Last Night in Twisted River (24 page)

That he couldn’t remember was why the sheriff had eventually stopped drinking. Years ago, when Ketchum had first told Danny and his dad about “the new teetotaler in Coos County,” both the cook and his son had laughed about it—they’d positively
howled
.

“Cookie’s got to get out of Boston—that’s for starters,” Ketchum said now. “He ought to lose the Del Popolo, too. I’m going to tell him, but you’ve got to tell him, too, Danny. Your dad doesn’t always listen to me.”

“Ketchum, are you saying it’s
inevitable
that Pam will tell Carl everything?”

“As inevitable as the fact that one day, Danny, the cowboy is going to beat her up.”

“Jesus!” Danny suddenly cried. “What were you and Mom doing when she was supposed to be teaching you to read?”

“Talk to your dad, Danny—it’s not my business to tell you.”

“Were you sleeping with her?” Danny asked him.

“Talk to your dad,
please,”
Ketchum said. Danny couldn’t remember Ketchum ever saying the
please
word before.

“Does my dad know you slept with her?” Danny asked him.

“Constipated Christ!” Ketchum shouted into the phone. “Why do you think your dad busted half my head open with the damn skillet?”

“What did you just say?” Danny asked him.

“I’m drunk,” Ketchum told him. “Don’t listen to what I say.”

“I thought Carl cracked your head open with his Colt forty-five,” Danny said.

“Hell, if the cowboy had cracked my head open, I would have killed him!” Ketchum thundered. As soon as the logger said this, Danny knew it was true; Ketchum would never have tolerated having his head cracked open, unless Dominic had done it.

“I saw lights on in the cookhouse,” Ketchum began, suddenly sounding weary. “Your mom and dad were up late talking, and—in those days
—drinking
. I walked in the screen door to the kitchen. I didn’t know it was the night your mom told your dad about her and me.”

“I get it,” Danny said.

“Not all of it, you don’t. Talk to your dad,” Ketchum repeated.

“Did Jane know?” Danny asked.

“Shit, the Injun knew everything,” Ketchum told him.

“Ketchum?” Danny asked. “Does my dad know that you didn’t learn to read?”

“I’m trying to learn now,” Ketchum said defensively. “I think that schoolteacher lady is going to teach me. She said she would.”

“Does Dad know you can’t read?” the young man asked his father’s old friend.

“I suppose one of us will have to tell him,” Ketchum said. “Cookie is probably of the opinion that Rosie must have taught me
something
.”

“So that was why you called—what you meant by ‘Something’s up’ in your letter—is that it?” Danny asked him.

“I can’t believe you believed that bullshit about the fucking bear,” Ketchum said. The bear story had found its way, in a more
remote
form, into Daniel Baciagalupo’s first novel. But of course it hadn’t
really
been a bear that walked into the kitchen—it had just been Ketchum. And if the bear story hadn’t been planted in young Dan’s heart and mind, maybe he wouldn’t have reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet—maybe he wouldn’t have imagined that the sound of his father and Jane making love was the sound of a mauling-in-progress. Then maybe he wouldn’t have killed Jane.

“So there wasn’t a bear,” Danny said.

“Hell, there’s probably three thousand bears at any given time in northern New Hampshire—I’ve seen a bunch of bears. I’ve shot some,” Ketchum added. “But if a bear had walked into the cookhouse kitchen through that screen door, your father’s best way to save himself, and Rosie, would be if the two of them had exited the kitchen through the dining room—not running, either, or ever turning their backs on the bear, but just maintaining eye contact and backing up real slowly.
No
, you dummy, it wasn’t a bear—it was
me!
Anybody knows better than to hit a bear in the face with a fucking frying pan!”

“I wish I had never written about it,” was all Danny could say.

“There’s one more thing,” Ketchum told him. “It’s another kind of
writing
problem.”

“Jesus!” Danny said again. “How much have you been drinking?”

