John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

Amy Martin-Martin had been her maiden name, and she’d taken it back “years ago”-was a Canadian. She’d lived a long time in the United States, and had become an American citizen, but she was “at heart” a Canadian, Amy said, and she’d always wanted to come back to Canada.

Why had she gone to the States in the first place? Danny asked her. “Because of a guy I met,” Amy told him, shrugging. “Then my kid was born there, so I felt I should stay.”

She described her politics as “largely indifferent now.” She was sick of how little Americans knew about the rest of the world-or how little they cared to know. After two terms, the failed policies of the Bush presidency would probably leave the country (and the rest of the world) in a terrible mess. What Amy Martin meant by this was that it would then be high time for some hero on a horse to ride in, but what could one hero on one horse do?

Not much would change, Lady Sky said. She had fallen to earth in a country that didn’t believe in angels; yet the Bible-huggers had hijacked one of the two major political parties there. (With the Bible-huggers, not much would ever change.) Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”-what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots-and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster. “Conservatives are an extinct species,” Lady Sky said, “but they don’t know it yet.”

By the time Danny had shown Amy the main cabin-the big bathtub, the bedroom, and the venison steaks he was marinating for dinner-they’d established that they were bedfellows, at least politically. While Amy knew more about Danny than he knew about her, this was only because she’d read every word he’d written. She’d read almost all the “shit” that had been written about him, too. (The shit word was what they both instinctively used for the media, so that on the subject of the media they discovered they were bedfellows, too.)

Most of all, Amy knew when and how he’d lost his little Joe-and when his dad had died, and the how of that, too. He had to tell her about Ketchum, whom she knew nothing about, and while this was hard-except with Six-Pack, Danny didn’t talk about Ketchum-the writer discovered, in the process of describing Ketchum, that the old logger was alive in the novel Danny was dreaming, and so Danny talked and talked about that novel, and his elusive first chapter, too.

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.