Last Night In Twisted River

Ah Gou would get to keep his fingertip. Kaori or Sao took young Joe home and put him to bed that night, and Danny drove home with Yi-Yiing. The cook would drive himself home, after Mao’s had closed.

There was an awkward moment-after the Japanese babysitter had gone, and before the cook came home-when Joe was asleep upstairs, and Danny was alone in the third Court Street kitchen with the nurse from Hong Kong. Like Danny and his dad, Yi-Yiing didn’t drink. She was making tea for herself-something allegedly good for her cold.

“So, here we are, alone at last,” Yi-Yiing said to him. “I guess we’re almost alone, anyway,” she added. “It’s just you and me and my damn cold.”

The kettle had not yet come to boil, and Yi-Yiing folded her arms on her breasts and stared at him.

“What?” Danny asked her.

“You know what,” she said to him. He was the first to lower his eyes.

“How’s it going with that tricky business of moving your daughter and your parents here?” he asked her. Finally, she turned away.

“I’m very slowly changing my mind about that,” Yi-Yiing told him.

Much later, the cook would hear that she’d gone back to Hong Kong; she was working as a nurse there. (None of them ever heard what happened to the Yokohamas, Kaori and Sao.)

That night the war ended, Yi-Yiing took her tea upstairs with her, leaving Danny alone in the kitchen. The temptation to turn on the TV was great, but Danny wandered outside to the Court Street sidewalk instead. It wasn’t very late-not nearly midnight-but most of the houses on the street were dark, or the only lights that were on were in the upstairs of the houses. People reading in bed, or watching television, Danny imagined. From several of the nearby houses, Danny could recognize that sickly light from a TV set-an unnatural blue-green, blue-gray shimmer. There was something wrong with that color.

It was warm enough in Iowa at the end of April for some windows to be open, and while he couldn’t make out the exact language on the television, Danny recognized the drone as the disembodied voice of the news-or so the writer imagined. (If someone had been watching a love story or another kind of movie, how would Danny have known?)

If the stars were out, Danny couldn’t see them. He’d lived on Court Street for three years; there’d been nothing ominous about living there, except for the driverless blue Mustang, and now the writer and his family were about to go back to Vermont. “This asshole country-” Ketchum had started to say; he’d been too angry or too drunk, or both, to even finish his thought. Wasn’t it too harsh an assessment, anyway? Danny hoped so.

“Please look after my dad and my little boy,” the writer said aloud, but to what was he speaking-or to whom? The starless night above Iowa City? The one alert and restless soul on Court Street who might have heard him? (Yi-Yiing-if she was still awake-maybe.)

Danny stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty street, as if daring the blue Mustang to take notice of him. “Please don’t hurt my father or my son,” Danny said. “Hurt me, if you have to hurt someone,” he said.

But who was out there, under the unseen heavens, to either look after them or hurt them? “Lady Sky?” the writer asked out loud, but Amy had never said she was a full-time angel, and he’d not seen her for eight years. There was no answer.

CHAPTER 11. HONEY

WHERE HAS MY MEMORY GONE? THE COOK WAS THINKING; he was almost sixty, his limp more pronounced. Tony Angel was trying to remember those markets Little Brother had taken him to in Chinatown. Kam Kuo was on Mott Street, Kam Man on the Bowery-or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter, the cook concluded; he could still recall the more important things.

How Xiao Dee had hugged him when they’d said good-bye-how Ah Gou had twisted the reattached tip of his left index finger, to make himself cry. “She bu de!” Xiao Dee had shouted. (The Cheng brothers pronounced this SEH BOO DEH.)

“She bu de!” Ah Gou cried, bending that scarred and slightly crooked first digit.

Chinese immigrants said she bu de to one another, Xiao Dee had explained to the cook during one of their sixteen-hour marathons to or from Chinatown, somewhere out on I-80. You said she bu de when you were leaving your Chinese homeland, for New York or San Francisco -or for anywhere far away, where you might not see your childhood friends or members of your own family ever again. (Xiao Dee had told Tony Angel that she bu de meant something like “I can’t bear to let go.” You say it when you don’t want to give up something you have.)

“She bu de,” the cook whispered to himself in his cherished kitchen at Avellino.

“What’s that, boss?” Greg, the sous chef, asked him.

“I was talking to my calamari,” Tony told him. “The thing with squid, Greg, is either you cook it just a little or you cook it forever-anything in between, and it’s rubber.”

Greg had certainly heard this soliloquy on squid before. “Uh-huh,” the sous chef said.

The calamari the cook was preparing for his son, Daniel, was the forever kind. Tony Angel slowly stewed it with canned tomatoes and tomato paste-and with garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, and black olives. The cook added the pine nuts and chopped parsley only at the end, and he served the squid over penne, with more chopped parsley on the side. (Never with Parmesan-not on calamari.) He would give Daniel just a small arugula salad after the pasta dish, maybe with a little goat cheese; he had a local Vermont chevre that was pretty good.

But right now the pepperoni pizzas were ready, and the cook pulled them from the oven of his Stanley woodstove. (“She bu de,” he whispered to the old Irish stove, and Greg once more glanced in his direction.)

“You’re crying again-you know that, don’t you?” Celeste said to Tony. “You want to talk about it?”

“It must be the onions,” the cook told her.

“Bullshit, Tony,” she said. “Are those my two pepperonis for the old broads out there?” Without waiting for an answer, Celeste said: “They better be my pizzas. Those old girls are looking hungry enough to eat Danny for a first course.”

“They’re all yours,” Tony Angel told Celeste. He’d already put the penne in the pot of boiling water, and he took one out with a slotted spoon and tasted it while he watched every step of Celeste’s dramatic exit from the kitchen. Loretta was looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a code. “What?” the cook said to her.

“Mystery man,” Loretta said. “Danny’s a mystery man, too-isn’t he?”

“You’re as dramatic as your mother,” the cook told her, smiling.

“Is the calamari ready, or are you telling it your life story?” Loretta asked him.

Out in the dining room, Dot exclaimed: “My, that’s a thin-lookin’ crust!”

“It’s thin, all right,” May said approvingly.

“Our cook makes great pizzas,” Celeste told them. “His crusts are always thin.”

“What’s he put in the dough?” Dot asked the waitress.

“Yeah, what’s his secret ingredient?” May asked Celeste.

“I don’t know if he has one,” Celeste said. “I’ll ask him.” The two old broads were digging in-they ignored her. “I hope you ladies are hungry,” Celeste added, as she turned to go back to the kitchen. Dot and May just kept eating; this was no time to talk.

Danny watched the women eat with growing wonder. Where had he seen people eat like that? he was thinking. Surely not at Exeter, where table manners didn’t matter but the food was awful. At Exeter, you picked over your food with the greatest suspicion-and you talked nonstop, if only to distract yourself from what you were eating.

The old women had been talking and whispering (and cackling) together (like a couple of crows); now there wasn’t a word between them, and no eye contact, either. They rested their forearms on the table and bent over their plates, heads down. Their shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off an attack from behind, and Danny imagined that if he were closer to them, he might hear them emit an unconscious moan or growl-a sound so innately associated with eating that the women were unaware of it and had long ceased to hear it