Last Night in Twisted River

  "Is it the season for shooting coyotes?" Danny asked the old logger.

  "It's always open season for coyotes," Ketchum said. "They're worse than woodchucks--they're varmints. They're not good for anything at all. There's no bag limit on coyotes. You can even hunt them at night, from the first of January till the end of March. That's how much the state wants to get rid of the critters."

  But Carmella wasn't persuaded. "I don't want to see anything die today," she said to Ketchum; he saw she was blowing kisses across the water, either to bless the spot where her Angelu had perished or to bestow long life on the coyote.

  "Make your peace with those ashes, Danny," the woodsman said. "You know where to throw that jar in the river, don't you?"

  "I've made my peace," the writer said. He kissed the cook's ashes and the apple-juice jar good-bye. "Ready?" Danny asked the shooter.

  "Just throw it," Ketchum told him. Carmella covered her ears with her hands, and Danny threw the jar--to almost midstream in the river basin. Ketchum leveled the carbine and waited for the jar to bob back to the surface of the water; one shot from the Remington shattered the apple-juice jar, effectively scattering Dominic Baciagalupo's ashes in Twisted River.

  On the far shore, at the sound of the shot, the coyote crouched lower to the riverbank but insanely held its ground. "You miserable fucker," Ketchum said to the animal. "If you don't know enough to run, you're definitely dying. Sorry," the old logger said--this was spoken as an aside, to Carmella. It was a smooth-working rifle--Ketchum's "old-reliable, bolt-action sucker." The woodsman shot the coyote on top of its skull, just as the sick animal was bending down to drink again.

  "That's what I should have done to Carl," Ketchum told them, not looking at Carmella. "I could have done it anytime. I should have shot the cowboy down, like any varmint. I'm sorry I didn't do it, Danny."

  "It's okay, Ketchum," Danny said. "I always understood why you couldn't just kill him."

  "But I should have!" the logger shouted furiously. "There was nothing but bullshit morality preventing me!"

  "Morality isn't bullshit, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella began to lecture him, but when she looked at the dead coyote, she stopped whatever else she was going to say; the coyote lay still on the riverbank with the tip of its nose touching the running water.

  "Good-bye, Pop," Danny said to the flowing river. He turned away from the water and looked up at the grassy hill, where the cookhouse had been--where he'd disastrously mistaken Injun Jane for a bear, when all along she'd been his father's lover.

  "Good-bye, Cookie!" Ketchum called out, over the water.

  "Dormi pur," Carmella sang, crossing herself; then she abruptly turned her back on the river, where Angel had gone under the logs. "I need a head start on you two," she told Danny and Ketchum, and she started slowly up the hill through the tall grass--not once looking back.

  "What was she singing?" the woodsman asked the writer.

  It was from an old Caruso recording, Danny remembered. "Quartetto Notturno," it was called--a lullaby from an opera. Danny couldn't remember the opera, but the lullaby must have been what Carmella sang to her Angelu, when he'd been a little boy and she was putting him to bed. "Dormi pur," Danny repeated for Ketchum. "'Sleep clean.'"

  "Clean?" Ketchum asked.

  "Meaning, 'Sleep tight,' I guess," Danny told him.

  "Shit," was all Ketchum said, kicking the ground. "Shit," the logger said again.

  The two men watched Carmella's arduous ascent of the hill. The tall, waving grass was waist-high to her truncated, bearlike body, and the wind was behind her, off the river; the wind blew her hair to both sides of her lowered head. When Carmella reached the crown of the hill, where the cookhouse had been, she bowed her head and rested her hands on her knees. For just a second or two--for no longer than it took Carmella to catch her breath--Danny saw in her broad, bent-over body a ghostly likeness to Injun Jane. It was as if Jane had returned to the scene of her death to say good-bye to the cook's ashes.

  Ketchum had lifted his face to the sun. He'd closed his eyes but was moving his feet--just the smallest steps, in no apparent direction, as if he were walking on floating logs. "Say it again, Danny," the old riverman said.

  "Sleep tight," Danny said.

