Last Night in Twisted River (30 page)

“I just want to be sure you’re okay,” Danny said to Joe, but the seventeen-year-old—child or man, or both—surely knew that by the
okay
word his father was implying much more than
okay
. The writer meant
thriving;
Danny also meant
safe
, as if regular father-son conversations could possibly ensure Joe’s safety. (The child’s or the man’s.) Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer’s peculiar burden—namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.

The day he showed Joe the letter about Katie, it struck Danny Angel that the news of Katie’s death had an offstage, unreal quality; the distant report, from a stranger, had the effect of turning Katie into a minor fictional character. And if Danny had kept up the drinking with her, he would have turned out the same way—either an accident or a suicide, the finale disappointingly offstage. His dad had been right about the drinking; maybe not being able to handle it
was
, as his father had suggested, “genetic.”

“AT LEAST HE HASN’T WRITTEN
about Rosie—not yet,” Ketchum wrote to his old friend.

Tony Angel had liked Ketchum’s letters better before the old logger, who was now sixty-six, had learned to read. That lady he’d met in the library—“the schoolteacher” was all Ketchum ever called her—well, she’d done the job, but Ketchum was even crankier now that he could read and write, and the cook was convinced that Ketchum no longer listened as attentively. When you don’t read, you
have
to listen; maybe those books the woodsman had heard were the books he’d understood best. Now Ketchum complained about almost everything he read. It also might have been that Tony Angel missed Six-Pack’s handwriting. (In Ketchum’s opinion, by the way, the cook had gotten crankier, too.)

Danny definitely missed Six-Pack Pam’s influence on Ketchum; possibly his dependence on Pam had made Ketchum less lonely than he seemed to Danny now, and Danny had long ago accepted Six-Pack’s role as a go-between in Ketchum’s correspondence with the young writer and his dad.

Danny was forty-one in 1983. When men turn forty, most of them no longer feel young, but Joe—at eighteen—knew he had a relatively young dad. Even the girls Joe’s age (and younger) at Northfield Mount Hermon had told the boy that his famous father was
very
good-looking. Maybe Danny was good-looking, but he wasn’t nearly as good-looking as Joe.

The young man was almost eight inches taller than his dad and grandfather. Katie, the boy’s mother, had been a noticeably small woman, but the men in the Callahan family were uniformly tall—not heavy but very tall. Their height went with their “patrician airs,” the cook had declared.

He and Carmella had hated the wedding; they’d felt snubbed the whole time. It had been a lavish affair, at an expensive private club in Manhattan—Katie was already a couple of months pregnant—and for all the money the party cost, the food had been inedible. The Callahans weren’t food people; they were the kind of ice-cube suckers who had too many cocktails and filled themselves with endless hors d’oeuvres. They looked like they had so much money that they didn’t need to eat—that was what Tony Angel told Ketchum, who was still driving logs on the Kennebec at the time. He’d told Danny he had too much to do in Maine and couldn’t come to the wedding. But the real reason Ketchum hadn’t gone to the wedding was that the cook had asked him not to come.

“I know you, Ketchum—you’ll bring your Browning knife and a twelve-gauge. You’ll kill every Callahan you can identify, Katie included, and then you’ll go to work on a couple of Danny’s fingers with the Browning.”

“I know you feel the same way I do, Cookie.”

“Yes, I do,” the cook admitted to his best friend, “and Carmella even agrees with us. But we’ve got to let Daniel do this his way. The Callahan whore is going to have
someone’s
baby, and that baby will keep mine out of this disastrous war.”

So Ketchum had stayed in Maine. The logger would later say it was a good thing Cookie had gone to the wedding. When Joe turned out to be tall, the cook might have been inclined to believe that his beloved Daniel couldn’t have been the boy’s father. After all, Katie fucked anyone she wanted to; she could easily have been knocked up by someone else and then married Daniel. But the wedding offered proof that there was a gene for tall men in the Callahan family, and Joe turned out to be the spitting image of Danny; it was just that the top of his dad’s head came up only to the top of the young man’s chest.

Joe had the body of an oarsman, but he wasn’t a rower. For the most part, he’d grown up in Vermont—the boy was an experienced downhill skier. His dad didn’t much care for the sport; as a runner, he preferred cross-country skiing, when he skied at all. Danny had continued to run; it still helped him to think, and to imagine things.

