Last Night in Twisted River

Later, back in the airboat--but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound--Danny asked the dog: "Do I look lonely to you, Hero? I must be a little lonely, huh?"

--

IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY'S HOUSE on Cluny Drive--particularly as the year 2004 advanced--the politics on the writer's refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Danny was developing in his ninth novel.

As always, he began at the end of the story. He'd not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel--his first as Daniel Baciagalupo. Danny was slowly but gradually making his way backward through the narrative, to where he thought the book should begin. That was just the way he'd always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence--meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down--often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward--or, in Danny's case, back to where he'd begun.

As always, too, the more deeply Danny immersed himself in a novel, the more what passed for his politics fell away. While the writer's political opinions were genuine, Danny would have been the first to admit that he was mistrustful of all politics. Wasn't he a novelist, in part, because he saw the world in a most subjective way? And not only was writing fiction the best of what Daniel Baciagalupo could manage to do; writing a novel was truly all he did. He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual.

Yet Danny was unavoidably remembering those last two U.S. helicopters that left Saigon--those poor people clinging to the helicopters' skids, and the hundreds of desperate South Vietnamese who were left behind in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. The writer had no doubt that we would see that (or something like that) in Iraq. Shades of Vietnam, Danny was thinking--typical of his age, because Iraq wasn't exactly another Vietnam. (Daniel Baciagalupo was such a sixties fella, as Ketchum had called him; there would be no reforming him.)

It was with little conviction that Danny spoke to the yawning, otherwise unresponsive dog. "I'll bet you a box of dog biscuits, Hero--everything is going to get a lot worse before anything gets a little better." The bear hound didn't even react to the dog biscuits part; Hero found all politics every bit as boring as Danny did. It was just the world as usual, wasn't it? Who among them would ever change anything about the way the world worked? Not a writer, certainly; Hero had as good a chance of changing the world as Danny did. (Fortunately, Danny didn't say this to Hero--not wanting to offend the noble dog.)

IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Danny's refrigerator, when Lupita--that most loyal and long-suffering Mexican cleaning woman--found the writer in his kitchen, where Danny was actually writing. This disturbed Lupita, who--in her necessary departmentalizing of the household--took a totalitarian approach to what the various rooms in a working writer's house were for.

Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest--if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.

Caring, as she did, for Danny's house on Cluny Drive had been nothing short of a series of heartbreaks for Lupita. That Mr. Ketchum didn't come to Toronto for Christmas anymore could make the Mexican cleaning woman cry, especially in that late-December time of year--not to mention that the effort she'd had to expend in restoring the late cook's bedroom, following that double shooting, had come close to killing her. Naturally, the blood-soaked bed had been taken away, and the wallpaper was replaced, but Lupita had individually wiped clean every blood-spattered snapshot on Dominic's bulletin boards, and she'd scrubbed the floor until she thought her knees and the heels of her hands were going to bleed. She'd persuaded Danny to replace the curtains, too; otherwise, the smell of gunpowder would have remained in the murderous bedroom.

It is worth noting that, in this period of Danny's life, the two women he maintained the most constant contact with were both cleaning women, though certainly Lupita exerted more influence on the writer than Tireless did. It was because of Lupita's prodding that Danny had gotten rid of the couch in his third-floor writing room, and this was entirely the result of Lupita claiming that the imprint of the loathsome deputy sheriff's body was visible (to her) on that couch. "I can still see him lying there, waiting for you and your dad to fall asleep," Lupita had said to Danny.

Naturally, Danny disposed of the couc

h--not that the imprint of the cowboy's fat body had ever been visible to Daniel Baciagalupo, but once the Mexican cleaning woman claimed to have sighted an imprint of Carl on that couch, the writer soon found himself imagining it.

Lupita hadn't stopped there. It was soon after Hero had come to live with him, Danny was remembering, when Lupita proposed a more monumental change. Those bulletin boards with their collected family history--the hundreds of overlapping snapshots the cook had saved, and there were hundreds more in Dominic's desk drawers--well, you can imagine what the Mexican cleaning woman thought. It made no sense, Lupita had said, for those special photos to be on display in a room where they were now unseen. "They should be in your bedroom, Mr. Writer," Lupita had told Danny. (She'd spontaneously taken to calling him that, or "Senor Writer." Danny couldn't recall exactly when this had started.)

