by John Irving
On the night of Dot and May's visit to Avellino, when Danny and his dad would soon be on the move again, the famous writer's compound in Putney was ablaze with lights. To anyone driving by on Hickory Ridge Road, the lights that were on--in every room, in each building--seemed to advertise just how kind capitalism had been to the bestselling author Danny Angel.
Was the compound overrun with revelers? Was every last room of the old farmhouse (now the guesthouse) occupied--as was, evidently, the new house that Danny had built for himself and Joe? The lights were also on in the famous writer's so-called writing shack, as if the partygoers were even partying there.
But Danny had left only the kitchen light on, in the new building; he'd left the other rooms (and the other buildings) dark. The music was loud and conflicting--it was coming from both the new building and the guesthouse, and every window must have been open. It was a wonder that someone hadn't called the police about the noise; though the writer's compound had no near neighbors, almost anyone driving by had to have heard the clashing music. Danny heard it, and saw all the lights ablaze even before he turned in to his driveway, where he stopped his car and turned off the engine and his headlights. There were no other cars around, except Joe's. (It was parked in the open garage, where Joe had left it the last time the boy had been home from school.) From the far end of his driveway, Danny could see that even the lights in the garage were on. If Amy were ever to forgo arriving via parachute, the writer was thinking, maybe this was how she would announce herself.
Or was it a prank? Pranks weren't Armando DeSimone's style. Other than Armando, Danny had no close friends in the Putney area--certainly no one who would have felt comfortable coming on the writer's property uninvited. Had Dot and May already called Carl? But those bad old broads didn't know where Danny lived, and if the cowboy had somehow managed to find Danny Angel, wouldn't the retired deputy have preferred the dark? Surely, the former constable and deputy sheriff wouldn't have turned on all the lights and the music; why would Carl have wanted to announce himself?
Furthermore, there was no occasion for a surprise party--not that the writer could think of. Maybe it was Armando, Danny was reconsidering, but the choice of music couldn't have been Armando's or Mary's. The DeSimones liked to dance; they were Beatles people. This sounded like eighties' music--the stuff Joe played when he was home. (Danny didn't know what the music was, but there were two separate sounds--both of them terrible, at war with each other.)
The tap-tap of the flashlight on the driver's-side window made Danny jump in the seat. He saw it was his friend Jimmy, the state trooper. Jimmy must have turned off the headlights of his patrol car when he'd slipped into the driveway and had parked broadside, behind Danny's car; he'd cut the police car's engine, too, not that Danny could possibly have heard the trooper's arrival over the music.
"What's with the music, Danny?" Jimmy asked him. "It's a little loud, isn't it? I think you should turn it down."
"I didn't turn it on, Jimmy," the writer said. "I didn't turn on the lights or the music."
"Who's in your house?" the trooper asked.
"I don't know," Danny said. "I didn't invite anyone."
"Maybe they've come and gone--shall I have a look?" Jimmy asked him.
"I'll come with you," Danny told the trooper.
"Have you had any letters from a crazy fan lately?" Jimmy asked the writer. "Or any hate mail, maybe?"
"Nothing like that for a while," Danny told him. There'd been the usual religious nuts, and the assholes who constantly complained about the writer's "unseemly" language or the "too-explicit" sex.
"Everyone's a fucking censor nowadays," Ketchum had said.
Once he published East of Bangor--his so-called abortion novel--the hate mail might heat up for a while, Danny knew. But there'd been nothing of a threatening nature recently.
"There's nobody out to get you--no one you know about, right?" Jimmy asked.
"There's someone who thinks he has a score to settle with my dad--someone dangerous," Danny said. "But this can't be about that," the writer said.
Danny followed the trooper into the kitchen of the new house first. Little things were amiss: The oven door was open; a bottle of olive oil lay on its side on the counter, but the cap was screwed on tight and the oil hadn't leaked. Danny walked into the living room, where he could shut off the loudest of the head-pounding music, and he noted that a coffee-table lamp now lay on the couch, but nothing appeared to have been damaged. The deliberate but small disturbances signified mischief, not vandalism; the television had been turned on, but without sound.
Though Danny had walked through the dining room on his way to the living room, which was the source of half the music, he'd noticed only that one of the chairs at the dining-room table had been upended. But Jimmy had lingered there, at the table. When Danny turned the music off, Jimmy said, "Do you know whose dog this is, Danny? I believe it's one of a pair of dogs I know out on the back road to Westminster West. The dogs belong to Roland Drake. Maybe you know him--he went to Windham."
