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

the river rushed into the warm kitchen.
    “You used to take chances, Cookie!” Ketchum called out to his old friend; he looked cautiously at Danny. “Your dad used to be happier, too—when he drank.”
    “I used to be happier—period,” the cook said; the way he dropped the slab of bacon on the cutting board made Danny look at his father, but Ketchum never turned his attention away from the meat loaf and applesauce.
    “Given that bodies move downstream slower than logs,” Ketchum said with deliberate slowness, his speech slightly slurred, “what would you guess as to Angel’s estimated time of arrival at that spot I’m having trouble remembering, exactly?”
    Danny was counting to himself, but it was clear to the boy, and to Ketchum, that the cook had already been estimating the young Canadian’s journey. “Saturday night or Sunday morning,” Dominic Baciagalupo said. He had to raise his voice above the hissing bacon. “I’m not going there with you at night, Ketchum.”
    Danny quickly looked at Ketchum, anticipating the big man’s response; it was, after all, the story that most interested the boy, and the one closest to his heart. “I went there with you at night, Cookie.”
    “The odds are better you’ll be sober Sunday morning,” the cook told Ketchum. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning—Daniel and I will meet you there.” (They meant Dead Woman Dam, though young Dan knew that neither man would say it.)
    “We can all go in my truck,” Ketchum said.
    “I’ll drive Daniel with me, in case you’re not quite sober,” Dominic replied.
    Ketchum pushed his clean plate away; he rested his shaggy head on the countertop and stared at his cast. “You’ll meet me at the mill-pond, you mean?” Ketchum asked.
    “I don’t call it that,” the cook said. “The dam was there before the mill. How can they call it a pond, when it’s where the river narrows?”
    “You know mill people,” Ketchum said with contempt.
    “The dam was there before the mill,” Dominic repeated, still not naming the dam.
    “One day the water will breach that dam, and they won’t bother to build another one,” Ketchum said; his eyes were closing.
    “One day they won’t be driving logs on Twisted River,” the cook said. “They won’t need a dam where the river runs into the reservoir, though I believe they’ll keep the Pontook Dam on the Androscoggin.”
    “One day soon , Cookie,” Ketchum corrected him. His eyes were closed—his head, his chest, and both his arms were sprawled on the countertop. The cook quietly removed the clean plate, but Ketchum wasn’t asleep; he spoke more slowly than before. “There’s a sort of spillway off to one side of the dam. The water makes a pool—it’s almost like an open well—but there’s a kind of containment boom, just a rope with floats, to keep the logs out.”
    “It sounds like you remember it as exactly as I do,” Dominic told him.
    That was where they’d found his mother, Danny knew. Her body floated lower in the water than the logs; she must have drifted under the containment boom and into the spillway. Ketchum had found her all alone in the pool, or the well—not a log around her.
    “I can’t quite see how to get there,” Ketchum said, with some frustration. With his eyes still closed, he was slowly curling the fingers of his right hand, his fingertips reaching for but not quite touching the palm of his cast; both the cook and his son knew that the logger was testing his tolerance of the pain.
    “Well, I can show you, Ketchum,” Dominic said gently. “You have to walk out on the dam, or across the logs—remember?”
    The cook had carried one of the folding cots into the kitchen. He nodded to his son, who helped him set up the cot—where it wouldn’t be in the way of the ovens, or the inside-opening screen door. “I want to sleep in the kitchen, too,” Danny told his dad.
    “If you make a little distance between yourself and the conversation, you might