Last Night in Twisted River (54 page)

The only snapshots of Charlotte that the cook continued to recycle on the bulletin boards in his bedroom were those of her with Joe, because Daniel couldn’t sleep with pictures of the dead boy in his bedroom. The cook admired how Charlotte had been unjealously fond of Joe, and Joe could see for himself how happy his father was with her; Joe had liked Charlotte from the start.

Charlotte wasn’t a skier, yet she tolerated those winter weekends and the Christmas holiday in Winter Park, where the cook had made fabulous dinners in the ski house at the base of the mountain. The restaurants in Winter Park weren’t bad, or they were good enough for Joe and his college friends, but they were beneath the cook’s standards, and Dominic Baciagalupo relished the opportunity to cook for his grandson; the boy didn’t come to Canada often enough, not in Dominic’s opinion. (Not in the writer Danny Angel’s opinion, either.)

NOW WHAT LIGHT HAD LINGERED
in the late December afternoon was entirely gone; both the darkness and the contrasting lights of the city were visible in the windows as Danny stretched out on the mat in his gym. Because it had been his writing room before it became his gym—and Danny wrote only in the daylight hours, since he’d gotten older—there were no curtains on the windows. In the winter months, it was often dark by the time he worked out, but Danny didn’t care if anyone in the neighborhood saw him using the aerobic machines or the free weights. Both when it was his office
and
since it had become his gym, he’d been photographed in that room; he’d been interviewed there, too, because he never allowed any journalists in his writing room on the third floor.

As soon as they were married, Charlotte had said, she was going to put curtains or window shades in the gym, but because the wedding was canceled—with all the rest of it—the windows in that room had remained as they were. It was an odd gym, because it was still surrounded by bookshelves; even after he’d moved his work to Joe’s former bedroom on the third floor, Danny had left many of his books in that ground-floor room.

When Danny and his dad had dinner parties in that house on Cluny Drive, everyone put their coats in the gym; they draped them on the handrails of the treadmill, or over the StairMaster machine, or on the stationary bike, and they piled them on the weight bench, too. Moreover, there were always a couple of clipboards in that room, and a ream of blank typing paper with lots of pens. Sometimes Danny made notes to himself when he rode the stationary bike in the late afternoon, or when he walked on the treadmill. His knees were shot from all the running, but he could still walk pretty fast on the treadmill, and riding the stationary bike or using the StairMaster didn’t bother his knees.

For a fifty-eight-year-old man, Danny was in halfway decent physical shape; he was still fairly slight of build, though he had put on a few pounds since he’d starting drinking beer and red wine again—even in moderation. If Injun Jane had been alive, she would have told Danny that for someone who weighed as little as he did, even a couple of beers and one or two glasses of red wine were too much. (“Well, the Injun was harsh on the firewater subject,” Ketchum had always said; he was not a man who put much stock in moderation, even at eighty-three.)

There was no telling when Ketchum would come for Christmas, Danny was thinking, as he settled into a comfortable pace on the StairMaster; for Christmas, Ketchum just showed up. For someone who fanatically faxed Danny or his dad a dozen times a week, and who still spontaneously phoned at all hours of the day and night, Ketchum was extremely secretive about his road trips—not only his trips to Toronto for Christmas but his hunting trips elsewhere in Canada. (The hunting trips—not to Quebec, but the ones up north in Ontario—occasionally brought Ketchum to Toronto, too.)

Ketchum started his hunting in September, the beginning of bear season in Coos County. The old woodsman claimed that the black bear population in New Hampshire was well over five thousand animals, and the annual bear harvest was “only about five or six hundred critters;” most of the bears were killed in the north and central regions of the state, and in the White Mountains. Ketchum’s bear hound, that aforementioned “fine animal”—by now the grandson (or great-grandson!) of that first fine animal, one would guess—was allowed to hunt with him from the second week of September till the end of October.

The dog was a crossbreed, what Ketchum called a Walker bluetick. He was tall and rangy, like a Walker foxhound, but with the bluetick’s white coat—blotched and flecked with bluish gray—and with the bluetick’s superior quickness. Ketchum got his Walker blueticks from a kennel in Tennessee; he always chose a male and named him Hero. The dog never barked, but he growled in his sleep—Ketchum claimed that the dog
didn’t
sleep—and Hero let loose a mournful baying whenever he was chasing a bear.

