Last Night in Twisted River

  "You blame Ketchum too much, for everything," Danny would tell his dad more than once, but that was just the way it was.

  If Molinari had been back in the kitchen, Dominic Del Popolo would have changed his name back to Dominic Baciagalupo--and he would have gone back to Boston, to Carmella. The cook would never have had to become Tony Angel. And the writer Danny Angel, whose fourth novel was his first bestseller--now in 1983, his fifth novel had already been translated into more than thirty foreign languages--would have gone back to calling himself, as he dearly wanted to, Daniel Baciagalupo.

  "Damn it, Ketchum!" the cook had said to his old friend. "If Carmella had been back in the kitchen with your blessed Ithaca, she would have shot Carl twice while he was still squinting at her. If the idiot busboy had been back there, I swear he would have pulled that trigger!"

  "I'm sorry, Cookie. They were your friends--I didn't know them. You should have told me there was a nonshooter--a fucking pacifist!--among them."

  "Stop blaming each other," Danny would tell them repeatedly.

  After all, it had been sixteen years--or it would be, this coming August--since Paul Polcari failed to pull the trigger of Ketchum's single-shot 20-gauge. It had all worked out, hadn't it? the cook was thinking, as he sipped his espresso and watched the Connecticut River run by his kitchen window.

  They had once run logs down the Connecticut. In the dining room of the restaurant, which looked out upon Main Street and the marquee with the name of whatever movie was currently playing at the Latchis Theatre, the cook had framed a big black-and-white photograph of a logjam in Brattleboro. The photo had been taken years ago, of course; they weren't moving logs over water in Vermont or New Hampshire anymore.

  River driving had lasted longer in Maine, which was why Ketchum had worked so much in Maine in the sixties and seventies. But the last river drive in Maine was in 1976--from Moosehead Lake, down the Kennebec River. Naturally, Ketchum had been in the thick of it. He'd called the cook collect from some bar in Bath, Maine, not far from the mouth of the Kennebec.

  "I'm trying to distract myself from some asshole shipyard worker, who is sorely tempting me to cause him a little bodily harm," Ketchum began.

  "Just remember you're an out-of-stater, Ketchum. The local authorities will take the side of the shipyard worker."

  "Christ, Cookie--do you know what it costs to move logs over water? I mean getting them from where you cut them to the mill--about fifteen fucking cents a cord! That's all a river drive will cost you."

  The cook had heard this argument too many times. I could hang up, Tony Angel thought, but he stayed on the phone--perhaps out of pity for the shipyard worker.

  "It'll cost you six or seven dollars a cord to get logs to the mill over land!" Ketchum shouted. "Most roads in northern New England aren't worth shit to begin with, and now there'll be nothing but asshole truck drivers on them! You may think it's already a world of accidents, Cookie, but imagine an overloaded logging truck tipping over and crushing a carload of skiers!"

  Ketchum had been right; there'd been some terrible accidents involving logging trucks. In northern New England, it used to be that you could drive all over the place--according to Ketchum, only a moose or a drunken driver could kill you. Now the trucks were on the big roads and the little ones; the asshole truck drivers were everywhere.

  "This asshole country!" Ketchum had bellowed into the phone. "It'll always find a way to make something that was cheap expensive, and to take a bunch of jobs away from fellas in the process!"

  There was an abrupt end to their conversation. In that bar in Bath, the sounds of an argument rose indistinctly; a violent scuffle ensued. No doubt somebody in the bar had objected to Ketchum defaming the entire country--in all likelihood, the aforementioned asshole shipyard worker. ("Some asshole patriot," Ketchum later called the fella.)

  THE COOK LIKED LISTENING to the radio when he started his pizza dough in the morning. Nunzi had taught him to always let a pizza dough rise twice; perhaps this was a silly habit, but he'd stuck to it. Paul Polcari, a superb pizza chef, had told Tony Angel that two rises were better than one, but that the second rise wasn't absolutely necessary. In the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River, the cook's pizza dough had lacked one ingredient he now believed was essential.