“You’re sounding more and more like your father,” Ketchum told him. “I just mean that you’re publishing a book, aren’t you? And have you thought about what it might mean if that book were to become a bestseller? If suddenly you were to become a
popular
writer, with your name and picture in the newspapers and magazines—you might even get to be on television!”

“It’s a first novel,” Danny said dismissively. “It will have only a small first printing, and not much publicity. It’s a
literary
novel, or I hope it is. It’s highly unlikely it’ll be a bestseller!”

“Think about it,” Ketchum said. “Anything’s
possible
, isn’t it? Don’t writers, even young ones, get lucky like other people—or unlucky, as the case may be?”

This time, Danny saw it coming—sooner than he’d seen it in Mr. Leary’s classroom at the Mickey when the old English teacher made his “bold suggestion” about the boy possibly losing the Baciagalupo. The pen-name proposition—it was coming again. Ketchum had first proposed a version of it to both Danny and his dad; now Ketchum was asking Dominic to lose the Del Popolo.

“Danny?” Ketchum asked. “Are you still there? What’s the name for it—when a writer chooses a name that’s not his or her given name? That George Eliot did it, didn’t she?”

“It’s called a pen name,” Danny told him. “Just how the fuck did you meet the schoolteacher lady in the
library
when you can’t even
read
?”

“Well, I can read some of the authors’ names and the titles,” Ketchum said indignantly. “I can borrow books and find someone to read them to me!”

“Oh,” Danny said. He guessed that was what Ketchum had done with his mother—this in lieu of learning to read. What had Ketchum called the reading-aloud part to Dominic?
Foreplay
, wasn’t it? (Actually, that had been Dominic’s word for it. Danny’s dad had told his son this funny story!)

“A pen name,” Ketchum repeated thoughtfully. “I believe there’s another phrase for it, something French-sounding.”

“A nom de plume,” Danny told him.

“That’s it!” Ketchum cried. “A nom de plume. Well, that’s what you need—just to be on the safe side.”

“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Daniel Baciagalupo said.

“You’re the writer—that’s your job,” Ketchum told him.
“Ketchum
kind of goes with Daniel, doesn’t it? And it’s a fine old Coos County kind of name.”

“I’ll think about it,” Danny told him.

“I’m sure you can come up with something better,” Ketchum said.

“Tell me one thing,” Danny said. “If my mom hadn’t died that night in the river, which one of you would she have left? You or my dad? I can’t talk to my dad about
that
, Ketchum.”

“Shit!” Ketchum cried. “I heard you call that wife of yours ‘a free spirit.’ Katie was a lawless soul, a political radical, a fucking anarchist, and a coldhearted woman—you should have known better, Danny. But
Rosie
was a free spirit! She wouldn’t have left
either
of us—not ever! Your
mom
was a free spirit, Danny—like you young people today have never seen! Shit!” Ketchum cried again. “Sometimes you ask the dumbest questions—you make me think you’re still a college kid who can’t properly drive a car, or that you’re still a twelve-year-old, one your dad and Jane and I could
still
fool about the world, if we wanted to. Talk to your
dad
, Danny—talk to him.”

There was a click, followed by a dial tone, because Ketchum had disconnected the call, leaving the young writer alone with his thoughts.

CHAPTER 6

IN MEDIAS RES

I
N THEIR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON WESLEY PLACE, FOR REASONS
that defied logic, the telephone was on Carmella’s side of the bed. In those years Danny was away at boarding school and then at college, if the phone ever rang, young Dan was the reason the cook wanted to answer it—hoping it
was
Daniel, and not some terrible news about him. (More often, when the phone rang, it was Ketchum.)

Carmella had told Danny that he should call home more than he did. “You’re the only reason we have a phone, your dad is always telling me!” The boy was pretty good, after that, about calling more frequently.

