Last Night In Twisted River

courses, at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. He had never heard of the college before he’d applied for the job, but with a first novel being published by Random House and an M.F.A. from a prestigious writing program like Iowa ’s-well, Danny was going to be a college teacher. The young writer was happy about returning to New England. He’d missed his dad, and Carmella-and, who knows, he might actually get to see more of Ketchum. Danny hadn’t seen Ketchum but once since that terrible April Sunday when the boy and his dad had fled from Twisted River.

Ketchum had shown up in Durham when Danny was starting his freshman year at the University of New Hampshire. The veteran logger was in his mid-forties by then, and he’d come to Danny’s dorm with a gruff announcement: “Your dad tells me you never learned how to drive on a real road.”

“Ketchum, we didn’t have a car in Boston -we sold the Chieftain the same week we arrived-and you don’t have any time to take driving lessons at a place like Exeter,” Danny explained.

“Constipated Christ!” Ketchum said. “A college kid who can’t get a driver’s license is no one I want to be associated with!”

Ketchum then taught Danny how to drive his old truck; those were hard lessons for a young man whose driving experience, heretofore, had been with automatic transmission on the haul roads around Twisted River. For the week or more that Ketchum was in Durham, he lived in his truck-“just like the wanigan days,” the woodsman said. The parking authorities at UNH twice gave Ketchum parking tickets when the logger was sleeping in the back of his truck. Ketchum gave the tickets to Danny. “You can pay these,” Ketchum told the young man. “The driving lessons are free.” It upset Danny that he hadn’t seen the woodsman but once in seven years. Now it had been six more years.

How can you not see someone as important to you as that? Daniel Baciagalupo was thinking in the Iowa spring rain. More perplexing, his father had not seen Ketchum once in thirteen years. What was the matter with them? But half of Danny’s mind was still unfocused-lost in the run-amuck chapter he was blundering about in.

THE YOUNG WRITER had jumped ahead to his family’s first meeting with Mr. Carlisle, the scholarship person at Exeter -once again in Vicino di Napoli. Maybe Danny also had Carmella to thank for getting him into the academy, because Mr. Carlisle had never laid eyes on anyone quite like Carmella-not in Exeter, New Hampshire, surely-and the smitten man must have thought, If the Baciagalupo kid doesn’t get into Exeter, I might never see this woman again!

Mr. Carlisle would be crushed that Carmella wasn’t with Danny when the boy first visited the prep school. Dominic didn’t make the trip, either. How could they? In Boston, March 17 wasn’t only St. Patrick’s Day. (The young Irish puking green beer in the streets was an annual embarrassment to Mr. Leary.) It was also Evacuation Day, a big deal in the North End, because in 1774 or 1775-Danny could never remember the correct year; actually, it was 1776-the artillery was set up in the Copps Hill Burying Ground to escort the British ships out of Boston Harbor. You got a day off from school on Evacuation Day, and on Bunker Hill Day, if you lived in Boston.

That year, 1957, Evacuation Day had come on a Sunday. Monday was the school holiday, and Mr. Leary had taken Danny on the train to Exeter. (The Evacuation Day holiday was an impossible day for Dominic and Carmella to be away from the restaurant.) The writer’s unfocused mind had once more jumped ahead to that train ride to Exeter with Mr. Leary-and what would be their first look at the venerable academy. Mr. Carlisle had been a most welcoming host, but it must have killed him not to see Carmella.

And despite his promise to come home a lot-every weekend he could-Danny wouldn’t do that. He rarely came home to Boston on his Exeter weekends-maybe twice a term, tops, and then he would meet his Exeter friends on a Saturday night in Scollay Square, usually to see the strippers at the Old Howard. You had to fake your age, but that was easy; they let the kids in most nights. You just had to be respectful to the ladies. On one of those nights at the Old Howard, Danny ran into his former English teacher. That was a sad night. For Mr. Leary, who loved Latin, it was an errare humanum est night-a “to err is human” night, for both the revered teacher and his prize student. Talk about jumping ahead! He would have to write about that unhappy night (or some version of it) one day, Daniel Baciagalupo supposed.

His first novel was dedicated to Mr. Leary. Because of the Irishman’s love of Latin, Danny had written:

MICHAEL LEARY,

IN MEMORIAM

It was from Mr. Leary that he’d first heard the phrase in medias res. Mr. Leary had praised young Dan’s writing by saying that, “as a reader,” he liked how Danny often began a narrative in the middle of the story rather than at the chronological beginning.

“What’s that called-is there a name for it?” the boy had innocently asked.

Mr. Leary had answered: “I call it in medias res, which in Latin means ‘in the middle of things.’”

Well, that was kind of where he was at this moment in his life, Daniel Baciagalupo was thinking. He had a two-year-old son, whom he’d inexplicably not named after his father; he’d lost his wife, and had not yet met another woman. He was struggling to begin a second novel while the first one was not yet published, and he was about to go back to New England to his first noncooking, not-in-a-kitchen job. If that wasn’t in medias res, Daniel Baciagalupo thought, what was?

And, continuing in Latin, when Danny had first gone to Exeter, he’d gone with Mr. Leary, who was with the boy in loco parentis-that is, “in the place of a parent.”

Maybe that was why the first novel was dedicated to Mr. Leary. “Not to your dad?” Ketchum would ask Danny. (Carmella would ask the young writer the same question.)

“Maybe the next one,” he would tell them both. His father never said anything about the dedication to Mr. Leary.

Danny got up from his desk to watch the rain streaking his windows in Iowa City. He then went and watched Joe sleeping. The way the chapter was going, the writer thought that he might as well go to bed, but he generally stayed up late. Like his dad, Daniel Baciagalupo didn’t drink anymore; Katie had cured him of that habit, which was not a story he wanted to think about on a night when his writing wasn’t working. He found himself wishing that Ketchum would call. (Hadn’t Ketchum said they should talk?)

Whenever Ketchum called from those faraway phone booths, time seemed to stop; whenever he heard from Ketchum, Daniel Baciagalupo, who was twenty-five, usually felt that he was twelve and leaving Twisted River all over again.

One day, the writer would acknowledge this: It was not a coincidence when the logger called on that rainy April night. As usual, Ketchum called collect, and Danny accepted the call. “Fucking mud season,” Ketchum said. “How the hell are you?”

“So you’re a typist now,” Danny said. “I’m going to miss your pretty handwriting.”

“It was never my handwriting,” Ketchum told him. “It was Pam’s. Six-Pack wrote all my letters.”

“Why?” Danny asked him.

“I can’t write!” Ketchum admitted. “I can’t read, either-Six-Pack read all your letters aloud to me, yours and your dad’s.”

This was a devastating moment for Daniel Baciagalupo; as the young writer would think of it later, it was right up there with his wife leaving him, but it would have more serious consequences. Danny thought of how he’d poured out his heart to Ketchum, of everything he’d written to the man-not to mention what Ketchum had to have told Pam, because it was obviously Six-Pack, not Ketchum, who’d replied. This meant that Six-Pack knew everything!

“I thought my mom taught you to read,” Danny said.

“Not really,” Ketchum replied. “I’m sorry, Danny.”

“So now Pam is typing? Danny asked. (This was truly hard to imagine; there’d not been a single typo in the typed letters both Danny and his dad had received from Ketchum.)

“There’s a lady I met in the library-she turned out to be a schoolteacher, Danny. She typed the letters for me.”

“Where’s Six-Pack?” Danny asked.