  Long ago, he'd said to those fat sawmill workers' wives--Dot and May, those bad old broads--that he thought his crust could stand to be sweeter. Dot (the one who'd tricked him into feeling her up) said, "You're crazy, Cookie--you make the best pizza crust I've ever eaten."

  "Maybe it needs honey," the then Dominic Baciagalupo had told her. But it turned out that he was out of honey; he'd tried adding a little maple syrup instead. That was a bad idea--you could taste the maple. Then he'd forgotten about the honey idea until May reminded him. She'd bumped him, on purpose, with her big hip while handing him the honey jar.

  The cook had never forgiven May for her remark about Injun Jane--when she'd said that Dot and herself weren't "Injun enough" to satisfy him.

  "Here, Cookie," May had said. "It's honey for your pizza dough."

  "I changed my mind about it," he told her, but the only reason he hadn't tried putting honey in his dough was that he didn't want to give May the satisfaction.

  It was in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli where Paul Polcari first showed Tony Angel his pizza-dough recipe. In addition to the flour and water, and the yeast, Nunzi had always added a little olive oil to the dough--not more than a tablespoon or two, per pizza. Paul had shown the cook how to add an amount of honey about equal to the oil. The oil made the dough silky--you could bake the crust when it was thin, without its becoming too dry and brittle. The honey--as the cook himself had nearly discovered, back in Twisted River--made the crust a little sweet, but you never tasted the honey part.

  Tony Angel rarely started a pizza dough without remembering how he'd almost invented the honey part of his recipe. The cook hadn't thought of big Dot and even bigger May in years. He was fifty-nine that morning he thought of them in his Brattleboro kitchen. How old would those old bitches be? Tony Angel wondered; surely they'd be in their sixties. He remembered that May had a slew of grandchildren--some of them the same age as her children with her second husband.

  Then the radio distracted Tony from his thoughts; he missed what he imagined as the Dominic in himself, and the radio reminded him of all he missed. It had been better back in Boston--both the radio station they'd listened to in Vicino di Napoli and the music. The music had been awful in the fifties, the cook thought, and then it got so unbelievably good in the sixties and seventies; now it was borderline awful again. He liked George Strait--"Amarillo by Morning" and "You Look So Good in Love"--but this very day they'd played two Michael Jackson songs in a row ("Billie Jean" and "Beat It"). Tony Angel detested Michael Jackson. The cook believed it was beneath Paul McCartney to have done "The Girl Is Mine" with Jackson; they had played that song, too, earlier in the morning. Now it was Duran Duran on the radio--"Hungry Like the Wolf."

  The music really had been better in Boston, in the sixties. Even old Joe Polcari had sung along with Bob Dylan. Paul Polcari would bang on the pasta pot to "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and in addition to The Rolling Stones and all the Dylan, there were Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. Tony imagined he could still hear how Carmella sang "The Sound of Silence;" they had danced together in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli to "Eight Days a Week" and "Ticket to Ride" and "We Can Work It Out." And don't forget there'd been "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever." The Beatles had changed everything.

  The cook shut off the radio in his Brattleboro kitchen. He tried to sing "All You Need Is Love" to himself instead of listening to the radio, but neither Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, nor Tony Angel had ever been able to sing, and it wasn't long before that Beatles' song began to resemble a song by The Doors ("Light My Fire"), which gave the cook a most unwelcome memory of his former daughter-in-law, Katie. She'd been a big fan of The Doors and The Grateful Dead a
nd Jefferson Airplane. The cook kind of liked The Doors and The Dead, but Katie had done a Grace Slick impersonation that made it impossible for Tony Angel to like Jefferson Airplane--"Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," especially.

  He remembered that time, just before Daniel and his wife and the baby had left for Iowa, when Daniel brought Joe to Boston to stay with the cook and Carmella. Daniel and Katie were going to a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York; someone in Katie's la-di-da family had gotten her the tickets. It was August; over fifty thousand people had attended that concert. Carmella loved taking care of little Joe--he'd been a March baby, like his father, so the boy had been only five months old at the time--but both Katie and Daniel were drunk when they came to the North End to pick up their baby.

