when there’s snow.”) There were not more than two hundred people in Pointe au Baril in the winter.
Kennedy’s, which was good for groceries and home hardware, stayed open most of the week in the winter months. There was the Haven restaurant out on Route 69, where they served alcohol and had a pool table. The Haven had a fondness for Christmas wreaths, and they displayed an abundance of Santas-including a bass with a Santa Claus hat. While the most popular food with the snowmobilers were the chicken wings and the onion rings and the French fries, Danny stuck to the BLTs and the coleslaw-when he went there at all, which was rarely.
Larry’s Tavern was out on 69, too-Danny had stayed there with Ketchum on their deer-hunting trips in the Bayfield and Pointe au Baril area-though there was already a rumor that Larry’s would be sold to make room for the new highway. They were always widening 69, but for now the Shell station was still operating; supposedly, the Shell station was the only place in Pointe au Baril where you could buy porn magazines. (Not very good ones, if you could trust Ketchum’s evaluation.)
It could be forlorn at that time of year, and there wasn’t a lot to talk about, except for the repeated observation that the main channel didn’t freeze over for all but a week or two. And all winter long, both the gossip and the local news provided various gruesome details of the accidents out on 69; there were a lot of accidents on that highway. This winter, there’d already been a five-vehicle pileup at the intersection with Go Home Lake Road, or near Little Go Home Bay-Danny could never keep the two of them straight. (To those year-round residents who didn’t know he was a famous author, Daniel Baciagalupo was just another out-of-it American.)
Naturally, the liquor store-out on 69, across from the bait shop-was always busy, as was the Pointe au Baril nursing station, where an ambulance driver had recently stopped Danny, who was on his snowmobile, and told him about the snowmobiler who’d gone through the ice in Shawanaga Bay.
“Did he drown?” Danny asked the driver.
“Haven’t found him yet,” the ambulance driver replied.
Danny thought that maybe they wouldn’t find the snowmobiler until the ice broke up sometime in mid-April. According to this same ambulance driver at the nursing station, there’d also been “a doozy of a head-on” in Honey Harbour, and an alleged “first-rater of a rear-end job” in the vicinity of Port Severn. Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.
Those ten weeks that Danny lived in the environs of Pointe au Baril Station were a strong dose of rural life; maybe it wasn’t enough country living to have satisfied Ketchum, but it was enough for Danny. It counted as the writer’s requisite country living-whether Ketchum would have counted it or not.
IN THE AFTER-HOURS RESTAURANT, the eighth and final novel by “Danny Angel,” was published in 2002, seven years after Baby in the Road. What Danny had predicted to Ketchum was largely true-namely, his publishers complained that a book by an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo couldn’t possibly sell as many copies as a new novel by Danny Angel.
But Danny made his publishers understand that In the After-Hours Restaurant was absolutely the last book he would publish under the Angel name. And, in every interview, he repeatedly referred to himself as Daniel Baciagalupo; over and over again, he told the story of the circumstances that had forced the nom de plume upon him when he’d been a young and beginning writer. It had never been a secret that Danny Angel was a pen name, or that the writer’s real name was Daniel Baciagalupo-the secret had been why.
The accidental death of the bestselling author’s son-not to mention the violent murder of the writer’s father, and the subsequent shooting of the cook’s killer-had been big news. Danny could have insisted that In the After-Hours Restaurant be the debut novel by Daniel Baciagalupo; their complaining aside, and however reluctantly, Danny’s publishers would have agreed. But Danny was content to let his next novel (it would be his ninth) be Daniel Baciagalupo’s debut.
In the After-Hours Restaurant got a warm reception and mostly good reviews-the author was often praised for a nowadays-atypical “restraint.” Maybe the oft-repeated restraint word was what bothered the writer, though it was meant as praise. Danny would never know what Ketchum thought of In the After-Hours Restaurant, but restraint had never been a prominent part of the logger’s vocabulary-not in the category of admired qualities, anyway. Would Danny Angel’s last novel have satisfied the former river driver’s demand that Danny let himself go-that is, be more daring as a writer? (Apparently, Danny didn’t think so.)
“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum had told him. In the case of In the After-Hours Restaurant, would the nightly efforts of the gentle sous chef to teach himself his illustrious father’s trade constitute more of the same “writing around the periphery of things”-as Ketchum had unkindly put it? (Danny must have thought so; otherwise, why wouldn’t he have proudly put Daniel Baciagalupo’s name on the new novel?)
“His most subtle work,” one reviewer had written glowingly about In the After-Hours Restaurant. In Ketchum’s unsubtle vocabulary, the subtle word had never been uttered in praise.
“His most symbolic undertaking,” another critic had commented.
There was no telling what Ketchum might have said about the symbolic word, Danny knew, but the writer didn’t doubt what the fearless riverman would have thought: Symbolism and subtlety and restraint added up to “dodging the squeamish stuff,” which Ketchum had already criticized Danny for.
And would the old logger have liked how Danny answered the repeated political questions he was asked during the promotional trips he took to publicize In the After-Hours Restaurant? (In 2005, the novelist was still answering political questions-and there were a few translation trips for In the After- Hours Restaurant yet to come.)
“Yes, it’s true-I continue to live in Canada, and will continue to live here,” Danny had said, “though the reason for my leaving the United States has been, as an old friend of my family once put it, removed.” (It had been Ketchum, of course, who’d used the removed word in reference to the deceased cowboy-more than once.)
“No, it’s not true that I am ‘politically opposed,’ as you say, to living in the U.S.,” Danny had said, many times, “and-just because I live in Canada, and I’m a Canadian citizen-I do not intend to stop writing about Americans, or about behavior I associate with being an American. It could even be argued that living in a foreign country-especially in Canada, which is right across the border-enables me to see America more clearly, or at least from a slightly less American perspective.” (Ketchum would certainly have recognized the writer’s sources for that answer, though the combative woodsman wouldn’t necessarily have appreciated how tactful Danny usually was in answering those questions regarding the novelist’s political opposition to his country of birth.)
“It’s too soon to say,” the writer was always saying-in response to how the attacks of September 11, and President Bush’s retaliation to those attacks, had affected the United States; in response to where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were headed; in response to whether or not Canada would be dragged into a recession, or a depression. (Because the U.S. was fast approaching one, or both, wasn’t it? From the Canadian journalists, that was generally the implication.)
It was going on four years since Ketchum had called the United States “an empire in decline;” what might the old logger have called the country now? In Canada, the questions Danny was asked were increasingly political. Most recently, it had been someone at the Toronto Star who’d asked Danny a battery of familiar questions.
Wasn’t it true that the United States was “hopelessly overextended, militarily”? Wasn’t the federal government “wallowing under massive debt”? And would the writer care to comment on America ’s “belligerent, warmongering nature”? Wasn’t the bestselling author’s “former country,” as the Canadian journalist referred to the United States, “in decay”?
For how much longer, Danny wondered, would the answers to these and other insinuating questions fall into the too-soon-to-say category? The writer knew that he couldn’t get away with that answer forever. “I am a slow processor-I mean, as a writer,” Danny liked to preface his remarks. “And I’m a fiction writer-meaning that I won’t ever write about the September Eleventh attacks, though I may use those events, when they’re not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising.” (The combined evasiveness and vagueness of
