Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  There'd been nowhere to run in the North End--not if you liked running any distance. And in the Great North Woods, there was nowhere safe to run; you would trip over something, trying to run in those woods, and if you ran on one of the haul roads, a logging truck would mow you down or force you off the road. The logging companies owned those roads, and the asshole truck drivers--as Ketchum called them--drove as if they owned them. (Of course there was also the deer hunting, both bow season and the firearm season. If you tried running in the woods or on a haul road during deer season, some asshole hunter might shoot you or run you through with a hunting arrow.)

  When Danny wrote Ketchum about his running at Exeter, Ketchum wrote the boy back as follows: "Hell, Danny, it's a good thing you didn't do all that running around Twisted River. Most places I'm familiar with in Coos County, if I see a fella running, I assume he's done some dirt and is running away. It would be a safe bet to shoot most fellas you see running around here."

  Danny loved the indoor track at Exeter. The Thompson Cage had a sloped wooden track above a dirt one. It was a good place to think about the stories he was imagining; he could think very clearly when he ran, Danny discovered, especially when he started to get tired.

  When he left Exeter with B grades in English and history, and C grades in just about everything else, Mr. Carlisle told Dominic and Carmella that perhaps the boy would be a "late bloomer." But, as a writer, to publish a first novel less than a year after he left the Iowa Workshop was a fairly early-bloomer thing to do; of course Mr. Carlisle had been speaking strictly academically. And Danny's grades at UNH were excellent; compared to Exeter, the University of New Hampshire had been easy. The hard part about Durham was meeting Katie Callahan, and everything that had happened with her--both in Durham and in Iowa City. Neither Carmella nor her dear Gamba could talk about that young woman without feeling sick, almost poisoned.

  "And here you were, Gamba, worried about a few hot Italian girls in the North End!" Carmella had once exploded at him. "What you should have seen coming was that University of New Hampshire iceberg!"

  "A cold cunt," Ketchum had called Katie.

  "It was all the writing, too," Dominic had replied to Carmella. "All that damn imagining all the time--it couldn't have been good for Daniel."

  "You're crazy, Gamba," Carmella told him. "Danny didn't make up Katie. And would you really have wanted him to go to Vietnam instead?"

  "Ketchum wouldn't have let that happen," Dominic told her. "Ketchum wasn't kidding, Carmella. Daniel would have become a writer with some missing fingers on his writing hand."

  Maybe she didn't want to meet Mr. Ketchum after all, Carmella found herself thinking.

  THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO received his M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in June 1967. Together with his two-year-old son, Joe, the writer left for Vermont almost immediately upon his graduation. Despite his troubles with Katie, Danny had liked Iowa City and the Writers' Workshop, but Iowa was hot in the summer, and he wanted to take his time about finding a place to live in Putney, Vermont, where Windham College was. It would also be necessary to set up a proper day-care situation for little Joe, and to hire a regular babysitter for the boy--though perhaps one or two of Danny's students at the college would be willing to help out.

  He told only one of his teachers (and no one else) at Iowa about the nom-de-plume idea--the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who was a kind man and a good teacher. Vonnegut also knew about Danny's difficulties with Katie. Danny didn't tell Mr. Vonnegut the reason he was considering a pen name, just that he was unhappy about it.

  "It doesn't matter what your name is," Vonnegut told him. He also told the young writer that Family Life in Coos County, Danny's first book, was one of the best novels he'd ever read. "That's what matters--not what name you use," Mr. Vonnegut said.

  The one criticism the author of Slaughterhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. "People will probably figure out that you went to college--you don't have to try to prove it to them," he told Danny.

  But the semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place. He'd seen the titles and the authors' names on the novels his mother had left behind--the books his father had bequeathed to Ketchum in Twisted River. Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he'd paid special attention to those authors there--Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, for example. They wrote long, complicated sentences; Hawthorne and Melville had liked semicolons. Plus they were New England writers, those two--they were Danny's favorites. And the English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to Daniel Baciagalupo, who--even at twenty-five--had seen his share of what looked like fate to him.

