Last Night in Twisted River

  "Tell me what you're writing now, Secondo," Carmella suddenly blurted out, smiling warmly at him. "You've been rather a long time between books again--haven't you? Tell me what you're up to. I'm just dying to know what's next!"

  NOT MUCH LATER, after Carmella went to bed, some men were watching Monday Night Football at the bar, but Danny had already gone to his room, where he left the television dark. He also left the curtains open, confident in how lightly he slept--knowing that the early-morning light would wake him. He was only a little worried about getting Carmella up and going in the morning; Danny knew that Ketchum would wait for them if they were late. The lamp on the night table was on, as Danny lay in bed, and there on the table, too, was the jar containing his father's ashes. It would be Danny's last night with the cook's ashes, and he lay looking at them--as if they might suddenly speak, or give him some other indication of his dad's last wishes.

  "Well, Pop, I know you said you wanted this, but I hope you haven't changed your mind," Danny spoke up in the hotel room. As for the ashes, they were in what was formerly a container of Amos' New York Steak Spice--the listed ingredients had once been sea salt, pepper, herbs, and spices--and the cook must have bought it at his favorite fancy meat market in their neighborhood of Toronto, because Olliffe was the name on the label.

  Danny had gotten rid of most, but not all, of the contents; after he'd placed his father's ashes in, there'd been room to put some of the herbs and spices back in as well, and Danny had done so. If someone had questioned him about the container at U.S. Customs--if they'd opened the jar and had a whiff--it still would have smelled like steak spice. (Perhaps the pepper would have made the customs officer sneeze!)

  But Danny had brought the cook's ashes through U.S. Customs without any questioning. Now he sat up in bed and opened the jar, cautiously sniffing the contents. Knowing what was in the container, Danny wouldn't have wanted to sprinkle it on a steak, but it still smelled like pepper and herbs and spices--it even looked like crushed herbs and a variety of spices, not human ashes. How fitting for a cook, that his remains had taken up residency in a jar of Amos' New York Steak Spice!

  Dominic Baciagalupo, his writer son thought, might have gotten a kick out of that.

  Danny turned out the lamp on the night table and lay in bed in the dark. "Last chance, Pop," he whispered in the quiet room. "If you don't have anything else to say, we're going back to Twisted River." But the cook's ashes, together with the herbs and spices, maintained their silence.

  DANNY ANGEL ONCE WENT ELEVEN YEARS between novels--between East of Bangor and Baby in the Road. Again, a death in the family would delay him, though Carmella had been wrong to suggest that the writer was once more taking "rather a long time between books." It had been only six years since his most recent novel was published.

  As had happened with Joe, after the cook was murdered, the novel Danny had been writing suddenly looked inconsequential to him. But this time there was no thought of revising the book--he'd simply thrown it away, all of it. And he had started a new and completely different novel, almost immediately. The new writing emerged from those months when what remained of his privacy had been taken from him; the writing itself was like a landscape suddenly and sharply liberated from a fog.

  "The publicity was awful," Carmella bluntly said, at dinner. But this time, Danny had expected the publicity. After all, a famous writer's father had been murdered, and the writer himself had shot the killer--irrefutably, in self-defense. What's more, Danny Angel and his dad had been on the run for nearly forty-seven years. The internationally bestselling author had left the United States for Canada, but not for political reasons--just as Danny always claimed, without revealing the actual circumstances. He and his dad had been running away from a crazy ex-cop!

  Naturally, there were those in the American media who would say that the cook and his son should have gone to the police in the first place. (Did they miss the fact that Carl was the police?) Of course the Canadian press was indignant that "American violence" had followed the famous author and his father across the border. In retrospect, this was really a reference to the guns themselves--both the cowboy's absurd Colt .45 and Ketchum's Christmas present to Danny, the Winchester 20-gauge that had blown away the deputy sheriff's throat. And in Canada, much was made of the fact that the writer's possession of the shotgun was illegal. In the end, Danny wasn't charged. Ketchum's 20-gauge Ranger had been confiscated--that was all.

  "That shotgun saved your life!" Ketchum had bellowed to Danny. "And it was a present, for Christ's sake! Who confiscated it? I'll blow his balls off!"

  "Let it go, Ketchum," Danny said. "I don't need a shotgun, not anymore."

  "You have fans--and whatever their opposites are called--don't you?" the old logger pointed out. "Some critters among them, I'll bet."

  As for the question Danny was asked the most, by both the American and the Canadian media, it was: "Are you going to write about this?"

  He'd learned to be icy in answering the oft-repeated question. "Not immediately," Danny always said.

  "But are you going to write about it?" Carmella had asked him again, over dinner.

  He talked about the book he was writing instead. It was going well. In fact, he was writing like the wind--the words wouldn't stop. This one would be another long novel, but Danny didn't think it would take long to write. He didn't know why it was coming so easily; from the first sentence, the story had flowed. He quoted the first sentence to Carmella. (Later, Danny would realize what a fool he'd been--to have expected her to be impressed!) "'In the closed restaurant, after hours, the late cook's son--the maestro's sole surviving family member--worked in the dark kitchen.'" And from that mysterious beginning, Danny had composed the novel's title: In the After-Hours Restaurant.

