by John Irving
All the while, Ketchum had continued to demonstrate the sliding action of the Winchester, the ejected shotgun shells flying all around. One of the live shells (a deer slug) would be lost for a time in the discarded wrapping paper for other Christmas presents, but Ketchum kept loading and unloading the weapon as if he were mowing down a horde of attackers.
"If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves," Danny said aloud to himself--as if he were writing this down, which he wasn't. The writer was still contorting himself in bed, where he was transfixed by the photo of Charlotte with the mysterious inuksuk--that is, when he wasn't drawn to the dangerous but thrilling sight of the loaded shotgun under his bed.
IT WAS BOXING DAY in Canada. A writer Danny knew always had a party. Every Christmas, the cook bought Ketchum some outdoor clothing--at either Eddie Bauer or Roots--and Ketchum wore his new gear to the Boxing Day party. Dominic never failed to help out in the kitchen; the kitchen, anybody's kitchen, was ever the cook's home away from home. Danny mingled with his friends at the party; he tried to remain unembarrassed by Ketchum's political outbursts. There was never any need for Danny to feel embarrassed--not in Canada, where the old logger's anti-American ranting was very popular.
"Some fella from the CBC wanted me to go on a radio show," Ketchum told Danny and his dad, when the cook was driving them home from the Boxing Day party.
"Dear God," Dominic said again.
"Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie--you best let Danny and me handle the conversation while you pay attention to the mayhem in the streets."
The cowboy could have killed them all that night, but Carl was a coward; he wouldn't risk it, not with Ketchum in the house. The deputy didn't know that the youth-model 20-gauge was under Danny's bed, not Ketchum's, nor could Carl have guessed how much the old logger had had to drink at the party. The cowboy could have shot his way into the house; it's doubtful that Ketchum would have woken up. Danny wouldn't have woken up, either. It had been one of those nights when the supposed one or two glasses of red wine with his dinner had, in reality, turned out to be four or five. Danny woke once in the night, thinking he should look under his bed to be sure that the shotgun was still there; he fell out of bed in the process, making a resounding thump, which neither his dad nor the snoring logger heard.
Ketchum never lingered long in Toronto once Christmas was over. A pity he hadn't brought Hero with him and then--for some reason--left the dog with the cook and his son after Ketchum went back across the border. Carl couldn't have entered the house on Cluny Drive, or hidden himself in the third-floor writing room, if Hero, that fine animal, had been there. But the dog was in Coos County, staying with Six-Pack Pam--terrorizing her dogs, as it would turn out--and Ketchum left early the next morning for New Hampshire.
When Danny got up (before his dad), he found the note Ketchum had left on the kitchen table. To Danny's surprise, it was neatly typed. Ketchum had gone up to the third-floor writing room and used the typewriter there, but Danny hadn't heard the creaking of the floor above his bedroom--he hadn't heard the stairs creak, either. Both he and the cook had slept through the sound of the typewriter, too--not a good sign, the old logger could have told them. But Ketchum's note said nothing about that.
I'VE SEEN ENOUGH OF YOU FELLAS FOR A TIME! I MISS MY DOG, AND I'M GOING TO SEE HIM. BY THE TIME I'M BACK HOME, I'LL BE MISSING YOU, TOO! EASY ON THE RED WINE, DANNY. KETCHUM.
Carl was happy to see Ketchum's truck leave. The cowboy must have been growing impatient, but he waited for the Mexican cleaning woman to come and go; that way, the deputy had no doubt. With the guest bedroom empty--Lupita had made it up as good as new--Carl was convinced that Ketchum wasn't coming back. Yet the cowboy had to wait another night.
The cook and his son ate their dinner at home on the evening of December 27. Dominic had found a kielbasa sausage in the meat market and had browned it in olive oil, and then stewed it with chopped fennel and onions and cauliflower in a tomato sauce with crushed fennel seeds. The cook served the stew with a warm, fresh loaf of rosemary-and-olive bread, and a green salad.
"Ketchum would have liked this, Pop," Danny said.
"Ah, well--Ketchum is a good man," Dominic said, to his son's amazement.
Not knowing how to respond, Danny attempted to further compliment the kielbasa stew; he suggested it might make a suitable addition to the more bistro-like or low-key menu at Kiss of the Wolf.
