Last Night in Twisted River

It was a tough time of year for the writer, who was no spring chicken, Lupita knew. Christmas was the hardest time for people who'd lost family; of this, the cleaning woman had little doubt. She immediately did what Danny had asked her to do. (She actually welcomed the opportunity to interrupt his writing, since he was doing it in the wrong place.) Lupita gladly ripped the little scraps of paper off the fridge door; the damn Scotch tape would take longer, she knew, digging at the remaining strips with her fingernails. She would also scour the door with an antibacterial fluid, but she could do that later.

It's not likely that it ever occurred to the cleaning woman that she was throwing away what amounted to Danny's obsession with what Ketchum would have made of Bush's blundering in Iraq, but she was. Maybe in Danny's mind--way in the back, somewhere--the writer was aware that he was, at that moment, letting go of at least a little of the anger he felt at his former country.

Ketchum had called America a lost nation, but Danny didn't know if this was fair to say--or if the accusation was true yet. All that mattered to Daniel Baciagalupo, as a writer, was that his former country was a lost nation to him. Since Bush's reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was--from this minute, forward--an outsider living in Canada, till the end of his days.

While Lupita made a fuss over the refrigerator door, Danny went into the gym and called Kiss of the Wolf. He left a fairly detailed message on the answering machine; he said he wanted to make a reservation at the restaurant for every remaining night that Kiss of the Wolf was open--that is, until Patrice and Silvestro closed for the Christmas holiday. Lupita had been right: Christmas was always hard for Danny. First he'd lost Joe, and those Christmases in Colorado; then Danny's dad had been blown away. And every Christmas since that also-memorable Christmas of 2001, the writer was reminded of how he'd heard about Ketchum, who was lost to him, too.

Danny was not Ketchum; the writer was not even "like" Ketchum, though there'd been times when Danny had tried to be like the old logger. Oh, how he'd tried! But that wasn't Danny's job--to use the job word as Ketchum had meant it. Danny's job was to be a writer, and Ketchum had understood that long before Danny did.

"You've got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny," the veteran river driver had told him. Daniel Baciagalupo was trying; if the writer couldn't be Ketchum, he could at least heroize the logger. Really, how hard was it, the writer was thinking, to make Ketchum a hero?

"Well, writers should know it's sometimes hard work to die, Danny," Ketchum had told him when it had taken Danny three shots to drop his first deer.

Shit, I should have known then what Ketchum meant, the writer was thinking on that day when Lupita was m

adly cleaning all around him. (Yes, he should have.)

CHAPTER 17

KETCHUM EXCEPTED

DANNY DID HAVE SOME GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING IN regard to what Ketchum was up to--this had happened around the time of American Thanksgiving, in November 2001. The writer was having dinner one evening--naturally, at Kiss of the Wolf--and Danny's dinner date was his own doctor. Their relationship wasn't sexual, but they had a serious friendship; she'd been Danny's medical-expert reader for a number of his novels. She'd once written him a fan letter, and they'd begun a correspondence--long before he came to Canada. Now they were close friends.

The doctor's name was Erin Reilly. She was almost Danny's age--with two grown children, who had children of their own--and, not long ago, her husband had left her for her receptionist. "I should have seen it coming," Erin had told Danny philosophically. "They both kept asking me, repeatedly--I mean about a hundred times a day--if I was all right."

Erin had become the friend in his Toronto life that Armando DeSimone had been to Danny in Vermont. Danny still corresponded with Armando, but Armando and Mary didn't come to Toronto anymore; the drive from Vermont was too long, and airplane travel had become too inconvenient for people their age, and of their disposition. "The airport-security goons have taken every Swiss Army knife I ever owned," Armando had complained to Danny.

Erin Reilly was a real reader, and when Danny asked her a medical question--whether this was a concern he had for himself, or when he was doing research for a character in a novel--Danny appreciated that the doctor gave long, detailed answers. Erin liked to read long, detailed novels, too.

That night, in Kiss of the Wolf, Danny had said to his doctor: "I have a friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand; his left hand failed him somehow. Will he bleed to death, if he actually does it?"

