John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

What the writer had overlooked was the fact that Hero was a hunter; the bear hound had one good ear and a very good nose. The growl began in the dog’s chest, and Hero’s first bark was muffled-half swallowed in his throat. There was no one out there, on the frozen bay, but the bear hound knew she was coming; the dog’s barking began in earnest only seconds before Danny saw her. “Shut up, Hero-don’t scare her away,” Danny said. (Of course the writer understood that, if she was Lady Sky, nothing could scare her.)

The snowshoer was in full stride, practically running, when Danny saw her. At such a pace, and carrying a backpack that heavy, she’d worked up quite a sweat. She had unzipped the parka to cool herself off; the hood, which she’d pushed off her head, lay on the back of her broad shoulders. Danny could see her strawberry-blond hair; it was a little longer than she used to cut it, when she’d been a skydiver. The writer could understand why both Lupita and Andy Grant thought she was younger than Danny; Amy looked younger than the writer, if not way younger. When she reached the dock, Hero finally stopped barking.

“You’re not going to shoot me-are you, Danny?” Amy asked him. But the writer, who’d not had much luck with hope, couldn’t answer her. Danny couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t stop staring at her.

Because it was snowing, the tears on Danny’s face were mingled with the snow; he probably didn’t know he was crying, but Amy saw his eyes. “Oh, hold on-just hang on-I’m coming,” she said. “I got here as fast as I could, you know.” She threw the backpack up on the dock, together with her ski poles, and she climbed over the rocks, taking her snowshoes off when she gained her footing on the dock.

“Lady Sky,” Danny said; it was all he could say. He felt himself dissolving.

“Yeah, it’s me,” she said, hugging him; she pulled his face to her chest. He just shook against her. “Boy, you’re even more of a mess than I thought you would be,” Amy told him, “but I’m here now, and I’ve got you-you’re going to be okay.”

“Where have you been?” he managed to ask her.

“I had another project- two , actually,” she told him. “They turned out to be a waste of my time. But I’ve been thinking about you-for years.”

Danny didn’t mind if he was Lady Sky’s “project” now; he imagined that she’d had her share of projects, more than two. So what? the writer thought. He would soon be sixty-three; Danny knew he was no prize.

“I might have come sooner, you bastard, if you’d answered my letter,” Amy said to him.

“I never saw your letter. My dad read it and threw it away. He thought you were a stripper,” Danny told her.

“That was a long time ago-before the skydiving,” Amy said. “Was your dad ever in Chicago? I haven’t done any stripping since Chicago.” Danny thought this was very funny, but before he could clear up the misunderstanding, Lady Sky took a closer look at Hero. The bear hound had been sniffing Amy’s discarded snowshoes suspiciously-as if he were readying himself to piss on them. “Hey, you,” Amy said to the dog. “You lift your leg on my snowshoes, you might just lose your other ear-or your pecker.” Hero knew when he was being spoken to; he gave Amy an evil, crazed look with his lidless eye, but the dog backed away from the snowshoes. Something in Amy’s tone must have reminded the bear hound of Six-Pack Pam. In fact, at that moment, Lady Sky had reminded Danny of Six-Pack-a young Six-Pack, a Six-Pack from those long-ago days when she’d lived with Ketchum.

“Jeez, you’re shaking so much-that gun might go off,” Amy told the writer.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Danny told her. “I’ve been hoping.”

She kissed him; there was some mint-flavored gum in her mouth, but he didn’t mind. She was warm, and still sweating, but not out of breath-not even from the snowshoeing. “Can we go indoors, somewhere?” Amy asked him. (At a glance, anyone could see that Granddaddy’s cabin was uninhabitable-unless you were Ketchum, or a ghost. From the back dock of the island, it was impossible to see the other buildings-even when there wasn’t a snowstorm.) Danny picked up her snowshoes and the ski poles, being careful to keep the carbine pointed at the dock, and Amy shouldered the big backpack. Hero ran ahead, as before.

They stopped at the writing shack, so that Danny could show her where he worked. The little room still smelled of the dog’s lamentable farting, but the fire in the woodstove hadn’t died out-it was like a sauna in that shack. Amy took off her parka, and a couple of layers of clothes that she wore under the parka-until she was wearing just her snowpants and a T-shirt. Danny told her that he’d once believed she was older than he was-or they were the same age, maybe-but how was it possible that she seemed younger now? Danny didn’t mean younger than she was that day on the pig farm, in Iowa. He meant that she’d not aged as much as he had-and why was that, did she think?

Amy told him that she’d lost her little boy when she was much younger; she’d already lost him when Danny met her as a skydiver. Amy’s only child had died when he was two-little Joe’s age at the pig roast. That death had aged Amy when it happened, and for a number of years immediately following her boy’s death. It wasn’t that Amy was over her son’s death-one never got over a loss like that, as she knew Danny would know. It was only that the loss didn’t show as much, when so many years had passed. Maybe your child’s death ceased being as visible to other people, after a really long time. (Joe had died more recently; to anyone who knew Danny, the writer had noticeably aged because of it.)

“We’re the same age, more or less,” Amy told the writer. “I’ve been sixty for the last couple of years, I think-at least that’s what I tell the guys who ask.”

“You look fifty,” Danny told her.

“Are you trying to get in my pants, or something?” Amy asked him. She read those sentences, and the fragments of sentences, from the first chapter-the lines he’d thumbtacked to the pine-board wall of the writing shack. “What are these?” she asked.

“They’re sentences, or parts of sentences, ahead of myself; they’re waiting for me to catch up to them,” he told her. “They’re all lines from my first chapter-I just haven’t found the first sentence yet.”

“Maybe I’ll help you find it,” Amy said. “I’m not going anywhere for a while. I don’t have any other projects.” Danny could have cried again, but just then his cell phone rang-for the fourth fucking time that day! It was Andy Grant, of course, checking up on him.

“She there yet?” Andy asked. “Who is she?”

“She’s the one I’ve been waiting for,” Danny told him. “She’s an angel.”

“Sometimes,” Lady Sky reminded him, when he hung up. “This time, anyway.”

What might the cook have said to his son, if he’d had time to utter some proper last words before the cowboy shot him in the heart? At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son “find someone”-only that. Well, Danny had found her; actually, she’d found him. Given Charlotte, and now given Amy-at least in that aspect of his life-the writer knew he’d been lucky. Some people don’t ever find one person; Daniel Baciagalupo had found two.

SHE’D BEEN LIVING IN MINNESOTA for the last few years, Amy said. (“If you think Toronto’s cold, try Minneapolis,” she’d told him.) Amy had done a little grappling in a wrestling club called Minnesota Storm. She’d hung out with “a bunch of ex-Gopher wrestlers,” she said-a concept that Danny found difficult to grasp.