John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“Dear God,” the cook started up again. “I won’t sleep at all, knowing there’s a loaded gun in the house!”

“That’s okay with me, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “In fact, I would say it would be ideal- if you don’t sleep at all, I mean.”

The Winchester Ranger had a birch-wood forestock and butt-stock, with a rubber recoil pad that the writer now rested against his shoulder. Danny had to admit that he loved listening to his dad and Ketchum going at it.

“God damn you, Ketchum,” the cook was saying. “One night I’ll get up to pee, and my son will shoot me-thinking I’m the cowboy!”

Danny laughed. “Come on, you two-it’s Christmas! Let’s try to have a Merry Christmas,” the writer said.

But Ketchum wasn’t in a merry mood. “Danny’s not going to shoot you, Cookie,” the logger said. “I just want you fucking fellas to be ready!”

“IN-UK-SHUK,” Danny sometimes said in his sleep. Charlotte had taught him how to pronounce the Indian word; or, in Canada, was one supposed to say the Inuit word? (An Inuk word, Danny had also heard; he had no idea what was correct.) Danny had heard Charlotte say the inuksuk word many times.

When he woke up the morning after Christmas, Danny wondered if he should move the photograph of Charlotte from above the headboard of his bed-or perhaps exchange it for a different picture. In the photo in question, Charlotte is standing, wet and dripping, in a bathing suit, with her arms wrapped around herself; she’s smiling, but she looks cold. In the distance, one can see the island’s main dock- Charlotte was just swimming there-but nearer to her tall figure, between her and the dock, stands the unreadable inuksuk . This particular stone cairn was somewhat man-shaped but not really a human likeness. From the water, it might have been mistaken for a mark of navigation; some inuksuit (that was the plural form) were navigational markers, but not this one.

Two large rocks atop each other composed each manlike leg; a kind of shelf or tabletop possibly represented the figure’s hips or waist. Four smaller rocks composed a potbellied upper body. The creature, if it was intended to have human features, had absurdly truncated arms; its arms were as disproportionately short as its legs were overlong. The head, if it was meant to be a head, suggested permanently windswept hair. The stone cairn was as stunted as the winter-beaten pines on the Georgian Bay islands. The cairn stood only as tall as Charlotte ’s hips, and given the perspective of the photograph above the headboard of Danny’s bed-that is, with Charlotte in the foreground of the frame-the inuksuk looked even shorter than it was. Yet it also appeared to be indestructible; maybe that’s why the word was on Danny’s lips when he woke up.

There were countless inuksuit on those islands-and many more out on Route 69, between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, where Danny remembered a sign that said FIRST NATION, OJIBWAY TERRITORY. Not far from those summer cottages around Moonlight Bay, where Danny had driven in the boat with Charlotte one scorching day, there were some striking inuksuit near the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.

But what were they, exactly? the writer now wondered, as he lay in bed the morning after Christmas. Not even Charlotte knew who had built the inuksuk on her island.

There’d been a carpenter from the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve on Andy Grant’s crew, the summer the two sleeping cabins were under construction. Another summer, Danny remembered, one of the guys who brought the propane tanks to the island had a boat named First Nation . He’d told Danny he was a pure-blooded Ojibway, but Charlotte said it was “unlikely;” Danny hadn’t asked her why she was skeptical.

“Maybe Granddaddy built your inuksuk ,” Danny had said to Charlotte. Perhaps, he’d thought, the various Indians who’d worked on Turner Island over the years had rebuilt the stone cairn whenever the rocks had fallen down.

“The rocks don’t fall down,” Charlotte said. “Granddaddy had nothing to do with our inuksuk . A native built it-it won’t ever fall down.”

“But what do they mean , exactly?” Danny asked her.

“They imply origins, respect, endurance,” Charlotte answered, but this was too vague to satisfy the writer in Danny Angel; he remembered being surprised that Charlotte seemed satisfied with such a nonspecific description.

As for what an individual inuksuk meant-“Well, shit,” as Ketchum had said, “it seems to matter which Injun you ask.” (Ketchum believed that some inuksuit were nothing but meaningless heaps of rocks.)

Danny peered under his bed at the Winchester. Per Ketchum’s instructions, the loaded shotgun lay in an open case; according to Ketchum, the case should remain unzipped, “because any fool intruder can hear a zipper.”

It was obvious, of course, which fool intruder Ketchum meant-an eighty-three-year-old retired deputy sheriff, all the way from fucking New Hampshire! “And the safety?” Danny had asked Ketchum. “Do I leave the safety off, too?” It made a sound, a soft click, when you pushed the button for the safety, which was slightly forward of the trigger housing, but Ketchum had told Danny to leave the safety on.

The way the old logger put it was: “If the cowboy can hear the safety click off, he’s already too close to you.”

Danny looked first at the photograph of Charlotte with the inuksuk standing behind her, then at the 20-gauge shotgun under his bed. Perhaps the stone cairn and the Winchester Ranger both represented protection-the 20-gauge of a more specific kind. He was not unhappy to have the gun, Danny was thinking, though it seemed to him that every Christmas ushered in a morbid preoccupation-sometimes initiated by Ketchum (such as the Winchester) but at other times inspired by Danny or his dad. This Christmas Eve, for example, the cook could be blamed for beginning a downward spiral of gloominess.

“Just think of it,” Dominic had said to his son and Ketchum. “If Joe were alive, he would be in his mid-thirties-probably with a couple of kids of his own.”

“Joe would be older than Charlotte was when I first met her,” Danny chimed in.

“Actually, Daniel,” his father said, “Joe would be only a decade younger than you were-I mean, at the time Joe died.”

“Whoa! Stop this shit!” Ketchum cried. “And if Injun Jane were still alive, she’d be eighty-fucking-eight! I doubt she’d even be speaking to any of us-not unless we somehow managed to elevate our conversation.”

But the very next day, Ketchum had presented Danny with the 20-gauge shotgun-not exactly an elevation of their prevailing conversation, or their overriding fixation-and the cook had, seemingly out of the blue, begun to complain about “the sheer morbidity” of Daniel’s book dedications.

True, Baby in the Road (as might be expected) was dedicated as follows: “My son, Joe-in memoriam.” It was the second dedication to Joe-the third, overall, in memoriam. Dominic found this depressing.

“I can’t help it if the people I know keep dying, Pop,” Danny had said.

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.