Last Night in Twisted River (67 page)

“An exile, you mean,” Danny said.

“Your country is going to the dogs—it has been, for some time,” Ketchum told him. “You can see it better, and write about it better, if you stay in Canada—I know you can.”

“We were attacked, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said weakly; her heart wasn’t in the argument. “Are we going to the dogs because we were
attacked
?”

“It’s what we make out of the attack that counts,” Ketchum told her. “How’s Bush going to respond? Isn’t that what matters?” the old logger asked Danny, but the writer was no match for Ketchum’s pessimism. Danny had always underestimated the former river driver’s capacity for following things through to their worst-possible conclusion.

“Stay in Canada,” Ketchum told him. “If you’re living in a foreign country, you’ll see what’s true, and what isn’t true, back in the old U.S.A.—I mean, more clearly.”

“I know that’s what you think,” Danny said.

“The poor people in those towers—” Carmella started to say, but she stopped. Carmella was no match for Ketchum’s pessimism, either.

The three of them were in the bar at The Balsams, watching the TV at 4
P.M.
, when someone on CNN said there were “good indications” that the Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, who was suspected of coordinating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in 1998, was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—this was based on “new and specific” information, meaning since the attacks.

An hour and a half later, after Ketchum had consumed four beers and three shots of bourbon, and when Danny was still drinking his third beer, CNN reported that U.S. officials said the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania could have been headed for one of three possible targets: Camp David, the White House, or the U.S. Capitol building.

Carmella, who was sipping only her second glass of red wine, said: “I’ll bet on the White House.”

“Do you really think I should
marry
Six-Pack?” Ketchum asked Danny.

“Just try living with her,” Danny suggested.

“Well, I did that—once,” the old riverman reminded him. “I can’t believe Six-Pack wanted to fuck
Cookie!”
Ketchum cried. Then, out of consideration for Carmella, he added: “Sorry.”

The three of them went into the dining room and ate an enormous meal. Danny kept drinking beer, to Ketchum’s disgust, but Ketchum and Carmella went through two bottles of red wine, and Carmella retired early. “It’s been a difficult day for me,” she told them, “but I want to thank you, Mr. Ketchum, for showing me the river—and for everything else.” Carmella was assuming that she wouldn’t see Ketchum in the morning, and she wouldn’t; even when he’d been drinking, Ketchum was an earlier and earlier riser. Both gentlemen offered to walk Carmella to her hotel room, but she wouldn’t hear of it; she left them in the dining room, where Ketchum immediately ordered another bottle of red wine.

“I’m not going to help you drink it,” Danny told him.

“I don’t need your help, Danny,” Ketchum said.

For a small person, which Danny was, the problem with drinking only beer was that he began to feel full before he felt drunk, but Danny was determined not to let Ketchum tempt him with the red wine. Danny still imagined that the red wine had played some role in the cowboy’s murder of his father. On the very day the cook’s ashes were scattered in Twisted River, Danny didn’t want to belittle the memory of that terrible night when Carl killed Danny’s dad, and Danny gave all three rounds of the 20-gauge to the cowboy.

“You’ve got to let yourself go, Danny,” Ketchum was saying. “Be more daring.”

“I’m a beer drinker, Ketchum—no red wine for me,” Danny told him.

“For Christ’s sake—I mean, as a
writer!”
Ketchum said.

“As a
writer?”
Danny asked.

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum told him. “You have a way of writing around the
periphery
of things.”

“I
do?”
Danny asked him.

“You do. You seem to be dodging the squeamish stuff,” Ketchum told him. “You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine
everything
, Danny.”

At the time, this struck Danny as less in the spirit of literary criticism than it appeared to be a direct invitation to spend the night in the cab of Ketchum’s truck—or in the smokehouse with the skinned, smoking bear.

“What about the bear?” Danny suddenly asked the woodsman. “Won’t the fire in the smokehouse go out?”

“Oh, the bear will have smoked enough for now—I can start the fire up again tomorrow,” Ketchum told him impatiently. “There’s one more thing—well, okay,
two
things. First of all, you don’t seem to be a city person—not to me. I think the country is the place for you—I mean, as a writer,” Ketchum said more softly. “Secondly—though I would suggest this is more important—you have no need for the fucking nom de plume anymore. As I’m aware that the very idea of a pen name once affected you adversely, I think it’s time for you to take your own name back.
Daniel
always was your dad’s name for you, and I’ve heard you say, Danny, that Daniel Baciagalupo is a fine name for a writer. You’ll still be Danny to me, of course, but—once again,
as a writer—
you should be Daniel Baciagalupo.”

