Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  "We're all here, Ketchum," the cook told his old friend.

  "Well, I can see you are, Cookie," Ketchum said. "And from your disapproving expression, you don't look too happy to see me."

  Ketchum didn't wait for a response. He just walked into the back of the kitchen until they couldn't see him. "Can you see me?" he called to them.

  They hollered, "No!"--all but the cook.

  "Well, I can still see you--this is perfect," Ketchum told them. When he came out of the kitchen, he had the shotgun out of its carrying case; to a one, the cook included, they recoiled from it. The gun had a foreign smell--the gun oil, maybe, and the oil-stained leather case--but there was another smell, something truly foreign (even to cooks, even in a restaurant's dining room and kitchen). Maybe the smell was death, because guns are designed to do just one thing--kill.

  "This here is an Ithaca twenty-gauge--a single shot, no safety. It's as sweet and simple as a shotgun comes," Ketchum told them. "Even a child can shoot it." He broke open the shotgun, allowing the barrel to fall almost to a forty-five-degree angle. "There's no safety because you have to cock it with your thumb before it'll fire--there's no half-cock, either," the woodsman was saying. They watched, fascinated--all but Dominic.

  Everything Ketchum said about the gun made no sense to them, but Ketchum kept patiently repeating himself. He showed them how to load it, and how to take out the empty shell--he showed them again and again, until even the busboy and the young waitresses could have done it. It broke the cook's heart to see the rapt attention Carmella gave to the old logger; even Carmella could have loaded and fired the damn shotgun by the time Ketchum had finished.

  They didn't really comprehend the gravity of the demonstration until Ketchum got to the part about the two kinds of ammunition. "This here is buckshot. You keep the Ithaca loaded at all times with buckshot." Ketchum held up a big hand in front of Paul Polcari's flour-whitened face. "From back there, where I was standing in the kitchen, the buckshot would make a pattern about this size on a target standing here." They were getting the idea.

  "You just have to see how it goes. If Carl is believing your story--and you all have to tell the cowboy the same story--maybe he'll leave without incident. No shots need to be fired," Ketchum was saying.

  "What story is that?" the cook asked his old friend.

  "Well, it's about how you walked out on this lady," Ketchum said, indicating Carmella. "Not that even a fool would, mind you--but that's what you did, and everyone here hates you for it. They would like to kill you themselves, if they could find you. Do any of you have trouble remembering that story?" Ketchum asked them. They shook their heads--even the cook, but for a different reason.

  "Just so there's one of you back in the kitchen," Ketchum continued. "I don't care if the cowboy knows you're back there--just so he can't quite see you. You can be banging pots and pans around all you want to. If Carl asks to see you, and he will, just tell him you're busy cooking."

  "Which one of us should be back in the kitchen with the gun?" Paul Polcari asked the woodsman.

  "It doesn't matter which one of you is back there--just so you all know how to work the Ithaca," Ketchum answered.

  "You know Carl will come here, I suppose?" Dominic asked him.

  "It's inevitable, Cookie. He'll want to talk to Carmella most of all, but he'll come here to talk to everyone. If he doesn't believe your story, and there's any trouble--that's when one of you shoots him," Ketchum said to them all.

  "How will we know there's going to be trouble?" Tony Molinari asked. "How will we know if he believes our story?"

  "Well, you won't see the Colt forty-five," Ketchum answered. "Believe me, he'll have it on him, but you won't know there's going to be trouble until you see the weapon. When Carl lets you see the Colt, he intends to use it."

  "Then we shoot him?" Paul Polcari asked.

  "Whoever's in the kitchen should call out to him first," Ketchum told them. "You just say something like, 'Hey, cowboy!'--just so he looks at you."

  "It would seem to me," Molinari said, "that we'd have a better chance just to shoot him--I mean before he's looking in the direction of the shooter."

  "No, not really," Ketchum told him patiently. "If the cowboy is looking in your direction, assuming you take aim at his throat, you'll hit him in the face and chest--both--and you'll probably blind him."

  The cook looked at Carmella, because he thought she might faint. The busboy appeared to be feeling sick. "When the cowboy is blind, you don't have to be in as big a hurry--when you take the empty shell out and put the deer slug in. The buckshot blinds him, but the deer slug is the kill-shot," Ketchum explained to them. "First you blind him, then you kill him."

