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They navigated the bedroom; it was hard, even without a limp, to get around the enormous bed. And while it was easy for Dominic to imagine the extreme situation and awkward location of Ketchum's collapse, and why this might have made it necessary for Pam to hastily dress herself without a bra, they passed three bras en route to the bathroom--any one of which, even in a hurry, surely would have been opportune.
Six-Pack now scratched her breast under Ketchum's wool-flannel shirt. Dominic wasn't immediately worried that she was fondling herself suggestively, or otherwise flirting with him; it was as unplanned a gesture as her knocking Charlie Clough to the muddy ground, or the spontaneous forearm to the ear that had dropped Earl Dinsmore. The cook knew that if Six-Pack were to suggest anything, she would be far less ambiguous about it than to merely touch her breast in passing. Besides, Ketchum's wool-flannel shirt must have been itchy against her bare skin.
They found Ketchum on the toilet, more or less as Pam must have discovered him--with the paperback he'd been reading pinned by his cast, and held open on one of his bare thighs, and with both knees splayed wide apart. The water in the toilet was laced with bright bloodred streaks--as if Ketchum had been slowly bleeding to death.
"He's gotta be bleedin' internally!" Six-Pack exclaimed, but the cook realized that Ketchum had dropped a pen with red ink into the toilet; he must have been using the pen to circle certain words. "I already flushed, before leavin' him," Pam was saying, as Dominic rolled up his sleeve and (reaching between Ketchum's knees) picked the pen out of the toilet bowl--flushing again. Dominic washed his hands and the pen in the sink, drying them with a towel.
It was only then that he noticed Ketchum's erection. One of the cook's most fervent hopes--namely, to never see Ketchum with an erection--may have caused him to first overlook the obvious. Naturally, Six-Pack hadn't overlooked it. "Well, I wonder what he thinks he's goin' to do with that!" she was saying, as she lifted Ketchum under his heavy arms. She was able to prop him more upright on the toilet seat, rescuing him from his wedged position. "If you take hold of his ankles, Cookie, I can handle the rest."
The book, which nearly followed the pen's path into the toilet, slid off Ketchum's thigh to the floor. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot was a surprise to Dominic Baciagalupo, who could more easily understand Ketchum passing out with the novel on (or off) a toilet than he could imagine Six-Pack reading out loud to Ketchum from the gigantic greenly-lit bed. Dominic instinctively uttered aloud the book's title, which was misunderstood by Pam.
"You're tellin' me he's an idiot!" she said.
"How were you liking the book?" the cook asked her, as they lugged Ketchum out of the bathroom; they managed to hit Ketchum's head on the doorknob as they passed the open door. Ketchum's cast was dragging on the floor.
"It's about fuckin' Russians," Six-Pack said dismissively. "I wasn't payin' much attention to the story--I was just readin' it to him."
The passing blow to his head hadn't awakened Ketchum, although it seemed to serve as an invitation for him to speak. "As for those kind of dives, where you could get into a shitload of trouble just looking at some super-sensitive asshole, there was never anything in downtown Berlin to equal Hell's Half Acre in Bangor--not in my experience," Ketchum said, his erection as upstanding and worthy of attention as a weather vane.
"What do you know about Maine?" Pam asked him, as if Ketchum were conscious and could understand her.
"I didn't kill Pinette--they could never pin it on me!" Ketchum declared. "That wasn't my stamping hammer."
They'd found Lucky Pinette, murdered in his bed, in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin--about two miles north of Milan. He'd had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer, and there were those rivermen who claimed that Lucky had had a dispute with Ketchum at the sorting gaps on the river earlier in the afternoon. Ketchum, typically, was discovered to be spending the night at the Umbagog House in Errol--with a dim-witted woman who worked in the kitchen there. Neither the stamping hammer that had repeatedly hit Pinette (indenting his forehead with the letter H) nor Ketchum's hammer was ever found.
"So who killed Lucky?" Six-Pack asked Ketchum, as she and Dominic dropped him onto the bed, where the river driver's undying erection trembled at them like a flagpole in a gale-force wind.
