Last Night In Twisted River

CHAPTER 14. KETCHUM’S LEFT HAND

KETCHUM HAD BEEN HUNTING BEAR. HE’D DRIVEN HIS truck to Wilsons Mills, Maine, and he and Hero had taken the Suzuki ATV back into New Hampshire -crossing the border about parallel to Half Mile Falls on the Dead Diamond River, where Ketchum bagged a big male black bear. His weapon of choice for bear was the short-barreled, lightweight rifle Danny’s friend Barrett had (years ago) preferred for deer: a Remington.30-06 Springfield, a carbine, what Ketchum called “my old-reliable, bolt-action sucker.” (The model had been discontinued in 1940.)

Ketchum had some difficulty bringing the bear back across the border, the all-terrain vehicle notwithstanding. “Let’s just say Hero had to walk a fair distance,” Ketchum would tell Danny. When Ketchum said “walk,” this probably meant that the dog had to run the whole way. But it was the first weekend of bear season when hounds were permitted; that fine animal was excited enough to not mind running after Ketchum’s ATV. Anyway, counting Ketchum and the dead bear, there’d been no room for Hero on the Suzuki.

“It might be dark on Monday before Hero and I get home,” Ketchum had warned Danny. There would be no locating the old logger over the long weekend; Danny didn’t even try. Ketchum had gradually accepted the telephone and the fax machine, but-at eighty-four-the former river driver would never own a cell phone. (Not that there were a lot of cell phones in the Great North Woods in ’01.)

Besides, Danny’s flight from Toronto had been delayed; by the time he’d landed in Boston and had rented the car, the leisurely cup of coffee he’d planned with Paul Polcari and Tony Molinari turned into a quick lunch. It would be early afternoon before Danny and Carmella Del Popolo left the North End. Of course the roads were in better shape than they’d been in 1954, when the cook and his twelve-year-old son had made that trip in the other direction, but northern New Hampshire was still “a fair distance” (as Ketchum would say) from the North End of Boston, and it was late afternoon when Danny and Carmella passed the Pontook Reservoir and followed the upper Androscoggin along Route 16 to Errol.

When they drove by the reservoir, Danny recognized Dummer Pond Road -from when it had been a haul road-but all he said to Carmella was: “We’ll be coming back here with Ketchum tomorrow.”

Carmella nodded; she just looked out the passenger-side window at the Androscoggin. Maybe ten miles later, she said: “That’s a powerful-looking river.” Danny was glad she wasn’t seeing the river in March or April; the Androscoggin was a torrent in mud season.

Ketchum had told Danny that September was the best time of year for them to come-for Carmella, especially. There was a good chance for fair weather, the nights were growing cooler, the bugs were gone, and it was too soon for snow. But as far north as Coos County, the leaves were turning color in late August. That second Monday in September, it already looked like fall, and there was a nip in the air by late afternoon.

Ketchum had been worried about Carmella’s mobility in the woods. “I can drive us most of the way, but it will entail a little walking to get to the right place on the riverbank,” Ketchum had said.

In his mind’s eye, Danny could see the place Ketchum meant-an elevated site, overlooking the basin above the river bend. What he couldn’t quite imagine was how different it would be-with the cookhouse entirely gone, and the town of Twisted River burned to the ground. But Dominic Baciagalupo hadn’t wanted his ashes scattered where the cookhouse was, or anywhere near the town; the cook had requested that his ashes be sunk in the river, in the basin where his not-really-a-cousin Rosie had slipped under the breaking ice. It was almost exactly the same spot where Angelù Del Popolo had gone under the logs. That, of course, was really why Carmella had come; those many years ago (thirty-four, if Danny was doing the math correctly), Ketchum had invited Carmella to Twisted River.

“If, one day, you ever want to see the place where your boy perished, I would be honored to show you,” was how Ketchum had put it to her. Carmella had so wanted to see the river basin where the accident happened, but not the logs; she knew the logs would be too much for her. Just the riverbank, where her dear Gamba and young Dan had stood and seen it happen-and maybe the exact spot in the water where her one-and-only Angelù hadn’t surfaced. Yes, she might one day want to see that, Carmella had thought.

“Thank you, Mr. Ketchum,” she’d said that day, when the logger and the cook were leaving Boston. “If you ever want to see me-” Carmella had started to say to Dominic.

“I know,” the cook had said to her, but he wouldn’t look at her.

Now, on the occasion of Danny bringing his father’s ashes to Twisted River, Ketchum had insisted that the writer bring Carmella, too. When Danny had first met Angel’s mom, the twelve-year-old had noted her big breasts, big hips, big smile-knowing that only Carmella’s smile had been bigger than Injun Jane’s. Now the writer knew that Carmella was at least as old as Ketchum, or a little older; she would have been in her mid-eighties, Danny guessed. Her hair had turned completely white-even her eyebrows were white, in striking contrast to her olive complexion and her apparently robust good health. Carmella was big all over, but she was still more feminine than Jane had ever been. And however happy she was with the new fella in her life-Paul Polcari and Tony Molinari continued to insist that she was-she’d held on to the Del Popolo name, perhaps out of respect for the fact that she had lost both the drowned fisherman and her precious only child.

Yet on the long drive north, there’d been no bewailing her beloved Angelù-and only one comment from Carmella on the cook’s passing. “I lost my dear Gamba years ago, Secondo-now you’ve lost him, too!” Carmella had said, with tears in her eyes. But she’d quickly recovered herself; for the rest of the trip, Carmella gave Danny no indication that she was even thinking about where they were going, and why.

Carmella continued to refer to Dominic by his nickname, Gamba-just as she called Danny Secondo, as if Danny were (in her heart) still her surrogate son; it appeared she’d long ago forgiven him for spying on her in the bathtub. He could not imagine doing so now, but he didn’t say so; instead, Danny rather formally apologized to Carmella for his behavior all those years ago.

“Nonsense, Secondo-I suppose I was flattered,” Carmella told him in the car, with a dismissive wave of her plump hand. “I only worried that the sight of me would have a damaging effect on you-that you might be permanently attracted to fat, older women.”

Danny sensed that this might have been an invitation for him to proclaim that he was not (and had never been) attracted to such women, though in truth-after Katie, who was preternaturally small-many of the women in his life had been large. By the stick-figure standards of contemporary women’s fashion, Danny thought that even Charlotte -indisputably, the love of his life-might have been considered overweight.

Like his dad, Danny was small, and while the writer didn’t respond to Carmella’s comment, he found himself wondering if perhaps he was more at ease with women who were bigger than he was. (Not that spying on Carmella in a bathtub, or killing Injun Jane with a skillet, had anything to do with it!)

“I wonder if you’re seeing someone now-someone special, that is,” Carmella said, after a pause of a mile or more.

“No one special,” Danny replied.

“If I can still count, you’re almost sixty,” Carmella told him. (Danny was fifty-nine.) “Your dad always wanted you to be with someone who was right for you.”

“I was, but she moved on,” Danny told her.

Carmella sighed. She had brought her melancholy with her in the car; what was melancholic about Carmella, together with her undefined disapproval of Danny, had traveled with them all the way from Boston. Danny had detected the latter’s presence as strongly as Carmella’s engaging scent-either a mild, nonspecific perfume or a smell as naturally appealing as freshly baked bread.

“Besides,” Danny went on, “my dad wasn’t with anyone special-not after he was my age.” After a pause, while Carmella waited, Danny added: “And Pop was never with anyone as right for him as you.”

Carmella sighed again, as if to note (ambiguously) both her pleasure and displeasure-she was displeased by her failure to steer the conversation where she’d wanted it to go. The subject of what was wrong with Danny evidently weighed on her. Now Danny waited for what she would say next; it was only a matter of time, he knew, before Carmella would raise the more delicate matter of what was wrong with his writing.

ALL THE WAY FROM BOSTON, he’d found Carmella’s conversation dull-the self-righteousness of her old age was depressing. She would lose her way in what she was saying, and then blame Danny for her bewilderment; she implied that he wasn’t paying sufficient attention to her, or that he was deliberately confusing her. His dad, Danny realized, had remained sharp by comparison. While Ketchum grew deafer by the minute, and his ranting was more explosive-and though the old logger was close to Carmella’s age-Danny instinctively forgave him. After all, Ketchum had always been crazy. Hadn’t the veteran riverman been cranky and illogical when he was young? Danny was thinking to himself.

Just then, in the high-contrast, late-afternoon light, they drove past the small sign for ANDROSCOGGIN TAXIDERMY. “My goodness-’Moose Antlers for Sale,’” Carmella said aloud, attempting to read more minutiae from the sign. (She’d said, “My goodness,” every minute of the drive north, Danny reflected with irritation.)

“Want to stop and buy a stuffed dead animal?” he asked her.

“Just so long as it’s before dark!” Carmella answered, laughing; she patted his knee affectionately, and Danny felt ashamed for resenting her company. He’d loved her as a child and as a young man, and he had no doubt that she loved him-she’d positively adored his dad. Yet Danny found her tiresome now, and he hadn’t wanted her along on this trip. It was Ketchum’s idea to show her where Angel had died; Danny realized that he’d wanted Ketchum for himself. Seeing his dad’s ashes sunk in Twisted River, which was what the cook had wanted, mattered more to Danny than Ketchum making good on his promise to escort Carmella to the basin above the river bend, where her Angelù was lost. It made Danny feel ungenerous that he thought of Carmella as both a burden and a distraction; it made him feel unkind, but he believed, for the first time, that Paul Polcari and Tony Molinari hadn’t been kidding. Carmella truly must be happy-with her new fella and her life. (Nothing but happiness could explain why she was so boring!)

But hadn’t Carmella lost three loved ones, counting the cook-her one and only child among them? How could Danny, who had lost an only child himself, not see Carmella as a sympathetic soul? He did see her as “sympathetic,” of course! Danny just didn’t want to be with Carmella-not at this moment, when the dual missions of sinking his father’s ashes and being with Ketchum were entirely enough.

“Where are they?” Carmella asked, as they drove into Errol.

“Where are what?” Danny said. (They’d just been talking about taxidermy! Did she mean, Where are the dead stuffed animals?)

“Where are Gamba’s remains-his ashes?” Carmella asked.

“In a nonbreakable container, a jar-it’s a kind of plastic, not glass,” Danny answered, somewhat evasively.

“In your luggage, in the trunk of the car?” Carmella asked him.

“Yes.” Danny didn’t want to tell her more about the container itself-what the contents of the jar used to be, and so forth. Besides, they were coming into the town-such as it was-and while it was still light, Danny wanted to get his bearings and have a look around. That way, it would be easier to find Ketchum in the morning.

“I’ll see you bright and early Tuesday,” the old logger had said.

“What’s ‘bright and early’?” Danny asked.

“Before seven, at the latest,” Ketchum said.

“Before eight, if we’re lucky,” Danny told him. Danny had his concerns about how bright and early Carmella could get up and be fully functioning-not to mention that they were spending the night a few miles out of town. There was no proper place for them to stay in Errol, Ketchum had assured Danny. The logger had recommended a resort hotel in Dixville Notch.

From what Danny and Carmella could see of Errol, Ketchum had been right. They took the road toward Umbagog, past a general store, which was a liquor store, too; there was a bridge over the Androscoggin at the east end of town, and a fire station just west of the bridge, where Danny turned the car around. Driving back through town, they passed the Errol elementary school-they’d not noticed it the first time. There was also a restaurant called Northern Exposure, but the most prosperous-looking place in Errol was a sporting-goods store called L. L. Cote.

“Let’s have a look inside,” Danny suggested to Carmella.

