Last Night in Twisted River (46 page)

“The guinea hen is served with asparagus, and a risotto of oyster mushrooms and sage
jus,”
the cook was explaining to Danny and young Joe. “Don’t
slop
the risotto on the plates, please.”

“Where are the guinea hens from, Pop?” Danny asked.

“From Iowa, of course—we’re out of almost everything that
isn’t
from Iowa,” the cook told him.

“You want to see how your mushroom and mascarpone ravioli gets made?” Xiao Dee was asking the businessmen types. “It’s done with Parmesan and white truffle oil! It’s the best fucking ravioli you’ll ever have! You think white truffle oil comes from
Iowa?”
he asked them. “You want to come out in the kitchen and see a bunch of Asians
dying?
They are dying on TV right now—if you want to see!” Little Brother was shouting.

Tony Angel turned to the Japanese twins. “Go rescue the business guys from Xiao Dee,” he told them,
“both
of you.”

The cook accompanied the Yokohamas to the dining room, where they served the two couples the guinea hens. “Your pasta will be coming right along,” Tony told the businessmen; he’d wondered why the business guys had so quietly listened to Xiao Dee’s tirade. Now he saw that Little Brother had taken the bloody cleaver with him into the dining room.

“We need you back in the kitchen—we want you like
crazy
back there! We’re
dying
for you!” the Japanese twins were telling Xiao Dee; they had draped themselves on him, being careful not to touch the bloody cleaver. The businessmen types just sat there, waiting, even after the cook (and Xiao Dee, with Kaori and Sao) had gone back into the kitchen.

“What are the fascist pigs drinking?” Xiao Dee was asking the Yokohamas.

“Tsingtao,” Kaori or Sao answered him.

“Bring them more—keep the beer coming!” Little Brother told them.

“What goes with the ravioli, Pop?” Danny asked his dad.

“The peas,” the cook told him. “Use the slotted spoon, or there will be too much oil on them.”

Joe couldn’t get interested in being a sous chef, not while the television kept showing the helicopters. When the phone rang, Joe was the only one whose hands weren’t busy doing something; he answered it. They all knew there was no maître d’ in the dining room, and they thought it might be Yi-Yiing or Tzu-Min calling from Mercy Hospital with a report on whether or not they could save Ah Gou’s finger.

“It’s collect, from Ketchum,” Joe told them.

“Say that you accept,” his grandfather told him.

“I accept,” the boy said.

“You
talk to him, Daniel—I’m busy,” the cook said.

But in the passing of the telephone, they could all hear what Ketchum had to say—all the way from New Hampshire. “This asshole country—”

“Hi, it’s me—it’s Danny,” the writer told the old logger.

“You still sorry you didn’t get to go to Vietnam,
fella
?” Ketchum roared at him.

“No, I’m not sorry,” Danny told him, but it took him too long to say it; Ketchum had already hung up.

There was blood all over the kitchen. On the TV, the desperate Vietnamese dangled from, and then fell off, the skids of the helicopters. The debacle would be replayed for days—all over the world, the writer supposed, while he watched his ten-year-old watching the end of the war his dad hadn’t gone to.

The Japanese twins were placating the business guys with more beer. Xiao Dee was standing in the walk-in refrigerator with the door open. “We’re almost out of Tsingtao, Tony,” Little Brother was saying. He walked out of the fridge and closed the door; then he noticed that the door to the alley was still open. “What happened to Ed?” Xiao Dee asked. He stepped cautiously into the alley. “Maybe some fucking patriot farmer mistook him for one of us ‘gooks’ and killed him!”

“I think poor Ed just went home,” the cook said.

“I threw up in his sink—maybe that’s why,” Sao said. She and Kaori had come back to the kitchen to bring the business guys their pasta order.

“Can I turn the TV off?” Danny asked them all.

“Yes! Turn it off, please!” one of the Yokohamas told him.

“Ed is
gone!”
Xiao Dee was shouting from the alley. “The fucker-patriots have
kidnapped him!”

“I can take Joe home and put him to bed,” the other twin said to Danny.

