Last Night In Twisted River

that Lucky had had a dispute with Ketchum at the sorting gaps on the river earlier in the afternoon. Ketchum, typically, was discovered to be spending the night at the Umbagog House in Errol-with a dim-witted woman who worked in the kitchen there. Neither the stamping hammer that had repeatedly hit Pinette (indenting his forehead with the letter H) nor Ketchum’s hammer was ever found.

“So who killed Lucky?” Six-Pack asked Ketchum, as she and Dominic dropped him onto the bed, where the river driver’s undying erection trembled at them like a flagpole in a gale-force wind.

“I’ll bet Bergeron did it,” Ketchum answered her. “He had a stamping hammer just like mine.”

“And Bergeron wasn’t bangin’ some retard from Errol!” Pam replied.

With his eyes still closed, Ketchum merely smiled. The cook resisted the urge to go back into the bathroom and see what words Ketchum had circled in The Idiot-anything to get away from his old friend’s towering erection.

“Are you awake, or what?” Dominic asked Ketchum, who appeared to have passed completely out again-or else he was imagining himself as one of the passengers in a third-class compartment on the Warsaw-St. Petersburg train, because Ketchum had only recently borrowed The Idiot, and the cook found it unlikely that Six-Pack had read very far into the first chapter before the passing-out-on-the-toilet episode had interrupted what Ketchum called his chosen foreplay.

“Well, I guess I’ll go home,” Dominic said, as Ketchum’s finally drooping erection seemed to signify the end of the evening’s entertainment. Perhaps not to Pam-facing the cook, she began to unbutton her borrowed shirt.

Here comes suggestive, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. There was no room between the foot of the bed and the bedroom wall, where Six-Pack blocked his way; he would have had to walk on the bed, stepping over Ketchum, to get around her.

“Come on, Cookie,” Pam said. “Show me what you got.” She tossed the wool-flannel shirt on the bed, where it covered Ketchum’s face but not his fallen erection.

“She was semi-retarded,” Ketchum mumbled from under the shirt, “and she wasn’t from Errol-she came from Dixville Notch.” He must have meant the kitchen worker in the Umbagog House, the woman he’d been banging the night Lucky Pinette was hammered to death in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. (It could have been just a coincidence that neither Ketchum’s stamping hammer nor the murder weapon was ever found.)

Six-Pack fiercely took hold of the cook’s shoulders and snapped his face between her breasts-no ambiguity now. It was half a Heimlich maneuver that he made on her, ducking under her arms to get behind her-his hands locking on her lower rib cage, under her pretty breasts. With his nose jammed painfully between Pam’s shoulder blades, Dominic said: “I can’t do this, Six-Pack-Ketchum’s my friend.”

She easily broke his grip; her long, hard elbow smacked him in the mouth, splitting his lower lip. Then she headlocked him, half smothering him between her armpit and the soft side of her breast. “You ain’t no friend of his if you let him find Angel! He’s tearin’ himself up over that damn kid, Cookie,” Pam told him. “If you let him so much as see that boy’s body, or what’s left of it, you ain’t no friend of Ketchum’s!”

They were rolling around on the bed beside Ketchum’s covered face and his naked, unmoving body. The cook couldn’t breathe. He reached around Six-Pack’s shoulder and punched her in the ear, but she lay on him unflinchingly, with her weight on his chest; she had his head and neck, and his right arm, locked up tight. All the cook could do was hit her again with his awkward left hook-his fist struck her cheekbone, her nose, her temple, and her ear again.

“Christ, you can’t fight worth shit, Cookie,” Six-Pack said with contempt. She rolled off him, letting him go. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember lying there, his chest heaving alongside his snoring friend. The ghastly green light from the aquarium washed over the gasping cook; in the tank’s murky water, the unseen fish might have been mocking him. Pam had picked up a bra and was putting it on, with her back to him. “The least you can do is take Danny with you, earlier than when you’re goin’ to meet Ketchum. You two find Angel’s body-before Ketchum gets there. Just don’t let Ketchum see that boy!” she shouted.

Ketchum pulled the shirt off his face and stared unseeing at the ceiling; the cook sat up beside him. Pam had put the bra on and was angrily struggling into a T-shirt. Dominic would also remember this: Six-Pack’s unbelted dungarees, low on her broad but bony hips, and the unzipped fly, through which he caught a glimpse of her blond pubic hair. She’d dressed herself in a hurry, to be sure-and she was hurrying now. “Get out, Cookie,” she told him. He looked once at Ketchum, who had closed his eyes and covered his face with his cast. “Did Ketchum let you see your wife when he found her?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic Baciagalupo would try to forget this part-how he got up from the bed, but Six-Pack wouldn’t let him step around her. “Answer me,” she said to him.

“No, Ketchum didn’t let me see her.”

“Well, Ketchum was bein’ your friend,” she said, letting the cook limp past her to the door in the kitchen area. “Watch that step, second from the top,” she reminded him.

“You ought to ask Ketchum to fix that step for you,” Dominic said.

“Ketchum removed the step-so he could hear someone comin’ up the stairs, or sneakin’ down,” Six-Pack informed the cook.

There was no doubt Ketchum had to take certain precautions, Dominic was thinking, as he let himself out the door. The missing step awaited him-he stepped over it carefully. The depressing music from the dance hall hit him on the stairs. Teresa Brewer was singing “Till I Waltz Again with You” when the wind blew open the door the cook thought he had closed.

“Shit!” he heard Pam say.

Either the wind or the dance-hall music momentarily revived Ketchum-enough for the riverman to make a final comment before Six-Pack slammed the door. “Not so fucking lucky now-are you, Lucky?” Ketchum asked the windy night.

Poor Pinette, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Lucky Pinette may already have been past hearing the question-that is, the first time Ketchum had asked it, if he’d really asked it. (Certainly, Lucky was long past hearing anything now.)

The cook skirted the shabby hostelry bars with their broken, interrupted lettering.

NO MINO S! the neon blinked at him.

TH RD BEER FR E! another sign blinked.

After he passed the neon announcements, Dominic would realize he’d forgotten his flashlight. He was pretty sure that Six-Pack wouldn’t be friendly if he went back for it. The cook tasted the blood from his split lip before he put his hand to his mouth and looked at the blood on his fingers. But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer’s slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning “Rags to Riches.” Dominic didn’t for a moment doubt that the town’s eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.

Out in front of the saloon where the Beebe twins had been fighting, there was no evidence of a brawl; Charlie Clough and Earl Dinsmore had managed to pick themselves up from the muddy ground. The Beaudette brothers, either murdered or passed out, had roused themselves (or been removed) from the old Lombard forwarder forever occupying the lane alongside the dance hall, which it would almost certainly outlive.

Dominic Baciagalupo wove his way forward in the darkness, where his limp could easily have been mistaken for the tentative progress of a drunk. At the bar near the hostelry most frequented by the French Canadian itinerants, a familiar figure lurched toward Dominic out of the dark, but before the cook could be certain it was Constable Carl, a flashlight blinded him. “Halt! That means ‘Stop!’ Arrete, if you’re fuckin’ French,” the cowboy said.

“Good evening, Constable,” Dominic said, squinting into the light. Both the flashlight and the windblown sawdust were causing him problems.

“You’re out kinda late, Cookie-and you’re bleedin’,” the constable said.

“I was checking up on a friend,” the cook replied.

“Whoever hit you wasn’t your friend,” the cowboy said, stepping closer.

“I forgot my flashlight-I just bumped into something, Carl.”

“Like a knee… or an elbow, maybe,” Constable Carl speculated; his flashlight was almost touching Dominic’s