“Just so long as it’s before dark!” she said again. Carmella had been one of the earliest erotic stimulations of his life. How could she have become such a repetitious old woman? Danny was thinking.

They both regarded the sign on the door of the sporting-goods store with trepidation.

PLEASE NO LOADED FIREARMS INSIDE

“My goodness,” Carmella said; they hesitated, albeit briefly, at the door.

L. L. Cote sold snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles; inside there were dead stuffed animals, the regional species, enough to suggest that the local taxidermist was kept busy. (Bear, deer, lynx, fox, fisher cat, moose, porcupine, skunk-a host of “critters,” Ketchum would have said-in addition to all the ducks and the birds of prey.) There were more guns than any other single item; Carmella recoiled from such a display of lethal weaponry. A large selection of Browning knives caused Danny to reflect that probably Ketchum’s big Browning knife had been purchased here. There was also quite a collection of scent-elimination clothing, which Danny tried to explain to Carmella.

“So that the hunters don’t smell like people,” Danny told her.

“My goodness,” Carmella said.

“Can I help you folks?” an old man asked them suspiciously.

He was an unlikely-looking salesman, with a Browning knife on his belt and a portly appearance. His belly hung over his belt buckle, and his red-and-black flannel shirt was reminiscent of what Ketchum usually wore-the salesman’s camouflage fleece vest notwithstanding. (Ketchum wouldn’t have been caught dead in camouflage. “It’s not like a war,” the woodsman had said. “The critters can’t shoot back.”)

“I could use some directions, maybe,” Danny said to the salesman. “We have to find Lost Nation Road, but not until tomorrow morning.”

“It ain’t called that no more-not for a long time,” the salesman said, his suspicion deepening.

“I was told it’s off the road to Akers Pond-” Danny started to say, but the salesman interrupted him.

“It is, but it ain’t called Lost Nation-almost nobody calls it that, not nowadays.”

“Does the road have a new name, then?” Danny asked.

The salesman was eyeing Carmella disagreeably. “It don’t have a name-there’s just a sign that says somethin’ about small engine repairs. It’s the first thing you come to, off Akers Pond Road -you can’t miss it,” the old man said, but not encouragingly.

“Well, I’m sure we’ll find it,” Danny told him. “Thank you.”

“Who are you lookin’ for?” the salesman asked, still staring at Carmella.

“Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella answered.

“Ketchum would call it Lost Nation Road!” the salesman said emphatically, as if that settled everything that was wrong with the name. “Is Ketchum expectin’ you?” the old man asked Danny.

“Yes, actually, he is, but not until tomorrow morning,” Danny repeated.

“I wouldn’t pay a visit to Ketchum if he wasn’t expectin’ me,” the salesman said. “Not if I was you.”

“Thank you again,” Danny told the old man, taking Carmella’s arm. They were trying to leave L. L. Cote’s, but the salesman stopped them.

“Only an Injun would call it Lost Nation Road,” he said. “That proves it!”

“Proves what?” Danny asked him. “Ketchum isn’t an Indian.”

“Ha!” the salesman scoffed. “Half-breeds are Injuns!”

Danny could sense Carmella’s rising indignation-almost as physically as he could feel her weight against his arm. He had managed to steer her to the door of the sporting-goods store when the salesman called after them. “That fella Ketchum is a Lost Nation unto himself!” the salesman shouted. Then, as if he’d thought better of it-and with a certain measure of panic in the afterthought-he added: “Don’t tell him I said so.”

“I suppose Ketchum shops here, from time to time-doesn’t he?” Danny asked; he was enjoying the fat old salesman’s moment of fear.

“His money’s as good as anybody’s, isn’t it?” the salesman said sourly.

“I’ll tell him you said so,” Danny said, guiding Carmella out the door.

“Is Mr. Ketchum an Indian?” she asked Danny, when they were back in the car.

“I don’t know-maybe partly,” Danny answered. “I never asked him.”

“My goodness-I’ve never seen a bearded Indian,” Carmella said. “Not in the movies, anyway.”

THEY DROVE WEST OUT OF TOWN on Route 26. There was something called the Errol Cream Barrel & Chuck Wagon, and what appeared to be an immaculately well-kept campground and trailer park called Saw Dust Alley. They passed the Umbagog Snowmobile Association, too. That seemed to be about it for Errol. Danny didn’t turn off the highway at Akers Pond Road; he simply noted where it was. He was sure Ketchum would be easy to find in the morning-Lost Nation or no Lost Nation.

A moment later, just as it was growing dark, they drove alongside a field encircled by a high fence. Naturally, Carmella read the sign on the fence out loud. “‘Please Do Not Harass the Buffalo ’-well, my goodness, who would do such a thing?” she said, indignant as ever. But they saw no buffalo-only the fence and the sign.

The resort hotel in Dixville Notch was called The Balsams-for hikers and golfers in the warm-weather months, Danny supposed. (In the winter, for skiers certainly.) It was vast, and largely uninhabited on a Monday night. Danny and Carmella were practically alone in the dining room, where Carmella sighed deeply after they’d ordered their dinner. She had a glass of red wine. Danny had a beer. He’d stopped drinking red wine after his dad died, though Ketchum gave him endless shit about his decision to drink only beer. “You don’t have to lay off the red wine now!” Ketchum had shouted at him.

“I don’t care if I can’t sleep anymore,” Danny had told the old logger.

Now Carmella, after sighing, appeared to be holding her breath before beginning. “I guess it goes without saying that I’ve read all your books-more than once,” she began.

“Really?” Danny asked her, feigning innocence of where this conversation was headed.

“Of course I have!” Carmella cried. For someone who’s so happy, what is she angry with me for? Danny was wondering, when Carmella said, “Oh, Secondo-your dad was so proud of you, for being a famous writer and everything.”

It was Danny’s turn to sigh; he held his breath, for just a second or two. “And you?” he asked her, not so innocently this time.

“It’s just that your stories, and sometimes the characters themselves, are so-what is the word I’m looking for?-unsavory,” Carmella started in, but she must have seen something in Danny’s face that made her stop.

“I see,” he said. Danny might have looked at her as if she were another interviewer, some journalist who hadn’t done her homework, and whatever Carmella really thought about his writing, it suddenly wasn’t worth it to her to say this to him-not to her darling Secondo, her surrogate son-for hadn’t the world hurt him as much as it had hurt her?

“Tell me what you’re writing now, Secondo,” Carmella suddenly blurted out, smiling warmly at him. “You’ve been rather a long time between books again-haven’t you? Tell me what you’re up to. I’m just dying to know what’s next!”

NOT MUCH LATER, after Carmella went to bed, some men were watching Monday Night Football at the bar, but Danny had already gone to his room, where he left the television dark. He also left the curtains open, confident in how lightly he slept-knowing that the early-morning light would wake him. He was only a little worried about getting Carmella up and going in the morning; Danny knew that Ketchum would wait for them if they were late. The lamp on the night table was on, as Danny lay in bed, and there on the table, too, was the jar containing his father’s ashes. It would be Danny’s last night with the cook’s ashes, and he lay looking at them-as if they might suddenly speak, or give him some other indication of his dad’s last wishes.

“Well, Pop, I know you said you wanted this, but I hope you haven’t changed your mind,” Danny spoke up in the hotel room. As for the ashes, they were in what was formerly a container of Amos’ New York Steak Spice-the listed ingredients had once been sea salt, pepper, herbs, and spices-and the cook must have bought it at his favorite fancy meat market in their neighborhood of Toronto, because Olliffe was the name on the label.

Danny had gotten rid of most, but not all, of the contents; after he’d placed his father’s ashes in, there’d been room to put some of the herbs and spices back in as well, and Danny had done so. If someone had questioned him about the container at U.S. Customs-if they’d opened the jar and had a whiff-it still would have smelled like steak spice. (Perhaps the pepper would have made the customs officer sneeze!)

But Danny had brought the cook’s ashes through U.S. Customs without any questioning. Now he sat up in bed and opened the jar, cautiously sniffing the contents. Knowing what was in the container, Danny wouldn’t have wanted to sprinkle it on a steak, but it still smelled like pepper and herbs and spices-it even looked like crushed herbs and a variety of spices, not human ashes. How fitting for a cook, that his remains had taken up residency in a jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice!

Dominic Baciagalupo, his writer son thought, might have gotten a kick out of that.

Danny turned out the lamp on the night table and lay in bed in the dark. “Last chance, Pop,” he whispered in the quiet room. “If you don’t have anything else to say, we’re going back to Twisted River.” But the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, maintained their silence.

DANNY ANGEL ONCE WENT ELEVEN YEARS between novels-between East of Bangor and Baby in the Road. Again, a death in the family would delay him, though Carmella had been wrong to suggest that the writer was once more taking “rather a long time between books.” It had been only six years since his most recent novel was published.

As had happened with Joe, after the cook was murdered, the novel Danny had been writing suddenly looked inconsequential to him. But this time there was no thought of revising the book-he’d simply thrown it away, all of it. And he had started a new and completely different novel, almost immediately. The new writing emerged from those months when what remained of his privacy had been taken from him; the writing itself was like a landscape suddenly and sharply liberated from a fog.

“The publicity was awful,” Carmella bluntly said, at dinner. But this time, Danny had expected the publicity. After all, a famous writer’s father had been murdered, and the writer himself had shot the killer-irrefutably, in self-defense. What’s more, Danny Angel and his dad had been on the run for nearly forty-seven years. The internationally bestselling author had left the United States for Canada, but not for political reasons-just as Danny always claimed, without revealing the actual circumstances. He and his dad had been running away from a crazy ex-cop!

Naturally, there were those in the American media who would say that the cook and his son should have gone to the police in the first place. (Did they miss the fact that Carl was the police?) Of course the Canadian press was indignant that “American violence” had followed the famous author and his father across the border. In retrospect, this was really a reference to the guns themselves-both the cowboy’s absurd Colt.45 and Ketchum’s Christmas present to Danny, the Winchester 20-gauge that had blown away the deputy sheriff’s throat. And in Canada, much was made of the fact that the writer’s possession of the shotgun was illegal. In the end, Danny wasn’t charged. Ketchum’s 20-gauge Ranger had been confiscated-that was all.

“That shotgun saved your life!” Ketchum had bellowed to Danny. “And it was a present, for Christ’s sake! Who confiscated it? I’ll blow his balls off!”

“Let it go, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I don’t need a shotgun, not anymore.”

“You have fans-and whatever their opposites are called-don’t you?” the old logger pointed out. “Some critters among them, I’ll bet.”

As for the question Danny was asked the most, by both the American and the Canadian media, it was: “Are you going to write about this?”

He’d learned to be icy in answering the oft-repeated question. “Not immediately,” Danny always said.

“But are you going to write about it?” Carmella had asked him again, over dinner.

He talked about the book he was writing instead. It was going well. In fact, he was writing like the wind-the words wouldn’t stop. This one would be another long novel, but Danny didn’t think it would take long to write. He didn’t know why it was coming so easily; from the first sentence, the story had flowed. He quoted the first sentence to Carmella. (Later, Danny would realize what a fool he’d been-to have expected her to be impressed!) “‘In the closed restaurant, after hours, the late cook’s son-the maestro’s sole surviving family member-worked in the dark kitchen.’” And from that mysterious beginning, Danny had composed the novel’s title: In the After-Hours Restaurant.

To the writer’s thinking, Carmella’s reaction was as predictable as her conversation. “It’s about Gamba?” she asked.

