John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“I’m sorry about your horse,” he told her.

“I’m sorry about the gun-I know you don’t like guns,” she said. “But I didn’t recognize your car-it’s new, I guess-and one should take some precaution when there are strange men parked in one’s driveway.”

“Yes, I was missing you,” Danny lied. “I’m leaving Vermont. Maybe I was just trying to remember it, before I go.” This last bit was true. Besides, the fiction writer couldn’t tell such a selective animal lover the dead-dog story-not to mention that he was waiting to hear the fate of a second dog-not on such a gloomy night as the one Dot and May had created, anyway.

“You’re leaving?” Barrett asked him. “Why? I thought you liked it here-your dad loves his place in Brattleboro, doesn’t he?”

“We’re both leaving. We’re… lonely, I guess,” Danny told her.

“Tell me about it,” Barrett said; she let the butt of the gun rest against her thigh while she took one of Danny’s hands and guided it under the poncho, to her breast. She was so small-as petite as Katie had been, the writer realized-and in the silvery light of the blotted-out moon, in the near-total darkness of the car’s interior, Barrett’s white hair shone like the hair of Katie’s ghost.

“I must have wanted to say good-bye,” Danny said to her. He meant it, actually-this wasn’t untrue. Might it not be a comfort to lie in the lithe, older woman’s warm arms, and not think about anything else?

“You’re sweet,” Barrett said to him. “You’re much too sad for my taste, but you’re very sweet.”

Danny kissed her on the mouth, the shock of her extremely white hair casting a ghostly glow on her narrow face, which she’d turned up to him while she closed her pale-gray, ice-cold eyes. This allowed Danny to look past her, out the open window of the car; he wanted to be sure he saw Jimmy’s state-police cruiser if it passed by on the road.

How long did it take to deliver a dead dog to the animal’s owner, and to deliver whatever lecture Jimmy had in mind for the asshole hippie? Danny was wondering. Almost certainly, if the trooper was going to be forced to shoot Drake’s other dog, Danny would already have heard the shot; he’d been listening and listening for it, even over his conversation with Barrett. (It was better to kiss her than to talk; the kissing was quiet. There would be no missing the gunshot, if there was one.)

“Let’s go up to my house,” Barrett murmured to him, breaking away from the kiss. “I just shot my horse-I want to take a bath.”

“Sure,” Danny said, but he didn’t reach for the key in the ignition. The squad car hadn’t driven past Barrett’s driveway, and there’d been no shot.

The writer tried to imagine them-Jimmy and the writer carpenter. Maybe the trooper and Roland Drake, that trust-fund fuck, were sitting at the hippie’s kitchen table. Danny tried to envision Jimmy patting the husky-shepherd mix, or possibly scratching the dog’s soft ears-most dogs liked it when you did that. But Danny had trouble seeing such a scene; that was why he hesitated before starting his car.

“What is it?” Barrett asked him.

The shot was louder than he’d expected; though Drake’s driveway was two or three miles away, Danny had underestimated the sound of Jimmy’s gun. (He’d been thinking that the trooper carried a.38, but-not knowing guns, handguns especially-Danny didn’t know that Jimmy liked a.475 Wildey Magnum, also known as the Wildey Survivor.) There was a muffled bang-even bigger than the cowboy’s Colt.45, Danny only realized as Barrett flinched in his arms, her fingers locating but scarcely touching the trigger of her Remington.

“Some bloody poacher-I’ll give Jimmy a call in the morning,” Barrett said; she had relaxed again in his arms.

“Why call Jimmy?” Danny asked her. “Why not the game warden?”

“The game warden is worthless-the bloody fool is afraid of poachers,” Barrett said. “Besides, Jimmy knows who all the poachers are. They’re all afraid of him.”

“Oh,” was all Danny could say. He didn’t know anything about poachers.

Danny started the engine; he turned on his headlights and the windshield wipers, and he and Barrett put up the windows of the car. The writer turned around in the road and headed up the long driveway to the horse farm-not knowing which piece of the puzzle was missing, and not sure what part of the story was still ongoing.

One thing was clear, as Barrett sat beside him with the carbine now across her lap, the short barrel of the lightweight rifle pointed at the passenger-side door. Enough was never enough; there would be no stopping the violence.

IT WAS NOT FAR FROM THEIR ROSEDALE NEIGHBORHOOD, WHERE the cook shared a three-story four-bedroom house with his writer son, to the restaurant on Yonge Street. But at his age-he was now seventy-six-and with his limp, which had noticeably worsened after seventeen years of city sidewalks, Dominic Baciagalupo, who’d reclaimed his name, was a slow walker.

The cook now limped along the slippery sidewalk; winter had never been his friend. And today Dominic was worrying about those two new condominiums under construction, virtually in their backyard. What if one or the other of these eclipsed Daniel’s writing-room view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store?

“When I can no longer see the clock tower from my desk, it’s time for us to move,” Danny had told his dad.

Whether his son was serious or not, the cook was no fan of moving; he’d moved enough. The view from the house on Cluny Drive was of no concern to Dominic. He’d not had any alcohol for more than fifty-six years; the cook couldn’t have cared less that a couple of condominiums-in-progress might keep him from seeing the Summerhill liquor store.

Was it because Daniel was drinking again that he cared about losing his view of the liquor store? Dominic wondered. And for how long would the construction sites be an eyesore? the cook was fretting. (Dominic was of an age when anything that made a mess bothered him.) Yet he liked living in Rosedale, and he loved the restaurant where he worked.

Dominic Baciagalupo also loved the sound of tennis balls, which he could hear in the warm-weather months, when the windows were open in the house on Cluny Drive, because the cook and his son lived within sight and sound of the courts belonging to the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club, where they could also hear the voices of children in the swimming pool in the summer. Even in the winter months, when all the windows were closed, they slept to the sound of the slowly moving trains that snaked through midtown Toronto and crossed Yonge Street on the trestle bridge, which the cook now saw was adorned with Christmas lights, enlivening the dull, gray gloom of early afternoon.

It was December in the city. The festive lights, the decorations, the shoppers were all around. As he stood waiting for the crossing light on Yonge Street to change, it was a mild shock to Dominic to suddenly remember that Ketchum was coming to Toronto for Christmas; while this wasn’t a recent phenomenon, the cook couldn’t get used to the un-naturalness of the old logger being in the city. It had been fourteen years since the writer Danny Angel and his dad had spent their Christmases in Colorado with Joe. (Ketchum had not made those trips. It was too long a drive from New Hampshire to Colorado, and Ketchum steadfastly refused to fly.)

In those winters when Joe went to the university in Boulder, Daniel had rented a ski house in Winter Park. The road out of Grand Lake, through Rocky Mountain National Park, was closed in the wintertime, so it took about two hours to drive from Boulder-you had to take I-70, and U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass-but Joe loved the skiing in Winter Park, and his dad had spoiled him. (Or so the cook reflected, as he waited for the long light on Yonge Street to change.)