Last Night in Twisted River (75 page)

They heated the pasta pots of lake water to a near boil on the gas stove, and with their two bodies in that big bathtub, the tub was full to the brim; Danny had not imagined it was possible to fill that giant bathtub, but not even the novelist had ever imagined that tub with a
giantess
in it.

Amy talked him through the history of her myriad tattoos. The when and the where and the why of the tattoos held Danny’s attention for the better part of an hour, or more—both in the warm bathtub and in the bed in that bedroom with the propane fireplace. He’d not taken a close look at Amy’s tattoos before—not when she was spattered with mud and pig shit, and not afterward, when she was wearing just a towel. Danny felt it would have been improper and unwelcome to have stared at her then.

He stared at her now; he took all of her in. Many of Amy’s tattoos had a martial-arts theme. She’d tried kickboxing in Bangkok; for a couple of years, she had lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she’d competed in an unsuccessful start-up tour of Ultimate Fighting for women. (Some of those Brazilian broads were tougher than the Thai kickboxers, Lady Sky said.)

Tattoos have their own stories, and Danny heard them all. But the one that mattered most to Amy was the name Bradley; that had been her son’s name, and her father’s. She’d called the boy both Brad and Bradley, and (after he died) she’d had the two-year-old’s given name tattooed on her right hip where it jutted out—precisely where Amy had once carried her child when he was a toddler.

In explaining how how she’d borne the weight of her little boy’s death, Amy pointed out to Danny that her hips were the strongest part of her strong body. (Danny didn’t doubt it.)

Amy was happy to discover that Danny could cook, because she couldn’t. The venison was good, though there wasn’t quite enough of it. Danny had sliced some potatoes very thinly, and stir-fried them with the onions, peppers, and mushrooms, so they didn’t go hungry. Danny served a green salad after the meal, because the cook had taught him that this was the “civilized” way to serve a salad—though it was almost never served this way in a restaurant.

It pleased the writer no end that Lady Sky was a beer drinker. “I found out long ago,” she told him, “that I drink everything alcoholic as fast as I drink a beer—so I better stick with beer, if I don’t want to kill myself. I’m pretty much over wanting to kill myself,” Amy added.

He was pretty much over that part, too, Danny told her. He had learned to like Hero’s company, the farting notwithstanding, and the writer had two cleaning ladies looking after him; they would all be disappointed in him if he killed himself.

Amy had met one of the cleaning ladies, of course, and—weather permitting—Lady Sky would probably meet Tireless tomorrow, or the next day. As for Lupita, Amy called the Mexican cleaning woman a better guard dog than Hero; Lady Sky was sure that she and Lupita would become great friends.

“I have no right to be happy,” Danny told his angel, when they were falling asleep in each other’s arms that first night.

“Everyone has a right to be a
little
happy, asshole,” Amy told him.

Ketchum would have liked how Lady Sky used the
asshole
word, the writer was thinking. It was a word choice after the old logger’s heart, Danny knew, which—in his sleep—led him back to the novel he was dreaming.

AMY MARTIN AND DANIEL BACIAGALUPO
had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner’s island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly—as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth—the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.

Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo’s life when Joe wasn’t loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum’s left hand would live forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend.

One mid-February day, a snowstorm blew across Lake Huron from western Canada; all of Georgian Bay was blanketed by it. When the writer and Lady Sky woke up, the storm was gone. It was a dazzling morning.

Danny let the dog out and made the coffee; when the writer brought some coffee to Amy in the bedroom, he saw that she’d fallen back to sleep. Lady Sky had been traveling a long way, and the life she’d led would have tired anyone out; Danny let her sleep. He fed the dog and wrote Amy a note, not telling her he was falling in love with her. He simply told her that she knew where to find him—in his writing shack. Danny thought that he would have breakfast later, whenever Lady Sky woke up again. He would take some coffee with him to the writing shack, and start a fire in the woodstove there; he’d already built up the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin.

“Come on, Hero,” the writer said, and together they went out in the fresh snow. Danny was relieved to see that his father’s likeness, that wind-bent little pine, had survived the storm.

IT WASN’T THE KETCHUM
character who should
begin
the first chapter, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. It was better to keep the Ketchum character hidden for a while—to make the reader wait to meet him. Sometimes, those most important characters need a little concealment. It would be better, Danny thought, if the first chapter—and the novel—began with the lost boy. The Angel character, who was not who he seemed, was a good decoy; in storytelling terms, Angel was a
hook
. The young Canadian (who was
not
a Canadian) was where the writer should start.

It won’t take long now, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. And whenever he found that first sentence, there would be someone in his life the writer dearly desired to read it to!

