Last Night in Twisted River (28 page)

“Thank you, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said to him. She watched them get into the car. Ketchum, of course, was the driver.

“If you ever want to see me—” Carmella started to say to Dominic.

“I know,” the cook said to her, but he wouldn’t look at her.

COMPARED TO THE DAY HER GAMBA LEFT
, the day Carl came to Vicino di Napoli was almost easy for Carmella. It had again been at the time of their midafternoon meal, and it was nearly the end of that summer—sometime in August ’67, when they’d all started to imagine (or hope) that the cowboy wasn’t ever coming.

Carmella saw the cop first. It was just as Gamba had told her: When Carl was out of uniform, he still looked like he was wearing one. Of course Ketchum had remarked on the jowls, and the way the cowboy’s neck was bunched in folds. (“Maybe all cops have bad haircuts,” Ketchum had said to her.)

“Someone go back in the kitchen,” Carmella said, standing up from the table; the door was locked, and she went to unlock it. It was Paul Polcari who went back in the kitchen. The second the cowboy came inside, Carmella found herself wishing it had been Molinari back there.

“You would be the Del Popolo woman?” the deputy sheriff asked her. He showed them all his badge while saying, “Massachusetts is out of my jurisdiction—actually, everythin’ outside Coos County is out of my jurisdiction—but I’m lookin’ for a fella I think you all know. He’s got some answerin’ to do—name of Dominic, a little guy with a limp.”

Carmella started to cry; she cried easily, but in this case she had to force herself.

“That prick,” Molinari said. “If I knew where he was, I’d kill him.”

“Me, too!” Paul Polcari cried from the kitchen.

“Can you come out of there?” the deputy called to Paul. “I like to see everyone.”

“I’m busy cooking!” Paul screamed; pots and pans were banging.

The cowboy sighed. They all remembered how the cook and Ketchum had described Carl; they’d said the cop never stopped smiling, but it was the most insincere smile in the world. “Look,” the cowboy said to them, “I don’t know what the cook’s done to you, but he’s got some explainin’ to do to me—”

“He walked out on her!” Molinari said, pointing to Carmella.

“He stole
her jewels!”
the busboy cried.

The kid is an idiot! the others thought. (Even the cop might be smart enough to know that Carmella wasn’t the sort of woman who
had jewels.)

“I didn’t figure Cookie for a jewel thief,” Carl said. “Are you people bein’ honest with me? You really don’t know where he is?”

“No!” one of the young waitresses cried out, as if her companion waitress had stabbed her.

“That prick,” Molinari repeated.

“What about
you?”
the cowboy called into the kitchen. Paul seemed to have lost his voice. When the pots and pans commenced to banging again, the others took this as a signal to move a little bit away from the cop. Ketchum had told them not to scatter like a bunch of chickens, but to get some necessary separation between the cowboy and themselves—just to give the shooter a decent shot at the bastard.

“If I knew where he was, I would
cook
him!” Paul Polcari shouted. He held the Ithaca in his heavily floured hands, which were shaking. He sighted down the barrel till he found the cowboy’s throat—what he could manage to see of it, under Carl’s multiple chins.

“Can you come out of there, where I can see you?” the cop called to Paul, squinting into the kitchen.
“Wops,”
the cowboy muttered. That was when Tony Molinari got a glimpse of the Colt. Carl had put his hand inside his jacket, and Molinari saw the big holster that was awkwardly at an angle under the deputy’s armpit, the fat man’s fingers just grazing the grip of the long-barreled handgun. The handle of the Colt .45 was inlaid with what looked like bone; it was probably deer antler.

For Christ’s sake, Paul! Molinari was thinking. The cowboy’s already
looking
at you—just shoot him! To her surprise, Carmella was thinking the same thing—just shoot him! She had all she could do not to cover both ears with her hands.

Paul Polcari just wasn’t the one for the job. The pizza chef was a sweet, gentle man; now he found that his throat felt as if a cup of flour had clogged it. He was
trying
to say, “Hey, cowboy!” The words wouldn’t come. And the cowboy kept squinting into the kitchen; Paul Polcari knew that he didn’t have to say anything. He could just pull the trigger and Carl would be blinded. But Paul couldn’t—more to the point, he
didn’t—
do it.

“Well, shit,” the deputy sheriff said. He was moving sideways, toward the restaurant door. Molinari was worried, because the cowboy was out of sight from Paul’s spot in the back of the kitchen; then Carl reached inside his jacket again, and they all froze. (Here comes the Colt! Molinari was thinking.) But now they saw it was just a small card that the cowboy had pulled out of his pocket; he handed it to Carmella. “Call me if that little cripple calls you,” Carl said to her; he was still smiling.

From the sound of the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, Molinari imagined that Paul Polcari had passed out back there.

