Last Night In Twisted River

advise you either to leave now or to order something basic. The pizzas, maybe, or a pasta dish. By the way, the beef satay is excellent. So is the calamari.”

He went to the wine rack and picked out a couple of good reds; Danny Angel may have stopped drinking sixteen years ago, when he was still Daniel Baciagalupo, but the writer knew the names of the better bottles. “The wine is on me,” he told them, bringing them glasses, too. He had to go back to the kitchen to get a corkscrew from either Loretta or Celeste, and one of the party of eight asked him timidly for a beer. “Sure,” Danny said. “A beer’s no problem. You should try a Moretti.”

At least Celeste was standing, though Loretta looked in better shape. “One Moretti for the party of eight. I gave wine to everyone else-on me,” Danny said to Loretta. “Can you pull the corks?”

“Yeah, I guess I’m okay,” Loretta told him.

“I can work,” Celeste said unconvincingly.

“You better get your dad off the phone before he has a heart attack,” Greg said to Danny.

“I’m not changing my name again!” the cook was screaming into the phone. “I’m not leaving my country, Ketchum! Why do I have to leave the entire country?”

“Let me speak to him, Pop,” Danny said; he kissed his father on the forehead, taking the telephone from him. “It’s me, Ketchum,” the writer began.

“Dot and May!” Ketchum hollered. “For Christ’s sake, Danny-those two would talk their heads off to a pinch of coon shit! The first time those bitches run into Carl, the cowboy’s going to know where to find you!”

“How long do we have, Ketchum?” Danny asked. “Just give me an educated guess.”

“You should have left yesterday,” Ketchum told him. “You have to leave the country as soon as possible!”

“The country?” Danny asked.

“You’re a famous writer! What do you have to live in this asshole country for?” Ketchum asked him. “You can write anywhere, can’t you? And how long before Cookie retires? For that matter, he can cook anywhere-can’t he? Just don’t let it be an Italian place! That’s what the cowboy will be looking for. And Cookie needs a new name.”

“Dot and May never heard the Angel name,” Danny told the old logger.

“Carl could hear it-when he comes looking for you two, Danny. No matter how long after you’re gone, someone could say the Angel name to the cowboy.”

“So I’m supposed to change my name, too? For God’s sake, Ketchum-I’m a writer!”

“Keep it, then,” Ketchum said morosely. “The cowboy’s no reader, I’ll grant you that. But Cookie can’t keep the Tony Angel-he’d be better off being Dominic Baciagalupo again! Danny, don’t you dare let him cook in any restaurant with an Italian name-not even if it’s out of the country.”

“I have a son, Ketchum-he’s American, remember?” Danny said to the old woodsman.

“Joe is going to be in college in Colorado ,” Ketchum reminded him. This was a sore point with Danny: That Joe would be going to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, was something of a disappointment to his dad. In Danny’s opinion, his son had gotten into better schools. Danny believed that Joe was going to Colorado for the skiing, not an education; the writer had also read that Boulder was a big party town. “Carl doesn’t even know you have a child,” Ketchum also reminded Danny. “If you’re out of the country, I’ll look after Joe.”

“In Colorado?” Danny asked.

“First things first, Danny,” Ketchum said. “Get the fuck out of Vermont -both you and your dad! I can look after your boy in the interim-before he goes off to Colorado, anyway.”

“Maybe Pop and I could go to Colorado, too,” Danny suggested. “It’s a little like Vermont, I imagine-there are mountains, just bigger ones. Boulder is a university town, and we all liked Iowa City. Writers can fit in, in a university town. A cook could fit in, in Boulder -couldn’t he? It wouldn’t have to be Italian- ”

Ketchum cut him off. “You must be as simple-minded as a pinch of coon shit, Danny! You guys ran the first time-now you have to keep running! Do you think Carl cares that you’re a family? The cowboy doesn’t have a family-he’s a fucking killer, Danny, and he’s on a mission!”

“I’ll let you know our plans, Ketchum,” the writer told his father’s old friend.

“Carl doesn’t know shit about foreign countries,” Ketchum said. “Hell, Boston wasn’t foreign enough for him. You think Colorado would be too far away for the cowboy to find you? Colorado ’s a lot like New Hampshire, Danny- they have guns out there, don’t they? You could be carrying a gun in Colorado, and no one would look at you twice-isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so,” Danny said. “I know you love us, Ketchum.”

“I promised your mom I would look after you!” Ketchum shouted, his voice breaking.

“Well, I guess you’re doing it,” Danny told him, but Ketchum had hung up. The writer would remember the song that was playing on the radio; it was Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” a song from the seventies. (When Danny had switched stations from the Red Sox game, he’d inadvertently found Greg’s Oldie-But- Goldie music.)

I was thinking about what a

Friend had said.

I was hoping it was a lie.

Danny saw that his father was once more stirring his sauces; the cook then started rolling out the dough for what looked like three or four more pizzas. Greg was grilling something, but the sous chef paused to take a dish out of the oven. Neither waitress was in the kitchen, but the busboy was busy filling a couple of bread baskets.

The dishwasher was waiting for more dirty dishes; an earnest-looking boy, he was reading a paperback. Probably an assignment for school, Danny thought; nowadays, kids didn’t read much on their own. Danny asked the boy what he was reading. The young dishwasher smiled shyly, showing the author a dog-eared mass-market edition of a Danny Angel novel. But that was such a tough night, when Dot and May made their disruptive appearance in Avellino, the writer would never remember which book the kid was reading.

And the bad night was far from over; for Danny, it was just beginning.

“YOU’LL FIND SOMEONE,” Kurt Vonnegut had said to Danny when the young writer was leaving Iowa City the first time; Katie had only recently left him. But it hadn’t happened-not yet. Danny supposed there was still time for him to find someone; he was only forty-one, and he never would have claimed that he’d sincerely been trying. Did he think Lady Sky was going to drop into his life again, just because he couldn’t forget her?

As for what Vonnegut also said to the then-unpublished writer-the part about “maybe capitalism will be kind to you”-well, Danny was wondering (as he drove home to Putney from Brattleboro) how Kurt had known.

On the night of Dot and May’s visit to Avellino, when Danny and his dad would soon be on the move again, the famous writer’s compound in Putney was ablaze with lights. To anyone driving by on Hickory Ridge Road, the lights that were on-in every room, in each building-seemed to advertise just how kind capitalism had been to the bestselling author Danny Angel.

Was the compound overrun with revelers? Was every last room of the old farmhouse (now the guesthouse) occupied-as was, evidently, the new house that Danny had built for himself and Joe? The lights were also on in the famous writer’s so-called writing shack, as if the partygoers were even partying there.

But Danny had left only the kitchen light on, in the new building; he’d left the other rooms (and the other buildings) dark. The music was loud and conflicting-it was coming from both the new building and the guesthouse, and every window must have been open. It was a wonder that someone hadn’t called the police about the noise; though the writer’s compound had no near neighbors, almost anyone driving by had to have heard the clashing music. Danny heard it, and saw all the lights ablaze even before he turned in to his driveway, where he stopped his car and turned off the engine and his headlights. There were no other cars around, except Joe’s. (It was parked in the open garage, where Joe had left it the last time the boy had been home from school.) From the far end of his driveway, Danny could see that even the lights in the garage were