  He'd been somewhat alone among his fellow workshop students at Iowa, in that he loved these older writers far better than most contemporary ones. But Danny did like Kurt Vonnegut's writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with the teachers he had for his writing, beginning with Michael Leary.

  "You'll find someone," Vonnegut said to Danny, when they said good-bye in Iowa City. (His teacher probably meant that Danny would meet the right woman, eventually.) "And," Kurt Vonnegut added, "maybe capitalism will be kind to you."

  That last thought was the one Danny drove back East with. "Maybe capitalism will be kind to us," he said several times to little Joe, en route to Vermont.

  "You better find a place with a spare room for your dad," Ketchum had told him, when they'd last talked. "Although Vermont isn't far enough away from New Hampshire--not in my opinion. Couldn't you get a teaching job out West somewhere?"

  "For Christ's sake," Danny had said. "Southern Vermont is about the same driving distance from Coos County as Boston is, isn't it? And we were far enough away in Boston for thirteen years!"

  "Vermont's too close--I just know it is," Ketchum told him, "but right now it's a lot safer for your father than staying in Boston."

  "I keep telling him," Danny said.

  "I keep telling him, too, but he's not listening worth shit," the woodsman said.

  "It's because of Carmella," Danny told Ketchum. "He's very attached to her. He should take her with him--I know she'd go, if he asked her--but he won't. I think Carmella is the best thing that ever happened to him."

  "Don't say that, Danny," Ketchum told him. "You didn't get to know your mother."

  Danny kept quiet about that with Ketchum. He didn't want the old logger to hang up on him.

  "Well, it looks to me like I'll just have to haul Cookie's ass out of Boston--one way or another," Ketchum said, after there was silence for a while.

  "How are you going to do that?" Danny asked him.

  "I'll put him in a cage, if I have to. You just find a house in Vermont that's big enough, Danny. I'll bring your dad to it."

  "Ketchum--you didn't kill Lucky Pinette, did you?"

  "Of course I didn't!" Ketchum shouted into the phone. "Lucky wasn't worth murdering."

  "I sometimes think that Carl is worth murdering," the writer Daniel Baciagalupo ventured; he just floated that idea out there.

  "I find that I keep thinking about it," Ketchum admitted.

  "I wouldn't want you to get caught," Danny told him.

  "That's not the problem I'm having with it," the woodsman said. "I don't imagine that Carl would care if he got caught--I mean for killing your dad."

  "What's the problem, then?" Danny asked.

  "I would like him to try to kill me first," Ketchum answered. "Then I wouldn't have a problem with it."

  It was just as the writer Daniel Baciagalupo had imagined; the conundrum was that although the cowboy was exceedingly stupid, he was smart enough to stay alive. And he'd stopped drinking--that meant Carl wouldn't completely lose control of himself. That might have been why he hadn't beaten up Six-Pack in two whole months, or at least he hadn't beaten her enough for her to leave him and tell him w
hat she knew.

  Six-Pack still drank. Ketchum knew she could easily and completely lose control of herself--that was also a problem.

  "I worry about something," Danny told Ketchum. "You haven't stopped drinking. Aren't you afraid you'll pass out dead drunk, and that's when Carl will come after you?"

  "You haven't met my dog, Danny--he's a fine animal."

  "I didn't know you had a dog," Danny said.

  "Hell, when Six-Pack left me, I needed someone to talk to."

  "What about that lady you met in the library--the schoolteacher who's teaching you how to read?" Danny asked the logger.

  "She is teaching me, but it's not a very conversational experience," Ketchum said.

  "You're actually learning to read?" Danny asked.

  "Yes, I am--it's just slower going than counting coon shit," Ketchum told him. "But I'm aiming to be ready to read that book of yours, when it's published." There was a pause on the phone before Ketchum asked: "How's it going with the nom de plume? Have you come up with one?"

  "My pen name is Danny Angel," the writer Daniel Baciagalupo told Ketchum stiffly.

  "Not Daniel? Your dad is real fond of the Daniel. I like the Angel part," Ketchum said.

  "Dad can still call me Daniel," Danny said. "Danny Angel is the best I can do, Ketchum."

