Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  Over time, a few of those photos Danny had pressed flat between the pages of the novels left behind in Twisted River--some of them, but no way near all of them--had been sent to him by Ketchum. "Here, I found this picture in one of her books," the accompanying letter from Ketchum would say. "I thought you should have it, Danny."

  Albeit reluctantly, Danny had kept the photos. Joe liked to look at them. Perhaps the cook was right: Maybe Joe got some of his risk-taking or reckless instincts from his grandmother, not from Katie. When Danny looked at his mom's pictures, he saw a pretty woman with intense blue eyes, but the drunken rebel who'd do-si-doed two drunken men on the black ice of Twisted River--well, that element of Rosie Baciagalupo, nee Calogero, wasn't evident in the photos her son had kept.

  "Just keep an eye on his drinking," the cook had told his son--he meant young Joe's drinking. (It was Tony Angel's way of inquiring if his eighteen-year-old grandson was drinking yet.)

  "I suppose there's the occasional party," Danny told his dad, "but Joe doesn't drink around me."

  "The kind of drinking Joe might do around you isn't the kind we need to worry about," the cook said.

  Joe's drinking would bear watching, the writer Danny Angel imagined. As for his son's genetic package, Danny knew more than he cared to remember about the boy's mom, Katie Callahan; she'd had one whale of an alcohol problem. And in Katie's case, she'd done more than the "occasional" marijuana, when she and Danny had been a couple--she'd smoked more than a "little" pot, Danny knew.

  IT COULD BE ARGUED that Windham College was in its death throes before the end of the Vietnam War. Decreasing enrollment and an inability to meet a loan repayment would force the college to close in 1978, but Danny Angel sensed that there were signs of trouble ahead for Windham well before then. The writer would resign from the college in 1972, when he accepted a teaching job back at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa. He'd not written The Kennedy Fathers yet; Danny still had to teach for a living, and for teaching-writing jobs, Iowa is as good as they get. (You have students who are serious, and busy with their own writing, which means you get lots of time to write.)

  Danny Angel would publish his second novel and write his third when he was again in Iowa City. In those years, before Joe was a teenager, Iowa City was a great town for Danny's son, too--pretty good schools, as one would expect in a university town, and a semblance of neighborhood life. Iowa City wasn't the North End, to be sure--not when it came to restaurants, especially--but Danny had liked being back there.

  The writer gave his dad a choice: Tony Angel could come to Iowa City or he could stay in Putney. Danny wanted to keep the Vermont farmhouse. He'd bought the rental property on Hickory Ridge Road, just before he accepted the Iowa offer and resigned from Windham, because he wanted his father to be able to stay in Windham County--if the cook wanted to.

  In the cook's mind, Carmella was the question. For the five years Tony Angel ran the Benevento pizza place in Putney, he'd taken a lot of shopping trips to Boston. It was more than a two-hour drive each way--kind of far for "shopping." Danny's dad claimed that he had to buy his pizza sausages at the Abruzzese meat market in the North End--and while he was in his old neighborhood, he might as well stock up on his cheeses, his olives, and his olive oil. But Danny knew that his dad was trying to "stock up" on as much of Carmella as he could. They hadn't really been able to break things off cleanly.

  The cook had invested very little in Benevento; compared to where he'd worked before, in both Coos County and Boston, a pizza place in a poor man's college town had been relatively easy. He'd bought the building from an aging hippie who'd called himself The Sign Painter; it had looked to Tony Angel like a failing small business, and there was a rumor in town that the sign painter was responsible for the misspelling of the theatre word on the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro. (The word on the marquee of the Main Street movie house was spelled "Theater," not "Theatre;" for years, the Latchis had sought funds to correct the mistake.) It was no rumor that the sign painter's wife, an allegedly flaky potter, had recently run out on him. All she'd left the miserable sign painter was her kiln, which gave the cook the idea for his brick pizza oven.