"No, no," the cook said dismissively. "Kielbasa is too rustic--even for Kiss of the Wolf."
All Danny said was: "It's a good dish, Dad. You could serve it to royalty, I think."
"I should have made it for Ketchum--I never made it for him," was all Dominic said.
THE COOK'S LAST NIGHT ALIVE, he ate with his beloved Daniel at a Portuguese place near Little Italy. The restaurant was called Chiado; it was one of Dominic's favorites in Toronto. Arnaud had introduced him to it when they'd both been working downtown on Queen Street West. That Thursday night, December 28, both Danny and his dad had the rabbit.
During Ketchum's Christmas visit, it had snowed and it had rained--everything had frozen and thawed, and then it all froze again. By the time the cook and his son took a taxi home from Chiado, it had started to snow once more. (Dominic didn't like to drive downtown.) The imprints of the cowboy's footsteps in the crusty old snow on the outdoor fire escape were faint and hard to see in the daylight; now that it was dark, and snowing, Carl's tracks were completely covered. The ex-cop had taken off his parka and his boots. He'd stretched out on the couch in Danny's third-floor writing room with the Colt .45 revolver clasped to his chest--in the scenario he'd imagined, the old sheriff had no need of a holster.
The voices of the cook and his writer son reached Carl from the kitchen, though we'll never know if the cowboy understood their conversation.
"At fifty-eight, you should be married, Daniel. You should be living with your wife, not your father," the cook was saying.
"And what about you, Pop? Wouldn't a wife be good for you?" Danny asked.
"I've had my opportunities, Daniel. At seventy-six, I would embarrass myself with a wife--I would always be apologizing to her!" Dominic said.
"For what?" Danny asked his dad.
"Occasional incontinence, perhaps. Farting, certainly--not to mention talking in my sleep," the cook confided to his son.
"You should find a wife who's hard of hearing--like Ketchum," Danny suggested. They both laughed; the cowboy had to have heard their laughter.
"I was being serious, Daniel--you should at least have a regular girlfriend, a true companion," Dominic was saying, as they came up the stairs to the second-floor hall. Even from the third floor, Carl could have singled out the distinguishing sounds of the cook's limp on the stairs.
"I have women friends," Danny started to say.
"I'm not talking about groupies, Daniel."
"I don't have groupies, Pop--not anymore."
"Young fans, then. Remember, I've read your fan mail--"
"I don't answer those letters, Dad."
"Young--what are they called?--'editorial assistants,' maybe? Young booksellers, too, Daniel ... I've seen you with one or two. All those young people in publishing!"
"Young women are more likely to be unattached," Danny pointed out to his dad. "Most women my age are married, or they're widows."
"What's wrong with widows?" his father asked. (At that, they'd both laughed again--a shorter laugh this time.)
"I'm not looking for a permanent relationship," Danny said.
"I can see that. Why?" Dominic wanted to know. They were at opposite ends of the second-floor hall, at the doorways to their respective bedrooms. Their voices were raised; surely the cowboy could hear every word.
"I've had my opportunities, too, Pop," Danny told his dad.
"I just want all the best for you, Daniel," the cook told him.
"You've been a good father--the best," Danny said.
"You were a good
father, too, Daniel--"
"I could have done a better job," Danny quickly interjected.
"I love you!" Dominic said.
"I love you, too, Dad. Good night," Danny said; he went into his bedroom and quietly closed the door.
"Good night!" the cook called from the hall. It was such a heartfelt blessing; it's almost conceivable that the cowboy was tempted to wish them both a good night, too. But Carl lay unmoving above them, not making a sound.
Did the deputy wait as long as an hour after he'd heard them brush their teeth? Probably not. Did Danny once more dream about the windswept pine on Charlotte's island in Georgian Bay--specifically, the view of that hardy little tree from what had been his writing shack there? Probably. Did the cook, in his prayers, ask for more time? Probably not. Under the circumstances, and knowing Dominic Baciagalupo, the cook couldn't have asked for much--that is, if he'd prayed at all. At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son "find someone"--only that.
