Last Night In Twisted River

THERE WERE THINGS Carmella had never told her dear Gamba about his beloved Daniel. How the boy had managed to get laid before he even went off to Exeter, for example. Carmella had caught Danny doing it with one of her nieces-one of those DiMattia girls, Teresa’s younger sister Josie. Carmella had gone out to work in the restaurant, but she’d forgotten something and had to go back to the Wesley Place apartment. (Now she couldn’t even remember what it was she’d forgotten.) It was Danny’s day off from his busboy job. He already knew he had a full scholarship to Exeter -maybe he was celebrating. Of course Carmella knew that Josie DiMattia was older than Danny; probably Josie had started it. And all along Dominic had suspected that Teresa DiMattia-or her friend Elena Calogero, definitely a kissing cousin-would sexually initiate Danny.

Why was Gamba so worried about that? Carmella wondered. If the boy had had more sex-she meant in those years when he was a student at Exeter -maybe he wouldn’t have become so infatuated with that Callahan girl when he went to college! And if he’d fucked a few more of his kissing cousins-Calogeros and Saettas, or for that matter every female in the DiMattia family- possibly he would have knocked up someone a whole lot nicer than Katie!

But because Dominic had obsessed about Elena Calogero and Teresa DiMattia, when Carmella came into the apartment and saw Danny fucking someone on her bed, she first assumed it was Teresa who was initiating the frightened-looking fifteen-year-old. Naturally, young Dan was frightened because Carmella had caught them at it!

“Teresa, you whore!” Carmella cried. (She actually called the girl a troia-from that notorious Trojan woman-but the word meant “whore,” of course.)

“I’m Josie, Teresa’s sister,” the girl said indignantly. She must have been miffed that her aunt didn’t recognize her.

“Well, yes, you are,” Carmella replied. “And what are you doing using our bed, Danny? You’ve got your own bed, you disgraziato-”

“Jeez, yours is bigger,” Josie told her aunt.

“And I hope you’re using a condom!” Carmella cried.

Dominic used condoms; he didn’t mind, and Carmella preferred it. Maybe the boy had found his father’s condoms. When it came to condoms, it was a dumb world, Carmella knew. At Barone’s Pharmacy, they kept the condoms hidden, completely out of sight. If kids asked for them, the pharmacist would give them shit about it. Yet any responsible parent who had a kid that age would tell the kid to use a condom. Where exactly were the kids supposed to get them?

“Was it one of your dad’s condoms?” Carmella asked Danny, while the boy lay covered by a sheet; he looked mortified that she’d discovered him. The DiMattia girl, on the other hand, hadn’t even bothered to cover her breasts. She just sat sullenly naked, staring at her aunt with defiance. “Are you going to confess this, Josie?” Carmella asked the girl. “How are you going to confess this?”

“I brought the condoms-Teresa gave them to me,” Josie said, ignoring the larger question of confession.

Now Carmella was really angry. Just what did that troia Teresa think she was doing, giving her kid sister condoms! “How many did she give you?” Carmella asked. But before the girl could answer, Carmella asked Danny: “Don’t you have any homework to do?” Then Carmella seemed to realize that she was guilty of a certain hypocrisy in her hasty judgment of Teresa. (Shouldn’t Teresa be thanked for giving her kid sister condoms? Yet had the condoms enabled Josie to seduce Secondo?)

“Jeez, do you want me to count them or something?” Josie asked her aunt, about the condoms. Poor Danny just looked like he wanted to die, Carmella would always remember.

“Well, you kids be careful-I have to go to work,” Carmella told them. “Josie!” Carmella had cried, as she walked out of the apartment, just before she’d slammed the door. “You wash my sheets, you make my bed-or I’ll tell your mother!”

Carmella wondered if they had fucked all afternoon and evening, and if they’d had enough condoms. (She was so upset about it, she forgot that she’d gone back to the apartment because she’d forgotten something.)

