Last Night In Twisted River

their eyes. It was very flammable, what Ketchum called a “potential inferno”-at this time of year, especially. The winter-long pile wouldn’t be trucked out of town until the haul roads hardened up at the end of mud season; only then would they truck it away, and sell it to the farmers in the Androscoggin Valley. (Of course, there was more inside the mill.) A fire in the sawdust would ignite the whole town; not even the cookhouse on the hill nearest the river bend would be spared, because the hill and the cookhouse bore the brunt of the wind off the river. The bigger, more brightly burning embers would be blown uphill from the town to the cookhouse.

Yet the building the cook had insisted upon was the most substantial in the settlement of Twisted River. The hostelries and saloons-even the sawmill itself, and the so-called dance hall-were mere kindling for the sawdust fire Ketchum imagined in his doomsayer dreams of ever-impending calamities.

Possibly, Ketchum was even dreaming now-on the toilet. Or so Dominic Baciagalupo considered, as he struggled to keep pace with Six-Pack Pam. They passed the bar near the hostelry favored by the French Canadian itinerants. In the muddy lane alongside the dance hall was a 1912 Lombard steam log hauler; it had been parked there so long that the dance hall had been torn down and rebuilt around it. (They’d used gasoline-powered log haulers to pull the loaded sleds of logs through the woods since the 1930s.)

If the town burned, Dominic was thinking, maybe the old Lombard forwarder would be the only surviving remains. To the cook’s surprise, when he regarded the Lombard now, he saw the Beaudette brothers asleep or dead in the front seat over the sled runners. Perhaps they’d been evicted from the dance hall and had passed out (or been deposited) there.

Dominic slowed as he limped by the slumped-over brothers, but Pam had seen them, too, and she wasn’t stopping. “They won’t freeze-it ain’t even snowin’,” Six-Pack said.

Outside the next saloon, four or five men had gathered to watch a desultory fight. Earl Dinsmore and one of the Beebe twins had been brawling so long that they’d exhausted their best punches, or maybe the men were too inebriated to be fighting in the first place. They seemed beyond hurting each other-at least, intentionally. The other Beebe twin, out of either boredom or sheer embarrassment for his brother, suddenly started fighting with Charlie Clough. In passing, Six-Pack Pam knocked Charlie down; then she leveled Earl Dinsmore with a forearm to his ear, leaving the Beebe twins to aimlessly regard each other, the recognition slowly dawning on them that there was no one to fight-not unless they dared to take on Pam.

“It’s Cookie with Six-Pack,” No-Fingers La Fleur observed.

“I’m surprised you can tell us apart,” Pam told him, shoving him out of her way.

They reached the flat-roofed row houses-the newer hostelries, where the truckers and donkey-engine men stayed. As Ketchum said, any contractor who would construct a flat-roofed, two-story building in northern New Hampshire was enough of a moron to not know how many assholes a human being had. Just then, the dance-hall door blew (or was shoved) open and the miserable music reached them-Perry Como singing “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”

There was an outside flight of stairs to the nearest hostelry, and Pam turned, catching Dominic by his shirtsleeve and pulling him after her.

“Watch the next-to-last step, Cookie,” she told him, tugging him up the stairs.

Stairs had never worked well with his limp-especially not at the pace Six-Pack led him. The next-to-last step from the top was missing. The cook stumbled forward, catching his balance against Pam’s broad back. She simply turned again and lifted him under both arms-hoisting him to the topmost step, where the bridge of his nose collided with her collarbone. There was a womanly smell at her throat, if not exactly perfume, but the cook was confused by whatever odors of maleness clung to Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt.

The music from the dance hall was louder at the top of the stairs-Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No wonder no one dances anymore, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, just as Six-Pack lowered her shoulder and forced open the door. “Shit, I hate this song,” she was saying, dragging the cook inside. “Ketchum!” she shouted, but there was no answer. Thankfully, the awful music stopped when Pam closed the door.

