Last Night in Twisted River (40 page)

“My previous life is
over,”
Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Danny couldn’t help but wonder about that, too.

Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Danny had looked in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom she used. He saw her birth-control pills—it was an Iowa City prescription.

Danny always used a condom. It was an old habit—and, given his history of occasionally having more than one sexual partner, not a bad one. But Youn had said to him one time, almost casually, “Thank you for using a condom. I’ve taken a lifetime of birth-control pills. I don’t ever want to take them again.”

But she
was
taking them, wasn’t she? Well, if Danny’s dad didn’t question Yi-Yiing, why should Danny expect answers to everything from Youn? Hadn’t her life been complicated, too?

It was into this careless world of unasked or unanswered questions—not only of an Asian variety, but including some longstanding secrets between the cook and his writer son—that a blue Mustang brought them all to their senses (albeit only momentarily) regarding the fragile, unpredictable nature of things.

ON SATURDAY MORNINGS
in the fall, when there was an Iowa home football game, Danny could hear the Iowa band playing—he never knew where. If the band had been practicing in Kinnick Stadium, across the Iowa River and up the hill, could he have heard the music so far away, on Court Street, on the eastern side of town?

That Saturday it was bright and fair, and Danny had tickets to take Joe to the football game. He’d gotten up early and had made the boy pancakes. Friday had been a late night for the cook at Mao’s, and the Saturday night following a home football game would be later. That morning, Danny’s dad was still in bed; so was Yi-Yiing, who’d finished her usual night shift at Mercy Hospital. Danny didn’t expect to see the Pajama Lady before noon. It was Joe’s neighborhood friend Max, an Iowa faculty kid in Joe’s third-grade class at Longfellow Elementary, who’d first referred to Yi-Yiing as the Pajama Lady. (The eight-year-old couldn’t remember Yi-Yiing’s name.)

Danny was washing his and Joe’s breakfast dishes while Joe was playing outside with Max. They were riding their bicycles in the back alley again; they’d taken some apples from the crate on the porch, but not to eat them. The boys were using the apples as slalom gates, Danny would later realize. He liked Max, but the kid rode his bike all over town; it was a source of some friction between Danny and Joe that Joe wasn’t allowed to do this.

Max was a fanatical collector of posters, stickers, and sew-on insignia, all advertising brands of beer. The kid had given dozens of these to Joe, who had Yi-Yiing sew the various insignia on his jean jacket; the stickers were plastered to the fridge, and the posters hung in Joe’s bedroom. It was funny, Danny thought, and totally innocent; after all, the eight-year-olds weren’t
drinking
the beer.

What Danny would remember foremost about the car was the sudden screech of tires; he saw only a blue blur pass by the kitchen window. The writer ran out on the back porch, where he’d previously thought the only threat to his son was a possum. “Joe!” Danny called, but there was no answer—only the sound of the blue car hitting some trash barrels at the farthest end of the alley.

“Mr. Angel!” Danny heard Max calling; the boy was almost never off his bike, but this time Danny saw him running.

Several of the apples, placed as slalom gates, had been squashed flat in the alley. Danny saw that both boys’ bikes were lying on their sides, off the pavement; Joe lay curled up in a fetal position next to his bike.

Danny could see that Joe was conscious, and he appeared more frightened than hurt. “Did it hit you? Did the car
hit
you?” he asked his son. The boy quickly shook his head but otherwise wouldn’t move; he just stayed in a tight ball.

“We crashed, trying to get out of the way—the Mustang was coming right at us,” Max said. “It was the blue Mustang—it always goes too fast,” Max told Danny. “It’s gotta be a customized job—it’s a funny blue.”

“You’ve seen the car before?” Danny asked. (Clearly, Max knew cars.)

“Yeah, but not here—not in the alley,” the boy said.

“Go get the Pajama Lady, Max,” Danny told the kid. “You can find her. She’s upstairs, with my pop.” Danny had never called his dad a “pop” before; where the word came from must have had something to do with the fright of the moment. He knelt beside Joe, almost afraid to touch him, while the boy shivered. He was like a fetus willing himself back to the womb, or trying to, the writer thought. “Joe?” his father said. “Does anything hurt? Is anything broken? Can you
move?”

“I couldn’t see a driver. It was just a car,” the boy said—still not moving, except for the shivering. Probably the sunlight had been reflecting off the windshield, Danny thought.

“Some teenager, I’ll bet,” Danny said.

“There was no driver,” Joe insisted. Later Max would claim to have
never
seen the driver, though he’d seen the speeding blue Mustang in the neighborhood before.

“Pajama Lady!” Danny heard Max calling. “Pop!”

The cook had sat up in bed beside the drowsy Yi-Yiing. “Who’s ‘Pop,’ do you suppose?” he asked her.

“I’m guessing that
I’m
the Pajama Lady,” Yi-Yiing answered sleepily.
“You
must be Pop.”

