Last Night in Twisted River

The day he showed Joe the letter about Katie, it struck Danny Angel that the news of Katie's death had an offstage, unreal quality; the distant report, from a stranger, had the effect of turning Katie into a minor fictional character. And if Danny had kept up the drinking with her, he would have turned out the same way--either an accident or a suicide, the finale disappointingly offstage. His dad had been right about the drinking; maybe not being able to handle it was, as his father had suggested, "genetic."

"AT LEAST HE HASN'T WRITTEN about Rosie--not yet," Ketchum wrote to his old friend.

Tony Angel had liked Ketchum's letters better before the old logger, who was now sixty-six, had learned to read. That lady he'd met in the library--"the schoolteacher" was all Ketchum ever called her--well, she'd done the job, but Ketchum was even crankier now that he could read and write, and the cook was convinced that Ketchum no longer listened as attentively. When you don't read, you have to listen; maybe those books the woodsman had heard were the books he'd understood best. Now Ketchum complained about almost everything he read. It also might have been that Tony Angel missed Six-Pack's handwriting. (In Ketchum's opinion, by the way, the cook had gotten crankier, too.)

Danny definitely missed Six-Pack Pam's influence on Ketchum; possibly his dependence on Pam had made Ketchum less lonely than he seemed to Danny now, and Danny had long ago accepted Six-Pack's role as a go-between in Ketchum's correspondence with the young writer and his dad.

Danny was forty-one in 1983. When men turn forty, most of them no lon

ger feel young, but Joe--at eighteen--knew he had a relatively young dad. Even the girls Joe's age (and younger) at Northfield Mount Hermon had told the boy that his famous father was very good-looking. Maybe Danny was good-looking, but he wasn't nearly as good-looking as Joe.

The young man was almost eight inches taller than his dad and grandfather. Katie, the boy's mother, had been a noticeably small woman, but the men in the Callahan family were uniformly tall--not heavy but very tall. Their height went with their "patrician airs," the cook had declared.

He and Carmella had hated the wedding; they'd felt snubbed the whole time. It had been a lavish affair, at an expensive private club in Manhattan--Katie was already a couple of months pregnant--and for all the money the party cost, the food had been inedible. The Callahans weren't food people; they were the kind of ice-cube suckers who had too many cocktails and filled themselves with endless hors d'oeuvres. They looked like they had so much money that they didn't need to eat--that was what Tony Angel told Ketchum, who was still driving logs on the Kennebec at the time. He'd told Danny he had too much to do in Maine and couldn't come to the wedding. But the real reason Ketchum hadn't gone to the wedding was that the cook had asked him not to come.

"I know you, Ketchum--you'll bring your Browning knife and a twelve-gauge. You'll kill every Callahan you can identify, Katie included, and then you'll go to work on a couple of Danny's fingers with the Browning."

"I know you feel the same way I do, Cookie."

"Yes, I do," the cook admitted to his best friend, "and Carmella even agrees with us. But we've got to let Daniel do this his way. The Callahan whore is going to have someone's baby, and that baby will keep mine out of this disastrous war."

So Ketchum had stayed in Maine. The logger would later say it was a good thing Cookie had gone to the wedding. When Joe turned out to be tall, the cook might have been inclined to believe that his beloved Daniel couldn't have been the boy's father. After all, Katie fucked anyone she wanted to; she could easily have been knocked up by someone else and then married Daniel. But the wedding offered proof that there was a gene for tall men in the Callahan family, and Joe turned out to be the spitting image of Danny; it was just that the top of his dad's head came up only to the top of the young man's chest.

Joe had the body of an oarsman, but he wasn't a rower. For the most part, he'd grown up in Vermont--the boy was an experienced downhill skier. His dad didn't much care for the sport; as a runner, he preferred cross-country skiing, when he skied at all. Danny had continued to run; it still helped him to think, and to imagine things.

Joe was a wrestler at Northfield Mount Hermon, though he didn't have the body of a wrestler. It was probably Ketchum's influence that made Joe choose wrestling, the cook thought. (Ketchum was just a barroom brawler, but wrestling came closer to describing Ketchum's favorite kind of fight than boxing did. Usually, Ketchum didn't hit people until he got them down on the ground.)

The first time Ketchum had gone to one of Joe's wrestling matches at NMH, the barroom brawler hadn't understood the sport very well. Joe had scored a takedown, and his opponent lay stretched out on his side, when Ketchum shouted, "Now hit him--hit him now!"

"Ketchum," Danny said, "there's no hitting allowed--it's a wrestling match."

"Christ, that's the best time to hit a fella," Ketchum said, "when you've got him stretched out like that."

Later in that same match, Joe had his opponent in a near-pin position; Joe had sunk a half nelson around the other wrestler's neck and was tilting him toward his back.

"Joe's got his arm around the wrong side of the neck," Ketchum complained to the cook. "You can't choke someone with your arm around the back of a fella's neck--you've got to be on his fucking throat!"

"Joe's trying to pin that guy on his back, Ketchum--he's not trying to choke him!" Tony Angel told his old friend.

"Choking is illegal," Danny explained.

Joe won his match, and, after all the matches were over, Ketchum went to shake the boy's hand. That was when Ketchum stepped on a wrestling mat for the first time. When the woodsman felt the mat yield under his foot, he stepped quickly back to the hardwood floor of the gym; it was as if he'd stepped on something alive. "Shit, that's the first problem," Ketchum said. "The mat's too soft--you can't really hurt a guy on it."

"Ketchum, you're not trying to hurt your opponent--just pin him, or beat him on points," Danny tried to explain. But the next thing they knew, Ketchum was attempting to show Joe a better way to crank someone over on his back.

"You get him down on his belly, and pull one of his arms behind his back," Ketchum said with enthusiasm. "Then you get a little leverage under the fella's forearm, and you drive his right elbow till it touches his left ear. Believe me, he'll turn over--if he doesn't want to lose his whole shoulder!"

"You can't bend someone's arm past a forty-five-degree angle," Joe told the old logger. "Submission holds and choke holds used to be legal, but nowadays you can't make someone yield to pain--that's called a submission hold--and you can't choke anyone. Those things aren't legal--not anymore."

"Constipated Christ--it's like everything else!" Ketchum complained. "They take what was once a good thing and fuck it up with rules!"

But after Ketchum had seen a few more of Joe's matches, he grew to like high school wrestling. "Hell, to be honest with you, Cookie, when I first saw it, I thought it was a sissy way to fight. But once you get the idea of it, you can actually tell who would win the match if it was taking place in a parking lot and there was no referee."

Joe was surprised by how many matches Ketchum attended. The old woodsman drove all over New England to see Joe and the NMH team wrestle. They had a pretty good team in Joe's senior year. In Joe's four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, Ketchum definitely saw more of the boy's wrestling matches than his father or grandfather did.

The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel's Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson's wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches--the season-ending tournaments, for example--were on the weekends. Danny Angel got to see more than half of his son's matches, but the writer took a lot of publishing-related trips. It was Ketchum who went to almost all of Joe's "fights," as the logger was inclined to call them.

"You missed a good fight," Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Danny to tell them the results of young Joe's wrestling matches.