Last Night In Twisted River

1967. Together with his two-year-old son, Joe, the writer left for Vermont almost immediately upon his graduation. Despite his troubles with Katie, Danny had liked Iowa City and the Writers’ Workshop, but Iowa was hot in the summer, and he wanted to take his time about finding a place to live in Putney, Vermont, where Windham College was. It would also be necessary to set up a proper day-care situation for little Joe, and to hire a regular babysitter for the boy-though perhaps one or two of Danny’s students at the college would be willing to help out.

He told only one of his teachers (and no one else) at Iowa about the nom-de-plume idea-the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who was a kind man and a good teacher. Vonnegut also knew about Danny’s difficulties with Katie. Danny didn’t tell Mr. Vonnegut the reason he was considering a pen name, just that he was unhappy about it.

“It doesn’t matter what your name is,” Vonnegut told him. He also told the young writer that Family Life in Coos County, Danny’s first book, was one of the best novels he’d ever read. “That’s what matters-not what name you use,” Mr. Vonnegut said.

The one criticism the author of Slaughterhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn’t like all the semicolons. “People will probably figure out that you went to college-you don’t have to try to prove it to them,” he told Danny.

But the semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place. He’d seen the titles and the authors’ names on the novels his mother had left behind-the books his father had bequeathed to Ketchum in Twisted River. Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he’d paid special attention to those authors there-Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, for example. They wrote long, complicated sentences; Hawthorne and Melville had liked semicolons. Plus they were New England writers, those two-they were Danny’s favorites. And the English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to Daniel Baciagalupo, who-even at twenty- five-had seen his share of what looked like fate to him.

He’d been somewhat alone among his fellow workshop students at Iowa, in that he loved these older writers far better than most contemporary ones. But Danny did like Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with the teachers he had for his writing, beginning with Michael Leary.

“You’ll find someone,” Vonnegut said to Danny, when they said good-bye in Iowa City. (His teacher probably meant that Danny would meet the right woman, eventually.) “And,” Kurt Vonnegut added, “maybe capitalism will be kind to you.”

That last thought was the one Danny drove back East with. “Maybe capitalism will be kind to us,” he said several times to little Joe, en route to Vermont.

“You better find a place with a spare room for your dad,” Ketchum had told him, when they’d last talked. “Although Vermont isn’t far enough away from New Hampshire -not in my opinion. Couldn’t you get a teaching job out West somewhere?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Danny had said. “Southern Vermont is about the same driving distance from Coos County as Boston is, isn’t it? And we were far enough away in Boston for thirteen years!”

“ Vermont ’s too close-I just know it is,” Ketchum told him, “but right now it’s a lot safer for your father than staying in Boston.”

“I keep telling him,” Danny said.

“I keep telling him, too, but he’s not listening worth shit,” the woodsman said.

“It’s because of Carmella,” Danny told Ketchum. “He’s very attached to her. He should take her with him-I know she’d go, if he asked her-but he won’t. I think Carmella is the best thing that ever happened to him.”

“Don’t say that, Danny,” Ketchum told him. “You didn’t get to know your mother.”

Danny kept quiet about that with Ketchum. He didn’t want the old logger to hang up on him.

“Well, it looks to me like I’ll just have to haul Cookie’s ass out of Boston -one way or another,” Ketchum said, after there was silence for a while.

“How are you going to do that?” Danny asked him.

“I’ll put him in a cage, if I have to. You just find a house in Vermont that’s big enough, Danny. I’ll bring your dad to it.”

“Ketchum-you didn’t kill Lucky Pinette, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t!” Ketchum shouted into the phone. “Lucky wasn’t worth murdering.”

“I sometimes think that Carl is worth murdering,” the writer Daniel Baciagalupo ventured; he just floated that idea out there.

“I find that I keep thinking about it,” Ketchum admitted.

“I wouldn’t want you to get caught,” Danny told him.

“That’s not the problem I’m having with it,” the woodsman said. “I don’t imagine that Carl would care if he got caught-I mean for killing your dad.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Danny asked.

“I would like him to try to kill me first,” Ketchum answered. “Then I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

It was just as the writer Daniel Baciagalupo had imagined; the conundrum was that although the cowboy was exceedingly stupid, he was smart enough to stay alive. And he’d stopped drinking-that meant Carl wouldn’t completely lose control of himself. That might have been why he hadn’t beaten up Six-Pack in two whole months, or at least he hadn’t beaten her enough for her to leave him and tell him what she knew.

Six-Pack still drank. Ketchum knew she could easily and completely lose control of herself-that was also a problem.

“I worry about something,” Danny told Ketchum. “You haven’t stopped drinking. Aren’t you afraid you’ll pass out dead drunk, and that’s when Carl will come after you?”

“You haven’t met my dog, Danny-he’s a fine animal.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog,” Danny said.

“Hell, when Six-Pack left me, I needed someone to talk to.”

“What about that lady you met in the library-the schoolteacher who’s teaching you how to read?” Danny asked the logger.

“She is teaching me, but it’s not a very conversational experience,” Ketchum said.

“You’re actually learning to read?” Danny asked.

“Yes, I am-it’s just slower going than counting coon shit,” Ketchum told him. “But I’m aiming to be ready to read that book of yours, when it’s published.” There was a pause on the phone before Ketchum asked: “How’s it going with the nom de plume? Have you come up with one?”

“My pen name is Danny Angel,” the writer Daniel Baciagalupo told Ketchum stiffly.

“Not Daniel? Your dad is real fond of the Daniel. I like the Angel part,” Ketchum said.

“Dad can still call me Daniel,” Danny said. “Danny Angel is the best I can do, Ketchum.”

“How’s that little Joe doing?” Ketchum asked; he could tell that the young writer was touchy about the nom- de-plume subject.

ON THE TRIP BACK EAST, Danny mostly drove at night, when little Joe was sleeping. He would find a motel with a pool and play with Joe most of the day. Danny took a nap in the motel when his two-year-old did; then he drove all night again. The writer Danny Angel had lots of time to think as he drove. He could think the whole night through. But even with his imagination, Danny couldn’t quite see a woodsman like Ketchum coming to Boston. Not even Danny Angel, ne Daniel Baciagalupo, could have imagined how the fearsome logger would conduct himself there.

THAT WINDHAM COLLEGE would turn out to be a funny sort of place wouldn’t matter much to Danny Angel, whose first novel, Family Life in Coos County, would be published to fairly good reviews with modest hardcover sales. The young author would sell the paperback rights, and he sold the movie rights, too, though no film was ever made from the book-and the two novels that followed the first would receive more mixed reviews, and sell fewer copies. (Novels two and three wouldn’t even be published in paperback, and there was no interest in the movie rights for either book.) But all of that wouldn’t matter much to Danny, who was consumed by the task of keeping his father from harm-all the while trying to be a good dad to Joe. Danny just kept writing and