  At the time Danny invited him to come to Iowa City, Tony was a little tired of running his own restaurant--a pizza place wasn't quite the kind of restaurant the cook wanted to own, anyway--and things with Carmella had pretty much run their course. Seeing each other only occasionally, she'd told the cook, had made her feel she was in an illicit relationship instead of a legitimate one. The illicit word sounded to Tony like something that might have come up when Carmella had been confessing her sins--either at St. Leonard or St. Stephen's, wherever Carmella did her confessing. (Confessing one's sins was a Catholic thing that had never caught on with the cook.)

  Why not just see what the Midwest was like? Tony Angel thought. If he sold it now, the cook could get a little money for Benevento--whereas, if he waited, and if Windham College was going under, which Danny said it was, what would anyone want with a pizza place in Putney?

  "Why don't you just let a fire get out of control in your pizza oven, and then collect the insurance?" Ketchum had asked his old friend.

  "Did you burn down Twisted River?" the cook asked Ketchum.

  "Hell, it was a ghost town when it burned--it was nothing but an eyesore, Cookie!"

  "Those buildings, my cookhouse among them, weren't nothing, Ketchum."

  "Shit, if that's how you feel about a little fire, maybe you should just sell your pizza place," the cook's old friend told him.

  It was hardly a "little" fire that took down what had been the town of Twisted River. Ketchum had planned the torching to perfection. He chose a windless night in March, before mud season; it was before Carl had stopped drinking, too, which was why Ketchum got away with it. No one was able to find the deputy sheriff; in all probability, you couldn't have woken up the cowboy if you'd found him.

  If there'd been any wind, Ketchum would have had to light only one fire--to burn both the town and the cookhouse. But he might have started a forest fire in the process--even in what had been a typically wet month of March, when there was still a lot of snow on the ground. Ketchum wasn't taking any chances. He liked the forest--it was the town of Twisted River and the cookhouse that he hated. (The night Rosie died, Ketchum had almost cut off his left hand in the cookhouse kitchen; he'd heard Cookie crying himself to sleep while Jane had stayed upstairs with the cook and little Danny.)

  The night Twisted River burned, Ketchum must have had three-quarters of a cord of firewood in his truck. He divided the wood between the two bonfires he built--one at the abandoned sawmill in town, the other in what had been the cookhouse kitchen. He set both fires within minutes of each other, and watched them burn to the ground before morning. He used some fancy pine-scented lamp oil to ignite the bonfires; either kerosene or gasoline might have left some residue of themselves, and surely both would have left a taint in the air. But there'd been nothing left of the lamp oil, with its innocent pine scent--not to mention the well-seasoned firewood he'd used to start both fires.

  "You know anythin' 'bout that fire in Twisted River last night, Ketchum?" Carl asked him the following day, after the hungover deputy sheriff had driven to the site of the devastation. "The tire tracks back in there looked like your truck to me."

  "Oh, I was back in there, all right," Ketchum told the cop. "It was a helluva fire, cowboy--you should have seen it! It burned damn-near all night! I just took a beer or two and drove back in there to watch it." (It was a pity that the deputy had stopped drinking, Ketchum would say in later years.)

  They were not on friendlier terms these days--the cowboy and Ketchum--now that Carl knew the Baciagalupo boy had killed Injun Jane with a skillet, and all the rest of it. Jane's death had been an accident, the deputy sheriff understood; according to Ketchum, her death probably didn't matter all that much to Carl, though the cop was pissed at Ketchum for never telling him the truth. What really mattered to the cowboy was that Cook
ie had been fucking Jane--at a time when Jane "belonged" to Carl. That was why Carl wanted to kill the cook; the deputy had made himself clear to Ketchum on that point.

  "I know you won't tell me where Cookie is, Ketchum, but you tell that little cripple for me--I'm gonna find him," the cowboy said. "And you better watch your back, if you know what's good for you."

  "I'm always watching my back, Carl," Ketchum told him. The old woodsman didn't say a word about his dog, that "fine animal." If the cowboy came after Ketchum, the veteran logger wanted the dog to be a surprise. Naturally, everyone who lived year-round on the upper Androscoggin must have known that Ketchum had a dog--Carl included. The animal rode around in Ketchum's truck. It was the dog's ferocity that Ketchum had managed to keep secret. (Of course it couldn't have been the same fine animal protecting Ketchum for sixteen years; the present watchdog had to have been the son or grandson of that first fine animal, the dog who'd replaced Six-Pack Pam.)

