Last Night In Twisted River

“Maybe for something like this to happen to you, so you might understand how difficult it can be with women,” Dominic said. There in the bed, Carmella punched him. The “this” referred to Katie leaving, of course-as if that relationship, which was wrongheaded from the start, was at all comparable to what had gone on with Rosie and Ketchum. And why had they lied to the boy about the bear for so long? Carmella couldn’t understand it; she certainly didn’t expect Danny to.

She lay there listening to the cook tell his son about that night in the cookhouse kitchen, when Rosie had confessed to sleeping with Ketchum-and then Ketchum had walked through the screen door, when all of them were drunk, and Dominic had hit his old friend with the skillet. Luckily, Ketchum had been in enough fights; he never entirely believed that there was anyone alive who wouldn’t take a swing at him. The big man’s reactions were ingrained. He must have deflected the skillet with a forearm, slightly turning the weapon in Dominic’s hand, so that only the cast-iron edge of the frying pan hit him-and it hit him in the dead center of his forehead, not in the temple, where even a partially blocked blow from such a heavy implement might have killed him.

There’d been no doctor in Twisted River, and there wasn’t even a sawmill and a so-called millpond at what would become Dead Woman Dam, where there would later be an absolute moron of a doctor. Rosie had stitched up Ketchum’s forehead on one of the dining-room tables; she’d used the ultra-thin stainless-steel wire the cook kept on hand for trussing up his chickens and turkeys. The cook had sterilized the wire by boiling it first, and Ketchum had bellowed like a bull moose throughout the process. Dominic had limped around and around the table while Rosie talked to the two of them. She was so angry that she was rough with the stitches.

“I wish I was stitching the two of you up,” she said, looking at Dominic, before telling them both how it was going to be. “If there is ever another act of violence between the two of you, I will leave you both-is that clear enough?” she’d asked them. “If you promise never to hurt each other-in fact, you must always look after each other, like good brothers-then I will never leave either of you, not until the day I die,” she told them. “So you can each have half of me, or you can both have none of me-in the latter case, I take Danny with me. Is everything understood?” They could tell she was totally serious about it.

“I suppose your mother was too proud to go back to Boston when she had the miscarriage-and she thought I was too young to be left alone when my mother died,” Carmella heard Dominic telling Danny. “Rosie must have thought she had to take care of me, and of course she knew that I loved her. I don’t doubt that she loved me, too, but I was still just a nice boy to her, and when she met Ketchum-well, he was her age. Ketchum was a man. We had no choice but to put up with it, Daniel-both Ketchum and I adored her, and in her own way I believe she loved the two of us.”

“What did Jane think of it?” Danny asked his dad, because Ketchum had said that the Injun knew everything.

“Well, exactly what you would expect Jane to think of it,” his father told him. “She said all three of us were assholes. Jane thought we were all taking a terrible chance-the Indian said it was a big gamble that any of it would work out. I thought so, too, but your mother wasn’t giving us another option-and Ketchum was always a bigger gambler than I was.”

“You should have told me earlier,” his son said.

“I know I should have, Daniel-I’m sorry,” Carmella heard the cook say.

Later, Dominic would tell Carmella what Danny had said to him then. “I don’t care that much about the bear-it was a good story,” Danny said to his dad. “But there’s another thing you’re wrong about. You told me you suspected that Ketchum killed Lucky Pinette. You and Jane, and half those West Dummer kids-that’s what you all told me.”

“I think Ketchum may have killed him, Daniel.”

“I think you’re wrong. Lucky Pinette was murdered in his bed-in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. He’d had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer when they found him-isn’t that the story?” Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, asked his father.

“That’s it, exactly,” his dad answered. “Lucky Pinette’s forehead was indented with the letter H.”

“Cold-blooded murder-right, Dad?”

“It sure looked like it, Daniel.”

“Then it wasn’t Ketchum,” Danny told him. “If Ketchum found it so easy to murder Lucky Pinette in bed, why doesn’t he just kill Carl? There’re any number of ways Ketchum could kill the cowboy-if Ketchum were a murderer.”

Dominic knew that Daniel was right. (“Maybe the boy really is a writer!” the cook would say when he told Carmella the story.) Because if Ketchum were a murderer, the cowboy would already be dead. Ketchum had promised Rosie he would look after Dominic-they had both promised to look after each other- and, under the circumstances, what better way to look after Dominic was there? Just kill the cowboy-in bed, or wherever the woodsman could catch Carl napping.

“Don’t you get it, Dad?” Danny had asked. “If Pam tells Carl everything, and the cowboy can’t find you or me, why wouldn’t he go after Ketchum? He’d know that Ketchum always knew everything-Six-Pack will tell him!”

But both father and son knew the answer to that. If the cowboy came after Ketchum, then Ketchum would kill him-both Ketchum and Carl knew that. Like most men who beat women, the cowboy was a coward; Carl probably wouldn’t dare go after Ketchum, not even with a rifle with a scope. The cowboy knew that the logger would be hard to kill-not like the cook.

“Dad?” Danny asked. “When are you getting the hell out of Boston?” By the guilty, frightened way Dominic turned in bed to look at her, Carmella must have known what the new topic of conversation was. They had discussed Dominic leaving Boston, but the cook either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was going.

When Dominic first told Carmella everything, he made one point particularly clear: If Carl ever came after him, and the cook had to go on the run again, Carmella couldn’t come with him. She’d lost her husband and her only child. She had been spared just one thing-she’d not seen them die. If Carmella went on the run with Dominic, the cowboy might not kill her, too, but she would watch the cook get killed. “I won’t allow it,” Dominic had told her. “If that asshole comes after me, I go alone.”

“Why can’t you and Danny just tell the police?” Carmella had asked him. “What happened to Jane was an accident! Can’t you make the police understand that Carl is crazy, and that he’s dangerous?”

It was hard to explain to someone who wasn’t from Coos County. In the first place, the cowboy was the police-or what passed for the police up there. In the second place, it wasn’t a crime to be crazy and dangerous-not anywhere, but especially not in northern New Hampshire. Nor was it much of a crime that Carl had buried or otherwise disposed of Jane’s body without telling anyone. The point was, the cowboy didn’t kill her-Danny did. And the cook had been old enough to know better than to have run away the first time, when if he’d stayed and simply told the truth, to someone-well, maybe then it might have worked out. (Or Dominic could have just gone back to Twisted River with Daniel. The cook could have bluffed it out, as Ketchum had wanted him to-as young Dan also had wanted.)

Of course, it was too late to change any of that now. It was early enough in their relationship when the cook had told Carmella all this; she’d accepted the terms. Now that she loved him more than a little, she regretted what she’d agreed to. Not going with him, if Dominic had to go, would be very hard for her. Naturally, Dominic knew he would miss Carmella-more than he’d missed Injun Jane. Maybe not as much as both he and Ketchum still missed Rosie, but the cook knew that Carmella was special. Yet the more he loved Carmella, the more dead set Dominic was against her going with him.

As Carmella lay in bed, she thought about the places she could no longer go in the North End, first because she’d gone there with the fisherman, and then-more painfully-because she associated specific areas of the neighborhood with those special things she’d done with Angelu. Now where would she no longer be able to go when Dominic (her dear Gamba) had left her? the widow Del Popolo wondered.

After Angelu drowned, Carmella took no more walks on Parmenter Street -specifically, not in the vicinity of what had been Cushman’s. The elementary school, where Angelu had gone to the early grades, had been torn down. (In ’55, or maybe in ’56-Carmella couldn’t remember.) In its place, there would one day be a library, but