The dead dog had stiffened since Danny last saw him--he was the husky-shepherd mix, the one Rooster had killed. The dog lay fully extended, with a frozen snarl, on the dining-room table. One of the dog's paws, contorted by rigor mortis, pressed flat the note Danny had composed to the hippie carpenter. Where Danny had typed, "Enough is enough, okay?" the hippie had replied in longhand.
"Don't tell me--let me guess," the writer said to the state trooper. "I'll bet the asshole wrote, 'Fuck you!'--or words to that effect."
"That's what he wrote, Danny," Jimmy said. "I guess you know him."
Roland Drake--that asshole! Danny was thinking. Armando DeSimone had been right. Roland Drake had been one of Danny's writing students at Windham College, albeit briefly. Drake had dropped the course after his first teacher's conference, when Danny told the arrogant young fuck that good writing could rarely be accomplished without revision. Roland Drake wrote first-draft gibberish--he had a halfway decent imagination, but he was sloppy. He paid no attention to specific details, or to the language.
"I'm into writing, not rewriting," Drake had told Danny. "I only like the creative part."
"But rewriting is writing," Danny said to the young man. "Sometimes, rewriting is the most creative part."
Roland Drake had sneered and walked out of Danny's office. That had been their only conversation. The boy hadn't been as hairy then; perhaps Drake hadn't been as drawn to the hippie persuasion when he was younger. And Danny had trouble recognizing people he previously knew. That was a real problem with being famous: You were always meeting people for what you thought was the first time, but they would remember that they'd already met you. It was probably an additional insult to Drake that Danny hadn't remembered him--not just that Danny had told Drake to mind his dog (or dogs).
"Yes, I know Roland Drake," Danny said to Jimmy. He told the state trooper the story--including the part about Rooster killing the dog that now lay stiffly on the dining-room table. From Danny's typed note, Jimmy could see for himself how the writer had tried to make peace with the asshole hippie. The writer carpenter, as Armando had called him, didn't know when enough was enough--no more than Roland Drake knew that rewriting was writing, and that it could be the most creative part of the process.
Danny and Jimmy went through the rest of the main house, turning off lights, putting things in order. In Joe's bathroom, the bathtub had been filled. The water was cold, but there was no mess; there'd been no spills. In Joe's bedroom, one of the boy's wrestling-team photos had been removed from the picture hook on the wall and was propped up (by a pillow) against the headboard of the bed. In Danny's bathroom, one of his suit jackets (on a coat hanger) had been hung on the shower-curtain rod; his electric razor and a pair of dress shoes were in the otherwise-empty bathtub. All the bath towels were piled at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom.
"Drake is just a shit-disturber, Danny," the trooper told him. "He's a little trust-fund fuck--
they never dare to do any real damage, because they know their parents would end up having to pay for it."
The same small nuisances were everywhere, throughout the house. When they went to turn the lights out in the garage, Danny discovered a tube of toothpaste on the driver's seat of Joe's car; a toothbrush was tucked under the driver's-side sun visor.
There was more of the same juvenile mischief in the guesthouse--the original farmhouse--where the music had been cranked up as loud as it would go and the soundless TV was on. Lamps were tipped on their sides, a pyramid of lampshades decorated the kitchen table, several pictures had been rehung (upside down), and the beds were unmade--in a manner that made you think someone had slept in them.
"This is irritating, but it's mainly childish," Danny said to the trooper.
"I agree," Jimmy said.
"I'm selling the whole property anyway," Danny told him.
"Not because of this, I hope," the state trooper said.
"No, but this makes it easier," the writer answered. Because Danny knew he was moving away, and the Putney property would have to be sold, maybe Roland Drake's violation of the writer's personal effects felt like less of an invasion than it truly was--that is, until Danny and Jimmy came to the famous author's writing shack. Yes, all the lights were on, and some papers had been misplaced, but Drake had overstepped; he'd done some actual harm.
Danny had been proofreading the galleys of East of Bangor. As testimony to the novelist's ceaseless need to rewrite--to tamper with, to endlessly revise--Danny had written more than the usual number of notes and queries in the margins of the galleys. This demonstration--namely, that Danny Angel was both a writer and a rewriter--must have been too much to take for a failed writer (a writer carpenter) like Roland Drake. The evidence of rewriting in the galleys of Danny's soon-to-be-published next novel had pushed Drake over the edge.
With a Sharpie permanent marker, in deep black, Roland Drake had scrawled on the cover of the uncorrected proofs of East of Bangor, and inside the galleys, on every page, Drake had written his comments with a Sharpie fine-point red pen. Not that the writer carpenter's commentary was either insightful or elaborate, but Drake had taken the time to defile every page; there were more than four hundred pages in the galleys of East of Bangor. Danny had proofread three quarters of the novel, and--notwithstanding what a rewriter he was--he'd written notes or queries on only about fifteen or twenty of the pages. Roland Drake had crossed out Danny's notes and queries; he'd rendered the author's revisions unreadable. Drake had purposely made a mess of the galleys, but it needn't have cost Danny more than two weeks' additional work--not even that, under normal circumstances, though Drake's destruction of the writer's uncorrected proofs seemed greater than a merely symbolic assault.
