Last Night in Twisted River

"Thank you, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said to him. She watched them get into the car. Ketchum, of course, was the driver.

"If you ever want to see me--" Carmella started to say to Dominic.

"I know," the cook said to her, but he wouldn't look at her.

COMPARED TO THE DAY HER GAMBA LEFT, the day Carl came to Vicino di Napoli was almost easy for Carmella. It had again been at the time of their midafternoon meal, and it was nearly the end of that summer--sometime in August '67, when they'd all started to imagine (or hope) that the cowboy wasn't ever coming.

Carmella saw the cop first. It was just as Gamba had told her: When Carl was out of uniform, he still looked like he was wearing one. Of course Ketchum had remarked on the jowls, and the way the cowboy's neck was bunched in folds. ("Maybe all cops have bad haircuts," Ketchum had said to her.)

"Someone go back in the kitchen," Carmella said, standing up from the table; the door was locked, and she went to unlock it. It was Paul Polcari who went back in the kitchen. The second the cowboy came inside, Carmella found herself wishing it had been Molinari back there.

"You would be the Del Popolo woman?" the deputy sheriff asked her. He showed them all his badge while saying, "Massachusetts is out of my jurisdiction--actually, everythin' outside Coos County is out of my jurisdiction--but I'm lookin' for a fella I think you all know. He's got some answerin' to do--name of Dominic, a little guy with a limp."

Carmella started to cry; she cried easily, but in this case she had to force herself.

"That prick," Molinari said. "If I knew where he was, I'd kill him."

"Me, too!" Paul Polcari cried from the kitchen.

"Can you come out of there?" the deputy called to Paul. "I like to see everyone."

"I'm busy cooking!" Paul screamed; pots and pans were banging.

The cowboy sighed. They all remembered how the cook and Ketchum had described Carl; they'd said the cop never stopped smiling, but it was the most insincere smile in the world. "Look," the cowboy said to them, "I don't know what the cook's done to you, but he's got some explainin' to do to me--"

"He walked out on her!" Molinari said, pointing to Carmella.

"He stole her jewels!" the busboy cried.

The kid is an idiot! the others thought. (Even the cop might be smart enough to know that Carmella wasn't the sort of woman who had jewels.)

"I didn't figure Cookie for a jewel thief," Carl said. "Are you people bein' honest with me? You really don't know where he is?"

"No!" one of the young waitresses cried out, as if her companion waitress had stabbed her.

"That prick," Molinari repeated.

"What about you?" the cowboy called into the kitchen. Paul seemed to have lost his voice. When the pots and pans commenced to banging again, the others took this as a signal to move a little bit away from the cop. Ketchum had told them not to scatter like a bunch of chickens, but to get some necessary separation between the cowboy and themselves--just to give the shooter a decent shot at the bastard.

"If I knew where he was, I would cook him!" Paul Polcari shouted. He held the Ithaca in his heavily floured hands, which were shaking. He sighted down the barrel till he found the cowboy's throat--what he could manage to see of it, under Carl's multiple chins.

"Can you come out of there, where I can see you?" the cop called to Paul, squinting into the kitchen. "Wops," the cowboy muttered. That was when Tony Molinari got a glimpse of the Colt. Carl had put his hand inside his jacket, and Molinari saw the big holster that was awkwardly at an angle under the deputy's armpit, the fat man's fingers just grazing the grip of the long-barreled handgun. The handle of the Colt .45 was inlaid with what looked like bone; it was probably deer antler.

For Christ's sake, Paul! Molinari was thinking. The cowboy's already looking at you--just shoot him! To her surprise, Carmella was thinking the same thing--just shoot him! She had all she could do not to cover both ears with her hands.

Paul Polcari just wasn't the one for the job. The pizza chef was a sweet, gentle man; now he found that his throat felt as if a cup of flour had clogged it. He was trying to say, "Hey, cowboy!" The words wouldn't come. And the cowboy kept squinting into the kitchen; Paul Polcari knew that he didn't have to say anything. He could just pull the trigger and Carl would be blinded. But Paul couldn't--more to the point, he didn't--do it.

"Well, shit," the deputy sheriff said. He was moving sideways, toward the restaurant door. Molinari was worried, because the cowboy was out of sight from Paul's spot in the back of the kitchen; then Carl reached inside his jacket again, and they all froze. (Here comes the Colt! Molinari was thinking.) But now they saw it was just a small card that the cowboy had pulled out of his pocket; he handed it to Carmella. "Call me if that little cripple calls you," Carl said to her; he was still smiling.

From the sound of the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, Molinari imagined that Paul Polcari had passed out back there.

"It should have been you in the kitchen, Tony," Carmella told Molinari later, "but I can't blame poor Paul."

Paul Polcari would blame himself, however; he would never shut up about it. It took Tony Molinari almost an hour to clean the Ithaca of all the flour, too. But the cowboy wouldn't come back. Maybe just having the gun in the kitchen had helped. As for the story Ketchum had told them to stick to, Carl must have believed it.

When their ordeal was over, Carmella cried and cried; they'd all assumed she was crying from the terrible tension of the moment. But her Gamba leaving had hurt her more; Carmella was crying because she knew that her Gamba's ordeal was not over. Contrary to what she had said to Ketchum, she would have fired the Ithaca herself if she'd been back in the kitchen. One look at the cowboy--and, as Ketchum had forewarned her, the way he'd looked at her--had convinced Carmella that she could have pulled the trigger. But that chance wouldn't come to her, or to any of them, again.

IN TRUTH, Carmella Del Popolo would miss Dominic more than she ever did the fisherman, and she would miss Secondo, too. She knew about that hole the boy had bored in his bedroom door in the cold-water Charter Street apartment. Maybe she bathed more modestly after she knew about the hole, but Carmella had let young Dan see her nonetheless. With the fisherman dead, and Angelu gone, there'd been no one to look at her for too long. When Dominic and Danny came into her life, Carmella didn't really mind that the twelve-year-old watched her in the bathtub in the kitchen; she only worried what an influence the sight of her might have on the boy later on. (Carmella didn't mean on Danny's writing.)