Last Night In Twisted River

“You should leave here, Cookie-you know you should,” Ketchum said, as the first of the headlights from the kitchen help shone into the cookhouse.

“Yeah, sure,” the cook said again. Like Dominic Baciagalupo, Ketchum talked about leaving, but he stayed.

The engine sound of the Indian dishwasher’s truck stood out among the other vehicles. “Constipated Christ!” said Ketchum, as he finally stood up. “Does Jane ever shift out of first gear?”

The cook, who had not once looked at Ketchum while he was working at the stove, looked at him now. “I didn’t hire her for her driving, Ketchum.”

“Yeah, sure,” was all Ketchum said, as Injun Jane opened the outer door; the Indian dishwasher and the rest of the kitchen help came inside. (Danny briefly wondered why Jane was the only one who seemed to have no trouble dealing with that tricky door.)

Ketchum had folded up the cot and the sleeping bag; he was putting them away when Jane spoke. “Uh-oh- there’s a logger in the kitchen,” she said. “That’s never a good sign.”

“You and your signs,” Ketchum said, without looking at her. “Is your husband dead yet, or do we have to postpone the celebration?”

“I haven’t married him yet, and I have no plans to,” Jane replied, as always. The Indian dishwasher lived with Constable Carl-a bone of contention with Ketchum and the cook. Dominic didn’t like the cowboy any better than Ketchum did-nor had Jane been with the constable long, and (speaking of signs) she gave some vague indication that she might leave him. He beat her. The cook and Ketchum had more than once remarked on Jane’s black eyes and split lips, and even Danny had noticed the thumb-size and fingerprint-shaped bruises on her upper arms, where the constable had evidently grabbed her and shaken her.

“I can take a beating,” was what Jane usually said to Ketchum or the cook, though it clearly pleased her that they were concerned for her safety. “But Carl should watch out,” she only occasionally added. “One day, I just might beat him back.”

Jane was a big woman, and she greeted the twelve-year-old (as she always did) by hugging him against one of her massive hips. The boy came up to her breasts, which were monumental; not even the baggy sweatshirt that she wore in the early-morning cold could conceal them. Injun Jane had a ton of coal-black hair, too-although this was unfailingly arranged in one thick braid, which hung to her rump. Even in sweatpants, or baggy dungarees-her kitchen clothes of choice-Jane couldn’t hide her rump.

On top of her head, with a hole cut out of it for the braid, was a 1951 Cleveland Indians baseball cap-a gift from Ketchum. One summer, sick of the blackflies and the mosquitoes, Ketchum had tried driving a truck; it was a long- distance lumber hauler, and he’d actually acquired the baseball cap in far-off Cleveland. (Danny could only imagine that this must have happened before Ketchum had decided that all truck drivers were assholes.)

“Well, Jane, you’re an Injun-this is the cap for you,” Ketchum had told her. The logo on the cap was the red face of Chief Wahoo, a toothy Indian with a crazed grin, his head, and part of his feather, encircled with the letter C. The wishbone-shaped C was red; the cap was blue. As for who Chief Wahoo was, neither Ketchum nor Injun Jane knew.

The twelve-year-old had heard the story frequently; it was one of Jane’s favorites. One of the more memorable times Danny saw her take the Cleveland Indians cap off was when she told the boy how Ketchum had given the cap to her. “Ketchum was actually kind of good-looking, when he was younger,” Jane never failed to tell the boy. “Though he was never as good-looking as your dad-or as good-looking as you’re going to be,” the Indian dishwasher always added. Her grinning-Indian baseball cap was water-marked and stained with cooking oil. Jane liked to put the Chief Wahoo cap on the twelve-year-old’s head, where it rested low on his forehead, just above the boy’s eyes; he could feel his hair sticking out of the hole in the back of the cap.

Danny had never seen Injun Jane’s hair unbraided, although she’d been his babysitter many times, especially when he was younger-too young, at the time, to accompany his dad on the river drives, which meant that the boy was too young to get a decent night’s sleep in the kitchen wanigan. Jane had regularly put young Dan to bed in his room above the cookhouse kitchen. (Danny had assumed that she must have slept in his dad’s bedroom on those nights when his father was away.)

