Last Night in Twisted River (69 page)

For those November hunting trips, Danny always stayed at Larry’s Tavern. In the bar was where he’d heard the rumor that Larry’s would one day be sold, whenever the new highway advanced that far north. Who was Danny to say, as the old-timers in the bar often did, that Larry’s should be spared? Neither the tavern nor the motel seemed worth saving to the writer, but he couldn’t deny that both parts of the roadside establishment had long served a local (albeit largely self-destructive) purpose.

And every winter, when Danny arrived on Charlotte’s island, Andy Grant loaned him Ketchum’s Remington. (“In case of
critters,”
Ketchum would have said.) Andy also left a couple of extra loaded cartridge clips with the writer. Hero invariably recognized the carbine. It was one of the few times the bear hound wagged his tail, for that bolt-action Remington .30-06 Springfield had been Ketchum’s gun of choice for bear, and doubtless Hero was reminded of the thrill of the chase—or of his former master.

IT HAD TAKEN TWO YEARS
for Danny to teach the dog to bark. The growling and farting, and the snoring in his sleep, came naturally to Hero—that is, if the bear hound
hadn’t
learned these indelicate arts from Ketchum—but Hero had never barked before. In his earliest efforts to encourage Hero to bark, Danny would occasionally wonder if the old logger had disapproved of barking.

There was a little park and playground, probably as big as a football field, near Danny’s Rosedale residence and adjacent to those two new condominiums on Scrivener Square, which—as luck would have it—did
not
block the writer’s view of the clock tower on the Summer-hill liquor store. Danny walked Hero in the park three or four times a day—more often than not on a leash, lest there might happen to be a German shepherd present in the park, or some other male dog who could have reminded Hero of Six-Pack’s late shepherd.

In the park, Danny barked for Hero; the writer made every effort to bark authentically, but Hero was unimpressed. After a year of this, Danny wondered if Hero somehow didn’t think that barking was a
weakness
in dogs.

Other dog-walkers in the little park were disconcerted by Hero’s lean-and-mean appearance, and by the bear hound’s preternatural aloofness from other dogs. There were also the scars, the stiff-hipped limp—not to mention the wonky-eyed, baleful stare. “It’s only because Hero lost an eyelid—he’s not really giving your dog the evil eye, or anything,” Danny would try to reassure the anxious dog owners.

“What happened to that ear?” a young woman with a brainless breed of spaniel asked the writer.

“Oh, that was a bear,” Danny admitted.

“A
bear!”

“And the poor thing’s hip—those terrible scars?” a nervous-looking man with a schnauzer had asked.

“The same bear,” Danny said.

It was their second winter on Charlotte’s island when the barking began. Danny had parked the Polar airboat on the ice off the front dock; he was unloading groceries from the boat, while Hero waited for him on the dock. Danny tried once more to bark at the dog—the writer had almost given up. To both Danny and the dog’s surprise, Danny’s bark was repeated; there was an echo of the bark from the direction of Barclay Island. When Hero heard the echo, he barked. Of course there was an echo attending Hero’s bark, too; the bear hound heard a dog uncannily like himself bark back.

It had gone on for over an hour—Hero barking at himself on the dock. (If Ketchum had been there, Danny thought, the former river driver would probably have shot the bear hound.) What have I created? the writer wondered, but after a while, Hero had stopped.

After that, the dog barked normally; he barked at snowmobiles and at the once-in-a-while airplanelike sound of a distant airboat out in the main channel. He barked at the train whistles, which the dog could hear from the mainland—and, less frequently, at the whine of the tires on those big long-haul trucks out on 69. As for intruders—well, in those winter weeks, there were none—there was only a now-and-again visit from Andy Grant. (Hero barked at Andy, too.)

One could never say that Ketchum’s bear hound was normal—or even
almost
normal—but the barking did much to alleviate the sheer creepiness of Hero’s one-eared, gaping-eyed face. Certainly, Danny’s fellow dog-walkers in that little park near Scrivener Square were less visibly anxious about the bear hound—and now that the dog barked, he growled less. It was a pity that there was nothing Danny could do about Hero’s silent farting or his colossal snoring.

What the writer was realizing was that he hadn’t known what owning a dog was like. The more Danny talked to Hero, the less the writer was inclined to think about what Ketchum would have said about Iraq. Did having a dog make you less political? (Not that Danny had ever been
truly
political; he’d never been like Katie,
or
like Ketchum.)

Danny did take sides, politically; he had political opinions. But Danny wasn’t an anti-American—the writer didn’t even feel like an expatriate! The world that was captured in the barest outline form on his Toronto refrigerator began to seem less and less important to the author. That world was increasingly
not
what Daniel Baciagalupo wanted to think about—especially not, as Ketchum would have said,
as a writer
.

THERE’D BEEN AN ACCIDENT
on 69 near Horseshoe Lake Road. A dipshit driving a Hummer had rear-ended a cattle-transport trailer, killing himself and a bunch of beef cattle. This happened the first winter Danny stayed on Charlotte’s island, and he’d heard about the accident from his cleaning woman. She was a First Nation person—a young woman with black hair and eyes, a pretty face, and thick, strong-looking hands. Once a week, Danny drove the airboat to the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve; that was where he picked her up, and where he returned her at the end of the day, but she almost certainly didn’t live there. Shawanaga Landing was mostly used in the summer months, both as a campsite and as a gateway to the bay. The residents of the reserve lived in the village of Shawanaga, though there were a few First Nation people who lived year-round in Skerryvore—or so Andy Grant had told Danny. (Both areas could be reached by road in the winter months, at least on snowmobiles.)

