by John Irving
Ketchum had called the cook and his son, in the logger's hungover or fragile sobriety of the morning following Dot and May's calamitous visit to Avellino. Of course Ketchum phoned them individually, but it was irritating how the woodsman spoke to each of them as if both Danny and his dad were there.
"For thirteen years, the cowboy believed you two were in Toronto--because Carl thought that was where Angel was from, right? You bet I'm right!" Ketchum bellowed.
Dear God, the cook was thinking in his beloved kitchen at Avellino, where he'd made himself a very strong espresso and was wondering why Ketchum couldn't resist shouting to make himself heard. According to Ketchum, Dot and May had sizably less imagination than a pinch of coon shit; while "the gossip-feeding bitches" would definitely tell the cowboy what they knew, they wouldn't agree with each other about how to tell him, or when. Dot would be in favor of waiting until the retired deputy did something particularly obnoxious, or he was behaving in a superior fashion, whereas May would want to insinuate that she knew something--until Carl was crazy to know what it was. In short, the old broads' habits of mean-spirited manipulation might buy Danny and his dad a little time.
On the phone to Danny, Ketchum was more exact: "Here's the point, you two. Now that Carl knows you went to Boston, not Toronto--and he'll know soon enough that you then went to Vermont--the cowboy would never believe that you're in Toronto. That's the last place he'd look--that's where you should go! They speak English in Toronto. You've got a publisher there, don't you, Danny? And I imagine there's lots of jobs for a cook--something not Italian, Cookie, or I swear I'll come shoot you myself!"
I'm not Cookie, Danny almost said, but he just held the phone.
Toronto wasn't such a bad idea, the writer Danny Angel was thinking, as he waited out the mounting hysteria of Ketchum's phone call. Danny had been there on a book tour or two. It was a good city, he was thinking--to the degree that Danny thought about cities at all. (The cook was more of a city guy than his son.) Canada was a foreign country, thus satisfying Ketchum's criterion, but Toronto was near enough to the States to make keeping in touch with Joe possible; Colorado would be easy to get to from Toronto. Of course, Danny wanted to know what Joe might think of the idea--not to mention what the cook thought of Ketchum's suggestion.
After Ketchum ended his call to Danny, the writer's telephone rang almost immediately. Naturally, it was Danny's dad.
"There will be no peace while that lunatic has his own phone, Daniel," the cook said to his son. "And if he ever gets a fax machine, we will be doomed to be addressed in capital letters and exclamation points for the rest of our lives."
"But what do you think of Ketchum's idea, Dad? What about Toronto?" Danny asked.
"I don't care where we go--I'm just sorry to have dragged you into this. I was only trying to keep you safe!" his father said; then the cook started to cry. "I don't want to go anywhere," Tony Angel said. "I love it here!"
"I know you do--I'm sorry, Pop. But we'll be okay in Toronto--I know we will," the writer told his father.
"I can't ask Ketchum to kill Carl, Daniel--I just can't do it," the cook told his son.
"I know--I can't ask him, either," Danny said.
"You do have a publisher in Canada, don't you, Daniel?" his dad asked. For the first time, Danny could hear something old--something approaching elderly--in his father's voice. The cook was almost sixty, but what Danny had heard in his dad's voice sounded older than that; he'd heard something more than anxious, something almost frail. "If you have a publisher in Toronto," his father was saying, "I'm sure he'll help us get settled in there, won't he?"
"She--my Canadian publisher is a she," Danny told his dad. "I know she'll help us, Pop--it'll be easy there. And we'll get a place in Colorado, where we can visit Joe--and Joe can come visit us. We don't have to think of this move as necessarily permanent--not for a while, anyway. We'll just see how we like it in Canada, okay?"
"Okay," the cook said, but he was still crying.
I could leave Vermont today, the writer was thinking. Danny did not feel an attachment to his Putney property that nearly approximated his dad's love of Avellino in Brattleboro, or his father's life there. After Dot and May's appearance in the restaurant--not to mention Roland Drake's visit, and Drake's dead dog on the dining-room table--Danny felt that he could leave Vermont forever, and never look back.
When Carl eventually encountered those bad old broads Dot and May, the cowboy would get to Vermont too late. With Armando and Mary DeSimone's help, Danny had sold the Putney property by then; there was no writer's compound remaining on Hickory Ridge Road. And Windham College, where the writer Danny Angel had taught, was a college with a different name (and purpose) now--Landmark College, a leading institution for learning-disabled students. By the time the cowboy showed up in Brattleboro, Avellino itself would be gone--and wherever Greg, the sous chef, went, Carl wouldn't find him. At the cook's urging, Celeste and her daughter, Loretta (and Loretta's kid), left town. The cowboy would come up empty, once again, but there was no question that Dot and May had blabbed their best to him.
Was it possible that Carl was as much of an imbecile as Ketchum had, at times, maintained? Did the cowboy possess no better detective skills than those of Ketchum's much-maligned pinch of coon shit? Or was it simply that, throughout the retired deputy's investigations in Vermont, the Angel name had not come up? In Brattleboro, evidently, the cowboy had not inquired about the cook and his son at The Book Cellar!
"You knew Cookie was in Vermont--you knew it all along, didn't you, Ketchum?" Carl would one day ask the old logger.
"Cookie? Is he still around?" Ketchum said to the cowboy. "I wouldn't have figured that a little fella with a limp like his would be so long-lasting--would you, Carl?"
