Last Night in Twisted River

  At night, Danny had trouble keeping Ketchum out of the bar at Larry's Tavern, which was also a motel--south of Pointe au Baril Station, on Route 69. The motel's walls were so thin, they could hear whoever was humping in the room next door. "Some asshole trucker and a hooker," Ketchum declared the first night.

  "I don't think there are any hookers in Pointe au Baril," Danny said.

  "It's a one-night stand, then," Ketchum replied. "They sure don't sound married."

  Another night, there was a prolonged caterwauling of a certain female kind. "This one sounds different from the night before, and the night before that," Ketchum said.

  Whoever the woman was, she went on and on. "I'm coming! I'm coming!" she kept repeating.

  "Are you timing this, Danny? It might be a record," Ketchum said, but he walked naked into the hall and beat on the door of the longest orgasm in the world. "Listen up, fella," the old river driver said. "She's obviously lying."

  The young man who opened the door was menacing, and in a mood to fight, but the fight--if you could call it that--was over in a hurry. Ketchum put the guy in a choke hold before the fella had managed to throw more than a punch or two. "I wasn't lying," the woman called from the dark room, but by then not even the young man believed her.

  It was not how Danny had imagined he and Ketchum would be camping out, or otherwise roughing it, while they were hunting deer. As for the deer, the first buck Danny dropped in Bayfield required all three rounds--including the kill-shot. "Well, writers should know it's sometimes hard work to die, Danny," was all Ketchum told him.

  Ketchum got his buck near Byng Inlet, with one shot from his 12-gauge. The next deer season in Ontario, they shot two more bucks--both of them at Still River--and by then the so-called improvements on Charlotte's island were complete, including the winterizing. Ketchum and Danny returned to Pointe au Baril Station in early February, when the ice on the bay nearest the mainland was two feet thick. They followed the snowmobile portage from Payne's Road, out of Pointe au Baril, and went across the ice and drifting snow to the back dock and Granddaddy's cabin.

  Deer season was over, but Ketchum had brought his 12-gauge. "Just in case," he told Danny.

  "In case what?" Danny asked him. "We're not poaching deer, Ketchum."

  "In case there's some other critter," Ketchum replied.

  Later, Danny saw Ketchum grilling a couple of venison steaks on the barbecue, which Andy had hooked up to the propane inside Charlotte's new screened-in verandah; the verandah was boarded up in winter to keep out the snow, because the outdoor summer furniture and two canoes were stored there. Unbeknownst to Danny, Ketchum had also brought his bow.

  Danny forgot that Ketchum was a bow hunter, too, and that the archery season for deer in New Hampshire was three months long; Ketchum had had a lot of practice.

  "That's poaching," Danny told the logger.

  "The Mounties didn't hear any shots, did they?" Ketchum asked.

  "It's still poaching, Ketchum."

  "If you don't hear anything, it's more like nothing, Danny. I know Cookie's not a fan of venison, but I think it tastes pretty good this way."

  Danny didn't really like deer hunting--not the killing part, anyway--but he enjoyed spending time with Ketchum, and that February of '86, when they stayed for a few nights in the main cottage on Turner Island, Danny discovered that the winter on Georgian Bay was wonderful.

  From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When new snow was falling, and there were near whiteout conditions--so that where the rocks on shore ended and the frozen bay began were all one--it struck Danny Angel that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival.

  Danny sat transfixed in his writing shack, looking at that wind-bent pine; he was actually imagining what it might be like to live on the island in Lake Huron for a whole winter. (Of course he knew that Charlotte wouldn't have tolerated it for longer than one weekend.)

  Ketchum had come into the writing shack; he'd been hauling water from the lake, and had brought some pasta pots to a near boil on the gas stove. He'd come to inquire if Danny wanted to take the first bath or the next one.

  "Do you see that tree, Ketchum?" Danny asked him, pointing to the little pine.

  "I suppose you mean the one the wind has fucked over," Ketchum said.

  "Yes, that's the one," Danny answered. "What does it remind you of?"