Erin was a gangling, heron-like woman with closely cut gray hair and steely hazel eyes. She was intensely absorbed in her work, and in whatever novel or novels she was reading--to a flaw, Danny knew, and maybe the flaw was why he loved her. She could be blind to the world around her to an alarming degree--the way, with the passage of time, the cook had managed to convince himself that the cowboy wasn't really coming after him. Erin could joke that she should have "seen it coming"--meaning her husband's involvement with her receptionist--but the fact that they'd both kept asking Erin if she was all right, was not (in Danny's opinion) what his dear friend Erin should have noticed. Erin had written her husband's Viagra prescriptions; she had to have known how much of that stuff he was taking! But Danny loved this about Erin--her acute innocence, which reminded him of everything his father had been blind to, which Danny had also loved.

"This ... friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand," Dr. Reilly slowly said. "Is it you, Danny, or is this a character you're writing about?"

"Neither. It's an old friend," Danny told her. "I would tell you the story, Erin, but it's too long, even for you."

Danny remembered what he and Erin had to eat that night. They'd ordered the prawns with coconut milk and green curry broth; they'd both had the Malpeque oysters, with Silvestro's Champagne-shallot mignonette, to start.

"Tell me everything, Erin," he'd told her. "Spare me no detail." (The writer was always saying this to her.) Erin smiled and took a tiny sip of her wine. She was in the habit of ordering an expensive bottle of white wine; she never drank more than a glass or two, donating the remainder of the bottle to Patrice, who then sold it by the glass. For his part, Patrice every so often paid for Erin's wine. Patrice Arnaud was Dr. Reilly's patient, too.

"Well, Danny, here goes," Erin had begun that night in November 2001. "Your friend probably would not bleed to death--not if he cut his hand off at the wrist, with a clean swipe and a sharp blade." Danny didn't doubt that whatever instrument Ketchum might use would be sharp--be it the Browning knife, an ax, or even the old logger's chainsaw. "But your friend would bleed a lot--a real spurting mess out of the radial and ulnar arteries, which are the two main vessels he would have severed. Yet this unfortunate friend of yours would have a few problems--that is, if he wanted to die." Here Erin paused; at first, Danny didn't know why. "Does your friend want to die, or does he just want to be rid of the hand?" the doctor asked him.

"I don't know," Danny answered her. "I always thought it was just about the hand."

"Well, then, he may get what he wants," Erin said. "You see, the arteries are very elastic. After they were cut, they would retract back into the arm, where the surrounding tissues would compress them, at least to a degree. The muscles in the arterial walls would immediately contract, narrowing the diameter of the arteries and slowing the blood loss. Our bodies are resourceful at trying to stay alive; your friend would have many mechanisms coming into play, all making an effort to save him from bleeding to death." Here Erin paused again. "What's wrong?" she asked Danny.

Daniel Baciagalupo was still thinking about whether or not Ketchum wanted to kill himself; over all those years with the incessant talk about the left hand, it hadn't occurred to the writer that Ketchum might have been harboring more serious intentions.

"Are you feeling sick, or something?" Dr. Reilly asked Danny.

"No, it's not that," Danny said. "So he wouldn't bleed to death--that's what you're saying?"

"The platelets would save him," Erin answered. "Platelets are tiny blood particles, which aren't even large enough to be real cells; they're actually flakes that fall off a cell and then circulate in the bloodstream. Under normal circumstances, platelets are tiny, smooth-walled, non-adherent flecks. But when your friend cuts off his hand, he exposes the endothelium, or inner arterial wall, which would cause a spill of a protein called collagen--the same stuff plastic surgeons use. When the platelets encounter the exposed collagen, they undergo a drastic transformation--a metamorphosis. The platelets become sticky, spiculated particles. They aggregate and adhere to one another--they form a plug."

"Like a clot?" Danny asked; his voice sounded funny. He couldn't eat because he couldn't swallow. He was somehow certain that Ketchum intended to kill himself; cutting off his left hand was just the logger's way of doing it, and of course Ketchum held his left hand responsible for letting Rosie slip away. But Rosie had been gone for years. Danny realized that Ketchum must have been holding himself accountable for not killing Carl. For his friend Dominic's death, Ketchum faulted himself--meaning all of himself. Ketchum's left hand couldn't be blamed for the cowboy killing the cook.

"Too much detail while you're eating?" Erin asked. "I'll stop. The clotting comes a little later; there are a couple of other proteins involved. Suffice it to say, there is an artery-plugging clot; this would stem the tide of your friend's bleeding, and save his life. Cutting off your hand won't kill you."