“It should have been you in the kitchen, Tony,” Carmella told Molinari later, “but I can’t blame poor Paul.”

Paul Polcari would blame himself, however; he would never shut up about it. It took Tony Molinari almost an hour to clean the Ithaca of all the flour, too. But the cowboy wouldn’t come back. Maybe just having the gun in the kitchen had helped. As for the story Ketchum had told them to stick to, Carl must have believed it.

When their ordeal was over, Carmella cried and cried; they’d all assumed she was crying from the terrible tension of the moment. But her Gamba leaving had hurt her more; Carmella was crying because she knew that her Gamba’s ordeal was
not
over. Contrary to what she had said to Ketchum, she would have fired the Ithaca herself if she’d been back in the kitchen. One look at the cowboy—and, as Ketchum had forewarned her, the way he’d looked at her—had convinced Carmella that she could have pulled the trigger. But that chance wouldn’t come to her, or to any of them, again.

IN TRUTH
, Carmella Del Popolo would miss Dominic more than she ever did the fisherman, and she would miss Secondo, too. She knew about that hole the boy had bored in his bedroom door in the cold-water Charter Street apartment. Maybe she bathed more modestly after she knew about the hole, but Carmella had let young Dan see her nonetheless. With the fisherman dead, and Angelù gone, there’d been no one to look at her for too long. When Dominic and Danny came into her life, Carmella didn’t really mind that the twelve-year-old watched her in the bathtub in the kitchen; she only worried what an influence the sight of her might have on the boy later on. (Carmella didn’t mean on Danny’s
writing.)

Of all the people who were surprised, puzzled, disappointed, or indifferent regarding what the writer Daniel Baciagalupo would choose for a nom de plume, Carmella Del Popolo was without a doubt the most pleased. For when
Family Life in Coos County
, by Danny Angel, was published, Carmella was sure that Secondo had always known he was her surrogate son—just as surely as everyone in Vicino di Napoli knew (Carmella, most of all) that absolutely no one could replace her cherished but departed Angelù.

III.

WINDHAM COUNTY,
VERMONT, 1983
——

CHAPTER 7

BENEVENTO AND AVELLINO

T
HE BUILDING WAS OLD AND MUCH ABUSED BY ITS PROXIMITY
to the Connecticut River. A few of the apartments had been abused, too, but not exclusively by the river; back in the sixties, a couple of Windham College kids had made a mess of one of them. Once cheap, the apartments were slightly more expensive now. The Connecticut had been cleaned up, and the town of Brattleboro was much improved by it. The cook’s second-floor apartment was in the back of the old Main Street building, overlooking the river. Most mornings, Dominic would go downstairs to his empty restaurant and the deserted kitchen to make himself some espresso; the kitchen was also in the back, with a good view of the river.

On the ground floor, there had always been a storefront or some kind of restaurant on the Main Street side of the weather-beaten apartment building, which was across the street from an army-navy clothing store and the local movie theater, known as the Latchis.

If you walked down the hill on Main Street, past the Latchis, you would come to Canal Street and the market where the cook did most of his shopping. From there, heading out of town, you could find your way to the hospital and a shopping mall—and, out by Interstate 91, a bunch of gas stations and the usual fast-food places.

If you walked north on Main Street, up the hill, you came to The Book Cellar—quite a good bookstore, where the now-famous author Danny Angel had done a reading or two, and his share of book signings. The cook had met a couple of his Vermont lady friends in The Book Cellar, where they all knew Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, as
Mr
. Angel—the celebrated novelist’s father, and the owner-chef of the best Italian restaurant around.

After Daniel chose that nom de plume, Dominic had had to rename himself, too.

“Shit, I suppose you should both be Angels—maybe that much is clear,” Ketchum had said. “Like father, like son—and all that goes with that.” But Ketchum had insisted that the cook lose the Dominic, too.

“How about
Tony?”
Danny had suggested to his dad. It was the Fourth of July, 1967, and Ketchum had nearly burned down the Putney farmhouse with his fireworks display; little Joe continued to scream for five minutes after the last cherry bomb went off.

The name Tony still sounded Italian but was nicely
anonymous
, Danny was thinking, while Dominic liked the name because of his fondness for Tony Molinari; only a few nights away from Boston, the cook already knew how much he was going to miss Molinari. Tony Angel, previously Dominic Del Popolo, previously Bacigalupo, would miss Paul Polcari, too—nor would the cook think any less of Paul when he heard about what happened in August of that same summer.

Tony Angel would blame Ketchum for the mishap of the cowboy getting out of Vicino di Napoli alive—not Paul Polcari. Poor Paul could never have squeezed the trigger. It was Ketchum’s fault, in the cook’s opinion, because Ketchum had told them all that it didn’t matter which one of them was back in the kitchen with the shotgun. Come on! For someone who knew guns as well as Ketchum did, he should have known that
of course
it mattered who was taking aim and would (or would not) pull the trigger! Tony Angel would never blame sweet, gentle Paul.

