by John Irving
Danny parked the Pontiac at the foot of the outside stairs to Pam's apartment. The boy had squeezed into the cab of Jane's truck, between poor dead Jane and his father, before Dominic noticed Injun Jane's missing baseball cap--young Dan was wearing it.
"We need to leave Chief Wahoo with her, don't we?" the twelve-year-old asked.
"Good boy," his dad said, his heart welling with pride and fear. Regarding the back-up plan, there was so much for a twelve-year-old to remember.
The cook needed his son's help in getting Injun Jane from the cab of the truck to Constable Carl's kitchen door, which Jane had said was always left unlocked. It would be all right if they dragged her feet through the mud, because the constable would expect Jane's boots to be muddy; they just couldn't allow another part of her to touch the ground. Naturally, the dolly would have left wheel tracks in the mud--and what would Dominic have done with the dolly? Leave it in Jane's truck, or at Constable Carl's door?
They drove to that forlorn part of town near the sawmill and the hostelry favored by the French Canadian itinerants. (Constable Carl liked living near his principal victims.) "What would you guess Ketchum weighs?" Danny asked, after his dad had parked Jane's truck in her usual spot. They were standing on the running board of the truck; young Dan held Jane upright in the passenger seat while his father managed to guide her stiffening legs out the open door. But once her feet were on the running board, what then?
"Ketchum weighs about two-twenty, maybe two-thirty," the cook said.
"And Six-Pack?" young Dan asked.
Dominic Baciagalupo would feel the stiffness in his neck from Six-Pack's headlock for about a week. "Pam probably weighs about one-seventy-five--one-eighty, tops," his dad answered.
"And what do you weigh?" Danny asked.
The cook could see where this line of questioning was going. He let Injun Jane's feet slide all the way to the mud; he stood on the wet ground beside her, holding her around her hips while Daniel (still standing on the running board) hugged her under her arms. We will both end up in the mud with Jane on top of us! Dominic was thinking, but he said, as casually as possible, "Oh, I don't know what I weigh--about one-fifty, I guess." (He weighed all of 145 with his winter clothes on, he knew perfectly well--he had never weighed as much as 150 pounds.)
"And Jane?" young Dan grunted, stepping down to the ground from the truck's running board. The body of the Indian dishwasher pitched forward into his and his father's waiting arms. Though Jane's knees buckled, they did not touch the mud; the cook and his son staggered to hold her, but they didn't fall.
Injun Jane weighed at least 300 pounds--maybe 315 or 320--although Dominic Baciagalupo would profess not to know. The cook could scarcely get his breath as he dragged his dead paramour to her bad boyfriend's kitchen door, but he managed to sound almost unconcerned as he answered his son in a whisper: "Jane? Oh, she weighs about the same as Ketchum--maybe a little more."
To their mutual surprise, the cook and his son saw that Constable Carl's kitchen door was not only unlocked--it was open. (The wind, maybe--or else the cowboy had come home so drunk that he'd left the door open in a blind, unthinking stupor.) The misty rain had wet what they could see of the kitchen floor. While the kitchen was dimly lit, at least one light was on, but they couldn't see beyond the kitchen; they could not know more.
When Jane's splayed feet were touching the kitchen floor, Dominic felt confident that he could slide her the rest of the way inside by himself; it would help him that her boots were muddy and the floor was wet. "Good-bye, Daniel," the cook whispered to his son. In lieu of a kiss, the twelve-year-old took Jane's baseball cap off his head and put it on his father's.
When the cook could no longer hear Danny's retreating steps on the muddy street, he steered Jane's great weight forward into the kitchen. He could only hope that the boy would remember his instructions. "If you hear a gunshot, go to Ketchum. If you wait for me in the Pontiac for more than twenty minutes--even if there is no shot--go to Ketchum."
Dominic had told the twelve-year-old that if anything ever happened to his dad--not just tonight--go to Ketchum, and tell Ketchum everything. "Watch out for the next-to-last step at the top of Pam's stairs," the cook had also told his son.
"Won't Six-Pack be there?" the boy had asked.
"Just tell her you need to talk to Ketchum. She'll let you in," his father had said. (He could only hope that Pam would let Daniel in.)