  They must have been smashed when they left New York, and they'd driven drunk the whole way to Boston. Dominic would not let them take Joe. "You're not driving back to New Hampshire with the baby--not in your condition," the cook told his son.

  That was when Katie did her sluttish swaying and singing--vamping her way through "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit." Neither Carmella nor the cook could bear to look at Grace Slick after Katie's lewd, provocative performance.

  "Come on, Dad," Danny said to his father. "We're fine to drive. Let little Joe come with us--we can't all sleep in this apartment."

  "You'll just have to, Daniel," his father told him. "Joe can sleep in our room, with Carmella and me, and you and Katie will just have to find a way to fit in the single bed in your room--neither one of you is a large person," the cook reminded the young couple.

  Danny was angry, but he held his temper. It was Katie who behaved badly. She went into the bathroom and peed with the door open--they could all hear her. Daniel gave his dad a look that said, Well, what did you expect? Carmella went into her bedroom and closed the door. (Little Joe was already asleep in there.) When Katie came out of the bathroom, she was naked.

  Katie spoke to Danny as if her father-in-law weren't there. "Come on. If we have to do it in a single bed, let's get started."

  Of course the cook knew that his son and Katie didn't really have noisy sex then and there, but that's what Katie wanted Danny's dad and Carmella to believe; she carried on like she was having an orgasm every minute. Both Danny and his wife were so drunk that they slept right through little Joe's nightmare later that night.

  The cook and his son didn't speak to each other when Daniel left with his wife and child the next day; Carmella didn't look at Katie. But shortly before the would-be writer Daniel Baciagalupo took his family to Iowa, the cook had called his son.

  "If you keep drinking the way you are, you won't write anything worth reading. The next day, you won't even remember what you wrote the day before," the young writer's father told him. "I stopped drinking because I couldn't handle it, Daniel. Well, maybe it's genetic--maybe you can't handle drinking, either."

  Tony Angel didn't know what had happened to his son in Iowa City, but something had made Daniel stop drinking. Tony didn't really want to know what had happened to his beloved boy in Iowa, because the cook was certain that Katie had had something to do with it.

  WHEN HE FINISHED WITH THE PIZZA DOUGH--the dough was having its first rise in the big bowls the cook covered with damp dish towels--Tony Angel limped up Main Street to The Book Cellar. He was fond of the young woman who ran the bookstore; she was always nice to him, and she often ate in his restaurant. Tony would buy her a bottle of wine on occasion. He cracked the same joke whenever he came into The Book Cellar.

  "Have you got any women to introduce to me today?" Tony always asked her. "Someone about my age--or a little younger, maybe."

  The cook really liked Brattleboro, and having his own restaurant. He had hated Vermont those first few years--better said, it was Putney he'd hated. Putney had an alternative style about it. ("Putney is an alternative to a town," the cook now liked to say to people.)

  Tony had missed the North End--"something wicked," as Ketchum would say--and Putney was full of self-advertising hippies and other dropouts. There was even a commune a few miles out of town; the name of it had the word clover in it, but Tony couldn't remember what the rest of it was. He believed it was a women-only commune, which led the cook to suspect they were all lesbians.

  And the butcher in the Putney Food Co-op kept cutting herself, or himself; cutting yourself wasn't what a butcher was supposed to do, and Tony thought the butcher's sex was "indeterminable."

  "For God's sake, Dad, the butcher is clearly a woman," Danny told his father, with exasperation.

  "You say she is, but have you taken all her clothes off--just to be sure?" his dad asked him.

  Yet Tony Angel had opened his own pizza place in Putney, and despite the cook's constant complaints about Windham College--it didn't look like a "real" college to him (never mind that he'd not been to college), and all the college kids were "assholes"--the pizza place did very well, largely because of the Windham students.