“The boy has to eat first,” the cook said. “You can be the maître d’ for a little while, can’t you, Daniel?”

“Sure, I can do it,” the writer told him. He washed his hands and face, and put on a clean apron. When he went into the dining room, the businessmen types seemed surprised that he wasn’t Asian—or especially angry-looking.

“What’s going on in the kitchen?” one of the men asked him tentatively; he definitely didn’t want Xiao Dee to overhear him.

“It’s the end of the war, on the television,” Danny told them.

“The pasta is terrific, in spite of everything,” another of the businessmen types said to Danny. “Compliments to the chef.”

“I’ll tell him,” Danny said.

Some faculty types showed up later, and a few proud parents taking their beloved university students out to dinner, but if you weren’t back in the kitchen at Mao’s with the angry Asians, you might not have known that the war was over, or how it ended. (They didn’t show that television footage everywhere, or for very long—not in most of America, anyway.)

Ah Gou would get to keep his fingertip. Kaori or Sao took young Joe home and put him to bed that night, and Danny drove home with Yi-Yiing. The cook would drive himself home, after Mao’s had closed.

There was an awkward moment—after the Japanese babysitter had gone, and before the cook came home—when Joe was asleep upstairs, and Danny was alone in the third Court Street kitchen with the nurse from Hong Kong. Like Danny and his dad, Yi-Yiing didn’t drink. She was making tea for herself—something allegedly good for her cold.

“So, here we are, alone at last,” Yi-Yiing said to him. “I guess we’re
almost
alone, anyway,” she added. “It’s just you and me and my damn cold.”

The kettle had not yet come to boil, and Yi-Yiing folded her arms on her breasts and stared at him.

“What?” Danny asked her.

“You know what,” she said to him. He was the first to lower his eyes.

“How’s it going with that tricky business of moving your daughter and your parents here?” he asked her. Finally, she turned away.

“I’m very slowly changing my mind about that,” Yi-Yiing told him.

Much later, the cook would hear that she’d gone back to Hong Kong; she was working as a nurse there. (None of them ever heard what happened to the Yokohamas, Kaori and Sao.)

That night the war ended, Yi-Yiing took her tea upstairs with her, leaving Danny alone in the kitchen. The temptation to turn on the TV was great, but Danny wandered outside to the Court Street sidewalk instead. It wasn’t very late—not nearly midnight—but most of the houses on the street were dark, or the only lights that were on were in the upstairs of the houses. People reading in bed, or watching television, Danny imagined. From several of the nearby houses, Danny could recognize that sickly light from a TV set—an unnatural blue-green, blue-gray shimmer. There was something wrong with that color.

It was warm enough in Iowa at the end of April for some windows to be open, and while he couldn’t make out the exact language on the television, Danny recognized the drone as the disembodied voice of the news—or so the writer imagined. (If someone had been watching a love story or another kind of movie, how would Danny have known?)

If the stars were out, Danny couldn’t see them. He’d lived on Court Street for three years; there’d been nothing ominous about living there, except for the driverless blue Mustang, and now the writer and his family were about to go back to Vermont. “This asshole country—” Ketchum had started to say; he’d been too angry or too drunk, or both, to even finish his thought. Wasn’t it too harsh an assessment, anyway? Danny hoped so.

“Please look after my dad and my little boy,” the writer said aloud, but to what was he speaking—or to whom? The starless night above Iowa City? The one alert and restless soul on Court Street who might have heard him? (Yi-Yiing—if she was still awake—maybe.)

Danny stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty street, as if daring the blue Mustang to take notice of him. “Please don’t hurt my father or my son,” Danny said. “Hurt
me
, if you have to hurt someone,” he said.

But who was out there, under the unseen heavens, to either look after them or hurt them? “Lady Sky?” the writer asked out loud, but Amy had never said she was a full-time angel, and he’d not seen her for eight years. There was no answer.

CHAPTER 11

HONEY

W
HERE HAS MY MEMORY GONE? THE COOK WAS THINKING;
he was almost sixty, his limp more pronounced. Tony Angel was trying to remember those markets Little Brother had taken him to in Chinatown. Kam Kuo was on Mott Street, Kam Man on the Bowery—or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter, the cook concluded; he could still recall the more important things.