No, he tried to explain; the story was about a man who’s lived in the shadow of his famous father, a masterful cook who has recently died and left his only son (already in his sixties) a lost and furtive soul. In the rest of the world’s judgment, the son seems somewhat retarded. He’s lived his whole life with his father; he has worked as a sous chef to his dad in the restaurant the well-respected cook made famous. Now alone, the son has never paid his own bills before; he’s not once bought his own clothes. While the restaurant continues to employ him, perhaps out of a lingering mourning for the deceased cook, the son is virtually worthless as a sous chef without his father’s guidance. Soon the restaurant will be forced to fire him, or else demote him to being a dishwasher.

What the son discovers, however, is that he can “contact” the dead cook’s spirit by cooking up a storm in the nighttime kitchen-but only after the restaurant is closed. There, long after hours, the son secretly slaves to teach himself his dad’s recipes-everything the sous chef failed to learn from his father when the great cook was alive. And when the former sous chef masters a recipe to his dad’s satisfaction, the spirit of the deceased cook advises his son on more practical matters-where to buy his clothes, what bills to pay first, how often and by whom the car should be serviced. (His father’s ghost, the son soon realizes, has forgotten a few things-such as the fact that his somewhat retarded son never learned to drive a car.)

“Gamba is a ghost?” Carmella cried.

“I suppose I could have called the novel The Retarded Sous Chef,” Danny said sarcastically, “but I thought In the After-Hours Restaurant was a better title.”

“Secondo, someone might think it’s a cookbook,” Carmella cautioned him.

Well, what could he say? Surely no one would think a new novel by Danny Angel was a cookbook! Danny stopped talking about the story; to placate Carmella, he told her what the dedication was. “My father, Dominic Baciagalupo-in memoriam.” This would be his second dedication to his dad, bringing the number of dedications “in memoriam” up to four. Predictably, Carmella burst into tears. There was a certain safety, a familiar kind of comfort, in her tears; Carmella seemed almost happy when she was crying, or at least her disapproval of Danny was somewhat abated by her sorrow.

As he lay awake in bed now, with little confidence that he would fall asleep, Danny wondered why he’d tried so hard to make Carmella understand what he was writing. Why had he bothered? Okay, so she’d asked what he was writing-she had even said she was dying to know what was next! But he’d been a storyteller forever; Danny had always known how to change the subject.

As he drifted-ever so lightly-to sleep, Danny imagined the son (the tentative sous chef) in the after-hours kitchen, where his father’s ghost instructs him. Similar to Ketchum before the logger learned to read, the son makes lists of words he is struggling to recognize and remember; this night, the son is obsessed with pasta. “Orecchiette,” he writes, “means ‘little ears.’ They are small and disk-shaped.” Bit by bit, the sous chef is becoming a cook-if it isn’t too late, if his dead father’s restaurant will only give him more time to learn! “Farfalle,” the somewhat retarded son writes, “means ‘butterflies,’ but my dad also called them bow ties.”

In his half-sleep, Danny was up to the chapter where the cook’s ghost speaks very personally to his son. “I had so wanted for you to be married, with children of your own. You would be a wonderful father! But you like the kind of woman who is-”

Is what? Danny was thinking. A new waitress has been added to the waitstaff in the haunted restaurant; she is precisely “the kind of woman” the cook’s ghost is trying to warn his son about. But at last the writer fell asleep; only then did the story stop.

THE POLICE BUSINESS concerning the double shooting in Toronto was finished; even the most egregious morons in the media had finally backed off. After all, the bloodbath had happened almost nine months ago-not quite the duration of a pregnancy. Only Danny’s mail had continued to discuss it-the sympathy letters, and whatever their opposite was.

That mail about the cook’s murder and the subsequent shooting of his killer had persisted-condolences, for the most part, though not all the letters were kind. Danny read every word of them, but he’d not yet received the letter he was looking for-nor did he seriously expect that he would ever hear from Lady Sky again. This didn’t stop Danny from dreaming about her-that vertical strip of the strawberry blonde’s pubic hair, the bright white scar from her cesarean section, the imagined histories of her unexplained tattoos. Little Joe had given her a superhero’s name, but was Lady Sky an actual warrior-or, in a previous life, had she been one? Danny could only imagine that Amy’s life had been different once. Doesn’t something have to happen to you before you jump naked out of an airplane? And after you’ve jumped, what more can happen to you? Danny would wonder.

That Amy had written him once, after Joe died, and that she’d also lost a child-well, that was one of life’s missed connections, wasn’t it? Since he’d not written her back, why would she write him again? But Danny read his mail, all of it-answering not a single letter-in the diminishing hope that he would hear from Amy. Danny didn’t even know why he wanted to hear from her, but he couldn’t forget her.

“If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky had told little Joe, kissing the two-year-old’s forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy.” So much for the promises of angels who drop naked out of the sky, though-to be fair-Amy had told them she was only an angel “sometimes.” Indeed, most persistently in Danny’s dreams, Lady Sky didn’t always make herself available as an angel-obviously, not on that snowy night when Joe and the wild blow-job girl met the blue Mustang going over Berthoud Pass.

“I would like to see you again, Amy,” Danny Angel said aloud, in the writer’s fragile sleep, but there was no one to hear him in the dark-only his father’s silent ashes. Evidently, in the drama enacted that night in that hotel room, the cook’s ashes-at rest in the jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice-had been given a nonspeaking part.

DANNY AWOKE WITH A START; the early-morning light seemed too bright. He thought he was already late for his meeting with Ketchum, but he wasn’t. Danny called Carmella in her hotel room. He was surprised at how wide awake she sounded, as if she’d been anticipating his call. “The bathtub is much too small, Secondo, but I managed somehow,” Carmella told him. She was waiting for him in the vast and almost empty dining hall when he went downstairs for breakfast.

Ketchum had been right about visiting in September; it was going to be quite a beautiful day in the northeastern United States. Even as Danny and Carmella drove away from The Balsams at that early-morning hour, the sun was bright, the sky a vivid and cloudless blue. A few fallen maple leaves dotted Akers Pond Road with reds and yellows. Danny and Carmella had told the resort hotel that they would be staying a second night in Dixville Notch. “Maybe Mr. Ketchum will join us for dinner tonight,” Carmella said to Danny in the car.

“Maybe,” Danny answered her; he doubted that The Balsams was Ketchum’s kind of place. The hotel had an oversize appearance, an ambience that possibly catered to conventions; Ketchum wasn’t the conventioneer type.

They quickly came upon the sign that said SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. “I’m at the end of the road,” was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering) BEWARE OF THE DOG. But there was no dog-no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality-namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.

“I think I know the dog,” Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. “His name is Hero, and he’s not really a bad dog-not that I’ve seen.”

The road went on, growing narrower-till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he’d definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.

“Looks like a dead end ahead,” Carmella said; she put her plump hands on the dashboard, as if to ward off a pending collision. But the road ended at a clearing, one that could have been mistaken for a dump-or perhaps it was a graveyard for abandoned trucks and trailers. Many of the trucks had been dissected for their parts. Several outbuildings were scattered throughout the premises; one weather-beaten shack had the appearance of a log-cabin smokehouse, from which so much smoke seeped through the cracks between the logs that the entire building looked as if it were about to burst into flames. A smaller, more focused column of smoke rose from a stovepipe atop a trailer-a former wanigan, Danny recognized. Probably, a woodstove was in the wanigan.

Danny shut off the car and listened for the dog. (He had forgotten that Hero didn’t bark.) Carmella rolled down her window. “Mr. Ketchum must be cooking something,” she said, sniffing the air. From the bearskin, stretched taut on a clothesline between two trailers, Danny assumed that the skinned bear was in the smokehouse-not exactly “cooking.”

“A fella I know butchers my bears for me, if I give him some of the meat,” Ketchum had told Danny, “but, especially in warm weather, I always smoke the bears first.” From the aroma in the air, it was definitely a bear that was smoking, Danny thought. He opened the driver’s-side door cautiously-on the lookout for Hero, assuming that the hound might see his designated role as that of guarding the smoking bear. But no dog emerged from one of the outbuildings, or from behind any of several sheltering piles of wreckage.

“Ketchum!” Danny called.

“Who wants to know?” they heard Ketchum shout, before the door opened to the wanigan with the smoking stovepipe. Ketchum quickly put the rifle away.

“Well, you aren’t as late as you thought you would be!” he hailed them, in a friendly fashion. “It’s nice to see you again, Carmella,” he told her, almost flirtatiously.

“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Ketchum,” she said.

“Come on in and have some coffee,” Ketchum told them. “Bring Cookie’s ashes with you, Danny-I want to see what you’ve got them in.”

Carmella was curious to see the container, too. They had to pass the strong-smelling bearskin on the clothesline before entering the wanigan, and Carmella looked away from the bear’s severed head; it was still attached to the pelt, but the head hung nose-down, almost touching the ground, and a bright globe of blood had bubbled and congealed. Where the blood had once dripped from the bear’s nostrils, it now resembled a Christmas ornament attached to the dead animal’s nose.

“‘Amos’ New York Steak Spice,’” Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. “Well, that’s a fine choice. If you don’t mind, Danny, I’m going to put the ashes in a glass jar-you’ll see why when we get there.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he’d been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.

Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He’d put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not-strong and sweet, and a little silty, “like Turkish coffee,” Carmella commented.

She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept-surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn’t see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal-as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.

Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound’s wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear’s claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero’s hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.

“I didn’t realize that Hero had lost half an ear,” Ketchum told them. “There was so much blood yesterday, I thought the whole ear was still there. It was only when the ear stopped bleeding a bit that I could see it was half gone!”

“My goodness-” Carmella started to say.

“Shouldn’t you take him to a vet?” Danny asked.

“Hero isn’t friendly to the vet,” Ketchum said. “We’ll take Hero to Six-Pack on our way to the river. Pam’s got some gunk that works good for claw wounds, and I’ve got an antibiotic for the ear-while what’s left of it is healing. Doesn’t it serve you right, Hero?” Ketchum asked the dog. “I told you-you were too far ahead of me! The fool dog got to the bear while I was out of range!” Ketchum explained to Carmella.

“The poor creature,” was all she could say.

“Oh, he’ll be fine-I’ll just feed him some of the bear meat!” Ketchum told her. “Let’s get going,” he said to Danny, taking the Remington.30-06 Springfield down from two pegs on the wall; he lowered the carbine across one forearm and headed for the wanigan’s door. “Come on, Hero,” he called to the hound, who rose stiffly from the dog bed and limped after him.

“What’s the gun for? It looks like you got your bear,” Danny said.

“You’ll see,” Ketchum told him.

“You’re not going to shoot anything, are you, Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked him.

“Only if there’s a critter in need of shooting,” Ketchum answered her. Then, as if to change the subject, Ketchum said to Danny: “I don’t imagine you’ve seen a skinned bear without its head. In that condition, a bear resembles a man. Not something for you to see, I think,” the logger added quickly, to Carmella.

“Stay!” Ketchum said suddenly, to Hero, and the dog froze alongside Carmella, who had stopped in her tracks, too.

In the smokehouse, the skinned bear was suspended above the smoldering fire pit like a giant bat. Without a head, the bear indeed resembled a hulking man-not that the writer had ever seen a skinned man before. “Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Ketchum said to Danny, who was speechless.

They went out of the smokehouse and saw Carmella and the bear hound, standing transfixed exactly where they’d left them-as if only a violent change in the weather would have persuaded the woman and the dog to rethink their positions. “Come on, Hero,” Ketchum said, and Carmella dutifully followed the hound to the truck-as if the old river driver had also spoken to her. Ketchum lifted Hero, putting the injured dog in the back of the pickup.