Dominic Baciagalupo slid Injun Jane's body past the wet area on the kitchen floor before he let her come to rest against a cabinet. Holding her under her arms, he allowed her immense weight to sag onto the countertop; then, with excruciating slowness, he stretched her body out upon the floor. While he was bending over her, the Cleveland Indians cap fell off the cook's head and landed upside down beside Jane; Chief Wahoo was grinning insanely while Dominic waited for the cocking-sound of the Colt .45, which the cook was certain he would hear. Just as Danny would be sure to hear the discharging of the gun--it was more than loud. At that hour, everyone in town would hear a gunshot--maybe even Ketchum, still sleeping off his bender. (On occasion, even from the distance of the cookhouse, Dominic had heard that Colt .45 discharge.)
But nothing happened. The cook let his breathing return to normal, choosing not to look around. If Constable Carl was there, Dominic didn't want to see him. The cook would rather let the cowboy shoot him in the back as he was leaving; he left carefully, using the outward-turned toe of his bad foot to smear his muddy footprints as he left.
Outside, a wooden plank was stretched across the gutter from the road. Dominic used the plank to wipe flat the drag marks where the toes and heels of Jane's boots had carved deep ruts--marking the tortured path from her truck to the constable's kitchen door. The cook returned the plank to its proper place, wiping the mud from his hands on the wet fender of Jane's truck, which the increasingly steady rain would wash clean. (The rain would take care of his and young Dan's footprints, too.)
No one saw the cook limp past the silent dance hall; the Beaudette brothers, or their ghosts, had not reoccupied the old Lombard log hauler, which stood as the lone sentinel in the muddy lane alongside the hall. Dominic Baciagalupo was wondering what Constable Carl might make of Injun Jane's body when he stumbled over it in the bleary-eyed morning. What had he hit her with? the cowboy might speculate, having hit her more than once before. But where is the weapon, the blunt instrument? the constable would be sure to ask himself. Maybe I'm not the one who hit her, the cowboy might later conclude--once his head cleared, or most certainly when he learned that the cook and his son had left town.
Please, God, give me time, the cook was thinking, as he saw his boy's small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. Young Dan was waiting in the passenger seat, as if he'd never lost faith that his father would safely return from Constable Carl's and be their driver.
By time, that dogged companion, Dominic Baciagalupo meant more than the time needed for this most immediate getaway. He meant the necessary time to be a good father to his precious child, the time to watch his boy become a man; the cook prayed he would have that much time, though he had no idea how he might arrange such an unlikely luxury.
He got into the driver's seat of the station wagon without receiving the .45-caliber bullet he'd been expecting. Young Dan began to cry. "I kept listening for the gunshot," the twelve-year-old said.
"One day, Daniel, you may hear it," his dad told him, hugging him before he started the Pontiac.
"Aren't we going to tell Ketchum?" Danny asked.
All the cook could say might one day be in danger of sounding like a mantra, but Dominic would say it nonetheless: "We haven't time."
Like a long, slowly moving hearse, the maroon semiwoodie took the haul road out of the settlement. As they drove south-southeast, sometimes within sight of Twisted River, the dawn was fast approaching. There would be the dam to deal with, when they reached the Pontook Reservoir; then, wherever they went next, they would be
on Route 16, which ran north and south along the Androscoggin.
Exactly how much time remained to them, in their more immediate future, would be determined by what they found at Dead Woman Dam--and how long they would need to linger there. (Not too long, Dominic would hope as he drove.)
"Are we ever going to tell Ketchum?" young Dan asked his dad.
"Sure we are," his father answered, though the cook had no idea how he might get the necessary message to Ketchum--one that would be safe yet somehow manage to be clear.
For now, the wind had dropped and the rain was letting up. Ahead of them, the haul road was slick with tire-rutted mud, but the sun was rising; it shone in the driver's-side window, giving Dominic Baciagalupo a bright (albeit unrealistic) view of the future.
Only hours ago, the cook had been worried about finding Angel's body--specifically, how the sight of the dead Canadian youth might affect his beloved Daniel. Since then, the twelve-year-old had killed his favorite babysitter, and both father and son had wrestled with her body--bringing Injun Jane the not-inconsiderable distance from the upstairs of the cookhouse to her near-final resting place at Constable Carl's.
