by John Irving
For how much longer, Danny wondered, would the answers to these and other insinuating questions fall into the too-soon-to-say category? The writer knew that he couldn't get away with that answer forever. "I am a slow processor--I mean, as a writer," Danny liked to preface his remarks. "And I'm a fiction writer--meaning that I won't ever write about the September Eleventh attacks, though I may use those events, when they're not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising." (The combined evasiveness and vagueness of that cautious manifesto might have elicited from Ketchum something along the lines of the embattled woodsman's mountains-of-moose-shit expletive.)
After all, Danny was on record for saying that the 2000 U.S. election--the one Bush "stole" from Gore--was, indeed, a "theft." How could the writer not comment on the 2004 version, when Bush had beaten John Kerry with questionable tactics and for the worst of all reasons? In Danny's view, John Kerry had been a hero twice--first in the war in Vietnam, later in his protests against it. Yet Kerry was viewed with disfavor by America's bully patriots, who were either stupid or stubborn enough to still be defending that misbegotten war.
What Danny had said to the media was that his so-called former country occasionally made him remember and appreciate Samuel Johnson's oft-quoted "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Regrettably, that wasn't all Danny said. In some instances, sounding like Ketchum, the writer had gone on to say that in the case of the 2004 U.S. election, the scoundrel was not only George W. Bush; it was every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter who'd believed that John Kerry wasn't patriotic enough to be the U.S. president.
Those remarks would be repeated--especially that bit about the "bully patriots," not to mention singling out "every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter." The novelist Daniel Baciagalupo had indeed written and published eight novels under the nom de plume of Danny Angel, and Danny and his father had fled the United States and come to Canada--an act of emigration to evade a madman who wanted to kill them, a crazy ex-cop who eventually did kill Danny's dad--but the way it appeared to most of the world was that Daniel Baciagalupo had chosen to stay in Canada for political reasons.
As for Danny, he was getting tired of denying it; also, sounding like Ketchum was easier. Danny, pretending to be Ketchum, had commented on a recent poll: Twice as many Americans had expressed more unrestrained loathing at the prospect of gay marriage than they'd registered even mild anxiety about the outcome of the war in Iraq. "Bush's regressive gay-bashing is reprehensible," the writer had said. (A comment like that further contributed to Danny's political reputation; sounding like Ketchum was very quotable.)
On the refrigerator in his Toronto kitchen, Danny had compiled a list of questions for Ketchum. But they didn't look like a list; they hadn't been assembled in an orderly way. There were many small scraps of paper taped to the fridge. Because Danny had dated each note, the recorded information on the door of the refrigerator resembled a kind of calendar of how the war in Iraq was proceeding. Soon the fridge would be covered.
Even the most anti-American of the writer's Canadian friends found his refrigerator politics a futile and juvenile exercise. (It was also a waste of Scotch tape.) And the same year In the After-Hours Restaurant was published, 2002, Danny had gotten in the habit of listening on the radio to a patriotic country-music station in the States. Danny could find the channel only late at night; he suspected that the signal was clearest when the wind was blowing north across Lake Ontario.
Did Danny do this to make himself angry at his former country? No, not at all; it was Ketchum's response to the crappy country music Danny wished he could hear. The writer longed to hear the old logger say, "I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism--it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win." Might not Ketchum have said something like that?
And now, with the war in Iraq almost two years old, wouldn't Ketchum also have railed that the majority of Americans were so poorly informed that they failed to see that this war was a distraction from the so-called war against terror--not a furtherance of that avowed war?
Danny had no quarrel with seeking out and destroying al-Qaeda--"Seek out and destroy fucking Hamas and Hezbollah while you're at it!" Ketchum had thundered--but Saddam's Iraq had been a secular tyranny. Did most Americans understand the distinction? Until we went there, there'd been no al-Qaeda in Iraq, had there? (It didn't take much for Danny to be over his head, politically; he wasn't as sure of himself as Ketchum had been. Danny didn't read as much, either.)
What would the raging woodsman from Coos County have said about the United States declaring an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq in May 2003--less than two months after the war had begun? It was tempting to wonder.