  The busboy dashed for the kitchen; they could hear him barfing in the overlarge sink the dishwasher used to scour pots and pans. "Maybe he's not the one to be back in the kitchen," Ketchum said softly to the others. "Hell, we used to jacklight deer in Coos County just like this. Shine the light on them, till the deer stared right at you. First the buckshot, then the deer slug." But here the woodsman paused before continuing. "Well, with a deer--if you're close enough--the buckshot will suffice. With the cowboy, we don't want to take any unnecessary chances."

  "I don't think we can kill anybody, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said. "We simply don't know how to do that."

  "I just showed you how!" Ketchum told her. "That little Ithaca is the simplest gun I own. I won it in an arm-wrestling match in Milan--you remember, don't you, Cookie?"

  "I remember," the cook told his old friend. It had turned into something more serious than an arm-wrestling match, as Dominic remembered it, but Ketchum had walked away with the single-shot Ithaca--there was no disputing that.

  "Hell, just work on your story," Ketchum told them. "If the story is good enough, maybe you won't have to shoot the bastard."

  "Did you come all this way just to bring us the gun?" the cook asked his old friend.

  "I brought the Ithaca for them, Cookie--it's for your friends, not for you. I came to help you pack. We've got a little traveling to do."

  Dominic reached back for Carmella's hand--he knew she was standing behind him--but Carmella was quicker. She wrapped her arms around her Gamba's waist and burrowed her face into the back of his neck. "I love you, but I want you to go with Mr. Ketchum," she told the cook.

  "I know," Dominic told her; he knew better than to resist her, or Ketchum.

  "What else is in the duffel bag?" the busboy asked the logger; the kid had come out of the kitchen and was looking a little better.

  "Fireworks--for the Fourth of July," Ketchum said. "Danny asked me to bring them," he told Dominic.

  Carmella went with them to the walk-up on Wesley Place. The cook didn't pack many things, but he took the eight-inch cast-iron skillet off the hook in their bedroom; Carmella supposed that the skillet was mostly symbolic. She walked with them to the car-rental place. They would drive the rental car to Vermont, and Ketchum would bring the car back to Boston; then he would take the train back to New Hampshire from North Station. Ketchum hadn't wanted his truck to be missing for a few days; he didn't want the deputy sheriff to know he was away. Besides, he needed a new truck, Ketchum told them; with all the driving he and Dominic had to do, Ketchum's truck might not have made it.

  For thirteen years, Carmella had been hoping to meet Mr. Ketchum. Now she'd met him, and his violence. She could see in an instant what her Angelu had admired about the man, and--when Ketchum had been younger--Carmella could easily imagine how Rosie Calogero (or any woman her age) might have fallen in love with him. But now she hated Ketchum for coming to the North End and taking her Gamba away; she would even miss the cook's limp, she told herself.

  Then Mr. Ketchum said something to her, and it completely won her over. "If, one day, you ever want to see the place where your boy perished, I would be honored to show you," Ketchum said to her. Carmella had to fight back tears. She had so wanted to see the river basin where the accident happened, but not t
he logs; she knew the logs would be too much for her. Just the riverbank, where the cook and young Dan had stood and seen it happen--and maybe the exact spot in the water--yes, she might one day want to see that.

  "Thank you, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said to him. She watched them get into the car. Ketchum, of course, was the driver.

  "If you ever want to see me--" Carmella started to say to Dominic.

  "I know," the cook said to her, but he wouldn't look at her.

  COMPARED TO THE DAY HER GAMBA LEFT, the day Carl came to Vicino di Napoli was almost easy for Carmella. It had again been at the time of their midafternoon meal, and it was nearly the end of that summer--sometime in August '67, when they'd all started to imagine (or hope) that the cowboy wasn't ever coming.

  Carmella saw the cop first. It was just as Gamba had told her: When Carl was out of uniform, he still looked like he was wearing one. Of course Ketchum had remarked on the jowls, and the way the cowboy's neck was bunched in folds. ("Maybe all cops have bad haircuts," Ketchum had said to her.)

  "Someone go back in the kitchen," Carmella said, standing up from the table; the door was locked, and she went to unlock it. It was Paul Polcari who went back in the kitchen. The second the cowboy came inside, Carmella found herself wishing it had been Molinari back there.

