Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound's wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear's claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero's hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.

  "I didn't realize that Hero had lost half an ear," Ketchum told them. "There was so much blood yesterday, I thought the whole ear was still there. It was only when the ear stopped bleeding a bit that I could see it was half gone!"

  "My goodness--" Carmella started to say.

  "Shouldn't you take him to a vet?" Danny asked.

  "Hero isn't friendly to the vet," Ketchum said. "We'll take Hero to Six-Pack on our way to the river. Pam's got some gunk that works good for claw wounds, and I've got an antibiotic for the ear--while what's left of it is healing. Doesn't it serve you right, Hero?" Ketchum asked the dog. "I told you--you were too far ahead of me! The fool dog got to the bear while I was out of range!" Ketchum explained to Carmella.

  "The poor creature," was all she could say.

  "Oh, he'll be fine--I'll just feed him some of the bear meat!" Ketchum told her. "Let's get going," he said to Danny, taking the Remington .30-06 Springfield down from two pegs on the wall; he lowered the carbine across one forearm and headed for the wanigan's door. "Come on, Hero," he called to the hound, who rose stiffly from the dog bed and limped after him.

  "What's the gun for? It looks like you got your bear," Danny said.

  "You'll see," Ketchum told him.

  "You're not going to shoot anything, are you, Mr. Ketchum?" Carmella asked him.

  "Only if there's a critter in need of shooting," Ketchum answered her. Then, as if to change the subject, Ketchum said to Danny: "I don't imagine you've seen a skinned bear without its head. In that condition, a bear resembles a man. Not something for you to see, I think," the logger added quickly, to Carmella.

  "Stay!" Ketchum said suddenly, to Hero, and the dog froze alongside Carmella, who had stopped in her tracks, too.

  In the smokehouse, the skinned bear was suspended above the smoldering fire pit like a giant bat. Without a head, the bear indeed resembled a hulking man--not that the writer had ever seen a skinned man before. "Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it?" Ketchum said to Danny, who was speechless.

  They went out of the smokehouse and saw Carmella and the bear hound, standing transfixed exactly where they'd left them--as if only a violent change in the weather would have persuaded the woman and the dog to rethink their positions. "Come on, Hero," Ketchum said, and Carmella dutifully followed the hound to the truck--as if the old river driver had also spoken to her. Ketchum lifted Hero, putting the injured dog in the back of the pickup.

  "You'll have to indulge Six-Pack, Danny," Ketchum was saying, as they got into the cab of his truck--Carmella taking up more than her share of room, in the middle. "Pam has something she wants to say to you both," Ketchum told them. "Six-Pack's not a bad person, and I suspect she just wants to say she's sorry. It was my fault that I couldn't read, remember. I never blamed Pam for telling Carl what really happened to Injun Jane. It was the only thing Six-Pack had over the cowboy, and he must have made her use it."

  "I never blamed Six-Pack, either," Danny told him; he tried to read Carmella's expression, which seemed slightly offended, but she didn't say anything. There was a bad smell in the cab; maybe the smell had offended Carmella.

  "It won't take too long, anyway--Six-Pack will have Hero to attend to," Ketchum said to them. "Hero barely tolerates Pam's dogs when he's not all clawed up. This morning could be interesting." They drove out the road advertising small engine repairs, though Danny somehow doubted that this was Ketchum's sign, or that Ketchum had ever been in the business of repairing other people's small engines; maybe the logger just fixed his own, but Danny didn't ask. The smell was overpowering; it had to be the bear, but why had the bear been in the cab?

  "We met a guy who knows you--a salesman at L. L. Cote," Danny told Ketchum.

  "Is that so?" the riverman said. "Was he a nice fella, or do I take it that you met the one asshole who works there?"

  "I believe that's the one we met, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said. The horrible smell traveled with them; definitely the bear had been in the cab.

  "Fat fella, always wears camouflage--that asshole?" Ketchum asked.

  "That's the one," Danny said; the bear smell almost made him gag. "He seems to think you're half-Indian."

  "Well, I don't know what I am--or what the missing half of me is, anyway!" Ketchum thundered. "It's fine with me if I'm half-Injun--or three-quarters-Injun, for that matter! Injuns are all a lost nation, which suits me fine, too!"