“You blame Ketchum too much, for everything,” Danny would tell his dad more than once, but that was just the way it was.

If Molinari had been back in the kitchen, Dominic Del Popolo would have changed his name back to Dominic Baciagalupo—and he would have gone back to Boston, to Carmella. The cook would never have had to become Tony Angel. And the writer Danny Angel, whose fourth novel was his first bestseller—now in 1983, his fifth novel had already been translated into more than thirty foreign languages—would have gone back to calling himself, as he dearly wanted to, Daniel Baciagalupo.

“Damn it, Ketchum!” the cook had said to his old friend. “If Carmella had been back in the kitchen with your blessed Ithaca, she would have shot Carl
twice
while he was still squinting at her. If the idiot
busboy
had been back there, I swear he would have pulled that trigger!”

“I’m sorry, Cookie. They were your friends—I didn’t know them. You should have told me there was a nonshooter—a fucking
pacifist!
—among them.”

“Stop blaming each other,” Danny would tell them repeatedly.

After all, it had been sixteen years—or it would be, this coming August—since Paul Polcari failed to pull the trigger of Ketchum’s single-shot 20-gauge. It had all worked out, hadn’t it? the cook was thinking, as he sipped his espresso and watched the Connecticut River run by his kitchen window.

They had once run logs down the Connecticut. In the dining room of the restaurant, which looked out upon Main Street and the marquee with the name of whatever movie was currently playing at the Latchis Theatre, the cook had framed a big black-and-white photograph of a logjam in Brattleboro. The photo had been taken years ago, of course; they weren’t moving logs over water in Vermont or New Hampshire anymore.

River driving had lasted longer in Maine, which was why Ketchum had worked so much in Maine in the sixties and seventies. But the last river drive in Maine was in 1976—from Moosehead Lake, down the Kennebec River. Naturally, Ketchum had been in the thick of it. He’d called the cook collect from some bar in Bath, Maine, not far from the mouth of the Kennebec.

“I’m trying to distract myself from some asshole shipyard worker, who is sorely tempting me to cause him a little bodily harm,” Ketchum began.

“Just remember you’re an out-of-stater, Ketchum. The local authorities will take the side of the shipyard worker.”

“Christ, Cookie—do you know what it costs to move logs over water? I mean getting them from where you cut them to the mill—about fifteen fucking cents a cord! That’s all a river drive will cost you.”

The cook had heard this argument too many times.
I could hang up
, Tony Angel thought, but he stayed on the phone—perhaps out of pity for the shipyard worker.

“It’ll cost you six or seven dollars a cord to get logs to the mill over
land!”
Ketchum shouted. “Most roads in northern New England aren’t worth shit to begin with, and now there’ll be nothing but asshole truck drivers on them! You may think it’s already a world of accidents, Cookie, but imagine an overloaded logging truck tipping over and crushing a carload of skiers!”

Ketchum had been right; there’d been some terrible accidents involving logging trucks. In northern New England, it used to be that you could drive all over the place—according to Ketchum, only a moose or a drunken driver could kill you. Now the trucks were on the big roads and the little ones; the asshole truck drivers were everywhere.

“This asshole country!” Ketchum had bellowed into the phone. “It’ll always find a way to make something that was cheap expensive, and to take a bunch of jobs away from fellas in the process!”

There was an abrupt end to their conversation. In that bar in Bath, the sounds of an argument rose indistinctly; a violent scuffle ensued. No doubt somebody in the bar had objected to Ketchum defaming the entire country—in all likelihood, the aforementioned asshole shipyard worker. (“Some asshole
patriot,”
Ketchum later called the fella.)

THE COOK LIKED LISTENING
to the radio when he started his pizza dough in the morning. Nunzi had taught him to always let a pizza dough rise twice; perhaps this was a silly habit, but he’d stuck to it. Paul Polcari, a superb pizza chef, had told Tony Angel that two rises were better than one, but that the second rise wasn’t absolutely necessary. In the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River, the cook’s pizza dough had lacked one ingredient he now believed was essential.

Long ago, he’d said to those fat sawmill workers’ wives—Dot and May, those bad old broads—that he thought his crust could stand to be sweeter. Dot (the one who’d tricked him into feeling her up) said, “You’re crazy, Cookie—you make the best pizza crust I’ve ever eaten.”

“Maybe it needs honey,” the then Dominic Baciagalupo had told her. But it turned out that he was out of honey; he’d tried adding a little maple syrup instead. That was a bad idea—you could taste the maple. Then he’d forgotten about the honey idea until May reminded him. She’d bumped him, on purpose, with her big hip while handing him the honey jar.

The cook had never forgiven May for her remark about Injun Jane—when she’d said that Dot and herself weren’t “Injun enough” to satisfy him.

