Last Night In Twisted River

found your lower lip,” Jane told him.

He smiled, which the lip didn’t like. When he winced at the pain, Jane said, “Poor baby-no kissing for you tonight.”

The cook lay down next to her. “There are other things besides kissing,” he said to her.

She pushed him to his back and lay on top of him, the sheer weight of her pressing him into the bed and taking his breath away. If the cook had closed his eyes, he would have seen himself in Six-Pack’s suffocating headlock again, so he kept his eyes wide open. When Injun Jane straddled his hips and firmly seated herself in his lap, Dominic felt a sudden intake of air fill his lungs. With an urgency possibly prompted by Six-Pack having assaulted him, Jane mounted the cook; she wasted no time in slipping him inside her.

“I’ll show you other things,” the Indian dishwasher said, rocking herself back and forth; her breasts fell on his chest, her mouth brushed his face, carefully not touching his lower lip, while her long hair cascaded forward, forming a tent around the two of them.

The cook could breathe, but he couldn’t move. Jane’s weight was too great for him to budge her. Besides, Dominic Baciagalupo wouldn’t have wanted to change a single element of the way she was rocking back and forth on top of him-or her gathering momentum. (Not even if Injun Jane had been as light as Dominic’s late wife, Rosie, and the cook himself were as big as Ketchum.) It was a little like riding a train, Dominic imagined-except all he could do was hold tightly to the train that was, in reality, riding him.

IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW that Danny was certain he’d heard water running in the bathroom, or that the kiss on his forehead-either his father’s kiss or a second good-night kiss from Jane-had been real. It didn’t matter, either, that the boy had incorporated the kiss into a dream he was having about Six-Pack Pam, who’d been ardently kissing him-not necessarily on his forehead. Nor did it matter that the twelve-year-old knew the odd creak his dad’s limp made on the stairs, because he’d heard the limp a while ago and there was a different, unfamiliar creaking now. (On stairs, his father always put his good foot forward; the lame foot followed, more lightly, after it.)

What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn’t only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Danny had heard and felt the wind in every season. The frightened boy quietly got out of bed, and-holding his breath-tiptoed to his partially open bedroom door and into the upstairs hall.

There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to Jane? young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her head? Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane-either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a human predator) with a bush hook?

As he made his cautious way down the hall, Danny half expected to see Jane’s severed head in the bathtub; as he passed the open bathroom door, without spotting her head, the twelve-year-old could only imagine that the intruder was a bear, not a man, and that the bear had eaten Jane and was now attacking his dad. For there was no denying where the violent creaks and moans were coming from-his father’s bedroom-and that was definitely moaning (or worse, whimpering) that the boy could hear as he came closer. When he passed the Cleveland Indians cap, the recognition that Chief Wahoo had landed upside down only heightened the twelve-year-old’s fears.

What Danny Baciagalupo would see (more accurately, what he thought he saw), upon entering his dad’s bedroom, was everything the twelve-year-old had feared, and worse-that is, both bigger and hairier than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be. Only his father’s knees and feet were visible beneath the bear; more frightening still, his dad’s lower legs weren’t moving. Maybe the boy had arrived too late to save him! Only the bear was moving-the rounded, humpbacked beast (its head not discernible) was rocking the entire bed, its glossy-black hair both longer and more luxuriant than Danny had ever imagined a black bear’s hair would be.

The bear was consuming his father, or so it appeared to the twelve-year-old. With no weapon at hand, one might have expected the boy to throw himself on the animal attacking his dad in such a savage or frenzied manner-if only to be hurled into a bedroom wall, or raked to death by the beast’s claws. But family histories-chiefly, perhaps, the stories we are told as children-invade our most basic instincts and inform our deepest memories, especially in an emergency. Young Dan reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as if it were his weapon of choice, not his father’s. That skillet was a legend, and Danny knew exactly where it was.

Holding the handle in both hands, the boy stepped up to the bed and took aim at where he thought the bear’s head ought to be. He’d already started his two-handed swing-as Ketchum had once shown him, with an ax, being sure to get his hips behind the swinging motion-when he noticed the bare soles of two clearly human feet. The feet were in a prayerful position, just beside his dad’s bare knees, and Danny thought that the feet looked a lot like Jane’s. The Indian dishwasher was on her feet all day, and-for such a heavy woman-it was only natural that her feet often hurt her. She liked nothing better, she’d told young Dan, than a foot rub, which Danny had more than once given her.

“Jane?” Danny asked-in a small, doubting voice-but nothing slowed the forward momentum of the cast-iron skillet.

Jane must have heard the boy utter her name, because she raised her head and turned to face him. That was why the skillet caught her full-force on her right temple. The ringing sound, a dull but deep gong, was followed by a stinging sensation young Dan first felt in his hands; a reverberant tingle passed through both wrists and up his forearms. For the rest of his life, or as long as his memory endured, it would be small consolation to Danny Baciagalupo that he didn’t see the expression on Jane’s pretty face when the skillet struck her. (Her hair was so long that it simply covered everything.)

Jane’s massive body shuddered. She was too massive, and her hair was too sleekly beautiful, for her ever to have been a black bear-not in this life or the next, where she most assuredly was going. Jane rolled off the cook and crashed to the floor.

There was no mistaking her for a bear now. Her hair had fanned out-flung wide as wings, to both sides of her inert, colossal torso. Her big, beautiful breasts had slumped into the hollows of her armpits; her motionless arms reached over her head, as if (even in death) Jane sought to hold aloft a heavy, descending universe. But as astonishing as her nakedness must have been to an innocent twelve-year-old, Danny Baciagalupo would best remember the faraway gaze in Jane’s wide-open eyes. Something more than the final, split-second recognition of her fate lingered in Injun Jane’s dead eyes. What had she suddenly seen in the immeasurable distance? Danny would wonder. Whatever Jane had glimpsed of the unforeseeable future had clearly terrified her-not just her fate but all their fates, maybe.

“Jane,” Danny said again; this time it wasn’t a question, though the boy’s heart was racing and he must have had many questions on his mind. Nor did Danny more than glance at his dad. Was it his father’s nakedness that made the boy so quickly look away? (Perhaps it was what Ketchum had called the little- fella aspect of the cook; the latter aspect was greatly enhanced by how near Dominic now was to the dead dishwasher.) “Jane!” Danny cried, as if the boy needed a third utterance of the Indian’s name to finally register what he had done to her.

The cook quickly covered her private parts with a pillow. He knelt in the vast expanse of her far-flung hair, putting his ear to her quiet heart. Young Dan held the skillet in both hands, as if the reverberation still stung his palms; possibly, the ongoing tingle in his forearms would last forever. Though he was only twelve, Danny Baciagalupo surely knew that the rest of his life had just begun. “I thought she was a bear,” the boy told his dad.

Dominic could not have looked more shocked if, at that moment, the dead dishwasher had turned herself into a bear; yet the cook could see for himself that it was his beloved Daniel who needed some consoling. Trembling, the boy stood clutching the murder weapon as if he believed a real bear would be the next thing to assail them.

“It’s understandable that you thought Jane was a bear,” his father said, hugging him. The cook took the skillet from his shaking son, hugging him again. “It’s not your fault, Daniel. It was an accident. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“How can it be nobody’s fault?” the twelve-year-old asked.

“It’s my fault, then,” his dad told him. “It will never be your fault, Daniel. It’s all