Last Night In Twisted River

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 “Senor 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