But the two drunks had been given a special supper and sent on their contented way. Danny and his dad and Jane were at the tail end of their Saturday-night chores when the wind from the suddenly kicked-open door to the dining room heralded another late arrival at the cookhouse.

From the kitchen, Jane couldn’t see the visitor. She shouted in the direction of the rushing wind at the dining-room door. “You’re too late! Supper is over!”

“I ain’t hungry,” said Six-Pack Pam.

Indeed, there was nothing hunger-driven in Pam’s appearance; what little flesh she had hung loosely from her big bones, and her lean, feral-looking face, tight-lipped and drawn, suggested more of a mostly-beer diet than a penchant for overeating. Yet she was tall and broad-shouldered enough to wear Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt without looking lost in it, and her lank blond hair, which was streaked with gray, appeared to be clean but uncared for-like the rest of her. She held a flashlight as big as a billy club. (Twisted River was not a well-lit town.) Not even the sleeves of Ketchum’s shirt were too long for her.

“So I guess you’ve killed him and claimed his clothes for your own,” the cook said, watching her warily.

“I ain’t chokin’, either, Cookie,” Pam told him.

“Not this time, Six-Pack!” Jane called from the kitchen. Danny guessed that the ladies must have known each other well enough for Jane to have recognized Pam’s voice.

“It’s kinda late for the hired help to still be here, ain’t it?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic recognized Six-Pack’s special drunkenness with an envy and nostalgia that surprised him-the big woman could hold her beer and bourbon, better than Ketchum. Jane had come out of the kitchen with a pasta pot under her arm; the open end of the pot was leveled at Pam like the mouth of a cannon.

Young Dan, in a presexual state of one-third arousal and two-thirds premonition, remembered Ketchum’s remark about women losing their looks, and how the various degrees of lost looks registered with Constable Carl. To the twelve-year-old, Jane hadn’t lost her looks-not quite yet. Her face was still pretty, her long braid was striking, and more radiant to imagine was all that coal-black hair when she undid the braid. There were her stupendous breasts to contemplate, too.

Yet seeing Six-Pack Pam unhinged Danny in a different but similar way: She was as handsome (in the category of strong-looking) as a man, and what was womanly about her came with a rawness-how she had insouciantly thrown on Ketchum’s shirt, without a bra, so that her loose breasts swelled the shirt-and now her eyes darted from Jane to Danny, and then fixed upon the cook with the venturesome but nervous daring of a young girl.

“I need your help with Ketchum, Cookie,” Pam said. Dominic was fearful that Ketchum had had a heart attack, or worse; he hoped that Six-Pack would spare young Daniel the gruesome details.

“I can help you with Ketchum,” Injun Jane told Pam. “I suppose he’s passed out somewhere-if so, I can carry him easier than Cookie can.”

“He’s passed out naked on the toilet, and I ain’t got but one toilet,” Pam said to Dominic, not looking at Jane.

“I hope he was just reading,” the cook replied.

Ketchum appeared to be making his dogged way through Dominic Baciagalupo’s books, which were really Dominic’s mother’s books and Rosie’s beloved novels. For someone who’d left school when he was younger than Danny, Ketchum read the books he borrowed with a determination bordering on lunacy. He returned the books to the cook with words circled on almost every page-not underlined passages, or even complete sentences, but just isolated words. (Danny wondered if his mom had taught Ketchum to read that way.)

Once young Dan had made a list of the words Ketchum had circled in his mother’s copy of Hawthorne ’s The Scarlet Letter. Collectively, the words made no sense at all.

symbolize

whipping-post

sex

malefactresses

pang

bosom

embroidered

writhing

ignominious

matronly

tremulous

punishment

salvation

plaintive

wailings

possessed

misbegotten

sinless

innermost

retribution

paramour

besmirches

hideous

And these were only the words Ketchum had circled in the first four chapters!

“What do you suppose he’s thinking?” Danny had asked his dad. The cook had held his tongue, though it was hard to resist the temptation to reply. Surely “sex” and “bosom” were much on Ketchum’s mind; as for “malefactresses,” Ketchum had known some. (Six-Pack Pam among them!) Regarding the “paramour,” Dominic Baciagalupo was more of an authority than he wanted to be-the hell with what Ketchum made of the word! And considering “whippingpost” and “writhing”-not to mention “wailings,” “misbegotten,” “besmirches,” and “hideous”-the cook had no desire to investigate Ketchum’s prurient interest in those words.

The “matronly,” the “sinless,” the “innermost,” and above all “symbolize,” were mild surprises; nor would Dominic have imagined that Ketchum gave much thought to what was “embroidered” or “ignominious” or “tremulous” or “plaintive.” The cook believed that “retribution” (especially the “punishment” part) was as much up his old friend’s alley as the “possessed” factor, because Ketchum surely was possessed-to the degree that the “salvation” ingredient seemed highly unlikely. (And did Ketchum regularly feel a “pang”-a pang for whom or what? Dominic wondered.)

“Maybe they’re just words,” young Dan had reasoned.

“What do you mean, Daniel?”

Was Ketchum trying to improve his vocabulary? For an uneducated man, he was very well spoken-and he kept borrowing books!

“It’s a list of kind of fancy words, most of them,” Danny had speculated.

Yes, the cook concurred-“sex” and “bosom,” and perhaps “pang,” excluded.

“All I know is, I was readin’ out loud to him, and then he took the fuckin’ book and went into the bathroom and passed out,” Six-Pack was saying. “He’s got himself wedged in a corner, but he’s still on the toilet,” she added.

Dominic didn’t want to know about the reading out loud. His impression of Ketchum’s dance-hall women did not include an element of literary interest or curiosity; it was the cook’s opinion that Ketchum rarely spoke to these women, or listened to them. But Dominic had once asked Ketchum (insincerely) what he did for “foreplay.”

To the cook’s considerable surprise, Ketchum had answered: “I ask them to read out loud to me. It gets me in the mood.”

Or in the mood to take the book to the bathroom and pass out with it, Dominic now thought dryly. Nor did the cook imagine that the literacy level among Ketchum’s dance-hall women was especially high. How did Ketchum know which women could read at all? And what was the book that had put him out of the mood with Six-Pack Pam? (Quite possibly, Ketchum simply had needed to go to the bathroom.)

Injun Jane had gone into the kitchen and now returned with a flashlight. “So you can find your way back,” she said to Dominic, handing him the light. “I’ll stay with Danny, and get him ready for bed.”

“Can I go with you?” the boy asked his dad. “I could help you with Ketchum.”

“My place ain’t very suitable for kids, Danny,” Pam told him.

That concept begged a response, but all the cook said was: “You stay with Jane, Daniel. I’ll be right back,” he added, more to Jane than to his son, but the Indian dishwasher had already gone back inside the kitchen.

FROM THE UPSTAIRS OF THE COOKHOUSE, where the bedrooms were, there was a partial view of the river basin and a better view of the town above the basin. However, the town was so dark at night that one had little sense of the activities in the various saloons and hostelries from the distant cookhouse-nor could Danny and Injun Jane hear the music from the dance hall, where no one was dancing.