How Xiao Dee had hugged him when they’d said good-bye—how Ah Gou had twisted the reattached tip of his left index finger, to make himself cry.
“She bu de!” Xiao
Dee had shouted. (The Cheng brothers pronounced this SEH BOO DEH.)

“She bu de!”
Ah Gou cried, bending that scarred and slightly crooked first digit.

Chinese immigrants said
she bu de
to one another, Xiao Dee had explained to the cook during one of their sixteen-hour marathons to or from Chinatown, somewhere out on I-80. You said
she bu de
when you were leaving your Chinese homeland, for New York or San Francisco—or for anywhere far away, where you might not see your childhood friends or members of your own family ever again. (Xiao Dee had told Tony Angel that
she bu de
meant something like “I can’t bear to let go.” You say it when you don’t want to give up something you have.)

“She bu de,”
the cook whispered to himself in his cherished kitchen at Avellino.

“What’s that, boss?” Greg, the sous chef, asked him.

“I was talking to my calamari,” Tony told him. “The thing with squid, Greg, is either you cook it just a little or you cook it forever—anything in between, and it’s rubber.”

Greg had certainly heard this soliloquy on squid before. “Uh-huh,” the sous chef said.

The calamari the cook was preparing for his son, Daniel, was the
forever
kind. Tony Angel slowly stewed it with canned tomatoes and tomato paste—and with garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, and black olives. The cook added the pine nuts and chopped parsley only at the end, and he served the squid over penne, with more chopped parsley on the side. (Never with Parmesan—not on calamari.) He would give Daniel just a small arugula salad after the pasta dish, maybe with a little goat cheese; he had a local Vermont chèvre that was pretty good.

But right now the pepperoni pizzas were ready, and the cook pulled them from the oven of his Stanley woodstove.
(“She bu de,”
he whispered to the old Irish stove, and Greg once more glanced in his direction.)

“You’re crying again—you know that, don’t you?” Celeste said to Tony. “You want to talk about it?”

“It must be the onions,” the cook told her.

“Bullshit, Tony,” she said. “Are those my two pepperonis for the old broads out there?” Without waiting for an answer, Celeste said: “They better be my pizzas. Those old girls are looking hungry enough to eat Danny for a first course.”

“They’re all yours,” Tony Angel told Celeste. He’d already put the penne in the pot of boiling water, and he took one out with a slotted spoon and tasted it while he watched every step of Celeste’s dramatic exit from the kitchen. Loretta was looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a code. “What?” the cook said to her.

“Mystery man,” Loretta said. “Danny’s a mystery man, too—isn’t he?”

“You’re as dramatic as your mother,” the cook told her, smiling.

“Is the calamari ready, or are you telling it your life story?” Loretta asked him.

Out in the dining room, Dot exclaimed: “My, that’s a thin-lookin’ crust!”

“It’s thin, all right,” May said approvingly.

“Our cook makes great pizzas,” Celeste told them. “His crusts are always thin.”

“What’s he put in the dough?” Dot asked the waitress.

“Yeah, what’s his secret ingredient?” May asked Celeste.

“I don’t know if he has one,” Celeste said. “I’ll ask him.” The two old broads were digging in—they ignored her. “I hope you ladies are hungry,” Celeste added, as she turned to go back to the kitchen. Dot and May just kept eating; this was no time to talk.

Danny watched the women eat with growing wonder. Where had he seen people eat like that? he was thinking. Surely not at Exeter, where table manners didn’t matter but the food was awful. At Exeter, you picked over your food with the greatest suspicion—and you talked nonstop, if only to distract yourself from what you were eating.

The old women had been talking and whispering (and
cackling)
together (like a couple of crows); now there wasn’t a word between them, and no eye contact, either. They rested their forearms on the table and bent over their plates, heads down. Their shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off an attack from behind, and Danny imagined that if he were closer to them, he might hear them emit an unconscious moan or growl—a sound so innately associated with eating that the women were unaware of it and had long ceased to hear it themselves.

