"Ketchum, are you saying it's inevitable that Pam will tell Carl everything?"
"As inevitable as the fact that one day, Danny, the cowboy is going to beat her up."
"Jesus!" Danny suddenly cried. "What were you and Mom doing when she was supposed to be teaching you to read?"
"Talk to your dad, Danny--it's not my business to tell you."
"Were you sleeping with her?" Danny asked him.
"Talk to your dad, please," Ketchum said. Danny couldn't remember Ketchum ever saying the please word before.
"Does my dad know you slept with her?" Danny asked him.
"Constipated Christ!" Ketchum shouted into the phone. "Why do you think your dad busted half my head open with the damn skillet?"
"What did you just say?" Danny asked him.
"I'm drunk," Ketchum told him. "Don't listen to what I say."
"I thought Carl cracked your head open with his Colt forty-five," Danny said.
"Hell, if the cowboy had cracked my head open, I would have killed him!" Ketchum thundered. As soon as the logger said this, Danny knew it was true; Ketchum would never have tolerated having his head cracked open, unless Dominic had done it.
"I saw lights on in the cookhouse," Ketchum began, suddenly sounding weary. "Your mom and dad were up late talking, and--in those days--drinking. I walked in the screen door to the kitchen. I didn't know it was the night your mom told your dad about her and me."
"I get it," Danny said.
"Not all of it, you don't. Talk to your dad," Ketchum repeated.
"Did Jane know?" Danny asked.
"Shit, the Injun knew everything," Ketchum told him.
"Ketchum?" Danny asked. "Does my dad know that you didn't learn to read?"
"I'm trying to learn now," Ketchum said defensively. "I think that schoolteacher lady is going to teach me. She said she would."
"Does Dad know you can't read?" the young man asked his father's old friend.
"I suppose one of us will have to tell him," Ketchum said. "Cookie is probably of the opinion that Rosie must have taught me something."
"So that was why you called--what you meant by 'Something's up' in your letter--is that it?" Danny asked him.
"I can't believe you believed that bullshit about the fucking bear," Ketchum said. The bear story had found its way, in a more remote form, into Daniel Baciagalupo's first novel. But of course it hadn't really been a bear that walked into the kitchen--it had just been Ketchum. And if the bear story hadn't been planted in young Dan's heart and mind, maybe he wouldn't have reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet--maybe he wouldn't have imagined that the sound of his father and Jane making love was the sound of a mauling-in-progress. Then maybe he wouldn't have killed Jane.
"So there wasn't a bear," Danny said.
"Hell, there's probably three thousand bears at any given time in northern New Hampshire--I've seen a bunch of bears. I've shot some," Ketchum added. "But if a bear had walked into the cookhouse kitchen through that screen door, your father's best way to save himself, and Rosie, would be if the two of them had exited the kitchen through the dining room--not running, either, or ever turning their backs on the bear, but just maintaining eye contact and backing up real slowly. No, you dummy, it wasn't a bear--it was me! Anybody knows better than to hit a bear in the face with a fucking frying pan!"
"I wish I had never written about it," was all Danny could say.
"There's one more thing," Ketchum told him. "It's another kind of writing problem."
"Jesus!" Danny said again. "How much have you been drinking?"
"You're sounding more and more like your father," Ketchum told him. "I just mean that you're publishing a book, aren't you? And have you thought about what it might mean if that book were to become a bestseller? If suddenly you were to become a popular writer, with your name and picture in the newspapers and magazines--you might even get to be on television!"
"It's a first novel," Danny said dismissively. "It will have only a small first printing, and not much publicity. It's a literary novel, or I hope it is. It's highly unlikely it'll be a bestseller!"