John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“‘Amos’ New York Steak Spice,’” Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. “Well, that’s a fine choice. If you don’t mind, Danny, I’m going to put the ashes in a glass jar-you’ll see why when we get there.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he’d been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.

Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He’d put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not-strong and sweet, and a little silty, “like Turkish coffee,” Carmella commented.

She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept-surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn’t see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal-as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.

Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound’s wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear’s claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero’s hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.

“I didn’t realize that Hero had lost half an ear,” Ketchum told them. “There was so much blood yesterday, I thought the whole ear was still there. It was only when the ear stopped bleeding a bit that I could see it was half gone!”

“My goodness-” Carmella started to say.

“Shouldn’t you take him to a vet?” Danny asked.

“Hero isn’t friendly to the vet,” Ketchum said. “We’ll take Hero to Six-Pack on our way to the river. Pam’s got some gunk that works good for claw wounds, and I’ve got an antibiotic for the ear-while what’s left of it is healing. Doesn’t it serve you right, Hero?” Ketchum asked the dog. “I told you-you were too far ahead of me! The fool dog got to the bear while I was out of range!” Ketchum explained to Carmella.

“The poor creature,” was all she could say.

“Oh, he’ll be fine-I’ll just feed him some of the bear meat!” Ketchum told her. “Let’s get going,” he said to Danny, taking the Remington.30-06 Springfield down from two pegs on the wall; he lowered the carbine across one forearm and headed for the wanigan’s door. “Come on, Hero,” he called to the hound, who rose stiffly from the dog bed and limped after him.

“What’s the gun for? It looks like you got your bear,” Danny said.

“You’ll see,” Ketchum told him.

“You’re not going to shoot anything, are you, Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked him.

“Only if there’s a critter in need of shooting,” Ketchum answered her. Then, as if to change the subject, Ketchum said to Danny: “I don’t imagine you’ve seen a skinned bear without its head. In that condition, a bear resembles a man. Not something for you to see, I think,” the logger added quickly, to Carmella.

“Stay!” Ketchum said suddenly, to Hero, and the dog froze alongside Carmella, who had stopped in her tracks, too.

In the smokehouse, the skinned bear was suspended above the smoldering fire pit like a giant bat. Without a head, the bear indeed resembled a hulking man-not that the writer had ever seen a skinned man before. “Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Ketchum said to Danny, who was speechless.

They went out of the smokehouse and saw Carmella and the bear hound, standing transfixed exactly where they’d left them-as if only a violent change in the weather would have persuaded the woman and the dog to rethink their positions. “Come on, Hero,” Ketchum said, and Carmella dutifully followed the hound to the truck-as if the old river driver had also spoken to her. Ketchum lifted Hero, putting the injured dog in the back of the pickup.

“You’ll have to indulge Six-Pack, Danny,” Ketchum was saying, as they got into the cab of his truck-Carmella taking up more than her share of room, in the middle. “Pam has something she wants to say to you both,” Ketchum told them. “Six-Pack’s not a bad person, and I suspect she just wants to say she’s sorry. It was my fault that I couldn’t read, remember. I never blamed Pam for telling Carl what really happened to Injun Jane. It was the only thing Six-Pack had over the cowboy, and he must have made her use it.”

“I never blamed Six-Pack, either,” Danny told him; he tried to read Carmella’s expression, which seemed slightly offended, but she didn’t say anything. There was a bad smell in the cab; maybe the smell had offended Carmella.

“It won’t take too long, anyway-Six-Pack will have Hero to attend to,” Ketchum said to them. “Hero barely tolerates Pam’s dogs when he’s not all clawed up. This morning could be interesting.” They drove out the road advertising small engine repairs, though Danny somehow doubted that this was Ketchum’s sign, or that Ketchum had ever been in the business of repairing other people’s small engines; maybe the logger just fixed his own, but Danny didn’t ask. The smell was overpowering; it had to be the bear, but why had the bear been in the cab?

“We met a guy who knows you-a salesman at L. L. Cote,” Danny told Ketchum.

“Is that so?” the riverman said. “Was he a nice fella, or do I take it that you met the one asshole who works there?”

“I believe that’s the one we met, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. The horrible smell traveled with them; definitely the bear had been in the cab.

“Fat fella, always wears camouflage-that asshole?” Ketchum asked.

“That’s the one,” Danny said; the bear smell almost made him gag. “He seems to think you’re half-Indian.”

“Well, I don’t know what I am-or what the missing half of me is, anyway!” Ketchum thundered. “It’s fine with me if I’m half-Injun-or three-quarters-Injun, for that matter! Injuns are all a lost nation, which suits me fine, too!”

“That fella seemed to think your road was no longer called Lost Nation Road,” Danny told the old woodsman.

“I ought to skin that fella and smoke him with my bear!” Ketchum shouted. “But you know what?” he asked Carmella, more flirtatiously.

“What, Mr. Ketchum?” she asked him fearfully.

“That fella wouldn’t taste as good as bear!” Ketchum hollered, laughing. They swerved onto Akers Pond Road and headed to the highway. Danny held the new glass jar with his dad’s ashes tightly in his lap; the old container, now empty, was pinched between his feet on the floor of the cab. The glass jar was bigger; the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, filled it only two-thirds full. It was once an apple-juice jar, Danny saw by the label.

Ketchum drove to that well-kept trailer park on Route 26, just outside Errol-the Saw Dust Alley campground, where Six-Pack Pam had a trailer. Six-Pack’s home, which was no longer mobile-it was set on cinder blocks, and half surrounded by a vegetable garden-was actually two trailers that had been joined together. A kennel kept the dogs out of the garden, and a large, hinged door of the kind cats usually use allowed Pam’s dogs free access between the kennel and the trailers. “I’ve tried to tell Six-Pack that a full-grown fella could come through that fucking dog door, though I suspect there’s no fella around here who would dare to,” Ketchum said. Hero had a hostile look about him as Ketchum lifted the dog from the back of the pickup. “Don’t get your balls crossed,” Ketchum told the hound.