Last Night In Twisted River

cook and his son were asleep. The floor creaked, Carl had noticed; so did the stairs leading down to the second- floor hall. But the cowboy would be wearing just socks on his feet. He would kill the cook first, Carl was thinking- then the son. Carl had seen the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging in the cook’s bedroom; of course the cowboy knew the Injun-killing history of that skillet, because Six-Pack had told him. Carl had amused himself by thinking how funny it would be to be standing in the cook’s bedroom, after he’d shot the little fucker, just waiting for the kid to come to his dad’s rescue with the stupid skillet! Well, if that was how it worked out, that would be okay with the cowboy. What was important to Carl was that he kill them both, and that he drive across the U. S. border before the bodies were discovered. (With any luck, the cowboy could be back in Coos County before then.)

The old sheriff was a little worried about encountering the Mexican cleaning woman, whose comings and goings weren’t as predictable as the cook’s-or the no-less-observable habits of his writer son. Compared to Lupita suddenly showing up to do a load or two of laundry, or compulsively attacking the kitchen, even Ketchum’s routine was reasonably consistent. The logger went to a Tae Kwon Do gym on Yonge Street for a couple of hours every day. The gym was called Champion Centre, and Ketchum had found the place by accident a few years ago; the master instructor was a former Iranian wrestler, now a boxer and a kickboxer. Ketchum said he was working on his “kicking skills.”

“Dear God,” the cook had complained. “Why would an eighty-three-year-old man have an interest in learning a martial art?”

“It’s more mixed martial arts, Cookie,” Ketchum explained. “It’s boxing and kickboxing-and grappling, too. I’m just interested in finding new ways to get a fella down to the ground. Once I get a guy on the ground, I know what to do with him.”

“But why, Ketchum?” the cook cried. “How many more fights are you planning to be in?”

“That’s just it, Cookie-no one can plan on being in a fight. You just have to be ready!”

“Dear God,” Dominic said again.

To Danny it seemed that Ketchum had always been getting ready for a war. Ketchum’s Christmas present to the writer, the Winchester Ranger, with which Danny had killed three deer, appeared to emphasize this point.

“What would I want with a shotgun, Ketchum?” Danny had asked the old logger.

“You’re not much of a deer hunter, Danny-I’ll grant you that-and you might never go back to hunting deer,” Ketchum began, “but every household should have a twenty-gauge.”

“Every household,” Danny repeated.

“Okay, maybe this household especially,” Ketchum said. “You need to have a quick- handling, fast-action gun around-something you can’t miss with, in a close situation.”

“A close situation,” the cook repeated, throwing his hands in the air.

“I don’t know, Ketchum,” Danny said.

“Just take the gun, Danny,” the logger told him. “See that it’s loaded, at all times-slip it under your bed, for safekeeping.”

The first two rounds were buckshot, Danny knew-the third was the deer slug. At the time, he’d handled the Winchester appreciatively-not only to please Ketchum, but because the writer knew that his acceptance of the shotgun would exasperate his father. Danny was adept at getting Ketchum and his dad riled up at each other.

“Dear God,” the cook started up again. “I won’t sleep at all, knowing there’s a loaded gun in the house!”

“That’s okay with me, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “In fact, I would say it would be ideal- if you don’t sleep at all, I mean.”

The Winchester Ranger had a birch-wood forestock and butt-stock, with a rubber recoil pad that the writer now rested against his shoulder. Danny had to admit that he loved listening to his dad and Ketchum going at it.

“God damn you, Ketchum,” the cook was saying. “One night I’ll get up to pee, and my son will shoot me- thinking I’m the cowboy!”

Danny laughed. “Come on, you two-it’s Christmas! Let’s try to have a Merry Christmas,” the writer said.

But Ketchum wasn’t in a merry mood. “Danny’s not going to shoot you, Cookie,” the logger said. “I just want you fucking fellas to be ready!”

“IN-UK-SHUK,” Danny sometimes said in his sleep. Charlotte had taught him how to pronounce the Indian word; or, in Canada, was one supposed to say the Inuit word? (An Inuk word, Danny had also heard; he had no idea what was correct.) Danny had heard Charlotte say the inuksuk word many times.

When he woke up the morning after Christmas, Danny wondered if he should move the photograph of Charlotte from above the headboard of his bed-or perhaps exchange it for a different picture. In the photo in question, Charlotte is standing, wet and dripping, in a bathing suit, with her arms wrapped around herself; she’s smiling, but she looks cold. In the distance, one can see the island’s main dock- Charlotte was just swimming there-but nearer to her tall figure, between her and the dock, stands the unreadable inuksuk. This particular stone cairn was somewhat man-shaped but not really a human likeness. From the water, it might have been mistaken for a mark of navigation; some inuksuit (that was the plural form) were navigational markers, but not this one.

Two large rocks atop each other composed each manlike leg; a kind of shelf or tabletop possibly represented the figure’s hips or waist. Four smaller rocks composed a potbellied upper body. The creature, if it was intended to have human features, had absurdly truncated arms; its arms were as disproportionately short as its legs were overlong. The head, if it was meant to be a head, suggested permanently windswept hair. The stone cairn was as stunted as the winter-beaten pines on the Georgian Bay islands. The cairn stood only as tall as Charlotte ’s hips, and given the perspective of the photograph above the headboard of Danny’s bed-that is, with Charlotte in the foreground of the frame-the inuksuk looked even shorter than it was. Yet it also appeared to be indestructible; maybe that’s why the word was on Danny’s lips when he woke up.

There were countless inuksuit on those islands-and many more out on Route 69, between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, where Danny remembered a sign that said FIRST NATION, OJIBWAY TERRITORY. Not far from those summer cottages around Moonlight Bay, where Danny had driven in the boat with Charlotte one scorching day, there were some striking inuksuit near the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.

But what were they, exactly? the writer now wondered, as he lay in bed the morning after Christmas. Not even Charlotte knew who had built the inuksuk on her island.

There’d been a carpenter from the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve on Andy Grant’s crew, the summer the two sleeping cabins were under construction. Another summer, Danny remembered, one of the guys who brought the propane tanks to the island had a boat named First Nation. He’d told Danny he was a pure-blooded Ojibway, but Charlotte said it was “unlikely;” Danny hadn’t asked her why she was skeptical.

“Maybe Granddaddy built your inuksuk,” Danny had said to Charlotte. Perhaps, he’d thought, the various Indians who’d worked on Turner Island over the years had rebuilt the stone cairn whenever the rocks had fallen down.

“The rocks don’t fall down,” Charlotte said. “Granddaddy had nothing to do with our inuksuk. A native built it-it won’t ever fall down.”

“But what do they mean, exactly?” Danny asked her.

“They imply origins, respect, endurance,” Charlotte answered, but this was too vague to satisfy the writer in Danny Angel; he remembered being surprised that Charlotte seemed satisfied with such a nonspecific description.

As for what an individual inuksuk meant-“Well, shit,” as Ketchum had said, “it seems to matter which Injun you ask.” (Ketchum believed that some inuksuit were nothing but meaningless heaps of rocks.)

Danny peered under his bed at the Winchester. Per Ketchum’s instructions, the loaded shotgun lay in an open case; according to Ketchum, the case should remain unzipped, “because any fool intruder can hear a zipper.”

It was obvious, of course, which fool intruder Ketchum meant-an eighty-three-year- old retired deputy sheriff, all the way from fucking New Hampshire! “And the safety?” Danny had asked Ketchum.