Free Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Page A

formed a ramp up to the truck bed; then a horse, or a tractor-powered jammer (a hoist), was used to load the logs. Ketchum wouldn’t have wanted Angel Pope to have anything to do with loading or unloading logs.
    Danny Baciagalupo had begun his kitchen chores when Ketchum spoke again in his drunken stupor. “He should have been sticking lumber, Cookie.” The cook nodded at the stove, though he knew perfectly well that Ketchum was still asleep, without once looking at the veteran riverman.
    Stacking boards—or “sticking lumber,” as it was called—was usually a beginning-laborer position at a sawmill. Even the cook wouldn’t have considered Angel too green for that. The lumber was stacked by alternating layers of boards with “stickers;” these were narrow slats of wood laid perpendicular to the boards to separate them, to allow the air to circulate for drying. Dominic Baciagalupo might have allowed Danny to do that.
    “Progressively increasing mechanization,” Ketchum mumbled. If the big man had so much as attempted to roll over on the folding cot, he would have fallen off or collapsed the cot. But Ketchum lay un-moving on his back, with his cast held across his chest—as if he were about to be buried at sea. The unzipped sleeping bag covered him like a flag; his left hand touched the floor.
    “Oh, boy—here we go again,” the cook said, smiling at his son. Progressively increasing mechanization was a sore point with Ketchum. By 1954, rubber-tired skidders were already appearing in the woods. The larger trees were generally being yarded by tractors; the smaller horse-logging crews were being paid what was called a “piece rate” (by the cord or thousand board feet) to cut and haul timber to an assigned roadside location. As rubber-tired logging equipment became more common, an old horse-logger like Ketchum knew that the trees were being harvested at a faster rate. Ketchum was not a faster-rate man.
    Danny opened the tricky outer door of the cookhouse kitchen and went outside to pee. (Although his father disapproved of peeing outdoors, Ketchum had taught young Dan to enjoy it.) It was still dark, and the mist from the rushing river was cold and wet on the boy’s face.
    “Fuck the donkey-engine men!” Ketchum shouted in his sleep. “Fuck the asshole truck drivers, too!”
    “You’re quite right about that,” the cook said to his sleeping friend. The twelve-year-old came back inside, closing the kitchen’s outer door. Ketchum was sitting up on the cot; perhaps his own shouting had woken him. He was frightening to behold. The unnatural blackness of his hair and beard gave him the appearance of someone who’d been burned in a terrible fire—and now the livid scar on his forehead seemed especially ashen in the whitish light from the fluorescent lamps. Ketchum was assessing his surroundings in an unfocused but wary way.
    “Don’t forget to fuck Constable Carl, too,” the cook said to him.
    “Absolutely,” Ketchum readily agreed. “That fucking cowboy.”
    Constable Carl had given Ketchum the scar. The constable routinely broke up fights at the dance hall and in the hostelry bars. He’d broken up one of Ketchum’s fights by cracking the logger’s head with the long barrel of his Colt .45—“the kind of show-off weapon only an asshole would have in New Hampshire,” in Ketchum’s opinion. (Hence Constable Carl was a “cowboy.”)
    Yet, in Danny Baciagalupo’s opinion, getting smacked on your forehead with a Colt .45 was preferable to Constable Carl shooting you in the foot, or in the knee—a method of breaking up fights that the cowboy generally favored with the Canadian itinerants. This usually meant that the French Canadians couldn’t work in the woods; they had to go back to Quebec, which was okay with Constable Carl.
    “Was I saying something?” Ketchum asked the cook and his son.
    “You were positively eloquent on the subject of the donkey-engine men and the truck drivers,” Dominic