Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on "poor" Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Danny's sexual life, she more than made up for lost time. That she was a teacher at Sacred Heart--in the same Catholic and all-girls' environment where the younger Filomena had been held down--was a perfect disguise.

  All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as "pathetic"--those were his father's very words for her, Danny remembered, as he ran harder and harder. Outwardly, Filomena had seemed the picture of propriety and Catholic repression, but--oh!--not when she shed her clothes!

  "Let's just say I keep them busy at confession," she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Danny's life couldn't match his aunt's erotic performance.

  Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties--too old to have a baby, in her estimation--when the issue of Danny going to Vietnam (or not) was raised. She might have been happier with Ketchum's solution; if Danny had lost a finger or two, he might have stayed with his aunt a little longer. Filomena was insane, but she was no fool; she knew she wouldn't get to keep her beloved young Dan forever. She liked the sound of Katie Callahan's idea better than she ever warmed to Ketchum's plan--after all, in her own odd way, Filomena loved her nephew, and she had not met Katie.

  Had Filomena met that most vulgar young woman, she might have opted for Ketchum's Browning knife instead, but ultimately that decision wasn't hers. Filomena felt fortunate to have captured such a vital young man's almost complete attention for the seven years she'd held him in her thrall. Danny's dalliances with those DiMattia girls, or several of his kissing cousins, didn't bother her. Filomena knew that Danny would always come back to her, with renewed vigor. Those clumsy sluts couldn't hold a candle to her--not in the boy's fond estimation, anyway. Nor would Katie ever become the younger Filomena Danny may have desired--or, once upon a time, wished her to be.

  Filomena would be in her mid-to late fifties now, the writer knew--running harder. Filomena had never married; she was no longer at Sacred Heart, but she was still teaching. His novel with the semicolon in the title--the one everyone had scorned (The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt)--had received one favorable review, which the writer Danny Angel appreciated.

  In her letter, Filomena wrote: "I warmly enjoyed your novel, as you no doubt intended--a generous amount of homage with a justifiable measure of condemnation. Yes, I took advantage of you--if only in the beginning. That you stayed with me so long made me proud of myself, as I am proud of you now. And I'm sorry if, for a time, I made it hard for you to appreciate those inexperienced girls. But you must learn to choose more wisely, my dear--now that you're a little older than I was when we went our separate ways."

  She'd written that letter two years ago--The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt had been published in '81. He'd often thought of seeing her again, but how could Danny revisit Filomena without having unrealistic expectations? A man in his early forties, his unmarried aunt in her mid-to late fifties--well, what sort of relationship could exist between them now?

  Nor had he learned to choose more wisely, as Filomena had recommended; perhaps he'd purposely decided against choosing to be with anyone who so much as hinted at the promise of permanence. And the writer knew he was too old to still hold his aunt accountable for introducing him to sex when he was too young. Whatever reluctance Danny felt for involving himself in a permanent relationship couldn't be blamed on Filomena--certainly not anymore.

  IT WAS THE BAD-DOG PART of Danny's run; if there was going to be trouble, it would happen here. Danny was looking for the different-eyed dog in the narrow, flat driveway lined with abandoned vehicles--dead cars, some minus tires, trucks without engines, a motorcycle on its side and missing its handlebars--when the big male dog emerged from a Volkswagen bus without any doors. A husky-shepherd mix, he came into the road on a dead run--no bark, not a growl, all business. The patter of the pads of his paws on the dirt road was the only sound the dog made; he hadn't yet begun to breathe hard.

  Danny had had to beat him off with the squash-racquet handles before, and he'd had words with the animal's no-less-aggressive owner--a young man in his twenties, possibly one of those former Windham College students who wouldn't move away. The guy had a hippie appearance but was no pacifist; he might have been one of the countless young men living in the Putney area who called themselves "carpenters." (If so, he was a carpenter who either didn't work or was always at home.)

  "Mind your dog!" Danny had called up the driveway to him, that previous time.

  "Fuck you! Run somewhere else!" the hippie carpenter had yelled back.