Joe was a wrestler at Northfield Mount Hermon, though he didn’t have the body of a wrestler. It was probably Ketchum’s influence that made Joe choose wrestling, the cook thought. (Ketchum was just a barroom brawler, but wrestling came closer to describing Ketchum’s favorite kind of fight than boxing did. Usually, Ketchum didn’t hit people until he got them down on the ground.)

The first time Ketchum had gone to one of Joe’s wrestling matches at NMH, the barroom brawler hadn’t understood the sport very well. Joe had scored a takedown, and his opponent lay stretched out on his side, when Ketchum shouted,
“Now
hit him—hit him
now!”

“Ketchum,” Danny said, “there’s no hitting allowed—it’s a wrestling match.”

“Christ, that’s the best time to hit a fella,” Ketchum said, “when you’ve got him stretched out like that.”

Later in that same match, Joe had his opponent in a near-pin position; Joe had sunk a half nelson around the other wrestler’s neck and was tilting him toward his back.

“Joe’s got his arm around the wrong side of the neck,” Ketchum complained to the cook. “You can’t choke someone with your arm around the
back
of a fella’s neck—you’ve got to be on his fucking throat!”

“Joe’s trying to pin that guy on his back, Ketchum—he’s not trying to
choke
him!” Tony Angel told his old friend.

“Choking is illegal,” Danny explained.

Joe won his match, and, after all the matches were over, Ketchum went to shake the boy’s hand. That was when Ketchum stepped on a wrestling mat for the first time. When the woodsman felt the mat yield under his foot, he stepped quickly back to the hardwood floor of the gym; it was as if he’d stepped on something alive. “Shit, that’s the first problem,” Ketchum said. “The mat’s too soft—you can’t really hurt a guy on it.”

“Ketchum, you’re not trying to hurt your opponent—just pin him, or beat him on points,” Danny tried to explain. But the next thing they knew, Ketchum was attempting to show Joe a better way to crank someone over on his back.

“You get him down on his belly, and pull one of his arms behind his back,” Ketchum said with enthusiasm. “Then you get a little leverage under the fella’s forearm, and you drive his right elbow till it touches his left ear. Believe me, he’ll turn over—if he doesn’t want to lose his whole shoulder!”

“You can’t bend someone’s arm past a forty-five-degree angle,” Joe told the old logger. “Submission holds and choke holds used to be legal, but nowadays you can’t make someone yield to pain—that’s called a submission hold—and you can’t choke anyone. Those things aren’t legal—not anymore.”

“Constipated Christ—it’s like everything else!” Ketchum complained. “They take what was once a good thing and fuck it up with
rules!”

But after Ketchum had seen a few more of Joe’s matches, he grew to like high school wrestling. “Hell, to be honest with you, Cookie, when I first saw it, I thought it was a sissy way to fight. But once you get the idea of it, you can actually tell who would win the match if it was taking place in a parking lot and there was no referee.”

Joe was surprised by how many matches Ketchum attended. The old woodsman drove all over New England to see Joe and the NMH team wrestle. They had a pretty good team in Joe’s senior year. In Joe’s four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, Ketchum definitely saw more of the boy’s wrestling matches than his father or grandfather did.

The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel’s Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson’s wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches—the season-ending tournaments, for example—were on the weekends. Danny Angel got to see more than half of his son’s matches, but the writer took a lot of publishing-related trips. It was Ketchum who went to almost all of Joe’s “fights,” as the logger was inclined to call them.

“You missed a good fight,” Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Danny to tell them the results of young Joe’s wrestling matches.

UNTIL HE HAD A BESTSELLER
with
The Kennedy Fathers
, Danny didn’t know that publishing houses had publicity departments. Now that his publishers were promoting his books, Danny felt an obligation to do some traveling on the books’ behalf. And the translations were published at different times, rarely simultaneously with the English-language editions. This meant that it was unusual for a year to go by without Danny going somewhere to do a book tour.

