John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way the riverman had stared at the cast on his right wrist, after Angel went under the logs.

Now they drove alongside the Androscoggin in silence, before Danny finally said: “I don’t care what you promised my dad or my mom, Ketchum. What I’m wondering is, if you hated yourself-if you were really taking yourself to task, or holding yourself accountable-wouldn’t you want to cut off your good hand?”

“My left hand is my good hand!” Ketchum cried.

Carmella cleared her throat; it might have been the awful bear smell. Without turning her head to look at either of them, but speaking instead to the dashboard of the truck-or perhaps to the silent radio-Carmella said: “Please tell us the story, Mr. Ketchum.”

IT WAS NO SURPRISE TO DANNY THAT THE STORY OF KETCHUM’S left hand was not immediately forthcoming. By the time the truck passed the Pontook Reservoir-and Danny noted the familiar drain age into the fields, as they drove down Dummer Pond Road-it was obvious that Ketchum had his own agenda. The story revealing whatever curious logic had persuaded the old logger to consider his left hand his “good” one would have to wait. Danny also noticed that Ketchum drove past the former haul road to Twisted River.

“Are we going to Paris, for some reason?” the writer asked.

“ West Dummer,” Ketchum corrected him, “or what’s left of it.”

“Does anyone call it West Dummer anymore?” Danny asked.

“I do,” Ketchum answered.

Crossing the new bridge over Phillips Brook, they went the way young Dan had gone to school when Injun Jane was driving him. Long ago, it had seemed a never-ending trip from Twisted River to Paris; now the time and the road flew by, but not the bear smell.

“Don’t get your balls crossed about it, Danny, but the Paris Manufacturing Company School -the actual schoolhouse-is still standing,” Ketchum warned him. “Where the young writer-to-be spent a few of his formative years-getting the shit beat out of him, for the most part,” the woodsman explained to Carmella, who seemed to be struggling with the concept of crossed balls.

It’s probable that Carmella was simply fighting nausea; the combination of the rough surface of the dirt road with the rank smell in the truck’s cab must have made her feel sick. Danny, who was definitely nauseated, tried to ignore the bear hair drifting at their feet, blown about by the air from the open driver’s-side window of the lurching truck.

Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver’s-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the long, bent stick shift-in the area of Carmella’s knees. Ketchum’s left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.

Ketchum’s driving was a fairly fluid process, as seemingly natural and unplanned as the way his beard blew in the wind from the open driver’s-side window. (Had the window not been open, Danny was thinking, he and Carmella almost certainly would have thrown up.)

“Why didn’t you put the bear in the back of the pickup?” Danny asked Ketchum. The writer wondered if some essential hunting ritual were the reason for the slain bear riding in the cab of the truck.

“I was in Maine, remember?” Ketchum said. “I shot the bear in New Hampshire, but I had to drive in and out of Maine. I have New Hampshire plates on my truck. If the bear had been in the back of my pickup, some game warden or a Maine state trooper would have stopped me. I have a New Hampshire hunting license,” Ketchum explained.

“Where was Hero?” Danny asked.

“Hero was in the back of the pickup-he was bleeding all over,” Ketchum said. “Live critters bleed more than dead ones, because their hearts are still pumping,” the old logger told Carmella, who appeared to be suppressing a gag reflex. “I just buckled the bear in your seat belt, Danny, and pulled a hat over his ears. The beast’s head looked like it was stuffed between his shoulders-bears don’t have much in the way of necks-but I suppose we looked like two bearded fellas out driving around!”

Ketchum would have sat up taller in the cab than the dead bear, Danny realized. From a distance, the woodsman’s beard and long hair were as black as a black bear’s; you had to look closely at Ketchum to see the gray. Through the windshield of Ketchum’s approaching truck, especially if you’d been passing with any speed, probably Ketchum and the bear had looked like two young men with heavy beards-younger than Ketchum really was, anyway.

“Hell, I wiped the bear blood off the seat,” the river driver was saying, as the truck pulled into Paris. “I do wonder, though, how long the critter’s reek will last. Bears do smell something awful, don’t they?”

Ketchum dropped the truck down to first gear, his rough right hand briefly brushing one of Carmella’s knees. “I’m not trying to feel you up, Carmella,” the logger said to her. “I didn’t plan on my stick shift ending up between your legs! We’ll put Danny in the middle next time.”

Danny was looking all around for the steam-powered sawmill, but he couldn’t see it. Hardwood sawlogs had once been driven down Phillips Brook to Paris; the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine, had made toboggans, the writer remembered. But where was the old sawmill? What had happened to the horse hovel and the tool shops? There’d been a mess hall and a hostelry-a seventy-five-man bunkhouse, as Danny recalled-and what had appeared to be (at the time) a rather fancy-looking house for the mill manager. Now, as Ketchum stopped the truck, Danny saw that only the schoolhouse remained. The logging camp was gone.

“What happened to Paris?” Danny asked, getting out of the truck. He could hear Phillips Brook; it sounded just the same.

“ West Dummer!” Ketchum barked. He was striding toward the knoll where the mess hall had been. “Why they waited till ninety-six to take it down, I couldn’t tell you-and they did a piss-poor job of it, when they finally got around to the bulldozing!” the logger yelled. He bent down and picked up a rusted pot and pan, clanging them together. Danny followed him, leaving Carmella behind.

“They bulldozed it?” the writer asked. He could now see sharp shards of metal, from the sawmill, poking out of the ground like severed bones. The horse hovel had collapsed and was left in a pile; the seventy-five-man bunkhouse or hostelry had been churned half-underground, with the childlike remains of bunk beds scattered in the low-lying juniper. An old washstand stood like a scooped-out skeleton; there was an empty, circular hole where the washbasin had been. There was even the rusted hulk of a steam-engine Lombard log hauler-rolled on its side, with its boiler dented, by the destructive but ineffectual force of the bulldozer. The Lombard rose out of a patch of raspberry bushes; it resembled the violated carcass of a dinosaur, or some other extinct species.

“You want to get rid of a place, you should burn it!” Ketchum railed. Carmella traipsed far behind them, pausing to pluck the burrs and the milkweed off her city slacks. “I wanted you to see this ass-wipe place first, Danny-it’s a fucking disgrace that they couldn’t even dispose of it properly! They were always dumber than dog shit in West Dummer!” the old logger hollered.