  "I told you," Ketchum would say, to both Danny and his dad. "New Hampshire is next to Vermont--that's too close for comfort, in my opinion. I think it's a terrific idea for you both to go to Iowa. I'm sure little Joe will love it out there, too. It's another Injun name, Iowa--isn't it? Boy, those Injuns were once all over, weren't they? And just look what this country did to them! It kind of makes you wonder about our country's intentions, doesn't it? Vietnam wasn't the first thing that made us look bad. And where this asshole country is headed--well, maybe those Injuns lying underground in Iowa, and all over, might just say that we're one day going to get what's coming to us."

  HOW WOULD ONE describe Ketchum's politics? the cook was thinking, as he limped down Brattleboro's Main Street, making his slow way back to his restaurant from The Book Cellar.

  LIVE FREE OR DIE

  That's what it said on the New Hampshire license plates; Ketchum was clearly a live-free-or-die man, and he'd always believed that the country was going to Hell, but Tony Angel was wondering if his old friend had ever even voted. The woodsman was disinclined to trust any government, or anyone who took part in it. In Ketchum's opinion, the only justification for having laws--for abiding by any rules, really--was that the assholes outnumbered the sensible fellas. (And of course the laws didn't apply to Ketchum; he'd lived without rules, except those of his own making.)

  The cook stopped walking and looked admiringly down the hill at his very own restaurant--the one he'd always wanted.

  AVELLINO

  ITALIAN COOKING

  Avellino was that other hill town (also a province) in the vicinity of Naples; it had always been the second word Nunzi murmured in her sleep. And the sign said COOKING, not CUISINE--for the same reason that Tony Angel thought of himself and called himself a cook, not a chef. He would always be just a cook, Tony thought; he believed he wasn't good enough to be a chef. Deep in his bones, the former Dominic Baciagalupo--how he missed the Dominic!--was just a mill-town, logging-camp kind of cook.

  Tony Molinari was a chef, the cook was thinking--Paul Polcari, too. Tony Angel had learned a lot from those two--more than Nunzi ever could have taught him--but the cook had also learned he would never be as good as Molinari or Paul.

  "You have no feeling for fish, Gamba," Molinari had told him as sympathetically as possible. It was true. There was only one fish dish on the menu at Avellino, and sometimes the only seafood of the day was a pasta dish--if the cook could get calamari. (He stewed it slowly for a long time, in a spicy marinara sauce with black olives and pine nuts.) But in Brattleboro, the calamari he could get generally came frozen, which was all right, and the most reliable fresh fish was sword-fish, which Tony Molinari had taught him to prepare with lemon and garlic and olive oil--either under the broiler or on a grill--with fresh rosemary, if the cook could get it, or with dried oregano.

  He didn't do dolci. It was Paul Polcari who'd gently made the point that the cook had no feeling for desserts, either--more to the point, Italian desserts, Tony Angel was thinking. What he did do well was the regular mill-town and logging-camp fare--pies and cobblers. (In Vermont, you couldn't go wrong with blueberries and apples.) At Avellino, the cook served a fruit-and-cheese course, too; many of his regular customers preferred that to dessert.

  The admiration of his very own restaurant had distracted Tony Angel from his thoughts about Ketchum's politics, which he returned to while he made his gimpy way downhill to Avellino. When it came to what other people called progress--most engines, and machinery of all sorts--Ketchum was a bit of a Luddite. Not only did he miss the river drives; he claimed he'd liked logging better before there were chainsaws! (But Ketchum was overly fond of guns, the cook was thinking--guns were in a category of machinery the old woodsman would approve of.)

