Last Night In Twisted River

present that there was a Dominic Baciagalupo back in action? (At least Ketchum was somewhat relieved to learn that, at the height of her phonetic sensibilities, Nunzi had misspelled the Baciacalupo word!)

But, realistically thinking, how would it be possible for a retired deputy sheriff in Coos County, New Hampshire, to discover that a restaurant called Kiss of the Wolf in Toronto, Ontario, was the English translation of the phonetically made-up name of Baciagalupo? And don’t forget, the cook reassured himself-the cowboy is as old as Ketchum, who’s eighty-three!

If I’m not safe now, I never will be, Dominic was thinking as he came into the narrow, bustling kitchen of Patrice-soon to be renamed Kiss of the Wolf. Well, it’s a world of accidents, isn’t it? In such a world, more than the names would keep changing.

DANNY ANGEL WISHED with all his heart that he had never given up the name Daniel Baciagalupo, not because he wanted to be the more innocent boy and young man he’d once been-or even because Daniel Baciagalupo was his one true name, the only one his parents had given him-but because the fifty-eight-year-old novelist believed it was a better name for a writer. And the closer the novelist came to sixty, the less he felt like a Danny or an Angel; that his father had all along insisted on the Daniel name made more and more sense to the son. (Not that it was always easy for a stay-at-home, work-at-home writer, who was almost sixty, to share a house with his seventy-six-year-old dad. They could be a contentious couple.)

Given the disputed presidential election in the United States-“the Florida fiasco,” as Ketchum called George W. Bush’s “theft” of the presidency from Al Gore, the result of a 5-4 Supreme Court vote along partisan lines-the faxes from Ketchum were often incendiary. Gore had won the popular vote. The Republicans stole the election, both Danny and his dad believed, but the cook and his son didn’t necessarily share Ketchum’s more extreme beliefs- namely, that they were “better off being Canadians,” and that America, which Ketchum obdurately called an “asshole country,” deserved its fate.

WHERE ARE THE ASSASSINS WHEN YOU WANT ONE?

Ketchum had faxed. He didn’t mean George W. Bush; Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn’t played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged-“preferably, in a child’s defective car seat”-and sunk in the Androscoggin.

During the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, Bush criticized President Clinton’s use of U.S. troops in Somalia and the Balkans. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” the future president said.

YOU WANT TO WAIT AND SEE HOW THAT LYING LITTLE FUCKER WILL FIND A WAY TO USE OUR TROOPS? YOU WANT TO BET THAT “NATION-BUILDING” WON’T BE PART OF IT?

Ketchum had faxed.

But Danny didn’t relish America ’s impending disgrace-not from the Canadian perspective, particularly. He and his dad had never wanted to leave their country. To the extent it was possible for an internationally bestselling author to not make a big deal of changing his citizenship, Danny Angel had tried to play down his politics, though this had been harder to do after East of Bangor was published in ’84; his abortion novel was certainly political.

The process of Danny and his dad being admitted to Canada as new citizens was a slow one. Danny had applied as self-employed; the immigration lawyer representing him had categorized the writer as “someone who participates at a world-class level in cultural activities.” Danny made enough money to support himself and his father. They’d both passed the medical exam. While they were living in Toronto on visitors’ visas, it had been necessary for them to cross the border every six months to have their visas validated; also, they’d had to apply for Canadian citizenship at a Canadian consulate in the United States. (Buffalo was the closest American city to Toronto.)

An assistant to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship had discouraged them from a so-called fast-track application. In their case, what was the hurry? The famous writer wasn’t rushing to change countries, was he? (The immigration lawyer had forewarned Danny that Canadians were a little suspicious of success; they tended to punish it, not reward it.) In fact, to escape undue attention, the cook and his son had made the slowest possible progress in their application for Canadian citizenship. The process had taken four, almost five years. But now, with the Florida fiasco, there’d been comments in the Canadian media about the writer Danny Angel’s “defection;” his “giving up on the United States” when he did, more than a decade ago, made the author appear “prescient”-or so the Toronto Globe and Mail had said.

It didn’t help that the film adapted from East of Bangor had released in theaters only recently-in ’99-and the movie had won a couple of Academy Awards in 2000. Early in the New Year, 2001, a joint session of Congress would meet to certify the electoral vote in the States; now that there was going to be a U.S. president who opposed abortion rights, it came as no surprise to Danny and his dad that the writer’s liberal abortion politics were back in the news. And writers were more in the news in Canada than in the United States -not only for what they wrote but for what they said and did.

Danny was still sensitive to what he read about himself in the American media, where he was frequently labeled “anti-American”-both for his writing and because of his expatriation to Toronto. In other parts of the world-without fail, in Europe and in Canada -the author’s alleged anti-Americanism was viewed as a good thing. It was written that the expatriate writer “vilified” life in the United States - that is, in his novels. It had also been reported that the American-born author had moved to Toronto “to make a statement.” (Despite Danny Angel’s commercial success, he had accepted the fact that his Canadian taxes were higher than what he’d paid in the States.) But, as a novelist, Danny was increasingly uncomfortable when he was condemned or praised for his perceived anti-American politics. Naturally, he couldn’t say-most of all, not to the press-why he had really moved to Canada.

What Danny did say was that only two of his seven published novels could fairly be described as political; he was aware that he sounded defensive in saying this, but it was notably true. Danny’s fourth book, The Kennedy Fathers, was a Vietnam novel-it was read as a virtual protest of that war. The sixth, East of Bangor, was a didactic novel-in the view of some critics, an abortion-rights polemic. But what was political about the other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies-none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain-if there was one-was more often human nature than the United States. Danny had never been any kind of activist.

“All writers are outsiders,” Danny Angel had once said. “I moved to Toronto because I like being an outsider.” But no one believed him. Besides, it was a better story that the world-famous author had rejected the United States.

Danny thought that his move to Canada had been sensationalized in the press, the presumed politics of their entirely personal decision magnified out of proportion. Yet what bothered the novelist more was that his novels had been trivialized. Danny Angel’s fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect?

In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up. In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer-or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known-more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story-as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the fiction in fiction writing-because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)

Yet who was the audience for Danny Angel, or any other novelist, defending the fiction in fiction writing? Students of creative writing? Women of a certain age in book