When it wasn’t wrestling season and his dad was traveling, Joe often spent weekends at his grandfather’s apartment in Brattleboro. Sometimes his friends from Northfield Mount Hermon would have their parents take them out to dinner at Tony Angel’s Italian restaurant. Occasionally, Joe would help out in the kitchen. It was like old times, and
not
like them, the cook would think—seeing his grandson instead of his son in a working kitchen, or busing tables. Tony, né Dominic, was reminded that he’d not seen as much of Daniel in those prep-school years as he now saw of Joe. Because of this, there was something bittersweet about the cook’s relationship with his grandson; almost magically, there were times when Tony Angel got to relax with Joe—without once judging the boy the way the cook had felt compelled to judge (and criticize) Daniel.

The other guys on Joe’s wrestling team had grown fond of Ketchum. “Is he your uncle—that tough-looking man with the scar?” the wrestlers would ask Joe.

“No, Ketchum’s just a friend of the family—he was a river driver,” Joe would tell them.

One day, Joe’s wrestling coach asked him, “Did that big man with the hard handshake ever wrestle? He kind of looks like he might have, or could have.”

“Not officially,” Joe answered.

“What about that scar?” the coach asked Joe. “That’s a nasty one—better than your average head-butt, anyway.”

“That was no head-butt—that was a bear,” Joe told the coach.

“A
bear!”

“Just don’t ever ask Ketchum about it,” Joe said. “It’s a terrible story. Ketchum had to kill the bear, but he didn’t want to. He
likes
bears, generally.”

There was a bit of the writer Danny Angel in Joe Baciagalupo, clearly—a deeper ingredient than a physical resemblance. But Danny worried that there was something reckless about his son; it wasn’t a Baciagalupo recklessness of the
imagination
, either. It also wasn’t the wrestling, which was nothing Danny had ever wanted to do—and the cook couldn’t have imagined doing it, not with that limp. In fact, the wrestling seemed safe enough—once Joe had learned a little about it. There was another element in young Joe that Danny didn’t recognize as coming from himself or his dad.

If there was an active Katie Callahan gene in the boy, maybe it was his penchant for risk-taking. He skied too fast, he drove a car too fast, and he was more than fast with girls; it seemed to his writer father that Joe just took too many chances.

“Maybe that’s the Katie in him,” Danny had said to his dad.

“Maybe,” the cook replied; Tony Angel didn’t like to think that
anything
of that awful woman had gotten into his grandson. “Then again, it might be your mother, Daniel. Rosie was a risk-taker, after all—just ask Ketchum.”

In the time he’d spent looking at those photographs of his mother, Danny could have written a novel—though he’d stopped looking at the photos, for a while, after he learned the truth about his mom and Ketchum and his father. He’d once tried to give the photos to his dad, but Tony Angel wouldn’t take them. “No, they’re yours—I can see her very clearly, Daniel.” His father tapped his temple. “Up here.”

“Maybe Ketchum would like the photos,” Danny said.

“Ketchum has his own pictures of your mother, Daniel,” the cook told him.

Over time, a few of those photos Danny had pressed flat between the pages of the novels left behind in Twisted River—some of them, but no way near all of them—had been sent to him by Ketchum. “Here, I found this picture in one of her books,” the accompanying letter from Ketchum would say. “I thought you should have it, Danny.”

Albeit reluctantly, Danny had kept the photos. Joe liked to look at them. Perhaps the cook was right: Maybe Joe got some of his risk-taking or reckless instincts from his grandmother, not from Katie. When Danny looked at his mom’s pictures, he saw a pretty woman with intense blue eyes, but the drunken rebel who’d do-si-doed two drunken men on the black ice of Twisted River—well, that element of Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wasn’t evident in the photos her son had kept.

“Just keep an eye on his drinking,” the cook had told his son—he meant young Joe’s drinking. (It was Tony Angel’s way of inquiring if his eighteen-year-old grandson was drinking yet.)

“I suppose there’s the occasional party,” Danny told his dad, “but Joe doesn’t drink around me.”

“The kind of drinking Joe might do around you isn’t the kind we need to worry about,” the cook said.

Joe’s drinking would bear watching, the writer Danny Angel imagined. As for his son’s genetic package, Danny knew more than he cared to remember about the boy’s mom, Katie Callahan; she’d had one whale of an alcohol problem. And in Katie’s case, she’d done more than the “occasional” marijuana, when she and Danny had been a couple—she’d smoked more than a “little” pot, Danny knew.