"Keep it up, Ketchum--you just keep it up," Carl said.
"Oh, I will--I'll keep it up, all right," Ketchum told the cowboy.
But Danny couldn't wait to leave Vermont; after the night he and Jimmy found the dead dog on the writer's dining-room table, Danny Angel wanted to be gone.
That night he'd driven no farther out the back road to Westminster West than the bottom of Barrett's long, uphill driveway. He had backed his car onto the animal lover's property. Danny knew that Barrett went to bed early, and that she wouldn't be aware of a car parked in her driveway--so far away from her horse farm that not even her horses would be disturbed by its presence. Besides, Danny had turned off the engine and his headlights. He just sat in the car, which was facing Westminster West with all the windows open.
It was a warm, windless night. Danny knew he could hear a gunshot for a couple of miles on such a night. What he didn't know at first was: Did he really want to hear it? And what would hearing or not hearing that gunshot signify, exactly? It was more than the survival or the death of Roland Drake's bite-you-from-behind husky-shepherd mix that the writer was listening for.
At forty-one, Danny felt like a twelve-year-old all over again; it didn't help that it had started to rain. He remembered the misty night he and his dad had left Twisted River in the Pontiac Chieftain--how he'd sat waiting in the station wagon, which was parked near Six-Pack Pam's. Danny had been listening for the discharge of Carl's Colt .45, which would mean his dad was dead. Upon the sound of that shot, the boy would have run up the stairs to Six-Pack's place; he would have begged her to let him in, and then Ketchum would have taken care of him. That had been the plan, and Danny had done his part; he'd sat in the car, in the falling rain, waiting to hear the gunshot that never came, though there were times when Danny felt he was still waiting to hear it.
On the back road to Westminster West--at the foot of his former lover's driveway--the writer Danny Angel was listening as alertly as he could. He was hoping he would never hear that shot--the earsplitting discharge of the cowboy's Colt .45--but it was with that shot in mind that the writer began to indulge the dangerous, what-if side of his imagination. What if the state trooper didn't have to shoot Roland Drake's other dog--wh
at if, somehow, Jimmy could persuade the writer carpenter and his shepherd-husky mix that, truly, enough was enough? Might that signify an end to the violence, or to the threat of violence?
It was then that the writer was aware of what he was listening for: nothing. It was nothing that he hoped he would hear. It was the no-shot that might mean his dad would be safe--that the cowboy, like Paul Polcari, might never pull the trigger.
Danny was trying not to think about what Jimmy had told him--this was concerning the tube of toothpaste and the toothbrush in Joe's car. Possibly, they'd not been put there by Roland Drake; maybe the toothpaste and the toothbrush hadn't been part of Drake's mischief.
"I hate to tell you this, Danny, but I've busted lots of kids who've been drinking in their cars," the trooper had said. "The kids often have toothpaste and a toothbrush handy--so their parents don't smell what they've been drinking on their breath, when they come home." But Danny preferred to think that the toothpaste and the toothbrush had been more of Drake's childish business. The writer didn't like to think about his son drinking and driving.
Was Danny superstitious? (Most writers who believe in plot are.) Danny didn't like to think about what Lady Sky had said to Joe, either. "If you're ever in trouble, I'll be back," she'd said to the two-year-old, kissing his forehead. Well, not on a night as dark as this one, the writer thought. On a night as dark as this one, no skydiver--not even Lady Sky--could see where to land.
Now the rain had blotted out what little moonlight there was; the rain was coming in the open windows of Danny's car, and the water had beaded on the windshield, which made the darkness more impenetrable.
Surely, the state trooper had already arrived in Drake's junkyard of a driveway. And what would Jimmy do then? Danny was wondering. Just sit in the patrol car until Drake had noticed the car was there and came outside to talk to him? (And would Roland have come out alone, or would he have brought the back-biting dog with him?) Then again, it was raining; out of consideration for the hippie carpenter, and because it was late, the trooper might have gotten out of his car and knocked on Drake's door.
At that thought came a knocking on the passenger-side door of Danny's car; a flashlight shone in the writer's face. "Oh, heart be still--it's just you," he heard Barrett say. His former lover, who was carrying a rifle, opened the car door and slipped inside to sit beside him. She was wearing her knee-high rubber stable boots and an oil-skin poncho. She'd pushed back the hood when she got into the car, and her long white hair was unbraided--as if she'd gone to bed hours ago, and had suddenly been woken up. Barrett's thighs were bare; under the poncho, she was wearing nothing. (Danny knew, of course, that Barrett slept naked.) "Were you missing me, Danny?" she asked him.
"You're up late, aren't you?" Danny asked her.
"About an hour ago, I had to put one of my horses down--it was too late to call the bloody vet," Barrett told him. She sat like a man, with her knees spread apart; the carbine, with the barrel pointed to the floor, rested between her pretty dancer's legs. It was an old bolt-action Remington--a .30-06 Springfield, she'd explained to him, some years ago, when she'd shown up on his Putney property, where she was hunting deer. Barrett still hunted deer there; there was an untended apple orchard on the land, and Barrett had shot more than one deer in that orchard. (What had the cook called her--a "selective" animal lover, was it? Danny knew more than a few like her.)
"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.
IV.
TORONTO, 2000
----
CHAPTER 12
THE BLUE MUSTANG
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.