  "No, no--in Italian!" Ketchum commanded him. The river driver's eyes were still closed, and he kept moving his feet; Danny knew that the veteran logger was just trying to stay afloat.

  "Dormi pur," Danny said.

  "Shit, Angel!" Ketchum cried. "I said, 'Move your feet, Angel. You have to keep moving your feet!' Oh, shit."

  IT HAD BEEN a bitterly confusing morning for Six-Pack Pam, who liked to work in her garden early--even earlier than she fed the dogs or made coffee for herself, and while her hip lasted. First Ketchum had come and disrupted everything, in his inimitable fashion, and she'd put the sulfa powder on Hero's wounds--all this before she fed her own dear dogs and made the coffee. It was because of Ketchum's willful disruption of her day, and treating the wretched dog who'd been mauled by a bear, that Six-Pack had turned her television on a little later than usual, but she still turned the TV on soon enough.

  Pam was thinking that it was partly her own fault: After all, she'd asked to see Danny and that Italian woman who'd been the cook's lover--the Injun Jane replacement, as Six-Pack thought of Carmella. Pam had wanted to make her peace with them, but now she felt conflicted. The shock of Danny being almost thirty years older than his father had been--that is, when Six-Pack had last seen the little cook--was upsetting. And, having made her apologies to Danny and Carmella, Pam was only now realizing that it was Ketchum's forgiveness she wanted; that was confusing, too. Moreover, treating Hero's wounds had made her cry, as if they were Ketchum's wounds she was impossibly trying to heal. It was exactly at this bewildering moment--at the height of her most bitter disappointment, or so Six-Pack imagined--when she turned on the TV.

  The world was about to overwhelm her, too, but Six-Pack didn't know that when she saw the wreckage caused by the first of the hijacked passenger jets; American Airlines Flight 11, flying out of Boston, had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, where the plane tore a gaping hole in the building and set it on fire. "It must have been a small plane," someone on television said, but Six-Pack Pam didn't think so.

  "Does that look like a hole a small plane would leave, Hero?" Six-Pack asked the wounded Walker bluetick. The dog had his eye on Six-Pack's male German shepherd; both dogs were under the kitchen table. The stoic bear hound didn't respond to Pam's question. (Living with Ketchum had made Hero overfamiliar with being spoken to; with Ketchum, the dog knew that no response was expected.)

  Pam just kept watching the news about the plane crash. On the TV, it looked like a bright, sunny day in New York City, too--not the kind of day a pilot has a visibility problem, Six-Pack was thinking.

  Six-Pack was regretting that she'd ever said she once "kinda fancied Cookie"--hadn't that been how she'd put it? Pam could have kicked herself for saying that within Ketchum's diminished hearing. Every time she thought their relationship was improving, if not exactly back on track, it seemed to Six-Pack that she said the dead-wrong thing--or that Ketchum did.

  She'd left a lot of men, and had been left by them, but busting up with Ketchum had hit her the hardest--even when Six-Pack considered that leaving Carl had caused the cowboy to very nearly kill her. The deputy sheriff had raped her on a dock at night--at the Success Pond boat launch. Afterward a couple who had witnessed it had taken Pam to the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she'd spent a few days recuperating. This had led to Six-Pack getting a job in the hospital, which she liked; she had a cleaning job, most nights, while her dogs were sleeping. Talking to some of the patients made Pam feel less sorry for herself. Printed in small, neat letters on her hospital uniform was the word SANITIZATION. Six-Pack doubted that many of the patients ever mistook her for a nurse, or a nurse's aide, but she believed she was nevertheless a comfort to some of them--as they were to
her.

  Six-Pack Pam knew she would have to have her hip replaced, and every time the hip hurt her, she thought about the cowboy banging her on the dock--how he'd pushed her face against a boat cleat, which was what had given her the scar on her upper lip--but the worst of it was she'd told Ketchum that the woodsman really should kill Carl. This was the worst, because Six-Pack hadn't known how strongly Ketchum believed that he should have killed the cowboy years ago. (And when the deputy sheriff shot Cookie, Ketchum's self-recriminations never ceased.)