Her dear Gamba had wanted his son to be safe from girls-and how the cook had cried when Danny went away to Exeter! Yet Carmella could never tell him that sending the boy to boarding school hadn’t really worked. (Not in the way Dominic had hoped.) Dominic had also been overly impressed by the list of the colleges and universities many Exeter graduates attended; the cook couldn’t understand why Danny hadn’t been a good enough student at the academy to get into one of those Ivy League schools. The University of New Hampshire had been a disappointment to Dominic, as were his son’s grades at Exeter. But the academy was a very hard school for someone coming from the Mickey, and Danny had demonstrated little aptitude for math and the sciences.

Mainly, the boy’s grades weren’t great because he wrote all the time. Mr. Leary had been right: So-called creative writing wasn’t valued at Exeter, but the mechanics of good writing was. And there were individual English teachers there who’d played the Mr. Leary role for Danny-they read the fiction that young Baciagalupo showed them. (They hadn’t once suggested a nom de plume, either.)

The other thing Danny did at Exeter was all that insane running. He ran cross-country in the fall, and ran on the track teams both winter and spring. He hated the required athletics at the school, but he liked running. He was a distance runner, primarily; it just went with his body, with his slightness. He was never very competitive; he liked to run as hard and as fast as he could, but he didn’t care about beating anybody. He had never been able to run before going to Exeter, and you could run year-round there.

There’d been nowhere to run in the North End-not if you liked running any distance. And in the Great North Woods, there was nowhere safe to run; you would trip over something, trying to run in those woods, and if you ran on one of the haul roads, a logging truck would mow you down or force you off the road. The logging companies owned those roads, and the asshole truck drivers-as Ketchum called them-drove as if they owned them. (Of course there was also the deer hunting, both bow season and the firearm season. If you tried running in the woods or on a haul road during deer season, some asshole hunter might shoot you or run you through with a hunting arrow.)

When Danny wrote Ketchum about his running at Exeter, Ketchum wrote the boy back as follows: “Hell, Danny, it’s a good thing you didn’t do all that running around Twisted River. Most places I’m familiar with in Coos County, if I see a fella running, I assume he’s done some dirt and is running away. It would be a safe bet to shoot most fellas you see running around here.”

Danny loved the indoor track at Exeter. The Thompson Cage had a sloped wooden track above a dirt one. It was a good place to think about the stories he was imagining; he could think very clearly when he ran, Danny discovered, especially when he started to get tired.

When he left Exeter with B grades in English and history, and C grades in just about everything else, Mr. Carlisle told Dominic and Carmella that perhaps the boy would be a “late bloomer.” But, as a writer, to publish a first novel less than a year after he left the Iowa Workshop was a fairly early-bloomer thing to do; of course Mr. Carlisle had been speaking strictly academically. And Danny’s grades at UNH were excellent; compared to Exeter, the University of New Hampshire had been easy. The hard part about Durham was meeting Katie Callahan, and everything that had happened with her-both in Durham and in Iowa City. Neither Carmella nor her dear Gamba could talk about that young woman without feeling sick, almost poisoned.

“And here you were, Gamba, worried about a few hot Italian girls in the North End!” Carmella had once exploded at him. “What you should have seen coming was that University of New Hampshire iceberg!”

“A cold cunt,” Ketchum had called Katie.

“It was all the writing, too,” Dominic had replied to Carmella. “All that damn imagining all the time-it couldn’t have been good for Daniel.”

“You’re crazy, Gamba,” Carmella told him. “Danny didn’t make up Katie. And would you really have wanted him to go to Vietnam instead?”

“Ketchum wouldn’t have let that happen,” Dominic told her. “Ketchum wasn’t kidding, Carmella. Daniel would have become a writer with some missing fingers on his writing hand.”

Maybe she didn’t want to meet Mr. Ketchum after all, Carmella found herself thinking.

THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO received his M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in June