  Neither a liberal nor a conservative, Ketchum could best be described as a libertarian--well, the logger was a libertine, too, Tony Angel considered, and (in the woodsman's younger days) something of a rake and a profligate. Why was it that every time he thought of Ketchum, the cook couldn't help thinking of the logger in sexual terms? (The former Dominic Baciagalupo knew why that was, of course; it just always depressed him when his thoughts about Ketchum went there.)

  Ketchum had been furious when father and son and grandson all came back to Vermont from Iowa, but the Writers' Workshop had been generous to let Danny teach there for as long as they did. They'd offered him only a two-year contract; Danny had asked to stay a third year, and they let him, but in the summer of '75, when Joe was ten, the family returned to Windham County. Danny loved his old farmhouse in Putney. His father would have nothing to do with living there. The Vietnam War was over; Windham College's death throes were more apparent. Besides, Tony Angel had never liked Putney.

  While neither Danny's second nor third novel would make him any money, the cook had increased his savings in Iowa--enough to buy the old storefront space with the apartment above it on Brattleboro's Main Street. That was the year Avellino was born--when Danny was commuting to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the closest college-teaching job that the writer could find, but the distinguished and somewhat staid women's college was well over an hour's drive (nearly two) from Putney--a long commute in the winter months, if it was snowing. Still, living in Putney mattered to Danny. No small part of it was his high opinion of the Grammar School--within walking distance of home--where Joe would finish the eighth grade before going off to Northfield Mount Hermon.

  The cook was shaking his head as he limped into his restaurant, because he was thinking that Daniel truly must love living in the country. Tony Angel didn't; the North End had made a city man out of him, or at least he was a neighborhood kind of guy. But not Daniel. He'd made the commute to that women's college for three years, before The Kennedy Fathers was published in '78; the novel's success had freed him from ever having to teach again.

  Of course there'd been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried--he still worried--about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn't this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through--both before and after he was famous.

  The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy's name--"It's Franky, with a y," she liked to say with a pout--hadn't made the move with them.

  Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.

  "She wasn't my student when I began to sleep with her," Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around--they wouldn't leave.

  The girl had dropped in o
n her former teacher one day, and she'd simply stayed.

  "What does Franky do all day?" his dad had asked Danny.

  "She's trying to be a writer," Danny said. "Franky likes hanging around, and she's nice to Joe--he likes her."

  Franky did some housecleaning, and a little cooking--if you could call it that, the cook thought. The wild girl was barefoot most of the time--even in that drafty old farmhouse in the winter months, when Daniel heated the whole place with a couple of woodstoves. (Putney was the kind of town that worshipped woodstoves, Tony Angel had observed; there was even an alternative to heating in that town! The cook simply hated the place.)

  Franky was a dirty-blonde with lank hair and a slouchy posture. She wore funny old-fashioned dresses of the kind the cook remembered Nunzi wearing, except Franky never wore a bra, and her underarms--what the cook saw of them--were unshaven. And Franky couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three when she'd lived with Daniel and little Joe. Daniel had just turned thirty when they went to Iowa.

  There'd been more young women in the writer's life in Iowa City, one of his workshop students among them, and while there was no one special now--nor had there been anyone long-lasting since Danny Angel became famous--Joe, by the time he was a teenager, had seen his dad with numerous young women. (And three or four notably older women, the cook was remembering; two of those ladies were among Daniel's foreign publishers.)

  The Putney property was a virtual compound these days. The writer had turned the old farmhouse into his guesthouse; he'd built a new house for himself and Joe, and there was a separate building where Danny did his writing. His "writing shack," Daniel called it. Some shack! Tony Angel thought. The building was small, but it had a half-bathroom in it; there was also a phone, a TV, and a small fridge.

  Danny may have liked living in the country, but he wasn't exactly reclusive--hence the guesthouse. In his life as a writer, he'd gotten to know a number of city people, and they came to visit him--the occasional women included. Had Joe's exposure to his famous father's casual relationships with women made the teenager something of a playboy at prep school? Tony Angel wondered. He worried about his grandson--as much as, if not more than, the boy's dad did. Yes, the eighteen-year-old's drinking would bear watching, the cook knew. Joe had the mischievous insouciance of a boy who liked to party.