Last Night in Twisted River (16 page)

But was it possible that his deadbeat dad had run no farther than an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street—what Nunzi had called “the main drag” of the North End of Boston? Because, according to the business card in Angel’s wallet, the restaurant was called Vicino di Napoli—clearly a Neapolitan place—and it was on Hanover Street, near Cross Street. The street names themselves were as familiar to Dominic’s childhood as Nunzi’s oft-repeated recommendations for parsley
(prezzémolo)
, or her frequent mention of Mother Anna’s and the Europeo—two other restaurants on Hanover Street.

Nothing struck the cook as too coincidental to be believed—not on a day when twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo had killed his father’s lover with the same skillet the cook had put to such legendary use. (Who would believe he’d once saved his now-dead wife from a
bear?)
Even so, Dominic was unprepared for the last item he discovered in Angel Pope’s wallet. As near as the cook could tell, this was a summer pass to Boston’s streetcar and subway system—a transit pass, Dominic had heard his mother call it. The pass declared that the bearer was under the age of sixteen in the summer of 1953—and there was Angel’s date of birth, to prove it. The boy had been born on February 16, 1939, which meant that Angel had only recently turned fifteen. The youth would have had to have run away from home when he was
only fourteen—
if he had really run away. (And of course there was no way of knowing if Boston was still the dead boy’s “home,” although the transit pass and the business card from Vicino di Napoli strongly suggested that this was so.)

What would most convincingly catch Dominic Baciagalupo’s attention was Angel’s real name—it wasn’t exactly Angel Pope.

ANGELÙ DEL POPOLO

“Who?” Danny asked, when his father read the name on the streetcar and subway pass out loud.

The cook knew that Del Popolo meant “Of the People,” and that Pope was a common Americanization of the Sicilian name; while Del Popolo was probably but not necessarily Sicilian, the an-geh-LOO was
definitely
Sicilian, which the cook knew, too. Had the boy worked in a Neapolitan restaurant? (At fourteen, a part-time job was permitted.) But what had made him run away? From the photograph, it appeared he had still loved his mom.

But all the cook said to his son was: “It seems that Angel wasn’t who he said he was, Daniel.” Dominic let Danny look over the transit pass—it and the business card from Vicino di Napoli in the North End were all they had to go on, if they were going to try to find Angelù Del Popolo’s family.

Naturally, there was a more pressing problem. Where the hell was Ketchum? Dominic Baciagalupo was wondering. How long could they afford to wait? What if Constable Carl hadn’t been all that drunk? What if the cowboy had found Injun Jane’s body, but he’d known in an instant that he hadn’t laid a hand on her—at least not last night?

It was hard to imagine what written message the cook could leave for Ketchum on Angel’s body, because what if Ketchum didn’t find Angel first? Wouldn’t the message have to be in code?

Surprise! Angel isn’t Canadian!
And, by the way, Jane was in an accident!
Nobody did it—not even Carl!

Well, just how could the cook leave a note like that?

“Are we still waiting for Ketchum?” young Dan asked his dad.

It was with notably less conviction that his father replied: “For just a little while longer, Daniel.”

THE SONG ON THE RADIO
in Ketchum’s badly lived-in truck reached them on the loading dock of the sawmill before the truck itself appeared on the haul road—maybe it was Jo Stafford singing “Make Love to Me,” but Ketchum turned off the radio before the cook could be sure about the song. (Ketchum was on his way to becoming chainsaw-deaf. The radio in his truck was always overloud, the windows—now that it was what passed for spring—usually open.) Dominic was relieved to see that Six-Pack hadn’t come along for the ride; that would have seriously complicated matters.

Ketchum parked his rattling heap a discreet distance from the Pontiac; he sat in the cab with his white cast resting on the steering wheel, his eyes looking past them on the platform to where Angel was reclining in the uncertain sunlight.

“You found him, I see,” Ketchum said; he looked away, toward the dam, as if he were counting the logs in the containment boom.

As always, both predictable and unaccountable things were transported in the back of Ketchum’s pickup truck; a homemade shelter covered the bed of the pickup, turning the entire truck into a wanigan. Ketchum carried his chainsaws around, together with an assortment of axes and other tools—and, under a canvas tarp, an inexplicable half-cord of firewood, in case the suddenly urgent need to build a bonfire possessed him.

“Daniel and I can put Angel in the back of your pickup, where you don’t have to see him,” Dominic said.