“Shouldn’t the phone be on my side of the bed?” Dominic had asked Carmella. “I mean, you don’t want to have to talk to Ketchum, and if it’s Daniel—or worse, if there’s any bad news about Daniel—”

Carmella wouldn’t let him finish. “If there’s bad news about Danny, I want to know it first—so I can tell you about it, and put my arm around your shoulders, the way you told me and held me,” she said to him.

“That’s crazy, Carmella,” the cook said.

But that was the way it had worked out; the phone stayed on Carmella’s side of the bed. Whenever Ketchum called collect, Carmella always accepted the call, and she usually said, “Hello, Mr. Ketchum. When am I going to get to meet you? I would very much like to meet you one day.” (Ketchum wasn’t very talkative—not to her, anyway. She would soon pass the phone to Dominic—“Gamba,” she fondly called him.)

But that spring of ’67, when the news came about Danny’s miserable marriage—that awful wife of his; the dear boy had deserved better—and there’d been more collect calls than usual from up north (most of them about that menacing cop), Ketchum had scared Carmella. Dominic would later think that Ketchum probably meant to. When she’d said the usual to the old woodsman—Carmella was about to hand the phone across the bed to Dominic—Ketchum said, “I don’t know that you want to meet me,
ever
, because it might not be under the best of circumstances.”

That had given Carmella quite a chill; she’d been upset enough with the way things were that spring, and now Mr. Ketchum had frightened her. And Carmella wished that Danny was as relieved as
she
was that Katie had left him. It was one thing to leave the man you were with—Carmella could understand that—but it was a sin for a mother to walk away from her own child. Carmella was relieved that Katie had left, because Carmella believed that Katie wouldn’t have been any kind of mother if she’d
stayed
. Of course, Carmella and Dominic had never liked Katie Callahan; they’d both seen their share of customers like her in Vicino di Napoli. “You can smell the money on her,” Carmella had said to the cook.

“It’s not exactly on her, it’s
under
her,” the cook had commented. He meant that the money in Katie’s family was a safety net for the wild girl; she could behave in any fashion she wanted because the family money was there to catch her if she fell. Dominic felt certain, as Ketchum did, that Katie Callahan’s so-called free spirit was a fraud. Danny had misunderstood his dad; the boy thought that the cook didn’t like Katie strictly because the young woman looked like Rosie, Danny’s unfaithful mother. But Katie’s looks had little to do with what Dominic
and
Ketchum didn’t like about her; it was how she was
not
like Rosie Calogero that had bothered them, from the beginning.

Katie was nothing but a renegade young woman with a money cushion under her; “a mere sexual outlaw,” Ketchum had called her. Whereas Rosie had loved both a boy and a man. She’d been trapped because she had genuinely loved the two of them—hence they’d been trapped, too. By comparison, the Callahan whore had just been fucking around; worse, with her high-minded politics, Katie thought she was above such mundanities as marriage and motherhood.

Carmella knew it pained Dominic that Danny believed his mother had been the same sort of lawless creature Katie was. Though Dominic had gone to great lengths to explain the threesome with Rosie and Ketchum to Carmella, she had to confess that she didn’t understand it much better than Danny did. Carmella could understand the reason for it happening, but not for it continuing the way it had. Danny didn’t get that part of it, either. Carmella also had been mad at her dear Gamba for not telling the boy about his mother sooner. Danny had long been old enough to know the story, and it would have been better if his dad had told him before the cat got let out of the bag in that conversation Danny had had with Mr. Ketchum.

Carmella had been the one who’d answered the phone on that early morning Danny called to talk about it. “Secondo!” she said, when she heard his voice on the phone. That had been Danny’s nickname all the years he’d worked at Vicino di Napoli.

“Secondo Angelo,” old Polcari had first named him—literally, “Second Angel.”

All of them had been careful to call him Angelo, never Angelù, and around Carmella they would shorten the nickname to just plain Secondo—though Carmella herself was so fond of Danny that she often spoke of him as her
secondo figlio
(her “second son”).

