Last Night In Twisted River

DANNY 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