  Pam was sorry, too, that she'd ever told Ketchum what Carl had done following that fatal collision on Route 110--this was out on the Berlin-Groveton road, where the highway ran alongside Dead River. Two teenagers who weren't wearing their seat belts had slammed head-on into a turkey truck. The turkeys were already dead; they'd been "processed," as they say in the turkey-farming business. The truck driver survived, but he'd suffered a neck injury and had briefly lost consciousness; when he came to, the driver was facing the two dead teenagers. The boy, who'd been driving, was run through by his steering column, and the girl, who was pinned in the passenger seat, had been decapitated. Carl was the first one from law enforcement on the scene, and--according to the turkey-truck driver--the cowboy had fondled the dead, decapitated girl.

  Carl claimed that the truck driver was out of his head; after all, he'd snapped his neck and had blacked out, and when he came to, he was evidently hallucinating. But the cowboy had told Pam the truth. What did it matter that he'd played with the headless girl's tits--she was dead, wasn't she?

  To which Ketchum had said--not for the first, or the last, time--"I should just kill that cowboy."

  Six-Pack now said to Hero and her German shepherd: "You two should stop eyeballin' each other that way." It was a little after nine in the morning--exactly eighteen minutes after the first passenger jet had hit the north tower--when the second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 (also flying out of Boston), crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center and exploded. Both buildings were burning when Six-Pack said to the assembled dogs, "Tell me that was another small plane, and I'll ask you what you've been drinkin' with your dog food."

  Hero tentatively licked some of the sulfa powder on his claw wounds, but the taste of it stopped the dog from licking further. "Don't that taste special?" Pam asked the bear hound. "You lick that off, Hero, I've got more."

  In what appeared to be a calculated non sequitur, Hero lunged at the German shepherd; both dogs were going at it, under the kitchen table, before Six-Pack was able to separate them with the water pistol. She kept it loaded with dishwasher detergent and lemon juice, and she squirted both dogs in their eyes--they hated it. But it had hurt Pam's hip to drop down on all fours and crawl under the kitchen table with the fighting dogs, and she was in no mood to listen to President Bush, who came on television at 9:30, speaking from Sarasota, Florida.

  Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

  True to this portrait, President Bush said on TV that the country had suffered an "apparent terrorist attack."

  "Ya think?" Six-Pack asked the president on television. Characteristic of people who lived alone, discounting her dogs, Pam talked back to the people on TV--as if, like the dogs, the people on television could actually hear her.

  By now, the Federal Aviation Administration had shut down the New York airports, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had ordered all the bridges and tunnels in the New York area closed. "What are the dumb fuckers waitin' for?" Six-Pack asked the dogs. "They should close down all the airports!" Ten minutes later, the FAA halted all flight operations at U.S. airports; it was the first time in the history of the United States that air traffic had been halted nationwide. "Ya see?" Six-Pack asked the dogs. "Someone must be listen-in' to me." (If not Ketchum, and definitely not the dogs.)

  Six-Pack had soaked a clean sponge in cold water and was rinsing the dishwasher detergent and lemon juice out of the German shepherd's eyes. "You're next, Hero," Pam told the bear hound, who watched her and the shepherd impassively.

  Three minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, sending up a towering plume of smoke; two minutes after that, they evacuated the White House. "Holy shit," Six-Pack said to the dogs. "It's lookin' more and more like an apparent terrorist attack, don'tcha think?"

  She was holding Hero's head in her lap, rinsing the dishwasher detergent and lemon juice from the wounded bear hound's eyes, when, at 10:05, the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. After the tower plummeted into the streets, a billowing cloud of dust and debris drifted away from the building; people were running through the waves of dust.

  Five minutes later, a portion of the Pentagon collapsed--at the same time that United Airlines Flight 93, which had also been hijacked, crashed to the ground in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh. "I wonder where that one was headed, Hero," Six-Pack said to the dog.

