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“I know you, Ketchum-you’ll bring your Browning knife and a twelve-gauge. You’ll kill every Callahan you can identify, Katie included, and then you’ll go to work on a couple of Da
“I know you feel the same way I do, Cookie.”
“Yes, I do,” the cook admitted to his best friend, “and Carmella even agrees with us. But we’ve got to let Daniel do this his way. The Callahan whore is going to have someone’s baby, and that baby will keep mine out of this disastrous war.”
So Ketchum had stayed in Maine. The logger would later say it was a good thing Cookie had gone to the wedding. When Joe turned out to be tall, the cook might have been inclined to believe that his beloved Daniel couldn’t have been the boy’s father. After all, Katie fucked anyone she wanted to; she could easily have been knocked up by someone else and then married Daniel. But the wedding offered proof that there was a gene for tall men in the Callahan family, and Joe turned out to be the spitting image of Da
Joe had the body of an oarsman, but he wasn’t a rower. For the most part, he’d grown up in Vermont -the boy was an experienced downhill skier. His dad didn’t much care for the sport; as a ru
Joe was a wrestler at Northfield Mount Hermon, though he didn’t have the body of a wrestler. It was probably Ketchum’s influence that made Joe choose wrestling, the cook thought. (Ketchum was just a barroom brawler, but wrestling came closer to describing Ketchum’s favorite kind of fight than boxing did. Usually, Ketchum didn’t hit people until he got them down on the ground.)
The first time Ketchum had gone to one of Joe’s wrestling matches at NMH, the barroom brawler hadn’t understood the sport very well. Joe had scored a takedown, and his opponent lay stretched out on his side, when Ketchum shouted, “Now hit him-hit him now!”
“Ketchum,” Da
“Christ, that’s the best time to hit a fella,” Ketchum said, “when you’ve got him stretched out like that.”
Later in that same match, Joe had his opponent in a near-pin position; Joe had sunk a half nelson around the other wrestler’s neck and was tilting him toward his back.
“Joe’s got his arm around the wrong side of the neck,” Ketchum complained to the cook. “You can’t choke someone with your arm around the back of a fella’s neck-you’ve got to be on his fucking throat!”
“Joe’s trying to pin that guy on his back, Ketchum-he’s not trying to choke him!” Tony Angel told his old friend.
“Choking is illegal,” Da
Joe won his match, and, after all the matches were over, Ketchum went to shake the boy’s hand. That was when Ketchum stepped on a wrestling mat for the first time. When the woodsman felt the mat yield under his foot, he stepped quickly back to the hardwood floor of the gym; it was as if he’d stepped on something alive. “Shit, that’s the first problem,” Ketchum said. “The mat’s too soft-you can’t really hurt a guy on it.”
“Ketchum, you’re not trying to hurt your opponent-just pin him, or beat him on points,” Da
“You get him down on his belly, and pull one of his arms behind his back,” Ketchum said with enthusiasm. “Then you get a little leverage under the fella’s forearm, and you drive his right elbow till it touches his left ear. Believe me, he’ll turn over-if he doesn’t want to lose his whole shoulder!”
“You can’t bend someone’s arm past a forty-five-degree angle,” Joe told the old logger. “Submission holds and choke holds used to be legal, but nowadays you can’t make someone yield to pain-that’s called a submission hold-and you can’t choke anyone. Those things aren’t legal-not anymore.”
“Constipated Christ-it’s like everything else!” Ketchum complained. “They take what was once a good thing and fuck it up with rules!”
But after Ketchum had seen a few more of Joe’s matches, he grew to like high school wrestling. “Hell, to be honest with you, Cookie, when I first saw it, I thought it was a sissy way to fight. But once you get the idea of it, you can actually tell who would win the match if it was taking place in a parking lot and there was no referee.”
Joe was surprised by how many matches Ketchum attended. The old woodsman drove all over New England to see Joe and the NMH team wrestle. They had a pretty good team in Joe’s senior year. In Joe’s four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, Ketchum definitely saw more of the boy’s wrestling matches than his father or grandfather did.
The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel’s Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson’s wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches-the season-ending tournaments, for example-were on the weekends. Da
“You missed a good fight,” Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Da
UNTIL HE HAD A BESTSELLER with The Ke
When it wasn’t wrestling season and his dad was traveling, Joe often spent weekends at his grandfather’s apartment in Brattleboro. Sometimes his friends from Northfield Mount Hermon would have their parents take them out to di
The other guys on Joe’s wrestling team had grown fond of Ketchum. “Is he your uncle-that tough-looking man with the scar?” the wrestlers would ask Joe.
“No, Ketchum’s just a friend of the family-he was a river driver,” Joe would tell them.
One day, Joe’s wrestling coach asked him, “Did that big man with the hard handshake ever wrestle? He kind of looks like he might have, or could have.”
“Not officially,” Joe answered.
“What about that scar?” the coach asked Joe. “That’s a nasty one-better than your average head-butt, anyway.”
“That was no head-butt-that was a bear,” Joe told the coach.
“A bear!”
“Just don’t ever ask Ketchum about it,” Joe said. “It’s a terrible story. Ketchum had to kill the bear, but he didn’t want to. He likes bears, generally.”
There was a bit of the writer Da