  To the writer's thinking, Carmella's reaction was as predictable as her conversation. "It's about Gamba?" she asked.

  No, he tried to explain; the story was about a man who's lived in the shadow of his famous father, a masterful cook who has recently died and left his only son (already in his sixties) a lost and furtive soul. In the rest of the world's judgment, the son seems somewhat retarded. He's lived his whole life with his father; he has worked as a sous chef to his dad in the restaurant the well-respected cook made famous. Now alone, the son has never paid his own bills before; he's not once bought his own clothes. While the restaurant continues to employ him, perhaps out of a lingering mourning for the deceased cook, the son is virtually worthless as a sous chef without his father's guidance. Soon the restaurant will be forced to fire him, or else demote him to being a dishwasher.

  What the son discovers, however, is that he can "contact" the dead cook's spirit by cooking up a storm in the nighttime kitchen--but only after the restaurant is closed. There, long after hours, the son secretly slaves to teach himself his dad's recipes--everything the sous chef failed to learn from his father when the great cook was alive. And when the former sous chef masters a recipe to his dad's satisfaction, the spirit of the deceased cook advises his son on more practical matters--where to buy his clothes, what bills to pay first, how often and by whom the car should be serviced. (His father's ghost, the son soon realizes, has forgotten a few things--such as the fact that his somewhat retarded son never learned to drive a car.)

  "Gamba is a ghost?" Carmella cried.

  "I suppose I could have called the novel The Retarded Sous Chef," Danny said sarcastically, "but I thought In the After-Hours Restaurant was a better title."

  "Secondo, someone might think it's a cookbook," Carmella cautioned him.

  Well, what could he say? Surely no one would think a new novel by Danny Angel was a cookbook! Danny stopped talking about the story; to placate Carmella, he told her what the dedication was. "My father, Dominic Baciagalupo--in memoriam." This would be his second dedication to his dad, bringing the number of dedications "in memoriam" up to four. Predictably, Carmella burst into tears. There was a certain safety, a familiar kind of comfort, in her tears; Carmel
la seemed almost happy when she was crying, or at least her disapproval of Danny was somewhat abated by her sorrow.

  As he lay awake in bed now, with little confidence that he would fall asleep, Danny wondered why he'd tried so hard to make Carmella understand what he was writing. Why had he bothered? Okay, so she'd asked what he was writing--she had even said she was dying to know what was next! But he'd been a storyteller forever; Danny had always known how to change the subject.

  As he drifted--ever so lightly--to sleep, Danny imagined the son (the tentative sous chef) in the after-hours kitchen, where his father's ghost instructs him. Similar to Ketchum before the logger learned to read, the son makes lists of words he is struggling to recognize and remember; this night, the son is obsessed with pasta. "Orecchiette," he writes, "means 'little ears.' They are small and disk-shaped." Bit by bit, the sous chef is becoming a cook--if it isn't too late, if his dead father's restaurant will only give him more time to learn! "Farfalle," the somewhat retarded son writes, "means 'butterflies,' but my dad also called them bow ties."

  In his half-sleep, Danny was up to the chapter where the cook's ghost speaks very personally to his son. "I had so wanted for you to be married, with children of your own. You would be a wonderful father! But you like the kind of woman who is--"

  Is what? Danny was thinking. A new waitress has been added to the waitstaff in the haunted restaurant; she is precisely "the kind of woman" the cook's ghost is trying to warn his son about. But at last the writer fell asleep; only then did the story stop.

  THE POLICE BUSINESS concerning the double shooting in Toronto was finished; even the most egregious morons in the media had finally backed off. After all, the bloodbath had happened almost nine months ago--not quite the duration of a pregnancy. Only Danny's mail had continued to discuss it--the sympathy letters, and whatever their opposite was.

  That mail about the cook's murder and the subsequent shooting of his killer had persisted--condolences, for the most part, though not all the letters were kind. Danny read every word of them, but he'd not yet received the letter he was looking for--nor did he seriously expect that he would ever hear from Lady Sky again. This didn't stop Danny from dreaming about her--that vertical strip of the strawberry blonde's pubic hair, the bright white scar from her cesarean section, the imagined histories of her unexplained tattoos. Little Joe had given her a superhero's name, but was Lady Sky an actual warrior--or, in a previous life, had she been one? Danny could only imagine that Amy's life had been different once. Doesn't something have to happen to you before you jump naked out of an airplane? And after you've jumped, what more can happen to you? Danny would wonder.

  That Amy had written him once, after Joe died, and that she'd also lost a child--well, that was one of life's missed connections, wasn't it? Since he'd not written her back, why would she write him again? But Danny read his mail, all of it--answering not a single letter--in the diminishing hope that he would hear from Amy. Danny didn't even know why he wanted to hear from her, but he couldn't forget her.