And it followed, of course, that those photographs of Charlotte would have to be moved. "It's no longer appropriate," Lupita had told Danny; she meant that he shouldn't be sleeping with those nostalgic pictures of Charlotte Turner, who was a married woman with a family of her own. (Without a word of resistance from Mr. Writer, Lupita had simply taken charge.)

Now it made sense. The late cook's bedroom served as a second guest room; it was rarely used, but it was particularly useful if a couple with a child (or children) were visiting the writer. Dominic's double bed had been replaced with two twins. The homage to Charlotte in this far-removed guest room--at the opposite end of the hall from Danny's bedroom--seemed more suitable to what Danny's relationship with Charlotte had become.

It made more sense, too, that Danny now slept with those photographs of the cook's immediate and extended families--including some snapshots of the writer's dead son, Joe. Danny had Lupita to thank for this even being possible, and Lupita was the one who maintained the bulletin boards; she chose the new and recycled photographs that she wanted Danny to sleep with. Once or twice a week, Danny looked closely at the pictures on those bulletin boards, just to see what Lupita had rearranged.

Occasionally, there were small glimpses of Charlotte in the snapshots--for the most part, these pictures were of Charlotte with Joe. (They had somehow passed Lupita's unfathomable radar of approval.) And there were pictures of Ketchum galore, of course--even a few new ones of the woodsman, and of Danny's young mother with his even younger dad. These long-saved shots of Cousin Rosie had come into Danny's possession together with Hero, and Ketchum's guns--not to mention the chainsaw. The old photos had been spared any exposure to sunlight, pressed flat in the pages of Rosie's beloved books, which had also come into Danny's possession--now that the old logger could no longer read them. What a lot of books Ketchum had hoarded! How many more might he have read?

That December morning in 2004, when Lupita caught Danny writing in the kitchen, he was closing in on a couple of scenes he imagined might be near the beginning of his novel--even actual sentences, in some cases. He was definitely getting close to the start of the first chapter, but exactly where to begin--the very first sentence, for example--still eluded him. He was writing in a simple spiral notebook on white lined paper; Lupita knew that the writer had a stack of such notebooks in his third-floor writing room, where (she felt strongly) he should have been writing.

"You're writing in the kitchen," the cleaning woman said. It was a straightforward, declarative sentence, but Danny detected an edge to it; from the critical tone of Lupita's remark, it was as if she'd said, "You're fornicating in the driveway." (In broad daylight.) Danny was somewhat taken aback by the Mexican cleaning woman's meaning.

"I'm not exactly writing, Lupita," he said defensively. "I'm making a few notes to myself about what I'm going to write."

"Whatever you're doing, you're doing it in the kitchen," Lupita insisted.

"Yes," Danny answered her cautiously.

"I suppose I could start upstairs--like on the third floor, in your writing room, where you're not writing," the cleaning woman said.

"That would be fine," Danny told her.

Lupita sighed, as if the world were an endless source of pain for her--it had been, Danny knew. He tolerated how difficult she could be, and for the most part Danny accepted Lupita's presumed authority; the writer knew that one had to be more accepting of the authority of someone who'd lost a child, as the cleaning woman had, and more tolerant of her, too. But before Lupita could leave the kitchen--to attend to what she clearly considered her out-of-order (if not altogether wrong) first task of the day--Danny said to her, "Would you please clean the fridge today, Lupita? Just throw everything away."

The Mexican was not easily surprised, but Lupita stood as if she were in shock. Recovering herself, she opened the door to the fridge, which she had cleaned just the other day; there was practically nothing in it. (Except when Danny was having a dinner party, there almost never was.)

"No, I mean the door," Danny told her. "Please clean it off entirely. Throw all those notes away."

At this point, Lupita's disapproval turned to worry. "?Enfermo?" she suddenly asked Danny. Her plump brown hand felt the writer's forehead; to her practiced touch, Danny didn't feel as if he had a fever.

"No, I am not sick, Lupita," Danny told the cleaning woman. "I am merely sick of how I've been distracting myself."