  Now here was the unchained dog again, snapping at the runner. Danny moved to the far-right side of the road and tried to outrun the dog, but the husky-shepherd quickly gained on him. Danny stopped diagonally across the road from the hippie carpenter's driveway, and the dog stopped, too--circling him, his head low to the ground, his teeth bared. When the dog lunged at his thigh, Danny jabbed him in the ear with one of the sawed-off squash racquets; when the husky-shepherd seized the racquet handle in his teeth, Danny hit the animal as hard as he could with the other handle, both on the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. (One of his eyes was the light-blue color of a Siberian husky's eyes, and the other was the dark-brown, more penetrating eye of a German shepherd.) The dog yelped and let go of the first racquet handle. Danny hit him on one ear, then the other, as the animal momentarily retreated.

  "Leave my dog alone, you son of a bitch!" the hippie carpenter yelled. He was walking down his driveway between the rows of wrecked vehicles.

  "Mind your dog," was all Danny told him. He had started to run again before he saw the second dog--so similar-looking to the first that Danny thought, for a moment, it was the same dog. Then, suddenly, he had two dogs snapping at him; the second one was always at his back. "Call your dogs!" Danny shouted to the hippie carpenter.

  "Fuck you. Run somewhere else," the guy said. He was walking back up his driveway; he didn't care if his dogs bit Danny, or not. The dogs tried hard to bite him, but Danny managed to jam one of the racquet handles deep down the throat of the first dog, and a lucky backhand swing caught the second dog in the face--lashing one of its eyes, as it was about to bite Danny in the calf. He kicked the dog choking on the squash-racquet handle in the throat. As the dog turned to run, Danny struck him behind one ear; the dog fell but quickly got up again. The second dog was slinking away. The hippie carpenter was nowhere to be seen, now that his dogs drew back to their territory in the driveway.

  When Danny had first moved to Windham County, there'd been a bad dog on the back road between Dummerston and the Putney School. Danny had called the state police; it was a similar hostile-dog-owner situation. A state trooper had driven out there, just to talk to the dog owner, and when the dog attacked the trooper, he'd shot it dead--right in the driveway. "What did you say to the dog owner?" Danny had asked the trooper. (His name was Jimmy; they'd since become friends.)

  "I told him to mind his dog," Jimmy had answered.

  Danny had been saying that ever since, but with less authority than a state trooper--clearly. Now, without further incident, he ran to the DeSimones' house, but Danny didn't like it when he'd had to break the pace he'd picked up in his last couple of miles. He told Armando about the two dogs and the hippie carpenter. "Call your friend Jimmy," Armando said, but Danny explained that the state trooper would probably be forced to shoot both dogs.

  "Why don't we kill just one of them?" Armando suggested. "Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea."

  "That seems harsh," Danny said. He'd understood what Armando's proposed method of killing one of the husky-shepherds would entail. The DeSimones
' dog was a purebred German shepherd male named Rooster. Even as a puppy, Rooster had stuck out his chest and strutted, stiff-legged and threatening, in the presence of other male dogs--hence his name. But Rooster hadn't been bluffing. Full-grown, he was a dog-killer--Rooster hated other male dogs. At least one of the dogs who'd attacked Danny was a male; the writer couldn't be sure about the second dog, because it had come at him from behind.

  Armando DeSimone was more than what amounted to Danny Angel's only "literary" friend in Putney; Armando was a real reader, and he and Danny argued about what they read in a reasonably constructive way. But there was something innately confrontational in Armando, who reminded Danny of a more civilized version of Ketchum.

  Danny had a tendency to avoid confrontation, which he often regretted. People who picked an argument or a fight with the writer got the idea that he would never fight back; they were surprised, or their feelings were hurt, when Danny did come back at them--though not until the third or fourth provocation. What Danny had learned was that these people who'd grown used to baiting or goading him were always indignant to discover that the writer had been keeping score.

  Armando didn't keep score. When attacked, he attacked back--the first time. Danny believed this was healthier--for a writer, especially--but it was not in his nature to be like Armando. In the disturbing case of the undisciplined dogs, it was only because he believed Armando's way was better that Danny Angel allowed himself to be persuaded. ("Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea," Armando had reasoned.)

