’d sat with Ketchum for the better part of that morning, just holding his one remaining hand, the right one—“the only one he ever touched me with,” as Six-Pack put it in her letter.

Pam told Danny he would find some photographs pressed flat in the books that had once belonged to Danny’s mother. It had been hard for Six-Pack not to burn the pictures of Rosie, though Pam did more than put her jealousy aside. Six-Pack admitted that she now believed Ketchum had loved the cook even more than the logger had once loved Rosie. Six-Pack could live with that—the left-hand business notwithstanding. Besides, Six-Pack said, Ketchum had wanted Danny to have those photos of the writer’s mother.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Pam also wrote to Danny, “but if I were you, I would write
and
sleep in that third-floor room. It is peaceful up there, in my opinion—and it’s the best room in the house. But—don’t get your balls crossed about this, Danny—I suspect you are well acquainted with more than your fair share of ghosts. I suppose it’s one thing to
work
in a room with a ghost, but quite another matter to
sleep
in the same room with one. I wouldn’t know—I never had children, on purpose. My philosophy was always to do without those things I didn’t dare to lose—Ketchum excepted.”

Danny wrote the
Ketchum excepted
words on a scrap of typing paper and taped it to one of his outdated typewriters—another IBM Selectric II, the one he was currently using in that third-floor room he shared with Joe’s ghost. The writer liked the phrase
Ketchum excepted;
maybe he could use it.

All that had happened three years ago, and counting. The only reason Danny hadn’t thrown out his relic of a fax machine, which was still in the kitchen of that house on Cluny Drive, was that Six-Pack occasionally faxed him and he faxed her. Pam must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine—the same age Ketchum would have been, if the old logger were still alive—and her messages via the fax machine had lost what literary pizazz she’d once demonstrated as a letter writer.

Six-Pack had grown more terse in her old age. When there was something she’d read, or had seen in the news on TV—and provided the item was in the dumber-than-dog-shit category of human stupidities—Six-Pack would fax Danny. Pam unflinchingly stated what Ketchum would have said about this or that, and Danny never hesitated to fax her back with the writer’s version of the river driver’s vernacular.

It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Danny or Six-Pack. It was what Ketchum would have said about
anything
. It was the old logger’s
voice
that Danny and Six-Pack wanted to hear.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

THE MID-FEBRUARY STORM
had blown across Lake Huron from western Canada, but when the wind and snow hit the Georgian Bay islands, the wind shifted and the snow just kept falling; the wind now blew from a southerly direction, from Parry Sound to Shawanaga Bay. From his writing shack, Danny could no longer see where the bay ended and the mainland began. Because of the whiteout from the storm, the fir trees on what Danny knew was the mainland appeared as a mirage of a floating forest—or the trees seemed to be growing out of the frozen bay. The wind whipped little spirals of snow skyward; these twisters looked like small tornadoes of snow. Sometimes, when the wind blew northward, along the length of Shawanaga Bay, there were
actual
tornadoes—not unlike the kind you see in the American Midwest or on the Canadian prairies, Danny knew. (Andy Grant had warned the writer to watch out for them.)

Tireless had called Danny on his cell phone. She didn’t want to be an island cleaning woman today; it wasn’t a good idea to be out in the Polar airboat, not when the visibility was this bad. In a similar storm, only a few years ago, Tireless told Danny, some butt-brained oaf from Ohio had run his airboat aground on the O’Connor Rocks—just a little northwest of Moonlight Bay. (Danny had to come that way in order to pick Tireless up at the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.)

“What happened to him—the butt-brained oaf from Ohio?” Danny asked her.

“They found the poor fool frozen—stiff as a stick,” Tireless told him.

“I’ll come get you tomorrow, or the next day—whenever the storm’s over,” Danny said. “I’ll call you, or you call me.”

“Kiss Hero for me,” she said.

“I don’t kiss Hero a lot,” Danny told Tireless. “At least I’m not inclined to.”

“Well, you should kiss him more,” the First Nation woman said. “I think Hero would be nicer to you if you kissed him a lot.”

All morning, in the writing shack, Hero had been farting up a storm—the near equal of the snowstorm Danny was watching out his window. It was a morning when the writer wasn’t tempted to make his relationship with the bear hound a
closer
one. “Jesus, Hero!” Danny had exclaimed several times in the course of the foul-smelling morning, but it was unfit weather for the Walker bluetick to be put outside. And despite the dog’s unrelenting flatulence, the writing had been going well; Danny was definitely getting closer to the start of his first chapter.

Certain sentences now came to him whole, intact; even the punctuation seemed permanent. When two such sentences were born consecutively, one emerging immediately after the other, the writer felt especially riveted to his task. He’d written the first twosome of the morning on a piece of typing paper and had thumbtacked the page to the rough pine-board wall of his writing shack. Danny kept looking at the sentences, rereading them.

“As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do—as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro—to and fro.”

Danny liked the repetition. He knew this was first-chapter material, but the passage belonged at the end of the chapter—it definitely didn’t sound like a beginning. Danny had circled the
under the logs
phrase, which the writer thought wouldn’t be a bad chapter title. Yet much of the focus of the first chapter seemed to be on the cook; the focus really wasn’t on the boy who’d slipped under the logs.

“You could not say ‘the past’ or ‘the future’ in the cook’s presence without making him frown,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. There were other, isolated sentences about this young cook; they were like landmarks or signposts for Danny, helping to orient the writer as he plotted his first chapter. Another sentence was: “In the cook’s opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river’s name.” There would be much more about the cook, of course; it kept coming. “The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand,” Danny wrote.

