John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

The three of them looked out across the water. On the far shore of Twisted River, they could see a coyote watching them. “Give me the carbine, Danny,” Ketchum said. The coyote took a long, delirious drink from the river; the animal still watched them, but not furtively. Something was the matter with it.

“Please don’t shoot it, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said.

“It must be sick, if it’s out in the daytime and not running away from us,” the woodsman told her. Danny handed him the Remington.30-06 Springfield. The coyote sat on the opposite riverbank, watching them with increasing indifference; it was almost as if the animal were talking to itself.

“Let’s not kill anything today, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. Lowering the gun, Ketchum picked up a rock and threw it into the river in the coyote’s direction, but the animal didn’t flinch. It seemed dazed.

“That critter is definitely sick,” Ketchum said. The coyote took another long drink from the river; now it didn’t even watch them. “Look how thirsty it is-it’s dying of something,” Ketchum told them.

“Is it the season for shooting coyotes?” Danny asked the old logger.

“It’s always open season for coyotes,” Ketchum said. “They’re worse than woodchucks-they’re varmints . They’re not good for anything at all. There’s no bag limit on coyotes. You can even hunt them at night, from the first of January till the end of March. That’s how much the state wants to get rid of the critters.”

But Carmella wasn’t persuaded. “I don’t want to see anything die today,” she said to Ketchum; he saw she was blowing kisses across the water, either to bless the spot where her Angelù had perished or to bestow long life on the coyote.

“Make your peace with those ashes, Danny,” the woodsman said. “You know where to throw that jar in the river, don’t you?”

“I’ve made my peace,” the writer said. He kissed the cook’s ashes and the apple-juice jar good-bye. “Ready?” Danny asked the shooter.

“Just throw it,” Ketchum told him. Carmella covered her ears with her hands, and Danny threw the jar-to almost midstream in the river basin. Ketchum leveled the carbine and waited for the jar to bob back to the surface of the water; one shot from the Remington shattered the apple-juice jar, effectively scattering Dominic Baciagalupo’s ashes in Twisted River.

On the far shore, at the sound of the shot, the coyote crouched lower to the riverbank but insanely held its ground. “You miserable fucker,” Ketchum said to the animal. “If you don’t know enough to run, you’re definitely dying. Sorry,” the old logger said-this was spoken as an aside, to Carmella. It was a smooth-working rifle-Ketchum’s “old-reliable, bolt-action sucker.” The woodsman shot the coyote on top of its skull, just as the sick animal was bending down to drink again.

“That’s what I should have done to Carl,” Ketchum told them, not looking at Carmella. “I could have done it anytime. I should have shot the cowboy down, like any varmint. I’m sorry I didn’t do it, Danny.”

“It’s okay, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I always understood why you couldn’t just kill him.”

“But I should have!” the logger shouted furiously. “There was nothing but bullshit morality preventing me!”

“Morality isn’t bullshit, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella began to lecture him, but when she looked at the dead coyote, she stopped whatever else she was going to say; the coyote lay still on the riverbank with the tip of its nose touching the running water.

“Good-bye, Pop,” Danny said to the flowing river. He turned away from the water and looked up at the grassy hill, where the cookhouse had been-where he’d disastrously mistaken Injun Jane for a bear, when all along she’d been his father’s lover.

“Good-bye, Cookie!” Ketchum called out, over the water.

“Dormi pur,” Carmella sang, crossing herself; then she abruptly turned her back on the river, where Angel had gone under the logs. “I need a head start on you two,” she told Danny and Ketchum, and she started slowly up the hill through the tall grass-not once looking back.

“What was she singing?” the woodsman asked the writer.

It was from an old Caruso recording, Danny remembered. “Quartetto Notturno,” it was called-a lullaby from an opera. Danny couldn’t remember the opera, but the lullaby must have been what Carmella sang to her Angelù, when he’d been a little boy and she was putting him to bed. “Dormi pur,” Danny repeated for Ketchum. “‘Sleep clean.’”

“Clean?” Ketchum asked.

“Meaning, ‘Sleep tight,’ I guess,” Danny told him.

“Shit,” was all Ketchum said, kicking the ground. “Shit,” the logger said again.

The two men watched Carmella’s arduous ascent of the hill. The tall, waving grass was waist-high to her truncated, bearlike body, and the wind was behind her, off the river; the wind blew her hair to both sides of her lowered head. When Carmella reached the crown of the hill, where the cookhouse had been, she bowed her head and rested her hands on her knees. For just a second or two-for no longer than it took Carmella to catch her breath-Danny saw in her broad, bent-over body a ghostly likeness to Injun Jane. It was as if Jane had returned to the scene of her death to say good-bye to the cook’s ashes.

Ketchum had lifted his face to the sun. He’d closed his eyes but was moving his feet-just the smallest steps, in no apparent direction, as if he were walking on floating logs. “Say it again, Danny,” the old riverman said.

“Sleep tight,” Danny said.

“No, no-in Italian !” Ketchum commanded him. The river driver’s eyes were still closed, and he kept moving his feet; Danny knew that the veteran logger was just trying to stay afloat.

“Dormi pur,” Danny said.

“Shit , Angel!” Ketchum cried. “I said, ‘Move your feet, Angel. You have to keep moving your feet!’ Oh, shit.”

IT HAD BEEN a bitterly confusing morning for Six-Pack Pam, who liked to work in her garden early-even earlier than she fed the dogs or made coffee for herself, and while her hip lasted. First Ketchum had come and disrupted everything, in his inimitable fashion, and she’d put the sulfa powder on Hero’s wounds-all this before she fed her own dear dogs and made the coffee. It was because of Ketchum’s willful disruption of her day, and treating the wretched dog who’d been mauled by a bear, that Six-Pack had turned her television on a little later than usual, but she still turned the TV on soon enough.

Pam was thinking that it was partly her own fault: After all, she’d asked to see Danny and that Italian woman who’d been the cook’s lover-the Injun Jane replacement, as Six-Pack thought of Carmella. Pam had wanted to make her peace with them, but now she felt conflicted. The shock of Danny being almost thirty years older than his father had been-that is, when Six-Pack had last seen the little cook-was upsetting. And, having made her apologies to Danny and Carmella, Pam was only now realizing that it was Ketchum’s forgiveness she wanted; that was confusing, too. Moreover, treating Hero’s wounds had made her cry, as if they were Ketchum’s wounds she was impossibly trying to heal. It was exactly at this bewildering moment-at the height of her most bitter disappointment, or so Six-Pack imagined-when she turned on the TV.

The world was about to overwhelm her, too, but Six-Pack didn’t know that when she saw the wreckage caused by the first of the hijacked passenger jets; American Airlines Flight 11, flying out of Boston, had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, where the plane tore a gaping hole in the building and set it on fire. “It must have been a small plane,” someone on television said, but Six-Pack Pam didn’t think so.