Did the floorboards above them creak under the fat cowboy's weight, once Carl decided to make his move? Not that they heard; or, if Danny heard anything at all, he might have happily imagined (in his sleep) that Joe was home from Colorado.
Not knowing how dark it might be in the house at night, the cowboy had tested those stairs from the third-floor writing room with his eyes closed; he'd counted the number of steps in the second-floor hall to the cook's bedroom door, too. And Carl knew where the light switch was--just inside the door, right next to the eight-inch cast-iron skillet.
As it turned out, Danny always left a light on--on the stairs from the kitchen to the second-floor hall, so there was plenty of light in the hall. The cowboy, slipping silently in his socks, padded down the hallway to the cook's bedroom and opened the door. "Surprise, Cookie!" Carl said, flicking on the light. "It's time for you to die."
Maybe Danny heard that; perhaps he didn't. But his dad sat up in bed--blinking his eyes in the sudden, white light--and the cook said, in a very loud voice, "What took you so long, you moron? You must be dumber than a dog turd, cowboy--just like Jane always said." (Without a doubt, Danny heard that.)
"You little shit, Cookie!" Carl cried. Danny heard that, too; he was already kneeling on the floor, pulling the Winchester out of the open case under his bed.
"Dumber than a dog turd, cowboy!" his dad was shouting.
"I'm not so dumb, Cookie! You're the one who's gonna die!" Carl was hollering; he never heard Danny click the safety off, or the sound of the writer running barefoot down the hall. The cowboy took aim with the Colt .45 and shot the cook in the heart. Dominic Baciagalupo was blown into the headboard of the bed; he died instantly, on the pillows. There was no time for the deputy to comprehend the cook's curious smile, which stretched the white scar on his lower lip, and only Danny understood what his dad had uttered just before he was shot.
"She bu de," Dominic managed to say, as Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had taught him--the she bu de that means "I can't bear to let go."
The Chinese was, of course, meaningless to Carl, who, as he wheeled to face the naked man in the doorway, must have half understood why the cook had died smiling. Not only did Dominic know that all the yelling would save his son; the cook also knew that his friend Ketchum had provided Daniel with a better weapon than the eight-inch cast-iron skillet. And maybe there was a margin of last-minute recognition in the cowboy's eyes, when he saw that Danny had already taken aim with Ketchum's Winchester--the much-maligned youth model.
The long barrel of Carl's Colt .45 was still pointed at the floor when the first round of buckshot from the 20-gauge tore away half his throat; the cowboy was flung backward into the night table, where the lightbulb in the lamp exploded between his shoulder blades. Danny's second load of buckshot tore away what remained of the cowboy's throat. The deer slug, the so-called kill-shot, wasn't really necessary, but Danny--now at point-blank range--fired the shotgun's third and final round into Carl's mangled neck, as if the gaping wound itself were a magnet.
If Ketchum could be believed--that is, if he'd been speaking literally about the way wolves killed their prey--weren't these three shots from the 20-gauge Ranger exactly as kisses of wolves should be? Weren't they, indeed, not so pretty?
Still naked, Danny went downstairs. He called the police from the phone in the kitchen, telling them that he would unlock the front door for them, and that they could find him upstairs with his father. After he'd unlocked the door, he went back upstairs to his bedroom and put on some old sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Danny thought of calling Ketchum, but it was late and there was no reason to be in a hurry. When he reentered his dad's bedroom, there was no overlooking the kisses of wolves that had ripped the cowboy apart--leaving him like something sprayed from a hose--but Danny only briefly regretted the mess he'd made for Lupita. The blood-soaked rug, the blood-spattered walls, the bloodied photographs on the bulletin board above the shattered night table--well, Danny didn't doubt that Lupita could handle it. He knew that something worse had happened to her: She'd lost a child.
Ketchum had been right about the red wine, the writer was thinking, as he sat on the bed beside his father. If he'd been drinking only beer, Danny thought he might have heard the cowboy a few seconds sooner; Danny just might have been able to open fire with the shotgun before Carl could have pulled the trigger. "Don't beat up on yourself about it, Danny," Ketchum would tell him later. "I'm the one the cowboy followed. I should have seen that coming."
"Don't you beat up on yourself about it, Ketchum," Danny would tell the old logger, but of course Ketchum would.