  The German shepherd had circled around behind Pam, and Hero was anxious that he couldn't see the shepherd; the bear hound's nervousness alerted Six-Pack to her devious shepherd's presence. She reached quickly behind her and grabbed a handful of fur and skin, squeezing as hard as she could until she heard the shepherd yelp and felt the dog twist free of her grip.

  "Don't you try sneakin' up on me!" Six-Pack said, as the German shepherd slunk out the dog door into the outdoor kennel.

  It was next announced on television that they'd evacuated the United Nations building--and the State and Justice departments, along with the World Bank. "I see all the important fellas are runnin' for cover," Six-Pack said to Hero. The dog eyed her warily, as if he were considering her contradictory behavior in the following manner: First she puts the bad-tasting yellow gunk on my cuts, then she squirts me in my eyes with the stinging-and-burning stuff, and lastly she tries to make me feel better; not to mention, where is that sneak-attack fuck of a German shepherd?

  "Don't get your balls crossed, Hero--I ain't goin' to hurt you," Pam told the bear hound, but Hero regarded her mistrustfully; the dog might have preferred his chances with a bear.

  At 10:24, the FAA reported that all inbound transatlantic aircraft entering the United States had been diverted to Canada. "Oh, that's brilliant!" Six-Pack said to the TV. "I might have begun with that idea a few fuckin' months ago! Like I suppose ya thought that the fellas fly-in' those first two planes were from Boston!" But the television ignored her.

  Four minutes later, the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed; someone said that the tower appeared to peel apart, from the top down, as if a hand had taken a knife to a tall vegetable. "If this ain't the end of the world, it's surely the start of somethin' close to it," Six-Pack said to the dogs. (Hero was still looking all around for that fuckheaded German shepherd.)

  At 10:54, Israel evacuated all its diplomatic missions. Six-Pack thought she should be writing this down. Ketchum always said that the Israelis were the only ones who knew what was what; that the Israelis were closing down their diplomatic missions meant that the Muslim extremists, those militant Islamists who were determined to wipe out the Jews, were beginning their religious war by wiping out the United States--because without the United States, Israel would long ago have ceased to exist. Nobody else
in the craven, so-called democratic world had the balls to stick up for the Israelis--or so Ketchum also said, and Six-Pack pretty much took what amounted to her politics from the old libertarian logger. (Ketchum admired the Israelis, and almost nobody else.)

  Six-Pack had often wondered if Ketchum was half-Injun and half-Jewish, because the riverman periodically threatened to move to Israel. Pam had, more than once, heard Ketchum say: "I might make more beneficial use of myself killing those assholes from Hamas and Hezbollah, instead of picking on the poor deer and bear!"

  SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN THAT MORNING, the New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, urged New Yorkers to stay at home; the mayor also ordered an evacuation of the area of the city south of Canal Street. By now, Pam was vexed at Ketchum and the two others for spending close to the whole morning scattering the little cook's ashes. But, knowing Ketchum, Six-Pack considered that the logger would have insisted on showing Danny what the woodsman called the "vandalism" that had been done to Paris--or West Dummer, as Ketchum obdurately called it--and either en route to Paris, or on the way back, Six-Pack knew that Ketchum would have paused to deliver a fucking eulogy to the confused, heartbreaking moose who danced their scrawny asses off in Moose-Watch Pond.

  Pam felt a pang that she had not often accepted Ketchum's periodic invitations to join him in a middle-of-the-night visit to see the moose dancing. (Six-Pack believed that the moose were just aimlessly "millin' around.") It was also with a pang that Six-Pack regretted that she had not accompanied Ketchum on many of his proposed overnight "campin' trips," as she called them, to that grassy hill where the cookhouse had been; she knew this was hallowed ground to Ketchum, and that he liked nothing better than to spend the night there. Ketchum just pitched a tent and slept in a sleeping bag, but his snoring kept her awake half the night, and Pam's hip hurt her on the hard ground. Furthermore, Ketchum best liked camping at the cookhouse site when the weather had turned colder--especially, once there was snow. The cold weather made Six-Pack's hip throb.