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IT DIDN'T MATTER NOW that Danny was certain he'd heard water running in the bathroom, or that the kiss on his forehead--either his father's kiss or a second goodnight kiss from Jane--had been real. It didn't matter, either, that the boy had incorporated the kiss into a dream he was having about Six-Pack Pam, who'd been ardently kissing him--not necessarily on his forehead. Nor did it matter that the twelve-year-old knew the odd creak his dad's limp made on the stairs, because he'd heard the limp a while ago and there was a different, unfamiliar creaking now. (On stairs, his father always put his good foot forward; the lame foot followed, more lightly, after it.)
What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn't only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Danny had heard and felt the wind in every season. The frightened boy quietly got out of bed, and--holding his breath--tiptoed to his partially open bedroom door and into the upstairs hall.
There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to Jane? young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her head? Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane--either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a human predator) with a bush hook?
As he made his cautious way down the hall, Danny half expected to see Jane's severed head in the bathtub; as he passed the open bathroom door, without spotting her head, the twelve-year-old could only imagine that the intruder was a bear, not a man, and that the bear had eaten Jane and was now attacking his dad. For there was no denying where the violent creaks and moans were coming from--his father's bedroom--and that was definitely moaning (or worse, whimpering) that the boy could hear as he came closer. When he passed the Cleveland Indians cap, the recognition that Chief Wahoo had landed upside down only heightened the twelve-year-old's fears.
What Danny Baciagalupo would see (more accurately, what he thought he saw), upon entering his dad's bedroom, was everything the twelve-year-old had feared, and worse--that is, both bigger and hairier than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be. Only his father's knees and feet were visible beneath the bear; more frightening still, his dad's lower legs weren't moving. Maybe the boy had arrived too late to save him! Only the bear was moving--the rounded, humpbacked beast (its head not discernible) was rocking the entire bed, its glossy-black hair both longer and more luxuriant than Danny had ever imagined a black bear's hair would be.
The bear was consuming his father, or so it appeared to the twelve-year-old. With no weapon at hand, one might have expected the boy to throw himself on the animal attacking his dad in such a savage or frenzied manner--if only to be hurled into a bedroom wall, or raked to death by the beast's claws. But family histories--chiefly, perhaps, the stories we are told as children--invade our most basic instincts and inform our deepest memories, especially in an emergency. Young Dan reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as if it were his weapon of choice, not his father's. That skillet was a legend, and Danny knew exactly where it was.
Holding the handle in both hands, the boy stepped up to the bed and took aim at where he thought the bear's head ought to be. He'd already started his two-handed swing--as Ketchum had once shown him, with an ax, being sure to get his hips behind the swinging motion--when he noticed the bare soles of two clearly human feet. The feet were in a prayerful position, just beside his dad's bare knees, and Danny thought that the feet looked a lot like Jane's. The Indian dishwasher was on her feet all day, and--for such a heavy woman--it was only natural that her feet often hurt her. She liked nothing better, she'd told young Dan, than a foot rub, which Danny had more than once given her.
"Jane?" Danny asked--in a small, doubting voice--but nothing slowed the forward momentum of the cast-iron skillet.
Jane must have heard the boy utter her name, because she raised her head and turned to face him. That was why the skillet caught her full-force on her right temple. The ringing sound, a dull but deep gong, was followed by a stinging sensation young Dan first felt in his hands; a reverberant tingle passed through both wrists and up his forearms. For the rest of his life, or as long as his memory endured, it would be small consolation to Danny Baciagalupo that he didn't see the expression on Jane's pretty face when the skillet struck her. (Her hair was so long that it simply covered everything.)
Jane's massive body shuddered. She was too massive, and her hair was too sleekly beautiful, for her ever to have been a black bear--not in this life or the next, where she most assuredly was going. Jane rolled off the cook and crashed to the floor.
