by John Irving
The cook couldn't comprehend where the kitchen, which they had entered, ended and the bedroom began; scattered pots and pans and bottles gave way to strewn undergarments and the giant, unmade bed, the only light on which was cast by a greenish aquarium. Who knew that Six-Pack Pam was a fish person, or that she liked pets of any species? (If fish were what was in the aquarium--Dominic couldn't see anything swimming around in the algae. Maybe Six-Pack was an algae person.)
They navigated the bedroom; it was hard, even without a limp, to get around the enormous bed. And while it was easy for Dominic to imagine the extreme situation and awkward location of Ketchum's collapse, and why this might have made it necessary for Pam to hastily dress herself without a bra, they passed three bras en route to the bathroom--any one of which, even in a hurry, surely would have been opportune.
Six-Pack now scratched her breast under Ketchum's wool-flannel shirt. Dominic wasn't immediately worried that she was fondling herself suggestively, or otherwise flirting with him; it was as unplanned a gesture as her knocking Charlie Clough to the muddy ground, or the spontaneous forearm to the ear that had dropped Earl Dinsmore. The cook knew that if Six-Pack were to suggest anything, she would be far less ambiguous about it than to merely touch her breast in passing. Besides, Ketchum's wool-flannel shirt must have been itchy against her bare skin.
They found Ketchum on the toilet, more or less as Pam must have discovered him--with the paperback he'd been reading pinned by his cast, and held open on one of his bare thighs, and with both knees splayed wide apart. The water in the toilet was laced with bright bloodred streaks--as if Ketchum had been slowly bleeding to death.
"He's gotta be bleedin' internally!" Six-Pack exclaimed, but the cook realized that Ketchum had dropped a pen with red ink into the toilet; he must have been using the pen to circle certain words. "I already flushed, before leavin' him," Pam was saying, as Dominic rolled up his sleeve and (reaching between Ketchum's knees) picked the pen out of the toilet bowl--flushing again. Dominic washed his hands and the pen in the sink, drying them with a towel.
It was only then that he noticed Ketchum's erection. One of the cook's most fervent hopes--namely, to never see Ketchum with an erection--may have caused him to first overlook the obvious. Naturally, Six-Pack hadn't overlooked it. "Well, I wonder what he thinks he's goin' to do with that!" she was saying, as she lifted Ketchum under his heavy arms. She was able to prop him more upright on the toilet seat, rescuing him from his wedged position. "If you take hold of his ankles, Cookie, I can handle the rest."
The book, which nearly followed the pen's path into the toilet, slid off Ketchum's thigh to the floor. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot was a surprise to Dominic Baciagalupo, who could more easily understand Ketchum passing out with the novel on (or off) a toilet than he could imagine Six-Pack reading out loud to Ketchum from the gigantic greenly-lit bed. Dominic instinctively uttered aloud the book's title, which was misunderstood by Pam.
"You're tellin' me he's an idiot!" she said.
"How were you liking the book?" the cook asked her, as they lugged Ketchum out of the bathroom; they managed to hit Ketchum's head on the doorknob as they passed the open door. Ketchum's cast was dragging on the floor.
"It's about fuckin' Russians," Six-Pack said dismissively. "I wasn't payin' much attention to the story--I was just readin' it to him."
The passing blow to his head hadn't awakened Ketchum, although it seemed to serve as an invitation for him to speak. "As for those kind of dives, where you could get into a shitload of trouble just looking at some super-sensitive asshole, there was never anything in downtown Berlin to equal Hell's Half Acre in Bangor--not in my experience," Ketchum said, his erection as upstanding and worthy of attention as a weather vane.
"What do you know about Maine?" Pam asked him, as if Ketchum were conscious and could understand her.
"I didn't kill Pinette--they could never pin it on me!" Ketchum declared. "That wasn't my stamping hammer."
They'd found Lucky Pinette, murdered in his bed, in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin--about two miles north of Milan. He'd had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer, and there were those rivermen who claimed that Lucky had had a dispute with Ketchum at the sorting gaps on the river earlier in the afternoon. Ketchum, typically, was discovered to be spending the night at the Umbagog House in Errol--with a dim-witted woman who worked in the kitchen there. Neither the stamping hammer that had repeatedly hit Pinette (indenting his forehead with the letter H) nor Ketchum's hammer was ever found.