In restaurant language,
secondo
also means “second course,” so it was the name that had stuck.

But now Carmella’s Secondo Angelo was in no mood to speak to her. “I need to talk to my dad, Carmella,” he said.

(Ketchum had warned the cook that Danny would be calling. “I’m sorry, Cookie,” that call from Ketchum had begun. “I fucked up.”)

On the April morning Danny called, Carmella knew that the young man would be angry at his dad for not telling him all those things. Of course she heard mostly Dominic’s side of the conversation, but she could nevertheless tell how the phone call was going—badly.

“I’m sorry—I was going to tell you,” the cook started.

Carmella could hear Danny’s response to that, because he shouted into the phone at his father. “What were you waiting for?”

“Maybe for something like this to happen to you, so you might understand how difficult it can be with women,” Dominic said. There in the bed, Carmella punched him. The “this” referred to Katie leaving, of course—as if that relationship, which was wrongheaded from the start, was at all comparable to what had gone on with Rosie and Ketchum. And why had they lied to the boy about the
bear
for so long? Carmella couldn’t understand it; she certainly didn’t expect Danny to.

She lay there listening to the cook tell his son about that night in the cookhouse kitchen, when Rosie had confessed to sleeping with Ketchum—and then Ketchum had walked through the screen door, when all of them were drunk, and Dominic had hit his old friend with the skillet. Luckily, Ketchum had been in enough fights; he never entirely believed that there was anyone alive who
wouldn’t
take a swing at him. The big man’s reactions were ingrained. He must have deflected the skillet with a forearm, slightly turning the weapon in Dominic’s hand, so that only the cast-iron edge of the frying pan hit him—and it hit him in the dead center of his forehead, not in the temple, where even a partially blocked blow from such a heavy implement might have killed him.

There’d been no doctor in Twisted River, and there wasn’t even a sawmill and a so-called millpond at what would become Dead Woman Dam, where there would later be an absolute
moron
of a doctor. Rosie had stitched up Ketchum’s forehead on one of the dining-room tables; she’d used the ultra-thin stainless-steel wire the cook kept on hand for trussing up his chickens and turkeys. The cook had sterilized the wire by boiling it first, and Ketchum had bellowed like a bull moose throughout the process. Dominic had limped around and around the table while Rosie talked to the two of them. She was so angry that she was rough with the stitches.

“I wish I was stitching the
two
of you up,” she said, looking at Dominic, before telling them both how it was going to be. “If there is
ever
another act of violence between the two of you, I will leave you
both—
is that clear enough?” she’d asked them. “If you promise never to hurt each other—in fact, you must always look after each other, like good brothers—then I will never leave either of you, not until the day I die,” she told them. “So you can each have half of me, or you can both have none of me—in the latter case, I take Danny with me. Is everything understood?” They could tell she was totally serious about it.

“I suppose your mother was too proud to go back to Boston when she had the miscarriage—and she thought I was too young to be left alone when my mother died,” Carmella heard Dominic telling Danny. “Rosie must have thought she had to take care of me, and of course she knew that I loved her. I don’t doubt that she loved me, too, but I was still just a nice boy to her, and when she met Ketchum—well, he was her age. Ketchum was a man. We had no choice but to put up with it, Daniel—both Ketchum and I adored her, and in her own way I believe she loved the two of us.”

“What did Jane think of it?” Danny asked his dad, because Ketchum had said that the Injun knew everything.

“Well, exactly what you would expect Jane to think of it,” his father told him. “She said all three of us were assholes. Jane thought we were all taking a terrible chance—the Indian said it was a big gamble that any of it would work out. I thought so, too, but your mother wasn’t giving us another option—and Ketchum was always a bigger gambler than I was.”

“You should have told me earlier,” his son said.

“I know I should have, Daniel—I’m sorry,” Carmella heard the cook say.

