John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“I get your point,” the cook said again.

“Nine o’clock, Sunday morning,” Ketchum told him. Dominic could only guess that it was a date of two nights’ duration that Ketchum was having-more like a spree or a bender , maybe.

IN TWISTED RIVER, if there were nights the cook could have concealed from his son, they would have been Saturday nights, when the whoring around and drinking to excess were endemic to a community staking an improbable claim to permanence in such close proximity to a violent river-not to mention the people, who made a plainly perilous living and looked upon their Saturday nights as an indulgence they deserved.

Dominic Baciagalupo, who was both a teetotaler and a widower not in the habit of whoring around, was nonetheless sympathetic to the various self-destructions-in-progress he would witness on an average Saturday night. Maybe the cook revealed more disapproval for Ketchum’s behavior than he would ever show toward Twisted River ’s other louts and miscreants. Because Ketchum was no fool, perhaps the cook had less patience for Ketchum’s foolishness, but to a smart twelve-year-old-and Danny was both observant and smart-there appeared to be more than impatience motivating his father’s everlasting disappointment in Ketchum. And if Injun Jane didn’t defend Ketchum from the cook’s condemnation, young Dan did.

That Saturday night, when Angel had possibly arrived at Dead Woman Dam-where, because people float lower than logs, the boy’s battered body might already have passed under the containment boom, in which case the young Canadian would be eddying in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction to the right or left of the main dam and the sluice spillway-Danny Baciagalupo was helping his dad wipe down the tables after supper had been served in the cookhouse. The kitchen help had gone home, leaving Injun Jane to scour the last of the pots and pans while she waited for the washing cycles to end, so she could put all the towels and other linens in the dryers.

Whole families came to the cookhouse for Saturday-night supper; some of the men were already drunk and fighting with their wives, and a few of the women (in turn) lashed out at their children. One of the sawmill men had puked in the washroom, and two drunken loggers had shown up late for supper-naturally, they’d insisted on being fed. The spaghetti and meatballs, which the cook made every Saturday night-for the kids-was congealed and growing cold and was so beneath Dominic Baciagalupo’s standards that he fixed the men some fresh penne with a little ricotta and the perpetual parsley.

“This is fuckin’ delicious!” one of the drunks had declared.

“What’s it called, Cookie?” the other hammered logger asked.

“Prezzémolo,” Dominic said importantly, the sheer exoticness of the word washing over the drunken loggers like another round of beer. The cook had made them repeat the word until they could say it correctly -prets-ZAY-mo-loh .

Jane was disgusted; she knew it was nothing more exotic than the Italian word for parsley . “For two drunks who were born late!” Jane complained.

“You would let Ketchum go hungry, if it was Ketchum,” Danny said to his father. “You’re wicked harsh on Ketchum.”

But the two drunks had been given a special supper and sent on their contented way. Danny and his dad and Jane were at the tail end of their Saturday-night chores when the wind from the suddenly kicked-open door to the dining room heralded another late arrival at the cookhouse.

From the kitchen, Jane couldn’t see the visitor. She shouted in the direction of the rushing wind at the dining-room door. “You’re too late! Supper is over!”

“I ain’t hungry,” said Six-Pack Pam.

Indeed, there was nothing hunger-driven in Pam’s appearance; what little flesh she had hung loosely from her big bones, and her lean, feral-looking face, tight-lipped and drawn, suggested more of a mostly-beer diet than a penchant for overeating. Yet she was tall and broad-shouldered enough to wear Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt without looking lost in it, and her lank blond hair, which was streaked with gray, appeared to be clean but uncared for-like the rest of her. She held a flashlight as big as a billy club. (Twisted River was not a well-lit town.) Not even the sleeves of Ketchum’s shirt were too long for her.

“So I guess you’ve killed him and claimed his clothes for your own,” the cook said, watching her warily.

“I ain’t chokin’, either, Cookie,” Pam told him.

“Not this time, Six-Pack!” Jane called from the kitchen. Danny guessed that the ladies must have known each other well enough for Jane to have recognized Pam’s voice.

“It’s kinda late for the hired help to still be here, ain’t it?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic recognized Six-Pack’s special drunkenness with an envy and nostalgia that surprised him-the big woman could hold her beer and bourbon, better than Ketchum. Jane had come out of the kitchen with a pasta pot under her arm; the open end of the pot was leveled at Pam like the mouth of a cannon.

Young Dan, in a presexual state of one-third arousal and two-thirds premonition, remembered Ketchum’s remark about women losing their looks, and how the various degrees of lost looks registered with Constable Carl. To the twelve-year-old, Jane hadn’t lost her looks-not quite yet. Her face was still pretty, her long braid was striking, and more radiant to imagine was all that coal-black hair when she undid the braid. There were her stupendous breasts to contemplate, too.

Yet seeing Six-Pack Pam unhinged Danny in a different but similar way: She was as handsome (in the category of strong-looking) as a man, and what was womanly about her came with a rawness-how she had insouciantly thrown on Ketchum’s shirt, without a bra, so that her loose breasts swelled the shirt-and now her eyes darted from Jane to Danny, and then fixed upon the cook with the venturesome but nervous daring of a young girl.

“I need your help with Ketchum, Cookie,” Pam said. Dominic was fearful that Ketchum had had a heart attack, or worse; he hoped that Six-Pack would spare young Daniel the gruesome details.

“ I can help you with Ketchum,” Injun Jane told Pam. “I suppose he’s passed out somewhere-if so, I can carry him easier than Cookie can.”

“He’s passed out naked on the toilet, and I ain’t got but one toilet,” Pam said to Dominic, not looking at Jane.

“I hope he was just reading,” the cook replied.

Ketchum appeared to be making his dogged way through Dominic Baciagalupo’s books, which were really Dominic’s mother’s books and Rosie’s beloved novels. For someone who’d left school when he was younger than Danny, Ketchum read the books he borrowed with a determination bordering on lunacy. He returned the books to the cook with words circled on almost every page-not underlined passages, or even complete sentences, but just isolated words. (Danny wondered if his mom had taught Ketchum to read that way.)

Once young Dan had made a list of the words Ketchum had circled in his mother’s copy of Hawthorne ’s The Scarlet Letter . Collectively, the words made no sense at all.

symbolize

whipping-post

sex

malefactresses

pang

bosom

embroidered

writhing

ignominious

matronly

tremulous

punishment

salvation

plaintive

wailings

possessed