“I can guess what my publishers will say to that idea,” Danny said to the logger. “They’ll remind me that Danny Angel is a famous, best-selling author. They’re going to tell me, Ketchum, that an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo won’t sell as many books.”

“I’m just telling you what’s good for you—as a writer,” Ketchum told him almost offhandedly.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” the writer said a little peevishly. “I should rename myself Daniel Baciagalupo; I should live in the country, in Canada; I should let myself go—that is, be more daring as a writer,” Danny dutifully recited.

“I think you’re catching on,” the logger told him.

“Is there anything else you would recommend?” Danny asked him.

“We’ve been an empire in decline since I can remember,” Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn’t kidding. “We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.”

The two men stared at each other, poised over what they were drinking—Danny forcing himself both to keep drinking and to continue looking at Ketchum. Danny loved the old logger so much, but Ketchum had hurt him; Ketchum was good at it. “Well, I look forward to seeing you for Christmas,” Danny said. “It won’t be that long now.”

“Maybe not this year,” Ketchum told him.

The writer knew he was risking a blow from Ketchum’s powerful right hand, but Danny reached for the logger’s
left
hand and held it against the table. “Don’t—just
don’t,”
Danny said to him, but Ketchum easily pulled his hand away.

“Just do your job, Danny,” the old river driver told him. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

VI.

POINTE AU BARIL STATION,
ONTARIO, 2005
——

CHAPTER 16

LOST NATION

F
OR THREE WINTERS NOW, THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO
—who’d reclaimed the name that the cook and Cousin Rosie had given him—spent the months of January and February, and the first two weeks of March, on Turner Island in Georgian Bay. The island still belonged to Charlotte, the onetime love of Danny’s life, but Charlotte and her family had no desire to set foot on the frozen lake or those frigid, snow-covered rocks in the heart of the winter, when they lived happily in Los Angeles.

Danny had actually improved the place—not only according to Ketchum’s standards. Andy Grant had taped heated electrical cables to the waste lines that were used during the winter. These same pipes were also wrapped with a foil insulation and covered with an ice-and-water membrane. Danny could have had running hot water by applying similar heat-line and insulation methods to the water pipe running to the bay, but Andy would have had to do a lot more work—not to mention move the hot-water heater inside the main cabin to ensure that
those
pipes wouldn’t freeze. It was simpler for Danny to chop a hole in the ice on the lake, and carry the water from the bay in a bucket. This amounted to a lot of chopping and carrying, but—as Ketchum would have said—so what?

There wasn’t just the ice-chopping; there was a lot of wood to cut. (Ketchum’s chainsaw was a big help.) In the ten weeks Danny was there, he cut all the wood he would need the following winter—with enough left over for Charlotte and her family to use on those summer nights when it was cool enough to have a fire.

In addition to the woodstove in the main cabin, there was a propane fireplace in the bedroom and an electric heater in the bathroom—and Andy Grant had put fiberglass insulation between the floor joists. The main cabin was now sustainable for winter weather, and there was a second woodstove in Danny’s writing shack, though there was no insulation there; the little building was small enough to not need it, and Danny banked the perimeter walls of the shack with snow, which kept the wind from blowing under the building and cooling off the floor.

Every night, Danny also banked the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin; when the writer awoke in the morning, it was only necessary for him to put more wood on the fire and fully open the flue. Then he tramped outside to his writing shack and started a fire in the woodstove there. Overnight, the only concession he made to his IBM typewriter was that he covered it with an electric blanket—otherwise, the grease would freeze. While the writing shack was warming up, Danny chopped a hole in the ice on the lake and brought a couple of buckets of water up to the main cabin. One bucket of water was usually sufficient to flush the toilet for the day; a second sufficed for what cooking Danny did, and for washing the dishes. Charlotte’s oversize bathtub easily held four or five buckets, which included the two that had to be heated (near to boiling) on the stove, but Danny didn’t take a bath until the end of the day.

He went to work every morning in his writing shack, inspired by the view of that wind-bent pine—the little tree that had once reminded both the writer and Ketchum of the cook. Danny wrote every day until early afternoon; he wanted to have a few remaining hours of daylight in which to do his chores. There was always more wood to cut, and almost every day Danny went to town. If there wasn’t much garbage to haul off the island, and he needed only a few groceries, Danny would make the trip on cross-country skis. He kept the skis and poles, and a small haul sled, in Granddaddy’s cabin near the back dock. (That was the unheated, possibly haunted cabin Ketchum and Hero had preferred during their days and nights on the island—the cabin with the trapdoor in the floor, where Charlotte’s grandfather, the wily poacher, had likely hidden his illegally slain deer.)

