Last Night in Twisted River

"I'm not so dumb, Cookie! You're the one who's gonna die!" Carl was hollering; he never heard Danny click the safety off, or the sound of the writer running barefoot down the hall. The cowboy took aim with the Colt .45 and shot the cook in the heart. Dominic Baciagalupo was blown into the headboard of the bed; he died instantly, on the pillows. There was no time for the deputy to comprehend the cook's curious smile, which stretched the white scar on his lower lip, and only Danny understood what his dad had uttered just before he was shot.

"She bu de," Dominic managed to say, as Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had taught him--the she bu de that means "I can't bear to let go."

The Chinese was, of course, meaningless to Carl, who, as he wheeled to face the naked man in the doorway, must have half understood why the cook had died smiling. Not only did Dominic know that all the yelling would save his son; the cook also knew that his friend Ketchum had provided Daniel with a better weapon than the eight-inch cast-iron skillet. And maybe there was a margin of last-minute recognition in the cowboy's eyes, when he saw that Danny had already taken aim with Ketchum's Winchester--the much-maligned youth model.

The long barrel of Carl's Colt .45 was still pointed at the floor when the first round of buckshot from the 20-gauge tore away half his throat; the cowboy was flung backward into the night table, where the lightbulb in the lamp exploded between his shoulder blades. Danny's second load of buckshot tore away what remained of the cowboy's throat. The deer slug, the so-called kill-shot, wasn't really necessary, but Danny--now at point-blank range--fired the shotgun's third and final round into Carl's mangled neck, as if the gaping wound itself were a magnet.

If Ketchum could be believed--that is, if he'd been speaking literally about the way wolves killed their prey--weren't these three shots from the 20-gauge Ranger exactly as kisses of wolves should be? Weren't they, indeed, not so pretty?

Still naked, Danny went downstairs. He called the police from the phone in the kitchen, telling them that he would unlock the front door for them, and that they could find him upstairs with his father. After he'd unlocked the door, he went back upstairs to his bedroom and put on some old sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Danny thought of calling Ketchum, but it was late and there was no reason to be in a hurry. When he reentered his dad's bedroom, there was no overlooking the kisses of wolves that had ripped the cowboy apart--leaving him like something sprayed from a hose--but Danny only briefly regretted the mess he'd made for Lupita. The blood-soaked rug, the blood-spattered walls, the bloodied photographs on the bulletin board above the shattered night table--well, Danny didn't doubt that Lupita could handle it. He knew that something worse had happened to her: She'd lost a child.

Ketchum had been right about the red wine, the writer was thinking, as he sat on the bed beside his father. If he'd been drinking only beer, Danny thought he might have heard the cowboy a few seconds sooner; Danny just might have been able to open fire with the shotgun before Carl could have pulled the trigger. "Don't beat up on yourself about it, Danny," Ketchum would tell him later. "I'm the one the cowboy followed. I should have seen that coming."

"Don't you beat up on yourself about it, Ketchum," Danny would tell the old logger, but of course Ketchum would.

When the police came, the lights in the neighboring houses were all ablaze, and lots of dogs were barking; normally, at that hour of the night, Rosedale is very quiet. Most of the residents who lived near the double shooting had never heard gunfire as loud and terrifying as that--some dogs would bark until dawn. But when the police came, they found Danny quietly cradling his dad's head in his lap, the two of them huddled together on the blood-soaked pillows at the head of the bed. In his report, the young homicide detective would say that the bestselling author was waiting for them in the upstairs of the house--exactly where he'd said he would be--and that the writer appeared to be singing, or perhaps reciting a poem, to his murdered father.

"She bu de," Danny kept repeating in his dad's ear. Neither the cook nor his son had ever known if Ah Gou and Xiao Dee's translation of the Mandarin was essentially correct--that is, if she bu de literally meant "I can't bear to let go"--but what did it matter, really? "I can't bear to let go" was what the writer thought he was saying to his father, who'd kept his beloved son safe from the cowboy for nearly forty-seven years; that had been how long ago it was when they'd both left Twisted River.

Now, at last--now that the police were there--Danny began to cry. He just started to let go. An ambulance and two police cars were parked outside the house on Cluny Drive, their lights flashing. The first policemen to enter the cook's bedroom were aware of the rudimentary story, as it had been reported over the phone: There'd been a break-in, and the armed intruder had shot and killed the famous writer's father; Danny had then shot and killed the intruder. But surely there was more to the story than that, the young homicide detective was thinking. The detective had the utmost respect for Mr. Angel, and, under the circumstances, he wanted to give the writer all the time he needed to compose himself. Yet the damage done by that shotgun--repeatedly, and at such close range--was so excessive that the detective must have sensed that this break-in and murder, and the famous writer's retaliation, had a substantial history.

"Mr. Angel?" the young homicide detective asked. "If you're ready, sir, I wonder if you could tell me how this happened."

What made Danny's tears different was that he was crying the way a twelve-year-old would cry--as if Carl had somehow shot his dad their last night in Twisted River. Danny couldn't speak, but he managed to point to something; it was in the vicinity of his father's bedroom doorway.

The young detectiv

e misunderstood. "Yes, I know, you were standing there in the doorway when you shot," the homicide policeman said. "At least, for the first shot. Then you came closer into the room, didn't you?"

Danny was violently shaking his head. Another young policeman had noticed the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging just inside the doorway of the bedroom--an unusual spot for a frying pan--and he tapped the bottom of the skillet with his index finger.

"Yes!" Danny managed to say, between sobs.

"Bring that skillet over here," the homicide detective said.

While he didn't relinquish his hold on his father--Danny continued to cradle the cook's head in his lap--he reached with his right hand for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet, and when his fingers closed around the handle, his crying calmed down. The young homicide detective waited; he could see there was no rushing this story.

Raising the skillet in his right hand, Danny then rested the heavy pan on the bed. "I'll start with the eight-inch cast-iron skillet," the writer finally began, as if he had a long story to tell--one he knew well.

V.

COOS COUNTY,

NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2001

----

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.