The cook would be a major point-of-view character in the first chapter, the writer imagined—as Danny also imagined the cook’s twelve-year-old son would be. “The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. And there was one sentence about the cook that the writer left unfinished—at least for the moment. “The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters”—well, that was as far as Danny wanted to go with
that
sentence, which he knew he would have to complete another day. For now, it was enough to type all these thoughts about the cook on a single piece of paper and thumbtack the page to the wall of the writing shack.

“In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change,” Danny had also written; it could work as a first sentence to the chapter, but the writer knew he could do better. Still, the sentence about the weather was a keeper; Danny could use it somewhere. “Now it was that mud-season, swollen-river time of year again,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote—a better beginning sentence, but it wasn’t really what the writer was looking for.

Everything about the Ketchum character was more fragmentary. Nothing about the Ketchum character came to Danny in a complete sentence—not yet. There was something to the effect that “Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive;” Danny liked that line, but he couldn’t see where the sentence was going. There was another fragment about Ketchum being “no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive.” Danny knew he could and would use that, but he wasn’t sure where—maybe in proximity to an as-yet-uncertain sentence about Ketchum lying on his back on the riverbank “like a beached bear.” Yet these fragments also found their way to the writing-shack wall, where they were thumbtacked alongside the first chapter’s other signposts or landmarks.

At this point, the writer could see the Angel character more clearly than he could see the Ketchum character—though it was obvious to Daniel Baciagalupo that the Ketchum character was more major. (Maybe
most
major, Danny was thinking.)

Just then—at what amounted to a wave of more noxious farting from the dog—Danny’s cell phone rang again.

“Buenos días
, Señor Writer,” Lupita said.

“Buenos días
, Lupita,” Danny said.

The Mexican cleaning woman didn’t call often. In those ten weeks of the winter when Danny lived on the island in Georgian Bay, Lupita looked after the house on Cluny Drive; she opened and read the author’s mail, she replayed the messages on his answering machine, she kept an eye on the fax machine, too. Once a week, Lupita would compile a list of what she considered was important for Danny to know—in essence, what she believed couldn’t wait until he returned to Toronto. She faxed the list of priority messages to Andy Grant’s office in Pointe au Baril Station.

Danny always left a couple of checkbooks of signed blank checks for Lupita, who paid his bills while he was gone. Most of all, the Mexican cleaning woman demonstrably enjoyed reading the writer’s mail and deciding what was important—and what wasn’t. This doubtless appealed to Lupita’s pride—her sense of herself as having an immeasurable authority, an almost managerial control over the bestselling author’s domestic life.

Danny knew that Lupita would have seized any opportunity that presented itself for her to take charge of the writer’s wretched personal life, too. If she’d had daughters, she would have introduced them to Danny. Lupita
did have
nieces; she would shamelessly leave their photographs on the kitchen countertop, calling Danny (after she’d gone home) to tell him that she’d “lost” some photos that were dear to her. Perhaps he’d seen the pictures lying around somewhere?

“Lupita, the pictures are on my kitchen countertop—where you evidently left them,” he would tell her.

“The dark-haired beauty in the pink tank top—the one with the wonderful smile and the gorgeous skin? My precious niece, actually, Mr. Writer.”

“Lupita, she looks like a teenager,” Danny would point out.

“No, she’s
older—
a little,” Lupita would tell him.

Once Lupita had told him: “Just don’t marry another
writer
. All you’ll do is depress each other.”

“I’m not going to marry anybody—not ever,” he told her.

“Why don’t you stab yourself in the heart instead?” she asked him. “Soon you’ll be consorting with prostitutes! I know you talk to the dog—I’ve heard you!” she told him.

If Lupita was calling him in Pointe au Baril, she was vexed about something, Danny knew. “What’s up, Lupita?” he asked her on the cell phone. “Is it snowing in Toronto? We’re having quite a snowstorm up here—Hero and I are stranded.”

“I don’t know about that unfortunate dog, but I think you
like
to be stranded, Mr. Writer,” Lupita said. Clearly the weather wasn’t on her mind; that wasn’t why she’d called.

Sometimes, Lupita became convinced that people were
watching
the house on Cluny Drive; occasionally, they were. Shy fans, a few every year—mildly obsessed readers, just hoping to get a look at the author. Or lowlifes from the media, maybe—hoping to see what? (Another double shooting, perhaps.)

Some sleazy Canadian magazine had published a map of where Toronto’s celebrities lived; Danny’s house on Cluny Drive had been included. Not often, but once a month or so, an autograph-seeker came to the door; Lupita shooed them away, as if they were beggars. “He gets paid to
write
books—not
sign
them!” the cleaning woman would say.

Some half-wit in the media had actually written about Lupita: “The reclusive writer’s live-in girlfriend appears to be a stout, Hispanic-looking person—an older woman with an extremely protective disposition.” Lupita hadn’t been amused; both the
stout
and the
older
grievously troubled her. (As for Lupita’s disposition, she was more protective than ever.)

“There’s someone looking for you, Señor Writer,” Lupita now told him on his cell phone. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a stalker—not yet—but she is determined to find you, I can tell you that.”

“How determined?” Danny asked.

“I wouldn’t let her in!” Lupita exclaimed. “And I didn’t tell her where you were, of course.”

“Of course,” Danny repeated. “What did she want?”

“She wouldn’t say—she’s very
haughty
. She looks right through you—if looks could kill, as they say!—and she boldly hinted that she knew where you were. She was fishing for more information, I think, but I wouldn’t take the bait,” Lupita said, proudly.

“Boldly hinted how?” Danny asked.

“She was
unnaturally
informed,” Lupita said. “She asked if you were up on that island you’d once lived on with the screenwriter! I said, ‘
What
island?’ Well, you should have seen how she looked at me
then!”