“You’ll have to indulge Six-Pack, Danny,” Ketchum was saying, as they got into the cab of his truck-Carmella taking up more than her share of room, in the middle. “Pam has something she wants to say to you both,” Ketchum told them. “Six-Pack’s not a bad person, and I suspect she just wants to say she’s sorry. It was my fault that I couldn’t read, remember. I never blamed Pam for telling Carl what really happened to Injun Jane. It was the only thing Six-Pack had over the cowboy, and he must have made her use it.”

“I never blamed Six-Pack, either,” Danny told him; he tried to read Carmella’s expression, which seemed slightly offended, but she didn’t say anything. There was a bad smell in the cab; maybe the smell had offended Carmella.

“It won’t take too long, anyway-Six-Pack will have Hero to attend to,” Ketchum said to them. “Hero barely tolerates Pam’s dogs when he’s not all clawed up. This morning could be interesting.” They drove out the road advertising small engine repairs, though Danny somehow doubted that this was Ketchum’s sign, or that Ketchum had ever been in the business of repairing other people’s small engines; maybe the logger just fixed his own, but Danny didn’t ask. The smell was overpowering; it had to be the bear, but why had the bear been in the cab?

“We met a guy who knows you-a salesman at L. L. Cote,” Danny told Ketchum.

“Is that so?” the riverman said. “Was he a nice fella, or do I take it that you met the one asshole who works there?”

“I believe that’s the one we met, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. The horrible smell traveled with them; definitely the bear had been in the cab.

“Fat fella, always wears camouflage-that asshole?” Ketchum asked.

“That’s the one,” Danny said; the bear smell almost made him gag. “He seems to think you’re half-Indian.”

“Well, I don’t know what I am-or what the missing half of me is, anyway!” Ketchum thundered. “It’s fine with me if I’m half-Injun-or three-quarters-Injun, for that matter! Injuns are all a lost nation, which suits me fine, too!”

“That fella seemed to think your road was no longer called Lost Nation Road,” Danny told the old woodsman.

“I ought to skin that fella and smoke him with my bear!” Ketchum shouted. “But you know what?” he asked Carmella, more flirtatiously.

“What, Mr. Ketchum?” she asked him fearfully.

“That fella wouldn’t taste as good as bear!” Ketchum hollered, laughing. They swerved onto Akers Pond Road and headed to the highway. Danny held the new glass jar with his dad’s ashes tightly in his lap; the old container, now empty, was pinched between his feet on the floor of the cab. The glass jar was bigger; the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, filled it only two-thirds full. It was once an apple-juice jar, Danny saw by the label.

Ketchum drove to that well-kept trailer park on Route 26, just outside Errol-the Saw Dust Alley campground, where Six-Pack Pam had a trailer. Six-Pack’s home, which was no longer mobile-it was set on cinder blocks, and half surrounded by a vegetable garden-was actually two trailers that had been joined together. A kennel kept the dogs out of the garden, and a large, hinged door of the kind cats usually use allowed Pam’s dogs free access between the kennel and the trailers. “I’ve tried to tell Six-Pack that a full-grown fella could come through that fucking dog door, though I suspect there’s no fella around here who would dare to,” Ketchum said. Hero had a hostile look about him as Ketchum lifted the dog from the back of the pickup. “Don’t get your balls crossed,” Ketchum told the hound.

Danny and Carmella had not seen Six-Pack, who was kneeling in her garden. On her knees, she was almost as tall as Carmella was standing. Pam got to her feet-unsteadily, and with the help of a rake. Danny only then remembered how big she was-not fat, but big-boned, and nearly as tall as Ketchum. “How’s your hip?” Ketchum asked her. “Getting up off your knees isn’t the best thing for it, I suppose.”

“My hip is better than your poor dog,” Six-Pack told him. “Come here, Hero,” she said to the hound, who went over to her. “Did you kill the bear all by yourself, or did this asshole hunter finally get around to shootin’ it?”

“This asshole bear hound got too far ahead of me. When Hero got to the bear, I wasn’t in range!” Ketchum complained again.

“Old Ketchum ain’t as fast as he used to be, is he, Hero?” Six-Pack said to the dog.

“I shot the damn bear,” Ketchum told her peevishly.

“No shit-of course you did!” Pam said. “If you hadn’t shot the damn bear, your poor dog would be dead!”

“I’m giving Hero an antibiotic for that ear,” the logger said to Six-Pack. “I thought you might put some of that gunk you’ve got on his claw wounds.”

“It ain’t gunk-it’s sulfa,” Six-Pack told him.

The dogs in the kennel were an overeager-looking lot-mongrels, for the most part, though there was one that appeared to be close to a purebred German shepherd. Hero had his eye on that one, even with a fence between them.

“I’m sorry for your business here, Danny,” Six-Pack Pam said. “I’m sorry for my part in it, however long ago it was,” she added, this time looking directly at Carmella when she spoke.

“It’s okay,” Danny said to Six-Pack. “There was no preventing it, I guess.”

“Everyone loses people,” Carmella told her.

“I kinda fancied Cookie, once,” Six-Pack said, now looking at Danny. “But he wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with me. I suppose that was part of what provoked me.”

“You had the hots for Cookie?” Ketchum asked her. “High time I heard of it, I guess!”

“I ain’t tellin’ you-I’m tellin’ him!” Six-Pack said, pointing at Danny. “I ain’t sayin’ I’m sorry to you, either,” Pam told Ketchum.

Ketchum kicked the ground with his boot. “Well, shit, we’ll be back for the dog later this morning-or maybe not till this afternoon,” he said to Six-Pack.

“It don’t matter when you come back,” Pam told him. “Hero will be fine with me-I ain’t plannin’ on huntin’ any bears with him!”

“I’ll have some bear meat for you shortly,” Ketchum said sullenly. “If you don’t like it, you can always feed those mutts with it.” Ketchum made a sudden gesture to the kennel when he uttered the mutts word, and Six-Pack’s dogs commenced barking at him.

“Ain’t it just like you, Ketchum, to get me in trouble with my neighbors?” Pam turned to Carmella and Danny when she said, “Would you believe he’s the only asshole who can be counted upon to drive my dogs crazy?”

“I can believe it,” Danny said, smiling.

“Shut up, all of you!” Six-Pack yelled at her dogs; they stopped barking and slunk away from the fence, all but the German shepherd, who kept his muzzle pressed against the fence and continued to stare at Hero, who stared back.

“I’d keep those two fellas separated, if I were you,” Ketchum said to Pam, pointing to his bear hound and the shepherd.

“Like I need you to tell me that!” Six-Pack said.

“Shit,” the logger said to her. “I’ll be in the truck,” Ketchum told Danny. “Stay!” he said to Hero, without looking in the hound’s direction; thus again, Ketchum managed to make Carmella turn to stone.

OLD AGE HADN’T BEEN GENTLE to Six-Pack, who was Ketchum’s age, though she was still a scary-looking bleached blonde. There was a scar on her upper lip-one Danny didn’t remember. In all likelihood, the new scar was one the cowboy had given her, the writer thought. (What was wrong with her hip might have been something the deputy had done to her, too.)

When the woodsman had shut himself in the cab of his truck and turned the radio on, Six-Pack said to Danny and Carmella: “I still love Ketchum, you know, though he don’t forgive me much-and he can be an awful asshole, when he’s judgin’ you for your faults, or for what you can’t help about yourself.”

Danny could only nod, and Carmella had been turned to stone; there was a momentary silence before Pam continued. “Talk to him, Danny. Tell him not to do somethin’ stupid to himself-to his left hand, for starters.”

“What about Ketchum’s left hand?” Danny asked her.

“Ask Ketchum about it,” Six-Pack said. “It ain’t my favorite subject. That left hand ain’t the one he ever touched me with!” she suddenly cried.

The old logger rolled down the window on the driver’s side of his truck. “Just shut up, Six-Pack, and let them leave for Christ’s sake!” he shouted; Pam’s dogs started barking again. “You already got to say you were sorry, didn’t you?” Ketchum called to her.

“Come on, Hero,” Six-Pack said to the bear hound. Pam turned and went into the trailer, with Hero limping stiffly after her.

It was still only a little after seven in the morning, and once Danny and Carmella had joined Ketchum in the truck, Six-Pack’s dogs stopped barking. There was half a cord of firewood in the bed of the pickup; the wood was covered by a durable-looking tarpaulin, and Ketchum had put his rifle under the tarp. Anyone following behind the pickup truck wouldn’t have seen the old bolt-action Remington, which was hidden in the woodpile. There was no hiding the bear smell in the cab, however.

A Kris Kristofferson song from the seventies was playing on the radio. Danny had always liked the song, and the singer-songwriter, but not even Kris Kristofferson on a beautiful morning could distract the writer from the powerful stench in Ketchum’s truck.

This could be our last good night together; We may never pass this way again .

When Ketchum steered the truck south on Route 16, with the Androscoggin now running parallel to them on the driver’s side of the vehicle, Danny reached across Carmella’s lap and turned off the radio. “What’s this I hear about your left hand?” the writer asked the old logger. “You’re not still thinking about cutting it off, are you?”

“Shit, Danny,” Ketchum said. “There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about it.”

“My goodness, Mr. Ketchum-” Carmella started to say, but Danny wouldn’t let her go on.

“Why the left hand, Ketchum?” Danny asked the woodsman. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

“Shit, Danny-I promised your dad I would never tell you!” Ketchum said. “Even though, I suspect, Cookie probably forgot all about it.”

Danny held the cook’s ashes in both hands and shook them. “What do you say, Pop?” Danny asked the silent ashes. “I’m not hearing Dad raise an objection, Ketchum,” Danny told the logger.

“Shit-I promised your mom, too!” Ketchum shouted.

Danny remembered what Injun Jane had told him. On the night his mother disappeared under the ice, Ketchum got hold of a cleaver in the cookhouse. He’d just stood in the kitchen with his left hand on a cutting board, holding the cleaver in his right hand. “Don’t,” Jane had told the river driver, but Ketchum kept staring at his left hand on the cutting board-imagining it gone, maybe. Jane had left Ketchum there; she’d needed to take care of Danny and his dad. Later, when Jane came back to the kitchen, Ketchum was gone. Jane had looked everywhere for the logger’s left hand; she’d been sure she was going to find it somewhere. “I didn’t want you or your father finding it,” she’d told young Dan.

Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way the riverman had stared at the cast on his right wrist, after Angel went under the logs.

Now they drove alongside the Androscoggin in silence, before Danny finally said: “I don’t care what you promised my dad or my mom, Ketchum. What I’m wondering is, if you hated yourself-if you were really taking yourself to task, or holding yourself accountable-wouldn’t you want to cut off your good hand?”

“My left hand is my good hand!” Ketchum cried.

Carmella cleared her throat; it might have been the awful bear smell. Without turning her head to look at either of them, but speaking instead to the dashboard of the truck-or perhaps to the silent radio-Carmella said: “Please tell us the story, Mr. Ketchum.”

CHAPTER 15. MOOSE DANCING

IT WAS NO SURPRISE TO DANNY THAT THE STORY OF KETCHUM’S left hand was not immediately forthcoming. By the time the truck passed the Pontook Reservoir-and Danny noted the familiar drain age into the fields, as they drove down Dummer Pond Road-it was obvious that Ketchum had his own agenda. The story revealing whatever curious logic had persuaded the old logger to consider his left hand his “good” one would have to wait. Danny also noticed that Ketchum drove past the former haul road to Twisted River.

“Are we going to Paris, for some reason?” the writer asked.

“ West Dummer,” Ketchum corrected him, “or what’s left of it.”