The next morning, when Jane made the boy breakfast, there was no evidence that her long black braid had ever been undone-though it was hard to imagine that sleeping with a braid of hair that long and thick could be very comfortable. For all Danny knew, Jane might have slept in the Cleveland Indians baseball cap, too. The crazily grinning Chief Wahoo was a demonic, ever-watchful presence.

“I’ll leave you ladies to your chores,” Ketchum was saying. “Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“Lord knows,” one of the kitchen helpers said. She was one of the sawmill workers’ wives-most of the kitchen helpers were. They were all married and fat; only Injun Jane was fatter, and she wasn’t married to Constable Carl.

The constable was fat, too. The cowboy was as big as Ketchum-although Ketchum wasn’t fat-and Carl was mean. Danny had the impression that everyone despised the cowboy, but Constable Carl always ran for office unopposed; quite possibly, no one else in Twisted River had the slightest desire to be constable. The job chiefly entailed breaking up fights, and finding ways to send the French Canadian itinerants back to Quebec. Constable Carl’s way-namely, shooting them in the feet or in their knees-was mean, but it worked. Yet who wanted to split open people’s heads with a gun barrel, or shoot people in the feet and knees? Danny wondered. And why would Injun Jane, whom the boy adored, want to live with a cowboy like that?

“Living here can be compromising, Daniel,” the boy’s father often said.

“Women have to lose their looks before they’ll live with Constable Carl,” Ketchum had tried to explain to young Dan. “But when the women lose too much of their looks, Carl finds someone else.”

All the kitchen help, certainly each and every one of those sawmill workers’ wives, had lost their looks-in Danny Baciagalupo’s estimation. If Injun Jane was fatter than all of them, she still had a pretty face and amazing hair; and she had such sensational breasts that the cook’s son couldn’t bear to think about them, which meant (of course) that he couldn’t keep his thoughts from drifting to Jane’s breasts at unexpected times.

“Is it their breasts that men like about women?” Danny had asked his father.

“Ask Ketchum,” the cook had replied, but Danny thought that Ketchum was too old to take an interest in breasts-Ketchum seemed too old to even notice breasts anymore. Granted, Ketchum had lived hard; he’d been roughed up and looked older than he was. Ketchum was only thirty-seven-he just looked a lot older (except for how black his hair and beard were).

And Jane-how old was she? Danny wondered. Injun Jane was twelve years older than Danny’s dad-she was forty-two-but she looked older, too. She’d been roughed up as well, and not only by Constable Carl. To the twelve- year-old, everyone seemed old-or older than they were. Even the boys in Danny’s grade at school were older.

“I’ll bet you had a great night’s sleep,” Jane was saying to the cook. She smiled at Danny. When she reached behind herself to tie the apron strings around her thick waist, her breasts were gigantic! the boy was thinking. “Did you get any sleep, Danny?” the Indian dishwasher asked him.

“Sure, I got enough,” the boy answered. He wished his dad and the sawmill workers’ wives weren’t there, because he wanted to ask Jane about his mother.

His dad could talk to him about Ketchum retrieving her battered body from the spillway; maybe that was because Ketchum had prevented the cook from seeing what the river and the logs had done to her. But Danny’s father could never talk about the accident itself-at least not to his son, and not with anything approximating specific details. Ketchum could barely bring himself to say more. “We were all drunk, Danny,” Ketchum always began. “Your dad was drunk, I was drunk-your mom was a little drunk, too.”

“I was the drunkest,” Dominic would assert, without fail. There was such blame attached to his drunkenness that the cook had stopped drinking, though not immediately.

“Maybe I was drunker than you, Cookie,” Ketchum sometimes said. “After all, I let her go out on the ice.”

“That was my fault,” the cook usually insisted. “I was so drunk that you had to carry me, Ketchum.”

“Don’t think I don’t remember,” Ketchum would say. But neither man could (or would) say exactly what had happened. Danny doubted that the details had eluded them; it was more a matter of the details being unutterable, or that it was unthinkable for either man to divulge such details to a child.

Injun Jane, who had not been drinking-she never drank-told the twelve-year-old the story. As many times as the boy had asked her, she’d told him the same story every time; that’s how he knew it was probably true.