John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“I don’t need to eat,” the big man said again. “I need you to come with me, Cookie.”

“Where are we going?” Dominic asked, but even young Dan knew when his father was pretending not to know something he clearly knew.

“You know where,” Ketchum told the cook. “I just have trouble remembering the exact spot.”

“That’s because you drink too much, Ketchum-that’s why you can’t remember,” Dominic said.

When Ketchum lowered his head, he swayed more; for a moment, Danny thought that the logger might fall down. And by the way both men had lowered their voices, the boy understood that they were negotiating; they were also being careful not to say too much, because Ketchum didn’t know what the twelve-year-old knew about his mother’s death, and Dominic Baciagalupo didn’t want his son to hear whatever odd or unwelcome detail Ketchum might remember.

“Just try the meat loaf, Ketchum,” the cook said softly.

“It’s pretty good with applesauce,” Danny said. The riverman lowered himself onto a stool; he rested his new white cast on the counter-top. Everything about Ketchum was hardened and sharp-edged, like a whittled-down stick-and, as Danny had observed, “wicked tough”-which made the sterile, fragile-looking cast as unsuited to the man as a prosthetic limb. (If Ketchum had lost an arm, he would have made do with the stump-he might have used it as a club.)

But now that Ketchum was sitting down, Danny thought the river driver looked safe enough to touch. The boy had never felt a cast before. Even drunk, Ketchum somehow knew what Dan was thinking. “Go on-you can touch it,” the logger said, extending his cast in the boy’s direction. There was dried blood, or pitch, on what Danny could see of Ketchum’s crooked fingers; they protruded from the cast, un-moving. With a broken wrist, it hurt to move your fingers for the first few days. The boy gently touched Ketchum’s cast.

The cook gave Ketchum a generous serving of meat loaf and applesauce. “There’s milk or orange juice,” Dominic said, “or I could make you some coffee.”

“What a disheartening choice,” Ketchum said, winking at Danny.

“Disheartening,” the cook repeated, shaking his head. “I’ll make some coffee.”

Danny wished that the two men would just talk about everything; the boy knew much of their history, but not enough about his mother. Of her death, no detail could be odd or unwelcome-Danny wanted to hear every word of it. But the cook was a careful man, or he had become one; even Ketchum, who had driven his own children away from him, was especially cautious and protective with Danny, much as the veteran logger had behaved around Angel.

“I wouldn’t go there with you when you’ve been drinking, anyway,” the cook was saying.

“I took you there when you’d been drinking,” Ketchum said; so he wouldn’t say more, he took a mouthful of meat loaf and applesauce.

“Except when it’s under a logjam, a body doesn’t move downstream as fast as a log,” Dominic Baciagalupo said, as if he were speaking to the coffeepot-not to Ketchum, whose back was turned to him. “Not unless the body is caught on a log.”

Danny had heard this explanation, in another context. It had taken a few days-three, to be exact-for his mother’s body to make the journey from the river basin to the narrows, where it had bumped up against the dam. First a drowned body sinks, the cook had explained to his son; then it rises.

“They’re keeping the dams closed through the weekend,” Ketchum said. (He meant not only Dead Woman Dam but the Pontook Dam, on the Androscoggin.) Ketchum ate steadily but not fast, the fork held unfamiliarly, and a little clumsily, in his left hand.

“It’s good with applesauce, isn’t it?” the boy asked him. Ketchum nodded in agreement, chewing vigorously.

They could smell the coffee brewing, and the cook said-more to himself than to his son, or Ketchum-“I might as well start the bacon, while I’m at it.” Ketchum just went on eating. “I suppose the logs are already at the first dam,” Dominic added, as if he were still speaking to no one but himself. “I mean our logs.”

“I know which logs you mean, and which dam,” Ketchum told him. “Yes, the logs are already at the dam-they were there while you were making supper.”

“So you saw that moron doctor there?” the cook asked. “Not that you need a genius to put a cast on a broken wrist, but you must be a man who loves to take chances.” Dominic went out of the cookhouse to get the bacon from the cooler. It was black outside, and the sound of the river rushed into the warm kitchen.

“You used to take chances, Cookie!” Ketchum called out to his old friend; he looked cautiously at Danny. “Your dad used to be happier, too-when he drank.”

“I used to be happier-period,” the cook said; the way he dropped the slab of bacon on the cutting board made Danny look at his father, but Ketchum never turned his attention away from the meat loaf and applesauce.

“Given that bodies move downstream slower than logs,” Ketchum said with deliberate slowness, his speech slightly slurred, “what would you guess as to Angel’s estimated time of arrival at that spot I’m having trouble remembering, exactly?”

Danny was counting to himself, but it was clear to the boy, and to Ketchum, that the cook had already been estimating the young Canadian’s journey. “Saturday night or Sunday morning,” Dominic Baciagalupo said. He had to raise his voice above the hissing bacon. “I’m not going there with you at night, Ketchum.”

Danny quickly looked at Ketchum, anticipating the big man’s response; it was, after all, the story that most interested the boy, and the one closest to his heart. “I went there with you at night, Cookie.”

“The odds are better you’ll be sober Sunday morning,” the cook told Ketchum. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning-Daniel and I will meet you there.” (They meant Dead Woman Dam, though young Dan knew that neither man would say it.)

“We can all go in my truck,” Ketchum said.

“I’ll drive Daniel with me, in case you’re not quite sober,” Dominic replied.

Ketchum pushed his clean plate away; he rested his shaggy head on the countertop and stared at his cast. “You’ll meet me at the mill-pond, you mean?” Ketchum asked.

“I don’t call it that,” the cook said. “The dam was there before the mill. How can they call it a pond, when it’s where the river narrows?”

“You know mill people,” Ketchum said with contempt.

“The dam was there before the mill,” Dominic repeated, still not naming the dam.

“One day the water will breach that dam, and they won’t bother to build another one,” Ketchum said; his eyes were closing.

“One day they won’t be driving logs on Twisted River,” the cook said. “They won’t need a dam where the river runs into the reservoir, though I believe they’ll keep the Pontook Dam on the Androscoggin.”

“One day soon , Cookie,” Ketchum corrected him. His eyes were closed-his head, his chest, and both his arms were sprawled on the countertop. The cook quietly removed the clean plate, but Ketchum wasn’t asleep; he spoke more slowly than before. “There’s a sort of spillway off to one side of the dam. The water makes a pool-it’s almost like an open well-but there’s a kind of containment boom, just a rope with floats, to keep the logs out.”

“It sounds like you remember it as exactly as I do,” Dominic told him.

That was where they’d found his mother, Danny knew. Her body floated lower in the water than the logs; she must have drifted under the containment boom and into the spillway. Ketchum had found her all alone in the pool, or the well-not a log around her.