Last Night in Twisted River

Then Ketchum started his truck and drove off on the haul road, toward Twisted River, leaving the cook and his son to their lengthier and less certain journey--to their next life, no less.

II.

BOSTON, 1967

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CHAPTER 5

NOM DE PL

UME

IT WAS ALMOST EXACTLY AN UNLUCKY THIRTEEN YEARS SINCE Constable Carl had tripped over the body of the Indian dishwasher in his kitchen, and not even Ketchum could say for certain if the cowboy was suspicious of the cook and his son, who had disappeared that same night. To hear it from the most insightful gossips in that area of Coos County--that is to say, all along the upper Androscoggin--Injun Jane had disappeared with them.

According to Ketchum, it bothered Carl that people thought Jane had run off with the cook--more than the constable seemed troubled by the likelihood that he had murdered his companion with an unknown blunt instrument. (The murder weapon was never found.) And Carl must have believed he'd killed Jane; surely, he'd disposed of her body. Absolutely no one had seen her. (Her body hadn't turned up, either.)

Yet Ketchum continued to get insinuating inquiries from the cowboy, whenever their paths crossed. "Have you still not heard a word from Cookie?" Carl would never fail to ask Ketchum. "I thought you two were friends."

"Cookie never had a whole lot to say," Ketchum would point out repeatedly. "I'm not surprised I haven't heard from him."

"And what about the boy?" the cowboy occasionally asked.

"What about him? Danny's just a kid," Ketchum faithfully answered. "Kids don't write much, do they?"

But Daniel Baciagalupo wrote a lot--not only to Ketchum. From their earliest correspondence, the boy had told Ketchum that he wanted to become a writer.

"In that case, it would be best not to expose yourself to too much Catholic thinking," Ketchum had replied; his handwriting struck young Dan as curiously feminine. Danny had asked his dad if his mom had taught her handwriting to Ketchum--this in addition to the dancing, not to mention teaching the logger how to read.

All Dominic had said was: "I don't think so."

The puzzle of Ketchum's pretty penmanship remained unsolved, nor did Dominic appear to give his old friend's handwriting much thought--not to the degree young Dan did. For thirteen years, Danny Baciagalupo, the would-be writer, had corresponded with Ketchum more than his father had. The letters that passed between Ketchum and the cook were generally terse and to the point. Was Constable Carl looking for them? Dominic always wanted to know.

"You better assume so," was essentially all that Ketchum had conveyed to the cook, though lately Ketchum had had more to say. He'd sent Danny and Dominic the exact same letter; a further novelty was that the letter was typed. "Something's up," Ketchum had begun. "We should talk."

This was easier said than done--Ketchum had no phone. He was in the habit of calling both Dominic and young Dan collect from a public phone booth; these calls often ended abruptly, when Ketchum announced he was freezing his balls off. Granted, it was cold in northern New Hampshire--and in Maine, where Ketchum appeared to be spending more and more of his time--but, over the years, Ketchum's collect calls were almost invariably made in the cold-weather months. (Perhaps by choice--maybe Ketchum liked to keep things brief.)

Ketchum's very first typed letter to young Dan and his dad went on to say that the cowboy had let slip "an ominous insinuation." This was nothing new--Constable Carl was ominous, and he was forever insinuating, both Dominic and Danny already knew--but this time there'd been specific mention of Canada. In Carl's opinion, the Vietnam War was the reason relations between the United States and Canada had soured. "I'm not gettin' shit in the area of cooperation from the Canadian authorities," was all the cowboy had said to Ketchum, who took this to mean that Carl was still making inquiries across the border. For thirteen years, the cop had believed that the cook and his son went to Toronto. If the cowboy was looking for them, he wasn't making inquiries in Boston--not yet. But now Ketchum had written that something was up.

KETCHUM'S LONG-AGO ADVICE TO DANNY--namely, if the boy wanted to be a writer, he shouldn't expose himself to too much Catholic thinking--may have been a misunderstanding on Ketchum's part. The Michelangelo School--Danny's new school in the North End--was a middle school, and a public one. The kids called the school the Mickey because the teachers were Irish, but there were no nuns among them. Ketchum must have assumed that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school. ("Don't let them brainwash you," he had written to Danny--the them word, though probably connected to Catholic thinking, was forever unclear.)

