Last Night in Twisted River

"I would like him to try to kill me first," Ketchum answered. "Then I wouldn't have a problem with it."

It was just as the writer Daniel Baciagalupo had imagined; the conundrum was that although the cowboy was exceedingly stupid, he was smart enough to stay alive. And he'd stopped drinking--that meant Carl wouldn't completely lose control of himself. That might have been why he hadn't beaten up Six-Pack in two whole months, or at least he hadn't beaten her enough for her to leave him and tell him w

hat she knew.

Six-Pack still drank. Ketchum knew she could easily and completely lose control of herself--that was also a problem.

"I worry about something," Danny told Ketchum. "You haven't stopped drinking. Aren't you afraid you'll pass out dead drunk, and that's when Carl will come after you?"

"You haven't met my dog, Danny--he's a fine animal."

"I didn't know you had a dog," Danny said.

"Hell, when Six-Pack left me, I needed someone to talk to."

"What about that lady you met in the library--the schoolteacher who's teaching you how to read?" Danny asked the logger.

"She is teaching me, but it's not a very conversational experience," Ketchum said.

"You're actually learning to read?" Danny asked.

"Yes, I am--it's just slower going than counting coon shit," Ketchum told him. "But I'm aiming to be ready to read that book of yours, when it's published." There was a pause on the phone before Ketchum asked: "How's it going with the nom de plume? Have you come up with one?"

"My pen name is Danny Angel," the writer Daniel Baciagalupo told Ketchum stiffly.

"Not Daniel? Your dad is real fond of the Daniel. I like the Angel part," Ketchum said.

"Dad can still call me Daniel," Danny said. "Danny Angel is the best I can do, Ketchum."

"How's that little Joe doing?" Ketchum asked; he could tell that the young writer was touchy about the nom-de-plume subject.

ON THE TRIP BACK EAST, Danny mostly drove at night, when little Joe was sleeping. He would find a motel with a pool and play with Joe most of the day. Danny took a nap in the motel when his two-year-old did; then he drove all night again. The writer Danny Angel had lots of time to think as he drove. He could think the whole night through. But even with his imagination, Danny couldn't quite see a woodsman like Ketchum coming to Boston. Not even Danny Angel, ne Daniel Baciagalupo, could have imagined how the fearsome logger would conduct himself there.

THAT WINDHAM COLLEGE would turn out to be a funny sort of place wouldn't matter much to Danny Angel, whose first novel, Family Life in Coos County, would be published to fairly good reviews with modest hardcover sales. The young author would sell the paperback rights, and he sold the movie rights, too, though no film was ever made from the book--and the two novels that followed the first would receive more mixed reviews, and sell fewer copies. (Novels two and three wouldn't even be published in paperback, and there was no interest in the movie rights for either book.) But all of that wouldn't matter much to Danny, who was consumed by the task of keeping his father from harm--all the while trying to be a good dad to Joe. Danny just kept writing and writing. He would need to keep teaching to support himself and his young son--all the while saying to little Joe, "Maybe capitalism will be kind to us one day."

It hadn't been too tough to find a house to rent in Putney, one big enough to include his father--and Carmella, if she ever came to Vermont. It was a former farmhouse on a dirt road, which Danny liked because a brook ran alongside it; the road also crossed the brook in a couple of places. The running water was a reminder to Daniel Baciagalupo of where he'd come from. As for the farmhouse, it was a few miles from the village of Putney, which was little more than a general store and a grocery--called the Putney Food Co-op--and a convenience store with a gas station that was diagonally across from the old paper mill, on the road to the college. When Danny first saw the paper mill, he knew that his dad wouldn't like living in Putney. (The cook came from Berlin; he hated paper mills.)

Windham College was an architectural eyesore on an otherwise beautiful piece of land. The faculty were a mix of moderately distinguished and not-so-distinguished professors; Windham had no academic virtues to speak of, but some of its faculty were actually good teachers who could have been working at better colleges and universities, but they wanted to live in Vermont. Many of the male students might not have been attending college at all if there hadn't been a war in Vietnam; four years of college was the most widely available deferment from military service that young males of draft age had. Windham was that kind of place--not long for this world, but it would last as long as the war dragged on--and as the source of Danny's first not-in-a-restaurant job, it wasn't bad.

Danny wouldn't have many students who were genuinely interested in writing, and the few he had weren't talented or hardworking enough to suit him. At Windham, you were lucky if half the students in your classroom were interested in reading. But as a first novelist who'd been saved from the Vietnam War, which Daniel Baciagalupo knew was his case, he was a lenient teacher. Danny wanted everyone--his male students, especially--to stay in school.

If, as some cynics said, Windham's sole justification for existence was that it managed to prevent a few young men from going to Vietnam, that was okay with Danny Angel; he'd grown up enough politically to hate the war, and he was more of a writer than a teacher. Danny didn't really care how academically responsible (or not) Windham College was. The teaching was just a job to him--one that gave him enough time to write, and to be a good father.

Danny let Ketchum know as soon as he and Joe had moved into the old farmhouse on Hickory Ridge Road. Danny didn't care who was reading the logger's letters to him now; the young writer assumed it was the library lady, the schoolteacher whose work-in-progress was teaching Ketchum how to read.

"There's plenty of room for Dad," Danny wrote to the woodsman; the writer included his new phone number and directions to the Putney house, from both Coos County and Boston. (It was nearly the end of June 1967.) "Maybe you'll show up for the Fourth of July," Danny wrote to Ketchum. "If so, I trust you to bring the fireworks."

Ketchum was a big fireworks fan. There'd once been a fish he couldn't catch. "I swear, it's the biggest damn trout in Phillips Brook," he'd declared, "and the smartest." He'd blown up the fish, and no small number of nearby brook trout, with dynamite.

"Don't bring any dynamite," Danny had added, as a postscript. "Just the fireworks."

IT WASN'T PRINCIPALLY "fireworks" that Ketchum brought to Boston, the first leg of his trip. The North Station was in that part of the West End that bordered on the North End. Ketchum got off the train, carrying a shotgun over one shoulder and a canvas duffel bag in the other hand; the duffel bag looked heavy, but not the way Ketchum was toting it. The gun was in a leather carrying case, but it was clear to everyone who saw the woodsman what the weapon was--it had to be either a rifle or a shotgun. The way the carrying case was tapered, you could tell that Ketchum was holding the barrel of the weapon with the butt-end over his shoulder.

The kid who was then the busboy at Vicino di Napoli had just put his grandmother on a train. He saw Ketchum and ran ahead of him, back to the restaurant. The busboy said it appeared that Ketchum was "taking the long way around"--meaning that the logger must have looked at a map, and he'd chosen the most obvious route, which was not necessarily the fastest. Ketchum must have come along Causeway Street to Prince Street, and then intersected with Hanover--a kind of roundabout way to get to North Square, where the restaurant was, but the busboy alerted them all that the big man with a gun was coming.

"Which big man?" Dominic asked the busboy.

"I just know he's got a gun--he's carrying it over his shoulder!" the busboy said. Everyone who worked at Vicino di Napoli had been forewarned that the cowboy might be coming. "And he's definitely from up north--he's fucking scary-looking!"