Last Night in Twisted River

The clothes could mislead you about Charlotte, Dominic often recalled--especially when he saw pictures of her. However, like Danny with his novels, Charlotte was a workaholic with her scripts--no less so in the case of her proposed adaptation of East of Bangor, which was the reason she and Danny had met.

Charlotte knew all about Danny Angel's nonnegotiable rules regarding the sale of film rights to his novels; she'd seen the interviews, where Danny had said that someone would have to write a "halfway decent" adaptation before he would part with the movie rights to this or that book.

The tall twenty-seven-year-old--she was a head taller than Daniel, the cook would remember, which made Charlotte closer in height and age to Joe than she was to Danny or his dad--had agreed to write the first draft of a screenplay of East of Bangor "on spec." No money would change hands, no film rights would pass; if Danny didn't like her script, Charlotte would simply be out of luck.

"You must already see a way to make a movie out of this novel," Danny had said when they first met. (He didn't do lunch, he'd told her. They met for dinner at Bastringue, where--in those days--Danny must have eaten three or four nights a week.)

"No, I just want to do this--I have no idea how," Charlotte said. She wore dark-framed glasses, and was very studious-looking, but there was nothing bookish about her body; she was not only tall but had a voluptuous figure. (She must have outweighed Daniel by a few pounds, as the cook recalled.) She was a big girl to wear a pink dress, Danny had thought that first night, and her lipstick was a matching pink, but Charlotte did a lot of business in L.A.; even in '84, she looked more like Los Angeles than Toronto.

Danny had really liked the first draft of her screenplay of East of Bangor--he'd liked it well enough to sell Charlotte Turner the movie rights to his novel for one dollar, Canadian, which at the time was worth about seventy-five cents, U.S. They'd worked together on subsequent drafts of the script, so Danny had seen for himself how hard Charlotte worked. In those days, Danny's writing room was on the ground floor of the house on Cluny Drive--where his gym was now. He and Charlotte had worked there, and in her grandmother's house in Forest Hill. It would take fifteen years to get the film made, but the screenplay of East of Bangor was pulled together in four months' time; by then, Charlotte Turner and Danny Angel were already a couple.

In Danny's bedroom, which was as much a memorial to Charlotte as the third-floor writing room was a shrine to Joe, the cook had often marveled at how well dusted and sparkling clean Lupita maintained all the framed photographs of the successful screenwriter. Most of the photos had been taken during the three years Daniel and Charlotte were together; many of these pictures were from their brief summer months on Lake Huron. Like some other Toronto families, Charlotte's parents owned an island in Georgian Bay; Charlotte's grandfather was alleged to have won the island in a poker game, but there were those who said he'd traded a car for it. Since Charlotte's father was terminally ill, and her mother (a doctor) would soon be retiring, Charlotte stood to inherit the island, which was in the area of

Pointe au Baril Station. Daniel had loved that island, the cook would remember. (Dominic had visited Georgian Bay only once; he'd hated it.)

The only snapshots of Charlotte that the cook continued to recycle on the bulletin boards in his bedroom were those of her with Joe, because Daniel couldn't sleep with pictures of the dead boy in his bedroom. The cook admired how Charlotte had been unjealously fond of Joe, and Joe could see for himself how happy his father was with her; Joe had liked Charlotte from the start.

Charlotte wasn't a skier, yet she tolerated those winter weekends and the Christmas holiday in Winter Park, where the cook had made fabulous dinners in the ski house at the base of the mountain. The restaurants in Winter Park weren't bad, or they were good enough for Joe and his college friends, but they were beneath the cook's standards, and Dominic Baciagalupo relished the opportunity to cook for his grandson; the boy didn't come to Canada often enough, not in Dominic's opinion. (Not in the writer Danny Angel's opinion, either.)