"So who killed Lucky?" Six-Pack asked Ketchum, as she and Dominic dropped him onto the bed, where the river driver's undying erection trembled at them like a flagpole in a gale-force wind.
"I'll bet Bergeron did it," Ketchum answered her. "He had a stamping hammer just like mine."
"And Bergeron wasn't bangin' some retard from Errol!" Pam replied.
With his eyes still closed, Ketchum merely smiled. The cook resisted the urge to go back into the bathroom and see what words Ketchum had circled in The Idiot--anything to get away from his old friend's towering erection.
"Are you awake, or what?" Dominic asked Ketchum, who appeared to have passed completely out again--or else he was imagining himself as one of the passengers in a third-class compartment on the Warsaw-St. Petersburg train, because Ketchum had only recently borrowed The Idiot, and the cook found it unlikely that Six-Pack had read very far into the first chapter before the passing-out-on-the-toilet episode had interrupted what Ketchum called his chosen foreplay.
"Well, I guess I'll go home," Dominic said, as Ketchum's finally drooping erection seemed to signify the end of the evening's entertainment. Perhaps not to Pam--facing the cook, she began to unbutton her borrowed shirt.
Here comes suggestive, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. There was no room between the foot of the bed and the bedroom wall, where Six-Pack blocked his way; he would have had to walk on the bed, stepping over Ketchum, to get around her.
"Come on, Cookie," Pam said. "Show me what you got." She tossed the wool-flannel shirt on the bed, where it covered Ketchum's face but not his fallen erection.
"She was semi-retarded," Ketchum mumbled from under the shirt, "and she wasn't from Errol--she came from Dixville Notch." He must have meant the kitchen worker in the Umbagog House, the woman he'd been banging the night Lucky Pinette was hammered to death in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. (It could have been just a coincidence that neither Ketchum's stamping hammer nor the murder weapon was ever found.)
Six-Pack fiercely took hold of the cook's shoulders and snapped his face between her breasts--no ambiguity now. It was half a Heimlich maneuver that he made on her, ducking under her arms to get behind her--his hands locking on her lower rib cage, under her pretty breasts. With his nose jammed painfully between Pam's shoulder blades, Dominic said: "I can't do this, Six-Pack--Ketchum's my friend."
She easily broke his grip; her long, hard elbow smacked him in the mouth, splitting his lower lip. Then she headlocked him, half smothering him between her armpit and the soft side of her breast. "You ain't no friend of his if you let him find Angel! He's tearin' himself up over that damn kid, Cookie," Pam told him. "If you let him so much as see that boy's body, or what's left of it, you ain't no friend of Ketchum's!"
They were rolling around on the bed beside Ketchum's covered face and his naked, unmoving body. The cook couldn't breathe. He reached around Six-Pack's shoulder and punched her in the ear, but she lay on him unflinchingly, with her weight on his chest; she had his head and neck, and his right arm, locked up tight. All the cook could do was hit her again with his awkward left hook--his fist struck her cheekbone, her nose, her temple, and her ear again.
"Christ, you can't fight worth shit, Cookie," Six-Pack said with contempt. She rolled off him, letting him go. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember lying there, his chest heaving alongside his snoring friend. The ghastly green light from the aquarium washed over the gasping cook; in the tank's murky water, the unse
en fish might have been mocking him. Pam had picked up a bra and was putting it on, with her back to him. "The least you can do is take Danny with you, earlier than when you're goin' to meet Ketchum. You two find Angel's body--before Ketchum gets there. Just don't let Ketchum see that boy!" she shouted.
Ketchum pulled the shirt off his face and stared unseeing at the ceiling; the cook sat up beside him. Pam had put the bra on and was angrily struggling into a T-shirt. Dominic would also remember this: Six-Pack's unbelted dungarees, low on her broad but bony hips, and the unzipped fly, through which he caught a glimpse of her blond pubic hair. She'd dressed herself in a hurry, to be sure--and she was hurrying now. "Get out, Cookie," she told him. He looked once at Ketchum, who had closed his eyes and covered his face with his cast. "Did Ketchum let you see your wife when he found her?" Pam asked the cook.
