Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  "A warrior farmer," said Ah Gou Cheng, dismissively; he was the elder brother. Ah Gou was Shanghai dialect for "Big Brother."

  He was a terrific chef; he'd gone to cooking school at the Culinary Institute of America, and he'd grown up working in Chinese restaurants. Born in Queens, he'd moved to Long Island and then to Manhattan. A woman he'd met in a karate class had lured Ah Gou to Iowa, but she'd left him there. By then, Ah Gou was convinced that Mao's could make it in Iowa City.

  Ah Gou was just old enough to have missed the Vietnam War but not the U.S. Army; he'd been an army cook in Alaska. ("No authentic ingredients there, except the fish," he'd told Tony Angel.) Ah Gou had a Fu Manchu mustache and a black ponytail with a dyed orange streak in it.

  Ah Gou had coached his younger brother on how to stay out of the Vietnam War. In the first place, the little brother hadn't waited to be drafted--he'd volunteered. "Just say you won't kill other Asians," Ah Gou had advised him. "Otherwise, sound gung ho."

  The younger brother had said he would drive any vehicle anywhere, and cook for anyone. ("Show me the combat! I'll drive into an ambush, I'll cook in a mortar attack! I just won't kill other Asians.")

  It was a gamble, of course--the army still might have taken him. Good coaching aside, Tony Angel considered, the younger brother didn't have to pretend to be crazy--he was certifiable. That he'd saved his little brother from the Vietnam War--and from killing, or being killed by, other Asians--gave Ah Gou a certain chip on his shoulder.

  MAO'S DID CLASSIC French or a mix of Asian styles, but Ah Gou kept the Asian and French food separated--with some exceptions. Mao's version of oysters Rockefeller was topped with panko, Japanese bread crumbs, and Ah Gou used grapeseed oil and shallots to make the mayonnaise for his crabcakes. (The crab was tossed in the Japanese bread crumbs with some chopped tarragon; the panko didn't get soggy in the fridge, the way other bread crumbs did.)

  The problem was, they were in Iowa. Where was Ah Gou going to get panko--not to mention oysters, grapeseed oil, and crabs? That was where the crazy younger brother came in. He was a born driver. Xiao Dee meant "Little Brother" in Shanghai dialect; the Xiao was pronounced like Shaw. Xiao Dee drove the Cheng brothers' refrigerated truck--complete with two freezer units--to Lower Manhattan, and back, once a week. Tony Angel made the ambitious road trips with him. It was a sixteen-hour drive from Iowa City to Chinatown--to the markets on Pell and Mott streets, where the cook and Xiao Dee shopped.

  If a woman in a karate class had lured Ah Gou to Iowa, Xiao Dee had two women driving him nuts--one in Rego Park, the other in Bethpage. The cook didn't really care which woman Little Brother was seeing. Tony Angel missed the North End, and he was equally fond of the small Chinese communities in Queens and on Long Island; the people were friendly to him and affectionate with one another. (Personally, the cook would have preferred the Rego Park girlfriend, whose name was Spicy, to the one in Bethpage, whose name he could neither remember nor pronounce.) And Tony loved the shopping in Chinatown--even the long drive back to Iowa on I-80. The cook shared the driving on the interstate with Little Brother, but he let Xiao Dee do the driving around New York City.

  They would leave Iowa on a Tuesday afternoon, driving all night till dawn; they emerged from the Holland Tunnel onto Hudson and Canal streets before the Wednesday morning rush hour. They were parked in the Pell Street or Mott Street area of Chinatown when the markets opened. They spent Wednesday night in Queens, or on Long Island, and left before the morning rush hour on Thursday. They would drive all day back to Iowa City, and unload the new goods at Mao's after dinnertime Thursday evening. The weekends were big at Mao's. Even the oysters and mussels and fresh fish from Chinatown would still be fresh on Friday night--if they were lucky, on Saturday night, too.