“Does anyone call it West Dummer anymore?” Danny asked.

“I do,” Ketchum answered.

Crossing the new bridge over Phillips Brook, they went the way young Dan had gone to school when Injun Jane was driving him. Long ago, it had seemed a never-ending trip from Twisted River to Paris; now the time and the road flew by, but not the bear smell.

“Don’t get your balls crossed about it, Danny, but the Paris Manufacturing Company School -the actual schoolhouse-is still standing,” Ketchum warned him. “Where the young writer-to-be spent a few of his formative years-getting the shit beat out of him, for the most part,” the woodsman explained to Carmella, who seemed to be struggling with the concept of crossed balls.

It’s probable that Carmella was simply fighting nausea; the combination of the rough surface of the dirt road with the rank smell in the truck’s cab must have made her feel sick. Danny, who was definitely nauseated, tried to ignore the bear hair drifting at their feet, blown about by the air from the open driver’s-side window of the lurching truck.

Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver’s-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the long, bent stick shift-in the area of Carmella’s knees. Ketchum’s left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.

Ketchum’s driving was a fairly fluid process, as seemingly natural and unplanned as the way his beard blew in the wind from the open driver’s-side window. (Had the window not been open, Danny was thinking, he and Carmella almost certainly would have thrown up.)

“Why didn’t you put the bear in the back of the pickup?” Danny asked Ketchum. The writer wondered if some essential hunting ritual were the reason for the slain bear riding in the cab of the truck.

“I was in Maine, remember?” Ketchum said. “I shot the bear in New Hampshire, but I had to drive in and out of Maine. I have New Hampshire plates on my truck. If the bear had been in the back of my pickup, some game warden or a Maine state trooper would have stopped me. I have a New Hampshire hunting license,” Ketchum explained.

“Where was Hero?” Danny asked.

“Hero was in the back of the pickup-he was bleeding all over,” Ketchum said. “Live critters bleed more than dead ones, because their hearts are still pumping,” the old logger told Carmella, who appeared to be suppressing a gag reflex. “I just buckled the bear in your seat belt, Danny, and pulled a hat over his ears. The beast’s head looked like it was stuffed between his shoulders-bears don’t have much in the way of necks-but I suppose we looked like two bearded fellas out driving around!”

Ketchum would have sat up taller in the cab than the dead bear, Danny realized. From a distance, the woodsman’s beard and long hair were as black as a black bear’s; you had to look closely at Ketchum to see the gray. Through the windshield of Ketchum’s approaching truck, especially if you’d been passing with any speed, probably Ketchum and the bear had looked like two young men with heavy beards-younger than Ketchum really was, anyway.

“Hell, I wiped the bear blood off the seat,” the river driver was saying, as the truck pulled into Paris. “I do wonder, though, how long the critter’s reek will last. Bears do smell something awful, don’t they?”

Ketchum dropped the truck down to first gear, his rough right hand briefly brushing one of Carmella’s knees. “I’m not trying to feel you up, Carmella,” the logger said to her. “I didn’t plan on my stick shift ending up between your legs! We’ll put Danny in the middle next time.”

Danny was looking all around for the steam-powered sawmill, but he couldn’t see it. Hardwood sawlogs had once been driven down Phillips Brook to Paris; the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine, had made toboggans, the writer remembered. But where was the old sawmill? What had happened to the horse hovel and the tool shops? There’d been a mess hall and a hostelry-a seventy-five-man bunkhouse, as Danny recalled-and what had appeared to be (at the time) a rather fancy-looking house for the mill manager. Now, as Ketchum stopped the truck, Danny saw that only the schoolhouse remained. The logging camp was gone.

“What happened to Paris?” Danny asked, getting out of the truck. He could hear Phillips Brook; it sounded just the same.

“ West Dummer!” Ketchum barked. He was striding toward the knoll where the mess hall had been. “Why they waited till ninety-six to take it down, I couldn’t tell you-and they did a piss-poor job of it, when they finally got around to the bulldozing!” the logger yelled. He bent down and picked up a rusted pot and pan, clanging them together. Danny followed him, leaving Carmella behind.

“They bulldozed it?” the writer asked. He could now see sharp shards of metal, from the sawmill, poking out of the ground like severed bones. The horse hovel had collapsed and was left in a pile; the seventy-five-man bunkhouse or hostelry had been churned half-underground, with the childlike remains of bunk beds scattered in the low-lying juniper. An old washstand stood like a scooped-out skeleton; there was an empty, circular hole where the washbasin had been. There was even the rusted hulk of a steam-engine Lombard log hauler-rolled on its side, with its boiler dented, by the destructive but ineffectual force of the bulldozer. The Lombard rose out of a patch of raspberry bushes; it resembled the violated carcass of a dinosaur, or some other extinct species.

“You want to get rid of a place, you should burn it!” Ketchum railed. Carmella traipsed far behind them, pausing to pluck the burrs and the milkweed off her city slacks. “I wanted you to see this ass-wipe place first, Danny-it’s a fucking disgrace that they couldn’t even dispose of it properly! They were always dumber than dog shit in West Dummer!” the old logger hollered.

“Why is the schoolhouse still standing?” Danny asked. (Given how those West Dummer kids had abused him, Danny would have liked to burn the Paris Manufacturing Company School to the ground.)

“I don’t know,” Ketchum told him. “That schoolhouse has some frigging recreational use, I suppose. I see cross-country skiers here, now and again-and snowmobilers all the time, of course. I hear from those energy assholes that they’re going to put these fucking windmills on the high ridges, all around. Three-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high turbines-they have one-hundred-and-fifty-foot blades! They’ll build and service them with a thirty-two-foot-wide gravel-surfaced access road-which, as any fool knows, means they’ll have to clear about a seventy-five-foot-wide path just to build the road! These towers will make a whorehouse of noise and throw a shitload of ice; they’ll have to shut them down when there’s too much snow or sleet, or freezing fog. And after the piss-poor weather has passed, and they start the stupid windmills up again, the ice that has frozen on the blades will get thrown eight hundred fucking feet! The ice comes off in sheets, several feet long but less than an inch thick. Those sheets could slice right through a fella, or a whole moose! And of course there’s the flashing red lights to warn the airplanes away. It’s wicked ironic that these energy assholes are the same sorry bunch of fuck-headed environmentalists who said that river driving wrecked the rivers and the forests, or they’re the environmentalists’ asshole children!”

Ketchum suddenly stopped shouting, because he could see that Carmella was crying. She had not progressed very far from the truck; either the raspberry bushes had blocked her way, or the debris from the bulldozed logging camp had impeded her. With the uproar Ketchum had been making, Carmella couldn’t have heard Phillips Brook-nor could she see the water. The toppled Lombard log hauler, which was an utter unknown and, as such, forbiddingly foreign to her, appeared to have frightened her.

“Please, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said, “could we see where my Angelù lost his life?”

“Sure we can, Carmella-I was just showing Danny a part of his history,” the old river driver said gruffly. “Writers have to know their history, don’t they, Danny?” With a sudden wave of his hand, the woodsman exploded again: “The mess hall, the mill manager’s house-all bulldozed! And there was a small graveyard around here somewhere. They even bulldozed the graveyard!”

“I see they left the apple orchard,” Danny said, pointing to the scraggly trees-untended for years now.

“For no good reason,” Ketchum said, not even looking at the orchard. “Only the deer eat those apples. I’ve killed my fair share of deer here.” (Doubtless, even the deer were dumber than dog shit in West Dummer, Danny was thinking. Probably, the dumb deer just stood around eating apples, waiting to be shot.)

They got back in the truck, which Ketchum turned around; this time Danny took the middle seat in the cab, straddling the gearshift. Carmella rolled down the passenger-side window, gulping the incoming air. The truck had sat in the sun, unmoving, and the morning was warming up; the stench from the dead bear was as oppressive as a heavy, rank blanket. Danny held his dad’s ashes in his lap. (The writer would have liked to smell his father’s ashes, knowing that they smelled like steak spice-a possible antidote to the bear-but Danny restrained himself.)

On the road between Paris and Twisted River-at the height of land where Phillips Brook ran southwest to the Ammonoosuc and into the Connecticut, and where Twisted River ran southeast to the Pontook and into the Androscoggin-Ketchum stopped his foul-smelling truck again. The woodsman pointed out the window, far off, to what looked like a long, level field. Perhaps it was a swamp in the spring of the year, but it was dry land in September-with tall grasses and a few scrub pine, and young maple suckers taking root in the flat ground.

“When they used to dam up Phillips Brook,” the river driver began, “this was a pond, but they haven’t dammed up the brook in years. There hasn’t been a pond-not for a long time-though it’s still called Moose-Watch Pond. When there was a pond, the moose would gather here; the woodsmen came to watch them. Now the moose come out at night, and they dance where the pond was. And those of us who are still alive-there aren’t many-we come to watch the moose dance.”

“They dance?” Danny said.

“They do. It’s some kind of dance. I’ve seen them,” the old logger said. “And these moose-the ones who are dancing-they’re too young to remember when there was a pond! They just know it, somehow. The moose look like they’re trying to make the pond come back,” Ketchum told them. “I come out here some nights-just to watch them dance. Sometimes, I can talk Six-Pack into coming with me.”

There were no moose now-not on a bright and sunny September morning-but there was no reason not to believe Ketchum, Danny was thinking. “Your mom was a good dancer, Danny-as I know you know. I suppose the Injun told you,” Ketchum added.

When the old logger drove on, all Carmella said was: “My goodness-moose dancing!”

“If I had seen nothing else, in my whole life-only the moose dancing-I would have been happier,” Ketchum told them. Danny looked at him; the logger’s tears were soon lost in his beard, but Danny had seen them.

Here comes the left-hand story, the writer predicted. The mere mention of Danny’s mother, or her dancing, had triggered something in Ketchum.

Up close, the old riverman’s beard was more grizzled than it appeared from farther away; Danny couldn’t take his eyes off him. He’d thought that Ketchum was reaching for the gearshift when the logger’s strong right hand grabbed Danny’s left knee and squeezed it painfully. “What are you looking at?” Ketchum asked him sharply. “I wouldn’t break a promise I made to your mom or your dad, but for the fucking fact that some promises you make in your miserable life contradict some others-like I also promised Rosie that I would love you forever, and look after you if there came a day when your dad couldn’t. Like that one!” Ketchum cried; his reluctant left hand gripped the steering wheel, both harder and for longer than he allowed his left hand to hold the wheel when he was merely shifting gears.

Finally, the big right hand released Danny’s knee-Ketchum was once more driving right-handed. The logger’s left elbow pointed out the driver’s-side window, as if it were permanently affixed to the truck’s cab; the now-relaxed fingers of Ketchum’s left hand only indifferently grazed the steering wheel as he turned onto the old haul road to Twisted River.

Immediately, the road surface worsened. There was little traffic to a ghost town, and Twisted River wasn’t on the way to anywhere else; the haul road hadn’t been maintained. The first pothole the truck hit caused the glove-compartment door to spring open. The soothing smell of gun oil washed over them, momentarily relieving them from the unrelenting reek of the bear. When Danny reached to close the door of the glove compartment, he saw the contents: a big bottle of aspirin and a small handgun in a shoulder holster.

“Painkillers, both of them,” Ketchum remarked casually, as Danny closed the glove compartment. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon.”

In the pickup’s bed, nestled together on the woodpile under the tarp-along with the Remington.30-06 Springfield -Danny knew there was also a chainsaw and an ax. In a sheath above the sun visor of the truck, on the driver’s side, was a foot-long Browning knife.

“Why are you always armed, Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked the river driver.

