Last Night in Twisted River (50 page)

“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

I
T 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.

It was December in the city. The festive lights, the decorations, the shoppers were all around. As he stood waiting for the crossing light on Yonge Street to change, it was a mild shock to Dominic to suddenly remember that Ketchum was coming to Toronto for Christmas; while this wasn’t a recent phenomenon, the cook couldn’t get used to the un-naturalness of the old logger being in the city. It had been fourteen years since the writer Danny Angel and his dad had spent their Christmases in Colorado with Joe. (Ketchum had not made those trips. It was too long a drive from New Hampshire to Colorado, and Ketchum steadfastly refused to fly.)

In those winters when Joe went to the university in Boulder, Daniel had rented a ski house in Winter Park. The road out of Grand Lake, through Rocky Mountain National Park, was closed in the wintertime, so it took about two hours to drive from Boulder—you had to take I-70, and U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass—but Joe loved the skiing in Winter Park, and his dad had spoiled him. (Or so the cook reflected, as he waited for the long light on Yonge Street to change.)

Those Christmases in Colorado were beautiful, but the house in Winter Park had been too much of a temptation for Joe—especially during the remainder of the ski season, when the young college student’s father and grandfather were back in Toronto. Naturally, the boy was going to cut some classes—if not every time there was fresh snow in the ski area. The nearby skiing alone would have tempted any college kid in Boulder, but having a house in Winter Park at his disposal—it was within walking distance of the ski lifts—was almost certainly Joe’s undoing. (Oh, Daniel, what were you thinking? Dominic Baciagalupo thought.)

At last, the light changed and the cook limped across Yonge Street, mindful of those harebrained city drivers who were desperate to find a parking place at the Summerhill liquor store or The Beer Store. What had his writer son once called the neighborhood? the cook tried to remember. Oh, yes, Dominic recalled. “Shopping for hedonists,” Daniel had said.

There were some fancy markets there; it was true—excellent produce, fresh fish, great sausages and meats, but ridiculously expensive, in the cook’s opinion—and now, in the holiday season, it seemed to Dominic that every bad driver in town was buying booze! (He did not fault his beloved Daniel for drinking again; the cook understood his son’s reasons.)

The icy wind whipped the long way up Yonge Street from Lake Ontario as Dominic fumbled with his gloves and the key to the restaurant’s locked door. The waitstaff and most of the kitchen crew entered the kitchen from Crown’s Lane—the alleyway parallel to Yonge Street, behind the restaurant—but the cook had his own key. Turning his back to the wind, he struggled to let himself in the front door.

The winters had been colder in Coos County—and in Windham County, Vermont, too—but the damp, penetrating cold of the wind off the lake reminded Dominic Baciagalupo of how cold he’d been in the North End of Boston. Though he’d had Carmella to keep him warm, the cook was remembering. He missed her—her alone,
only
Carmella—but Dominic strangely
didn’t
miss having a woman in his life. Not anymore, not at his age.

Why was it that he didn’t miss Rosie? the cook caught himself thinking. “Nowadays, Cookie,” Ketchum had said, “I sometimes find myself
not
missing her. Can you imagine that?” Yes, he could, Dominic had to admit. Or was it the tension among the three of them—or Jane’s harsh judgment, or keeping Daniel in the dark—that Ketchum and the cook didn’t miss?

—

INSIDE THE RESTAURANT
, Dominic was greeted by the smell of what Silvestro, the young chef, called “the mother sauces.” The veal
jus—
the mother of all mother sauces—had been started during the dinner service last night. It underwent both a first and a second boil before a final reduction. Silvestro’s other mother sauces were a tomato sauce and a béchamel. The cook, as he hung up his coat and scarf—and halfheartedly attempted to rearrange what Joe’s favorite ski hat had done to his hair—could somehow smell
all
the mother sauces at once.

“The old pro,” they called him in the kitchen, although Dominic was content with the role of sous chef to the masterful Silvestro, who was the
saucier
and did all the meats. Kristine and Joyce did the soups and the fish—they were the first women chefs the cook had worked with—and Scott was the bread and dessert guy. Dominic, who was semiretired, was the odd-job man in the kitchen; he did start-up and finish-up jobs from each station, which included spelling Silvestro with the sauces and the meats. “Jack of all trades,” they called the cook in the kitchen, too. He was older than any of them, by far—not just Silvestro, their hotshot young chef, whom Dominic adored. Silvestro was like a second son to him, the cook thought—not that he ever would have said so to his beloved Daniel.

Dominic had also been careful not to mention the filial nature of his feelings for young Silvestro to Ketchum—partly because the woodsman was now a veteran and bullying faxer. Ketchum’s faxes to the cook and his son were ceaseless and indiscriminate. (You could sometimes read a page or more without knowing who the fax was for!) And Ketchum’s faxes arrived at all hours of the day and night; for the sake of a good night’s sleep, Danny and his dad had been forced to keep the fax machine in the kitchen of their house on Cluny Drive.