  The cook had never felt stronger; he'd been forty-eight, forty-nine, and fifty in those Iowa years, but loading and unloading Xiao Dee's refrigerated truck gave him the muscles of a professional mover. There was a lot of heavy stuff on board: the cases of Tsingtao beer, the vat of salt water with the smoking blocks of dry ice for the mussels, the tubs of crushed ice for the oysters. On the way back, they would usually stop for more ice at a discount-liquor store in Indiana or Illinois. They kept the flounder, the monkfish, the sea bass, the Scottish salmon, the scallops, the shrimp, the lap xuong sausage, and all the crabs on ice, too. The whole way west, the truck melted and sloshed. One of the freezers always smelled like squid; they kept the calamari frozen. The big brown crocks of Tianjin preserved vegetable (from China) had to be wrapped in newspaper or they would crack against themselves and break. It was "asking for bad luck" to pack the Japanese dried anchovies anywhere near the Chinese preserved duck eggs, Xiao Dee said.

  Once, when they were crossing the bridge over the Mississippi, at East Moline, they swerved to avoid a bus with a blown-out tire, and all the scents of Asia followed them home: the broken jars of Golden Boy fish sauce for the green Thai curry; the shattered remains of the Chinese soybean sauce (fermented bean curd) and Formosa pork sung; the many jagged edges from the Thai Mae Ploy bottles of sweet chili sauce, and red and green curry paste. The truck was awash with sesame oil and soy sauce, but it was mainly the Hong Kong chili garlic sauce that had endured. The aura of garlic was somehow permeated with the lasting essence of Japanese bonito tuna flakes and dried Chinese shrimp. Black shiitake mushrooms turned up everywhere, for weeks.

  The cook and Xiao Dee had pulled off I-80 immediately west of Davenport--just to open the rear door of the truck and survey the spillage from the near-collision over the Mississippi--but an indescribable odor forewarned them not to risk opening the truck until they were back at Mao's. Something undefined was leaking under the truck's rear door.

  "What does it smell like?" Xiao Dee asked the cook. It was a brownish liquid with beer foam in it--they could both see that much.

  "Everything," Tony Angel answered, kneeling on the pavement and sniffing the bottom of the door.

  A motorcycle cop drove up and asked them if they needed assistance. Little Brother kept all the receipts from their shopping in the glove compartment in case they were ever stopped and suspected of transporting stolen goods. The cook explained to the policeman how they'd swerved on the bridge to avoid the incapacitated bus.

  "Maybe we should just keep going, and inspect the damage when we get to Iowa City," Tony said. The baby-faced, clean-shaven Xiao Dee was nodding his head, his glossy black ponytail tied with a pink ribbon, some trifle of affection either Spicy or the other girlfriend had given him.

  "It smells like a Chinese restaurant," the motorcycle cop commented to the cook.

  "That's what it is," Tony told him.

  Both Little Brother and the cook could tell that the cop wanted to see the mess inside; now that they'd stopped, they had no choice but to open the truck's rear door. There was Asia, or at least the entire continent's culinary aromas: the pot of lychee nuts with almond-milk gelee, the pungent shock of the strewn fresh ginger, and the Mitoku Trading Company's brand of miso leaves--the latter giving a fungal appearance to the walls and ceiling of the truck. There was also a ghoulish monkfish staring at them from a foul sea of soy sauce and dark-brown ice--a contender for the title of Ugliest Fish in the World, under the best of circumstances.

  "Sweet Jesus, what's that?" the motorcycle cop asked.

  "Monkfish, the poor man's lobster," Xiao Dee explained.

  "What's the name of your restaurant in Iowa City?" the cop asked.

  "Mao's," Xiao Dee answered proudly.

  "That place!" the motorcycle cop said. "You get the drive-by vandalism, right?"

  "Occasionally," the cook admitted.

  "It's because of the war," Xiao Dee said defensively. "The farmers are hawks."

  "It's because of the name!" the cop said. "Mao's--no wonder you get vandalized! This is the Midwest, you know. Iowa City isn't Berkeley!"

  Back in the truck that would forever smell like all of Pell and Mott streets on a bad morning (such as when there was a g
arbage strike in Lower Manhattan), the cook said to Little Brother, "The cop has a point, you know. About the name, I mean."

  Xiao Dee was hopped up on chocolate-espresso balls, which he kept in the glove compartment with all the receipts and ate nonstop when he drove--just to keep himself fanatically awake. If the cook had more than two or three on the sixteen-hour drive, his heart would race until the following day--his bowels indicating the pending onset of explosive diarrhea--as if he'd had two dozen cups of double espresso.