  "How's that little Joe doing?" Ketchum asked; he could tell that the young writer was touchy about the nom-de-plume subject.

  ON THE TRIP BACK EAST, Danny mostly drove at night, when little Joe was sleeping. He would find a motel with a pool and play with Joe most of the day. Danny took a nap in the motel when his two-year-old did; then he drove all night again. The writer Danny Angel had lots of time to think as he drove. He could think the whole night through. But even with his imagination, Danny couldn't quite see a woodsman like Ketchum coming to Boston. Not even Danny Angel, ne Daniel Baciagalupo, could have imagined how the fearsome logger would conduct himself there.

  THAT WINDHAM COLLEGE would turn out to be a funny sort of place wouldn't matter much to Danny Angel, whose first novel, Family Life in Coos County, would be published to fairly good reviews with modest hardcover sales. The young author would sell the paperback rights, and he sold the movie rights, too, though no film was ever made from the book--and the two novels that followed the first would receive more mixed reviews, and sell fewer copies. (Novels two and three wouldn't even be published in paperback, and there was no interest in the movie rights for either book.) But all of that wouldn't matter much to Danny, who was consumed by the task of keeping his father from harm--all the while trying to be a good dad to Joe. Danny just kept writing and writing. He would need to keep teaching to support himself and his young son--all the while saying to little Joe, "Maybe capitalism will be kind to us one day."

  It hadn't been too tough to find a house to rent in Putney, one big enough to include his father--and Carmella, if she ever came to Vermont. It was a former farmhouse on a dirt road, which Danny liked because a brook ran alongside it; the road also crossed the brook in a couple of places. The running water was a reminder to Daniel Baciagalupo of where he'd come from. As for the farmhouse, it was a few miles from the village of Putney, which was little more than a general store and a grocery--called the Putney Food Co-op--and a convenience store with a gas station that was diagonally across from the old paper mill, on the road to the college. When Danny first saw the paper mill, he knew that his dad wouldn't like living in Putney. (The cook came from Berlin; he hated paper mills.)

  Windham College was an architectural eyesore on an otherwise beautiful piece of land. The faculty were a mix of moderately distinguished and not-so-distinguished professors; Windham had no academic virtues to speak of, but some of its faculty were actually good teachers who could have been working at better colleges and universities, but they wanted to live in Vermont. Many of the male students might not have been attending college at all if there hadn't been a war in Vietnam; four years of college was the most widely available deferment from military service that young males of draft age had. Windham was that kind of place--not long for this world, but it would last as long as the war dragged on--and as the source of Danny's first not-in-a-restaurant job, it wasn't bad.

  Danny wouldn't have many students who were genuinely interested in writing, and the few he had weren't talented or hardworking enough to suit him. At Windham, you were lucky if half the students in your classroom were interested in reading. But as a first novelist who'd been saved from the Vietnam War, which Daniel Baciagalupo knew was his case, he was a lenient teacher. Danny wanted everyone--his male students, especially--to stay in school.

  If, as some cynics said, Windham's sole justification for existence was that it managed to prevent a few young men from going to Vietnam, that was okay with Danny Angel; he'd grown up enough politically to hate the war, and he was more of a writer than a teacher. Danny didn't really care how academically responsible (or not) Windham College was. The teaching was just a job to him--one that gave him enough time to write, and to be a good father.

  Danny let Ketchum know as soon as he and Joe had moved into the old farmhouse on Hickory Ridge Road. Danny didn't care who was reading the logger's letters to him now; the young writer assumed it was the library lady, the schoolteacher whose work-in-progress was teaching Ketchum how to read.

  "There's plenty of room for Dad," Danny wrote to the woodsman; the writer included his new phone number and directions to the Putney house, from both Coos County and Boston. (It was nearly the end of June 1967.) "Maybe you'll show up for the Fourth of July," Danny wrote to Ketchum. "If so, I trust you to bring the fireworks."

  Ketchum was a big fireworks fan. There'd once been a fish he couldn't catch. "I swear, it's the biggest damn trout in Phillips Brook," he'd declared, "and the smartest." He'd blown up the fish, and no small number of nearby brook trout, with dynamite.

