Last Night In Twisted River

understand him well enough. “She can’t be gone, Ketchum-she can’t just disappear like that!”

“But she was gone that fast, Danny,” the dishwasher told the boy. “Faster than the moon can slide behind a cloud-your mom was gone like that. And when we got back to the cookhouse, you were wide awake and screaming-it was worse than any nightmare I ever saw you have. I took it as a sign that you somehow knew your mom was gone. I couldn’t get you to stop crying-you or your father. Ketchum had got hold of a cleaver. He just stood in the kitchen with his left hand on a cutting board, holding the cleaver in his right hand. ‘Don’t,’ I told him, but he kept staring at his left hand on the cutting board-imagining it gone, I guess. I left him in order to look after you and your dad. When I came back to the kitchen, Ketchum was gone. I looked everywhere for his left hand; I was sure I was going to find his hand somewhere. I didn’t want you or your father finding it.”

“But he didn’t cut his hand off?” Danny always interrupted her.

“Well, no-he didn’t,” Jane told the boy, with some impatience. “You’ve noticed that Ketchum still has a left hand, haven’t you?”

Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way he’d stared at his cast last night. If Injun Jane had seen Ketchum staring at his cast, she might have taken this as a sign that Ketchum still thought about cutting off his hand. (But why the left one? Danny Baciagalupo would wonder. Ketchum was right-handed. If you hated yourself, if you were really taking yourself to task or holding yourself accountable, wouldn’t you want to cut off your good hand?)

THEY WERE BUSTLING about the kitchen-all the fat women, and the lean cook with his leaner son. You didn’t pass behind someone without saying, “Behind you!” or putting your hand on the person’s back. When the sawmill workers’ wives passed behind Danny, they often patted the boy on his bum. One or two of them would pat the cook on his bum, too, but not if Injun Jane was watching. Danny had noticed how Jane often placed herself between his father and the kitchen helpers-especially in the narrow gauntlet between the stove and the countertop, which got narrower whenever the oven doors needed to be opened. There were other tight quarters in the cookhouse kitchen, challenging the cooks and the servers, but that passage between the stove and the countertop was the tightest.

Ketchum had gone outside to pee-a seemingly unbreakable habit from the wanigan days-while Injun Jane went into the dining room to set the tables. In those “good old days” in the portable logging camps, Ketchum liked to wake up the rivermen and the other loggers by pissing on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans. “There’s a wanigan in the river!” he was fond of hollering. “Oh, sweet Jesus-it’s floating away!” A cacophony of swearing followed, from inside the portables.

Ketchum also liked to beat on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans with one of the river drivers’ pike poles. “Don’t let the bear in!” he would holler. “Oh, Lord-it’s got one of the women! Oh, Lord-dear God, no!”

Danny was ladling the warm maple syrup from the big saucepan on the back burner into the pitchers. One of the sawmill workers’ wives was breathing down the back of the boy’s neck. “Behind you, cutie!” the woman said hoarsely. His dad was dipping the banana bread in the egg mixture; one of the kitchen helpers was putting the banana-bread French toast on the griddle, while another kept turning the lamb hash with a spatula.

Before he went outside for an apparently never-ending piss, Ketchum had spoken to the twelve-year-old. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning-don’t let your dad forget, Danny.”

“We’ll be there,” the boy had said.

“What plans are you making with Ketchum?” Injun Jane whispered in the twelve-year-old’s ear. Big as she was, the boy hadn’t noticed her behind him; he first mistook her for the sawmill worker’s wife who’d been breathing down his neck, but Jane had returned from the dining room.

“Dad and I are meeting Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam on Sunday morning,” Danny told her.

Jane shook her head, her long braid, longer than a horse’s tail, swishing above her big rump. “So Ketchum talked him into it,” she said disapprovingly; the boy couldn’t see her eyes above the pulled-down visor of her Cleveland Indians cap. As always, Chief Wahoo was grinning insanely at the twelve-year-old.

The near-perfect choreography in the kitchen would have been imperceptible to a stranger, but Danny and the Indian dishwasher were used to it. They saw that everything was always the same, right down to the cook holding the hot tray of scones with the oven mitts while the sawmill workers’ wives deftly got out of his way-one of them knocking the corn muffins out of the muffin tins into a big china bowl as she did so. No one bumped into anyone, big as they all were-save Danny and his dad, who were (in the present company) noticeably small.

In the cramped aisle between the countertop and the stove, where there was a pan or a pot on six of the eight burners, the cook and the Indian dishwasher passed back-to-back. This wasn’t new-it happened all the time-but Danny caught a nuance in their dance, and he overheard (as he previously hadn’t) the brief but distinct dialogue between them. As they passed, back-to-back, Jane deliberately bumped Dominic-she just touched her big rump to the middle of his back, because the top of the cook’s head came up only to Jane’s shoulders.

“Do-si-do your partner,” the dishwasher said.

Despite his limp, the cook caught his balance; not one scone slid off the hot tray. “Do-si-do,” Dominic Baciagalupo softly said. Injun Jane had already passed behind him. No one but Danny had noticed the contact, though if Ketchum had been there-drunk or sober-Ketchum surely would have noticed. (But Ketchum, of course, was outside-presumably, still pissing.)

CHAPTER 3. A WORLD OF ACCIDENTS

ANGEL POPE HAD GONE UNDER THE LOGS ON THURSDAY. After breakfast on Friday, Injun Jane drove Danny in her truck to the Paris Manufacturing Company School, on Phillips Brook, and then drove back to the cookhouse in Twisted River.

The river-driving crew would be prodding logs on a site just upstream of Dead Woman Dam. The cook and his kitchen helpers would prepare four midday meals; they would backpack two meals to the rivermen, and drive two meals to the loggers loading the trucks along the haul road between the town of Twisted River and the Pontook Reservoir.

Fridays were hard enough without the woe of losing Angel. Everyone was in too much of a hurry for the weekend to start, although weekends in Twisted River (in the cook’s opinion) amounted to little more than drinking too much and the usual sexual missteps-“not to mention the subsequent embarrassment or shame,” as Danny Baciagalupo had heard his dad say (repeatedly). And from Dominic’s point of view, the Friday-night meal in the cookhouse was the week’s most demanding. For the practicing Catholics among the French Canadians, the cook made his renowned meatless pizzas, but for the “non-mackerel-snappers”-as Ketchum was fond of describing himself, and most of the loggers and sawmill workers-a meatless pizza on a Friday night wouldn’t suffice.

When Injun Jane dropped Danny at the Paris school, she punched him lightly on his upper arm; it was where the older boys at school would hit him, if he was lucky. Naturally, the older boys hit him harder than Jane did- whether they hit him on the upper arm or somewhere else. “Keep your chin down, your shoulders relaxed, your elbows in, and your hands up around your face,” Jane told him. “You want to look like you’re going to throw a punch-then you kick the bastard in the balls.”

“I know,” the twelve-year-old told her. He had never thrown a punch at anyone-nor had he ever kicked someone in the balls. Jane’s instructions to the boy bewildered him; he thought that her directions must have been based on some advice Constable Carl had given her, but Jane only had to worry about the constable hitting her. Young Dan believed that nobody else would have dared to confront her-maybe not even Ketchum.

While Jane would kiss Danny good-bye at the cookhouse, or virtually anywhere in Twisted River, she never kissed him when she dropped him at the Paris Manufacturing Company School -or when she picked him up in the vicinity of Phillips Brook, where those West Dummer kids might be hanging out. If the older boys saw Injun Jane