Last Night In Twisted River

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“Ketchum couldn’t forgive himself for failin’ to keep Cookie alive,” Six-Pack told the writer. “And before that- after your boy died, Danny-Ketchum felt he was powerless to protect you. All he could do was obsess about your writin’.”

“Me, too,” the writer said to Six-Pack. “Me, too.”

SIX-PACK DIDN’T STAY for Christmas. After they’d carried Ketchum’s guns up to Danny’s bedroom on the second floor-Pam insisted that all the guns be stowed under Danny’s bed, because this was what Ketchum had wanted-and once they’d lugged the boxes of Rosie’s books up to Danny’s third-floor writing room, Six-Pack warned the writer that she was an early riser.

“How early?” he asked her.

Ketchum’s truck and Six-Pack Pam were gone when Danny woke up in the morning; she’d made coffee for him and had left him a letter, which she’d written by hand on several pages of the typing paper he kept in the gym. Six- Pack’s handwriting was very familiar to Danny, from those years when she’d written Ketchum’s letters for the then- illiterate logger. But Danny had forgotten how well Pam wrote-far better than she spoke. Even her spelling was correct. (The writer wondered if this was the result of all the reading-aloud she’d once done to Ketchum.)

Naturally, Six-Pack’s letter included instructions for taking care of Hero, but most of her letter was more personal than Danny had expected. She was having the hip-replacement surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital, as Ketchum had recommended. She’d made a few new friends at the Saw Dust Alley campground, that nice-looking trailer park on Route 26-the attacks of September 11 had served to introduce her to many of her neighbors. Henry, the old West Dummer sawyer with the missing thumb and index finger, would look after Pam’s dogs while she was having the surgery. (Henry had volunteered to look after the dogs while Six-Pack was driving Ketchum’s truck to Toronto and back, too.)

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