The cook couldn’t comprehend where the kitchen, which they had entered, ended and the bedroom began; scattered pots and pans and bottles gave way to strewn undergarments and the giant, unmade bed, the only light on which was cast by a greenish aquarium. Who knew that Six-Pack Pam was a fish person, or that she liked pets of any species? (If fish were what was in the aquarium-Dominic couldn’t see anything swimming around in the algae. Maybe Six-Pack was an algae person.)

They navigated the bedroom; it was hard, even without a limp, to get around the enormous bed. And while it was easy for Dominic to imagine the extreme situation and awkward location of Ketchum’s collapse, and why this might have made it necessary for Pam to hastily dress herself without a bra, they passed three bras en route to the bathroom-any one of which, even in a hurry, surely would have been opportune.

Six-Pack now scratched her breast under Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt. Dominic wasn’t immediately worried that she was fondling herself suggestively, or otherwise flirting with him; it was as unplanned a gesture as her knocking Charlie Clough to the muddy ground, or the spontaneous forearm to the ear that had dropped Earl Dinsmore. The cook knew that if Six-Pack were to suggest anything, she would be far less ambiguous about it than to merely touch her breast in passing. Besides, Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt must have been itchy against her bare skin.

They found Ketchum on the toilet, more or less as Pam must have discovered him-with the paperback he’d been reading pinned by his cast, and held open on one of his bare thighs, and with both knees splayed wide apart. The water in the toilet was laced with bright bloodred streaks-as if Ketchum had been slowly bleeding to death.

“He’s gotta be bleedin’ internally!” Six-Pack exclaimed, but the cook realized that Ketchum had dropped a pen with red ink into the toilet; he must have been using the pen to circle certain words. “I already flushed, before leavin’ him,” Pam was saying, as Dominic rolled up his sleeve and (reaching between Ketchum’s knees) picked the pen out of the toilet bowl-flushing again. Dominic washed his hands and the pen in the sink, drying them with a towel.

It was only then that he noticed Ketchum’s erection. One of the cook’s most fervent hopes-namely, to never see Ketchum with an erection-may have caused him to first overlook the obvious. Naturally, Six-Pack hadn’t overlooked it. “Well, I wonder what he thinks he’s goin’ to do with that!” she was saying, as she lifted Ketchum under his heavy arms. She was able to prop him more upright on the toilet seat, rescuing him from his wedged position. “If you take hold of his ankles, Cookie, I can handle the rest.”

The book, which nearly followed the pen’s path into the toilet, slid off Ketchum’s thigh to the floor. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot was a surprise to Dominic Baciagalupo, who could more easily understand Ketchum passing out with the novel on (or off) a toilet than he could imagine Six-Pack reading out loud to Ketchum from the gigantic greenly-lit bed. Dominic instinctively uttered aloud the book’s title, which was misunderstood by Pam.

“You’re tellin’ me he’s an idiot!” she said.

“How were you liking the book?” the cook asked her, as they lugged Ketchum out of the bathroom; they managed to hit Ketchum’s head on the doorknob as they passed the open door. Ketchum’s cast was dragging on the floor.

“It’s about fuckin’ Russians,” Six-Pack said dismissively. “I wasn’t payin’ much attention to the story-I was just readin’ it to him.”

The passing blow to his head hadn’t awakened Ketchum, although it seemed to serve as an invitation for him to speak. “As for those kind of dives, where you could get into a shitload of trouble just looking at some super-sensitive asshole, there was never anything in downtown Berlin to equal Hell’s Half Acre in Bangor-not in my experience,” Ketchum said, his erection as upstanding and worthy of attention as a weather vane.

“What do you know about Maine?” Pam asked him, as if Ketchum were conscious and could understand her.

“I didn’t kill Pinette-they could never pin it on me!” Ketchum declared. “That wasn’t my stamping hammer.”

They’d found Lucky Pinette, murdered in his bed, in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin-about two miles north of Milan. He’d had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer, and there were those rivermen who claimed