There was no mista
king her for a bear now. Her hair had fanned out--flung wide as wings, to both sides of her inert, colossal torso. Her big, beautiful breasts had slumped into the hollows of her armpits; her motionless arms reached over her head, as if (even in death) Jane sought to hold aloft a heavy, descending universe. But as astonishing as her nakedness must have been to an innocent twelve-year-old, Danny Baciagalupo would best remember the faraway gaze in Jane's wide-open eyes. Something more than the final, split-second recognition of her fate lingered in Injun Jane's dead eyes. What had she suddenly seen in the immeasurable distance? Danny would wonder. Whatever Jane had glimpsed of the unforeseeable future had clearly terrified her--not just her fate but all their fates, maybe.
"Jane," Danny said again; this time it wasn't a question, though the boy's heart was racing and he must have had many questions on his mind. Nor did Danny more than glance at his dad. Was it his father's nakedness that made the boy so quickly look away? (Perhaps it was what Ketchum had called the little-fella aspect of the cook; the latter aspect was greatly enhanced by how near Dominic now was to the dead dishwasher.) "Jane!" Danny cried, as if the boy needed a third utterance of the Indian's name to finally register what he had done to her.
The cook quickly covered her private parts with a pillow. He knelt in the vast expanse of her far-flung hair, putting his ear to her quiet heart. Young Dan held the skillet in both hands, as if the reverberation still stung his palms; possibly, the ongoing tingle in his forearms would last forever. Though he was only twelve, Danny Baciagalupo surely knew that the rest of his life had just begun. "I thought she was a bear," the boy told his dad.
Dominic could not have looked more shocked if, at that moment, the dead dishwasher had turned herself into a bear; yet the cook could see for himself that it was his beloved Daniel who needed some consoling. Trembling, the boy stood clutching the murder weapon as if he believed a real bear would be the next thing to assail them.
"It's understandable that you thought Jane was a bear," his father said, hugging him. The cook took the skillet from his shaking son, hugging him again. "It's not your fault, Daniel. It was an accident. It's nobody's fault."
"How can it be nobody's fault?" the twelve-year-old asked.
"It's my fault, then," his dad told him. "It will never be your fault, Daniel. It's all mine. And it was an accident."
Of course the cook was thinking about Constable Carl; in the constable's world, there was no such thing as a no-fault accident. In the cowboy's mind, if you could call it that, good intentions didn't count. You can't save yourself, but you can save your son, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. (And for how many years might the cook manage to save them both?)
For so long, Danny had wanted to see Jane undo her braid and let down her hair--not to mention how he had dreamed of seeing her enormous breasts. Now he couldn't look at her. "I loved Jane!" the boy blurted out.
"Of course you did, Daniel--I know you did."
"Were you do-si-doing her?" the twelve-year-old asked.
"Yes," his father answered. "I loved Jane, too. Just not like I loved your mom," he added. Why was it necessary for him to say that? the cook asked himself guiltily. Dominic had truly loved Jane; he must have been yielding to the fact that there was no time to grieve for her.
"What happened to your lip?" the boy asked his dad.
"Six-Pack smacked me with her elbow," the cook answered.
"Were you do-si-doing Six-Pack, too?" his son asked him.
"No, Daniel. Jane was my girlfriend--just Jane."
"What about Constable Carl?" young Dan asked.
"We have a lot to do, Daniel," was all his dad would tell him. And they didn't have a lot of time, the cook knew. Before long, it would be light outside; they had to get started.
IN THE CONFUSION and sheer clumsiness that followed, and in their frantic haste, the cook and his son would find a multitude of reasons to relive the night of their departure from Twisted River--though they would remember the details of their forced exit differently. For young Dan, the monumental task of dressing the dead woman--not to mention bringing her body down the cookhouse stairs, and toting her to her truck--had been herculean. Nor did the boy at first understand why it was so important to his father that Jane be correctly dressed--that is, exactly as she would have dressed herself. Nothing missing, nothing awry. The straps to her stupendous bra could not be twisted; the waistband of her mammoth boxer shorts could not be rolled under; her socks could not be worn inside out.