  The only way that would happen, the writer should have known, was if Rooster bit the hippie carpenter. Yet Rooster wasn't wired that way; Rooster never bit people.

  "Just one dog, Armando--you promise," his wife, Mary, said, when they were all in the car with Rooster, driving back to Danny's house.

  "Tell Rooster--make him promise," Armando said; he'd been a boxer, back when colleges and universities had boxing teams. Armando drove, with Danny up front in the passenger seat of the VW Beetle. Seemingly long-suffering Mary sat in the back with the panting German shepherd. Mary often seemed at odds with, or put out by, her husband's combativeness, but Danny knew that Armando and Mary were a formidable couple--at heart, they were unassailably supportive of each other. Maybe Mary was more like Armando than Armando. Danny remembered her remark when a fellow teacher had been fired--a former colleague of Mary's at the Grammar School, and later of Armando's at the Putney School.

  "Because justice is so rare, it's such a delight," Mary had remarked. (Now, Danny wondered, did Mary only seem to disapprove of her husband appointing Rooster as executioner?)

  In the end, Danny Angel could only have said (in his own defense) that he did not acquiesce to the assassination of the dog--even a dog who'd attacked him--lightly. Yet, somehow, whenever Armando was involved--on matters of moral authority, especially--Danny did acquiesce.

  "Oh, you mean this asshole," Armando said, when Danny indicated the driveway with the dead cars.

  "You know him?" Danny asked.

  "You know him!" Armando said. "I'm sure he was one of your students."

  "At Windham?"

  "Of course at Windham," Armando said.

  "I didn't recognize him. I don't think he was ever a student of mine," Danny told his friend.

  "Do you remember all your mediocre students, Danny?" Mary asked him.

  "He's just another hippie carpenter--or noncarpenter, as the case may be," Danny said, but (even to himself) he didn't sound too sure about it.

  "Perhaps he's a writer carpenter," Armando suggested. Danny hadn't considered that the young man might have known who Danny Angel was. There were almost as many would-be writers in Putney as there were hippies calling themselves carpenters. (The animosity, or envy, you encountered as a writer in Vermont was often of a back-road mentality.)

  A HUSKY-SHEPHERD MIX is generally no match for a purebred German shepherd, but there were two of them. Then again, maybe no two dogs were ever a match for Rooster. Danny got out of the VW and pulled his seat-back out of the way to let Rooster out of the rear of the car. The German shepherd had hardly touched the ground with his forepaws when the two mixed breeds attacked him. Danny just got back in the Volkswagen and watched. Rooster killed one dog so quickly that neither Danny nor the DeSimones could ascertain if the second dog was male or female; it had crawled under the VW Beetle, where Rooster couldn't get it. (The German shepherd had seized the first dog by the throat, and had snapped his neck with a couple of shakes.)

  Armando called Rooster, and Danny let the German shepherd back into the Beetle. The hippie or writer carpenter had come out of his house and was staring at his dead dog; he hadn't yet figured out that his other dog was cringing under the little car. "Mind your dog," Danny said to him--as Armando slowly backed up, over the remaining husky-shepherd mix. There was just a bump when one of the front wheels rolled over the dog, and a corresponding grunt from the dog. The shepherd-husky got up stiffly and shook itself; it was another male, Danny could see. He saw the dog walk over to his dead mate, sniffing the body while the asshole hippie watched the Volkswagen Beetle back out of his driveway. But was this what Mary (or Armando) meant by "justice"? Maybe calling Jimmy would have been a better idea, Danny thought--even if the state trooper had wound up killing both dogs. It was the dog owner someone should have shot and killed, the writer believed; that would have been a better story.

  THERE ARE THINGS I'LL MISS about Vermont, if I ever have to leave, Danny Angel was thinking, but most of all he would miss Armando and Mary DeSimone. He admired their certainty.

  As the three friends swam in the pool at Danny's Putney property, the dog-killer German shepherd watched over them. Rooster didn't swim, but he did drink from a large bowl of cold water that Danny had given him, while the writer made gin and tonics for Armando and Mary. Looking back, it would be Danny's sharpest memory of Rooster--the dog was panting with apparent satisfaction near the deep end of the pool. The big shepherd loved little children but hated other male dogs; something in the animal's history must have made this so, something neither Danny nor the DeSimones ever knew.