“Why can’t Angel ride with you in the Chieftain?” Ketchum asked.

“Because we’re not going back to Twisted River,” the cook told his old friend.

Ketchum sighed, his eyes coming slowly to rest on Angel. The river driver got out of his truck and walked with an unexplained limp to the loading dock. (Dominic wondered if Ketchum was limping to mock him.) Ketchum picked up the dead youth’s body as if it were a sleeping baby; the logger carried the fifteen-year-old to the cab of his truck, where Danny had run ahead to open the door.

“I guess I might as well see him now as wait till I have to unload him back in town,” Ketchum told them. “I suppose these are your clothes on him?” he asked young Dan.

“Mine and my dad’s,” the twelve-year-old said.

The cook limped over to the truck, carrying Angel’s wet and dirty clothes; he put them on the floor of the cab, by the dead boy’s feet. “Angel’s clothes could stand some washing and drying,” he told Ketchum.

“I’ll have Jane wash and dry his clothes,” Ketchum told them. “Jane and I can clean Angel up a little, too—then we’ll dress him in his own clothes.”

“Jane is dead, Ketchum,” the cook told him.
(It was an accident
, he was about to add, but his beloved Daniel was quicker.)

“I killed her with the skillet—the one Dad hit the bear with,” Danny blurted out. “I thought Jane was a bear,” the boy told Ketchum.

The cook confirmed the story by immediately looking away from his old friend. Ketchum put his good arm around Danny’s shoulders and pulled the boy against him. Young Dan buried his face in the stomach of Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt—the same green and blue Black Watch plaid that Six-Pack Pam had been wearing. To the twelve-year-old, the commingled smells of Ketchum and Six-Pack inhabited the shirt as confidently as their two strong bodies.

Raising his cast, Ketchum pointed to the Pontiac. “Christ, Cookie, you haven’t got poor Jane in the Chieftain, have you?”

“We took her to Constable Carl’s,” Danny said.

“I don’t know if Carl had passed out in another room, or if he wasn’t home, but I left Jane on his kitchen floor,” the cook explained. “With any luck, the cowboy will find her body and think
he
did it.”

“Of
course
he’ll think he did it!” Ketchum thundered. “I’ll bet he buried her an hour ago, or he’s digging the damn hole as we speak. But when Carl hears that you and Danny have left town, he’ll begin to think he
didn’t
do it! He’ll think
you
did it, Cookie—if you and Danny don’t get your asses back to Twisted River!”

“Bluff it out, you mean?” Dominic asked.

“What’s to bluff?” Ketchum asked. “For the rest of his rotten life, the cowboy will be trying to remember exactly how and why he killed Jane—or he’ll be looking for you, Cookie.”

“You’re assuming he won’t remember last night,” the cook said. “That’s a pretty big assumption, isn’t it?”

“Six-Pack told me you paid us a visit last night,” Ketchum told his old friend. “Well, do you think I remember you being there?”

“Probably not,” Dominic answered. “But what you’re suggesting is that I gamble
everything.”
It was both unconscious and uncontrollable that, when the cook said
everything
, he looked straight at young Daniel.

“You go back to the cookhouse, I help you unpack the Chieftain, you and Danny are completely settled in by the time the kitchen helpers show up this afternoon. Then, around suppertime,” Ketchum continued, “you send Dot or May—or one of those worthless fucking sawmill workers’ wives—to Constable Carl’s. You have her say, ‘Where’s Jane? Cookie’s going crazy without his dishwasher!’
That’s
bluffing it out! You win that bluff hands down,” Ketchum told him. “The cowboy will be shitting his pants. He’ll be shitting them for years—just waiting for some dog to dig up the Injun’s body!”

“I don’t know, Ketchum,” the cook said. “It’s a huge bluff. I can’t take a chance like that—not with Daniel.”

“You’re taking a bigger chance if you leave,” his old friend told him. “Shit, if the cowboy blows your head off, I’ll take good care of Danny.”

Young Dan’s eyes kept moving from his father to Ketchum, and back to his father again. “I think we should go back to the cookhouse,” the twelve-year-old told his dad.

But the cook knew how change
—any
change—made his son anxious. Of course Daniel Baciagalupo would vote to stay and bluff it out;
leaving
represented a more unknown fear.

