“Jesus, Carl, don’t…” Dominic was saying, as the constable took aim at the young Frenchman.

“Get your naked French ass back indoors where you belong!” the constable shouted. “Before I blow your balls off, and your pecker with ’em!”

On all fours, Lucien Charest peed straight down at the ground-the puddle of piss quickly spreading to his muddy knees. The Frenchman turned and, still on all fours, scampered like a dog toward the hostelry, where the mischief-makers who’d thrown the young man outside now greeted him at the hostelry door as if his naked life depended on it. (It probably did.) Cries of “Lucien!” were followed by French-speaking gibberish too fast and hysterical for either the cook or the constable to comprehend. When Charest was safely back inside the hostelry, Constable Carl turned off his flashlight. The ridiculous Colt.45 was still cocked; the cook was disconcerted that the cowboy slowly uncocked the weapon while it was pointed at the knee of Dominic Baciagalupo’s good leg.

“You want me to walk you home, little Cookie?” Carl asked.

“I’m okay,” Dominic answered. They could both make out the lights of the cookhouse, uphill from the river-basin end of town.

“I see you got my darlin’ Jane workin’ late again tonight,” the constable said. Before the cook had time to consider a careful reply, Carl added: “Isn’t that boy of yours gettin’ old enough to put himself to bed?”

“Daniel’s old enough,” Dominic answered. “I just don’t like leaving him alone at night, and he’s wicked fond of Jane.”

“That makes two of us,” Constable Carl said, spitting.

That makes three of us! Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, but the cook said nothing. He was also remembering how Pam had pressed his face between her breasts, and how close she had come to suffocating him. He felt ashamed, and disloyal to Jane, because Six-Pack had also aroused him-in a peculiarly life-threatening way.

“Good night, Constable,” the cook said. He had started uphill before the cowboy shone his flashlight on him, briefly illuminating the way ahead.

“Good night, Cookie,” Carl said. When the flashlight went out, the cook could feel that the constable was still watching him. “You get around pretty good for a cripple!” the cowboy called up the dark hill. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember that, too.

Just a snatch of the song from the dance hall reached him, but Dominic was now too far from town to hear the words clearly. It was only because he’d heard the song so many times that he knew what it was-Eddie Fisher singing “Oh My Papa”-and long after the cook could no longer hear the stupid song, he was irritated to find himself singing it.

CHAPTER 4. THE EIGHT-INCH CAST-IRON SKILLET

THE COOK COULDN’T ENTIRELY DISPEL THE FEELING THAT the constable had followed him home. For a while, Dominic Baciagalupo stood at the window in the darkened dining hall, on the lookout for a flashlight coming up the hill from town. But if the cowboy were intent on investigating the goings-on at the cookhouse, not even he would have been dumb enough to use his flashlight.

Dominic left the porch light on by the kitchen door, so that Jane could see the way to her truck; he put his muddy boots beside Jane’s at the foot of the stairs. The cook considered that, perhaps, he had lingered downstairs for another reason. How would he explain his lip injury to Jane, and should he tell her about his meeting with the constable? Shouldn’t Jane know that Dominic had encountered the cowboy, and that both Constable Carl’s behavior and his disposition were as unpredictable and unreadable as ever?

The cook couldn’t even say for certain if the constable somehow knew that Jane was Dominic’s “paramour,” as Ketchum might have put it-in reference to the toilet-reader’s list of words from another illicit love story.

Dominic Baciagalupo went quietly upstairs in his socks-though the stairs creaked in a most specific way because of his limp, and he could not manage to creep past his open bedroom door without Jane sitting up in bed and seeing him. (He sneaked enough of a look at her to know she’d let her hair down.) Dominic had wanted to clean up his wounded lower lip before he saw her, but Jane must have sensed he was hiding something from her; she sailed her Cleveland Indians cap into the hall, nearly hitting him. Chief Wahoo landed upside down but still grinning-the chief appearing to stare crazily down the hall, in the direction of the bathroom and young Dan’s bedroom.

In the bathroom mirror, the cook saw that his lower lip probably needed to be stitched; the wound would heal eventually, without stitches, but his lip would heal faster and there would be less of a scar if he had a couple of stitches. For now, after he’d painfully brushed his teeth, he poured some hydrogen peroxide on his lower lip and patted it dry with a clean towel-noting the blood on the towel. It was just bad luck that tomorrow was Sunday; he would rather let Ketchum or Jane stitch up his lip than try to find that moron doctor on a Sunday, in that place Dominic wouldn’t even think of by its ill-fated name.

The cook came out of the bathroom and continued down the hall to Daniel’s room. Dominic Baciagalupo kissed his sleeping son good night, leaving an unnoticed spot of blood on the boy’s forehead. When the cook came out into the hall, there was Chief Wahoo grinning upside down at him-as if to remind him that he better watch his words carefully with Injun Jane.

“Who hit you?” she asked him, as he was getting undressed in the bedroom.

“Ketchum was wild and unruly-you know how he can be when he’s passed out and talking at the same time.”

“If Ketchum had hit you, Cookie, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“It was just an accident,” the cook insisted, relying on a favorite word. “Ketchum didn’t mean to hurt me-he just caught me with his cast, by accident.”

“If he’d hit you with his cast, you would be dead,” Jane told him. She was sitting up in bed, with her hair all around her; it hung down below her waist, and she had folded her arms over her breasts, which were hidden by both her hair and her arms.

Whenever she took her hair down, and later went home that way, she could get in real trouble with Constable Carl-if he hadn’t already passed out. It was a night when Jane should stay late and leave early in the morning, if she went home at all, Dominic was thinking.

“I saw Carl tonight,” the cook told her.

“It wasn’t Carl who hit you, either,” Jane said, as he got into bed beside her. “And it doesn’t look as if he shot you,” she added.

“I can’t tell if he knows about us, Jane.”

“I can’t tell, either,” she told him.

“Did Ketchum kill Lucky Pinette?” the cook asked.

“Nobody knows, Cookie. We haven’t known doodley-squat about that for ages! Why did Six-Pack hit you?” Jane asked him.

“Because I wouldn’t fool around with her-that’s why.”

“If you had screwed Six-Pack, I would have hit you so hard you wouldn’t ever have found your lower lip,” Jane told him.

He smiled, which the lip didn’t like. When he winced at the pain, Jane said, “Poor baby-no kissing for you tonight.”

The cook lay down next to her. “There are other things besides kissing,” he said to her.

She pushed him to his back and lay on top of him, the sheer weight of her pressing him into the bed and taking his breath away. If the cook had closed his eyes, he would have seen himself in Six-Pack’s suffocating headlock again, so he kept his eyes wide open. When Injun Jane straddled his hips and firmly seated herself in his lap, Dominic felt a sudden intake of air fill his lungs. With an urgency possibly prompted by Six-Pack having assaulted him, Jane mounted the cook; she wasted no time in slipping him inside her.

“I’ll show you other things,” the Indian dishwasher said, rocking herself back and forth; her breasts fell on his chest, her mouth brushed his face, carefully not touching his lower lip, while her long hair cascaded forward, forming a tent around the two of them.