John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Joe couldn’t look at his dad or grandfather. “The beer-truck boys,” the cook repeated.

“I gotta go home,” Max said; he was that quickly gone.

“When I see these boys in City Park,” Colby went on, “I tell them I hope they’re not riding their bikes on Dubuque Street. It’s safer to take the footbridge behind the student union, and ride their bikes along the Hancher side of the river. But I suppose it takes you longer to get to the park or the zoo that way-doesn’t it?” Officer Colby asked Joe. The boy just nodded his head; he knew he’d been busted.

Very early the next morning, when Youn was sound asleep and Yi-Yiing hadn’t yet come home from her night shift at Mercy Hospital, Danny went into Joe’s bedroom and observed the eight-year-old asleep in what amounted to a shrine to various brands of beer. “Wake up,” he said to his son, shaking him gently.

“It’s too early for school, isn’t it?” Joe asked.

“Maybe you’ll miss school this morning,” his father said. “We’ll just tell the school you’re sick.”

“But I feel fine,” the boy said.

“Get up and get dressed, Joe-you’re not fine,” his dad told him. “You’re dead-you’ve already died.”

They left the house without having any breakfast, walking down to Muscatine Avenue. In the early morning, there was always traffic on Muscatine, which turned into Iowa Avenue, a divided highway with a grassy median strip separating the driving lanes of the two-way street.

When Joe had been a baby and a toddler, and Danny had lived with Katie in a duplex apartment on Iowa Avenue, the young couple had complained about the noise of the traffic on the street; the residences (among them, an especially rowdy sorority house nearer the campus and downtown) were then slightly upscale off-campus housing for graduate students or well-to-do undergraduates. But in the fall of ’73, when Danny walked to Iowa Avenue with his third-grade son, the houses along the divided, tree-lined street were even more pricey; junior faculty, and probably some tenured faculty, lived there. “Isn’t this the street where you lived with Mom?” Joe asked his dad, as they walked toward the campus and downtown.

“Where we lived with Mom, you mean-yes, it is,” Danny said. Somewhere between the intersections with Johnson and Gilbert streets, the writer recognized the gray-clapboard, two-story house-the bottom floor of which had been the apartment he’d shared with Katie and their little boy. The house had since been repainted-there’d been pale-yellow clapboards in the late sixties-and it was probably a single-family dwelling now.

“The gray one?” Joe asked, because his dad had stopped walking on the sidewalk in front of the house, which was on the downtown-heading-traffic side of the street. The cars veering off Muscatine onto Iowa Avenue were more numerous now.

“Yes, the gray one,” Danny said; he turned his back on the house and faced the avenue. He noticed that the plantings in the median strip had been prettified in the six years since he’d moved away from Iowa Avenue.

“Grandpa said you didn’t like Iowa Avenue -that you wouldn’t even drive on the street,” Joe said to his dad.

“That’s right, Joe,” Danny said. Standing close together, they just watched the traffic going by.

“What’s wrong? Am I grounded?” the boy asked his dad.

“No, you’re not grounded-you’re already dead,” his father told him. Danny pointed to the street. “You died out there, in the road. It was the spring of ’67. You were still in diapers-you were only two.”

“Was I hit by a car?” Joe asked his dad.

“You should have been,” his father answered. “But if you’d really been hit by a car, I would have died, too.”

There was one driver in the outbound lane who would see them standing on the other side of Iowa Avenue -Yi-Yiing, on her way back to Court Street from Mercy Hospital. In the incoming lane, one of Danny’s colleagues at the Writers’ Workshop, the poet Marvin Bell, drove by them and honked his horn. But neither father nor son acknowledged him.

Perhaps Danny and Joe weren’t really standing on the sidewalk, facing the traffic; maybe they were back in the spring of 1967. At least the writer Daniel Baciagalupo, who’d not yet chosen a nom de plume, was back there. It often seemed to Danny that he’d never really left that moment in time.

IN AVELLINO, LORETTA BROUGHT the writer his surprise first course. In the something-from-Asia category, the cook had prepared Ah Gou’s beef satay with peanut sauce for his son; the beef was grilled on wooden skewers. There was assorted tempura, too-shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. Loretta also brought Danny chopsticks, but she hesitated before handing them over. “Do you use these? I can’t remember,” she said. (The writer knew she was lying.)

“Sure, I use them,” he told her.

Loretta still held on to the chopsticks. “You know what? You’re alone too much,” she told him.

“I am alone too much,” Danny said. They flirted with each other, but that was as far as it ever went; it was simply awful, for both of them, to contemplate sleeping with each other when Loretta’s mom and Danny’s dad were sleeping together, too.

Whenever Danny had considered it, he’d imagined Loretta saying, “That would be too much like being brother and sister, or something!”

“What are you writing?” Loretta asked him; as long as she held the chopsticks, he would keep looking at her, she thought.

“Just some dialogue,” Danny told her.

“Like we’re having?” she asked.

“No, it’s… different,” he said. Loretta could tell when she’d lost his attention; she gave him the chopsticks. The way the notebook was open on the table, Loretta could have read the dialogue Danny was writing, but he seemed edgy about it, and she decided not to be pushy.

“Well, I hope you like the surprise,” she told him.

The cook knew it was what Danny had ordered at Mao’s-maybe a hundred times. “Tell Dad it’s the perfect choice,” Danny said, as Loretta was leaving.

He glanced once at the dialogue he had written in the notebook. Danny wanted the line to be very literal- the way an eight-year-old would phrase a question to his father, carefully. (“Why would you have died, too-if I’d really been hit by a car?” the writer had written.)

Dot and May, who were still waiting for their pizzas, had watched everything between Danny and Loretta. It totally killed them that they hadn’t been able to hear their dialogue. “The waitress wants to fuck him, but there’s a problem,” Dot said.

“Yeah, he’s more interested in what he’s writin !” May said.

“What’s he eatin’?” Dot asked her old friend.

“It’s somethin’ on a stick,” May said. “It doesn’t look very appetizin’ .”

“I get the feelin’ our pizzas are gonna be disappointin’,” Dot told her.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised,” May said.

“Now look at him!” Dot whispered. “He’s got food in front of him, and he still can’t stop writin’!”

But the food was good; Danny liked most of his memories of Mao’s, and he’d liked all the food there. The dialogue he’d written was also good-it would work fine, Danny had decided. It was just that the timing was wrong, and he wanted to remind himself of the right time to use the line. Before turning his attention to the beef satay , the writer simply circled the dialogue and wrote a note to himself in the margin of the notebook.

“Not now,” Danny wrote. “Tell the part about the pig roast first.”

SPRING WAS A BIG DEAL IN IOWA; THE FIELDS WERE A SPECIAL green. Pig roasts were the rage with the art-department types and the writing students. Danny had avoided most of the Writers’ Workshop parties when he’d been a student, but Katie dragged him to the artists’ parties, which in Danny’s opinion were worse than whatever trouble the writers managed to cause themselves. Katie knew everyone in the Iowa art department, because of her modeling for the life-drawing classes; though he’d been a life-drawing model in New Hampshire, Danny hadn’t been married at the time. In Iowa, it made him uncomfortable to know that many of the graduate students in art-not to mention some of the faculty-had seen his wife naked. Danny didn’t know most of their names.