Last Night in Twisted River

Danny let the dog out and made the coffee; when the writer brought some coffee to Amy in the bedroom, he saw that she'd fallen back to sleep. Lady Sky had been traveling a long way, and the life she'd led would have tired anyone out; Danny let her sleep. He fed the dog and wrote Amy a note, not telling her he was falling in love with her. He simply told her that she knew where to find him--in his writing shack. Danny thought that he would have breakfast later, whenever Lady Sky woke up again. He would take some coffee with him to the writing shack, and start a fire in the woodstove there; he'd already built up the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin.

"Come on, Hero," the writer said, and together they went out in the fresh snow. Danny was relieved to see that his father's likeness, that wind-bent little pine, had survived the storm.

IT WASN'T THE KETCHUM character who should begin the first chapter, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. It was better to keep the Ketchum character hidden for a while--to make the reader wait to meet him. Sometimes, those most important characters need a little concealment. It would be better, Danny thought, if the first chapter--and the novel--began with the lost boy. The An

gel character, who was not who he seemed, was a good decoy; in storytelling terms, Angel was a hook. The young Canadian (who was not a Canadian) was where the writer should start.

It won't take long now, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. And whenever he found that first sentence, there would be someone in his life the writer dearly desired to read it to!

"Legally or not, and with or without proper papers," Danny wrote, "Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire."

It's okay, the writer thought, but it's not the beginning--the mistaken idea that Angel had crossed the border comes later.

"In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin," Danny wrote. "It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there."

Yes, yes--the writer thought, more impatiently now. But these last two sentences were too technical for a beginning; he thumbtacked these sentences to the wall alongside the other lines, and then added this sentence to the mix: "The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water."

Almost, Daniel Baciagalupo thought. Immediately, another sentence emerged--as if Twisted River itself were allowing these sentences to bob to the surface. "The repeated thunk-thunk of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel's pike pole--more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished."

Fine, fine, Danny thought, but it was too busy for a beginning sentence; there were too many distractions in that sentence.

Maybe the very idea of distractions distracted him. The writer's thoughts leapt ahead--too far ahead--to Ketchum. There was something decidedly parenthetical about the new sentence. "(Only Ketchum can kill Ketchum.)" Definitely a keeper, Danny thought, but most definitely not first-chapter material.

Danny was shivering in his writing shack. The fire in the woodstove was taking its time to heat the little room. Normally, Danny was chopping a hole in the ice and hauling a couple of buckets of water out of the bay while the writing shack was warming up; this morning, he'd skipped the chopping and the hauling. (Later in this glorious day, he would have Lady Sky to help him with the chores.)

Just then, without even trying to think of it--in fact, at that moment, Daniel Baciagalupo had reached out to rub Hero behind the dog's good ear--the first sentence came to him. The writer felt it rising into view, as if from underwater; the sentence came into sight the way that apple-juice jar with his dad's ashes had bobbed to the surface, just before Ketchum shot it.

"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long."

Oh, God--here I go again--I'm starting! the writer thought.

He'd lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels--how they simply couldn't be stopped. He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning--as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River.