John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“A crazy ex-cop… that’s not good,” Jimmy said.

“The former deputy sheriff is getting old-that’s the good part. He can’t keep looking much longer,” Danny told the trooper, who looked thoughtful; Jimmy also seemed suspicious.

There was more to the story, of course, and the state trooper probably could discern this in the writer’s atypically vague telling of the tale. (And what trouble could Danny have gotten into for killing a woman he mistook for a bear when he’d been a twelve-year-old?) But Danny didn’t say more about it, and Jimmy could tell that his friend was content to keep the matter to himself and his dad. Besides, there was a dead dog to deal with; the business at hand, giving Roland Drake a good talking-to, must have seemed more pressing to the state trooper.

“Have you got some of those large green garbage bags?” Jimmy asked. “I’ll take care of that dog for you. Why don’t you get a little sleep, Danny? We can talk more about the crazy old ex-cop when you want to.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Danny told his friend. Just like that, the writer was thinking, he’d driven past the intersection in the road. It hadn’t even been in the category of a decision, but now the cook and his son could only keep driving. And how old was the cowboy, anyway? Carl was the same age as Ketchum, who was the same age as Six-Pack Pam. The retired deputy sheriff was sixty-six, not too old to squeeze a trigger-not yet.

From his driveway, Danny watched the taillights of the state-police patrol car as Jimmy drove off on Hickory Ridge Road. It wouldn’t take the trooper long to get to Roland Drake’s driveway of abandoned vehicles, and Drake’s surviving husky-shepherd mix. Suddenly, it meant a lot to Danny to know what was going to happen when Jimmy brought the dead dog back to the asshole hippie. Would that really be the end of it? Was enough ever enough, or did the violence just perpetuate-that is, whenever something began violently?

Danny had to know. He got in his car and drove up Hickory Ridge Road until he spotted the trooper’s taillights flickering ahead of him; then Danny slowed down. He could no longer keep the squad car’s taillights in sight, but he kept following at a distance. Jimmy had probably seen Danny’s headlights, albeit briefly. Surely the state policeman would have known he was being followed; knowing Jimmy, he would have guessed it was Danny, too. But Danny knew that he didn’t need to see what happened when the trooper pulled into Roland Drake’s salvage yard of a driveway. The writer knew he needed only to be near enough to hear the shot, if there was a shot.

IT TURNED OUT THAT Danny and his dad had more time than they knew, but they were wise not to count on it. They listened to Ketchum this time. For hadn’t Ketchum been right the last time? Vermont wasn’t far enough away from New Hampshire, as the old woodsman had told them. Would Dot and May have wandered into Mao’s, in Iowa City? Not likely. For that matter, Danny wondered whether anyone from Coos County ever would have found the cook and his son in Boulder, Colorado, where Joe would soon be going to school. Also unlikely, but the writer was persuaded not to take that chance, though leaving the country wouldn’t be easy-not the way Ketchum meant it, because the logger had something permanent in mind. (Ketchum also had an idea about where.)

Ketchum had called the cook and his son, in the logger’s hungover or fragile sobriety of the morning following Dot and May’s calamitous visit to Avellino. Of course Ketchum phoned them individually, but it was irritating how the woodsman spoke to each of them as if both Danny and his dad were there.

“For thirteen years, the cowboy believed you two were in Toronto -because Carl thought that was where Angel was from, right? You bet I’m right!” Ketchum bellowed.

Dear God, the cook was thinking in his beloved kitchen at Avellino, where he’d made himself a very strong espresso and was wondering why Ketchum couldn’t resist shouting to make himself heard. According to Ketchum, Dot and May had sizably less imagination than a pinch of coon shit; while “the gossip-feeding bitches” would definitely tell the cowboy what they knew, they wouldn’t agree with each other about how to tell him, or when. Dot would be in favor of waiting until the retired deputy did something particularly obnoxious, or he was behaving in a superior fashion, whereas May would want to insinuate that she knew something-until Carl was crazy to know what it was. In short, the old broads’ habits of mean-spirited manipulation might buy Danny and his dad a little time.

On the phone to Danny, Ketchum was more exact: “Here’s the point, you two. Now that Carl knows you went to Boston, not Toronto -and he’ll know soon enough that you then went to Vermont -the cowboy would never believe that you’re in Toronto. That’s the last place he’d look-that’s where you should go! They speak English in Toronto. You’ve got a publisher there, don’t you, Danny? And I imagine there’s lots of jobs for a cook-something not Italian, Cookie, or I swear I’ll come shoot you myself!”

I’m not Cookie , Danny almost said, but he just held the phone.

Toronto wasn’t such a bad idea, the writer Danny Angel was thinking, as he waited out the mounting hysteria of Ketchum’s phone call. Danny had been there on a book tour or two. It was a good city, he was thinking-to the degree that Danny thought about cities at all. (The cook was more of a city guy than his son.) Canada was a foreign country, thus satisfying Ketchum’s criterion, but Toronto was near enough to the States to make keeping in touch with Joe possible; Colorado would be easy to get to from Toronto. Of course, Danny wanted to know what Joe might think of the idea-not to mention what the cook thought of Ketchum’s suggestion.

After Ketchum ended his call to Danny, the writer’s telephone rang almost immediately. Naturally, it was Danny’s dad.

“There will be no peace while that lunatic has his own phone, Daniel,” the cook said to his son. “And if he ever gets a fax machine, we will be doomed to be addressed in capital letters and exclamation points for the rest of our lives.”

“But what do you think of Ketchum’s idea, Dad? What about Toronto?” Danny asked.

“I don’t care where we go-I’m just sorry to have dragged you into this. I was only trying to keep you safe!” his father said; then the cook started to cry. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Tony Angel said. “I love it here!”

“I know you do-I’m sorry, Pop. But we’ll be okay in Toronto -I know we will,” the writer told his father.

“I can’t ask Ketchum to kill Carl, Daniel-I just can’t do it,” the cook told his son.

“I know-I can’t ask him, either,” Danny said.

“You do have a publisher in Canada, don’t you, Daniel?” his dad asked. For the first time, Danny could hear something old-something approaching elderly- in his father’s voice. The cook was almost sixty, but what Danny had heard in his dad’s voice sounded older than that; he’d heard something more than anxious, something almost frail. “If you have a publisher in Toronto,” his father was saying, “I’m sure he’ll help us get settled in there, won’t he?”

“She- my Canadian publisher is a she,” Danny told his dad. “I know she’ll help us, Pop-it’ll be easy there. And we’ll get a place in Colorado, where we can visit Joe-and Joe can come visit us. We don’t have to think of this move as necessarily permanent- not for a while, anyway. We’ll just see how we like it in Canada, okay?”

“Okay,” the cook said, but he was still crying.