Last Night In Twisted River

and a shopping mall-and, out by Interstate 91, a bunch of gas stations and the usual fast-food places.

If you walked north on Main Street, up the hill, you came to The Book Cellar-quite a good bookstore, where the now-famous author Danny Angel had done a reading or two, and his share of book signings. The cook had met a couple of his Vermont lady friends in The Book Cellar, where they all knew Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, as Mr. Angel-the celebrated novelist’s father, and the owner-chef of the best Italian restaurant around.

After Daniel chose that nom de plume, Dominic had had to rename himself, too.

“Shit, I suppose you should both be Angels-maybe that much is clear,” Ketchum had said. “Like father, like son-and all that goes with that.” But Ketchum had insisted that the cook lose the Dominic, too.

“How about Tony?” Danny had suggested to his dad. It was the Fourth of July, 1967, and Ketchum had nearly burned down the Putney farmhouse with his fireworks display; little Joe continued to scream for five minutes after the last cherry bomb went off.

The name Tony still sounded Italian but was nicely anonymous, Danny was thinking, while Dominic liked the name because of his fondness for Tony Molinari; only a few nights away from Boston, the cook already knew how much he was going to miss Molinari. Tony Angel, previously Dominic Del Popolo, previously Bacigalupo, would miss Paul Polcari, too-nor would the cook think any less of Paul when he heard about what happened in August of that same summer.

Tony Angel would blame Ketchum for the mishap of the cowboy getting out of Vicino di Napoli alive-not Paul Polcari. Poor Paul could never have squeezed the trigger. It was Ketchum’s fault, in the cook’s opinion, because Ketchum had told them all that it didn’t matter which one of them was back in the kitchen with the shotgun. Come on! For someone who knew guns as well as Ketchum did, he should have known that of course it mattered who was taking aim and would (or would not) pull the trigger! Tony Angel would never blame sweet, gentle Paul.

“You blame Ketchum too much, for everything,” Danny would tell his dad more than once, but that was just the way it was.

If Molinari had been back in the kitchen, Dominic Del Popolo would have changed his name back to Dominic Baciagalupo-and he would have gone back to Boston, to Carmella. The cook would never have had to become Tony Angel. And the writer Danny Angel, whose fourth novel was his first bestseller-now in 1983, his fifth novel had already been translated into more than thirty foreign languages-would have gone back to calling himself, as he dearly wanted to, Daniel Baciagalupo.

“Damn it, Ketchum!” the cook had said to his old friend. “If Carmella had been back in the kitchen with your blessed Ithaca, she would have shot Carl twice while he was still squinting at her. If the idiot busboy had been back there, I swear he would have pulled that trigger!”

“I’m sorry, Cookie. They were your friends-I didn’t know them. You should have told me there was a nonshooter-a fucking pacifist!-among them.”

“Stop blaming each other,” Danny would tell them repeatedly.

After all, it had been sixteen years-or it would be, this coming August-since Paul Polcari failed to pull the trigger of Ketchum’s single-shot 20-gauge. It had all worked out, hadn’t it? the cook was thinking, as he sipped his espresso and watched the Connecticut River run by his kitchen window.

They had once run logs down the Connecticut. In the dining room of the restaurant, which looked out upon Main Street and the marquee with the name of whatever movie was currently playing at the Latchis Theatre, the cook had framed a big black-and-white photograph of a logjam in Brattleboro. The photo had been taken years ago, of course; they weren’t moving logs over water in Vermont or New Hampshire anymore.

River driving had lasted longer in Maine, which was why Ketchum had worked so much in Maine in the sixties and seventies. But the last river drive in Maine was in 1976-from Moosehead Lake, down the Kennebec River. Naturally, Ketchum had been in the thick of it. He’d called the cook collect from some bar in Bath, Maine, not far from the mouth of the Kennebec.

“I’m trying to distract myself from some asshole shipyard worker, who is sorely tempting me to cause him a little bodily harm,” Ketchum began.

“Just remember you’re an out-of-stater, Ketchum. The local authorities will take the side of the shipyard worker.”

“Christ, Cookie-do you know what it costs to move logs over water? I mean getting them from where you cut them to the mill-about fifteen fucking cents a cord! That’s all a river drive will cost you.”

The cook had heard this argument too many times. I could hang up, Tony Angel thought, but he stayed on the phone-perhaps out of pity for the shipyard worker.

“It’ll cost you six or seven dollars a cord to get logs to the mill over land!” Ketchum shouted. “Most roads in northern New England aren’t worth shit to begin with, and now there’ll be nothing but asshole truck drivers on them! You may think it’s already a world of accidents, Cookie, but imagine an overloaded logging truck tipping over and crushing a carload of skiers!”

Ketchum had been right; there’d been some terrible accidents involving logging trucks. In northern New England, it used to be that you could drive all over the place-according to Ketchum, only a moose or a drunken driver could kill you. Now the trucks were on the big roads and the little ones; the asshole truck drivers were everywhere.

“This asshole country!” Ketchum had bellowed into the phone. “It’ll always find a way to make something that was cheap expensive, and to take a bunch of jobs away from fellas in the process!”

There was an abrupt end to their conversation. In that bar in Bath, the sounds of an argument rose indistinctly; a violent scuffle ensued. No doubt somebody in the bar had objected to Ketchum defaming the entire country-in all likelihood, the aforementioned asshole shipyard worker. (“Some asshole patriot,” Ketchum later called the fella.)

THE COOK LIKED LISTENING to the radio when he started his pizza dough in the morning. Nunzi had taught him to always let a pizza dough rise twice; perhaps this was a silly habit, but he’d stuck to it. Paul Polcari, a superb pizza chef, had told Tony Angel that two rises were better than one, but that the second rise wasn’t absolutely necessary. In the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River, the cook’s pizza dough had lacked one ingredient he now believed was essential.

Long ago, he’d said to those fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-that he thought his crust could stand to be sweeter. Dot (the one who’d tricked him into feeling her up) said, “You’re crazy, Cookie-you make the best pizza crust I’ve ever eaten.”

“Maybe it needs honey,” the then Dominic Baciagalupo had told her. But it turned out that he was out of honey; he’d tried adding a little maple syrup instead. That was a bad idea-you could taste the maple. Then he’d forgotten about the honey idea until May reminded him. She’d bumped him, on purpose, with her big hip while handing him the honey jar.

The cook had never forgiven May for her remark about Injun Jane-when she’d said that Dot and herself weren’t “Injun enough” to satisfy him.

“Here, Cookie,” May had said. “It’s honey for your pizza dough.”

“I changed my mind about it,” he told her, but the only reason he hadn’t tried putting honey in his dough was that he didn’t want to give May the satisfaction.

It was in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli where Paul Polcari first showed Tony Angel his pizza-dough recipe. In addition to the flour and water, and the yeast, Nunzi had always added a little olive oil to the dough-not more than a tablespoon or two, per pizza. Paul had shown the cook how to add an amount of honey about equal to the oil. The oil made the dough silky-you could bake the crust when it was thin, without its becoming too dry and brittle. The honey-as the cook himself had nearly discovered, back in Twisted River-made the crust a little sweet, but you never tasted the honey part.

Tony Angel rarely started a pizza dough without remembering how he’d almost invented the honey part of his recipe. The cook hadn’t thought of big Dot and even bigger May in years. He was fifty-nine that morning he thought of them in his Brattleboro kitchen. How old would those old bitches be? Tony Angel wondered; surely they’d be in their sixties. He remembered that May had a slew of grandchildren-some of them the same age as her children with her second husband.

Then the radio distracted Tony from his thoughts; he missed what he imagined as the