  "That fella seemed to think your road was no longer called Lost Nation Road," Danny told the old woodsman.

  "I ought to skin that fella and smoke him with my bear!" Ketchum shouted. "But you know what?" he asked Carmella, more flirtatiously.

  "What, Mr. Ketchum?" she asked him fearfully.

  "That fella wouldn't taste as good as bear!" Ketchum hollered, laughing. They swerved onto Akers Pond Road and headed to the highway. Danny held the new glass jar with his dad's ashes tightly in his lap; the old container, now empty, was pinched between his feet on the floor of the cab. The glass jar was bigger; the cook's ashes, together with the herbs and spices, filled it only two-thirds full. It was once an apple-juice jar, Danny saw by the label.

  Ketchum drove to that well-kept trailer park on Route 26, just outside Errol--the Saw Dust Alley campground, where Six-Pack Pam had a trailer. Six-Pack's home, which was no longer mobile--it was set on cinder blocks, and half surrounded by a vegetable garden--was actually two trailers that had been joined together. A kennel kept the dogs out of the garden, and a large, hinged door of the kind cats usually use allowed Pam's dogs free access between the kennel and the trailers. "I've tried to tell Six-Pack that a full-grown fella could come through that fucking dog door, though I suspect there's no fella around here who would dare to," Ketchum said. Hero had a hostile look about him as Ketchum lifted the dog from the back of the pickup. "Don't get your balls crossed," Ketchum told the hound.

  Danny and Carmella had not seen Six-Pack, who was kneeling in her garden. On her knees, she was almost as tall as Carmella was standing. Pam got to her feet--unsteadily, and with the help of a rake. Danny only then remembered how big she was--not fat, but big-boned, and nearly as tall as Ketchum. "How's your hip?" Ketchum asked her. "Getting up off your knees isn't the best thing for it, I suppose."

  "My hip is better than your poor dog," Six-Pack told him. "Come here, Hero," she said to the hound, who went over to her. "Did you kill the bear all by yourself, or did this asshole hunter finally get around to shootin' it?"

  "This asshole bear hound got too far ahead of me. When Hero got to the bear, I wasn't in range!" Ketchum complained again.

  "Old Ketchum ain't as fast as he used to be, is he, Hero?" Six-Pack said to the dog.

  "I shot the damn bear," Ketchum told her peevishly.

  "No shit--of course you did!" Pam said. "If you hadn't shot the damn bear, your poor dog would be dead!"

  "I'm giving Hero an antibiotic for that ear," the logger said to Six-Pack. "I thought you might put some of that gunk you've got on his claw wounds."

  "It ain't gunk--it's sulfa," Six-Pack told him.

  The dogs in the kennel were an overeager-looking lot--mongrels, for the most part, though there was one that appeared to be close to a purebred German shepherd. Hero had his eye on that one, even with a fence between them.

  "I'm sorry for your business here, Danny," Six-Pack Pam said. "I'm sorry for my part in it, however long ago it was," she added, this time looking directly at Carmella when she spoke.

  "It's okay," Danny said to Six-Pack. "There was no preventing it, I guess."

&
nbsp; "Everyone loses people," Carmella told her.

  "I kinda fancied Cookie, once," Six-Pack said, now looking at Danny. "But he wouldn't have nothin' to do with me. I suppose that was part of what provoked me."

  "You had the hots for Cookie?" Ketchum asked her. "High time I heard of it, I guess!"

  "I ain't tellin' you--I'm tellin' him!" Six-Pack said, pointing at Danny. "I ain't sayin' I'm sorry to you, either," Pam told Ketchum.

  Ketchum kicked the ground with his boot. "Well, shit, we'll be back for the dog later this morning--or maybe not till this afternoon," he said to Six-Pack.

  "It don't matter when you come back," Pam told him. "Hero will be fine with me--I ain't plannin' on huntin' any bears with him!"

  "I'll have some bear meat for you shortly," Ketchum said sullenly. "If you don't like it, you can always feed those mutts with it." Ketchum made a sudden gesture to the kennel when he uttered the mutts word, and Six-Pack's dogs commenced barking at him.