The young cleaning woman seemed to like riding in the Polar air-boat. Danny always brought a second pair of ear guards for her, and after she’d met Hero, she asked why the bear hound couldn’t come along for the ride. “The airboat is too loud for a dog’s ears—well, for his one ear, anyway,” Danny told her. “I don’t know how well Hero can hear out of the mangled ear.”

But the cleaning woman had a way with dogs. She told Danny to put her ear guards on Hero when he drove to Shawanaga Landing to pick her up, and when he drove back to Turner Island without her. (Surprisingly, the dog didn’t object to wearing them.) And when the cleaning woman rode in the airboat with Hero, she held the bear hound in her lap and covered his ears—even the mostly missing one—with her big, strong hands. Danny had never seen Hero sit in anyone’s lap before. The Walker bluetick weighed sixty or seventy pounds.

The dog devotedly followed the young woman throughout her cleaning chores, the same way Hero attached himself to Danny everywhere on the island when Danny was otherwise alone there. When Danny was using the chainsaw, the bear hound maintained a safe distance between them. (The writer was sure that Hero had learned this from Ketchum.)

There was an ongoing misunderstanding in regard to where the young First Nation person
lived—
Danny never saw anyone waiting for her at Shawanaga Landing, or any kind of vehicle she might have used to get herself to and from the boat landing. Danny had asked her only once, but the young cleaning woman’s answer struck him as dreamy or facetious—or both—and he’d not asked her for clarification. “Ojibway Territory,” she’d said.

Danny couldn’t tell what the First Nation woman had meant—maybe nothing. He could have asked Andy Grant where she was actually from—Andy had put him in touch with her in the first place—but Danny had let it go. Ojibway Territory was a good enough answer for him.

And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman’s name, if he’d ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he’d said to her admiringly, “You are tireless.” This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did—and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she’d liked the
tireless
word.

“You may call me that
—please
call me that,” she’d told him.

“Tireless?”

“That’s my name,” the First Nation woman had told him. “That’s who I am, all right.”

Again, Danny could have asked Andy Grant for her real name, but the woman liked to be called Tireless, and that was good enough for Danny, too.

Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the
inuksuk
. She didn’t formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it—and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.

Danny worked as well in his writing shack on the one day a week when Tireless came to clean as he did when he was alone with Hero there; the cleaning woman didn’t distract him. When she was done with her work in the main cabin—it didn’t matter that, on other days, Danny was used to Hero sleeping (and farting and snoring) in the writing shack while he worked—the writer would look up from his writing and suddenly see Tireless standing by that wind-bent little pine. She never touched the crippled tree; she just stood beside it, like a sentinel, with Hero standing beside her. Neither the First Nation cleaning woman nor the bear hound ever stared at Danny through the window of his writing shack. Whenever the writer happened to look up and see them next to the weather-beaten pine, both the dog and the young woman had their backs to him; they appeared to be scouting the frozen bay.

Then Danny would tap the window, and both Tireless and Hero would come inside the writing shack. Danny would leave the shack (and his writing) while Tireless cleaned up in there, which never took her long—usually, less than the time it took Danny to make himself a cup of tea in the main cabin.

Except for Andy Grant—and those repeat old-timers Danny occasionally encountered in the bar at Larry’s Tavern, or at the Haven restaurant, and in the grocery store—the First Nation cleaning woman was the only human being Danny had any social intercourse with in his winters on the island in Georgian Bay, and Danny and Hero saw Tireless just once a week for the ten weeks that the writer was there. One time, when Danny was in town and he ran into Andy Grant, the writer had told Andy how well the young First Nation woman was working out.

“Hero and I just love her,” he’d said. “She’s awfully easy and pleasant to have around.”

“Sounds like you’re getting ready to
marry
her,” Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Danny—if only for a minute, or two—found himself seriously considering the idea.

Later, back in the airboat—but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound—Danny asked the dog: “Do I look lonely to you, Hero? I must be a little lonely, huh?”

—

IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY’S HOUSE
on Cluny Drive—particularly as the year 2004 advanced—the politics on the writer’s refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had
always
been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Danny was developing in his ninth novel.

As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel—his first as Daniel Baciagalupo. Danny was slowly but gradually making his way
backward
through the narrative, to where he thought the book should begin. That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter
last
. By the time Danny got to the first sentence—meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down—often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward—or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.

As always, too, the more deeply Danny immersed himself in a novel, the more what passed for his politics fell away. While the writer’s political opinions were genuine, Danny would have been the first to admit that he was mistrustful of
all
politics. Wasn’t he a novelist, in part, because he saw the world in a most subjective way? And not only was writing fiction the best of what Daniel Baciagalupo could manage to do; writing a novel was truly all he did. He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual.

Yet Danny was unavoidably remembering those last two U.S. helicopters that left Saigon—those poor people clinging to the helicopters’ skids, and the hundreds of desperate South Vietnamese who were left behind in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. The writer had no doubt that we would see that (or something like that) in Iraq. Shades of Vietnam, Danny was thinking—typical of his age, because Iraq wasn’t exactly another Vietnam. (Daniel Baciagalupo was such a sixties fella, as Ketchum had called him; there would be no reforming him.)

It was with little conviction that Danny spoke to the yawning, otherwise unresponsive dog. “I’ll bet you a box of dog biscuits, Hero—everything is going to get a lot worse before anything gets a little better.” The bear hound didn’t even react to the
dog biscuits
part; Hero found all politics every bit as boring as Danny did. It was just the world as usual, wasn’t it? Who among them would ever change anything about the way the world worked? Not a
writer
, certainly; Hero had as good a chance of changing the world as Danny did. (Fortunately, Danny
didn’t
say this to Hero—not wanting to offend the noble dog.)