“Here, Cookie,” May had said. “It’s honey for your pizza dough.”

“I changed my mind about it,” he told her, but the only reason he hadn’t tried putting honey in his dough was that he didn’t want to give May the satisfaction.

It was in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli where Paul Polcari first showed Tony Angel his pizza-dough recipe. In addition to the flour and water, and the yeast, Nunzi had always added a little olive oil to the dough—not more than a tablespoon or two, per pizza. Paul had shown the cook how to add an amount of honey about equal to the oil. The oil made the dough silky—you could bake the crust when it was thin, without its becoming too dry and brittle. The honey—as the cook himself had nearly discovered, back in Twisted River—made the crust a little sweet, but you never tasted the honey part.

Tony Angel rarely started a pizza dough without remembering how he’d
almost
invented the honey part of his recipe. The cook hadn’t thought of big Dot and even bigger May in years. He was fifty-nine that morning he thought of them in his Brattleboro kitchen. How old would those old bitches be? Tony Angel wondered; surely they’d be in their sixties. He remembered that May had a slew of grandchildren—some of them the same age as her children with her second husband.

Then the radio distracted Tony from his thoughts; he missed what he imagined as the
Dominic
in himself, and the radio reminded him of all he missed. It had been better back in Boston—both the radio station they’d listened to in Vicino di Napoli
and
the music. The music had been awful in the fifties, the cook thought, and then it got so unbelievably good in the sixties and seventies; now it was borderline awful again. He liked George Strait—“Amarillo by Morning” and “You Look So Good in Love”—but this very day they’d played two Michael Jackson songs in a row (“Billie Jean” and “Beat It”). Tony Angel detested Michael Jackson. The cook believed it was beneath Paul McCartney to have done “The Girl Is Mine” with Jackson; they had played that song, too, earlier in the morning. Now it was Duran Duran on the radio—“Hungry Like the Wolf.”

The music really had been better in Boston, in the sixties. Even old Joe Polcari had sung along with Bob Dylan. Paul Polcari would bang on the pasta pot to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and in addition to The Rolling Stones and all the Dylan, there were Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. Tony imagined he could still hear how Carmella sang “The Sound of Silence;” they had danced together in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli to “Eight Days a Week” and “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” And don’t forget there’d been “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles had changed everything.

The cook shut off the radio in his Brattleboro kitchen. He tried to sing “All You Need Is Love” to himself instead of listening to the radio, but neither Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo,
nor
Tony Angel had ever been able to sing, and it wasn’t long before that Beatles’ song began to resemble a song by The Doors (“Light My Fire”), which gave the cook a most unwelcome memory of his former daughter-in-law, Katie. She’d been a big fan of The Doors and The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The cook kind of liked The Doors and The Dead, but Katie had done a Grace Slick impersonation that made it impossible for Tony Angel to like Jefferson Airplane—“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” especially.

He remembered that time, just before Daniel and his wife and the baby had left for Iowa, when Daniel brought Joe to Boston to stay with the cook and Carmella. Daniel and Katie were going to a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York; someone in Katie’s la-di-da family had gotten her the tickets. It was August; over fifty thousand people had attended that concert. Carmella loved taking care of little Joe—he’d been a March baby, like his father, so the boy had been only five months old at the time—but both Katie and Daniel were drunk when they came to the North End to pick up their baby.

They must have been smashed when they left New York, and they’d driven drunk the whole way to Boston. Dominic would not let them take Joe. “You’re not driving back to New Hampshire with the baby—not in your condition,” the cook told his son.

That was when Katie did her sluttish swaying and singing
—vamping
her way through “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Neither Carmella nor the cook could bear to look at Grace Slick after Katie’s lewd, provocative performance.

“Come on, Dad,” Danny said to his father. “We’re fine to drive. Let little Joe come with us—we can’t all sleep in this apartment.”

“You’ll just have to, Daniel,” his father told him. “Joe can sleep in our room, with Carmella and me, and you and Katie will just have to find a way to fit in the single bed in your room—neither one of you is a large person,” the cook reminded the young couple.

Danny was angry, but he held his temper. It was Katie who behaved badly. She went into the bathroom and peed with the door open—they could all hear her. Daniel gave his dad a look that said, Well, what did you expect? Carmella went into her bedroom and closed the door. (Little Joe was already asleep in there.) When Katie came out of the bathroom, she was naked.

Katie spoke to Danny as if her father-in-law weren’t there. “Come on. If we have to do it in a single bed, let’s get started.”

Of course the cook knew that his son and Katie didn’t
really
have noisy sex then and there, but that’s what Katie wanted Danny’s dad and Carmella to believe; she carried on like she was having an orgasm every minute. Both Danny and his wife were so drunk that they slept right through little Joe’s nightmare later that night.