Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Read Free Book Online

careful not to say too much, because Ketchum didn’t know what the twelve-year-old knew about his mother’s death, and Dominic Baciagalupo didn’t want his son to hear whatever odd or unwelcome detail Ketchum might remember.
    “Just try the meat loaf, Ketchum,” the cook said softly.
    “It’s pretty good with applesauce,” Danny said. The riverman lowered himself onto a stool; he rested his new white cast on the counter-top. Everything about Ketchum was hardened and sharp-edged, like a whittled-down stick—and, as Danny had observed, “wicked tough”—which made the sterile, fragile-looking cast as unsuited to the man as a prosthetic limb. (If Ketchum had lost an arm, he would have made do with the stump—he might have used it as a club.)
    But now that Ketchum was sitting down, Danny thought the river driver looked safe enough to touch. The boy had never felt a cast before. Even drunk, Ketchum somehow knew what Dan was thinking. “Go on—you can touch it,” the logger said, extending his cast in the boy’s direction. There was dried blood, or pitch, on what Danny could see of Ketchum’s crooked fingers; they protruded from the cast, un-moving. With a broken wrist, it hurt to move your fingers for the first few days. The boy gently touched Ketchum’s cast.
    The cook gave Ketchum a generous serving of meat loaf and applesauce. “There’s milk or orange juice,” Dominic said, “or I could make you some coffee.”
    “What a disheartening choice,” Ketchum said, winking at Danny.
    “Disheartening,” the cook repeated, shaking his head. “I’ll make some coffee.”
    Danny wished that the two men would just talk about everything; the boy knew much of their history, but not enough about his mother. Of her death, no detail could be odd or unwelcome—Danny wanted to hear every word of it. But the cook was a careful man, or he had become one; even Ketchum, who had driven his own children away from him, was especially cautious and protective with Danny, much as the veteran logger had behaved around Angel.
    “I wouldn’t go there with you when you’ve been drinking, anyway,” the cook was saying.
    “I took you there when you’d been drinking,” Ketchum said; so he wouldn’t say more, he took a mouthful of meat loaf and applesauce.
    “Except when it’s under a logjam, a body doesn’t move downstream as fast as a log,” Dominic Baciagalupo said, as if he were speaking to the coffeepot—not to Ketchum, whose back was turned to him. “Not unless the body is caught on a log.”
    Danny had heard this explanation, in another context. It had taken a few days—three, to be exact—for his mother’s body to make the journey from the river basin to the narrows, where it had bumped up against the dam. First a drowned body sinks, the cook had explained to his son; then it rises.
    “They’re keeping the dams closed through the weekend,” Ketchum said. (He meant not only Dead Woman Dam but the Pontook Dam, on the Androscoggin.) Ketchum ate steadily but not fast, the fork held unfamiliarly, and a little clumsily, in his left hand.
    “It’s good with applesauce, isn’t it?” the boy asked him. Ketchum nodded in agreement, chewing vigorously.
    They could smell the coffee brewing, and the cook said—more to himself than to his son, or Ketchum—“I might as well start the bacon, while I’m at it.” Ketchum just went on eating. “I suppose the logs are already at the first dam,” Dominic added, as if he were still speaking to no one but himself. “I mean our logs.”
    “I know which logs you mean, and which dam,” Ketchum told him. “Yes, the logs are already at the dam—they were there while you were making supper.”
    “So you saw that moron doctor there?” the cook asked. “Not that you need a genius to put a cast on a broken wrist, but you must be a man who loves to take chances.” Dominic went out of the cookhouse to get the bacon from the cooler. It was black outside, and the sound of