No one in the North End had ever eaten that way, the writer was remembering. Food was a celebration at Vicino di Napoli, an event that inspired conversation; people were engaged with one another when they ate. At Mao’s, too, you didn’t just talk over a meal—you
shouted
. And you shared your food—whereas these two old broads appeared to be protecting their pizzas from each other. They wolfed their dinners down like dogs. Danny knew they wouldn’t leave a scrap.

“The Red Sox just aren’t reliable,” Greg was saying, but the cook was concentrating on the surprise squid dish for his son; he’d missed what had happened in the game on the radio.

“Daniel likes a little extra parsley,” he was saying to Loretta, just as Celeste came back into the kitchen.

“The two old broads want to know if there’s a secret ingredient in your pizza dough, Tony,” Celeste said to the cook.

“You bet there is—it’s
honey,”
Tony Angel told her.

“I would never have guessed that,” Celeste said. “That’s some secret, all right.”

Out in the dining room, it suddenly came to the writer Danny Angel where he’d seen people eat as if they were animals, the way these two old women were eating their pizzas. The woodsmen and the sawmill workers had eaten like that—not only in the cookhouse in Twisted River, but also in those makeshift wanigans, where he and his father had once fed the loggers during a river drive. Those men ate without talking; sometimes even Ketchum hadn’t spoken a word. But these tough-looking broads couldn’t have been
loggers
, Danny was thinking, when Loretta interrupted his thoughts.

“Surprise!” the waitress said, as she put the squid dish in front of him.

“I was hoping it was going to be the calamari,” Danny told her.

“Ha!” Loretta said. “I’ll tell your dad.”

May had finished her pepperoni pizza first, and anyone seeing the way she eyed the last piece on Dot’s plate might have had reason to warn Dot that she should never entirely trust her old friend. “I guess I liked mine a little better than you’re likin’ yours,” May said.

“I’m likin’ mine just fine,” Dot answered with her mouth full, her thumb and index finger quickly gripping the crust of that precious last slice.

May looked away. “That writer is finally eatin’ somethin’, and it looks pretty appetizin’,” she observed. Dot just grunted, finishing her pizza.

“Would you say it’s
almost
as good as Cookie’s?” May asked.

“Nope,” Dot said, wiping her mouth. “Nobody’s pizza is as good as Cookie’s.”

“I said
almost
, Dot.”

“Close
, maybe,” Dot told her.

“I hope you ladies left room for dessert,” Celeste said. “It looks like those pizzas hit the spot.”

“What’s the secret ingredient?” May asked the waitress.

“You’ll never guess,” Celeste said.

“I’ll bet it’s
honey
,” Dot said; both she and May cackled, but they stopped cackling when they saw how the waitress was staring at them. (It didn’t happen often that Celeste was speechless.)

“Wait a minute,” May said. “It
is
honey, isn’t it?”

“That’s what the cook said—he puts honey in his dough,” Celeste told them.

“Yeah, and the next thing you’re gonna tell us is that the cook
limps,”
Dot said. That really cracked up the two old broads; Dot and May couldn’t stop cackling over that one, not that they missed the message in Celeste’s amazed expression. (The waitress might as well have told them outright. Yes, indeed, the cook limped. He limped up a storm!)

But Danny had overheard snippets of their conversation before the ladies’ cackling got out of control. He’d heard Celeste say something about his dad putting honey in the pizza dough, and one of the old broads had joked about the cook’s limp. Danny was sensitive about his father’s limp; he’d heard enough jokes on that subject to last a lifetime, most of them from those West Dummer dolts at that piss-poor Paris Manufacturing Company School. And why did Celeste look so stricken suddenly? the writer was wondering.

“Weren’t you ladies interested in the pie and the cobbler?” the waitress asked them.

“Wait a minute,” May said again. “Are you sayin’ your cook’s got a limp?”

“He limps a
little,”
Celeste hesitated to say, but in effect she’d already said it.

“Are you shittin’ us?” Dot asked the waitress.