Maybe it was the armed word that caught Ketchum off-guard, because he hadn’t been armed that long-ago night when the logger and the cook and the cook’s cousin Rosie had started out on the ice-do-si-doing their way on the frozen river. Right there-in the bear-stinking truck, in the woodsman’s wild eyes-a vision of Rosie must have appeared to Ketchum. Danny noticed that Ketchum’s fierce beard was once more wet with tears.

“I have made … mistakes,” the riverman began; his voice sounded choked, half strangled. “Not only errors of judgment, or simply saying something I couldn’t live up to, but actual lapses.”

“You don’t have to tell the story, Ketchum,” Danny told him, but there was no stopping the logger now.

“A loving couple will say things to each other-you know, Danny-just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn’t good, or if they shouldn’t feel good about it,” Ketchum said. “A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by-if you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” Danny answered. The writer saw that the haul road to what had been the town of Twisted River was washed out-flooded, years past-and now the rocky road was overgrown with lichen and swamp moss. Only the fork in the road-a left turn, to the cookhouse-had endured, and Ketchum took it.

“My left hand was the one I touched your mom with, Danny. I wouldn’t touch her with my right hand-the one I had touched, and would touch, other women with,” Ketchum said.

“Stop!” Carmella cried. (At least she hadn’t said, “My goodness,” Danny thought; he knew Ketchum wouldn’t stop, now that he had started.)

“That was our first rule-I was her left-handed lover,” the logger explained. “In both our minds, my left hand was hers-it was Rosie’s hand, hence my most important hand, my good hand. It was my more gentle hand-the hand least like myself,” Ketchum said. It was the hand that had struck fewer blows, Danny was thinking, and Ketchum’s left index finger had never squeezed a trigger.

“I see,” Danny told him.

“Please stop,” Carmella begged. (Was she gagging or crying? the writer wondered. It hadn’t occurred to Danny that it wasn’t the story Carmella wanted to stop; it was the truck.)

“You said there was a lapse. So what was the mistake?” Danny asked the old woodsman.

But they were cresting the hill where the cookhouse had been. Just then-in the bouncing, vomitous truck-there hove into view the deceptively calm river basin, and below the basin was the bend in the river, where both Rosie and Angel had been swept away. Carmella gasped to see the water. For Danny, the shock was to see nothing there-not a board of the cookhouse remained-and as for the view of the town from where the cookhouse had been, there was no town.

“The mistake?” Ketchum shouted. “I’ll say there was a lapse! We were all drunk and hollering when we went out on the ice, Danny-you know that much, don’t you?”

“Yes-Jane told me,” Danny said.

“And I said, or I thought I said, to Rosie, ‘Give me your hand.’ I swear that’s what I said to her,” Ketchum declared. “But-being drunk, and being right-handed-I instinctively reached for her with my right hand. I had been carrying your father, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too-so I put him down.” Ketchum finally stopped the truck.

Carmella opened the passenger-side door and vomited in the grass; the poor woman kept retching while Danny surveyed the crumbled chimney of the cookhouse. Nothing taller than two or three feet of the bricks was left standing where once the cook’s pizza oven had been.

“But your mother knew our rules,” Ketchum continued. “Rosie said, ‘Not that hand-that’s the wrong hand.’ And she danced away from me-she wouldn’t take my hand. Then your father slipped and fell down, and I was pushing him across the ice-as if he were a human sled-but I couldn’t close the distance between your mom and me. I didn’t have hold of her hand, Danny, because I’d reached for her with my right one-the bad one. Do you see?”

“I see,” Danny said, “but it seems like such a small thing.” Yet the writer could see it, vividly-how the distance between his mom and Ketchum had been insurmountable, especially when the logs tore downstream from the Dummer ponds and onto the ice in the river basin, where they quickly picked up speed.

Carmella, on her knees, appeared to be praying; her view of where her beloved Angelù had been lost was truly the best in Twisted River, which was why the cook had wanted the cookhouse erected there.

“Don’t cut off your left hand, Ketchum,” Danny told him.

“Please don’t, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella begged the old woodsman.

“We’ll see,” was all Ketchum would tell them. “We’ll see.”

IN THE LATE FALL of the same year he’d set fire to Twisted River, Ketchum came back to the site of the cookhouse with a hoe and some grass seed. He didn’t bother to sow any of it in what had been the town of Twisted River, but in the area of the cookhouse-and everywhere on the hillside above the river basin, where the ashes from the fire had settled into the ground-Ketchum hoed the ashes and the earth together, and he scattered the grass seed. He’d picked a day when he knew it was going to rain; by the next morning, the rain had turned to sleet, and all winter long the grass seed lay under the snow. There was grass the next spring, and now there was a meadow where the cookhouse had been. No one had ever mowed the grass, which was tall and wavy.

Ketchum took Carmella by the arm, and they walked down the hill through the tall grass to where the town had been. Danny followed them, carrying his dad’s ashes and-at Ketchum’s insistence-the Remington carbine. There was nothing left standing in the town of Twisted River, save the onetime lone sentinel that had stood watch in the muddy lane alongside what had been the dance hall-namely, the old steam-engine Lombard log hauler. The fire must have burned so hot that the Lombard was permanently blackened-impervious to rust but not to bird shit, yet otherwise perfectly black. The strong sled runners were intact, but the bulldozer-type tracks were gone-taken as a souvenir, maybe, if not consumed in the fire. Where the helmsman had sat-at the front of the Lombard, perched over the sled runners-the long-untouched steering wheel looked ready to use (had there been a helmsman still alive who knew how to steer it). As the cook once predicted, the ancient log hauler had outlasted the town.

Ketchum guided Carmella closer to the riverbank, but even on a dry and sunny September morning, they couldn’t get within six feet of the water’s edge; the riverbank was treacherously slippery, the ground spongy underfoot. They didn’t dam up the Dummer ponds anymore, but the water upstream of the river basin nonetheless ran fast-even in the fall-and Twisted River often overflowed its banks. Closer to the river, Danny felt the wind in his face; it came off the water in the basin, as if blown downstream from the Dummer ponds.

“As I suspected,” Ketchum said. “If we try to scatter Cookie’s ashes in the river, we can’t get close enough to the water. The wind will blow the ashes back in our faces.”

“Hence the rifle?” Danny asked.

The woodsman nodded. “Hence the glass jar, too,” Ketchum said; he took Carmella’s hand and pointed her index finger for her. “Not quite halfway to the far shore, but almost in the middle of the basin-that’s where I saw your boy slip under the logs,” the riverman told her. “I swear to you, Danny, it wasn’t more than an arm’s length from where your mom went through the ice.”

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.

“Does that look like a hole a small plane would leave, Hero?” Six-Pack asked the wounded Walker bluetick. The dog had his eye on Six-Pack’s male German shepherd; both dogs were under the kitchen table. The stoic bear hound didn’t respond to Pam’s question. (Living with Ketchum had made Hero overfamiliar with being spoken to; with Ketchum, the dog knew that no response was expected.)

Pam just kept watching the news about the plane crash. On the TV, it looked like a bright, sunny day in New York City, too-not the kind of day a pilot has a visibility problem, Six-Pack was thinking.

Six-Pack was regretting that she’d ever said she once “kinda fancied Cookie”-hadn’t that been how she’d put it? Pam could have kicked herself for saying that within Ketchum’s diminished hearing. Every time she thought their relationship was improving, if not exactly back on track, it seemed to Six-Pack that she said the dead-wrong thing-or that Ketchum did.

She’d left a lot of men, and had been left by them, but busting up with Ketchum had hit her the hardest-even when Six-Pack considered that leaving Carl had caused the cowboy to very nearly kill her. The deputy sheriff had raped her on a dock at night-at the Success Pond boat launch. Afterward a couple who had witnessed it had taken Pam to the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she’d spent a few days recuperating. This had led to Six-Pack getting a job in the hospital, which she liked; she had a cleaning job, most nights, while her dogs were sleeping. Talking to some of the patients made Pam feel less sorry for herself. Printed in small, neat letters on her hospital uniform was the word SANITIZATION. Six-Pack doubted that many of the patients ever mistook her for a nurse, or a nurse’s aide, but she believed she was nevertheless a comfort to some of them-as they were to her.

Six-Pack Pam knew she would have to have her hip replaced, and every time the hip hurt her, she thought about the cowboy banging her on the dock-how he’d pushed her face against a boat cleat, which was what had given her the scar on her upper lip-but the worst of it was she’d told Ketchum that the woodsman really should kill Carl. This was the worst, because Six-Pack hadn’t known how strongly Ketchum believed that he should have killed the cowboy years ago. (And when the deputy sheriff shot Cookie, Ketchum’s self-recriminations never ceased.)

Pam was sorry, too, that she’d ever told Ketchum what Carl had done following that fatal collision on Route 110-this was out on the Berlin-Groveton road, where the highway ran alongside Dead River. Two teenagers who weren’t wearing their seat belts had slammed head-on into a turkey truck. The turkeys were already dead; they’d been “processed,” as they say in the turkey-farming business. The truck driver survived, but he’d suffered a neck injury and had briefly lost consciousness; when he came to, the driver was facing the two dead teenagers. The boy, who’d been driving, was run through by his steering column, and the girl, who was pinned in the passenger seat, had been decapitated. Carl was the first one from law enforcement on the scene, and-according to the turkey-truck driver-the cowboy had fondled the dead, decapitated girl.

Carl claimed that the truck driver was out of his head; after all, he’d snapped his neck and had blacked out, and when he came to, he was evidently hallucinating. But the cowboy had told Pam the truth. What did it matter that he’d played with the headless girl’s tits-she was dead, wasn’t she?

To which Ketchum had said-not for the first, or the last, time-“I should just kill that cowboy.”

Six-Pack now said to Hero and her German shepherd: “You two should stop eyeballin’ each other that way.” It was a little after nine in the morning-exactly eighteen minutes after the first passenger jet had hit the north tower-when the second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 (also flying out of Boston), crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center and exploded. Both buildings were burning when Six-Pack said to the assembled dogs, “Tell me that was another small plane, and I’ll ask you what you’ve been drinkin’ with your dog food.”

Hero tentatively licked some of the sulfa powder on his claw wounds, but the taste of it stopped the dog from licking further. “Don’t that taste special?” Pam asked the bear hound. “You lick that off, Hero, I’ve got more.”

In what appeared to be a calculated non sequitur, Hero lunged at the German shepherd; both dogs were going at it, under the kitchen table, before Six-Pack was able to separate them with the water pistol. She kept it loaded with dishwasher detergent and lemon juice, and she squirted both dogs in their eyes-they hated it. But it had hurt Pam’s hip to drop down on all fours and crawl under the kitchen table with the fighting dogs, and she was in no mood to listen to President Bush, who came on television at 9:30, speaking from Sarasota, Florida.

Six-Pack didn’t despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy’s boy, and she agreed with Ketchum’s assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved-that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

True to this portrait, President Bush said on TV that the country had suffered an “apparent terrorist attack.”

“Ya think?” Six-Pack asked the president on television. Characteristic of people who lived alone, discounting her dogs, Pam talked back to the people on TV-as if, like the dogs, the people on television could actually hear her.

By now, the Federal Aviation Administration had shut down the New York airports, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had ordered all the bridges and tunnels in the New York area closed. “What are the dumb fuckers waitin’ for?” Six-Pack asked the dogs. “They should close down all the airports!” Ten minutes later, the FAA halted all flight operations at U.S. airports; it was the first time in the history of the United States that air traffic had been halted nationwide. “Ya see?” Six-Pack asked the dogs. “Someone must be listen-in’ to me.” (If not Ketchum, and definitely not the dogs.)

