Last Night in Twisted River (61 page)

“So that the hunters don’t smell like people,” Danny told her.

“My goodness,” Carmella said.

“Can I help you folks?” an old man asked them suspiciously.

He was an unlikely-looking salesman, with a Browning knife on his belt and a portly appearance. His belly hung over his belt buckle, and his red-and-black flannel shirt was reminiscent of what Ketchum usually wore—the salesman’s camouflage fleece vest notwithstanding. (Ketchum wouldn’t have been caught dead in camouflage. “It’s not like a war,” the woodsman had said. “The critters can’t shoot back.”)

“I could use some directions, maybe,” Danny said to the salesman. “We have to find Lost Nation Road, but not until tomorrow morning.”

“It ain’t called that no more—not for a long time,” the salesman said, his suspicion deepening.

“I was told it’s off the road to Akers Pond—” Danny started to say, but the salesman interrupted him.

“It is, but it ain’t called Lost Nation—almost nobody calls it that, not nowadays.”

“Does the road have a new name, then?” Danny asked.

The salesman was eyeing Carmella disagreeably. “It don’t have a name—there’s just a sign that says somethin’ about small engine repairs. It’s the first thing you come to, off Akers Pond Road—you can’t miss it,” the old man said, but not encouragingly.

“Well, I’m sure we’ll find it,” Danny told him. “Thank you.”

“Who are you lookin’ for?” the salesman asked, still staring at Carmella.

“Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella answered.

“Ketchum
would call it Lost Nation Road!” the salesman said emphatically, as if that settled everything that was wrong with the name. “Is Ketchum expectin’ you?” the old man asked Danny.

“Yes, actually, he is, but not until tomorrow morning,” Danny repeated.

“I wouldn’t pay a visit to Ketchum if he
wasn’t
expectin’ me,” the salesman said. “Not if I was you.”

“Thank you again,” Danny told the old man, taking Carmella’s arm. They were trying to leave L. L. Cote’s, but the salesman stopped them.

“Only an Injun would call it Lost Nation Road,” he said. “That proves it!”

“Proves
what?”
Danny asked him. “Ketchum isn’t an Indian.”

“Ha!” the salesman scoffed. “Half-breeds are Injuns!”

Danny could sense Carmella’s rising indignation—almost as physically as he could feel her weight against his arm. He had managed to steer her to the door of the sporting-goods store when the salesman called after them. “That fella Ketchum is a Lost Nation unto himself!” the salesman shouted. Then, as if he’d thought better of it—and with a certain measure of panic in the afterthought—he added: “Don’t tell him I said so.”

“I suppose Ketchum shops here, from time to time—doesn’t he?” Danny asked; he was enjoying the fat old salesman’s moment of fear.

“His money’s as good as anybody’s, isn’t it?” the salesman said sourly.

“I’ll tell him you said so,” Danny said, guiding Carmella out the door.

“Is Mr. Ketchum an Indian?” she asked Danny, when they were back in the car.

“I don’t know—maybe partly,” Danny answered. “I never asked him.”

“My goodness—I’ve never seen a
bearded
Indian,” Carmella said. “Not in the movies, anyway.”

THEY DROVE WEST OUT OF TOWN
on Route 26. There was something called the Errol Cream Barrel & Chuck Wagon, and what appeared to be an immaculately well-kept campground and trailer park called Saw Dust Alley. They passed the Umbagog Snowmobile Association, too. That seemed to be about it for Errol. Danny didn’t turn off the highway at Akers Pond Road; he simply noted where it was. He was sure Ketchum would be easy to find in the morning—Lost Nation or no Lost Nation.

A moment later, just as it was growing dark, they drove alongside a field encircled by a high fence. Naturally, Carmella read the sign on the fence out loud. “‘Please Do Not Harass the Buffalo’—well, my goodness, who would do such a thing?” she said, indignant as ever. But they saw no buffalo—only the fence and the sign.

