John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

The cook had invested very little in Benevento; compared to where he’d worked before, in both Coos County and Boston, a pizza place in a poor man’s college town had been relatively easy. He’d bought the building from an aging hippie who’d called himself The Sign Painter; it had looked to Tony Angel like a failing small business, and there was a rumor in town that the sign painter was responsible for the misspelling of the theatre word on the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro. (The word on the marquee of the Main Street movie house was spelled “Theater,” not “Theatre;” for years, the Latchis had sought funds to correct the mistake.) It was no rumor that the sign painter’s wife, an allegedly flaky potter, had recently run out on him. All she’d left the miserable sign painter was her kiln, which gave the cook the idea for his brick pizza oven.

At the time Danny invited him to come to Iowa City, Tony was a little tired of running his own restaurant-a pizza place wasn’t quite the kind of restaurant the cook wanted to own, anyway-and things with Carmella had pretty much run their course. Seeing each other only occasionally, she’d told the cook, had made her feel she was in an illicit relationship instead of a legitimate one. The illicit word sounded to Tony like something that might have come up when Carmella had been confessing her sins-either at St. Leonard or St. Stephen’s, wherever Carmella did her confessing. (Confessing one’s sins was a Catholic thing that had never caught on with the cook.)

Why not just see what the Midwest was like? Tony Angel thought. If he sold it now, the cook could get a little money for Benevento -whereas, if he waited, and if Windham College was going under, which Danny said it was, what would anyone want with a pizza place in Putney?

“Why don’t you just let a fire get out of control in your pizza oven, and then collect the insurance?” Ketchum had asked his old friend.

“Did you burn down Twisted River?” the cook asked Ketchum.

“Hell, it was a ghost town when it burned-it was nothing but an eyesore, Cookie!”

“Those buildings, my cookhouse among them, weren’t nothing , Ketchum.”

“Shit, if that’s how you feel about a little fire, maybe you should just sell your pizza place,” the cook’s old friend told him.

It was hardly a “little” fire that took down what had been the town of Twisted River. Ketchum had planned the torching to perfection. He chose a windless night in March, before mud season; it was before Carl had stopped drinking, too, which was why Ketchum got away with it. No one was able to find the deputy sheriff; in all probability, you couldn’t have woken up the cowboy if you’d found him.

If there’d been any wind, Ketchum would have had to light only one fire-to burn both the town and the cookhouse. But he might have started a forest fire in the process-even in what had been a typically wet month of March, when there was still a lot of snow on the ground. Ketchum wasn’t taking any chances. He liked the forest-it was the town of Twisted River and the cookhouse that he hated. (The night Rosie died, Ketchum had almost cut off his left hand in the cookhouse kitchen; he’d heard Cookie crying himself to sleep while Jane had stayed upstairs with the cook and little Danny.)

The night Twisted River burned, Ketchum must have had three-quarters of a cord of firewood in his truck. He divided the wood between the two bonfires he built-one at the abandoned sawmill in town, the other in what had been the cookhouse kitchen. He set both fires within minutes of each other, and watched them burn to the ground before morning. He used some fancy pine-scented lamp oil to ignite the bonfires; either kerosene or gasoline might have left some residue of themselves, and surely both would have left a taint in the air. But there’d been nothing left of the lamp oil, with its innocent pine scent-not to mention the well-seasoned firewood he’d used to start both fires.

“You know anythin’ ’bout that fire in Twisted River last night, Ketchum?” Carl asked him the following day, after the hungover deputy sheriff had driven to the site of the devastation. “The tire tracks back in there looked like your truck to me.”

“Oh, I was back in there, all right,” Ketchum told the cop. “It was a helluva fire, cowboy-you should have seen it! It burned damn-near all night! I just took a beer or two and drove back in there to watch it.” (It was a pity that the deputy had stopped drinking, Ketchum would say in later years.)

They were not on friendlier terms these days-the cowboy and Ketchum-now that Carl knew the Baciagalupo boy had killed Injun Jane with a skillet, and all the rest of it. Jane’s death had been an accident, the deputy sheriff understood; according to Ketchum, her death probably didn’t matter all that much to Carl, though the cop was pissed at Ketchum for never telling him the truth. What really mattered to the cowboy was that Cookie had been fucking Jane-at a time when Jane “belonged” to Carl. That was why Carl wanted to kill the cook; the deputy had made himself clear to Ketchum on that point.

“I know you won’t tell me where Cookie is, Ketchum, but you tell that little cripple for me-I’m gonna find him,” the cowboy said. “And you better watch your back, if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’m always watching my back, Carl,” Ketchum told him. The old woodsman didn’t say a word about his dog, that “fine animal.” If the cowboy came after Ketchum, the veteran logger wanted the dog to be a surprise. Naturally, everyone who lived year-round on the upper Androscoggin must have known that Ketchum had a dog-Carl included. The animal rode around in Ketchum’s truck. It was the dog’s ferocity that Ketchum had managed to keep secret. (Of course it couldn’t have been the same fine animal protecting Ketchum for sixteen years; the present watchdog had to have been the son or grandson of that first fine animal, the dog who’d replaced Six-Pack Pam.)

“I told you,” Ketchum would say, to both Danny and his dad. “ New Hampshire is next to Vermont -that’s too close for comfort, in my opinion. I think it’s a terrific idea for you both to go to Iowa. I’m sure little Joe will love it out there, too. It’s another Injun name, Iowa -isn’t it? Boy, those Injuns were once all over, weren’t they? And just look what this country did to them! It kind of makes you wonder about our country’s intentions, doesn’t it? Vietnam wasn’t the first thing that made us look bad. And where this asshole country is headed- well, maybe those Injuns lying underground in Iowa, and all over, might just say that we’re one day going to get what’s coming to us.”

HOW WOULD ONE describe Ketchum’s politics? the cook was thinking, as he limped down Brattleboro ’s Main Street, making his slow way back to his restaurant from The Book Cellar.

LIVE FREE OR DIE

That’s what it said on the New Hampshire license plates; Ketchum was clearly a live-free-or-die man, and he’d always believed that the country was going to Hell, but Tony Angel was wondering if his old friend had ever even voted. The woodsman was disinclined to trust any government, or anyone who took part in it. In Ketchum’s opinion, the only justification for having laws-for abiding by any rules, really-was that the assholes outnumbered the sensible fellas. (And of course the laws didn’t apply to Ketchum; he’d lived without rules, except those of his own making.)

The cook stopped walking and looked admiringly down the hill at his very own restaurant-the one he’d always wanted.

AVELLINO

ITALIAN COOKING

Avellino was that other hill town (also a province) in the vicinity of Naples; it had always been the second word Nunzi murmured in her sleep. And the sign said COOKING, not CUISINE-for the same reason that Tony Angel thought of himself and called himself a cook, not a chef. He would always be just a cook, Tony thought; he believed he wasn’t good enough to be a chef. Deep in his bones, the former Dominic Baciagalupo-how he missed the Dominic !-was just a mill-town, logging-camp kind of cook.