Dominic Baciagalupo would try to forget this part--how he got up from the bed, but Six-Pack wouldn't let him step around her. "Answer me," she said to him.
"No, Ketchum didn't let me see her."
"Well, Ketchum was bein' your friend," she said, letting the cook limp past her to the door in the kitchen area. "Watch that step, second from the top," she reminded him.
"You ought to ask Ketchum to fix that step for you," Dominic said.
"Ketchum removed the step--so he could hear someone comin' up the stairs, or sneakin' down," Six-Pack informed the cook.
There was no doubt Ketchum had to take certain precautions, Dominic was thinking, as he let himself out the door. The missing step awaited him--he stepped over it carefully. The depressing music from the dance hall hit him on the stairs. Teresa Brewer was singing "Till I Waltz Again with You" when the wind blew open the door the cook thought he had closed.
"Shit!" he heard Pam say.
Either the wind or the dance-hall music momentarily revived Ketchum--enough for the riverman to make a final comment before Six-Pack slammed the door. "Not so fucking lucky now--are you, Lucky?" Ketchum asked the windy night.
Poor Pinette, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Lucky Pinette may already have been past hearing the question--that is, the first time Ketchum had asked it, if he'd really asked it. (Certainly, Lucky was long past hearing anything now.)
The cook skirted the shabby hostelry bars with their broken, interrupted lettering.
NO MINO S! the neon blinked at him.
TH RD BEER FR E! another sign blinked.
After he passed the neon announcements, Dominic would realize he'd forgotten his flashlight. He was pretty sure that Six-Pack wouldn't be friendly if he went back for it. The cook tasted the blood from his split lip before he put his hand to his mouth and looked at the blood on his fingers. But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer's slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning "Rags to Riches." Dominic didn't for a moment doubt that the town's eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.
Out in front of the saloon where the Beebe twins had been fighting, there was no evidence of a brawl; Charlie Clough and Earl Dinsmore had managed to pick themselves up from the muddy ground. The Beaudette brothers, either murdered or passed out, had roused themselves (or been removed) from the old Lombard forwarder forever occupying the lane alongside the dance hall, which it would almost certainly outlive.
Dominic Baciagalupo wove his way forward in the darkness, where his limp could easily have been mistaken for the tentative progress of a drunk. At the bar near the hostelry most frequented by the French Canadian itinerants, a familiar figure lurched toward Dominic out of the dark, but before the cook could be certain it was Constable Carl, a flashlight blinded him. "Halt! That means 'Stop!' Arrete, if you're fuckin' French," the cowboy said.
"Good evening, Constable," Dominic said, squinting into the light. Both the flashlight and the windblown sawdust were causing him problems.
"You're out kinda late, Cookie--and you're bleedin'," the constable said.
"I was checking up on a friend," the cook replied.
"Whoever hit you wasn't your friend," the cowboy said, stepping closer.
"I forgot my flashlight--I just bumped into something, Carl."
"Like a knee ... or an elbow, maybe," Constable Carl speculated; his flashlight was almost touching Dominic's bloody lower lip. The boilermakers on the constable's rank breath were as evident as the sawdust stinging the cook's face.
As luck would have it, someone had upped the volume on the music from the dance hall, where the virtual revolving door was flung open again--Doris Day singing "Secret Love"--while Injun Jane's two lovers stood face-to-face, the drunken cowboy patiently examining the sober cook's lip injury. Just then, the favorite hostelry of the French Canadian itinerants rudely disgorged one of the night's luckless souls. Young Lucien Charest, yipping like a coyote pup, was hurled out naked and landed on all fours in the muddy road. The constable swung his flashlight toward the frightened Frenchman.
It was deathly quiet then, as the dance-hall door slammed shut on Doris Day--as abruptly as the indiscriminate door had released "Secret Love" into the night--and both Dominic Baciagalupo and Lucien Charest clearly heard the knuckle-cracking sound of Constable Carl cocking his absurd Colt .45.
"Jesus, Carl, don't ..." Dominic was saying, as the constable took aim at the young Frenchman.
"Get your naked French ass back indoors where you belong!" the constable shouted. "Before I blow your balls off, and your pecker with 'em!"