  "If you're ever in trouble, I'll be back," Lady Sky had told little Joe, kissing the two-year-old's forehead. "Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy." So much for the promises of angels who drop naked out of the sky, though--to be fair--Amy had told them she was only an angel "sometimes." Indeed, most persistently in Danny's dreams, Lady Sky didn't always make herself available as an angel--obviously, not on that snowy night when Joe and the wild blow-job girl met the blue Mustang going over Berthoud Pass.

  "I would like to see you again, Amy," Danny Angel said aloud, in the writer's fragile sleep, but there was no one to hear him in the dark--only his father's silent ashes. Evidently, in the drama enacted that night in that hotel room, the cook's ashes--at rest in the jar of Amos' New York Steak Spice--had been given a nonspeaking part.

  DANNY AWOKE WITH A START; the early-morning light seemed too bright. He thought he was already late for his meeting with Ketchum, but he wasn't. Danny called Carmella in her hotel room. He was surprised at how wide awake she sounded, as if she'd been anticipating his call. "The bathtub is much too small, Secondo, but I managed somehow," Carmella told him. She was waiting for him in the vast and almost empty dining hall when he went downstairs for breakfast.

  Ketchum had been right about visiting in September; it was going to be quite a beautiful day in the northeastern United States. Even as Danny and Carmella drove away from The Balsams at that early-morning hour, the sun was bright, the sky a vivid and cloudless blue. A few fallen maple leaves dotted Akers Pond Road with reds and yellows. Danny and Carmella had told the resort hotel that they would be staying a second night in Dixville Notch. "Maybe Mr. Ketchum will join us for dinner tonight," Carmella said to Danny in the car.

  "Maybe," Danny answered her; he doubted that The Balsams was Ketchum's kind of place. The hotel had an oversize appearance, an ambience that possibly catered to conventions; Ketchum wasn't the conventioneer type.

  They quickly came upon the sign that said SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. "I'm at the end of the road," was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering) BEWARE OF THE DOG. But there was no dog--no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality--namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.

  "I think I know the dog," Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. "His name is Hero, and he's not really a bad dog--not that I've seen."

  The road went on, growing narrower--till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he'd definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.

  "Looks like a dead end ahead," Carmella said; she put her plump hands on the dashboard, as if to ward off a pending collision. But the road ended at a clearing, one that could have been mistaken for a dump--or perhaps it was a graveyard for abandoned trucks and trailers. Many of the trucks had been dissected for their parts. Several outbuildings were scattered throughout the premises; one weather-beaten shack had the appearance of a log-cabin smokehouse, from which so much smoke seeped through the cracks between the logs that the entire building looked as if it were about to burst into flames. A smaller, more focused column of smoke rose from a stovepipe atop a trailer--a former wanigan, Danny recognized. Probably, a woodstove was in the wanigan.

  Danny shut off the car and listened for the dog. (He had forgotten that Hero didn't bark.) Carmella rolled down her window. "Mr. Ketchum must be cooking something," she said, sniffing the air. From the bearskin, stretched taut on a clothesline between two trailers, Danny assumed that the skinned bear was in the smokehouse--not exactly "cooking."

  "A fella I know butchers my bears for me, if I give him some of the meat," Ketchum had told Danny, "but, especially in warm weather, I always smoke the bears first." From the aroma in the air, it was definitely a bear that was smoking, Danny thought. He opened the driver's-side door cautiously--on the lookout for Hero, assuming that the hound might see his designated role as that of guarding the smoking bear. But no dog emerged from one of the outbuildings, or from behind any of several sheltering piles of wreckage.

  "Ketchum!" Danny called.

  "Who wants to know?" they heard Ketchum shout, before the door opened to the wanigan with the smoking stovepipe. Ketchum quickly put the rifle away.

  "Well, you aren't as late as you thought you would be!" he hailed them, in a friendly fashion. "It's nice to see you again, Carmella," he told her, almost flirtatiously.

  "It's nice to see you, Mr. Ketchum," she said.

  "Come on in and have some coffee," Ketchum told them. "Bring Cookie's ashes with you, Danny--I want to see what you've
got them in."

  Carmella was curious to see the container, too. They had to pass the strong-smelling bearskin on the clothesline before entering the wanigan, and Carmella looked away from the bear's severed head; it was still attached to the pelt, but the head hung nose-down, almost touching the ground, and a bright globe of blood had bubbled and congealed. Where the blood had once dripped from the bear's nostrils, it now resembled a Christmas ornament attached to the dead animal's nose.

  "'Amos' New York Steak Spice,'" Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. "Well, that's a fine choice. If you don't mind, Danny, I'm going to put the ashes in a glass jar--you'll see why when we get there."

  "No, I don't mind," Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he'd been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.

  Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He'd put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not--strong and sweet, and a little silty, "like Turkish coffee," Carmella commented.

  She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn't help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept--surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn't see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal--as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.