John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

The cook and Xiao Dee had pulled off I-80 immediately west of Davenport-just to open the rear door of the truck and survey the spillage from the near-collision over the Mississippi-but an indescribable odor forewarned them not to risk opening the truck until they were back at Mao’s. Something undefined was leaking under the truck’s rear door.

“What does it smell like?” Xiao Dee asked the cook. It was a brownish liquid with beer foam in it-they could both see that much.

“Everything,” Tony Angel answered, kneeling on the pavement and sniffing the bottom of the door.

A motorcycle cop drove up and asked them if they needed assistance. Little Brother kept all the receipts from their shopping in the glove compartment in case they were ever stopped and suspected of transporting stolen goods. The cook explained to the policeman how they’d swerved on the bridge to avoid the incapacitated bus.

“Maybe we should just keep going, and inspect the damage when we get to Iowa City,” Tony said. The baby-faced, clean-shaven Xiao Dee was nodding his head, his glossy black ponytail tied with a pink ribbon, some trifle of affection either Spicy or the other girlfriend had given him.

“It smells like a Chinese restaurant,” the motorcycle cop commented to the cook.

“That’s what it is ,” Tony told him.

Both Little Brother and the cook could tell that the cop wanted to see the mess inside; now that they’d stopped, they had no choice but to open the truck’s rear door. There was Asia, or at least the entire continent’s culinary aromas: the pot of lychee nuts with almond-milk gelée, the pungent shock of the strewn fresh ginger, and the Mitoku Trading Company’s brand of miso leaves-the latter giving a fungal appearance to the walls and ceiling of the truck. There was also a ghoulish monkfish staring at them from a foul sea of soy sauce and dark-brown ice-a contender for the title of Ugliest Fish in the World, under the best of circumstances.

“Sweet Jesus, what’s that?” the motorcycle cop asked.

“Monkfish, the poor man’s lobster,” Xiao Dee explained.

“What’s the name of your restaurant in Iowa City?” the cop asked.

“Mao’s,” Xiao Dee answered proudly.

“That place!” the motorcycle cop said. “You get the drive-by vandalism, right?”

“Occasionally,” the cook admitted.

“It’s because of the war,” Xiao Dee said defensively. “The farmers are hawks.”

“It’s because of the name!” the cop said. “Mao’s- no wonder you get vandalized! This is the Midwest, you know. Iowa City isn’t Berkeley !”

Back in the truck that would forever smell like all of Pell and Mott streets on a bad morning (such as when there was a garbage strike in Lower Manhattan), the cook said to Little Brother, “The cop has a point, you know. About the name , I mean.”

Xiao Dee was hopped up on chocolate-espresso balls, which he kept in the glove compartment with all the receipts and ate nonstop when he drove-just to keep himself fanatically awake. If the cook had more than two or three on the sixteen-hour drive, his heart would race until the following day-his bowels indicating the pending onset of explosive diarrhea-as if he’d had two dozen cups of double espresso.

“What’s the matter with this country? Mao is just a name!” Xiao Dee cried. “This country has been getting its balls cut off in Vietnam for ten years! What does Mao have to do with it-it’s just a name!” The provocative pink ribbon Spicy (or the other girl) had tied around his ponytail had come undone; Xiao Dee resembled a hysterical woman weightlifter driving an entire Chinese restaurant, where you would surely be food-poisoned to death.

“Let’s just get home and unload the truck,” the cook proposed, hoping to calm Little Brother down. Tony Angel was trying to forget the image of the monkfish swimming through sesame oil, and everything else that was afloat in the back of the truck.

The vat of sea water had spilled; they’d lost all the mussels. There would be no sake-steamed mussels in black-bean sauce that weekend. No oysters Rockefeller, either. (To add insult to injury, by the time Xiao Dee and the cook got back to Iowa City, Ah Gou had already chopped the spinach and diced the bacon for the oysters Rockefeller.) The sea bass had perished en route, but the monkfish was salvageable-the tail was the only usable part, anyway, and Ah Gou served it sliced in medallions.

The cook had learned to test the freshness of the Scottish salmon by deboning it; if the bones were hard to pull out, Ah Gou said the fish was still pretty fresh. The lap xuong sausage, the fresh flounder, and the frozen squid had survived the near collision with the bus, but not the shrimp, the scallops, or the crabs. Ah Gou’s favorite mascarpone and the Parmesan were safe, but the other cheeses had to go. The bamboo mats, or nori rolls-for rolling out the sushi-had absorbed too much sesame oil and Tsingtao beer. Xiao Dee would hose out the truck every day for months , but it would always smell of that near accident over the Mississippi.

HE’D LOVED THAT TIME in Iowa City -including those road trips with Xiao Dee Cheng, Tony Angel was thinking. Every night, on the menu at Avellino, was an item or two the cook had acquired from working with Ah Gou at Mao’s. At Avellino, the cook indicated the French or Asian additions to his menu by writing simply, “Something from Asia” or “Something from France;” he’d learned this from Ah Gou at Mao’s. In an emergency, when all the fish (and the oysters and mussels) had perished before Saturday night, Ah Gou asked the cook to do a pasta special or a pizza.

“Something from Italy,” the menu at Mao’s would then say.

The long-distance truckers who stopped off the interstate would invariably complain. “What’s this fucking ‘Something from Italy ’ about? I thought this was a Chinese place.”

“We’re a little of everything,” Xiao Dee would tell them-Little Brother was usually the weekend maître d’, while the cook and Ah Gou slaved away in the kitchen.

The rest of the staff at Mao’s was a fiercely intelligent and multicultural collection of Asian students from the university-many of them not from Asia but from Seattle and San Francisco, or Boston, or New York. Tzu-Min, Ah Gou’s relatively new girlfriend, was a Chinese law-school student who’d been an undergraduate at Iowa just a couple of years before; she’d decided to stay in Iowa City (and not go back to Taiwan) because of Mao’s and Ah Gou and the law school. On Thursday nights, when Xiao Dee was still suffering the jazzed-up aftereffects of the chocolate-espresso balls, Tzu-Min would sub as the maître d’.

They didn’t have a radio at Mao’s, Tony Angel was remembering as he surveyed the place settings at Avellino, which on that late-spring ’83 night was not quite open for business but soon would be. At Mao’s, Ah Gou had kept a TV in the kitchen-the cause of many cut fingers, and other knife or cleaver accidents, in the cook’s opinion. But Ah Gou had liked sports and news; sometimes the Iowa football or basketball games were televised, and that way the kitchen knew in advance whether to expect a celebratory or dejected crowd after the game.

In those years, the Iowa wrestling team rarely lost-least of all, at home-and those dual meets brought an especially fired-up and hungry crowd to Mao’s. Daniel had taken young Joe to most of the home matches, the cook suddenly remembered. Maybe it had been the success of the Iowa wrestling team that made Joe want to wrestle when he went off to Northfield Mount Hermon; quite possibly, Ketchum’s reputation as a barroom brawler had had nothing to do with it.