Last Night In Twisted River

Carl thought he had several options. He’d unlocked the door to the fire escape in Da

Whether Carl entered the property via the third-floor fire escape or walked in the front door, he would be safe hiding out in that third-floor room; the cowboy only had to be careful not to move around too much, not until the cook and his son were asleep. The floor creaked, Carl had noticed; so did the stairs leading down to the second-floor hall. But the cowboy would be wearing just socks on his feet. He would kill the cook first, Carl was thinking-then the son. Carl had seen the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging in the cook’s bedroom; of course the cowboy knew the Injun-killing history of that skillet, because Six-Pack had told him. Carl had amused himself by thinking how fu

The old sheriff was a little worried about encountering the Mexican cleaning woman, whose comings and goings weren’t as predictable as the cook’s-or the no-less-observable habits of his writer son. Compared to Lupita suddenly showing up to do a load or two of laundry, or compulsively attacking the kitchen, even Ketchum’s routine was reasonably consistent. The logger went to a Tae Kwon Do gym on Yonge Street for a couple of hours every day. The gym was called Champion Centre, and Ketchum had found the place by accident a few years ago; the master instructor was a former Iranian wrestler, now a boxer and a kickboxer. Ketchum said he was working on his “kicking skills.”

“Dear God,” the cook had complained. “Why would an eighty-three-year-old man have an interest in learning a martial art?”

“It’s more mixed martial arts, Cookie,” Ketchum explained. “It’s boxing and kickboxing-and grappling, too. I’m just interested in finding new ways to get a fella down to the ground. Once I get a guy on the ground, I know what to do with him.”

“But why, Ketchum?” the cook cried. “How many more fights are you pla

“That’s just it, Cookie-no one can plan on being in a fight. You just have to be ready!”

“Dear God,” Dominic said again.

To Da

“What would I want with a shotgun, Ketchum?” Da

“You’re not much of a deer hunter, Da

“Every household,” Da

“Okay, maybe this household especially,” Ketchum said. “You need to have a quick-handling, fast-action gun around-something you can’t miss with, in a close situation.”

“A close situation,” the cook repeated, throwing his hands in the air.

“I don’t know, Ketchum,” Da

“Just take the gun, Da

The first two rounds were buckshot, Da

“Dear God,” the cook started up again. “I won’t sleep at all, knowing there’s a loaded gun in the house!”

“That’s okay with me, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “In fact, I would say it would be ideal-if you don’t sleep at all, I mean.”

The Winchester Ranger had a birch-wood forestock and butt-stock, with a rubber recoil pad that the writer now rested against his shoulder. Da

“God damn you, Ketchum,” the cook was saying. “One night I’ll get up to pee, and my son will shoot me-thinking I’m the cowboy!”

Da

But Ketchum wasn’t in a merry mood. “Da

“IN-UK-SHUK,” Da

When he woke up the morning after Christmas, Da

Two large rocks atop each other composed each manlike leg; a kind of shelf or tabletop possibly represented the figure’s hips or waist. Four smaller rocks composed a potbellied upper body. The creature, if it was intended to have human features, had absurdly truncated arms; its arms were as disproportionately short as its legs were overlong. The head, if it was meant to be a head, suggested permanently windswept hair. The stone cairn was as stunted as the winter-beaten pines on the Georgian Bay islands. The cairn stood only as tall as Charlotte ’s hips, and given the perspective of the photograph above the headboard of Da

There were countless inuksuit on those islands-and many more out on Route 69, between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, where Da

But what were they, exactly? the writer now wondered, as he lay in bed the morning after Christmas. Not even Charlotte knew who had built the inuksuk on her island.

There’d been a carpenter from the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve on Andy Grant’s crew, the summer the two sleeping cabins were under construction. Another summer, Da