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Six-Pack had grown more terse in her old age. When there was something she’d read, or had seen in the news on TV-and provided the item was in the dumber-than-dog-shit category of human stupidities-Six-Pack would fax Da
It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Da
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
THE MID-FEBRUARY STORM had blown across Lake Huron from western Canada, but when the wind and snow hit the Georgian Bay islands, the wind shifted and the snow just kept falling; the wind now blew from a southerly direction, from Parry Sound to Shawanaga Bay. From his writing shack, Da
Tireless had called Da
“What happened to him-the butt-brained oaf from Ohio?” Da
“They found the poor fool frozen-stiff as a stick,” Tireless told him.
“I’ll come get you tomorrow, or the next day-whenever the storm’s over,” Da
“Kiss Hero for me,” she said.
“I don’t kiss Hero a lot,” Da
“Well, you should kiss him more,” the First Nation woman said. “I think Hero would be nicer to you if you kissed him a lot.”
All morning, in the writing shack, Hero had been farting up a storm-the near equal of the snowstorm Da
Certain sentences now came to him whole, intact; even the punctuation seemed permanent. When two such sentences were born consecutively, one emerging immediately after the other, the writer felt especially riveted to his task. He’d written the first twosome of the morning on a piece of typing paper and had thumbtacked the page to the rough pine-board wall of his writing shack. Da
“As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do-as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro-to and fro.”
Da
“You could not say ‘the past’ or ‘the future’ in the cook’s presence without making him frown,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. There were other, isolated sentences about this young cook; they were like landmarks or signposts for Da
The cook would be a major point-of-view character in the first chapter, the writer imagined-as Da
“In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change,” Da
Everything about the Ketchum character was more fragmentary. Nothing about the Ketchum character came to Da
At this point, the writer could see the Angel character more clearly than he could see the Ketchum character-though it was obvious to Daniel Baciagalupo that the Ketchum character was more major. (Maybe most major, Da
Just then-at what amounted to a wave of more noxious farting from the dog-Da
“Buenos días, Señor Writer,” Lupita said.
“Buenos días, Lupita,” Da
The Mexican cleaning woman didn’t call often. In those ten weeks of the winter when Da