by John Irving
What had little Joe said that day at the pig roast? "Plane. Not a bird." And then, because Danny had been watching Katie instead of the small airplane, he'd heard Joe say: "Not flying. Falling!" Only then did Danny see her: The skydiver was free-falling, hurtling through the sky, when the writer had first spotted her, only seconds before her parachute opened. And Amy herself had come consecutively more and more into view. First, it became clear she was a woman skydiver; then, all at once, she was naked. Only when Danny was beside her, in the pigpen--in all the mud and pig shit--did he realize how big Amy was. She'd been so solid!
Now the writer squinted across the bay, into the falling snow, as if he were waiting for another little airplane to appear on the vanished horizon--or for another red-white-and-blue parachute to pop open.
Whoever she was, she wouldn't be naked this time, the writer knew. Yet he also knew that, like the skydiver, she would suddenly just be there--the way an angel drops down to earth from the heavens. He was looking and looking for her, but Danny understood that in the whiteout of the snowstorm, the woman would just plain appear, as if by magic. One second, nothing would be there. The next second, she would be halfway across the bay and coming closer--one long stride after another.
What the writer had overlooked was the fact that Hero was a hunter; the bear hound had one good ear and a very good nose. The growl began in the dog's chest, and Hero's first bark was muffled--half swallowed in his throat. There was no one out there, on the frozen bay, but the bear hound knew she was coming; the dog's barking began in earnest only seconds before Danny saw her. "Shut up, Hero--don't scare her away," Danny said. (Of course the writer understood that, if she was Lady Sky, nothing could scare her.)
The snowshoer was in full stride, practically running, when Danny saw her. At such a pace, and carrying a backpack that heavy, she'd worked up quite a sweat. She had unzipped the parka to cool herself off; the hood, which she'd pushed off her head, lay on the back of her broad shoulders. Danny could see her strawberry-blond hair; it was a little longer than she used to cut it, when she'd been a skydiver. The writer could understand why both Lupita and Andy Grant thought she was younger than Danny; Amy looked younger than the writer, if not way younger. When she reached the dock, Hero finally stopped barking.
"You're not going to shoot me--are you, Danny?" Amy asked him. But the writer, who'd not had much luck with hope, couldn't answer her. Danny couldn't speak, and he couldn't stop staring at her.
Because it was snowing, the tears on Danny's face were mingled with the snow; he probably didn't know he was crying, but Amy saw his eyes. "Oh, hold on--just hang on--I'm coming," she said. "I got here as fast as I could, you know." She threw the backpack up on the dock, together with her ski poles, and she climbed over the rocks, taking her snowshoes off when she gained her footing on the dock.
"Lady Sky," Danny said; it was all he could say. He felt himself dissolving.
"Yeah, it's me," she said, hugging him; she pulled his face to her chest. He just shook against her. "Boy, you're even more of a mess than I thought you would be," Amy told him, "but I'm here now, and I've got you--you're going to be okay."
"Where have you been?" he managed to ask her.
"I had another project--two, actually," she told him. "They turned out to be a waste of my time. But I've been thinking about you--for years."
Danny didn't mind if he was Lady Sky's "project" now; he imagined that she'd had her share of projects, more than two. So what? the writer thought. He would soon be sixty-three; Danny knew he was no prize.
"I might have come sooner, you bastard, if you'd answered my letter," Amy said to him.
"I never saw your letter. My dad read it and threw it away. He thought you were a stripper," Danny told her.
"That was a long time ago--before the skydiving," Amy said. "Was your dad ever in Chicago? I haven't done any stripping since Chicago." Danny thought this was very funny, but before he could clear up the misunderstanding, Lady Sky took a closer look at Hero. The bear hound had been sniffing Amy's discarded snowshoes suspiciously--as if he were readying himself to piss on them. "Hey, you," Amy said to the dog. "You lift your leg on my snowshoes, you might just lose your other ear--or your pecker." Hero knew when he was being spoken to; he gave Amy an evil, crazed look with his lidless eye, but the dog backed away from the snowshoes. Something in Amy's tone must have reminded the bear hound of Six-Pack Pam. In fact, at that moment, Lady Sky had reminded Danny of Six-Pack--a young Six-Pack, a Six-Pack from those long-ago days when she'd lived with Ketchum.
"Jeez, you're shaking so much--that gun might go off," Amy told the writer.
"I've been waiting for you," Danny told her. "I've been hoping."
She kissed him; there was some mint-flavored gum in her mouth, but he didn't mind. She was warm, and still sweating, but not out of breath--not even from the snowshoeing. "Can we go indoors, somewhere?" Amy asked him. (At a glance, anyone could see that Granddaddy's cabin was uninhabitable--unless you were Ketchum, or a ghost. From the back dock of the island, it was impossible to see the other buildings--even when there wasn't a snowstorm.) Danny picked up her snowshoes and the ski poles, being careful to keep the carbine pointed at the dock, and Amy shouldered the big backpack. Hero ran ahead, as before.
