That Amy had written him once, after Joe died, and that she’d also lost a child-well, that was one of life’s missed connections, wasn’t it? Since he’d not written her back, why would she write him again? But Danny read his mail, all of it-answering not a single letter-in the diminishing hope that he would hear from Amy. Danny didn’t even know why he wanted to hear from her, but he couldn’t forget her.
“If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky had told little Joe, kissing the two-year-old’s forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy.” So much for the promises of angels who drop naked out of the sky, though-to be fair-Amy had told them she was only an angel “sometimes.” Indeed, most persistently in Danny’s dreams, Lady Sky didn’t always make herself available as an angel-obviously, not on that snowy night when Joe and the wild blow-job girl met the blue Mustang going over Berthoud Pass.
“I would like to see you again, Amy,” Danny Angel said aloud, in the writer’s fragile sleep, but there was no one to hear him in the dark-only his father’s silent ashes. Evidently, in the drama enacted that night in that hotel room, the cook’s ashes-at rest in the jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice-had been given a nonspeaking part.
DANNY AWOKE WITH A START; the early-morning light seemed too bright. He thought he was already late for his meeting with Ketchum, but he wasn’t. Danny called Carmella in her hotel room. He was surprised at how wide awake she sounded, as if she’d been anticipating his call. “The bathtub is much too small, Secondo, but I managed somehow,” Carmella told him. She was waiting for him in the vast and almost empty dining hall when he went downstairs for breakfast.
Ketchum had been right about visiting in September; it was going to be quite a beautiful day in the northeastern United States. Even as Danny and Carmella drove away from The Balsams at that early-morning hour, the sun was bright, the sky a vivid and cloudless blue. A few fallen maple leaves dotted Akers Pond Road with reds and yellows. Danny and Carmella had told the resort hotel that they would be staying a second night in Dixville Notch. “Maybe Mr. Ketchum will join us for dinner tonight,” Carmella said to Danny in the car.
“Maybe,” Danny answered her; he doubted that The Balsams was Ketchum’s kind of place. The hotel had an oversize appearance, an ambience that possibly catered to conventions; Ketchum wasn’t the conventioneer type.
They quickly came upon the sign that said SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. “I’m at the end of the road,” was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering) BEWARE OF THE DOG. But there was no dog-no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality-namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.
“I think I know the dog,” Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. “His name is Hero, and he’s not really a bad dog-not that I’ve seen.”
The road went on, growing narrower-till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he’d definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.
“Looks like a dead end ahead,” Carmella said; she put her plump hands on the dashboard, as if to ward off a pending collision. But the road ended at a clearing, one that could have been mistaken for a dump-or perhaps it was a graveyard for abandoned trucks and trailers. Many of the trucks had been dissected for their parts. Several outbuildings were scattered throughout the premises; one weather-beaten shack had the appearance of a log-cabin smokehouse, from which so much smoke seeped through the cracks between the logs that the entire building looked as if it were about to burst into flames. A smaller, more focused column of smoke rose from a stovepipe atop a trailer-a former wanigan, Danny recognized. Probably, a woodstove was in the wanigan.
Danny shut off the car and listened for the dog. (He had forgotten that Hero didn’t bark.) Carmella rolled down her window. “Mr. Ketchum must be cooking something,” she said, sniffing the air. From the bearskin, stretched taut on a clothesline between two trailers, Danny assumed that the skinned bear was in the smokehouse-not exactly “cooking.”
“A fella I know butchers my bears for me, if I give him some of the meat,” Ketchum had told Danny, “but, especially in warm weather, I always smoke the bears first.” From the aroma in the air, it was definitely a bear that was smoking, Danny thought. He opened the driver’s-side door cautiously-on the lookout for Hero, assuming that the hound might see his designated role as that of guarding the smoking bear. But no dog emerged from one of the outbuildings, or from behind any of several sheltering piles of wreckage.
“Ketchum!” Danny called.
“Who wants to know?” they heard Ketchum shout, before the door opened to the wanigan with the smoking stovepipe. Ketchum quickly put the rifle away.
“Well, you aren’t as late as you thought you would be!” he hailed them, in a friendly fashion. “It’s nice to see you again, Carmella,” he told her, almost flirtatiously.
“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Ketchum,” she said.
“Come on in and have some coffee,” Ketchum told them. “Bring Cookie’s ashes with you, Danny-I want to see what you’ve got them in.”
Carmella was curious to see the container, too. They had to pass the strong-smelling bearskin on the clothesline before entering the wanigan, and Carmella looked away from the bear’s severed head; it was still attached to the pelt, but the head hung nose-down, almost touching the ground, and a bright globe of blood had bubbled and congealed. Where the blood had once dripped from the bear’s nostrils, it now resembled a Christmas ornament attached to the dead animal’s nose.
“‘Amos’ New York Steak Spice,’” Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. “Well, that’s a fine choice. If you don’t mind, Danny, I’m going to put the ashes in a glass jar-you’ll see why when we get there.”
“No, I don’t mind,” Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he’d been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.
Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He’d put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not-strong and sweet, and a little silty, “like Turkish coffee,” Carmella commented.
She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept-surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn’t see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal-as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.
Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound’s wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear’s claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero’s hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.