  Rooster would one day be killed on a back road--struck by a car while he was mindlessly chasing a schoolbus. Violence begets violence, as Ketchum and the cook already knew, as one nearly forgotten hippie carpenter, with one dead dog and one momentarily alive, might one day figure out.

  Danny didn't know it, but he'd taken his last run on the back road between Putney and Westminster West. It was a world of accidents, right? Perhaps it was wise not to be too confrontational in such a world.

  BOTH THEIR HUSBANDS had retired from the spruce mill in Milan. A world of small engine repair, and other tinkering, lay ahead of them. The fat sawmill workers' wives--Dot and May, those bad old broads--took every occasion that presented itself, no matter how much driving was involved, to leave town and their tiresome husbands. Retired men made a nuisance of themselves, the two old ladies had discovered; Dot and May preferred their own company to anyone else's. Now that May's younger children (and her older grandchildren) were producing more children, she used the excuse of being needed when whatever mother (and whoever's new baby) came home from the hospital. Wherever "home" was, it was a way to get out of Milan. Dot was always the driver.

  They were both sixty-eight, a couple of years older than Ketchum, whom they spotted occasionally--Ketchum lived in Errol, farther up the Androscoggin. The old logger never recognized Dot or May, nor would he have paid them any attention if he did recognize them, but everyone noticed Ketchum; the woodsman's reputation as a wild man had marked him, as surely as the scar on his forehead was a vivid advertisement of his violent history. But Dot had put on another sixty pounds, or so, and May another eighty; they were white-haired, with those weatherworn faces you see in the north country, and they ate their way through every day, the way some people in cold climates do, as if they were constantly starving.

  They'd come across northern New Hampshire on the Groveton road, thro
ugh Stark--much of the way, they were following the Ammonoosuc--and in Lancaster they crossed the Connecticut, into Vermont. They intersected I-91 just below St. Johnsbury, and followed the interstate south. They had a long drive ahead of them, but they were in no hurry to get there. May's daughter or granddaughter had given birth in Springfield, Massachusetts. If Dot and May arrived in time for supper, they would necessarily get themselves involved in feeding a bunch of little kids and cleaning up after them. The two old ladies were smarter than that--they'd decided they would stop somewhere for supper en route. That way, they could have a nice big meal by themselves and arrive in Springfield well after suppertime; with any luck, someone else would have done the dishes and put the littlest kids to bed.

  About the time those bad old broads were passing McIndoe Falls on I-91, the cook and his staff were finishing their midafternoon meal at Avellino. To have fed his staff a good meal, and to watch everyone cleaning up and readying themselves for the evening's dinner service, always made Tony Angel nostalgic. He was thinking about those years in Iowa City in the seventies--that interlude from their life in Vermont, as both the cook and his son remembered it.

  In Iowa City, Tony Angel had worked as a sous chef in the Cheng brothers' Chinese restaurant out on First Avenue--what the cook called the Coralville strip. The Cheng brothers might have had more business if they'd been closer to downtown; they were too upscale for Coralville, overlooked among its fast-food joints and cheap motels, but the brothers liked their proximity to the interstate, and on those Big Ten sports weekends when an Iowa team was competing at home, the restaurant attracted lots of out-of-towners. It was too expensive for most students, anyway--unless their parents were paying--and the university faculty, whom the Chengs considered their target clientele, all had cars and weren't limited to the bars and restaurants nearer the center of the campus, downtown.

  In Tony Angel's opinion, the name of the Chengs' restaurant was another questionable business decision--Mao's might have worked better with politically disenchanted students than it did with their parents, or the out-of-town sports fans--but the Cheng brothers were completely caught up in the anti-war protests of the time. Public opinion, especially in a university town, had turned against the war; from '72 till '75, there were many demonstrations outside the Old Capitol on the Iowa campus. Admittedly, Mao's might have worked better in Madison or Ann Arbor. Out on the Coralville strip, a passing patriot--in a quickly disappearing car or pickup truck--would sometimes lob a brick or a rock through the restaurant's window.