John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Since Charlotte ’s family used the bedroom in the main cabin only sparingly, as a guest room, Danny kept some of his winter clothing in the closet year-round-just his boots, his warmest parka, his snow pants, and his ski hats. Naturally, Charlotte’s and her family’s summer paraphernalia was everywhere-with new photographs on the walls every winter-but Charlotte had left Danny’s writing shack as it was. She’d found a couple of pictures of Ketchum with the cook, and two or three of Joe, which she had hung in the shack-perhaps to make Danny feel welcome there, not that she hadn’t already done enough to make him feel warmly invited to use the place.

Charlotte ’s husband, the Frenchman, was evidently the cook in their family, because he left notes for Danny in the kitchen about any new equipment that was there. Danny left notes for the Frenchman, too, and they traded presents every year-gadgets for the kitchen and sundry cooking ware.

The more recently restored sleeping cabins-where Charlotte and her husband, and their children, slept every summer-were understood to be off-limits to Danny in the winter. The buildings remained locked; the electricity and propane had been turned off, and the plumbing drained. But, every winter, Danny would at least once peer in the windows-no curtains were necessary on a private family island in Shawanaga Bay. The writer merely wanted to see the new photographs on the walls, and to get a look at what new toys and books the kids might have; this wasn’t really an invasion of Charlotte ’s privacy, was it? And, if only from such a wintry and far-removed perspective, Charlotte ’s family looked like a happy one to Daniel Baciagalupo. The notes back and forth with the Frenchman had all but replaced Charlotte ’s now-infrequent phone calls from the West Coast, and Danny still stayed out of Toronto at that September time of the year, when he knew Charlotte and her director husband were in town for the film festival.

Ketchum had advised the writer to live in the country. To the veteran river driver, Danny hadn’t seemed like a city person.

Well, that the writer spent a mere ten weeks on Turner Island in Georgian Bay didn’t exactly constitute living in the country; though he traveled a lot nowadays, Danny lived in Toronto the rest of the year. Yet-at least from early January till the middle of March-that lonely island in Shawanaga Bay and the town of Pointe au Baril Station were extremely isolated. (As Ketchum used to say, “You notice the birch trees more when there’s snow.”) There were not more than two hundred people in Pointe au Baril in the winter.

Kennedy’s, which was good for groceries and home hardware, stayed open most of the week in the winter months. There was the Haven restaurant out on Route 69, where they served alcohol and had a pool table. The Haven had a fondness for Christmas wreaths, and they displayed an abundance of Santas-including a bass with a Santa Claus hat. While the most popular food with the snowmobilers were the chicken wings and the onion rings and the French fries, Danny stuck to the BLTs and the coleslaw-when he went there at all, which was rarely.

Larry’s Tavern was out on 69, too-Danny had stayed there with Ketchum on their deer-hunting trips in the Bayfield and Pointe au Baril area-though there was already a rumor that Larry’s would be sold to make room for the new highway. They were always widening 69, but for now the Shell station was still operating; supposedly, the Shell station was the only place in Pointe au Baril where you could buy porn magazines. (Not very good ones, if you could trust Ketchum’s evaluation.)

It could be forlorn at that time of year, and there wasn’t a lot to talk about, except for the repeated observation that the main channel didn’t freeze over for all but a week or two. And all winter long, both the gossip and the local news provided various gruesome details of the accidents out on 69; there were a lot of accidents on that highway. This winter, there’d already been a five-vehicle pileup at the intersection with Go Home Lake Road, or near Little Go Home Bay-Danny could never keep the two of them straight. (To those year-round residents who didn’t know he was a famous author, Daniel Baciagalupo was just another out-of-it American.)

Naturally, the liquor store-out on 69, across from the bait shop-was always busy, as was the Pointe au Baril nursing station, where an ambulance driver had recently stopped Danny, who was on his snowmobile, and told him about the snowmobiler who’d gone through the ice in Shawanaga Bay.

“Did he drown?” Danny asked the driver.

“Haven’t found him yet,” the ambulance driver replied.

Danny thought that maybe they wouldn’t find the snowmobiler until the ice broke up sometime in mid-April. According to this same ambulance driver at the nursing station, there’d also been “a doozy of a head-on” in Honey Harbour, and an alleged “first-rater of a rear-end job” in the vicinity of Port Severn. Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.

Those ten weeks that Danny lived in the environs of Pointe au Baril Station were a strong dose of rural life; maybe it wasn’t enough country living to have satisfied Ketchum, but it was enough for Danny. It counted as the writer’s requisite country living-whether Ketchum would have counted it or not.

IN THE AFTER-HOURS RESTAURANT , the eighth and final novel by “Danny Angel,” was published in 2002, seven years after Baby in the Road . What Danny had predicted to Ketchum was largely true-namely, his publishers complained that a book by an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo couldn’t possibly sell as many copies as a new novel by Danny Angel.

But Danny made his publishers understand that In the After-Hours Restaurant was absolutely the last book he would publish under the Angel name. And, in every interview, he repeatedly referred to himself as Daniel Baciagalupo; over and over again, he told the story of the circumstances that had forced the nom de plume upon him when he’d been a young and beginning writer. It had never been a secret that Danny Angel was a pen name, or that the writer’s real name was Daniel Baciagalupo-the secret had been why.

The accidental death of the bestselling author’s son-not to mention the violent murder of the writer’s father, and the subsequent shooting of the cook’s killer-had been big news. Danny could have insisted that In the After-Hours Restaurant be the debut novel by Daniel Baciagalupo; their complaining aside, and however reluctantly, Danny’s publishers would have agreed. But Danny was content to let his next novel (it would be his ninth) be Daniel Baciagalupo’s debut.

In the After-Hours Restaurant got a warm reception and mostly good reviews-the author was often praised for a nowadays-atypical “restraint.” Maybe the oft-repeated restraint word was what bothered the writer, though it was meant as praise. Danny would never know what Ketchum thought of In the After-Hours Restaurant , but restraint had never been a prominent part of the logger’s vocabulary-not in the category of admired qualities, anyway. Would Danny Angel’s last novel have satisfied the former river driver’s demand that Danny let himself go-that is, be more daring as a writer? (Apparently, Danny didn’t think so.)

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum had told him. In the case of In the After-Hours Restaurant , would the nightly efforts of the gentle sous chef to teach himself his illustrious father’s trade constitute more of the same “writing around the periphery of things”-as Ketchum had unkindly put it? (Danny must have thought so; otherwise, why wouldn’t he have proudly put Daniel Baciagalupo’s name on the new novel?)