Six-Pack had soaked a clean sponge in cold water and was rinsing the dishwasher detergent and lemon juice out of the German shepherd’s eyes. “You’re next, Hero,” Pam told the bear hound, who watched her and the shepherd impassively.

Three minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, sending up a towering plume of smoke; two minutes after that, they evacuated the White House. “Holy shit,” Six-Pack said to the dogs. “It’s lookin’ more and more like an apparent terrorist attack, don’tcha think?”

She was holding Hero’s head in her lap, rinsing the dishwasher detergent and lemon juice from the wounded bear hound’s eyes, when, at 10:05, the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. After the tower plummeted into the streets, a billowing cloud of dust and debris drifted away from the building; people were running through the waves of dust.

Five minutes later, a portion of the Pentagon collapsed-at the same time that United Airlines Flight 93, which had also been hijacked, crashed to the ground in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh. “I wonder where that one was headed, Hero,” Six-Pack said to the dog.

The German shepherd had circled around behind Pam, and Hero was anxious that he couldn’t see the shepherd; the bear hound’s nervousness alerted Six-Pack to her devious shepherd’s presence. She reached quickly behind her and grabbed a handful of fur and skin, squeezing as hard as she could until she heard the shepherd yelp and felt the dog twist free of her grip.

“Don’t you try sneakin’ up on me!” Six-Pack said, as the German shepherd slunk out the dog door into the outdoor kennel.

It was next announced on television that they’d evacuated the United Nations building-and the State and Justice departments, along with the World Bank. “I see all the important fellas are runnin’ for cover,” Six-Pack said to Hero. The dog eyed her warily, as if he were considering her contradictory behavior in the following manner: First she puts the bad-tasting yellow gunk on my cuts, then she squirts me in my eyes with the stinging-and-burning stuff, and lastly she tries to make me feel better; not to mention, where is that sneak-attack fuck of a German shepherd?

“Don’t get your balls crossed, Hero-I ain’t goin’ to hurt you,” Pam told the bear hound, but Hero regarded her mistrustfully; the dog might have preferred his chances with a bear.

At 10:24, the FAA reported that all inbound transatlantic aircraft entering the United States had been diverted to Canada. “Oh, that’s brilliant!” Six-Pack said to the TV. “I might have begun with that idea a few fuckin’ months ago! Like I suppose ya thought that the fellas fly-in’ those first two planes were from Boston!” But the television ignored her.

Four minutes later, the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed; someone said that the tower appeared to peel apart, from the top down, as if a hand had taken a knife to a tall vegetable. “If this ain’t the end of the world, it’s surely the start of somethin’ close to it,” Six-Pack said to the dogs. (Hero was still looking all around for that fuckheaded German shepherd.)

At 10:54, Israel evacuated all its diplomatic missions. Six-Pack thought she should be writing this down. Ketchum always said that the Israelis were the only ones who knew what was what; that the Israelis were closing down their diplomatic missions meant that the Muslim extremists, those militant Islamists who were determined to wipe out the Jews, were beginning their religious war by wiping out the United States-because without the United States, Israel would long ago have ceased to exist. Nobody else in the craven, so-called democratic world had the balls to stick up for the Israelis-or so Ketchum also said, and Six-Pack pretty much took what amounted to her politics from the old libertarian logger. (Ketchum admired the Israelis, and almost nobody else.)

Six-Pack had often wondered if Ketchum was half-Injun and half-Jewish, because the riverman periodically threatened to move to Israel. Pam had, more than once, heard Ketchum say: “I might make more beneficial use of myself killing those assholes from Hamas and Hezbollah, instead of picking on the poor deer and bear!”

SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN THAT MORNING, the New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, urged New Yorkers to stay at home; the mayor also ordered an evacuation of the area of the city south of Canal Street. By now, Pam was vexed at Ketchum and the two others for spending close to the whole morning scattering the little cook’s ashes. But, knowing Ketchum, Six-Pack considered that the logger would have insisted on showing Danny what the woodsman called the “vandalism” that had been done to Paris-or West Dummer, as Ketchum obdurately called it-and either en route to Paris, or on the way back, Six-Pack knew that Ketchum would have paused to deliver a fucking eulogy to the confused, heartbreaking moose who danced their scrawny asses off in Moose-Watch Pond.

Pam felt a pang that she had not often accepted Ketchum’s periodic invitations to join him in a middle-of-the-night visit to see the moose dancing. (Six-Pack believed that the moose were just aimlessly “millin’ around.”) It was also with a pang that Six-Pack regretted that she had not accompanied Ketchum on many of his proposed overnight “campin’ trips,” as she called them, to that grassy hill where the cookhouse had been; she knew this was hallowed ground to Ketchum, and that he liked nothing better than to spend the night there. Ketchum just pitched a tent and slept in a sleeping bag, but his snoring kept her awake half the night, and Pam’s hip hurt her on the hard ground. Furthermore, Ketchum best liked camping at the cookhouse site when the weather had turned colder-especially, once there was snow. The cold weather made Six-Pack’s hip throb.

“You’re the one who keeps putting off the hip-replacement surgery,” Ketchum routinely told her; Six-Pack regretted putting off the surgery, too. And how could she expect the old river driver to resume their long-ago relationship if she wouldn’t go camping with him when he asked her?

When she’d suggested going to see a movie in Berlin instead, Ketchum had rolled his eyes at her. Six-Pack knew Ketchum’s opinion of movies and Berlin. He liked to say, “I would rather stay home and watch Hero fart.”

She wanted Ketchum to marry her, Six-Pack suddenly realized. But how?

Just after noon, with Ketchum and the other two having been gone the entire morning-and Pam feeling extremely pissed-off at them, and at the rest of the world-the Immigration and Naturalization Service said that the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico were on the highest state of alert, but that no decision had been made concerning closing the borders.

“The fanatics aren’t Canadians!” Six-Pack shouted meaninglessly at the dogs. “The terrorists aren’t Mexicans!” she wailed. She’d held herself together all morning, but Six-Pack was losing it now. Hero went out the dog door into the outdoor kennel, no doubt thinking his odds were better with the German shepherd than with Pam.

It was no wonder that when Ketchum finally arrived, with Danny and Carmella, the logger saw his long-suffering Hero (“that fine animal”) together with Pam’s dogs in the outdoor kennel-Six-Pack’s untrustworthy German shepherd among them-and took this to mean that Six-Pack had been neglecting his wounded bear hound. “Pam must be farting away her time, watching whatever abomination there is on daytime television,” was how the ever-critical woodsman expressed himself to Danny and Carmella.

“Uh-oh,” Danny said to Carmella. “You should be nice to Six-Pack, Ketchum,” Danny told the old logger. “In fact, I think you should marry her-or try living with her again, anyway.”

“Constipated Christ!” Ketchum shouted, slamming the door to his truck. Pam’s dogs immediately commenced barking, but not the stoic Hero.

Six-Pack came out the trailer door from her kitchen. “The country is under attack!” Pam screamed. “Bush is flyin’ around in Air Force One-the coward must be hidin’! The Israelis have all gone home to defend themselves! It’s the beginnin’ of the end of the world!” Six-Pack shouted at Ketchum. “And all you can do, you crotchety asshole, is rile up my dogs!”

“Marry her?” Ketchum said to Danny. “Why would I want to live with her? Can you imagine coming home every day to a deteriorated state of mind like that?”

“It’s all true!” Six-Pack wailed. “Come see for yourself, Ketchum-it’s on television!”

“On television!” Ketchum repeated, winking at Carmella-which doubtless drove Six-Pack around the bend. “Naturally, if it’s on TV, it must be truer than most things.”

But neither Six-Pack nor Ketchum had thought very much about where they were-in an orderly, fastidiously neat trailer park, in the Saw Dust Alley campground, where there were many stay-at-home women with young children, and some retired or unemployed older people (both men and women), and a few unattended teenagers who were skipping school while their working parents didn’t have a clue.

It was Ketchum who clearly didn’t have a clue about how many people had overheard him and Pam, and both Ketchum and Six-Pack were unprepared for the diversity of opinion among the trailer-park residents, who had been glued to their television sets all morning. Given that the walls of their trailers were paper-thin, and that many of them had been talking with one another in the course of the day’s unfolding events, they’d expressed quite a variety of views-in regard to what some of them saw as the first installment of the Armageddon they were witnessing-and now this notoriously belligerent intruder had come into their small community bellowing, and the famously loudmouthed Ketchum (for the former river driver was indeed famous in Errol) seemed to be unaware of the developing news.

“Ain’t you heard, Ketchum?” an old man asked. He was stooped, almost bent over-wearing red-and-black wool hunting pants on this warm September day-with his suspenders loosely cupping his bony shoulders, and his bare, scrawny arms dangling from a white sleeveless undershirt.

“Is that you, Henry?” the logger asked the old man. Ketchum had not seen the sawyer since they’d shut down the sawmill in Paris -years before they had bulldozed it half-underground.

Henry held up his left hand with the missing thumb and index finger. “Sure it’s me, Ketchum,” the sawyer said. “It’s the war in the Middle East, the war between the Muslims and the Jews-it’s started here, Ketchum,” Henry said.

“It started long ago,” Ketchum told the sawyer. “What’s going on?” the logger asked Six-Pack.

“I’ve been tryin’ to tell ya!” Six-Pack screamed.

There was a young woman with an infant in her arms. “It’s a terrorist attack-no airport is safe. They’ve closed them all down,” she said to Ketchum.

Two teenage boys, brothers who’d skipped school, were barefoot; they wore jeans and were shirtless in the midday sun. “Hundreds of people are dead-maybe thousands,” one said.

“They were jumpin’ from skyscrapers!” the other boy said.

“The president is missing!” a woman with two small children said.

“Well, that’s good news!” Ketchum declared.

“Bush ain’t missin’-he’s just flyin’ around, stayin’ safe. I told ya,” Six-Pack said to the logger.

“Maybe the Jews did it-to make us think it was the Arabs!” a young man on crutches said.

“If it’s your brain that’s addled, you don’t need crutches,” the old woodsman told him. “Constipated Christ-let me have a look at the TV,” Ketchum said to Six-Pack. (The former river driver, now a reader, was possibly the only resident of Errol who didn’t own a television.)

They traipsed into Pam’s kitchen-not just Ketchum, with Danny holding Carmella’s arm, but also Henry, the old sawyer with the stumps instead of a thumb and an index finger, and two of the women with young children.

The young man on crutches had hobbled away. Outside, the teenage boys could be heard by the kennel. After exchanging pleasantries with the dogs, one of the teenagers said, “Look at the tough bastard with one ear-he’s been in a fight.”

“Some fight,” the second boy said. “It musta been with a cat.”

“Some cat!” the first boy said appreciatively.

On Pam’s kitchen TV, the media kept replaying that moment when Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center-and of course those moments when first the south tower and then the north tower came down. “How many people were in those towers-how many cops and how many firemen were under those buildings when they fell?” Ketchum asked, but no one answered him; it was too early for those statistics.

At 1:04 P.M., speaking from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, President Bush said that all the appropriate security measures were being taken-including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. “Well, that sure as shit makes us all feel safer!” Ketchum said.

“Make no mistake,” Bush said on the TV. “The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

“Oh, boy,” Ketchum said. “It sounds to me like that’s what we should be afraid of next!”

“But they attacked us,” the young woman holding the infant said. “Don’t we have to attack them back?”

“They’re suicide bombers,” Ketchum said. “How do you attack them back?”