The resort hotel in Dixville Notch was called The Balsams—for hikers and golfers in the warm-weather months, Danny supposed. (In the winter, for skiers certainly.) It was vast, and largely uninhabited on a Monday night. Danny and Carmella were practically alone in the dining room, where Carmella sighed deeply after they’d ordered their dinner. She had a glass of red wine. Danny had a beer. He’d stopped drinking red wine after his dad died, though Ketchum gave him endless shit about his decision to drink only beer. “You don’t have to lay off the red wine
now!”
Ketchum had shouted at him.

“I don’t care if I can’t sleep anymore,” Danny had told the old logger.

Now Carmella, after sighing, appeared to be holding her breath before beginning. “I guess it goes without saying that I’ve read all your books—more than once,” she began.

“Really?” Danny asked her, feigning innocence of where this conversation was headed.

“Of
course
I have!” Carmella cried. For someone who’s so happy, what is she angry with me for? Danny was wondering, when Carmella said, “Oh, Secondo—your dad was
so proud
of you, for being a famous writer and everything.”

It was Danny’s turn to sigh; he held his breath, for just a second or two.
“And you
?” he asked her, not so innocently this time.

“It’s just that your stories, and sometimes the characters themselves, are so—what is the word I’m looking for?
—unsavory,”
Carmella started in, but she must have seen something in Danny’s face that made her stop.

“I see,” he said. Danny might have looked at her as if she were another interviewer, some journalist who hadn’t done her homework, and whatever Carmella
really
thought about his writing, it suddenly wasn’t worth it to her to say this to him—not to her darling Secondo, her surrogate son—for hadn’t the world hurt him as much as it had hurt her?

“Tell me what you’re writing now, Secondo,” Carmella suddenly blurted out, smiling warmly at him. “You’ve been rather a long time between books again—haven’t you? Tell me what you’re up to. I’m just
dying
to know what’s next!”

NOT MUCH LATER
, after Carmella went to bed, some men were watching
Monday Night Football
at the bar, but Danny had already gone to his room, where he left the television dark. He also left the curtains open, confident in how lightly he slept—knowing that the early-morning light would wake him. He was only a little worried about getting Carmella up and going in the morning; Danny knew that Ketchum would wait for them if they were late. The lamp on the night table was on, as Danny lay in bed, and there on the table, too, was the jar containing his father’s ashes. It would be Danny’s last night with the cook’s ashes, and he lay looking at them—as if they might suddenly speak, or give him some other indication of his dad’s last wishes.

“Well, Pop, I know you
said
you wanted this, but I hope you haven’t changed your mind,” Danny spoke up in the hotel room. As for the ashes, they were in what was formerly a container of Amos’ New York Steak Spice—the listed ingredients had once been sea salt, pepper, herbs, and spices—and the cook must have bought it at his favorite fancy meat market in their neighborhood of Toronto, because Olliffe was the name on the label.

Danny had gotten rid of most, but not all, of the contents; after he’d placed his father’s ashes in, there’d been room to put some of the herbs and spices back in as well, and Danny had done so. If someone had questioned him about the container at U.S. Customs—if they’d opened the jar and had a whiff—it still would have smelled like steak spice. (Perhaps the pepper would have made the customs officer sneeze!)

But Danny had brought the cook’s ashes through U.S. Customs without any questioning. Now he sat up in bed and opened the jar, cautiously sniffing the contents. Knowing what was in the container, Danny wouldn’t have wanted to sprinkle it on a steak, but it still smelled like pepper and herbs and spices—it even
looked
like crushed herbs and a variety of spices, not human ashes. How fitting for a cook, that his remains had taken up residency in a jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice!

Dominic Baciagalupo, his writer son thought, might have gotten a kick out of that.

Danny turned out the lamp on the night table and lay in bed in the dark. “Last chance, Pop,” he whispered in the quiet room. “If you don’t have anything else to say, we’re going back to Twisted River.” But the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, maintained their silence.

DANNY ANGEL ONCE WENT ELEVEN YEARS
between novels—between
East of Bangor
and
Baby in the Road
. Again, a death in the family would delay him, though Carmella had been wrong to suggest that the writer was once more taking “rather a long time between books.” It had been only six years since his most recent novel was published.