“Legally or not, and with or without proper papers,” Danny wrote, “Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire.”

It’s okay, the writer thought, but it’s not the beginning—the mistaken idea that Angel had crossed the border comes
later
.

“In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin,” Danny wrote. “It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there.”

Yes, yes—the writer thought, more impatiently now. But these last two sentences were too technical for a beginning; he thumbtacked these sentences to the wall alongside the other lines, and then added this sentence to the mix: “The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.”

Almost
, Daniel Baciagalupo thought. Immediately, another sentence emerged—as if Twisted River itself were allowing these sentences to bob to the surface. “The repeated
thunk-thunk
of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel’s pike pole—more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished.”

Fine, fine, Danny thought, but it was too
busy
for a beginning sentence; there were too many distractions in that sentence.

Maybe the very idea of
distractions
distracted him. The writer’s thoughts leapt ahead—too far ahead—to Ketchum. There was something decidedly parenthetical about the new sentence. “(Only Ketchum can kill Ketchum.)” Definitely a keeper, Danny thought, but most definitely
not
first-chapter material.

Danny was shivering in his writing shack. The fire in the wood-stove was taking its time to heat the little room. Normally, Danny was chopping a hole in the ice and hauling a couple of buckets of water out of the bay while the writing shack was warming up; this morning, he’d skipped the chopping and the hauling. (Later in this glorious day, he would have Lady Sky to help him with the chores.)

Just then, without even trying to think of it—in fact, at that moment, Daniel Baciagalupo had reached out to rub Hero behind the dog’s good ear—the first sentence came to him. The writer felt it rising into view, as if from underwater; the sentence came into sight the way that apple-juice jar with his dad’s ashes had bobbed to the surface, just before Ketchum shot it.

“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.”

Oh, God—here I go again—I’m
starting!
the writer thought.

He’d lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels—how they simply couldn’t be stopped. He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning—as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SPECIAL THANKS TO THESE CHEFS AND RESTAURATEURS FOR
their time and expertise: Bonnie Bruce at Up for Breakfast in Manchester, Vermont; Ray Chen and Christal Siewertsen at The Inn at West View Farm in Dorset, Vermont; Georges Gurnon and Steve Silvestro at Pastis Express in Toronto; Cheryl and Dana Markey at Mistral’s in Winhall, Vermont.

My appreciation to these friends and relations, and various expert readers of earlier drafts of the manuscript; they also assisted me with my research: in New Hampshire, Bill Altenburg, Bayard Kennett, John Yount; in Vermont, David Calicchio, Rick Kelley; in Ontario, James Chatto, Dean Cooke, Don Scale, Marty Schwartz, Helga Stephenson.

In addition, to my wife, Janet, and my son Everett, to whom I read aloud the first draft of the manuscript; to two full-time assistants, Alyssa Barrett and Emily Copeland, who transcribed and proofread all the drafts; and to my editor and copy editor, Amy Edelman—
un abbràccio
.

SOURCES

Barry, James.
Georgian Bay: The Sixth Great Lake
. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., Ltd., 1968.

Chatto, James. “Host Story.”
Toronto Life
, January 2006.

Gove, Bill.
Log Drives on the Connecticut River
. Littleton, N.H.: Bondcliff Books, 2003.

Gove, Bill.
Logging Railroads Along the Pemigewasset River
. Littleton, N.H.: Bondcliff Books, 2006.

Pinette, Richard E.
Northwoods Heritage: Authentic Short Accounts of
the Northland in Another Era
. Colebrook, N.H.: Liebl Printing Company, 1992.

Riccio, Anthony V.
Boston’s North End: Images and Recollections of an Italian-American Neighborhood
. Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1998.

Stone, Robert.
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
OHN
I
RVING
published his first novel,
Setting Free the Bears
, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for the novel
The World According to Garp
. He also received an O. Henry Award, in 1981, for the short story “Interior Space.”

In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for
The Cider House Rules
—a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Last Night in Twisted River
is John Irving’s twelfth novel.
www.John-Irving.com

Last Night in Twisted River
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

HAL LEONARD CORPORATION: Excerpt from “After the Gold Rush,” words and music by Neil Young, copyright © 1970 by Broken Arrow Music Corporation. Copyright Renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

RAM’S HORN MUSIC: Excerpt from “Tangled Up in Blue,” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Irving, John
Last night in twisted river: a novel / John Irving.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-900-0
1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction.
3. Fugitives from justice—Fiction.
4. Loggers—Fiction. 5. Coos County (N.H.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3559.R8l37 2009    813′.54—dc22    2009014449

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