The questions for Ketchum on Danny's refrigerator may have been a reminder of the war's folly, but the writer had to wonder why he'd bothered to keep such an overobvious account; it served Danny no purpose, other than to depress him.
To the separate but similar-sounding denials by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair--who swore in May 2003 that intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was neither distorted nor exaggerated in order to justify the attack on Iraq--Danny could imagine Ketchum saying, "Show me the weapons, fellas!"
At times, Danny recited the questions for Ketchum to the dog. ("Even the dog," Ketchum might have quipped, "is smart enough to know where this war is headed!")
Daniel Baciagalupo would be sixty-three this coming mud season. He was a man who'd lost his only child and his father, and he lived alone--not to mention that he was a writer. Naturally, Danny would talk and read aloud to the dog.
As for Hero, he seemed unsurprised by Danny's somewhat eccentric behavior. The former bear hound was used to being spoken to; it usually beat getting mauled by a bear.
THE DOG WAS OF INDETERMINATE AGE. Ketchum had been vague about how old this particular Hero was--meaning how many generations were descended from that first "fine animal," which the current Hero represented. There were more gray hairs on Hero's muzzle than Danny remembered, but the Walker bluetick's mottled-white and bluish-gray coat made the gray hairs of age harder to distinguish. And that Hero was lame was not only an indication that the dog was advanced in years; the claw wounds from the bear-mauling had healed long ago, though the scars were very visible, and that hip, where the bear had clawed Hero, suffered from some joint damage. The mangled, mostly missing ear had also healed, but the scar tissue was black and furless.
Most disconcerting to anyone encountering Hero for the first time was that the veteran bear hound was missing an eyelid--on the opposite side of the dog's fierce face from his mangled ear. The eyelid was lost in Hero's last confrontation with Six-Pack's German shepherd, though--according to Pam--Hero had gained the upper hand in the dogs' final, kennel-clearing fight. Six-Pack was forced to put the shepherd down. She'd never held it against Hero, however; by Pam's own account, the two dogs had always and sincerely hated each other.
To the writer, the battle-scarred bear hound was a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course. (As elsewhere, Danny considered--whenever he happened to glance at the questions for Ketchum on his refrigerator door.)
In January 2004, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the start of the war had climbed to five hundred. "Hell, five hundred is nothing--it's just getting started," Danny could imagine the old logger saying. "We'll be up to five thousand in just a few more years, and some asshole will be telling us that peace and stability are right around the corner."
"What do you think about that, Hero?" Danny had asked the dog, who'd pricked up his one ear at the question. "Wouldn't our mutual friend have been entertaining on the subject of this war?"
Danny could tell when the dog was really listening, or when Hero was actually asleep. The eye without the eyelid followed you when Hero was only pretending to sleep, but when the dog was truly dead to the world, the pupil and
the iris of the constantly open eye traveled somewhere unseen; the cloudy-white orb stared blankly.
The onetime bear hound slept on a zippered dog bed stuffed with cedar chips in the Toronto kitchen. Contrary to Danny's earlier opinion, Ketchum's stories of Hero's farting hadn't been exaggerated. On the dog bed, Hero's preferred chew toy was the old sheath for Ketchum's biggest Browning knife--the one-footer that the riverman used to stash over the sun visor on the driver's side of his truck. The sheath, which had absorbed the sharpening oil from Ketchum's oilstone knife sharpener, was possibly still redolent of the slain bear that had once ridden in the cab of the truck; from the way Hero seemed neurotically attached to the lightly gnawed sheath, Danny understandably believed so.
The foot-long Browning knife itself proved to be less useful. Danny had taken the knife to a kitchen-supply store, where they'd tried unsuccessfully to resharpen it; Danny's repeated efforts to rid the knife of any residue of Ketchum's sharpening oil, by putting the knife in the dishwasher, had dulled the blade. Now the knife was dull and oily, and Danny had hung it in a most visible but unreachable part of his Toronto kitchen, where it resembled a ceremonial sword.
