“Well, Danny, here goes,” Erin had begun that night in November 2001. “Your friend probably would not bleed to death-not if he cut his hand off at the wrist, with a clean swipe and a sharp blade.” Danny didn’t doubt that whatever instrument Ketchum might use would be sharp-be it the Browning knife, an ax, or even the old logger’s chain-saw. “But your friend would bleed a lot-a real spurting mess out of the radial and ulnar arteries, which are the two main vessels he would have severed. Yet this unfortunate friend of yours would have a few problems-that is, if he wanted to die.” Here Erin paused; at first, Danny didn’t know why. “Does your friend want to die, or does he just want to be rid of the hand?” the doctor asked him.
“I don’t know,” Danny answered her. “I always thought it was just about the hand.”
“Well, then, he may get what he wants,” Erin said. “You see, the arteries are very elastic. After they were cut, they would retract back into the arm, where the surrounding tissues would compress them, at least to a degree. The muscles in the arterial walls would immediately contract, narrowing the diameter of the arteries and slowing the blood loss. Our bodies are resourceful at trying to stay alive; your friend would have many mechanisms coming into play, all making an effort to save him from bleeding to death.” Here Erin paused again. “What’s wrong?” she asked Danny.
Daniel Baciagalupo was still thinking about whether or not Ketchum wanted to kill himself; over all those years with the incessant talk about the left hand, it hadn’t occurred to the writer that Ketchum might have been harboring more serious intentions.
“Are you feeling sick, or something?” Dr. Reilly asked Danny.
“No, it’s not that,” Danny said. “So he wouldn’t bleed to death-that’s what you’re saying?”
“The platelets would save him,” Erin answered. “Platelets are tiny blood particles, which aren’t even large enough to be real cells; they’re actually flakes that fall off a cell and then circulate in the bloodstream. Under normal circumstances, platelets are tiny, smooth-walled, non-adherent flecks. But when your friend cuts off his hand, he exposes the endothelium, or inner arterial wall, which would cause a spill of a protein called collagen-the same stuff plastic surgeons use. When the platelets encounter the exposed collagen, they undergo a drastic transformation-a metamorphosis. The platelets become sticky, spiculated particles. They aggregate and adhere to one another-they form a plug.”
“Like a clot?” Danny asked; his voice sounded funny. He couldn’t eat because he couldn’t swallow. He was somehow certain that Ketchum intended to kill himself; cutting off his left hand was just the logger’s way of doing it, and of course Ketchum held his left hand responsible for letting Rosie slip away. But Rosie had been gone for years. Danny realized that Ketchum must have been holding himself accountable for not killing Carl. For his friend Dominic’s death, Ketchum faulted himself-meaning all of himself. Ketchum’s left hand couldn’t be blamed for the cowboy killing the cook.
“Too much detail while you’re eating?” Erin asked. “I’ll stop. The clotting comes a little later; there are a couple of other proteins involved. Suffice it to say, there is an artery-plugging clot; this would stem the tide of your friend’s bleeding, and save his life. Cutting off your hand won’t kill you.”
But Danny felt that he was drowning; he was sinking fast. (“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” the old logger had told him.)
“Okay, Erin,” Danny said, but his voice wasn’t his own; neither he nor Erin recognized it. “Let’s say that my friend wanted to die. Let’s assume that he wants to cut off his left hand in the process, but what he really wants is to die. What then?”
The doctor was eating ravenously; she had to chew and swallow for a few seconds while Danny waited. “Easy,” Erin said, after another small sip of wine. “Does your friend know what aspirin is? He just takes some aspirin.”
“Aspirin,” Danny repeated numbly. He could see the contents of the glove compartment in Ketchum’s truck, as if the door were still open and Danny had never reached out and closed it-the small handgun and the big bottle of aspirin.
“Painkillers, both of them,” Ketchum had called them, casually. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon,” he’d said.
“Aspirin blocks certain parts of the process that activates the platelets,” Dr. Reilly was saying. “If you wanted to get technical, you could say that aspirin prevents blood from clotting-only two aspirin tablets in your friend’s system, and very possibly the clotting wouldn’t kick in quickly enough to save him. And if he really wanted to die, he could wash the aspirin down with some booze; through a completely different mechanism, alcohol also prevents platelet activation and aggregation. There would be a real synergy between the alcohol and the aspirin, rendering the platelets impotent-they wouldn’t stick to one another. No clot, in other words. Your hand-deprived friend would die.”
Erin finally stopped talking when she saw that Danny was staring at his food, not eating. It’s also worth noting that Daniel Baciaglupo had hardly touched his beer. “Danny?” his doctor said. “I didn’t know he was a real friend. I thought that he was probably a character in a novel, and you were using the friend word loosely. I’m sorry.”
DANNY HAD RUN HOME from Kiss of the Wolf that November night. He’d wanted to call Ketchum right away, but privately. It was a cold night in Toronto. That late in the fall, it would have already snowed a bunch of times in Coos County, New Hampshire.
Ketchum didn’t fax much anymore. He didn’t call Danny very frequently, either-not nearly as often as Danny called him. That night, the phone had rung and rung; there’d been no answer. Danny would have called Six-Pack, but he didn’t have her phone number and he’d never known her last name-no more than he knew Ketchum’s first name, if the old logger had ever had one.
He decided to fax Ketchum some evidently transparent bullshit-to the effect that Danny thought he should have Six-Pack’s phone number, in case there was ever an emergency and Danny couldn’t reach Ketchum.
I DON’T NEED ANYBODY CHECKING UP ON ME!
Ketchum had faxed back, before Danny was awake and downstairs in the morning. But, after a few more faxes and an awkward phone conversation, Ketchum provided Danny with Pam’s number.
It was December of that same year, 2001, before Danny got up the nerve to call Six-Pack, and she wasn’t much of a communicator on the phone. Yes, she and Ketchum had gone a couple of times that fall to Moose-Watch Pond and seen the moose dancing-or “millin’ around,” as Six-Pack said. Yes, she’d gone “campin’” with Ketchum, too-but only once, in a snowstorm, and if her hip hadn’t kept her awake the whole night, Ketchum’s snoring would have.
Nor did Danny have any luck in persuading Ketchum to come to Toronto for Christmas that year. “I may show up, I more likely won’t,” was how Ketchum had left it-as independent as ever.
All too soon, it was that time of year Daniel Baciagalupo had learned to dread-just a few days before Christmas 2001, coming up on what would be the first anniversary of his dad’s murder-and the writer was eating dinner alone at Kiss of the Wolf. His thoughts were unfocused, wandering, when Patrice-that ever-suave and graceful presence-approached Danny’s table. “Someone has come to see you, Daniel,” Patrice said with unusual solemnity. “But, strangely, at the kitchen door.”
“To see me? In the kitchen?” Danny asked.
“A tall, strong-looking person,” Patrice intoned, with an air of foreboding. “Doesn’t look like a big reader-might not be what you call a fan.”
“But why the kitchen door?” Danny asked.