On all fours, Lucien Charest peed straight down at the ground--the puddle of piss quickly spreading to his muddy knees. The Frenchman turned and, still on all fours, scampered like a dog toward the hostelry, where the mischief-makers who'd thrown the young man outside now greeted him at the hostelry door as if his naked life depended on it. (It probably did.) Cries of "Lucien!" were followed by French-speaking gibberish too fast and hysterical for either the cook or the constable to comprehend. When Charest was safely back inside the hostelry, Constable Carl turned off his flashlight. The ridiculous Colt .45 was still cocked; the cook was disconcerted that the cowboy slowly uncocked the weapon while it was pointed at the knee of Dominic Baciagalupo's good leg.
"You want me to walk you home, little Cookie?" Carl asked.
"I'm okay," Dominic answered. They could both make out the lights of the cookhouse, uphill from the river-basin end of town.
"I see you got my darlin' Jane workin' late again tonight," the constable said. Before the cook had time to consider a careful reply, Carl added: "Isn't that boy of yours gettin' old enough to put himself to bed?"
"Daniel's old enough," Dominic answered. "I just don't like leaving him alone at night, and he's wicked fond of Jane."
"That makes two of us," Constable Carl said, spitting.
That makes three of us! Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, but the cook said nothing. He was also remembering how Pam had pressed his face between her breasts, and how close she had come to suffocating him. He felt ashamed, and disloyal to Jane, because Six-Pack had also aroused him--in a peculiarly life-threatening way.
"Good night, Constable," the cook said. He had started uphill before the cowboy shone his flashlight on him, briefly illuminating the way ahead.
"Good night, Cookie," Carl said. When the flashlight went out, the cook could feel that the constable was still watching him. "You get around pretty good for a cripple!" the cowboy called up the dark hill. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember that, too.
Just a snatch of the song from the dance hall reached him, but Dominic was now too far from town to hear the words clearly. It was only because he'd heard the song so many times that he knew what it was--Eddie Fisher singing "Oh My Papa"--and long after the cook could no longer hear the stupid song, he was irritated to find himself singing it.
CHAPTER 4
THE EIGHT-INCH CAST-IRON SKILLET
THE COOK COULDN'T ENTIRELY DISPEL THE FEELING THAT the constable had followed him home. For a while, Dominic Baciagalupo stood at the window in the darkened dining hall, on the lookout for a flashlight coming up the hill from town. But if the cowboy were intent on investigating the goings-on at the cookhouse, not even he would have been dumb enough to use his flashlight.
Dominic left the porch light on by the kitchen door, so that Jane could see the way to her truck; he put his muddy boots beside Jane's at the foot of the stairs. The cook considered that, perhaps, he had lingered downstairs for another reason. How would he explain his lip injury to Jane, and should he tell her about his meeting with the constable? Shouldn't Jane know that Dominic had encountered the cowboy, and that both Constable Carl's behavior and his disposition were as unpredictable and unreadable as ever?
The cook couldn't even say for certain if the constable somehow knew that Jane was Dominic's "paramour," as Ketchum might have put it--in reference to the toilet-reader's list of words from another illicit love story.
Dominic Baciagalupo went quietly upstairs in his socks--though the stairs creaked in a most specific way because of his limp, and he could not manage to creep past his open bedroom door without Jane sitting up in bed and seeing him. (He sneaked enough of a look at her to know she'd let her hair down.) Dominic had wanted to clean up his wounded lower lip before he saw her, but Jane must have sensed he was hiding something from her; she sailed her Cleveland Indians cap into the hall, nearly hitting him. Chief Wahoo landed upside down but still grinning--the chief appearing to stare crazily down the hall, in the direction of the bathroom and young Dan's bedroom.
In the bathroom mirror, the cook saw that his lower lip probably needed to be stitched; the wound would heal eventually, without stitches, but his lip would heal faster and there would be less of a scar if he had a couple of stitches. For now, after he'd painfully brushed his teeth, he poured some hydrogen peroxide on his lower lip and patted it dry with a clean towel--noting the blood on the towel. It was just bad luck that tomorrow was Sunday; he would rather let Ketchum or Jane stitch up his lip than try to find that moron doctor on a Sunday, in that place Dominic wouldn't even think of by its ill-fated name.