It was a short ski from the back dock of the island across Shawanaga Bay, and then Danny took the South Shore Road into Pointe au Baril Station. He wore a harness around his chest; there was a ring attached to the harness, between Danny’s shoulder blades, where a carabiner held a tow cord to the haul sled. Of course, if there was a lot of garbage to take to town, or if he needed to do more extensive shopping in Pointe au Baril, Danny would take the snowmobile or the Polar airboat.

Andy Grant had warned the writer that he would need to have his own snowmobile as well as the airboat. There weren’t many days in the winter months when boating conditions were unfavorable, except when the temperature climbed above freezing; then the snow sometimes stuck to the bottom of the hull, making it difficult for the airboat to slide across the snow-covered ice. That was when you had to have a snowmobile. But in early January, when Danny arrived at Charlotte’s island, there was usually open water in the main channel out of Pointe au Baril Station—and often floating slabs of ice in the choppy water in the Brignall Banks Narrows. Early January was when the Polar airboat was essential—and, only occasionally, in mid-March. (In some years, albeit rarely, the ice in the bay began to break up that early.)

The airboat could cruise over ice and snow and open water—even over floating chunks of broken ice—with ease. It could go 100
MPH
, though Danny never drove it that fast; the airboat had an airplane engine and a single, rear-mounted propeller. It had a heated cabin, too, and you wore guards to protect your ears from the sound. The airboat had been the most expensive element of making Turner Island habitable for Danny during those ten weeks in the coldest part of the winter, but Andy Grant had shared the cost with the writer. Andy used it as a work boat, not only in December, when the ice began to form in the bay, but from the middle of March till whenever the ice was entirely gone—usually, by the end of April.

Danny liked to be gone from Georgian Bay before the start of mud season; the ice breaking up in the bay held no attraction for him. (There wasn’t much of a mud season in Georgian Bay—it was all rocks there. But for Daniel Baciagalupo, mud season was as much a state of mind as it was a recognizable season in northern New Eng land.)

Since Charlotte’s family used the bedroom in the main cabin only sparingly, as a guest room, Danny kept some of his winter clothing in the closet year-round—just his boots, his warmest parka, his snow pants, and his ski hats. Naturally, Charlotte’s and her family’s summer paraphernalia was everywhere—with new photographs on the walls every winter—but Charlotte had left Danny’s writing shack as it was. She’d found a couple of pictures of Ketchum with the cook, and two or three of Joe, which she had hung in the shack—perhaps to make Danny feel welcome there, not that she hadn’t already done enough to make him feel warmly invited to use the place.

Charlotte’s husband, the Frenchman, was evidently the cook in their family, because he left notes for Danny in the kitchen about any new equipment that was there. Danny left notes for the Frenchman, too, and they traded presents every year—gadgets for the kitchen and sundry cooking ware.

The more recently restored sleeping cabins—where Charlotte and her husband, and their children, slept every summer—were understood to be off-limits to Danny in the winter. The buildings remained locked; the electricity and propane had been turned off, and the plumbing drained. But, every winter, Danny would at least once peer in the windows—no curtains were necessary on a private family island in Shawanaga Bay. The writer merely wanted to see the new photographs on the walls, and to get a look at what new toys and books the kids might have; this wasn’t really an invasion of Charlotte’s privacy, was it? And, if only from such a wintry and far-removed perspective, Charlotte’s family looked like a happy one to Daniel Baciagalupo. The notes back and forth with the Frenchman had all but replaced Charlotte’s now-infrequent phone calls from the West Coast, and Danny still stayed out of Toronto at that September time of the year, when he knew Charlotte and her director husband were in town for the film festival.

Ketchum had advised the writer to live in the country. To the veteran river driver, Danny hadn’t seemed like a city person.

Well, that the writer spent a mere ten weeks on Turner Island in Georgian Bay didn’t exactly constitute
living
in the country; though he traveled a lot nowadays, Danny lived in Toronto the rest of the year. Yet—at least from early January till the middle of March—that lonely island in Shawanaga Bay and the town of Pointe au Baril Station were extremely isolated. (As Ketchum used to say, “You notice the birch trees more when there’s snow.”) There were not more than two hundred people in Pointe au Baril in the winter.