Quite a commotion ensued when Yi-Yiing and the cook learned that Joe had fallen off his bike and there’d been a car involved. Max would probably take to his grave the image of how fast the Pajama Lady ran barefoot to the scene of the accident, where Joe was now sitting up—rocking back and forth in his father’s arms. The cook, with his limp, was slower to arrive; by then, Youn had interrupted her novel-in-progress to see what was the matter.

The elegantly dressed dame at the farthest end of the alley—her trash barrels had been knocked over by the vanishing blue Mustang—approached fearfully. She was elderly and frail, but she wanted to see if the boys on their bicycles were all right. Like Max, the regal old woman had seen the blue Mustang in the neighborhood before—but never the driver.

“What kind of blue?” Danny asked her.

“Not a common blue—it’s
too
blue,” the old dame said.

“It’s a customized job, Mr. Angel—I told you,” Max said.

“You’re all right, you’re all right,” Yi-Yiing kept saying to Joe; she was feeling the boy all over. “You never hit your head, did you?” she asked him; he shook his head. Then she began to tickle him, maybe to relieve them both. Her Hong Kong pajamas this morning were an iridescent fish-scale green.

“Everything’s fine, isn’t it?” Youn asked Danny. The Korean divorcée probably wanted to get back to her writing.

No, everything isn’t “fine,” the writer Danny Angel was thinking—not with the driverless blue Mustang on the loose—but he smiled at her (Youn was also barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and jeans) and at his worried-looking father. The cook must have limped naked into the upstairs hall before he realized he lacked clothes, because he was wearing just a pair of Danny’s running shorts; Danny had left them on the railing at the top of the stairs.

“Are you taking a run, Pop?” Danny asked his dad, the new word seeming strangely natural to them both—as if a bullet dodged marked a turning point, or a new beginning, in both their lives and young Joe’s. Maybe it did.

COLBY WAS THE COP’S NAME.
“Officer
Colby,” the cook kept calling him, in the kitchen of the Court Street house—perhaps in mock respect of that other, long-ago policeman in his life. Except for the bad haircut, the young Iowa City cop in no way resembled Carl. Colby was fair-skinned with Scandinavian-blue eyes and a neatly trimmed blond mustache; he apologized for not responding sooner to Danny’s call about the dangerous driver, but those weekends when the Iowa football team played at home kept the local police busy. The policeman’s demeanor was at once friendly and earnest—Danny liked him immediately. (The writer could not help but observe how observant the policeman was; Colby had an eye for small details, such as those beer stickers on the fridge.) Officer Colby told Danny and his dad that he’d received previous reports of a blue Mustang; as Max had said, the car was probably a customized job, but there were some inconsistencies in the various sightings.

The hood ornament was either the original mustang or—according to a hysterical housewife in the parking lot of a supermarket near Fairchild and Dodge—an obscene version of a centaur. Other witnesses identified a nonspecific but clearly out-of-state license plate, while a university student who’d been run off Dubuque Street on his motorcycle said that the blue Mustang definitely had Iowa plates. As Officer Colby told the cook and his writer son, there were no descriptions of the driver.

“The boys will be home from school any minute,” Danny said to the cop, who’d politely glanced at his watch. “You can talk to them. I saw nothing but an unusual shade of blue.”

“May I see your son’s room?” the officer asked.

A curious request, Danny thought, but he saw no reason to object. It took only a minute, and Colby made no comment on the beer posters; the three men returned to the kitchen to wait for the kids. As for the back alley, where the blue Mustang had almost hit the boys on their bikes, Officer Colby pronounced it safe for bike-riding “under normal circumstances.” However, the officer seemed to share Yi-Yiing’s overall feelings about kids on bicycles in Iowa City. It was better for the kids to walk, or take the bus—certainly they should avoid riding their bikes downtown. There were more and more students driving, many of them newcomers to the university town—not to mention the out-of-towners on the big sports weekends.

“Joe doesn’t ride his bike downtown—only in this neighborhood—and he always walks his bike across the street,” Danny told the policeman, who looked as if he doubted this. “No, really,” the writer said. “I’m not so sure about Max, our neighbor’s eight-year-old. I think Max’s parents are more liberal—I mean concerning where Max can ride his bike.”

“Here they are,” the cook said; he’d been watching the back alley for Joe and Max to appear on their bicycles.

The eight-year-olds seemed surprised to see Officer Colby in the kitchen; like the third graders they were, and almost as if they were passing a secret message in class, they looked quickly at each other and then stared at the kitchen floor.

“The beer-truck boys,” Colby said. “Maybe you boys should keep in mind that the blue Mustang has been seen all over town.” The officer turned his attention to Danny and his dad. “They’re good kids, but they like getting beer stickers and posters and those sew-on badges from the beer-truck drivers. I see these boys at the bars downtown. I just remind them that they can’t go
inside
the bars, and I occasionally have to tell them not to follow the beer trucks from bar to bar—not on their bikes. Clinton and Burlington streets are particularly bad for bikes.”

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.