Free Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Page B

told his friend.
    “Fuck them,” Ketchum automatically replied. “I’m going north—anywhere but here,” he announced. Ketchum was still sitting on the cot, where he regarded his cast as if it were a newly acquired but utterly useless limb; he stared at it with hatred.
    “Yeah, sure,” Dominic said.
    Danny was working on the countertop, cutting up the peppers and tomatoes for the omelets; the boy knew that Ketchum talked about “going north” all the time. Both the Millsfield and the Second College Grant regions of New Hampshire, which is now officially known as the Great North Woods, and the Aziscohos Mountain area southeast of Wilsons Mills, Maine, were the logging territories that beckoned to Ketchum. But the veteran river driver and horse-logger knew that the aforementioned “progressively increasing mechanization” would go north, too; in fact, it was already there.
    “You should leave here, Cookie—you know you should,” Ketchum said, as the first of the headlights from the kitchen help shone into the cookhouse.
    “Yeah, sure,” the cook said again. Like Dominic Baciagalupo, Ketchum talked about leaving, but he stayed.
    The engine sound of the Indian dishwasher’s truck stood out among the other vehicles. “Constipated Christ!” said Ketchum, as he finally stood up. “Does Jane ever shift out of first gear?”
    The cook, who had not once looked at Ketchum while he was working at the stove, looked at him now. “I didn’t hire her for her driving, Ketchum.”
    “Yeah, sure,” was all Ketchum said, as Injun Jane opened the outer door; the Indian dishwasher and the rest of the kitchen help came inside. (Danny briefly wondered why Jane was the only one who seemed to have no trouble dealing with that tricky door.)
    Ketchum had folded up the cot and the sleeping bag; he was putting them away when Jane spoke. “Uh-oh—there’s a logger in the kitchen,” she said. “That’s never a good sign.”
    “You and your signs,” Ketchum said, without looking at her. “Is your husband dead yet, or do we have to postpone the celebration?”
    “I haven’t married him yet, and I have no plans to,” Jane replied, as always. The Indian dishwasher lived with Constable Carl—a bone of contention with Ketchum and the cook. Dominic didn’t like the cowboy any better than Ketchum did—nor had Jane been with the constable long, and (speaking of signs) she gave some vague indication that she might leave him. He beat her. The cook and Ketchum had more than once remarked on Jane’s black eyes and split lips, and even Danny had noticed the thumb-size and fingerprint-shaped bruises on her upper arms, where the constable had evidently grabbed her and shaken her.
    “I can take a beating,” was what Jane usually said to Ketchum or the cook, though it clearly pleased her that they were concerned for her safety. “But Carl should watch out,” she only occasionally added. “One day, I just might beat him back.”
    Jane was a big woman, and she greeted the twelve-year-old (as she always did) by hugging him against one of her massive hips. The boy came up to her breasts, which were monumental; not even the baggy sweatshirt that she wore in the early-morning cold could conceal them. Injun Jane had a ton of coal-black hair, too—although this was unfailingly arranged in one thick braid, which hung to her rump. Even in sweatpants, or baggy dungarees—her kitchen clothes of choice—Jane couldn’t hide her rump.
    On top of her head, with a hole cut out of it for the braid, was a 1951 Cleveland Indians baseball cap—a gift from Ketchum. One summer, sick of the blackflies and the mosquitoes, Ketchum had tried driving a truck; it was a long-distance lumber hauler, and he’d actually acquired the baseball cap in far-off Cleveland. (Danny could only imagine that this must have happened before Ketchum had decided that all truck drivers were assholes.)
    “Well, Jane, you’re an Injun—this is the cap for you,” Ketchum