  "Don't bring any dynamite," Danny had added, as a postscript. "Just the fireworks."

  IT WASN'T PRINCIPALLY "fireworks" that Ketchum brought to Boston, the first leg of his trip. The North Station was in that part of the West End that bordered on the North End. Ketchum got off the train, carrying a shotgun over one shoulder and a canvas duffel bag in the other hand; the duffel bag looked heavy, but not the way Ketchum was toting it. The gun was in a leather carrying case, but it was clear to everyone who saw the woodsman what the weapon was--it had to be either a rifle or a shotgun. The way the carrying case was tapered, you could tell that Ketchum was holding the barrel of the weapon with the butt-end over his shoulder.

  The kid who was then the busboy at Vicino di Napoli had just put his grandmother on a train. He saw Ketchum and ran ahead of him, back to the restaurant. The busboy said it appeared that Ketchum was "taking the long way around"--meaning that the logger must have looked at a map, and he'd chosen the most obvious route, which was not necessarily the fastest. Ketchum must have come along Causeway Street to Prince Street, and then intersected with Hanover--a kind of roundabout way to get to North Square, where the restaurant was, but the busboy alerted them all that the big man with a gun was coming.

  "Which big man?" Dominic asked the busboy.

  "I just know he's got a gun--he's carrying it over his shoulder!" the busboy said. Everyone who worked at Vicino di Napoli had been forewarned that the cowboy might be coming. "And he's definitely from up north--he's fucking scary-looking!"

  Dominic knew that Carl would have the Colt .45 concealed. It was big for a handgun, but no one carried a revolver over his shoulder. "It sounds like you mean a rifle or a shotgun," the cook said to the bus-boy.

  "Jesus and Mary!" Tony Molinari said.

  "He's got a scar on his forehead like someone split his face with a cleaver!" the busboy cried.

  "Is it Mr. Ketchum?" Carmella asked Dominic.

  "It must be," the cook told her. "It can't be the cowboy. Carl is big and fat, but he's not especially 'scary-looking,' and there's not much of the north country about him. He just looks like a cop--
either in or out of uniform."

  The busboy was still babbling. "He's wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he's got a huge hunting knife on his belt--it hangs almost to his knee!"

  "That would be the Browning," Dominic said. "It's definitely Ketchum. In the summer, he just cuts the sleeves off his old flannel shirts--the ones that have torn sleeves, anyway."

  "What's the gun for?" Carmella asked her dear Gamba.

  "Maybe he's going to shoot me before Carl gets a chance to," Dominic said, but Carmella didn't see the humor in it--none of them did. They went to the door and windows to look for Ketchum. It was that time of the afternoon they had to themselves; they were supposed to be eating their big meal of the day, before they started the dinner service.

  "I'm setting a place for Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said, and she started to do so. The two younger waitresses were checking themselves out in a mirror. Paul Polcari held a pizza paddle in both hands; it was the size of a giant tennis racquet.

  "Put the paddle down, Paul," Molinari told him. "You look ridiculous."

  "There's a lot of stuff in the duffel bag he's carrying--ammunition, maybe," the busboy said.

  "Dynamite, possibly," the cook said.

  "The way the man looks, someone might arrest him before he gets here!" the busboy told them all.

  "Why did he come? Why didn't he call first?" Carmella asked her Gamba.

  The cook shook his head; they would all just have to wait and see what Ketchum wanted.

  "He's coming to take you, Gamba, isn't he?" Carmella asked the cook.

  "Probably," Dominic answered.

  Even so, Carmella smoothed the little white apron over her black skirt; she unlocked the door and waited there. Someone should greet Mr. Ketchum, she was thinking.

  What will I do in Vermont? the cook thought to himself. Who cares about eating Italian there?

  Ketchum would waste little time with them. "I know who you are," he told Carmella pleasantly. "Your boy showed me your picture, and you haven't changed much." She had changed in the thirteen-plus years since that wallet photo had been taken--she was at least twenty pounds heavier, they all knew--but Carmella appreciated the compliment. "Are you all here?" Ketchum asked them. "Or is someone in the kitchen?"