Last Night In Twisted River

when Danny did come back at them-though not until the third or fourth provocation. What Danny had learned was that these people who’d grown used to baiting or goading him were always indignant to discover that the writer had been keeping score.

Armando didn’t keep score. When attacked, he attacked back-the first time. Danny believed this was healthier- for a writer, especially-but it was not in his nature to be like Armando. In the disturbing case of the undisciplined dogs, it was only because he believed Armando’s way was better that Danny Angel allowed himself to be persuaded. (“Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea,” Armando had reasoned.)

The only way that would happen, the writer should have known, was if Rooster bit the hippie carpenter. Yet Rooster wasn’t wired that way; Rooster never bit people.

“Just one dog, Armando-you promise,” his wife, Mary, said, when they were all in the car with Rooster, driving back to Danny’s house.

“Tell Rooster-make him promise,” Armando said; he’d been a boxer, back when colleges and universities had boxing teams. Armando drove, with Danny up front in the passenger seat of the VW Beetle. Seemingly long-suffering Mary sat in the back with the panting German shepherd. Mary often seemed at odds with, or put out by, her husband’s combativeness, but Danny knew that Armando and Mary were a formidable couple-at heart, they were unassailably supportive of each other. Maybe Mary was more like Armando than Armando. Danny remembered her remark when a fellow teacher had been fired-a former colleague of Mary’s at the Grammar School, and later of Armando’s at the Putney School.

“Because justice is so rare, it’s such a delight,” Mary had remarked. (Now, Danny wondered, did Mary only seem to disapprove of her husband appointing Rooster as executioner?)

In the end, Danny Angel could only have said (in his own defense) that he did not acquiesce to the assassination of the dog-even a dog who’d attacked him-lightly. Yet, somehow, whenever Armando was involved-on matters of moral authority, especially-Danny did acquiesce.

“Oh, you mean this asshole,” Armando said, when Danny indicated the driveway with the dead cars.

“You know him?” Danny asked.

“You know him!” Armando said. “I’m sure he was one of your students.”

“At Windham?”

“Of course at Windham,” Armando said.

“I didn’t recognize him. I don’t think he was ever a student of mine,” Danny told his friend.

“Do you remember all your mediocre students, Danny?” Mary asked him.

“He’s just another hippie carpenter-or noncarpenter, as the case may be,” Danny said, but (even to himself) he didn’t sound too sure about it.

“Perhaps he’s a writer carpenter,” Armando suggested. Danny hadn’t considered that the young man might have known who Danny Angel was. There were almost as many would-be writers in Putney as there were hippies calling themselves carpenters. (The animosity, or envy, you encountered as a writer in Vermont was often of a back-road mentality.)

A HUSKY-SHEPHERD MIX is generally no match for a purebred German shepherd, but there were two of them. Then again, maybe no two dogs were ever a match for Rooster. Danny got out of the VW and pulled his seat-back out of the way to let Rooster out of the rear of the car. The German shepherd had hardly touched the ground with his forepaws when the two mixed breeds attacked him. Danny just got back in the Volkswagen and watched. Rooster killed one dog so quickly that neither Danny nor the DeSimones could ascertain if the second dog was male or female; it had crawled under the VW Beetle, where Rooster couldn’t get it. (The German shepherd had seized the first dog by the throat, and had snapped his neck with a couple of shakes.)

Armando called Rooster, and Danny let the German shepherd back into the Beetle. The hippie or writer carpenter had come out of his house and was staring at his dead dog; he hadn’t yet figured out that his other dog was cringing under the little car. “Mind your dog,” Danny said to him-as Armando slowly backed up, over the remaining husky-shepherd mix. There was just a bump when one of the front wheels rolled over the dog, and a corresponding grunt from the dog. The shepherd-husky got up stiffly and shook itself; it was another male, Danny could see. He saw the dog walk over to his dead mate, sniffing the body while the asshole hippie watched the Volkswagen Beetle back out of his driveway. But was this what Mary (or Armando) meant by “justice”? Maybe calling Jimmy would have been a better idea, Danny thought-even if the state trooper had wound up killing both dogs. It was the dog owner someone should have shot and killed, the writer believed; that would have been a better story.

THERE ARE THINGS I’LL MISS about Vermont, if I ever have to leave, Danny Angel was thinking, but most of all he would miss Armando and Mary DeSimone. He admired their certainty.

As the three friends swam in the pool at Danny’s Putney property, the dog-killer German shepherd watched over them. Rooster didn’t swim, but he did drink from a large bowl of cold water that Danny had given him, while the writer made gin and tonics for Armando and Mary. Looking back, it would be Danny’s sharpest memory of Rooster-the dog was panting with apparent satisfaction near the deep end of the pool. The big shepherd loved little children but hated other male dogs; something in the animal’s history must have made this so, something neither Danny nor the DeSimones ever knew.

Rooster would one day be killed on a back road-struck by a car while he was mindlessly chasing a schoolbus. Violence begets violence, as Ketchum and the cook already knew, as one nearly forgotten hippie carpenter, with one dead dog and one momentarily alive, might one day figure out.

Danny didn’t know it, but he’d taken his last run on the back road between Putney and Westminster West. It was a world of accidents, right? Perhaps it was wise not to be too confrontational in such a world.

BOTH THEIR HUSBANDS had retired from the spruce mill in Milan. A world of small engine repair, and other tinkering, lay ahead of them. The fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-took every occasion that presented itself, no matter how much driving was involved, to leave town and their tiresome husbands. Retired men made a nuisance of themselves, the two old ladies had discovered; Dot and May preferred their own company to anyone else’s. Now that May’s younger children (and her older grandchildren) were producing more children, she used the excuse of being needed when whatever mother (and whoever’s new baby) came home from the hospital. Wherever “home” was, it was a way to get out of Milan. Dot was always the driver.

They were both sixty-eight, a couple of years older than Ketchum, whom they spotted occasionally-Ketchum lived in Errol, farther up the Androscoggin. The old logger never recognized Dot or May, nor would he have paid them any attention if he did recognize them, but everyone noticed Ketchum; the woodsman’s reputation as a wild man had marked him, as surely as the scar on his forehead was a vivid advertisement of his violent history. But Dot had put on another sixty pounds, or so, and May another eighty; they were white-haired, with those weatherworn faces you see in the north country, and they ate their way through every day, the way some people in cold climates do, as if they were constantly starving.

They’d come across northern New Hampshire on the Groveton road, through Stark-much of the way, they were following the Ammonoosuc-and in Lancaster they crossed the Connecticut, into Vermont. They intersected I-91 just below St. Johnsbury, and followed the interstate south. They had a long drive ahead of them, but they were in no hurry to get there. May’s daughter or granddaughter had given birth in Springfield, Massachusetts. If Dot and May arrived in time for supper, they would necessarily get themselves involved in feeding a bunch of little kids and cleaning up after them. The two old ladies were smarter than that-they’d decided they would stop somewhere for supper en route. That way, they could have a nice big meal by themselves and arrive in Springfield well after suppertime; with any luck, someone else would have done the dishes and put the littlest kids to bed.

About the time those bad old broads were passing McIndoe Falls on I-91, the cook and his staff were finishing their midafternoon meal at Avellino. To have fed his staff a good meal, and to watch everyone cleaning up and readying themselves for the evening’s dinner service, always made Tony Angel nostalgic. He was thinking about those years in Iowa City in the seventies-that interlude from their life in Vermont, as both the cook and his son remembered it.

In Iowa City, Tony Angel had worked as a sous chef in the Cheng brothers’ Chinese restaurant out on First