Whatever the cook and his dear boy would find at Dead Woman Dam, Dominic was optimistically thinking, how bad could it really be? (Under stress, as he was, the cook had uncharacteristically thought of the place by its ill-gotten name.)
AS THE CHIEFTAIN CAME CLOSER to the Pontook Reservoir, the boy and his dad could see the seagulls. Although the Pontook was more than one hundred miles from the ocean, there were always sea gulls around the Androscoggin--it was such big water.
"There's a kid in my class named Halsted," Danny was saying worriedly.
"I think I know his father," the cook said.
"His dad kicked him in the face with his caulk boots on--the kid has holes in his forehead," young Dan reported.
"That would definitely be the Halsted I know," Dominic replied.
"Ketchum says someone should stick a sawdust blower up Halsted's ass, and see if the fat bastard can be inflated--Ketchum means the dad," Danny explained.
"Ketchum recommends the sawdust blower for no small number of assholes," the cook said.
"I'll bet you we're going to miss Ketchum wicked," the boy said obsessively.
"I'll bet you we do," his father agreed. "Wickedly."
"Ketchum says you can't ever dry out hemlock." Danny talked on and on. The twelve-year-old was clearly nervous about where they were going--not just Dead Woman Dam, but where they might go after that.
"Hemlock beams are good for bridges," Dominic countered.
"Hook your whiffletree as close to the load as possible," young Dan recited, from memory--for no apparent reason. "Success Pond has the biggest fucking beaver pond there is," Danny continued.
"Are you going to quote Ketchum the whole way?" his dad asked him.
"The whole way where?" the twelve-year-old asked anxiously.
"I don't know yet, Daniel."
"Hardwoods don't float very well," the boy replied, apropos of nothing.
Yes, but softwoods float pretty high, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Those had been softwoods in the river drive, when Angel went under the logs. And with the wind last night, some of the topmost logs might have been blown outside the containment boom; those logs would be eddying in the overflow spillway to either side of the sluice dam. The stray logs, mostly spruce and pine, would make it hard to get Angel out of the circling water. Both the high-water shoreline and the more slowly moving water in the millpond had been formed by the dam; with any luck, they might find Angel's body there, in the shallows.
"Who would kick his own kid in the face with a caulk boot?" the distraught boy asked his dad.
"No one we'll ever see again," Dominic told his son. The sawmill at Dead Woman Dam looked abandoned, but that was just because it was Sunday.
"Tell me once more why they call it Dead Woman Dam," Danny said to his father.
"You know perfectly well why they call it that, Daniel."
"I know why you don't like to call it that," the boy quickly rejoined. "Mom was the dead woman--that's why, right?"
The cook parked the '52 Pontiac next to the loading dock at the mill. Dominic wouldn't answer his son, but the twelve-year-old knew the whole history--"perfectly well," as his dad had said. Both Jane and Ketchum had told the boy the story. Dead Woman Dam was named for his mother, but Danny never ceased wanting his father to talk about it--more than his father ever would.
"Why does Ketchum have a white finger? What does the chainsaw have to do with it?" young Dan started up; he simply couldn't stop talking.
"Ketchum has more than one white finger, and you know what the chainsaw has to do with it," his father said. "The vibration, remember?"
"Oh, right," the boy said.
"Daniel, please relax. Let's just try to get through this, and move on."
"Move on where?" the twelve-year-old shouted.
"Daniel, please--I'm as upset as you are," his father said. "Let's look for Angel. Let's just see what we find, okay?"
"We can't do anything about Jane, can we?" Danny asked.
"No, we can't," his dad said.
"What will Ketchum think of us?" the boy asked.
Dominic wished he knew. "That's enough about Ketchum," was all the cook could say. Ketchum will know what to do, his old friend was hoping.
But how would they manage to tell Ketchum what had happened? They couldn't wait at Dead Woman Dam until nine o'clock in the morning. If it took half that long to find Angel, they couldn't even wait until they found him!
It all depended on when Constable Carl woke up and discovered Jane's body. At first, the cowboy would surely think he was the culprit. And the cookhouse never served breakfast on a Sunday morning; an early supper was the only meal served on Sundays. It would be midafternoon before the kitchen helpers arrived at the cookhouse; when they learned that the cook and his son were gone, they wouldn't necessarily tell the constable. (Not right away.) The cowboy would have no immediate reason to go looking for Ketchum, either.
