Last Night In Twisted River

A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch-a raccoon, Danny at first suspected, but it was a possum, actually, and one early evening when young Joe went out on the porch to fetch an apple for himself, he put his hand in the crate and the possum scared him. It growled or hissed or snarled; the boy was so scared that he couldn’t even say for sure if the primitive-looking animal had bitten him.

All Danny kept asking was, “Did it bite you?” (He couldn’t stop examining Joe’s arms and hands for bite marks.)

“I don’t know!” the boy wailed. “It was white and pink-it looked awful! What was it?”

“A possum,” Danny kept repeating; he’d seen it slink away. Possums were ugly-looking creatures.

That night, when Joe fell asleep, Danny went into the boy’s bedroom and examined him all over. He wished Yi-Yiing was home, but she was working in the ER. She would know if possums were occasionally rabid-in Vermont, raccoons often were-and the good nurse would know what to do if Joe had been bitten, but Danny couldn’t find a bite mark anywhere on his son’s perfect body.

Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy’s bedroom; she’d watched Danny looking for any indication of an animal bite. “Wouldn’t Joe know if he was bitten?” she asked.

“He was too startled and too scared to know,” Danny answered her. Youn was staring at the sleeping boy as if he were a wild or unknown animal to her, and Danny realized that she often looked at Joe with this puzzled, from- another-world fascination. If Yi-Yiing doted on Joe because she longed to be with her daughter of that same age, Youn looked at Joe with what appeared to be incomprehension; it was as if she’d never been around children of any age before.

Then again, if one could believe her story (or her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband-most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure-was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel’s tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was trying to get pregnant, when all along she’d been taking birth-control pills and using a diaphragm-she was doing all she could not to get pregnant, and to never have a child.

Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Danny thought; her writing was good, though certain Korean elements remained mystifying. (What was Korean divorce law, anyway? Why was the charade of pretending to try to get pregnant necessary? And, according to Youn, she’d hated taking birth-control pills.)

The husband-ultimately, Danny assumed, the ex-husband-in Youn’s novel was a kind of gangster businessman. Perhaps he was a well-paid assassin, or he hired lesser hit men to do his dirty work; in Danny’s reading of Youn’s novel-in-progress, this wasn’t clear. That the husband was dangerous-in both Youn’s real life and her novel-seemed obvious. Danny could only wonder about the sexual detail. There was something sympathetic about the husband, despite Youn’s efforts to demonize him; the poor man imagined it was his fault that his scheming wife couldn’t get pregnant.

It didn’t help that, in bed at night, Youn told Danny the worst details of her miserable marriage-her husband’s tireless need for sex included. (But he was trying to get you pregnant, wasn’t he? Danny wanted to ask, though he didn’t. Maybe sex had felt like a duty to Youn’s unfortunate husband and to Youn. The things she told Danny in the dark and the details of her novels were becoming blurred-or were they interchangeable?)

Shouldn’t the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a different name from her actual ex-husband? Danny had asked Youn. What if her former husband ever read her novel? (Assuming she could get it published.) Wouldn’t he then know how she’d deceived him-by deliberately trying not to get pregnant when they were married?

“My previous life is over,” Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Danny couldn’t help but wonder about that, too.

Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Danny had looked in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom she used. He saw her birth-control pills-it was an Iowa City prescription.

Danny always used a condom. It was an old habit-and, given his history of occasionally having more than one sexual partner, not a bad one. But Youn had said to him one time, almost casually, “Thank you for using a condom. I’ve taken a lifetime of birth-control pills. I don’t ever want to take them again.”

But she was taking them, wasn’t she? Well, if Danny’s dad didn’t question Yi-Yiing, why should Danny expect answers to everything from Youn? Hadn’t her life been complicated, too?

It was into this careless world of unasked or unanswered questions-not only of an Asian variety, but including some longstanding secrets between the cook and his writer son-that a blue Mustang brought them all to their senses (albeit only momentarily) regarding the fragile, unpredictable nature of things.

ON SATURDAY MORNINGS in the fall, when there was an Iowa home football game, Danny could hear the Iowa band playing-he never knew where. If the band had been practicing in Kinnick Stadium, across the Iowa River and up the hill, could he have heard the music so far away, on Court Street, on the eastern side of town?

That Saturday it was bright and fair, and Danny had tickets to take Joe to the football game. He’d gotten up early and had made the boy pancakes. Friday had been a late night for the cook at Mao’s, and the Saturday night following a home football game would be later. That morning, Danny’s dad was still in bed; so was Yi-Yiing, who’d finished her usual night shift at Mercy Hospital. Danny didn’t expect to see the Pajama Lady before noon. It was Joe’s neighborhood friend Max, an Iowa faculty kid in Joe’s third-grade class at Longfellow Elementary, who’d first referred to Yi-Yiing as the Pajama Lady. (The eight-year-old couldn’t remember Yi-Yiing’s name.)

Danny was washing his and Joe’s breakfast dishes while Joe was playing outside with Max. They were riding their bicycles in the back alley again; they’d taken some apples from the crate on the porch, but not to eat them. The boys were using the apples as slalom gates, Danny would later realize. He liked Max, but the kid rode his bike all over town; it was a source of some friction between Danny and Joe that Joe wasn’t allowed to do this.

Max was a fanatical collector of posters, stickers, and sew-on insignia, all advertising brands of beer. The kid had given dozens of these to Joe, who had Yi-Yiing sew the various insignia on his jean jacket; the stickers were plastered to the fridge, and the posters hung in Joe’s bedroom. It was funny, Danny thought, and totally innocent; after all, the eight-year-olds weren’t drinking the beer.

What Danny would remember foremost about the car was the sudden screech of tires; he saw only a blue blur pass by the kitchen window. The writer ran out on the back porch, where he’d previously thought the only threat to his son was a possum. “Joe!” Danny called, but there was no answer-only the sound of the blue car hitting some trash barrels at the farthest end of the alley.

“Mr. Angel!” Danny heard Max calling; the boy was almost never off his bike, but this time Danny saw him running.

Several of the apples, placed as slalom gates, had been squashed flat in the alley. Danny saw that both boys’ bikes were lying on their sides, off the pavement; Joe lay curled up in a fetal position next to his bike.

Danny could see that Joe was conscious, and he appeared more frightened than hurt. “Did it hit you? Did the car hit you?” he asked his son. The boy quickly shook his head but otherwise wouldn’t move; he just stayed in a tight ball.

“We crashed, trying to get out of the way-the Mustang was coming right at us,” Max said. “It was the blue Mustang-it always goes too fast,” Max told Danny. “It’s gotta be a customized job-it’s a funny blue.”

“You’ve seen the car before?” Danny asked. (Clearly, Max knew cars.)

“Yeah, but not here-not in the alley,” the boy said.

“Go get the Pajama Lady, Max,” Danny told the kid. “You can find her. She’s upstairs, with my pop.” Danny had never called his dad a “pop” before; where the word came from must have had something to do with the fright of the moment. He knelt beside Joe, almost afraid to touch him, while the boy shivered. He was like a fetus willing himself back to the womb, or trying to, the writer thought. “Joe?” his father said. “Does anything hurt? Is anything broken? Can you move?”