But at a time when the cook and his son were confronted with the chaos of going on the run again, Roland Drake's attack on Danny's sixth novel might delay the publication of East of Bangor by several months--conceivably, for as long as half a year. The novel was scheduled to be published in the fall of '83. (Maybe not now--possibly, the book wouldn't be published until the winter of '84. With all that was newly happening in Danny's life, it would take the author a while to remember the revisions he'd already made in the galleys--and to find the time to proofread the last quarter of the novel.)
"Revise the chickenshit title!" Drake had scribbled on the cover of East of Bangor, in deep black. "Change the author's fake name!"
And in red, throughout the novel, while the writer carpenter's criticism demonstrated no great range or in-depth perception, Drake had underlined a phrase or circled a word--on four-hundred-plus pages--and he'd added a cryptic comment, albeit only one per page. "This sucks!" and "Rewrite!" were the most repeated, along with "Cut!" and "Dog-killer!" Less common were "Lame!" and "Feeble!" More than once, "Lengthy!" had been scrawled across the entire page. Only twice, but memorably, Drake had written, "I fucked Franky, too!" (Perhaps Drake had slept with Franky, Danny only now considered; that might have contributed to the onetime writing student's animosity toward the bestselling author.)
"Have a look, Jimmy," Danny said to the trooper, handing him the desecrated copy of the galleys.
"Gee ... this makes more work for you, I suppose," Jimmy said, turning the pages. "'Year of the Dog wouldn't publish this shit!'" the state trooper read aloud, with deadpan puzzlement. Jimmy always looked pained by what he didn't understand--at once heartbroken and baffled. For a cop who'd shot his share of dogs, Jimmy had the sad, droopy eyes of a Labrador retriever; tall and thin, with a long face, the trooper looked questioningly at Danny for some explanation of Roland Drake's ravings.
"Year of the Dog was a small literary magazine," Danny explained. "Either Windham College published it, or it was independently published by some Windham College students--I can't remember."
"Franky is a girl?" Jimmy asked, reading further.
"Yes," the writer answered.
"That young woman who lived here for a while--that one, right?" the trooper asked.
"That's her, Jimmy."
"'You write with a limp!'" Jimmy read aloud. "Gee ..."
"Drake should bury his own dog--don't you think, Jimmy?" Danny asked the trooper.
"I'll take Roland's dog back to him. We'll have a little talk," Jimmy said. "You could get a restraining order--"
"I don't need one, Jimmy--I'm leaving, remember?" Danny said.
"I know how to talk to Roland," the trooper said.
"Just watch out for the other dog, Jimmy--he comes at you from behind," Danny warned him.
"I won't shoot him if I don't have to, Danny--I only shoot them when I have to," the trooper said.
"I know," Danny told him.
"It's hard to imagine anyone out to get your dad," Jimmy ventured. "I can't conceive of someone having a score to settle with the cook. You want to tell me about that, Danny?" the cop asked.
Here was another intersection in the road, the writer thought. What were these junctions, where making a sharp-left or sharp-right turn from the previously chosen path presented a tempting possibility? Hadn't there been an opportunity for Danny and his dad to go back to Twisted River, as if nothing had ever happened to Injun Jane? And of course there was the case of putting Paul Polcari back in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli with Ketchum's single-shot 20-gauge--instead of putting someone back there who might have pulled the fucking trigger!
Well, wasn't this another opportunity to escape the conundrum? Just tell Jimmy everything! About Injun Jane, about Carl and Six-Pack Pam--about the retired deputy with his long-barreled Colt .45, that fucking cowboy! Short of asking Ketchum to kill the bastard, what other way out was there? And Danny knew that if he or his dad asked Ketchum outright, Ketchum would kill the cowboy. The old logger hadn't murdered Lucky Pinette in his bed with a stamping hammer; Lucky was probably asleep at the time, but the killer couldn't have been Ketchum, or there would be nothing holding Ketchum back from killing Carl.
But all Danny said to his state-trooper friend was, "It's about a woman. A long time ago, my dad was sleeping with a logging-camp constable's girlfriend. Later, the camp constable became a county deputy sheriff--and when he found out what had happened to his girlfriend, he came looking for my dad. The deputy is retired now, but we have reason to believe he might still be looking--he's crazy."
"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.)