NOW WHAT LIGHT HAD LINGERED in the late December afternoon was entirely gone; both the darkness and the contrasting lights of the city were visible in the windows as Danny stretched out on the mat in his gym. Because it had been his writing room before it became his gym--and Danny wrote only in the daylight hours, since he'd gotten older--there were no curtains on the windows. In the winter months, it was often dark by the time he worked out, but Danny didn't care if anyone in the neighborhood saw him using the aerobic machines or the free weights. Both when it was his office and since it had become his gym, he'd been photographed in that room; he'd been interviewed there, too, because he never allowed any journalists in his writing room on the third floor.

As soon as they were married, Charlotte had said, she was going to put curtains or window shades in the gym, but because the wedding was canceled--with all the rest of it--the windows in that room had remained as they were. It was an odd gym, because it was still surrounded by bookshelves; even after he'd moved his work to Joe's former bedroom on the third floor, Danny had left many of his books in that ground-floor room.

When Danny and his dad had dinner parties in that house on Cluny Drive, everyone put their coats in the gym; they draped them on the handrails of the treadmill, or over the StairMaster machine, or on the stationary bike, and they piled them on the weight bench, too. Moreover, there were always a couple of clipboards in that room, and a ream of blank typing paper with lots of pens. Sometimes Danny made notes to himself when he rode the stationary bike in the late afternoon, or when he walked on the treadmill. His knees were shot from all the running, but he could still walk pretty fast on the treadmill, and riding the stationary bike or using the StairMaster didn't bother his knees.

For a fifty-eight-year-old man, Danny was in halfway decent physical shape; he was still fairly slight of build, though he had put on a few pounds since he'd starting drinking beer and red wine again--even in moderation. If Injun Jane had been alive, she would have told Danny that for someone who weighed as little as he did, even a couple of beers and one or two glasses of red wine were too much. ("Well, the Injun was harsh on the firewater subject," Ketchum had always said; he was not a man who put much stock in moderation, even at eighty-three.)

There was no telling when Ketchum would come for Christmas, Danny was thinking, as he settled into a comfortable pace on the StairMaster; for Christmas, Ketchum just showed up. For someone who fanatically faxed Danny or his dad a dozen times a week, and who still spontaneously phoned at all hours of the day and night, Ketchum was extremely secretive about his road trips--not only his trips to Toronto for Christmas but his hunting trips elsewhere in Canada. (The hunting trips--not to Quebec, but the ones up north in Ontario--occasionally brought Ketchum to Toronto, too.)

Ketchum started his hunting in September, the beginning of bear season in Coos County. The old woodsman claimed that the black bear population in New Hampshire was well over five thousand animals, and the annual bear harvest was "only about five or six hundred critters;" most of the bears were killed in the north and central regions of the state, and in the White Mountains. Ketchum's bear hound, that aforementioned "fine animal"--by now the grandson (or great-grandson!) of that first fine animal, one would guess--was allowed to hunt with him from the second week of September till the end of October.

The dog was a crossbreed, what Ketchum called a Walker bluetick. He was tall and rangy, like a Walker foxhound, but with the bluetick's white coat--blotched and flecked with bluish gray--and with the bluetick's superior quickness. Ketchum got his Walker blueticks from a kennel in Tennessee; he always chose a male and named him Hero. The dog never barked, but he growled in his sleep--Ketchum claimed that the dog didn't sleep--and Hero let loose a mournful baying whenever he was chasing a bear.

In New Hampshire, the end of the bear season overlapped with the muzzle-loader season for deer--a short time, only from the end of October through the first week of November. The regular firearm season for deer ran the rest of the month of November, into early December, but as soon as Ketchum killed a deer in Coos County (he always dropped one with his muzzle loader), he headed up north to Canada; the regular firearm season for deer ended earlier there.

The old logger had never been able to interest the cook in deer hunting; Dominic didn't like guns, or the taste of venison, and his limp was no fun in the woods. But after Danny and his dad moved to Canada, and Danny met Charlotte Turner, Ketchum was invited to Charlotte's island in Lake Huron; it was the first summer she and Danny were a couple, when the cook was also invited to Georgian Bay. That was where and when--on Turner Island, in August 1984--Ketchum talked Danny into trying deer hunting.

DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO DESPISED the imposed rusticity of the summer-cottage life on those Georgian Bay islands--in '84, Charlotte's family still used an outhouse. And while they had propane lights and a propane fridge, they hauled what water they needed (by the bucket method) from the lake.

Furthermore, Charlotte's family seemed to have furnished the main cottage and two adjacent sleeping cabins with the cast-off couches, chipped dishes, and mortally uncomfortable beds that they'd long ago replaced in their Toronto home; worse, the cook surmised, there was a tradition among the Georgian Bay islanders that upheld such stingy behavior. Anything new--such as electricity, hot water, or a flush toilet--was somehow contemptible.

But what they ate was what the cook most deplored. The mainland provisions at Pointe au Baril Station--in particular, the produce and anything that passed for "fresh"--were rudimentary, and everyone burned the shit out of what they blackened beyond recognition on their outdoor barbecues.

In his first and only visit to Turner Island, Dominic was polite, and he helped out in the kitchen--to the degree this was tolerable--but the cook returned to Toronto at the end of a long weekend, relieved by the knowledge that he would never again test his limp on those unwelcoming rocks, or otherwise set foot on a dock at Pointe au Baril Station.

"There's too much of Twisted River here--it's not Cookie's kind of place," Ketchum had explained to Charlotte and Danny, after Dominic went back to the city. While the logger said this in forgiveness of his old friend, Danny was not entirely different from his dad in his initial reaction to island life. The difference was that Danny and Charlotte had talked about the changes they would make on the island--certainly after (if not before) her father passed away, and her mother was no longer able to safely get into or out of a boat, or climb up those jagged rocks from the dock to the main cottage.

Danny still wrote on an old-fashioned typewriter; he owned a half-dozen IBM Selectrics, which were in constant need of repair. He wanted electricity for his typewriters. Charlotte wanted hot water--she'd long dreamed of such luxuries as an outdoor shower and an oversize bathtub--not to mention several flush toilets. A little electric heat would be nice, too, both Danny and Charlotte had agreed, because it could get cold at night, even in the summer--they were that far north--and, after all, they would soon be having a baby.

Danny also wanted to construct "a writing shack," as he called it--he was no doubt remembering the former farmhouse shed he'd written in, in Vermont--and Charlotte wanted to erect an enormous screened-in verandah, something large enough to link the main cottage to the two sleeping cabins, so that no one would ever have to go out in the rain (or venture into the mosquitoes, which were constant after nightfall).

Danny and Charlotte had plans for the place, in other words--the way couples in love do. Charlotte had cherished her summers on the island since she'd been a little girl; perhaps what Danny had adored were the possibilities of the place, the life with Charlotte he'd imagined there.

OH, PLANS, PLANS, PLANS--how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there! In fact, the couple in love wouldn't wait for Charlotte's father to die, or for her mother to be physically incapable of handling the hardships of an island in Lake Huron. Over the next two years, Danny and Charlotte would put in the electricity, the flush toilets, and the hot water--even Charlotte's outdoor shower and her oversize bathtub, not to mention the enormous screened-in verandah. And there were a few other "improvements" that Ketchum suggested; the old woodsman had actually used the improvements word, on his very first visit to Georgian Bay and Turner Island. In the summer of '84, Ketchum had been a spry sixty-seven--young enough to still have a few plans of his own.

That summer, Ketchum had brought the dog. The fine animal was as alert as a squirrel from the second he put his paws on the island's main dock. "There must be a bear around here--Hero knows bears," Ketchum said. There was a stiff-standing ridge of fur (formerly, loose skin) at the back of the hound's tensed neck; the dog stayed as close to Ketchum as the woodsman's shadow. Hero wasn't a dog you were inclined to pat.

Ketchum wasn't a summer person; he didn't fish, or screw around with boats. The veteran river driver was no swimmer. What Ketchum saw in Georgian Bay, and on Turner Island, was what the place must be like in the late fall and the long winter, and when the ice broke up in the spring. "Lots of deer around here, I'll bet," the old logger remarked; he was sti