In New Hampshire, the end of the bear season overlapped with the muzzle-loader season for deer—a short time, only from the end of October through the first week of November. The regular firearm season for deer ran the rest of the month of November, into early December, but as soon as Ketchum killed a deer in Coos County (he always dropped one with his muzzle loader), he headed up north to Canada; the regular firearm season for deer ended earlier there.

The old logger had never been able to interest the cook in deer hunting; Dominic didn’t like guns, or the taste of venison, and his limp was no fun in the woods. But after Danny and his dad moved to Canada, and Danny met Charlotte Turner, Ketchum was invited to Charlotte’s island in Lake Huron; it was the first summer she and Danny were a couple, when the cook was also invited to Georgian Bay. That was where and when—on Turner Island, in August 1984—Ketchum talked Danny into trying deer hunting.

DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO DESPISED
the imposed rusticity of the summer-cottage life on those Georgian Bay islands—in ’84, Charlotte’s family still used an outhouse. And while they had propane lights and a propane fridge, they hauled what water they needed (by the bucket method) from the lake.

Furthermore, Charlotte’s family seemed to have furnished the main cottage and two adjacent sleeping cabins with the cast-off couches, chipped dishes, and mortally uncomfortable beds that they’d long ago replaced in their Toronto home; worse, the cook surmised, there was a tradition among the Georgian Bay islanders that upheld such stingy behavior. Anything new—such as electricity, hot water, or a flush toilet—was somehow contemptible.

But what they
ate
was what the cook most deplored. The mainland provisions at Pointe au Baril Station—in particular, the produce and anything that passed for “fresh”—were rudimentary, and everyone burned the shit out of what they blackened beyond recognition on their outdoor barbecues.

In his first and only visit to Turner Island, Dominic was polite, and he helped out in the kitchen—to the degree this was tolerable—but the cook returned to Toronto at the end of a long weekend, relieved by the knowledge that he would never again test his limp on those unwelcoming rocks, or otherwise set foot on a dock at Pointe au Baril Station.

“There’s too much of Twisted River here—it’s not Cookie’s kind of place,” Ketchum had explained to Charlotte and Danny, after Dominic went back to the city. While the logger said this in forgiveness of his old friend, Danny was not entirely different from his dad in his initial reaction to island life. The difference was that Danny and Charlotte had talked about the changes they would make on the island—certainly after (if not before) her father passed away, and her mother was no longer able to safely get into or out of a boat, or climb up those jagged rocks from the dock to the main cottage.

Danny still wrote on an old-fashioned typewriter; he owned a half-dozen IBM Selectrics, which were in constant need of repair. He wanted electricity for his typewriters. Charlotte wanted hot water—she’d long dreamed of such luxuries as an outdoor shower and an oversize bathtub—not to mention
several
flush toilets. A little electric heat would be nice, too, both Danny and Charlotte had agreed, because it could get cold at night, even in the summer—they were that far north—and, after all, they would soon be having a baby.

Danny also wanted to construct “a writing shack,” as he called it—he was no doubt remembering the former farmhouse shed he’d written in, in Vermont—and Charlotte wanted to erect an enormous screened-in verandah, something large enough to link the main cottage to the two sleeping cabins, so that no one would ever have to go out in the rain (or venture into the mosquitoes, which were constant after nightfall).

Danny and Charlotte had plans for the place, in other words—the way couples in love do. Charlotte had cherished her summers on the island since she’d been a little girl; perhaps what Danny had adored were the possibilities of the place, the life with Charlotte he’d imagined there.

OH, PLANS, PLANS, PLANS
—how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there! In fact, the couple in love wouldn’t wait for Charlotte’s father to die, or for her mother to be physically incapable of handling the hardships of an island in Lake Huron. Over the next two years, Danny and Charlotte would put in the electricity, the flush toilets, and the hot water—even Charlotte’s outdoor shower
and
her oversize bathtub, not to mention the enormous screened-in verandah. And there were a few other “improvements” that Ketchum suggested; the old woodsman had actually used the
improvements
word, on his very first visit to Georgian Bay and Turner Island. In the summer of ’84, Ketchum had been a spry sixty-seven—young enough to still have a few plans of his own.