When the police came, the lights in the neighboring houses were all ablaze, and lots of dogs were barking; normally, at that hour of the night, Rosedale is very quiet. Most of the residents who lived near the double shooting had never heard gunfire as loud and terrifying as that--some dogs would bark until dawn. But when the police came, they found Danny quietly cradling his dad's head in his lap, the two of them huddled together on the blood-soaked pillows at the head of the bed. In his report, the young homicide detective would say that the bestselling author was waiting for them in the upstairs of the house--exactly where he'd said he would be--and that the writer appeared to be singing, or perhaps reciting a poem, to his murdered father.
"She bu de," Danny kept repeating in his dad's ear. Neither the cook nor his son had ever known if Ah Gou and Xiao Dee's translation of the Mandarin was essentially correct--that is, if she bu de literally meant "I can't bear to let go"--but what did it matter, really? "I can't bear to let go" was what the writer thought he was saying to his father, who'd kept his beloved son safe from the cowboy for nearly forty-seven years; that had been how long ago it was when they'd both left Twisted River.
Now, at last--now that the police were there--Danny began to cry. He just started to let go. An ambulance and two police cars were parked outside the house on Cluny Drive, their lights flashing. The first policemen to enter the cook's bedroom were aware of the rudimentary story, as it had been reported over the phone: There'd been a break-in, and the armed intruder had shot and killed the famous writer's father; Danny had then shot and killed the intruder. But surely there was more to the story than that, the young homicide detective was thinking. The detective had the utmost respect for Mr. Angel, and, under the circumstances, he wanted to give the writer all the time he needed to compose himself. Yet the damage done by that shotgun--repeatedly, and at such close range--was so excessive that the detective must have sensed that this break-in and murder, and the famous writer's retaliation, had a substantial history.
"Mr. Angel?" the young homicide detective asked. "If you're ready, sir, I wonder if you could tell me how this happened."
What made Danny's tears different was that he was crying the way a twelve-year-old would cry--as if Carl had somehow shot his dad their last night in Twisted River. Danny couldn't speak, but he managed to point to something; it was in the vicinity of his father's bedroom doorway.
The young detectiv
e misunderstood. "Yes, I know, you were standing there in the doorway when you shot," the homicide policeman said. "At least, for the first shot. Then you came closer into the room, didn't you?"
Danny was violently shaking his head. Another young policeman had noticed the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging just inside the doorway of the bedroom--an unusual spot for a frying pan--and he tapped the bottom of the skillet with his index finger.
"Yes!" Danny managed to say, between sobs.
"Bring that skillet over here," the homicide detective said.
While he didn't relinquish his hold on his father--Danny continued to cradle the cook's head in his lap--he reached with his right hand for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet, and when his fingers closed around the handle, his crying calmed down. The young homicide detective waited; he could see there was no rushing this story.
Raising the skillet in his right hand, Danny then rested the heavy pan on the bed. "I'll start with the eight-inch cast-iron skillet," the writer finally began, as if he had a long story to tell--one he knew well.
V.
COOS COUNTY,
NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2001
----
CHAPTER 14
KETCHUM'S LEFT HAND
KETCHUM HAD BEEN HUNTING BEAR. HE'D DRIVEN HIS truck to Wilsons Mills, Maine, and he and Hero had taken the Suzuki ATV back into New Hampshire--crossing the border about parallel to Half Mile Falls on the Dead Diamond River, where Ketchum bagged a big male black bear. His weapon of choice for bear was the short-barreled, lightweight rifle Danny's friend Barrett had (years ago) preferred for deer: a Remington .30-06 Springfield, a carbine, what Ketchum called "my old-reliable, bolt-action sucker." (The model had been discontinued in 1940.)
Ketchum had some difficulty bringing the bear back across the border, the all-terrain vehicle notwithstanding. "Let's just say Hero had to walk a fair distance," Ketchum would tell Danny. When Ketchum said "walk," this probably meant that the dog had to run the whole way. But it was the first weekend of bear season when hounds were permitted; that fine animal was excited enough to not mind running after Ketchum's ATV. Anyway, counting Ketchum and the dead bear, there'd been no room for Hero on the Suzuki.