  "Ain't it just like you, Ketchum, to get me in trouble with my neighbors?" Pam turned to Carmella and Danny when she said, "Would you believe he's the only asshole who can be counted upon to drive my dogs crazy?"

  "I can believe it," Danny said, smiling.

  "Shut up, all of you!" Six-Pack yelled at her dogs; they stopped barking and slunk away from the fence, all but the German shepherd, who kept his muzzle pressed against the fence and continued to stare at Hero, who stared back.

  "I'd keep those two fellas separated, if I were you," Ketchum said to Pam, pointing to his bear hound and the shepherd.

  "Like I need you to tell me that!" Six-Pack said.

  "Shit," the logger said to her. "I'll be in the truck," Ketchum told Danny. "Stay!" he said to Hero, without looking in the hound's direction; thus again, Ketchum managed to make Carmella turn to stone.

  --

  OLD AGE HADN'T BEEN GENTLE to Six-Pack, who was Ketchum's age, though she was still a scary-looking bleached blonde. There was a scar on her upper lip--one Danny didn't remember. In all likelihood, the new scar was one the cowboy had given her, the writer thought. (What was wrong with her hip might have been something the deputy had done to her, too.)

  When the woodsman had shut himself in the cab of his truck and turned the radio on, Six-Pack said to Danny and Carmella: "I still love Ketchum, you know, though he don't forgive me much--and he can be an awful asshole, when he's judgin' you for your faults, or for what you can't help about yourself."

  Danny could only nod, and Carmella had been turned to stone; there was a momentary silence before Pam continued. "Talk to him, Danny. Tell him not to do somethin' stupid to himself--to his left hand, for starters."

  "What about Ketchum's left hand?" Danny asked her.

  "Ask Ketchum about it," Six-Pack said. "It ain't my favorite subject. That left hand ain't the one he ever touched me with!" she suddenly cried.

  The old logger rolled down the window on the driver's side of his truck. "Just shut up, Six-Pack, and let them leave for Christ's sake!" he shouted; Pam's dogs started barking again. "You already got to say you were sorry, didn't you?" Ketchum called to her.

  "Come on, Hero," Six-Pack said to the bear hound. Pam turned and went into the trailer, with Hero limping stiffly after her.

  It was still only a little after seven in the morning, and once Danny and Carmella had joined Ketchum in the truck, Six-Pack's dogs stopped barking. There was half a cord of firewood in the bed of the pickup; the wood was covered by a durable-looking tarpaulin, and Ketchum had put his rifle under the tarp. Anyone following behind the pickup truck wouldn't have seen the old bolt-action Remington, which was hidden in the woodpile. There was no hiding the bear smell in the cab, however.

  A Kris Kristofferson song from the seventies was playing on the radio. Danny had always liked the song, and the singer-songwriter, but not even Kris Kristofferson on a beautiful morning could distract the writer from the powerful stench in Ketchum's truck.

  This could be our last good night together; We may never pass this way again.

  When Ketchum steered the truck south on Route 16, with the Androscoggin now running parallel to them on the driver's side of the vehicle, Danny reached across Carmella's lap and turned off the radio. "What's this I hear about your left hand?" the writer asked the old logger. "You're not still thinking about cutting it off, are you?"

  "Shit, Danny," Ketchum said. "There's not a day that goes by when I don't think about it."

  "My goodness, Mr. Ketchum--" Carmella started to say, but Danny wouldn't let her go on.

  "Why the left hand, Ketchum?" Danny asked the woodsman. "You're right-handed, aren't you?"

  "Shit, Danny--I promised your dad I would never tell you!" Ketchum said. "Even though, I suspect, Cookie probably forgot all about it."

  Danny held the cook's ashes in both hands and shook them. "What do you say, Pop?" Danny asked the silent ashes. "I'm not hearing Dad raise an objection, Ketchum," Danny told the logger.

  "Shit--I promised your mom, too!" Ketchum shouted.

  Danny remembered what Injun Jane had told him. On the night his mother disappeared under the ice, Ketchum got hold of a cleaver in the cookhouse. He'd just stood in the kitchen with his left hand on a cutting board, holding the cleaver in his right hand. "Don't," Jane had told the river driver, but Ketchum kept staring at his left hand on the cutting board--imagining it gone, maybe. Jane had left Ketchum there; she'd needed to take care of Danny and his dad. Later, when Jane came back to the kitchen, Ketchum was gone. Jane had looked everywhere for the logger's left hand; she'd been sure she was going to find it somewhere. "I didn't want you or your father finding it," she'd told young Dan.

  Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way the riverman had stared at the cast on his right wrist, after Angel went under the logs.

  Now they drove alongside the Androscoggin in silence, before Danny finally said: "I don't care what you promised my dad or my mom, Ketchum. What I'm wondering is, if you hated yourself--if you were really taking yourself to task, or holding yourself accountable--wouldn't you want to cut off your good hand?"

  "My left hand is my good hand!" Ketchum cried.

  Carmella cleared her throat; it might have been the awful bear smell. Without turning her head to look at either of them, but speaking instead to the dashboard of the truck--or perhaps to the silent radio--Carmella said: "Please tell us the story, Mr. Ketchum."

  CHAPTER 15

  MOOSE DANCING

  IT WAS NO SURPRISE TO DANNY THAT THE STORY OF KETCHUM'S left hand was not immediately forthcoming. By the time the truck passed the Pontook Reservoir--and Danny noted the familiar drain age into the fields, as they drove down Dummer Pond Road--it was obvious that Ketchum had his own agenda. The story revealing whatever curious logic had persuaded the old logger to consider his left hand his "good" one would have to wait. Danny also noticed that Ketchum drove past the former haul road to Twisted River.

  "Are we going to Paris, for some reason?" the writer asked.

  "West Dummer," Ketchum corrected him, "or what's left of it."

  "Does anyone call it West Dummer anymore?" Danny asked.

  "I do," Ketchum answered.

  Crossing the new bridge over Phillips Brook, they went the way young Dan had gone to school when Injun Jane was driving him. Long ago, it had seemed a never-ending trip from Twisted River to Paris; now the time and the road flew by, but not the bear smell.

  "Don't get your balls crossed about it, Danny, but the Paris Manufacturing Company School--the actual schoolhouse--is still standing," Ketchum warned him. "Where the young writer-to-be spent a few of his formative years--getting the shit beat out of him, for the most part," the woodsman explained to Carmella, who seemed to be struggling with the concept of crossed balls.

  It's probable that Carmella was simply fighting nausea; the combination of the rough surface of the dirt road with the rank smell in the truck's cab must have made her fe
el sick. Danny, who was definitely nauseated, tried to ignore the bear hair drifting at their feet, blown about by the air from the open driver's-side window of the lurching truck.

  Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver's-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the long, bent stick shift--in the area of Carmella's knees. Ketchum's left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.

  Ketchum's driving was a fairly fluid process, as seemingly natural and unplanned as the way his beard blew in the wind from the open driver's-side window. (Had the window not been open, Danny was thinking, he and Carmella almost certainly would have thrown up.)

  "Why didn't you put the bear in the back of the pickup?" Danny asked Ketchum. The writer wondered if some essential hunting ritual were the reason for the slain bear riding in the cab of the truck.

  "I was in Maine, remember?" Ketchum said. "I shot the bear in New Hampshire, but I had to drive in and out of Maine. I have New Hampshire plates on my truck. If the bear had been in the back of my pickup, some game warden or a Maine state trooper would have stopped me. I have a New Hampshire hunting license," Ketchum explained.

  "Where was Hero?" Danny asked.

  "Hero was in the back of the pickup--he was bleeding all over," Ketchum said. "Live critters bleed more than dead ones, because their hearts are still pumping," the old logger told Carmella, who appeared to be suppressing a gag reflex. "I just buckled the bear in your seat belt, Danny, and pulled a hat over his ears. The beast's head looked like it was stuffed between his shoulders--bears don't have much in the way of necks--but I suppose we looked like two bearded fellas out driving around!"

  Ketchum would have sat up taller in the cab than the dead bear, Danny realized. From a distance, the woodsman's beard and long hair were as black as a black bear's; you had to look closely at Ketchum to see the gray. Through the windshield of Ketchum's approaching truck, especially if you'd been passing with any speed, probably Ketchum and the bear had looked like two young men with heavy beards--younger than Ketchum really was, anyway.