They stopped at the writing shack, so that Danny could show her where he worked. The little room still smelled of the dog's lamentable farting, but the fire in the woodstove hadn't died out--it was like a sauna in that shack. Amy took off her parka, and a couple of layers of clothes that she wore under the parka--until she was wearing just her snowpants and a T-shirt. Danny told her that he'd once believed she was older than he was--or they were the same age, maybe--but how was it possible that she seemed younger now? Danny didn't mean younger than she was that day on the pig farm, in Iowa. He meant that she'd not aged as much as he had--and why was that, did she think?
Amy told him that she'd lost her little boy when she was much younger; she'd already lost him when Danny met her as a skydiver. Amy's only child had died when he was two--little Joe's age at the pig roast. That death had aged Amy when it happened, and for a number of years immediately following her boy's death. It wasn't that Amy was over her son's death--one never got over a loss like that, as she knew Danny would know. It was only that the loss didn't show as much, when so many years had passed. Maybe your child's death ceased being as visible to other people, after a really long time. (Joe had died more recently; to anyone who knew Danny, the writer had noticeably aged because of it.)
"We're the same age, more or less," Amy told the writer. "I've been sixty for the last couple of years, I think--at least that's what I tell the guys who ask."
"You look fifty," Danny told her.
"Are you trying to get in my pants, or something?" Amy asked him. She read those sentences, and the fragments of sentences, from the first chapter--the lines he'd thumbtacked to the pine-board wall of the writing shack. "What are these?" she asked.
"They're sentences, or parts of sentences, ahead of myself; they're waiting for me to catch up to them," he told her. "They're all lines from my first chapter--I just haven't found the first sentence yet."
"Maybe I'll help you find it," Amy said. "I'm not going anywhere for a while. I don't have any other projects." Danny could have cried again, but just then his cell phone rang--for the fourth fucking time that day! It was Andy Grant, of course, checking up on him.
"She there yet?" Andy asked. "Who is she?"
"She's the one I've been waiting for," Danny told him. "She's an angel."
"Sometimes," Lady Sky reminded him, when he hung up. "This time, anyway."
What might the cook have said to his son, if he'd had time to utter some proper last words before the cowboy shot him in the heart? At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son "find someone"--only that. Well, Danny had found her; actually, she'd found him. Given Charlotte, and now given Amy--at least in that aspect of his life--the writer knew he'd been lucky.
Some people don't ever find one person; Daniel Baciagalupo had found two.
SHE'D BEEN LIVING IN MINNESOTA for the last few years, Amy said. ("If you think Toronto's cold, try Minneapolis," she'd told him.) Amy had done a little grappling in a wrestling club called Minnesota Storm. She'd hung out with "a bunch of ex-Gopher wrestlers," she said--a concept that Danny found difficult to grasp.
Amy Martin--Martin had been her maiden name, and she'd taken it back "years ago"--was a Canadian. She'd lived a long time in the United States, and had become an American citizen, but she was "at heart" a Canadian, Amy said, and she'd always wanted to come back to Canada.
Why had she gone to the States in the first place? Danny asked her. "Because of a guy I met," Amy told him, shrugging. "Then my kid was born there, so I felt I should stay."
She described her politics as "largely indifferent now." She was sick of how little Americans knew about the rest of the world--or how little they cared to know. After two terms, the failed policies of the Bush presidency would probably leave the country (and the rest of the world) in a terrible mess. What Amy Martin meant by this was that it would then be high time for some hero on a horse to ride in, but what could one hero on one horse do?
Not much would change, Lady Sky said. She had fallen to earth in a country that didn't believe in angels; yet the Bible-huggers had hijacked one of the two major political parties there. (With the Bible-huggers, not much would ever change.) Moreover, there was what Amy called "the cocksuckers' contingent of the country"--what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots--and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster. "Conservatives are an extinct species," Lady Sky said, "but they don't know it yet."
By the time Danny had shown Amy the main cabin--the big bathtub, the bedroom, and the venison steaks he was marinating for dinner--they'd established that they were bedfellows, at least politically. While Amy knew more about Danny than he knew about her, this was only because she'd read every word he'd written. She'd read almost all the "shit" that had been written about him, too. (The shit word was what they both instinctively used for the media, so that on the subject of the media they discovered they were bedfellows, too.)
Most of all, Amy knew when and how he'd lost his little Joe--and when his dad had died, and the how of that, too. He had to tell her about Ketchum, whom she knew nothing about, and while this was hard--except with Six-Pack, Danny didn't talk about Ketchum--the writer discovered, in the process of describing Ketchum, that the old logger was alive in the novel Danny was dreaming, and so Danny talked and talked about that novel, and his elusive first chapter, too.
They heated the pasta pots of lake water to a near boil on the gas stove, and with their two bodies in that big bathtub, the tub was full to the brim; Danny had not imagined it was possible to fill that giant bathtub, but not even the novelist had ever imagined that tub with a giantess in it.
Amy talked him through the history of her myriad tattoos. The when and the where and the why of the tattoos held Danny's attention for the better part of an hour, or more--both in the warm bathtub and in the bed in that bedroom with the propane fireplace. He'd not taken a close look at Amy's tattoos before--not when she was spattered with mud and pig shit, and not afterward, when she was wearing just a towel. Danny felt it would have been improper and unwelcome to have stared at her then.
