John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Dominic left the porch light on by the kitchen door, so that Jane could see the way to her truck; he put his muddy boots beside Jane’s at the foot of the stairs. The cook considered that, perhaps, he had lingered downstairs for another reason. How would he explain his lip injury to Jane, and should he tell her about his meeting with the constable? Shouldn’t Jane know that Dominic had encountered the cowboy, and that both Constable Carl’s behavior and his disposition were as unpredictable and unreadable as ever?

The cook couldn’t even say for certain if the constable somehow knew that Jane was Dominic’s “paramour,” as Ketchum might have put it-in reference to the toilet-reader’s list of words from another illicit love story.

Dominic Baciagalupo went quietly upstairs in his socks-though the stairs creaked in a most specific way because of his limp, and he could not manage to creep past his open bedroom door without Jane sitting up in bed and seeing him. (He sneaked enough of a look at her to know she’d let her hair down.) Dominic had wanted to clean up his wounded lower lip before he saw her, but Jane must have sensed he was hiding something from her; she sailed her Cleveland Indians cap into the hall, nearly hitting him. Chief Wahoo landed upside down but still grinning-the chief appearing to stare crazily down the hall, in the direction of the bathroom and young Dan’s bedroom.

In the bathroom mirror, the cook saw that his lower lip probably needed to be stitched; the wound would heal eventually, without stitches, but his lip would heal faster and there would be less of a scar if he had a couple of stitches. For now, after he’d painfully brushed his teeth, he poured some hydrogen peroxide on his lower lip and patted it dry with a clean towel-noting the blood on the towel. It was just bad luck that tomorrow was Sunday; he would rather let Ketchum or Jane stitch up his lip than try to find that moron doctor on a Sunday, in that place Dominic wouldn’t even think of by its ill-fated name.

The cook came out of the bathroom and continued down the hall to Daniel’s room. Dominic Baciagalupo kissed his sleeping son good night, leaving an unnoticed spot of blood on the boy’s forehead. When the cook came out into the hall, there was Chief Wahoo grinning upside down at him-as if to remind him that he better watch his words carefully with Injun Jane.

“Who hit you?” she asked him, as he was getting undressed in the bedroom.

“Ketchum was wild and unruly-you know how he can be when he’s passed out and talking at the same time.”

“If Ketchum had hit you, Cookie, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“It was just an accident,” the cook insisted, relying on a favorite word. “Ketchum didn’t mean to hurt me-he just caught me with his cast, by accident.”

“If he’d hit you with his cast, you would be dead,” Jane told him. She was sitting up in bed, with her hair all around her; it hung down below her waist, and she had folded her arms over her breasts, which were hidden by both her hair and her arms.

Whenever she took her hair down, and later went home that way, she could get in real trouble with Constable Carl-if he hadn’t already passed out. It was a night when Jane should stay late and leave early in the morning, if she went home at all, Dominic was thinking.

“I saw Carl tonight,” the cook told her.

“It wasn’t Carl who hit you, either,” Jane said, as he got into bed beside her. “And it doesn’t look as if he shot you,” she added.

“I can’t tell if he knows about us, Jane.”

“I can’t tell, either,” she told him.

“Did Ketchum kill Lucky Pinette?” the cook asked.

“Nobody knows, Cookie. We haven’t known doodley-squat about that for ages! Why did Six-Pack hit you?” Jane asked him.

“Because I wouldn’t fool around with her-that’s why.”

“If you had screwed Six-Pack, I would have hit you so hard you wouldn’t ever have found your lower lip,” Jane told him.

He smiled, which the lip didn’t like. When he winced at the pain, Jane said, “Poor baby-no kissing for you tonight.”

The cook lay down next to her. “There are other things besides kissing,” he said to her.

She pushed him to his back and lay on top of him, the sheer weight of her pressing him into the bed and taking his breath away. If the cook had closed his eyes, he would have seen himself in Six-Pack’s suffocating headlock again, so he kept his eyes wide open. When Injun Jane straddled his hips and firmly seated herself in his lap, Dominic felt a sudden intake of air fill his lungs. With an urgency possibly prompted by Six-Pack having assaulted him, Jane mounted the cook; she wasted no time in slipping him inside her.

“I’ll show you other things,” the Indian dishwasher said, rocking herself back and forth; her breasts fell on his chest, her mouth brushed his face, carefully not touching his lower lip, while her long hair cascaded forward, forming a tent around the two of them.

The cook could breathe, but he couldn’t move. Jane’s weight was too great for him to budge her. Besides, Dominic Baciagalupo wouldn’t have wanted to change a single element of the way she was rocking back and forth on top of him-or her gathering momentum. (Not even if Injun Jane had been as light as Dominic’s late wife, Rosie, and the cook himself were as big as Ketchum.) It was a little like riding a train, Dominic imagined-except all he could do was hold tightly to the train that was, in reality, riding him .

IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW that Danny was certain he’d heard water running in the bathroom, or that the kiss on his forehead-either his father’s kiss or a second good-night kiss from Jane-had been real. It didn’t matter, either, that the boy had incorporated the kiss into a dream he was having about Six-Pack Pam, who’d been ardently kissing him-not necessarily on his forehead. Nor did it matter that the twelve-year-old knew the odd creak his dad’s limp made on the stairs, because he’d heard the limp a while ago and there was a different, unfamiliar creaking now. (On stairs, his father always put his good foot forward; the lame foot followed, more lightly, after it.)

What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn’t only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Danny had heard and felt the wind in every season. The frightened boy quietly got out of bed, and-holding his breath-tiptoed to his partially open bedroom door and into the upstairs hall.

There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to Jane? young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her head? Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane-either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a human predator) with a bush hook?

As he made his cautious way down the hall, Danny half expected to see Jane’s severed head in the bathtub; as he passed the open bathroom door, without spotting her head, the twelve-year-old could only imagine that the intruder was a bear, not a man, and that the bear had eaten Jane and was now attacking his dad. For there was no denying where the violent creaks and moans were coming from-his father’s bedroom-and that was definitely moaning (or worse, whimpering) that the boy could hear as he came closer. When he passed the Cleveland Indians cap, the recognition that Chief Wahoo had landed upside down only heightened the twelve-year-old’s fears.

What Danny Baciagalupo would see (more accurately, what he thought he saw), upon entering his dad’s bedroom, was everything the twelve-year-old had feared, and worse-that is, both bigger and hairier than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be. Only his father’s knees and feet were visible beneath the bear; more frightening still, his dad’s lower legs weren’t moving. Maybe the boy had arrived too late to save him! Only the bear was moving-the rounded, humpbacked beast (its head not discernible) was rocking the entire bed, its glossy-black hair both longer and more luxuriant than Danny had ever imagined a black bear’s hair would be.