Last Night in Twisted River

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.