That summer, Ketchum had brought the dog. The fine animal was as alert as a squirrel from the second he put his paws on the island’s main dock. “There must be a bear around here—Hero knows bears,” Ketchum said. There was a stiff-standing ridge of fur (formerly, loose skin) at the back of the hound’s tensed neck; the dog stayed as close to Ketchum as the woodsman’s shadow. Hero wasn’t a dog you were inclined to pat.

Ketchum wasn’t a summer person; he didn’t fish, or screw around with boats. The veteran river driver was no swimmer. What Ketchum saw in Georgian Bay, and on Turner Island, was what the place must be like in the late fall and the long winter, and when the ice broke up in the spring. “Lots of deer around here, I’ll bet,” the old logger remarked; he was still standing on the dock, only moments after he’d arrived and before he picked up his gear. He appeared to be sniffing the air for bear, like his dog.

“Injun country,” Ketchum said approvingly. “Well, at least it
was—
before those damn missionaries tried to
Christianize
the fucking woods.” As a boy, he’d seen the old black-and-white photographs of a pulpwood boom afloat in Gore Bay, Manitoulin Island. The lumber business around Georgian Bay would have been at its height about 1900, but Ketchum had heard the history, and he’d memorized the yearly cycles of logging. (In the autumn months, you cut your trees, you built your roads, and you readied your streams for the spring drives—all before the first snowfall. In the winter, you kept cutting trees, and you hauled or sledded your logs over the snow to the edge of the water. In the spring, you floated your logs down the streams and the rivers into the bay.)

“But, by the nineties, all your forests went rafting down to the States—isn’t that right?” Ketchum asked Charlotte. She was surprised by the question; she didn’t know, but Ketchum did.

It was like logging everywhere, after all. The great forests had been cut down; the mills had burned down, or they’d been torn down. “The mills perished out of sheer neglect,” as Ketchum liked to put it.

“Maybe that bear’s on a nearby island,” Ketchum said, looking all around. “Hero’s not agitated enough for there to be a bear on
this
island.” (To Danny and Charlotte, the lean hound looked agitated enough for there to be a bear on the
dock.)

It turned out that there was a bear on Barclay Island that summer. The water between the two islands was a short swim for a bear—both Danny and Ketchum discovered they could
wade
there—but the bear never showed up on Turner Island, perhaps because the bear had smelled Ketchum’s dog.

“Burn the grease off the grill on the barbecue, after you’ve used it,” Ketchum advised them. “Don’t put the garbage out, and keep the fruit in the fridge. I would leave Hero with you, but I need him to look after me.”

There was an uninhabited log cabin, the first building to be assembled on Turner Island, near the back dock. Charlotte gave Ketchum a tour of it. The screens were a little torn, and a pair of bunk beds had first been separated and then nailed together, side by side, where they were covered with a king-size mattress that overhung the bed frames. The blanket on the bed was moth-eaten, and the mattress was mildewed; no one had stayed there since Charlotte’s grandfather stopped coming to the island.

It had been his cabin, Charlotte said, and after the old man died, no other member of the Turner family went near the run-down building, which Charlotte said was haunted (or so she’d believed as a girl).

She pulled aside a well-worn, dirty rug; she wanted to show Ketchum the hidden trapdoor in the floor. The cabin was set on cement posts, not much taller than cinder blocks—there was no foundation—and under the trapdoor was nothing but bare ground, about three feet below the floor. With the pine trees all around, pine needles had blown under the cabin, which gave the ground a deceptively soft and comfortable appearance.

“We don’t know what Granddaddy used the trapdoor for,” Charlotte explained to Ketchum, “but because he was a gambling man, we suspect he hid his money here.”

Hero was sniffing the hole in the floor when Ketchum asked: “Was your granddaddy a
hunting
man, Charlotte?”

“Oh, yes!” Charlotte cried. “When he died, we finally threw away his guns.” (Ketchum winced.)

“Well, this here’s a
meat
locker,” Ketchum told her. “Your granddaddy came up here in the winter, I would bet.”