  "What's the matter with this country? Mao is just a name!" Xiao Dee cried. "This country has been getting its balls cut off in Vietnam for ten years! What does Mao have to do with it--it's just a name!" The provocative pink ribbon Spicy (or the other girl) had tied around his ponytail had come undone; Xiao Dee resembled a hysterical woman weightlifter driving an entire Chinese restaurant, where you would surely be food-poisoned to death.

  "Let's just get home and unload the truck," the cook proposed, hoping to calm Little Brother down. Tony Angel was trying to forget the image of the monkfish swimming through sesame oil, and everything else that was afloat in the back of the truck.

  The vat of sea water had spilled; they'd lost all the mussels. There would be no sake-steamed mussels in black-bean sauce that weekend. No oysters Rockefeller, either. (To add insult to injury, by the time Xiao Dee and the cook got back to Iowa City, Ah Gou had already chopped the spinach and diced the bacon for the oysters Rockefeller.) The sea bass had perished en route, but the monkfish was salvageable--the tail was the only usable part, anyway, and Ah Gou served it sliced in medallions.

  The cook had learned to test the freshness of the Scottish salmon by deboning it; if the bones were hard to pull out, Ah Gou said the fish was still pretty fresh. The lap xuong sausage, the fresh flounder, and the frozen squid had survived the near collision with the bus, but not the shrimp, the scallops, or the crabs. Ah Gou's favorite mascarpone and the Parmesan were safe, but the other cheeses had to go. The bamboo mats, or nori rolls--for rolling out the sushi--had absorbed too much sesame oil and Tsingtao beer. Xiao Dee would hose out the truck every day for months, but it would always smell of that near accident over the Mississippi.

  HE'D LOVED THAT TIME in Iowa City--including those road trips with Xiao Dee Cheng, Tony Angel was thinking. Every night, on the menu at Avellino, was an item or two the cook had acquired from working with Ah Gou at Mao's. At Avellino, the cook indicated the French or Asian additions to his menu by writing simply, "Something from Asia" or "Something from France;" he'd learned this from Ah Gou at Mao's. In an emergency, when all the fish (and the oysters and mussels) had perished before Saturday night, Ah Gou asked the cook to do a pasta special or a pizza.

  "Something from Italy," the menu at Mao's would then say.

  The long-distance truckers who stopped off the interstate would invariably complain. "What's this fucking 'Something from Italy' about? I thought this was a Chinese place."

  "We're a little of everything," Xiao Dee would tell them--Little Brother was usually the weekend maitre d', while the cook and Ah Gou slaved away in the kitchen.

  The rest of the staff at Mao's was a fiercely intelligent and multicultural collection of Asian students from the university--many of them not from Asia but from Seattle and San Francisco, or Boston, or New York. Tzu-Min, Ah Gou's relatively new girlfriend, was a Chinese law-school student who'd been an undergraduate at Iowa just a couple of years before; she'd decided to stay in Iowa City (and not go back to Taiwan) because of Mao's and Ah Gou and the law school. On Thursday nights, when Xiao Dee was still suffering the jazzed-up aftereffects of the chocolate-espresso balls, Tzu-Min would sub as the maitre d'.

  They didn't have a radio at Mao's, Tony Angel was remembering as he surveyed the place settings at Avellino, which on that late-spring '83 night was not quite open for business but soon would be. At Mao's, Ah Gou had kept a TV in the kitchen--the cause of many cut fingers, and other knife or cleaver accidents, in the cook's opinion. But Ah Gou had liked sports and news; sometimes the Iowa football or basketball games were televised, and that way the kitchen knew in advance whether to expect a celebratory or dejected crowd after the game.

  In those years, the Iowa wrestling team rarely lost--least of all, at home--and those dual meets brought an especially fired-up and hungry crowd to Mao's. Daniel had taken young Joe to most of the home matches, the cook suddenly remembered. Maybe it had been the success of the Iowa wrestling team that made Joe want to wrestle when he went off to Northfield Mount Hermon; quite possibly, Ketchum's reputation as a barroom brawler had had nothing to do with it.

  Tony Angel had a Garland eight-burner stove, with two ovens and a broiler, in his kitchen at Avellino; he had a steam table for his chicken stocks, too. At Mao's, at their busiest, they could seat eighty or ninety people in an evening, but Avellino was smaller. Tony rarely fed more than thirty or forty people a night--fifty, tops.