  "Your dad," Ketchum told him, without hesitation. "That tree's got Cookie written all over it, but it'll be fine, Danny--like your dad. Cookie's going to be fine."

  KETCHUM AND DANNY went deer hunting around Pointe au Baril in November of '86--their third and last deer season together--and they went "camping," as they called it, on Turner Island in late January of '87, too. At Danny's insistence, and to Ketchum's considerable consternation, there was no more bow hunting out of season. Instead of his bow and the hunting arrows, Ketchum brought Hero along--together with the just-in-case 12-gauge, which was never fired.

  Danny believed that the bear hound's reputation for farting was exaggerated; that January, Ketchum again used the dog as an excuse to sleep in Granddaddy's log cabin, which was unheated. With all the winterizing, the main cottage was a little too warm (and too comfortable) for the old woodsman, who said he liked to see his breath at night--when he could see at all. Danny couldn't imagine what Ketchum could see at night in Granddaddy's cabin, because there was no electricity or propane lamps there. The logger took a flashlight with him when he went off to bed, but he carried it like a club; Danny never saw him turn it on.

  Ketchum had come to Charlotte's island only one time in summer, the same time when the cook had also come and gone. Charlotte never knew that Ketchum had the 12-gauge with him then, but Danny did. He'd heard Ketchum shooting a rattlesnake down at the back dock. Charlotte had taken the boat into Pointe au Baril Station; she didn't hear the shot.

  "The rattlesnakes are protected--an endangered species, I think," Danny told the river driver. Ketchum had already skinned the snake and cut off its rattles.

  In the summer, Charlotte had her boat serviced at Desmasdon's, the boat works where they dry-docked boats in the winter. Now, when Danny watched Ketchum skinning the snake, he was reminded of a poster on the ice cream freezer at Desmasdon's--it displayed the various snakes of Ontario, the Eastern Massasauga rattler among them. Those rattlesnakes really were protected, Danny was trying to make Ketchum understand, but the woodsman cut him off.

  "Hero's smart enough not to get bitten by a fucking snake, Danny--I don't need to protect him," Ketchum started in. "But I'm not so sure about you and Charlotte. You walk all over this island--I've seen you!--just talking to each other and not looking where you're stepping. People in love aren't looking for rattlers; they're not listening for them, either. And you and Charlotte are going to have a baby, isn't that right? It's not the rattlesnakes that need protection, Danny." With that, Ketchum cut off the snake's head with his Browning knife. He drained the venom from the fangs on a rock; then he hurled the head off the back dock, into the bay. "Fish food," he said. "I'm a regular environmentalist, sometimes." He tossed the snakeskin up on the roof of Granddaddy's cabin, where the sun would dry it out, he said--adding, "If the seagulls and the crows don't get it first."

  The birds would get it, and they made such a ruckus over the snakeskin early the next morning that Ketchum was tempted to fire off his 12-gauge again, this time to drive the seagulls and the crows off the roof of the log cabin. But he restrained himself, knowing Charlotte would hear the shot; Ketchum went outside and threw rocks at the birds instead. He watched a gull fly off with the remains of the snakeskin. ("Nothing wasted," as the logger later described the event to Danny.)

  That day, the Mounties came by in their boat to inquire about the gunshot the day before. Had anyone heard it? Someone on Barclay Island said that they thought they'd heard a shot on Turner Island. "I heard it, t
oo," Ketchum spoke up, getting the two young Mounties' attention. Ketchum even recalled the time of day, with impressive accuracy, but he said that the shooting definitely came from the mainland. "Sounded like a twelve-gauge to me," the veteran woodsman said, "but gunfire can be both magnified and distorted over water." The two Mounties nodded at such a sage assessment; the beautiful but unsuspecting Charlotte nodded, too.

  Then Joe had died, and Danny lost what little taste he had for killing things. And when Danny lost Charlotte, he and Ketchum gave up their dead-of-winter trips to Turner Island in Georgian Bay.

  There was something about Pointe au Baril Station that stayed with Danny, though he didn't go there anymore. In fact, his parting from Charlotte had been so civilized--she'd even offered to share her summer island with him, when they were no longer together. Maybe he could go there in July, and she would go in August, she said. After all, he'd put his money into those improvements, too. (Charlotte's offer was sincere; it wasn't only about the money.)