But young Dan was not struck (or even remotely influenced) by what was Catholic about the Mickey; what he had noticed about the North End, from the start, was what was Italian about it. The Michelangelo School Center had been a frequent site of the mass meetings where Italian immigrants gathered for Americanization. The overcrowded, cold-water tenement buildings, where so many of Danny's schoolmates at the Mickey lived, had originally been built for the Irish immigrants, who'd come to the North End before the Italians. But the Irish had moved--to Dorchester and Roxbury, or they were "Southies" now. Not all that long ago, there'd been a small number of Portuguese fishermen--maybe there still was a family or two, in the vicinity of Fleet Street--but in 1954, when Danny Baciagalupo and his dad arrived, the North End was virtually all Italian.

The cook and his son were not treated as strangers--not for long. Too many relatives wanted to take them in. There were countless Calogeros, ceaseless Saettas; cousins, and not-really-cousins, called the Baciagalupos "family." But Dominic and young Dan were unused to large families--not to mention extended ones. Hadn't being standoffish helped them to survive in Coos County? The Italians didn't understand "standoffish;" either they gave you un abbraccio ("an embrace") or you were in for a fight.

The elders still gathered on street corners and in the parks, where one heard not only the dialects of Naples and Sicily, but of Abruzzi and Calabria as well. In the warm weather, both the young and the old lived outdoors, in the narrow streets. Many of these immigrants had come to America at the turn of the century--not only from Naples and Palermo, but also from innumerable southern Italian villages. The street life they had left behind had been re-created in the North End of Boston--in the open-air fruit and vegetable stands, the small bakeries and pastry shops, the meat markets, the pushcarts with fresh fish every Friday on Cross and Salem streets, the barbershops and shoeshine shops, the summertime feasts and festivals, and those curious religious societies whose street-level windows were painted with figures of patron saints. At least the saints were "curious" to Dominic and Daniel Baciagalupo, who (in thirteen years) had failed to find exactly what was Catholic or Italian within themselves.

Well, to be fair, perhaps Danny hadn't entirely "failed" with the Italian part--he was still trying to lose that northern New Hampshire coldness. Dominic, it seemed, would never lose it; he could cook Italian, but being one was another matter.

Despite Ketchum's likely misunderstanding that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school, it had long seemed unfair to Danny that his dad blamed Ketchum for giving young Dan the idea of going "away" to a boarding school. All Ketchum had said, in one of his earlier letters to Danny--in that positively girlish handwriting--was that the smartest "fella" he ever knew had attended a private school in the vicinity of the New Hampshire seacoast. Ketchum meant Exeter, not a long drive north of Boston--and in those days you could take the train, what Ketchum called "the good old Boston and Maine." From Boston's North Station, the Boston & Maine ran to northern New Hampshire, too. "Hell, I'm sure you can walk from the North End to North Station," Ketchum wrote to young Dan. "Even a fella with a limp could walk that far, I imagine." (The fella word was increasingly common in Ketchum's vocabulary--maybe from Six-Pack, though Jane had also used the word. Both Danny and his dad said it, too.)

The cook had not taken kindly to what he called Ketchum's "interference" in Daniel's secondary-school education, though young Dan had argued with his father on that point; illogically, Dominic didn't blame the boy's seventh-and eighth-grade English teacher at the Mickey, Mr. Leary, who'd had far more to do with Danny eventually going to Exeter than Ketchum had ever had.

For that matter, the cook should have blamed himself--for when Dominic learned that Exeter (in those days) was an all-boys' school, he was suddenly persuaded to allow his beloved Daniel to leave home in the fall of 1957, when the boy was only fifteen. Dominic would be heartbroken by how much he missed his son, but the cook could sleep at night, secure in the knowledge (or, as Ketchum would say, "the illusion") that his boy was safe from girls. Dominic let Daniel go to Exeter because he wanted to keep his son away from girls "for as long as possible," as he wrote to Ketchum.

"Well, that's your problem, Cookie," his old friend wrote back.

Indeed, it was. It hadn't been such an apparent problem when they'd first come to the North End--when young Dan was only twelve, and he appeared to take no notice of girls--but the cook saw how the girls already noticed his son. Among those cousins and not-really-cousins in the Saetta and Calogero clans, there would soon be some kissing cousins among them, the cook could easily imagine--not to mention all the other girls the boy would meet, for the North End was a neighborhood, where you met people like crazy. The cook and his twelve-year-old had never lived in a neighborhood before.