He stared at her now; he took all of her in. Many of Amy's tattoos had a martial-arts theme. She'd tried kickboxing in Bangkok; for a couple of years, she had lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she'd competed in an unsuccessful start-up tour of Ultimate Fighting for women. (Some of those Brazilian broads were tougher than the Thai kickboxers, Lady Sky said.)
Tattoos have their own stories, and Danny heard them all. But the one that mattered most to Amy was the name Bradley; that had been her son's name, and her father's. She'd called the boy both Brad and Bradley, and (after he died) she'd had the two-year-old's given name tattooed on her right hip where it jutted out--precisely where Amy had once carried her child when he was a toddler.
In explaining how how she'd borne the weight of her little boy's death, Amy pointed out to Danny that her hips were the strongest part of her strong body. (Danny didn't doubt it.)
Amy was happy to discover that Danny could cook, because she couldn't. The venison was good, though there wasn't quite enough of it. Danny had sliced some potatoes very thinly, and stir-fried them with the onions, peppers, and mushrooms, so they didn't go hungry. Danny served a green salad after the meal, because the cook had taught him that this was the "civilized" way to serve a salad--though it was almost never served this way in a restaurant.
It pleased the writer no end that Lady Sky was a beer drinker. "I found out long ago," she told him, "that I drink everything alcoholic as fast as I drink a beer--so I better stick with beer, if I don't want to kill myself. I'm pretty much over wanting to kill myself," Amy added.
He was pretty much over that part, too, Danny told her. He had learned to like Hero's company, the farting notwithstanding, and the writer had two cleaning ladies looking after him; they would all be disappointed in him if he killed himself.
Amy had met one of the cleaning ladies, of course, and--weather permitting--Lady Sky would probably meet Tireless tomorrow, or the next day. As for Lupita, Amy called the Mexican cleaning woman a better guard dog than Hero; Lady Sky was sure that she and Lupita would become great friends.
"I have no right to be happy," Danny told his angel, when they were falling asleep in each other's arms that first night.
"Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole," Amy told him.
Ketchum would have liked how Lady Sky used the asshole word, the writer was thinking. It was a word choice after the old logger's heart, Danny knew, which--in his sleep--led him back to the novel he was dreaming.
AMY MARTIN AND DANIEL BACIAGALUPO had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.
Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would live forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend.
One mid-February day, a snowstorm blew across Lake Huron from western Canada; all of Georgian Bay was blanketed by it. When the writer and Lady Sky woke up, the storm was gone. It was a dazzling morning.
Danny let the dog out and made the coffee; when the writer brought some coffee to Amy in the bedroom, he saw that she'd fallen back to sleep. Lady Sky had been traveling a long way, and the life she'd led would have tired anyone out; Danny let her sleep. He fed the dog and wrote Amy a note, not telling her he was falling in love with her. He simply told her that she knew where to find him--in his writing shack. Danny thought that he would have breakfast later, whenever Lady Sky woke up again. He would take some coffee with him to the writing shack, and start a fire in the woodstove there; he'd already built up the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin.
"Come on, Hero," the writer said, and together they went out in the fresh snow. Danny was relieved to see that his father's likeness, that wind-bent little pine, had survived the storm.
IT WASN'T THE KETCHUM character who should begin the first chapter, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. It was better to keep the Ketchum character hidden for a while--to make the reader wait to meet him. Sometimes, those most important characters need a little concealment. It would be better, Danny thought, if the first chapter--and the novel--began with the lost boy. The An
gel character, who was not who he seemed, was a good decoy; in storytelling terms, Angel was a hook. The young Canadian (who was not a Canadian) was where the writer should start.
It won't take long now, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. And whenever he found that first sentence, there would be someone in his life the writer dearly desired to read it to!
"Legally or not, and with or without proper papers," Danny wrote, "Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire."
It's okay, the writer thought, but it's not the beginning--the mistaken idea that Angel had crossed the border comes later.
"In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin," Danny wrote. "It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there."
Yes, yes--the writer thought, more impatiently now. But these last two sentences were too technical for a beginning; he thumbtacked these sentences to the wall alongside the other lines, and then added this sentence to the mix: "The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water."
Almost, Daniel Baciagalupo thought. Immediately, another sentence emerged--as if Twisted River itself were allowing these sentences to bob to the surface. "The repeated thunk-thunk of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel's pike pole--more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished."
Fine, fine, Danny thought, but it was too busy for a beginning sentence; there were too many distractions in that sentence.
Maybe the very idea of distractions distracted him. The writer's thoughts leapt ahead--too far ahead--to Ketchum. There was something decidedly parenthetical about the new sentence. "(Only Ketchum can kill Ketchum.)" Definitely a keeper, Danny thought, but most definitely not first-chapter material.
Danny was shivering in his writing shack. The fire in the woodstove was taking its time to heat the little room. Normally, Danny was chopping a hole in the ice and hauling a couple of buckets of water out of the bay while the writing shack was warming up; this morning, he'd skipped the chopping and the hauling. (Later in this glorious day, he would have Lady Sky to help him with the chores.)