Kennedy’s, which was good for groceries and home hardware, stayed open most of the week in the winter months. There was the Haven restaurant out on Route 69, where they served alcohol and had a pool table. The Haven had a fondness for Christmas wreaths, and they displayed an abundance of Santas—including a bass with a Santa Claus hat. While the most popular food with the snowmobilers were the chicken wings and the onion rings and the French fries, Danny stuck to the BLTs and the coleslaw—when he went there at all, which was rarely.

Larry’s Tavern was out on 69, too—Danny had stayed there with Ketchum on their deer-hunting trips in the Bayfield and Pointe au Baril area—though there was already a rumor that Larry’s would be sold to make room for the
new
highway. They were always widening 69, but for now the Shell station was still operating; supposedly, the Shell station was the only place in Pointe au Baril where you could buy porn magazines. (Not very good ones, if you could trust Ketchum’s evaluation.)

It could be forlorn at that time of year, and there wasn’t a lot to talk about, except for the repeated observation that the main channel didn’t freeze over for all but a week or two. And all winter long, both the gossip and the local news provided various gruesome details of the accidents out on 69; there were a lot of accidents on that highway. This winter, there’d already been a five-vehicle pileup at the intersection with Go Home Lake Road, or near Little Go Home Bay—Danny could never keep the two of them straight. (To those year-round residents who didn’t know he was a famous author, Daniel Baciagalupo was just another out-of-it American.)

Naturally, the liquor store—out on 69, across from the bait shop—was always busy, as was the Pointe au Baril nursing station, where an ambulance driver had recently stopped Danny, who was on his snowmobile, and told him about the snowmobiler who’d gone through the ice in Shawanaga Bay.

“Did he drown?” Danny asked the driver.

“Haven’t found him yet,” the ambulance driver replied.

Danny thought that maybe they wouldn’t find the snowmobiler until the ice broke up sometime in mid-April. According to this same ambulance driver at the nursing station, there’d also been “a doozy of a head-on” in Honey Harbour, and an alleged “first-rater of a rear-end job” in the vicinity of Port Severn. Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.

Those ten weeks that Danny lived in the environs of Pointe au Baril Station were a strong dose of rural life; maybe it wasn’t enough country living to have satisfied Ketchum, but it was enough for Danny. It counted as the writer’s
requisite
country living—whether Ketchum would have counted it or not.

IN THE AFTER-HOURS RESTAURANT
, the eighth and final novel by “Danny Angel,” was published in 2002, seven years after
Baby in the Road
. What Danny had predicted to Ketchum was largely true—namely, his publishers complained that a book by an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo couldn’t possibly sell as many copies as a new novel by Danny Angel.

But Danny made his publishers understand that
In the After-Hours Restaurant
was absolutely the last book he would publish under the Angel name. And, in every interview, he repeatedly referred to himself as Daniel Baciagalupo; over and over again, he told the story of the circumstances that had forced the nom de plume upon him when he’d been a young and beginning writer. It had never been a secret that Danny Angel was a pen name, or that the writer’s real name was Daniel Baciagalupo—the secret had been why.

The accidental death of the bestselling author’s son—not to mention the violent murder of the writer’s father, and the subsequent shooting of the cook’s killer—had been big news. Danny could have insisted that
In the After-Hours Restaurant
be the debut novel by Daniel Baciagalupo; their complaining aside, and however reluctantly, Danny’s publishers would have agreed. But Danny was content to let his
next
novel (it would be his ninth) be Daniel Baciagalupo’s debut.

In the After-Hours Restaurant
got a warm reception and mostly good reviews—the author was often praised for a nowadays-atypical “restraint.” Maybe the oft-repeated
restraint
word was what bothered the writer, though it was meant as praise. Danny would never know what Ketchum thought of
In the After-Hours Restaurant
, but
restraint
had never been a prominent part of the logger’s vocabulary—not in the category of admired qualities, anyway. Would Danny Angel’s last novel have satisfied the former river driver’s demand that Danny let himself go—that is, be more daring as a writer? (Apparently, Danny didn’t think so.)

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum had told him. In the case of
In the After-Hours Restaurant
, would the nightly efforts of the gentle sous chef to teach himself his illustrious father’s trade constitute more of the same “writing around the
periphery
of things”—as Ketchum had unkindly put it? (Danny must have thought so; otherwise, why wouldn’t he have proudly put Daniel Baciagalupo’s name on the new novel?)

“His most subtle work,” one reviewer had written glowingly about
In the After-Hours Restaurant
. In Ketchum’s unsubtle vocabulary, the
subtle
word had never been uttered in praise.