Last Night In Twisted River

upstairs of the cookhouse to her near-final resting place at Constable Carl’s.

Whatever the cook and his dear boy would find at Dead Woman Dam, Dominic was optimistically thinking, how bad could it really be? (Under stress, as he was, the cook had uncharacteristically thought of the place by its ill- gotten name.)

AS THE CHIEFTAIN CAME CLOSER to the Pontook Reservoir, the boy and his dad could see the seagulls. Although the Pontook was more than one hundred miles from the ocean, there were always sea gulls around the Androscoggin -it was such big water.

“There’s a kid in my class named Halsted,” Danny was saying worriedly.

“I think I know his father,” the cook said.

“His dad kicked him in the face with his caulk boots on-the kid has holes in his forehead,” young Dan reported.

“That would definitely be the Halsted I know,” Dominic replied.

“Ketchum says someone should stick a sawdust blower up Halsted’s ass, and see if the fat bastard can be inflated-Ketchum means the dad,” Danny explained.

“Ketchum recommends the sawdust blower for no small number of assholes,” the cook said.

“I’ll bet you we’re going to miss Ketchum wicked,” the boy said obsessively.

“I’ll bet you we do,” his father agreed. “Wickedly.”

“Ketchum says you can’t ever dry out hemlock.” Danny talked on and on. The twelve-year-old was clearly nervous about where they were going-not just Dead Woman Dam, but where they might go after that.

“Hemlock beams are good for bridges,” Dominic countered.

“Hook your whiffletree as close to the load as possible,” young Dan recited, from memory-for no apparent reason. “Success Pond has the biggest fucking beaver pond there is,” Danny continued.

“Are you going to quote Ketchum the whole way?” his dad asked him.

“The whole way where?” the twelve-year-old asked anxiously.

“I don’t know yet, Daniel.”

“Hardwoods don’t float very well,” the boy replied, apropos of nothing.

Yes, but softwoods float pretty high, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Those had been softwoods in the river drive, when Angel went under the logs. And with the wind last night, some of the topmost logs might have been blown outside the containment boom; those logs would be eddying in the overflow spillway to either side of the sluice dam. The stray logs, mostly spruce and pine, would make it hard to get Angel out of the circling water. Both the high-water shoreline and the more slowly moving water in the millpond had been formed by the dam; with any luck, they might find Angel’s body there, in the shallows.

“Who would kick his own kid in the face with a caulk boot?” the distraught boy asked his dad.

“No one we’ll ever see again,” Dominic told his son. The sawmill at Dead Woman Dam looked abandoned, but that was just because it was Sunday.

“Tell me once more why they call it Dead Woman Dam,” Danny said to his father.

“You know perfectly well why they call it that, Daniel.”

“I know why you don’t like to call it that,” the boy quickly rejoined. “Mom was the dead woman-that’s why, right?”

The cook parked the ’52 Pontiac next to the loading dock at the mill. Dominic wouldn’t answer his son, but the twelve-year-old knew the whole history-“perfectly well,” as his dad had said. Both Jane and Ketchum had told the boy the story. Dead Woman Dam was named for his mother, but Danny never ceased wanting his father to talk about it-more than his father ever would.

“Why does Ketchum have a white finger? What does the chainsaw have to do with it?” young Dan started up; he simply couldn’t stop talking.

“Ketchum has more than one white finger, and you know what the chainsaw has to do with it,” his father said. “The vibration, remember?”

“Oh, right,” the boy said.

“Daniel, please relax. Let’s just try to get through this, and move on.”

“Move on where?” the twelve-year-old shouted.

“Daniel, please-I’m as upset as you are,” his father said. “Let’s look for Angel. Let’s just see what we find, okay?”

“We can’t do anything about Jane, can we?” Danny asked.

“No, we can’t,” his dad said.

“What will Ketchum think of us?” the boy asked.

Dominic wished he knew. “That’s enough about Ketchum,” was all the cook could say. Ketchum will know what to do, his old friend was hoping.

But how would they manage to tell Ketchum what had happened? They couldn’t wait at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. If it took half that long to find Angel, they couldn’t even wait until they found him!

It all depended on when Constable Carl woke up and discovered Jane’s body. At first, the cowboy would surely think he was the culprit. And the cookhouse never served breakfast on a Sunday morning; an early supper was the only meal served on Sundays. It would be midafternoon before the kitchen helpers arrived at the cookhouse; when they learned that the cook and his son were gone, they wouldn’t necessarily tell the constable. (Not right away.) The cowboy would have no immediate reason to go looking for Ketchum, either.

Dominic was beginning to think that it might be all right to wait for Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. From what the cook knew about Constable Carl, it would be just like him to bury Jane’s body and forget about her-that is, until the cowboy heard that the cook and his son were gone. Most people in Twisted River would conclude that Injun Jane had left town with them! Only the constable would know where Jane was, and, under the circumstances (the guilty-looking, premature burial), the cowboy wouldn’t be likely to dig up Jane’s body just to prove what he knew.

Or was this wishful thinking on Dominic Baciagalupo’s part? Constable Carl wouldn’t hesitate to bury Injun Jane, if he believed he killed her. What would be wishful thinking on the cook’s part was to imagine that the cowboy might feel contrite about killing Jane-enough to blow his brains out, one could only hope. (That would be wishful thinking-to dream of a penitent Constable Carl, as if the cowboy could even conceive of contrition!)

To the right of the flashboards and the sluice spillway, outside the containment boom, the water was eddying against the dam in a clockwise direction, a few windblown logs (some stray red pine and tamarack among the spruce) circling in the open water. Young Dan and his dad couldn’t spot a body there. Where the main water passed through the sluice spillway, the containment boom bulged with tangled logs, but nothing stood out from the wet- bark, dark-water tones.

The cook and his son carefully crossed the dam to the open water on the left side of the boom; here the water and some stray logs were eddying in a counterclockwise direction. A deerskin glove was twirling in the water, but they both knew Angel hadn’t been wearing gloves. The water was deep and black, with floating slabs of bark; to Dominic’s disappointment and relief, they didn’t see a body there, either.

“Maybe Angel got out,” Danny said, but his dad knew better; no one that young slipped under moving logs and got out.

It was already past seven in the morning, but they had to keep looking; even the family Angel had run away from would want to know about their boy. It would take longer to search the broader reaches of the millpond-at some distance from the dam-although the footing would be safer there. The closer they were to the dam and the containment boom, the more the cook and his son worried about each other. (They weren’t wearing caulk boots, they weren’t Ketchum-they weren’t even rivermen of the greenest kind. They simply weren’t loggers.)

It would be half past eight before they found Angel’s body. The long-haired boy, in his red, white, and green plaid shirt, was floating facedown in the shallows, close to shore-not one log was anywhere around him. Danny didn’t even get his feet wet bringing the body ashore. The twelve-year-old used a fallen branch to hook Angel’s Royal Stewart shirt; young Dan called to his dad while he towed the Canadian youth to within his grasp. Together they got Angel to higher ground on the riverbank; lifting and dragging the body was light work compared to toting Injun Jane.