At 1:48, President Bush left Barksdale aboard Air Force One and flew to another base in Nebraska. “More flyin’ around,” Six-Pack commented.

“How many wars will that shit-for-brains start, do you imagine?” Ketchum asked them.

“Come on, Ketchum-he’s the president,” the sawyer said.

Ketchum reached out and took the old sawyer’s hand-the one with the missing thumb and index finger. “Did you ever make a mistake, Henry?” the veteran river driver asked.

“A couple,” Henry answered; everyone could see the two stumps.

“Well, you just wait and see, Henry,” Ketchum said. “This ass-wipe in the White House is the wrong man for the job-you just wait and see how many mistakes this penis-breath is going to make! On this mouse turd’s watch, there’s going to be a fucking myriad of mistakes!”

“A fuckin’ what?” Six-Pack said; she sounded frightened.

“A myriad!” Ketchum shouted.

“An indefinitely large number-countless,” Danny explained to Six-Pack.

Six-Pack looked sick, as if the confidence had been kicked out of her. “Maybe you’d like to watch the moose dancin’ tonight,” she said to Ketchum. “Maybe you and me-and Danny and Carmella, too-could go campin’. It’s gonna be a pretty night up by the cookhouse, and between you and me, Ketchum, we could come up with some extra sleepin’ bags, couldn’t we?”

“Shit,” Ketchum said. “There’s an undeclared war going on, and you want to watch the moose dancing! Not tonight, Six-Pack,” Ketchum told her. “Besides, Danny and I have some serious issues to discuss. I suppose they have a bar and a TV at The Balsams out in Dixville Notch, don’t they?” the logger asked Danny.

“I want to go home,” Carmella said. “I want to go back to Boston.”

“Not tonight,” Ketchum said again. “The terrorists aren’t going to bomb Boston, Carmella. Two of the planes flew out of Boston. If they were going to attack Boston, they would have done it.”

“I’ll drive you back to Boston tomorrow,” Danny told Carmella; he couldn’t look at Six-Pack, who seemed to be in despair.

“Leave me the dog-let me look after Hero,” Pam said to Ketchum. “They don’t take dogs at The Balsams-and you should stay the night there, Ketchum, ’cause you’ll be drinkin’.”

“Just so you’re paying,” Ketchum said to Danny.

“Of course I’m paying,” Danny said.

All the dogs had come in the dog door and were huddled in the kitchen. There’d been no more hollering-not since Ketchum had shouted, “A myriad!”-and the dogs were anxious about so many humans standing around in Six-Pack’s small kitchen without any yelling.

“Don’t get your balls crossed, Hero-I’ll be back tomorrow,” Ketchum told the bear hound. “You don’t have to work at the hospital tonight?” the former river driver asked Six-Pack.

“I can get out of it,” she told him disinterestedly. “They like me at the hospital.”

“Well, shit-I like you, too,” Ketchum told her awkwardly, but Six-Pack didn’t say anything; she’d seen her opportunity pass. All Pam could do was position her aching body between the two children (belonging to one of the young women) and that unreliable German shepherd; the dog was just plain bonkers. Six-Pack knew that her odds of preventing the shepherd from biting the kids were far better than the possibility that she could ever persuade Ketchum to live with her again. He’d even offered to pay for her hip replacement-at that fancy fucking hospital near Dartmouth-but Pam speculated that Ketchum’s generosity toward her damaged hip had more to do with the logger’s infinite regret that he’d not killed the cowboy than it served as a testimony to Ketchum’s enduring affection for her.

“Everybody out. I want my kitchen back-everybody out, now,” Six-Pack suddenly said; she didn’t want to break down in front of a bunch of strangers. All but one of Pam’s mutts, as Ketchum called them, sidled out the dog door before Six-Pack could say to them, “Not you.” But the dogs were used to the everybody-out command, and they moved more quickly than the two women with young children or old Henry, the former sawyer and double-digit amputee.

Paying no heed to Pam’s command, the lunatic German shepherd and Hero stood their ground; the dogs were engaged in a macho standoff, in opposite corners of the kitchen. “No more trouble from you two,” Pam said to them, “or I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you.” But she’d already started to cry, and her voice lacked its customary firepower. The two dogs weren’t afraid of Six-Pack anymore; the dogs could sense when a fellow creature was defeated.

THE THREE OF THEM WERE RIDING in the bear-fouled truck again-Danny once more in the middle, and Carmella as close to the open passenger-side window as she could get-when Ketchum turned on the radio in the stinking cab. It wasn’t yet three o’clock in the afternoon, but Mayor Giuliani was having a press conference. Someone asked the mayor about the number of people killed, and Giuliani answered: “I don’t think we want to speculate about that-more than any of us can bear.”

“That sounds like a good guess,” Danny said.

“And you’re thinking about moving back here-isn’t that right?” Ketchum asked Danny suddenly. “Didn’t I hear you say that there was no real reason for you to stay in Canada -not anymore-and that you were inclined to come back to your own country? Weren’t you recently complaining to me that you didn’t really feel like a Canadian-and, after all, you were born here, you really are an American, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Danny answered; the writer knew enough to be careful with Ketchum’s line of questioning. “I was born here-I am an American. Becoming a Canadian citizen didn’t make me a Canadian,” Danny said more assertively.

“Well, that shows you how stupid I am-I’m just one of those slow fellas who believes what he reads,” the old riverman said slyly. “You know, Danny, I may have been a long time learning to read, but I read pretty well-and quite a lot-nowadays.”

“What are you driving at, Ketchum?” Danny asked him.

“I thought you were a writer,” Ketchum told him. “I read somewhere that you thought nationalism was ‘limiting.’ I believe you said something about all writers being ‘outsiders,’ and that you saw yourself as someone standing on the outside, looking in.”

“I did say that,” Danny admitted. “Of course, it was an interview-there was a context-”

“Fuck the context!” Ketchum shouted. “Who cares if you don’t feel like a Canadian? Who cares if you’re an American? If you’re a writer, you should be an outsider-you should stay on the outside, looking in.”

“An exile, you mean,” Danny said.

“Your country is going to the dogs-it has been, for some time,” Ketchum told him. “You can see it better, and write about it better, if you stay in Canada -I know you can.”

“We were attacked, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said weakly; her heart wasn’t in the argument. “Are we going to the dogs because we were attacked?”

“It’s what we make out of the attack that counts,” Ketchum told her. “How’s Bush going to respond? Isn’t that what matters?” the old logger asked Danny, but the writer was no match for Ketchum’s pessimism. Danny had always underestimated the former river driver’s capacity for following things through to their worst-possible conclusion.

“Stay in Canada,” Ketchum told him. “If you’re living in a foreign country, you’ll see what’s true, and what isn’t true, back in the old U.S.A. -I mean, more clearly.”

“I know that’s what you think,” Danny said.

“The poor people in those towers-” Carmella started to say, but she stopped. Carmella was no match for Ketchum’s pessimism, either.

The three of them were in the bar at The Balsams, watching the TV at 4 P.M., when someone on CNN said there were “good indications” that the Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, who was suspected of coordinating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in 1998, was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-this was based on “new and specific” information, meaning since the attacks.

An hour and a half later, after Ketchum had consumed four beers and three shots of bourbon, and when Danny was still drinking his third beer, CNN reported that U.S. officials said the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania could have been headed for one of three possible targets: Camp David, the White House, or the U.S. Capitol building.

Carmella, who was sipping only her second glass of red wine, said: “I’ll bet on the White House.”

“Do you really think I should marry Six-Pack?” Ketchum asked Danny.

“Just try living with her,” Danny suggested.

“Well, I did that-once,” the old riverman reminded him. “I can’t believe Six-Pack wanted to fuck Cookie!” Ketchum cried. Then, out of consideration for Carmella, he added: “Sorry.”

The three of them went into the dining room and ate an enormous meal. Danny kept drinking beer, to Ketchum’s disgust, but Ketchum and Carmella went through two bottles of red wine, and Carmella retired early. “It’s been a difficult day for me,” she told them, “but I want to thank you, Mr. Ketchum, for showing me the river-and for everything else.” Carmella was assuming that she wouldn’t see Ketchum in the morning, and she wouldn’t; even when he’d been drinking, Ketchum was an earlier and earlier riser. Both gentlemen offered to walk Carmella to her hotel room, but she wouldn’t hear of it; she left them in the dining room, where Ketchum immediately ordered another bottle of red wine.

“I’m not going to help you drink it,” Danny told him.

“I don’t need your help, Danny,” Ketchum said.

For a small person, which Danny was, the problem with drinking only beer was that he began to feel full before he felt drunk, but Danny was determined not to let Ketchum tempt him with the red wine. Danny still imagined that the red wine had played some role in the cowboy’s murder of his father. On the very day the cook’s ashes were scattered in Twisted River, Danny didn’t want to belittle the memory of that terrible night when Carl killed Danny’s dad, and Danny gave all three rounds of the 20-gauge to the cowboy.

“You’ve got to let yourself go, Danny,” Ketchum was saying. “Be more daring.”

“I’m a beer drinker, Ketchum-no red wine for me,” Danny told him.

“For Christ’s sake-I mean, as a writer!” Ketchum said.

“As a writer?” Danny asked.

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum told him. “You have a way of writing around the periphery of things.”

“I do?” Danny asked him.

“You do. You seem to be dodging the squeamish stuff,” Ketchum told him. “You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny.”

At the time, this struck Danny as less in the spirit of literary criticism than it appeared to be a direct invitation to spend the night in the cab of Ketchum’s truck-or in the smokehouse with the skinned, smoking bear.

“What about the bear?” Danny suddenly asked the woodsman. “Won’t the fire in the smokehouse go out?”

“Oh, the bear will have smoked enough for now-I can start the fire up again tomorrow,” Ketchum told him impatiently. “There’s one more thing-well, okay, two things. First of all, you don’t seem to be a city person-not to me. I think the country is the place for you-I mean, as a writer,” Ketchum said more softly. “Secondly-though I would suggest this is more important-you have no need for the fucking nom de plume anymore. As I’m aware that the very idea of a pen name once affected you adversely, I think it’s time for you to take your own name back. Daniel always was your dad’s name for you, and I’ve heard you say, Danny, that Daniel Baciagalupo is a fine name for a writer. You’ll still be Danny to me, of course, but-once again, as a writer-you should be Daniel Baciagalupo.”

“I can guess what my publishers will say to that idea,” Danny said to the logger. “They’ll remind me that Danny Angel is a famous, best-selling author. They’re going to tell me, Ketchum, that an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo won’t sell as many books.”

“I’m just telling you what’s good for you-as a writer,” Ketchum told him almost offhandedly.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” the writer said a little peevishly. “I should rename myself Daniel Baciagalupo; I should live in the country, in Canada; I should let myself go-that is, be more daring as a writer,” Danny dutifully recited.

“I think you’re catching on,” the logger told him.

“Is there anything else you would recommend?” Danny asked him.

“We’ve been an empire in decline since I can remember,” Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn’t kidding. “We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.”

The two men stared at each other, poised over what they were drinking-Danny forcing himself both to keep drinking and to continue looking at Ketchum. Danny loved the old logger so much, but Ketchum had hurt him; Ketchum was good at it. “Well, I look forward to seeing you for Christmas,” Danny said. “It won’t be that long now.”

“Maybe not this year,” Ketchum told him.

The writer knew he was risking a blow from Ketchum’s powerful right hand, but Danny reached for the logger’s left hand and held it against the table. “Don’t-just don’t,” Danny said to him, but Ketchum easily pulled his hand away.

“Just do your job, Danny,” the old river driver told him. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”