  Tonight the cook was working on a red-wine reduction for the braised beef short ribs, and he had both a light and a dark chicken stock on the steam table. In the "Something from Asia" category, he was serving Ah Gou's beef satay with peanut sauce and assorted tempura--just some shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. There were the usual pasta dishes--the calamari with black olives and pine nuts, over penne, among them--and two popular pizzas, the pepperoni with marinara sauce and a wild-mushroom pizza with four cheeses. He had a roast chicken with rosemary, which was served on a bed of arugula and grilled fennel, and a grilled leg of spring lamb with garlic, and a wild-mushroom risotto, too.

  Greg, the cook's young sous chef, had been to cooking school on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and was a fast learner. Tony was letting Greg do a sauce grenobloise, with brown butter and capers, for the chicken paillard--that was the little "Something from France" for the evening. And Tony's two favorite waitresses were on hand, a single mother and her college-student daughter. Celeste, the mom, had worked for the cook since '76, and the daughter, Loretta, was more mature than the usual Brattleboro high school kids he hired as waitresses, busboys, and dishwashers.

  Loretta was older than most college students; she'd had a baby her senior year in high school. Loretta was unmarried and had cared for the child in her mom's house until the little boy was old enough (four or five) to not drive Celeste crazy. Then Loretta had gotten into a nearby community college--not the easiest commute, but she'd arranged all her classes on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. She was back home in Brattleboro, still living with her mom and young son, from every Thursday night till the following Tuesday morning.

  Since the cook had been sleeping with Celeste--only for the last year, going on eighteen months--the arrangement had worked well for Tony Angel. He stayed in Celeste's house, with Celeste and her first-grade grandson, only two nights a week--on one of which, every Wednesday, the restaurant was closed. The cook moved back into his apartment whenever Loretta came home to Brattleboro. It had been more awkward last summer, when Celeste moved into Tony's small apartment above Avellino for upwards of three or four nights at a time. A redhead, with very fetching freckles on her chest, she was a big woman, though not nearly the size of either Injun Jane or Carmella. Celeste (at fifty) was as many years older than the cook's son, Danny, as she was younger than the cook.

  There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino--at their mutual insistence--though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an innocent joke when the cook asked the bookseller if she knew any women to introduce him to. (She either didn't or she wouldn't, not with Celeste in the picture. Brattleboro was a small town, and Celeste was a popular presence in it.)

  It had been easier to meet women in Iowa, Tony Angel was remembering. Granted, he was older now, and Brattleboro was a very small town compared to Iowa City, where Dan
ny had invited his dad to all the Writers' Workshop parties; those women writers knew how to have a good time.

  Danny had treated his workshop students to an evening at Mao's on many occasions--not least the celebration of the Chinese New Year, every January or February, when Ah Gou had presented a ten-course prix-fixe menu for three nights in a row. Just before the Chinese New Year in '73--it was the Year of the Ox, the cook remembered--Xiao Dee's truck had broken down in Pennsylvania, and Tony Angel and Little Brother almost hadn't made it back to Iowa City with the goods in time.

  In '74--the Year of the Tiger, Tony thought--Xiao Dee had convinced Spicy to ride along to Iowa City with them, all the way from Queens. Spicy was fortunately small, but it was still a tight squeeze in the truck's cab, and somewhere in Indiana or Illinois, Spicy figured out that Xiao Dee had been seeing a woman in Bethpage--"that Nassau County cunt," Spicy called her. The cook had listened to them argue the rest of the way.

  Somehow, thinking of Iowa City and Mao's had made Tony Angel consider that Avellino lacked ambition, but one of the things the cook loved about his Brattleboro restaurant was that it was relatively easy to run; real chefs, like Ah Gou Cheng and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari, might find Avellino unambitious, but the cook (at fifty-nine) wasn't trying to compete with them.

  One sadness was that Tony Angel wouldn't invite his old friends and mentors to come visit him in Vermont, and have a meal at Avellino. The cook felt that his Brattleboro restaurant was unworthy of these superior chefs, who'd taught him so much, though they probably would have been touched and flattered to have seen their obvious good influences on the menu at Avellino, and they surely would have supported the cook's pride in having his very own restaurant, which--albeit only in Brattleboro--was a local success. Since Molinari and Polcari were retired, they could have come to Vermont at their convenience; it might have been harder for the Cheng brothers to find the time.