"I'll bet Bergeron did it," Ketchum answered her. "He had a stamping hammer just like mine."
"And Bergeron wasn't bangin' some retard from Errol!" Pam replied.
With his eyes still closed, Ketchum merely smiled. The cook resisted the urge to go back into the bathroom and see what words Ketchum had circled in The Idiot--anything to get away from his old friend's towering erection.
"Are you awake, or what?" Dominic asked Ketchum, who appeared to have passed completely out again--or else he was imagining himself as one of the passengers in a third-class compartment on the Warsaw-St. Petersburg train, because Ketchum had only recently borrowed The Idiot, and the cook found it unlikely that Six-Pack had read very far into the first chapter before the passing-out-on-the-toilet episode had interrupted what Ketchum called his chosen foreplay.
"Well, I guess I'll go home," Dominic said, as Ketchum's finally drooping erection seemed to signify the end of the evening's entertainment. Perhaps not to Pam--facing the cook, she began to unbutton her borrowed shirt.
Here comes suggestive, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. There was no room between the foot of the bed and the bedroom wall, where Six-Pack blocked his way; he would have had to walk on the bed, stepping over Ketchum, to get around her.
"Come on, Cookie," Pam said. "Show me what you got." She tossed the wool-flannel shirt on the bed, where it covered Ketchum's face but not his fallen erection.
"She was semi-retarded," Ketchum mumbled from under the shirt, "and she wasn't from Errol--she came from Dixville Notch." He must have meant the kitchen worker in the Umbagog House, the woman he'd been banging the night Lucky Pinette was hammered to death in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. (It could have been just a coincidence that neither Ketchum's stamping hammer nor the murder weapon was ever found.)
Six-Pack fiercely took hold of the cook's shoulders and snapped his face between her breasts--no ambiguity now. It was half a Heimlich maneuver that he made on her, ducking under her arms to get behind her--his hands locking on her lower rib cage, under her pretty breasts. With his nose jammed painfully between Pam's shoulder blades, Dominic said: "I can't do this, Six-Pack--Ketchum's my friend."
She easily broke his grip; her long, hard elbow smacked him in the mouth, splitting his lower lip. Then she headlocked him, half smothering him between her armpit and the soft side of her breast. "You ain't no friend of his if you let him find Angel! He's tearin' himself up over that damn kid, Cookie," Pam told him. "If you let him so much as see that boy's body, or what's left of it, you ain't no friend of Ketchum's!"
They were rolling around on the bed beside Ketchum's covered face and his naked, unmoving body. The cook couldn't breathe. He reached around Six-Pack's shoulder and punched her in the ear, but she lay on him unflinchingly, with her weight on his chest; she had his head and neck, and his right arm, locked up tight. All the cook could do was hit her again with his awkward left hook--his fist struck her cheekbone, her nose, her temple, and her ear again.
"Christ, you can't fight worth shit, Cookie," Six-Pack said with contempt. She rolled off him, letting him go. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember lying there, his chest heaving alongside his snoring friend. The ghastly green light from the aquarium washed over the gasping cook; in the tank's murky water, the unse
en fish might have been mocking him. Pam had picked up a bra and was putting it on, with her back to him. "The least you can do is take Danny with you, earlier than when you're goin' to meet Ketchum. You two find Angel's body--before Ketchum gets there. Just don't let Ketchum see that boy!" she shouted.
Ketchum pulled the shirt off his face and stared unseeing at the ceiling; the cook sat up beside him. Pam had put the bra on and was angrily struggling into a T-shirt. Dominic would also remember this: Six-Pack's unbelted dungarees, low on her broad but bony hips, and the unzipped fly, through which he caught a glimpse of her blond pubic hair. She'd dressed herself in a hurry, to be sure--and she was hurrying now. "Get out, Cookie," she told him. He looked once at Ketchum, who had closed his eyes and covered his face with his cast. "Did Ketchum let you see your wife when he found her?" Pam asked the cook.
Dominic Baciagalupo would try to forget this part--how he got up from the bed, but Six-Pack wouldn't let him step around her. "Answer me," she said to him.
"No, Ketchum didn't let me see her."