  "Constipated Christ, don't call it Angel's Pizza--or anything with the Angel name in it," Ketchum had told the cook. In retrospect, Ketchum had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Danny and his father choosing the name Angel--in case Carl ever remembered that the death of the original Angel had been coincident with the cook and his son leaving town in the first place. As for little Joe's name, Danny had chosen it, though he'd wanted to name his son after his dad--Dominic, Jr. (Katie hadn't liked either the Dominic or the Junior.) But Danny had refused to give little Joe the writer's nom de plume. Joe had remained a Baciagalupo; the boy didn't become an Angel. Both Danny and the cook remembered that Carl hadn't been able to pronounce Baciagalupo; they told Ketchum it was unlikely the cowboy could spell it, either--not even to save his own fat ass. So what if Joe was still a Baciagalupo? Ketchum just had to live with it. And now Ketchum kept complaining about the Angel name!

  The cook often dreamed of that asshole Gennaro Capodilupo, his runaway father. Tony Angel could still hear the names of those two hill towns, which were also provinces, in the vicinity of Naples--those words his mother, Nunzi, had murmured in her sleep: Benevento and Avellino. Tony believed that his father really had gone back to the vicinity of Naples, where he'd come from. But the truth was, the cook didn't care. When someone abandons you, why should you care?

  "And don't get cute and call the pizza place Vicinity of Naples," Ketchum had told the cook. "I know the cowboy doesn't speak Italian, but any fool might one day figure out that Vicino di Napoli, or however the fuck you say it, means 'in the Vicinity of Naples.'"

  So the cook had called his Putney pizza place Benevento; it was always the first of the two towns or provinces Annunziata had uttered in her sleep, and no one but Tony Angel had heard his mother say it. The goddamn cowboy couldn't possibly come up with any connections to Benevento.

  "Shit, it sure sounds Italian--I'll give you that, Cookie," Ketchum had said.

  The Putney pizza place had been right on Route 5, just before the fork in the center of town, where Route 5 continued north, past the paper mill and a tourist trap called Basketville. Windham College was a little farther north, up Route 5. The left-hand fork, where the Putney General Store was--and the Putney Food Co-op, with the self-lacerating butcher of "indeterminable" sex--went off in the direction of Westminster West. Out that way was the Putney School--a prep school Danny disdained, because he thought it wasn't up to Exeter's standards--and, on Hickory Ridge Road, where the writer Danny Angel still lived, there was an independent elementary school called the Grammar School, which had been very much up to Danny's standards.

  He'd sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon--a prep school Danny did approve of. NMH, as the school was called, was about half an hour south of Brattleboro, in Massachusetts--and an hour's drive from Danny's property in Putney. Joe, who was a senior in the spring of 1983, saw quite a lot of his dad and his grandfather.

  In his Brattleboro apartment, the cook had a guest bedroom tha
t was always ready for his grandson. Tony had torn out the kitchen in that apartment, but he'd kept the plumbing intact; he had built quite a spacious bathroom, which overlooked the Connecticut. The bathtub was big and reminded the cook of the one Carmella had had in her kitchen in that cold-water Charter Street apartment. Tony still didn't know for certain that Daniel had spied on Carmella in that bathtub, but he'd read all five of his son's novels, and in one of them there's a luscious-looking Italian woman who luxuriates in taking long baths. The woman's stepson is of an age where he's just beginning to masturbate, and the boy beats off while watching his stepmother bathe. (The clever kid bores a hole in the bathroom wall; his bedroom is conveniently next to the bathroom.)

  While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Danny Angel's novels, the cook more often noticed things that he was sure his son must have made up. If Carmella had put in an identifiable bathtub appearance, the character of the stepmother in that novel was definitely not based on Carmella; nor could the cook find any but the most superficial elements of himself in Daniel's novels, or much of Ketchum. (A minor character's broken wrist is mentioned in passing in one novel, and there's a different character's penchant for saying, "Constipated Christ!" in another.) Both Ketchum and Tony Angel had talked about the absence of anyone in the novels who revealed to them their quintessential and beloved Daniel.

  "Where is that boy hiding himself?" Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Danny Angel's fourth (and most famous) novel, which was titled The Kennedy Fathers, the main character--who escapes the war in Vietnam with the same paternity deferment that kept Danny out of the war--bears little essential resemblance to the Daniel that Ketchum and the cook knew and loved.