  Yet it wasn't Georgian Bay in the summer that Danny had adored. He'd loved being there with her--he would have loved being anywhere with Charlotte--but when she was gone, whenever he thought about Lake Huron, he thought mostly about that wind-bent pine in the wintertime. How could he ask Charlotte for permission to let him have a winter view of that little tree from his writing shack--the weather-beaten pine he saw now only in his imagination?

  And how could Danny have had another child, after losing Joe? He'd known the day Joe died that he would lose Charlotte, too, because he sensed almost immediately that his heart couldn't bear losing another child; he couldn't stand the anxiety, or that terrible ending, ever again.

  Charlotte knew it, too--even before he found the courage to tell her. "I won't hold you to your promise," she told him, "even if it means that I might have to move on."

  "You should move on, Charlotte," he told her. "I just can't."

  She'd married someone else soon after. A nice guy--Danny had met him, and liked him. He was someone in the movie business, a French director living in L.A. He was much closer to Charlotte's age, too. She already had one baby, a little girl, and now Charlotte was expecting a second child--one more than Danny had promised her.

  Charlotte had kept her island in Georgian Bay, but she'd moved away from Toronto and was living in Los Angeles now. She came back to Toronto every September for the film festival, and that time of year--early fall--always seemed to Danny like a good time to leave town. They still talked on the phone--Charlotte was always the one who called; Danny never called her--but it was probably easier for both of them not to run into each other.

  Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant--she was about to have her first child--when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for East of Bangor, at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Danny and his dad had watched Charlotte accept the statuette. (Patrice was always closed on Sunday nights.) Somehow, seeing her on television--from Toronto, when Charlotte was in L.A.--well, that wasn't the same as actually seeing her, was it? Both the cook and Danny wished her well.

  It was just bad luck. "Bad timing, huh?" Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it's likely Danny would have already gotten Charlotte pregnant. It had been bad timing, indeed.)

  JOE AND THE GIRL HAD TAKEN some of the same courses in Boulder--she was a senior at the university, too--and their trip to Winter Park together might have been a belated birthday present that Joe decided to give himself. According to their mutual friends, Joe and the girl had been sleeping together for only a short time. It was the girl's first trip alone with Joe to the ski house in Winter Park, though both Danny and his dad remembered her staying at the house for a couple of nights over the last Christmas holiday, when a bunch of Joe's college friends--girls and boys, with no discernible relationship with one another (at least that the cook and his son could see)--were also camping out at that Winter Park house.

  It was a big house, after all, and--as Charlotte had said, because she was closer in age to Joe and his pals than Danny and Dominic were--it was impossible to tell who was sleeping with whom. There were so many of them, and they seemed to be lifelong friends. That last Colorado Christmas, the kids had taken the mattresses from all the guest bedrooms, and they'd piled them in the living room, where both the boys and the girls had cuddled together and slept in front of the fire.

  Yet, even with such a mob of them, and amid all the taking turns in the showers--it had surprised Danny and his dad that some of the girls took showers together--it was the cook and his son who'd noticed something special about that girl. Charlotte hadn't seen it. It was for just the briefest moment, and maybe it meant nothing, but after Joe died with the girl, the writer and the cook couldn't forget it.

  She was pretty and petite, almost elfin, and naturally Joe had made a point of telling his father and grandfather that he'd first met Meg in a life-drawing class, where she'd been the model.

  "One look at the girl doesn't suffice--it isn't nearly enough," the cook would tell Ketchum, shortly after that Christmas.

  It wasn't just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg clearly was that; as had been the case with Katie, Danny had seen for himself the first time, you simply had to look at Meg, and it was almost painful not to keep looking. (Once you saw her, it was hard to look away.)

  "What a distraction that girl is," Danny said to his dad.

  "She's trouble," the cook replied.

