Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving Page A

couple of ounces of vinegar, for the poached eggs—was coming to a boil again. For breakfast, he’d served the lamb hash with poached eggs, but when he served the hash as a midday meal, he would just have lots of ketchup handy; poached eggs didn’t travel well. When the water and vinegar came to a boil, Dominic poured it over the cutting boards to sterilize them.
    One of the sawmill workers’ wives had made about fifty bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with the leftover breakfast bacon. She was eating one of the sandwiches while she eyed the cook—some mischief was on her mind, Dominic could tell. Her name was Dot; she was far too large to be a Dot, and she’d had so many children that she seemed to be a woman who had abandoned every other capacity she’d ever conceivably possessed, except her appetite, which the cook didn’t like to think about at all. (She had too many appetites, Dominic imagined.)
    The sawmill worker’s wife with the spatula—the one who needed to be reminded to break up the sausage on the griddle—appeared to be in on the mischief, because she had her eye on the cook, too. Since the woman eating the BLT had her mouth full, the one with the spatula spoke first. Her name was May; she was bigger than Dot and had been married twice. May’s children with her second husband were the same age as her grandchildren—that is, the children of her children from her first marriage—and this unnatural phenomenon had completely unhinged May and her second husband, to the degree that they couldn’t recover sufficiently to console each other concerning the sheer strangeness of their lives.
    What Dominic found unnatural was May’s ceaseless need to lament the fact that she had children the age of her grandchildren. Why was it such a big deal? the cook had wondered.
    “Just look at her,” Ketchum had said, meaning May. “For her, everything is a big fucking deal.”
    Maybe so, the cook considered, as May pointed the spatula at him. Wiggling her hips in a seductive manner, she said in a purring voice: “Oh, Cookie, I would leave my miserable life behind—if only you would marry me, and cook for me, too!”
    Dominic was using the long-handled dish scrubber on the cutting boards, which were soaking in boiling water; the vinegar in the hot water made his eyes tear. “You’re married already, May,” he said. “If you married me, and we had children, you’d have kids younger than your grandchildren. I dare not guess how that would make you feel.”
    May looked genuinely stricken by the idea; maybe he shouldn’t have raised the dreaded subject, the cook was thinking. But Dot, who was still eating the BLT, spasmodically laughed with her mouth full—whereupon she commenced to choke. The kitchen helpers, May among them, stood waiting for the cook to do something.
    Dominic Baciagalupo was no stranger to choking. He’d seen a lot of loggers and mill workers choke—he knew what to do. Years ago, he’d saved one of the dance-hall women; she was drunk, and she was choking on her own vomit, but the cook had known how to handle her. It was a famous story—Ketchum had even titled it, “How Cookie Saved Six-Pack Pam.” The woman was as tall and rawboned as Ketchum, and Dominic had needed Ketchum’s help to knock her to her knees, and then wrestle her to all fours, where the cook could apply a makeshift Heimlich maneuver. (Six-Pack Pam was so named because this was Ketchum’s estimate of the woman’s nightly quota, before she started on the bourbon.)
    Dr. Heimlich was born in 1920, but his now-famous maneuver hadn’t been introduced in Coos County in 1954. Dominic Baciagalupo had been cooking for big eaters for fourteen years. Countless people had choked in front of him; three of them had died. The cook had observed that pounding someone on the back didn’t always work. Ketchum’s original maneuver, which entailed holding the chokers upside down and vigorously shaking them, had been known to fail,