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The cook could breathe, but he couldn’t move. Jane’s weight was too great for him to budge her. Besides, Dominic Baciagalupo wouldn’t have wanted to change a single element of the way she was rocking back and forth on top of him-or her gathering momentum. (Not even if Injun Jane had been as light as Dominic’s late wife, Rosie, and the cook himself were as big as Ketchum.) It was a little like riding a train, Dominic imagined-except all he could do was hold tightly to the train that was, in reality, riding him.
IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW that Da
What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn’t only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Da
There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to Jane? young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her head? Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane-either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a human predator) with a bush hook?
As he made his cautious way down the hall, Da
What Da
The bear was consuming his father, or so it appeared to the twelve-year-old. With no weapon at hand, one might have expected the boy to throw himself on the animal attacking his dad in such a savage or frenzied ma
Holding the handle in both hands, the boy stepped up to the bed and took aim at where he thought the bear’s head ought to be. He’d already started his two-handed swing-as Ketchum had once shown him, with an ax, being sure to get his hips behind the swinging motion-when he noticed the bare soles of two clearly human feet. The feet were in a prayerful position, just beside his dad’s bare knees, and Da
“Jane?” Da
Jane must have heard the boy utter her name, because she raised her head and turned to face him. That was why the skillet caught her full-force on her right temple. The ringing sound, a dull but deep gong, was followed by a stinging sensation young Dan first felt in his hands; a reverberant tingle passed through both wrists and up his forearms. For the rest of his life, or as long as his memory endured, it would be small consolation to Da
Jane’s massive body shuddered. She was too massive, and her hair was too sleekly beautiful, for her ever to have been a black bear-not in this life or the next, where she most assuredly was going. Jane rolled off the cook and crashed to the floor.
There was no mistaking her for a bear now. Her hair had fa
“Jane,” Da
The cook quickly covered her private parts with a pillow. He knelt in the vast expanse of her far-flung hair, putting his ear to her quiet heart. Young Dan held the skillet in both hands, as if the reverberation still stung his palms; possibly, the ongoing tingle in his forearms would last forever. Though he was only twelve, Da
Dominic could not have looked more shocked if, at that moment, the dead dishwasher had turned herself into a bear; yet the cook could see for himself that it was his beloved Daniel who needed some consoling. Trembling, the boy stood clutching the murder weapon as if he believed a real bear would be the next thing to assail them.
“It’s understandable that you thought Jane was a bear,” his father said, hugging him. The cook took the skillet from his shaking son, hugging him again. “It’s not your fault, Daniel. It was an accident. It’s nobody’s fault.”