  "You would be the Del Popolo woman?" the deputy sheriff asked her. He showed them all his badge while saying, "Massachusetts is out of my jurisdiction--actually, everythin' outside Coos County is out of my jurisdiction--but I'm lookin' for a fella I think you all know. He's got some answerin' to do--name of Dominic, a little guy with a limp."

  Carmella started to cry; she cried easily, but in this case she had to force herself.

  "That prick," Molinari said. "If I knew where he was, I'd kill him."

  "Me, too!" Paul Polcari cried from the kitchen.

  "Can you come out of there?" the deputy called to Paul. "I like to see everyone."

  "I'm busy cooking!" Paul screamed; pots and pans were banging.

  The cowboy sighed. They all remembered how the cook and Ketchum had described Carl; they'd said the cop never stopped smiling, but it was the most insincere smile in the world. "Look," the cowboy said to them, "I don't know what the cook's done to you, but he's got some explainin' to do to me--"

  "He walked out on her!" Molinari said, pointing to Carmella.

  "He stole her jewels!" the busboy cried.

  The kid is an idiot! the others thought. (Even the cop might be smart enough to know that Carmella wasn't the sort of woman who had jewels.)

  "I didn't figure Cookie for a jewel thief," Carl said. "Are you people bein' honest with me? You really don't know where he is?"

  "No!" one of the young waitresses cried out, as if her companion waitress had stabbed her.

  "That prick," Molinari repeated.

  "What about you?" the cowboy called into the kitchen. Paul seemed to have lost his voice. When the pots and pans commenced to banging again, the others took this as a signal to move a little bit away from the cop. Ketchum had told them not to scatter like a bunch of chickens, but to get some necessary separation between the cowboy and themselves--just to give the shooter a decent shot at the bastard.

  "If I knew where he was, I would cook him!" Paul Polcari shouted. He held the Ithaca in his heavily floured hands, which were shaking. He sighted down the barrel till he found the cowboy's throat--what he could manage to see of it, under Carl's multiple chins.

  "Can you come out of there, where I can see you?" the cop called to Paul, squinting into the kitchen. "Wops," the cowboy muttered. That was when Tony Molinari got a glimpse of the Colt. Carl had put his hand inside his jacket, and Molinari saw the big holster that was awkwardly at an angle under the deputy's armpit, the fat man's fingers just grazing the grip of the long-barreled handgun. The handle of the Colt .45 was inlaid with what looked like bone; it was probably deer antler.

  For Christ's sake, Paul! Molinari was thinking. The cowboy's already looking at you--just shoot him! To her surprise, Carmella was thinking the same thing--just shoot him! She had all she could do not to cover both ears with her hands.

  Paul Polcari just wasn't the one for the job. The pizza chef was a sweet, gentle man; now he found that his throat felt as if a cup of flour had clogged it. He was trying to say, "Hey, cowboy!" The words wouldn't come. And the cowboy kept squinting into the kitchen; Paul Polcari knew that he didn't have to say anything. He could just pull the trigger and Carl would be blinded. But Paul couldn't--more to the point, he didn't--do it.

  "Well, shit," the deputy sheriff said. He was moving sideways, toward the restaurant door. Molinari was worried, because the cowboy was out of sight from Paul's spot in the back of the kitchen; then Carl reached inside his jacket again, and they all froze. (Here comes the Colt! Molinari was thinking.) But now they saw it was just a small card that the cowboy had pulled out of his pocket; he handed it to Carmella. "Call me if that little cripple calls you," Carl said to her; he was still smiling.

  From the sound of the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, Molinari imagined that Paul Polcari had passed out back there.

  "It should have been you in the kitchen, Tony," Carmella told Molinari later, "but I can't blame poor Paul."

  Paul Polcari would blame himself, however; he would never shut up about it. It took Tony Molinari almost an hour to clean the Ithaca of all the flour, too. But the cowboy wouldn't come back. Maybe just having the gun in the kitchen had helped. As for the story Ketchum had told them to stick to, Carl must have believed it.

  When their ordeal was over, Carmella cried and cried; they'd all assumed she was crying from the terrible tension of the moment. But her Gamba leaving had hurt her more; Carmella was crying because she knew that her Gamba's ordeal was not over. Contrary to what she had said to Ketchum, she would have fired the Ithaca herself if she'd been back in the kitchen. One look at the cowboy--and, as Ketchum had forewarned her, the way he'd looked at her--had convinced Carmella that she could have pulled the trigger. But that chance wouldn't come to her, or to any of them, again.