“Look at it this way, Cookie,” Ketchum was saying, his white cast leveled at his friend—as heavy as the cowboy’s Colt .45—“if I’m wrong and Carl shoots you, he won’t dare lay so much as a finger on Danny. But if I’m right, and the cowboy comes after you, he could kill you both—because you’d both be fugitives.”

“Well, that’s what we are—we’re fugitives,” Dominic said. “I’m not a gambler, Ketchum—not anymore.”

“You’re gambling now, Cookie,” Ketchum told him. “Either way, it’s a gamble, isn’t it?”

“Give Ketchum a hug, Daniel—we should be going,” his dad said.

Danny Baciagalupo would remember that hug, and how he thought it strange that his father and Ketchum didn’t hug each other—they were such old friends, and such good ones.

“Big changes are coming, Cookie,” Ketchum tried to tell his friend. “They won’t be moving logs over water much longer. Those dams on the Dummer ponds will be gone—this dam here won’t last, either,” he said, with a wave of his cast indicating the containment boom but choosing to leave Dead Woman Dam unnamed.

“Dummer Pond and Little Dummer
and
Twisted River will just flow into the Pontook. I suspect the old boom piers on the Androscoggin will last, but they won’t be using them anymore. And the first time there’s a fire in West Dummer or Twisted River, do you think anyone will bother to rebuild those sorry settlements? Who wouldn’t rather move to Milan or Errol—or even Berlin, if you were old and feeble enough?” Ketchum added. “All you have to do is stay and
outlast
this miserable place, Cookie—you and Danny.” But the cook and his son were making their way to the Chieftain. “If you run now, you’ll be running forever!” Ketchum called after them. He limped around his truck from the passenger’s to the driver’s side.

“Why are you limping?” the cook called to him.

“Shit,” Ketchum said. “There’s a step missing on Six-Pack’s stairs—I fucking forgot about it.”

“Take care of yourself, Ketchum,” his old friend told him.

“You, too, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “I won’t ask you about your lip, but I’m familiar with that injury.”

“By the way, Angel wasn’t Canadian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told Ketchum.

“His real name was Angelù Del Popolo,” young Dan explained, “and he came from Boston, not Toronto.”

“I suppose that’s where you’re going?” Ketchum asked them. “Boston?”

“Angel must have had a family—there’s got to be someone who needs to know what happened to him,” the cook said.

Ketchum nodded. Through the windshield of his truck, the insufficient sunlight was playing tricks with the way Angelù Del Popolo sat up (almost straight) and faced alertly forward. Angel not only looked alive, but he seemed to be just starting the journey of his young life—not ending it.

“Suppose I tell Carl that you and Danny are delivering the bad news to Angel’s family? You didn’t leave the cookhouse looking like you were leaving it for good, did you?” Ketchum asked.

“We took nothing anybody would notice,” Dominic said. “It would appear that we were coming back.”

“Suppose I tell the cowboy that I was surprised Injun Jane wasn’t with you?” Ketchum asked. “I could say that, if I were Jane, I would have gone to Canada, too.” Danny saw how his dad considered this, before Ketchum said, “I think I
won’t
say you’ve gone to Boston. Maybe it’s better to say, ‘If I were Jane, I would have gone to
Toronto.’
Suppose I say that?”

“Just don’t say too much, whatever you say,” the cook told him.

“I believe I’ll still think of him as ‘Angel,’ if that’s okay,” Ketchum said, as he climbed into his truck; he glanced only briefly at the dead boy, quickly looking away.

“I’ll
always
think of him as ‘Angel’!” young Dan called.

To what extent a twelve-year-old is aware, or not, of the start of an adventure—or whether this misadventure had begun long before Danny Baciagalupo mistook Injun Jane for a bear—neither Ketchum nor the cook could say, though Danny seemed very “aware.” Ketchum must have known that he might be seeing them for the last time, and he wanted to cast this phase of the gamble the cook was taking in a more positive light. “Danny!” Ketchum called. “I just want you to know that, on occasion, I more than once mistook Jane for a bear myself.”

But Ketchum was not one for casting a positive light for long. “I don’t suppose Jane was wearing the Chief Wahoo hat—when it happened,” the logger said to Danny.

“No, she wasn’t,” the twelve-year-old told him.

“Damn it, Jane—oh, shit, Jane!” Ketchum cried. “Some fella in Cleveland told me it was a lucky hat,” the river driver explained to the boy. “This fella said Chief Wahoo was some kind of spirit; he was supposed to look after Injuns.”