Ketchum's guns were another matter. Danny hadn't wanted them--not in Toronto. He'd given them to Andy Grant, with whom Danny went deer hunting every November. Killing Carl had made it easier for Danny to shoot deer, though he'd refused to fire a shotgun. ("Never again," he'd said to Andy.) Danny used Ketchum's Remington .30-06 Springfield instead. In a wooded area, even at reasonably close range, it was harder to hit a deer with that prized collectible, but the kick of the carbine--or the resonance of the short-barreled rifle's discharge, in his ear--was different from what Danny remembered of the 20-gauge.
Andy Grant knew the Bayfield area like the back of his hand; he'd hunted there as a boy. But, for the most part, Andy took Danny deer hunting on what was more familiar terrain for Danny--that area west of Lost Tower Lake, between Payne's Road and Shawanaga Bay. In the vicinity of the winter snowmobile portage, and sometimes within sight of the back dock on Charlotte's island, was a natural runway--a virtual game path for deer. That way, every November, Danny could look across the gray water at his winter destination. There were places on the mainland, overlooking Shawanaga Bay, where you could see the back dock on Turner Island--even the roof of Granddaddy's cabin, where Ketchum had once thrown the skin from that rattlesnake he'd shot.
For those November hunting trips, Danny always stayed at Larry's Tavern. In the bar was where he'd heard the rumor that Larry's would one day be sold, whenever the new highway advanced that far north. Who was Danny to say, as the old-timers in the bar often did, that Larry's should be spared? Neither the tavern nor the motel seemed worth saving to the writer, but he couldn't deny that both parts of the roadside establishment had long served a local (albeit largely self-destructive) purpose.
And every winter, when Danny arrived on Charlotte's island, Andy Grant loaned him Ketchum's Remington. ("In case of critters," Ketchum would have said.) Andy also left a couple of extra loaded cartridge clips with the writer. Hero invariably recognized the carbine. It was one of the few times the bear hound wagged his tail, for that bolt-action Remington .30-06 Springfield had been Ketchum's gun of choice for bear, and doubtless Hero was reminded of the thrill of the chase--or of his former master.
IT HAD TAKEN TWO YEARS for Danny to teach the dog to bark. The growling and farting, and the snoring in his sleep, came naturally to Hero--that is, if the bear hound hadn't learned these indelicate arts from Ketchum--but Hero had never barked before. In his earliest efforts to encourage Hero to bark, Danny would occasionally wonder if the old logger had disapproved of barking.
There was a little park and playground, probably as big as a football field, near Danny's Rosedale residence and adjacent to those two new condominiums on Scrivener Square, which--as luck would have it--did not block the writer's view of the clock tower on the Summer-hill liquor store. Danny walked Hero in the park three or four times a day--more often than not on a leash, lest there might happen to be a German shepherd present in the park, or some other male dog who could have reminded Hero of Six-Pack's late shepherd.
In the park, Danny barked for Hero; the writer made every effort to bark authentically, but Hero was unimpressed. After a year of this, Danny wondered if Hero somehow didn't think that barking was a weakness in dogs.
Other dog-walkers in the little park were disconcerted by Hero's lean-and-mean appearance, and by the bear hound's preternatural aloofness from other dogs. There were also the scars, the stiff-hipped limp--not to mention the wonky-eyed, baleful stare. "It's only because Hero lost an eyelid--he's not really giving your dog the evil eye, or anything," Danny would try to reassure the anxious dog owners.
"What happened to that ear?" a young woman with a brainless breed of spaniel asked the writer.
"Oh, that was a bear," Danny admitted.
"A bear!"
"And the poor thing's hip--those terrible scars?" a nervous-looking man with a schnauzer had asked.
"The same bear," Danny said.
It was their second winter on Charlotte's island when the barking began. Danny had parked the Polar airboat on the ice off the front dock; he was unloading groceries from the boat, while Hero waited for him on the dock. Danny tried once more to bark at the dog--the writer had almost given up. To both Danny and the dog's surprise, Danny's bark was repeated; there was an echo of the bark from the direction of Barclay Island. When Hero heard the echo, he barked. Of course there was an echo attending Hero's bark, too; the bear hound heard a dog uncannily like himself bark back.