Dominic was beginning to think that it might be all right to wait for Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam until nine o'clock in the morning. From what the cook knew about Constable Carl, it would be just like him to bury Jane's body and forget about her--that is, until the cowboy heard that the cook and his son were gone. Most people in Twisted River would conclude that Injun Jane had left town with them! Only the constable would know where Jane was, and, under the circumstances (the guilty-looking, premature burial), the cowboy wouldn't be likely to dig up Jane's body just to prove what he knew.
Or was this wishful thinking on Dominic Baciagalupo's part? Constable Carl wouldn't hesitate to bury Injun Jane, if he believed he killed her. What would be wishful thinking on the cook's part was to imagine that the cowboy might feel contrite about killing Jane--enough to blow his brains out, one could only hope. (That would be wishful thinking--to dream of a penitent Constable Carl, as if the cowboy could even conceive of contrition!)
To the right of the flashboards and the sluice spillway, outside the containment boom, the water was eddying against the dam in a clockwise direction, a few windblown logs (some stray red pine and tamarack among the spruce) circling in the open water. Young Dan and his dad couldn't spot a body there. Where the main water passed through the sluice spillway, the containment boom bulged with tangled logs, but nothing stood out from the wet-bark, dark-water tones.
The cook and his son carefully crossed the dam to the open water on the left side of the boom; here the water and some stray logs were eddying in a counterclockwise direction. A deerskin glove was twirling in the water, but they both knew Angel hadn't been wearing gloves. The water was deep and black, with floating slabs of bark; to Dominic's disappointment and relief, they didn't see a body there, either.
"Maybe Angel got out," Danny said, but his dad knew better; no one that young slipped under moving logs and got out.
It was already past seven
in the morning, but they had to keep looking; even the family Angel had run away from would want to know about their boy. It would take longer to search the broader reaches of the millpond--at some distance from the dam--although the footing would be safer there. The closer they were to the dam and the containment boom, the more the cook and his son worried about each other. (They weren't wearing caulk boots, they weren't Ketchum--they weren't even rivermen of the greenest kind. They simply weren't loggers.)
It would be half past eight before they found Angel's body. The long-haired boy, in his red, white, and green plaid shirt, was floating facedown in the shallows, close to shore--not one log was anywhere around him. Danny didn't even get his feet wet bringing the body ashore. The twelve-year-old used a fallen branch to hook Angel's Royal Stewart shirt; young Dan called to his dad while he towed the Canadian youth to within his grasp. Together they got Angel to higher ground on the riverbank; lifting and dragging the body was light work compared to toting Injun Jane.
They unlaced the young logger's caulk boots and converted one of the boots to a pail, to bring fresh water ashore. They used the water to wipe the mud and pieces of bark from Angel's face and hands, which were a pale pearl color tinged with blue. Danny did his best to run his fingers like a comb through the dead youth's hair.
The twelve-year-old was the first to find a leech. As long and thick as Ketchum's oddly bent index finger, it was what the locals called a northern bloodsucker--it was attached to Angel's throat. The cook knew it wouldn't be the only leech on Angel. Dominic Baciagalupo also knew how Ketchum hated leeches. The way things were working out, Dominic might not be able to spare his old friend the sight of Angel's body, but--with Daniel's help--they might spare Ketchum the bloodsuckers.
By nine o'clock, they had moved Angel to the loading dock at the sawmill, where the platform was at least dry and partly sunny--and in view of the parking lot. They had stripped the body and removed almost twenty leeches; they'd wiped Angel clean with his wet plaid shirt, and had managed to re-dress the dead boy in an anonymous combination of the cook's and his son's unrecognizable clothes. A T-shirt that had always been too big for Danny fit Angel fine; an old pair of Dominic's dungarees completed the picture. For Ketchum's sake, if Ketchum ever showed up, at least the clothes were clean and dry. There was nothing they could do about the pearl-gray, bluish tint to Angel's skin; it was unreasonable to hope that the weak April sun would return the natural color to the dead youth, but somehow Angel looked warm.