Celeste seemed offended, but she also looked afraid; she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know why or what it was. Neither did Danny, but to anyone seeing him, the writer appeared to be frightened, too.

“Look, our cook’s got a limp, and he puts honey in his pizza dough—it’s no big deal,” Celeste said to them.

“Maybe it’s a big deal to
us,”
May told the waitress.

“Is he a little fella?” Dot asked.

“Yeah … and what’s his name?” May asked.

“I would say our cook is … slightly built,” Celeste answered carefully. “His name’s Tony.”

“Oh,” Dot said, disappointed.

“Tony,” May repeated, shaking her head.

“You can bring us one apple pie and one blueberry cobbler,” Dot told the waitress.

“We’ll share ’em,” May said.

It might have ended there, if Danny hadn’t spoken; it was his voice that made Dot and May look at him more closely. When they’d first seen him, they must have missed the writer’s physical resemblance to his father as a young man, but it was how well-spoken Danny was that reminded both Dot and May of the cook. In a town like Twisted River, the cook’s enunciation—and his perfect diction—had stood out.

“Might I inquire if you two ladies are from around here?” Danny asked those bad old broads.

“Sweet Jesus, May,” Dot said to her friend. “Don’t that voice kinda take you back?”

“Way
back,” May said, looking hard at Danny. “Don’t he look just like Cookie, too?”

The
Cookie
word was enough to tell Danny where these old ladies were from, and why they might have been badgering Celeste about honey in pizza dough and a little fella of a cook—one who limped.

“Your name was Danny,” Dot said to him. “Have you changed your name, too?”

“No,” the writer told them too quickly.

“I gotta meet this here cook,” May said.

“Why don’tcha tell your dad to come say hello to us, will ya?” Dot asked Danny. “It’s been so long since we seen one another, we got some serious catchin’ up to do.”

Celeste came back with the ladies’ desserts, which Danny knew would be only a temporary distraction.

“Celeste,” Danny said. “Would you please tell Pop that there are two old friends who want to see him? Tell him they’re from Twisted River,” Danny told her.

“Our cook’s name is
Tony
,” Celeste said a little desperately to the bad old broads. She’d heard enough about Twisted River to make her hope she would never hear anything more about it. (The cook had told her it would be all over on the day Twisted River caught up to him.)

“Your cook’s name is
Cookie
,” Dot said to the waitress.

“Just tell him we’re
chokin’,”
May told Celeste. “That’ll bring him runnin’.”

“Limpin’
, you mean,” Dot corrected her, but now their cackles were suppressed. If the writer had to guess, it seemed that these women had a score to settle with his father.

“You got the same superior-soundin’ voice as your daddy,” May said to Danny.

“Is the Injun around?” Dot asked him.

“No, Jane is … long gone,” Danny told them.

In the kitchen, Celeste was still dry-eyed when she walked past her daughter. “I could have used a little help with the party of eight, Mom,” Loretta was saying to her, “and then those three couples came in, but you just kept talking away to those two old biddies.”

“Those old biddies are from Twisted River,” Celeste told the cook. “They said to tell you they were
chokin’ …
Cookie.” Celeste had never seen such an expression on Tony Angel’s face—none of them had—but of course she’d never called him “Cookie” before.

“Is there a problem, boss?” the sous chef asked.

“It was the honey in the pizza, wasn’t it?” Celeste was saying. “The honey gave it away, I guess.”

“Dot and May. It’s finished, sweetheart,” Tony Angel said to Celeste; she started to cry.

“Mom?” Loretta said.

“You don’t know me,” the cook told them all. “You won’t ever know where I go from here.” He took off his apron and let it fall on the floor. “You’re in charge, Greg,” he said to the sous chef.

“They don’t know your last name, not unless Danny tells them,” Celeste managed to say; Loretta was holding her while she sobbed.

The cook walked out into the dining room. Danny was standing between him and the two tough broads. “They don’t know the
Angel
name, Pop,” his son whispered to him.

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for,” his dad said.

“I wouldn’t call that a
little
limp—would you, May?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Hello, ladies,” the cook said to them, but he didn’t come any closer.