  IN TRUTH, Carmella Del Popolo would miss Dominic more than she ever did the fisherman, and she would miss Secondo, too. She knew about that hole the boy had bored in his bedroom door in the cold-water Charter Street apartment. Maybe she bathed more modestly after she knew about the hole, but Carmella had let young Dan see her nonetheless. With the fisherman dead, and Angelu gone, there'd been no one to look at her for too long. When Dominic and Danny came into her life, Carmella didn't really mind that the twelve-year-old watched her in the bathtub in the kitchen; she only worried what an influence the sight of her might have on the boy later on. (Carmella didn't mean on Danny's writing.)

  Of all the people who were surprised, puzzled, disappointed, or indifferent regarding what the writer Daniel Baciagalupo would choose for a nom de plume, Carmella Del Popolo was without a doubt the most pleased. For when Family Life in Coos County, by Danny Angel, was published, Carmella was sure that Secondo had always known he was her surrogate son--just as surely as everyone in Vicino di Napoli knew (Carmella, most of all) that absolutely no one could replace her cherished but departed Angelu.

  III.

  WINDHAM COUNTY,

  VERMONT, 1983

  ----

  CHAPTER 7

  BENEVENTO AND AVELLINO

  THE BUILDING WAS OLD AND MUCH ABUSED BY ITS PROXIMITY to the Connecticut River. A few of the apartments had been abused, too, but not exclusively by the river; back in the sixties, a couple of Windham College kids had made a mess of one of them. Once cheap, the apartments were slightly more expensive now. The Connecticut had been cleaned up, and the town of Brattleboro was much improved by it. The cook's second-floor apartment was in the back of the old Main Street building, overlooking the river. Most mornings, Dominic would go downstairs to his empty restaurant and the deserted kitchen to make himself some espresso; the kitchen was also in the back, with a good view of the river.

  On the ground
floor, there had always been a storefront or some kind of restaurant on the Main Street side of the weather-beaten apartment building, which was across the street from an army-navy clothing store and the local movie theater, known as the Latchis.

  If you walked down the hill on Main Street, past the Latchis, you would come to Canal Street and the market where the cook did most of his shopping. From there, heading out of town, you could find your way to the hospital and a shopping mall--and, out by Interstate 91, a bunch of gas stations and the usual fast-food places.

  If you walked north on Main Street, up the hill, you came to The Book Cellar--quite a good bookstore, where the now-famous author Danny Angel had done a reading or two, and his share of book signings. The cook had met a couple of his Vermont lady friends in The Book Cellar, where they all knew Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, as Mr. Angel--the celebrated novelist's father, and the owner-chef of the best Italian restaurant around.

  After Daniel chose that nom de plume, Dominic had had to rename himself, too.

  "Shit, I suppose you should both be Angels--maybe that much is clear," Ketchum had said. "Like father, like son--and all that goes with that." But Ketchum had insisted that the cook lose the Dominic, too.

  "How about Tony?" Danny had suggested to his dad. It was the Fourth of July, 1967, and Ketchum had nearly burned down the Putney farmhouse with his fireworks display; little Joe continued to scream for five minutes after the last cherry bomb went off.

  The name Tony still sounded Italian but was nicely anonymous, Danny was thinking, while Dominic liked the name because of his fondness for Tony Molinari; only a few nights away from Boston, the cook already knew how much he was going to miss Molinari. Tony Angel, previously Dominic Del Popolo, previously Bacigalupo, would miss Paul Polcari, too--nor would the cook think any less of Paul when he heard about what happened in August of that same summer.

  Tony Angel would blame Ketchum for the mishap of the cowboy getting out of Vicino di Napoli alive--not Paul Polcari. Poor Paul could never have squeezed the trigger. It was Ketchum's fault, in the cook's opinion, because Ketchum had told them all that it didn't matter which one of them was back in the kitchen with the shotgun. Come on! For someone who knew guns as well as Ketchum did, he should have known that of course it mattered who was taking aim and would (or would not) pull the trigger! Tony Angel would never blame sweet, gentle Paul.