John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

Danny wrote the Ketchum excepted words on a scrap of typing paper and taped it to one of his outdated typewriters-another IBM Selectric II, the one he was currently using in that third-floor room he shared with Joe’s ghost. The writer liked the phrase Ketchum excepted; maybe he could use it.

All that had happened three years ago, and counting. The only reason Danny hadn’t thrown out his relic of a fax machine, which was still in the kitchen of that house on Cluny Drive, was that Six-Pack occasionally faxed him and he faxed her. Pam must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine-the same age Ketchum would have been, if the old logger were still alive-and her messages via the fax machine had lost what literary pizazz she’d once demonstrated as a letter writer.

Six-Pack had grown more terse in her old age. When there was something she’d read, or had seen in the news on TV-and provided the item was in the dumber-than-dog-shit category of human stupidities-Six-Pack would fax Danny. Pam unflinchingly stated what Ketchum would have said about this or that, and Danny never hesitated to fax her back with the writer’s version of the river driver’s vernacular.

It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Danny or Six-Pack. It was what Ketchum would have said about anything . It was the old logger’s voice that Danny and Six-Pack wanted to hear.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

THE MID-FEBRUARY STORM had blown across Lake Huron from western Canada, but when the wind and snow hit the Georgian Bay islands, the wind shifted and the snow just kept falling; the wind now blew from a southerly direction, from Parry Sound to Shawanaga Bay. From his writing shack, Danny could no longer see where the bay ended and the mainland began. Because of the whiteout from the storm, the fir trees on what Danny knew was the mainland appeared as a mirage of a floating forest-or the trees seemed to be growing out of the frozen bay. The wind whipped little spirals of snow skyward; these twisters looked like small tornadoes of snow. Sometimes, when the wind blew northward, along the length of Shawanaga Bay, there were actual tornadoes-not unlike the kind you see in the American Midwest or on the Canadian prairies, Danny knew. (Andy Grant had warned the writer to watch out for them.)

Tireless had called Danny on his cell phone. She didn’t want to be an island cleaning woman today; it wasn’t a good idea to be out in the Polar airboat, not when the visibility was this bad. In a similar storm, only a few years ago, Tireless told Danny, some butt-brained oaf from Ohio had run his airboat aground on the O’Connor Rocks-just a little northwest of Moonlight Bay. (Danny had to come that way in order to pick Tireless up at the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.)

“What happened to him-the butt-brained oaf from Ohio?” Danny asked her.

“They found the poor fool frozen-stiff as a stick,” Tireless told him.

“I’ll come get you tomorrow, or the next day-whenever the storm’s over,” Danny said. “I’ll call you, or you call me.”

“Kiss Hero for me,” she said.

“I don’t kiss Hero a lot,” Danny told Tireless. “At least I’m not inclined to.”

“Well, you should kiss him more,” the First Nation woman said. “I think Hero would be nicer to you if you kissed him a lot.”

All morning, in the writing shack, Hero had been farting up a storm-the near equal of the snowstorm Danny was watching out his window. It was a morning when the writer wasn’t tempted to make his relationship with the bear hound a closer one. “Jesus, Hero!” Danny had exclaimed several times in the course of the foul-smelling morning, but it was unfit weather for the Walker bluetick to be put outside. And despite the dog’s unrelenting flatulence, the writing had been going well; Danny was definitely getting closer to the start of his first chapter.

Certain sentences now came to him whole, intact; even the punctuation seemed permanent. When two such sentences were born consecutively, one emerging immediately after the other, the writer felt especially riveted to his task. He’d written the first twosome of the morning on a piece of typing paper and had thumbtacked the page to the rough pine-board wall of his writing shack. Danny kept looking at the sentences, rereading them.

“As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do-as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro-to and fro.”

Danny liked the repetition. He knew this was first-chapter material, but the passage belonged at the end of the chapter-it definitely didn’t sound like a beginning. Danny had circled the under the logs phrase, which the writer thought wouldn’t be a bad chapter title. Yet much of the focus of the first chapter seemed to be on the cook; the focus really wasn’t on the boy who’d slipped under the logs.

“You could not say ‘the past’ or ‘the future’ in the cook’s presence without making him frown,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. There were other, isolated sentences about this young cook; they were like landmarks or signposts for Danny, helping to orient the writer as he plotted his first chapter. Another sentence was: “In the cook’s opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river’s name.” There would be much more about the cook, of course; it kept coming. “The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand,” Danny wrote.

The cook would be a major point-of-view character in the first chapter, the writer imagined-as Danny also imagined the cook’s twelve-year-old son would be. “The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. And there was one sentence about the cook that the writer left unfinished-at least for the moment. “The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters”-well, that was as far as Danny wanted to go with that sentence, which he knew he would have to complete another day. For now, it was enough to type all these thoughts about the cook on a single piece of paper and thumbtack the page to the wall of the writing shack.

“In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change,” Danny had also written; it could work as a first sentence to the chapter, but the writer knew he could do better. Still, the sentence about the weather was a keeper; Danny could use it somewhere. “Now it was that mud-season, swollen-river time of year again,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote-a better beginning sentence, but it wasn’t really what the writer was looking for.

Everything about the Ketchum character was more fragmentary. Nothing about the Ketchum character came to Danny in a complete sentence-not yet. There was something to the effect that “Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive;” Danny liked that line, but he couldn’t see where the sentence was going. There was another fragment about Ketchum being “no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive.” Danny knew he could and would use that, but he wasn’t sure where-maybe in proximity to an as-yet-uncertain sentence about Ketchum lying on his back on the riverbank “like a beached bear.” Yet these fragments also found their way to the writing-shack wall, where they were thumbtacked alongside the first chapter’s other signposts or landmarks.

At this point, the writer could see the Angel character more clearly than he could see the Ketchum character-though it was obvious to Daniel Baciagalupo that the Ketchum character was more major. (Maybe most major, Danny was thinking.)