It had gone on for over an hour--Hero barking at himself on the dock. (If Ketchum had been there, Danny thought, the former river driver would probably have shot the bear hound.) What have I created? the writer wondered, but after a while, Hero had stopped.
After that, the dog barked normally; he barked at snowmobiles and at the once-in-a-while airplanelike sound of a distant airboat out in the main channel. He barked at the train whistles, which the dog could hear from the mainland--and, less frequently, at the whine of the tires on those big long-haul trucks out on 69. As for intruders--well, in those winter weeks, there were none--there was only a now-and-again visit from Andy Grant. (Hero barked at Andy, too.)
One could never say that Ketchum's bear hound was normal--or even almost normal--but the barking did much to alleviate the sheer creepiness of Hero's one-eared, gaping-eyed face. Certainly, Danny's fellow dog-walkers in that little park near Scrivener Square were less visibly anxious about the bear hound--and now that the dog barked, he growled less. It was a pity that there was nothing Danny could do about Hero's silent farting or his colossal snoring.
What the writer was realizing was that he hadn't known what owning a dog was like. The more Danny talked to Hero, the less the writer was inclined to think about what Ketchum would have said about Iraq. Did having a dog make you less political? (Not that Danny had ever been truly political; he'd never been like Katie, or like Ketchum.)
Danny did take sides, politically; he had political opinions. But Danny wasn't an anti-American--the writer didn't even feel like an expatriate! The world that was captured in the barest outline form on his Toronto refrigerator began to seem less and less important to the author. That world was increasingly not what Daniel Baciagalupo wanted to think about--especially not, as Ketchum would have said, as a writer.
THERE'D BEEN AN ACCIDENT on 69 near Horseshoe Lake Road. A dipshit driving a Hummer had rear-ended a cattle-transport trailer, killing himself and a bunch of beef cattle. This happened the first winter Danny stayed on Charlotte's island, and he'd heard about the accident from his cleaning woman. She was a First Nation person--a young woman with black hair and eyes, a pretty face, and thick, strong-looking hands. Once a week, Danny drove the airboat to the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve; that was where he picked her up, and where he returned her at the end of the day, but she almost certainly didn't live there. Shawanaga Landing wa
s mostly used in the summer months, both as a campsite and as a gateway to the bay. The residents of the reserve lived in the village of Shawanaga, though there were a few First Nation people who lived year-round in Skerryvore--or so Andy Grant had told Danny. (Both areas could be reached by road in the winter months, at least on snowmobiles.)
The young cleaning woman seemed to like riding in the Polar airboat. Danny always brought a second pair of ear guards for her, and after she'd met Hero, she asked why the bear hound couldn't come along for the ride. "The airboat is too loud for a dog's ears--well, for his one ear, anyway," Danny told her. "I don't know how well Hero can hear out of the mangled ear."
But the cleaning woman had a way with dogs. She told Danny to put her ear guards on Hero when he drove to Shawanaga Landing to pick her up, and when he drove back to Turner Island without her. (Surprisingly, the dog didn't object to wearing them.) And when the cleaning woman rode in the airboat with Hero, she held the bear hound in her lap and covered his ears--even the mostly missing one--with her big, strong hands. Danny had never seen Hero sit in anyone's lap before. The Walker bluetick weighed sixty or seventy pounds.
The dog devotedly followed the young woman throughout her cleaning chores, the same way Hero attached himself to Danny everywhere on the island when Danny was otherwise alone there. When Danny was using the chainsaw, the bear hound maintained a safe distance between them. (The writer was sure that Hero had learned this from Ketchum.)
There was an ongoing misunderstanding in regard to where the young First Nation person lived--Danny never saw anyone waiting for her at Shawanaga Landing, or any kind of vehicle she might have used to get herself to and from the boat landing. Danny had asked her only once, but the young cleaning woman's answer struck him as dreamy or facetious--or both--and he'd not asked her for clarification. "Ojibway Territory," she'd said.
Danny couldn't tell what the First Nation woman had meant--maybe nothing. He could have asked Andy Grant where she was actually from--Andy had put him in touch with her in the first place--but Danny had let it go. Ojibway Territory was a good enough answer for him.