As had happened with Joe, after the cook was murdered, the novel Danny had been writing suddenly looked inconsequential to him. But this time there was no thought of revising the book—he’d simply thrown it away, all of it. And he had started a new and completely different novel, almost immediately. The new writing emerged from those months when what remained of his privacy had been taken from him; the writing itself was like a landscape suddenly and sharply liberated from a fog.

“The publicity was awful,” Carmella bluntly said, at dinner. But this time, Danny had expected the publicity. After all, a famous writer’s father had been murdered, and the writer himself had shot the killer—irrefutably, in self-defense. What’s more, Danny Angel and his dad had been on the run for nearly forty-seven years. The internationally bestselling author had left the United States for Canada, but
not
for political reasons—just as Danny always claimed, without revealing the actual circumstances. He and his dad had been running away from a crazy ex-cop!

Naturally, there were those in the American media who would say that the cook and his son should have gone to the police in the first place. (Did they miss the fact that Carl
was
the police?) Of course the Canadian press was indignant that “American violence” had followed the famous author and his father across the border. In retrospect, this was really a reference to the guns themselves—both the cowboy’s absurd Colt .45 and Ketchum’s Christmas present to Danny, the Winchester 20-gauge that had blown away the deputy sheriff’s throat. And in Canada, much was made of the fact that the writer’s possession of the shotgun was illegal. In the end, Danny wasn’t charged. Ketchum’s 20-gauge Ranger had been confiscated—that was all.

“That shotgun saved your life!” Ketchum had bellowed to Danny. “And it was a
present
, for Christ’s sake!
Who
confiscated it? I’ll blow his balls off!”

“Let it go, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I don’t need a shotgun, not anymore.”

“You have fans—and whatever their opposites are called—don’t you?” the old logger pointed out. “Some
critters
among them, I’ll bet.”

As for the question Danny was asked the most, by both the American and the Canadian media, it was: “Are you going to write about this?”

He’d learned to be icy in answering the oft-repeated question. “Not immediately,” Danny always said.

“But
are
you going to write about it?” Carmella had asked him again, over dinner.

He talked about the book he was writing instead. It was going well. In fact, he was writing like the wind—the words wouldn’t stop. This one would be another long novel, but Danny didn’t think it would take long to write. He didn’t know why it was coming so easily; from the first sentence, the story had flowed. He quoted the first sentence to Carmella. (Later, Danny would realize what a fool he’d been—to have expected her to be impressed!) “‘In the closed restaurant, after hours, the late cook’s son—the maestro’s sole surviving family member—worked in the dark kitchen.’” And from that mysterious beginning, Danny had composed the novel’s title:
In the After-Hours Restaurant
.

To the writer’s thinking, Carmella’s reaction was as predictable as her conversation. “It’s about Gamba?” she asked.

No, he tried to explain; the story was about a man who’s lived in the shadow of his famous father, a masterful cook who has recently died and left his only son (already in his sixties) a lost and furtive soul. In the rest of the world’s judgment, the son seems somewhat retarded. He’s lived his whole life with his father; he has worked as a sous chef to his dad in the restaurant the well-respected cook made famous. Now alone, the son has never paid his own bills before; he’s not once bought his own clothes. While the restaurant continues to employ him, perhaps out of a lingering mourning for the deceased cook, the son is virtually worthless as a sous chef without his father’s guidance. Soon the restaurant will be forced to fire him, or else demote him to being a dishwasher.

What the son discovers, however, is that he can “contact” the dead cook’s spirit by cooking up a storm in the nighttime kitchen—but only after the restaurant is closed. There, long after hours, the son secretly slaves to teach himself his dad’s recipes—everything the sous chef failed to learn from his father when the great cook was alive. And when the former sous chef masters a recipe to his dad’s satisfaction, the spirit of the deceased cook advises his son on more practical matters—where to buy his clothes, what bills to pay first, how often and by whom the car should be serviced. (His father’s ghost, the son soon realizes, has forgotten a few things—such as the fact that his somewhat retarded son never learned to drive a car.)

“Gamba is
a
ghost?”
Carmella cried.

“I suppose I could have called the novel
The Retarded Sous Chef,”
Danny said sarcastically, “but I thought
In the After-Hours Restaurant
was a better title.”

“Secondo, someone might think it’s a cookbook,” Carmella cautioned him.