Later, Dominic would tell Carmella what Danny had said to him then. “I don’t care that much about the bear—it was a good story,” Danny said to his dad. “But there’s another thing you’re wrong about. You told me you suspected that Ketchum killed Lucky Pinette. You and Jane, and half those West Dummer kids—that’s what you all told me.”

“I think Ketchum
may
have killed him, Daniel.”

“I think you’re wrong. Lucky Pinette was murdered in his bed—in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. He’d had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer when they found him—isn’t that the story?” Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, asked his father.

“That’s it, exactly,” his dad answered. “Lucky Pinette’s forehead was indented with the letter
H.”

“Cold-blooded murder—right, Dad?”

“It sure looked like it, Daniel.”

“Then it wasn’t Ketchum,” Danny told him. “If Ketchum found it so easy to murder Lucky Pinette in bed, why doesn’t he just kill Carl? There’re any number of ways Ketchum could kill the cowboy
—if
Ketchum were a murderer.”

Dominic knew that Daniel was right. (“Maybe the boy really
is
a writer!” the cook would say when he told Carmella the story.) Because if Ketchum were a murderer, the cowboy would already be dead. Ketchum had promised Rosie he would look after Dominic—they had both promised to look after each other—and, under the circumstances, what better way to look after Dominic was there? Just kill the cowboy—in bed, or wherever the woodsman could catch Carl napping.

“Don’t you get it, Dad?” Danny had asked. “If Pam tells Carl everything, and the cowboy can’t find you or me, why wouldn’t he go after Ketchum? He’d know that Ketchum always knew everything—Six-Pack will tell him!”

But both father and son knew the answer to that. If the cowboy came after Ketchum, then Ketchum
would
kill him—both Ketchum and Carl knew that. Like most men who beat women, the cowboy was a coward; Carl probably wouldn’t dare go after Ketchum, not even with a rifle with a scope. The cowboy knew that the logger would be hard to kill—not like the cook.

“Dad?” Danny asked. “When are you getting the hell out of Boston?” By the guilty, frightened way Dominic turned in bed to look at her, Carmella must have known what the new topic of conversation was. They had discussed Dominic leaving Boston, but the cook either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was going.

When Dominic first told Carmella everything, he made one point particularly clear: If Carl ever came after him, and the cook had to go on the run again, Carmella couldn’t come with him. She’d lost her husband and her only child. She had been spared just one thing—she’d not seen them die. If Carmella went on the run with Dominic, the cowboy might not kill her, too, but she would watch the cook get killed. “I won’t allow it,” Dominic had told her. “If that asshole comes after me, I go alone.”

“Why can’t you and Danny just tell the police?” Carmella had asked him. “What happened to Jane was an
accident!
Can’t you make the police understand that Carl is crazy, and that he’s dangerous?”

It was hard to explain to someone who wasn’t from Coos County. In the first place, the cowboy
was
the police—or what passed for the police up there. In the second place, it wasn’t a crime to be crazy and dangerous—not anywhere, but especially not in northern New Hampshire. Nor was it much of a crime that Carl had buried or otherwise disposed of Jane’s body without telling anyone. The point was, the cowboy didn’t kill her—Danny did. And the cook had been old enough to know better than to have run away the first time, when if he’d stayed and simply told the truth, to
someone—
well, maybe then it might have worked out. (Or Dominic could have just gone back to Twisted River with Daniel. The cook could have bluffed it out, as Ketchum had wanted him to—as young Dan also had wanted.)

Of course, it was too late to change any of that now. It was early enough in their relationship when the cook had told Carmella all this; she’d accepted the terms. Now that she loved him more than a little, she regretted what she’d agreed to. Not going with him, if Dominic had to go, would be very hard for her. Naturally, Dominic knew he would miss Carmella—more than he’d missed Injun Jane. Maybe not as much as both he and Ketchum still missed Rosie, but the cook knew that Carmella was special. Yet the more he loved Carmella, the more dead set Dominic was against her going with him.