  The two older men were making their way along the upstairs hall of that Winter Park house. The wing where the guest bedrooms were was a curious L-shaped addition off that hall--so architecturally strange that you couldn't pass the junction without at least glancing at the guest-wing hallway, and that was why Danny and Dominic noticed the slight commotion. Then again, their heads might have turned in that direction at the piercing shrieks of the young girls' laughter--not an everyday occurrence in the lives of the cook and his son.

  Meg and another girl were emerging from one of the guest bedrooms, both of them wrapped in towels. Their hair was wet--they must have come directly from a shower--and they ran awkwardly in their tightly wrapped towels to the door of a different guest bedroom, the other girl disappearing into the room before Meg, who was left alone in the guest-wing hallway, just as Joe came around the corner of the L. It all happened so suddenly that Joe never saw his father or grandfather, and neither did Meg. She saw only Joe, and he clearly saw her, and before she slipped inside the guest room and closed the door--to more shrieks of laughter, from within the room--Meg had opened her towel to Joe.

  "She shook her little titties at him!" as the cook would later describe the episode to Ketchum.

  "A distraction, indeed," was all Danny had said at the time.

  It was what Charlotte would have called "a throwaway line"--a reference to any extraneous dialogue in a screenplay--but after the accident that killed Joe and Meg, the distraction word lingered.

  Why hadn't they been wearing their seat belts, for example? Had the girl been giving him a blow job? Probably she had; Joe's fly was open, and his penis was poking out of his pants when the body was discovered. He'd been thrown from the car and died immediately. Meg wasn't so lucky. The girl was found alive, but with her head and neck at an unnatural angle; she was wedged between the brake and the accelerator pedal. She'd died in the ambulance, before reaching the hospital.

  What had led Joe and Meg to cut two days of classes in Boulder, and make the drive to Winter Park, at first seemed pretty obvious; yet two days of new, nonstop snow wasn't the prevailing reason. Besides, it had been a typical late-March snow, wet and heavy--the skiing must have been slow, the visibility on the mountain treacherous. And from the look of the ski house in Winter Park--that is, before the cleaning lady rushed in and made some attempt to restore order--Joe and the girl had spent most of their time indoors. It didn't appear that they'd done much skiing. Perhaps it had no more significance than most youthful experiments, but the young couple seemed to have made a game out of slee
ping in every bed in the house.

  Naturally, there would remain some unanswerable questions. If they weren't in Winter Park to ski, why had they waited until the evening of the second day to drive back to Boulder? Joe knew that after midnight and before dawn, the ski patrol was in the habit of closing U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, whenever there was any avalanche danger; with such a heavy, wet snow, and because it was the avalanche time of year, possibly Joe hadn't wanted to risk leaving before light the next morning, when they might still be blasting avalanches above Berthoud Pass. Of course the two lovers could have waited until daylight of the following morning, but maybe Joe and Meg had thought that missing two days of classes was enough.

  It was snowing heavily in Winter Park when they left, but there was next to no ski traffic on U.S. 40 in the direction of I-70, and that highway was well traveled. (Well, it was a weekday night; for most schools and colleges that had a March break, the vacation was over.) Joe and Meg must have passed the snowplow at the top of Berthoud Pass; the plowman remembered Joe's car, though he'd noticed only the driver. Apparently, the plowman hadn't seen the passenger; perhaps the blow job was already in progress. But Joe had waved to the plowman, and the plowman recalled waving back.

  Only seconds later, the plowman spotted the other car--it was coming in the other direction, from I-70, and the plowman presumed it was "a goddamn Denver driver." This was because the driver was going much too fast for the near-blizzard conditions. In the plowman's estimation, Joe had been driving safely--or at least slowly enough, given the storm and the slickness of the wet snow on the highway. Whereas the Denver car--if, indeed, the driver was from Denver--was fishtailing out of control as the car came over the pass. The plowman had flashed his lights, but the other car never slowed down.

  "It was just a blue blur," the plowman said in his deposition to the police. (What kind of blue? he was asked.) "With all the snow, I'm not really sure about the color," the plowman admitted, but Danny would always imagine the other car as an unusual shade of blue--a customized job, as Max had called it.