More to the point, Ketchum had issues regarding Silvestro; the young chef’s name was too Italian for the old logger’s liking. It wouldn’t be good if Ketchum knew that his pal Cookie thought of Silvestro as “a second son”—no, Dominic didn’t want to receive a slew of faxes from Ketchum complaining about that, too. Ketchum’s
usual
complaints were more than enough.

I THOUGHT THIS WAS A FRENCH PLACE—WHERE YOU WERE WORKING IN YOUR SEMIRETIRED FASHION, COOKIE. YOU WOULDN’T BE THINKING OF CHANGING THE RESTAURANT’S NAME, WOULD YOU? NOT TO ANYTHING ITALIAN, I PRESUME! THAT NEW FELLA, THE YOUNG CHEF YOU SPEAK OF—SILVESTRO? IS THAT HIS NAME? WELL, HE DOESN’T SOUND VERY FRENCH TO ME! THE RESTAURANT IS STILL CALLED
PATRICE
, RIGHT?

Yes and no, the cook was thinking; there was a reason he hadn’t answered Ketchum’s most recent fax.

THE OWNER AND
maître d’ of the restaurant, Patrice Arnaud, was Daniel’s age—fifty-eight. Arnaud had been born in Lyon but grew up in Marseilles—at sixteen, he went to hotel school in Nice. In the kitchen at Patrice, there was an old sepia-toned photograph of Arnaud as a teenager in chef’s whites, but Arnaud’s future would lie in management; he had impressed the guests in the dining room of a beach club in Bermuda, where he’d met the proprietor of Toronto’s venerable Wembley Hotel.

When the cook had first come to Toronto, in ’83, Patrice Arnaud was managing Maxim’s—a favorite café rendezvous in the Bay and Bloor area of the city. At the time, Maxim’s was the third transformation of a café-restaurant in the tired old Wembley. To Dominic Baciagalupo, who was still quaking from Ketchum’s dire warning that he totally detach himself from the world of Italian restaurants, Patrice Arnaud and Maxim’s were clearly first-rate—better yet, they were not Italian. In fact, Patrice had enticed his brother, Marcel, to leave Marseilles and become the chef at Maxim’s, which was very French.

“Ah, but the ship is sinking, Dominic,” Patrice had warned the cook; he meant that Toronto was rapidly changing. The restaurant-goers of the future would want to venture beyond the staid hotel restaurants. (After Arnaud and his brother left Maxim’s, the old Wembley Hotel became a parking garage.)

For the next decade, the cook worked with the Arnaud brothers at their own restaurant on Queen Street West—a neighborhood in transition, and somewhat seedy for much of that time, but the restaurant, which Patrice named Bastringue, prospered. They were doing fifty covers at lunch and dinner; Marcel was the master chef then, and Dominic loved learning from him. There was foie gras, there were fresh Fine de Claire oysters from France. (Once again, the cook failed to teach himself desserts; he never mastered Marcel’s tarte tatin with Calvados sabayon.)

Bastringue—Parisian
argot
for a popular dance hall and bar that served food and wine—would even weather the 1990 recession. They put waxed paper over the linen tablecloths and turned the restaurant into a bistro—steak frites, steamed mussels with white wine and leeks—but their lease ran out in ’95, after Queen Street West had gone from seedy to hip to dull mainstream in the space of a decade. (Bastringue became a shoe store; Marcel went back to France.)

The cook and Patrice Arnaud stuck together; they went to work at Avalon for a year, but Arnaud told Dominic that they were “just biding time.” Patrice wanted another place of his own, and in ’97 he bought what had been a failed restaurant on Yonge Street at Summer-hill. As for Silvestro, he originally came from Italy, but he was a Calabrese who’d worked in London and Milan; travel was important to Arnaud. (“It means you can learn new things,” Patrice told Dominic, when he decided on young Silvestro as his next master chef.)

As for the new restaurant’s name,
Patrice—
well, what else would Arnaud have called it? “You earned it,” Dominic told Patrice. “Don’t be embarrassed by your own name.”

For the first few years, Patrice—the name and, to a lesser extent, the restaurant—had worked. Arnaud and the cook taught Silvestro some of Marcel’s standbys: the lobster with mustard sabayon, the fish soup from Brittany, the duck foie-gras terrine with a spoonful of port jelly, the halibut
en papillote
, the
côte de boeuf
for two, the grilled calf’s liver with lardons and pearl onions and a balsamic demi-glace. Naturally, Silvestro added his own dishes to the menu—ravioli with snails and garlic-herb butter, veal scallopini with a lemon sauce, house-made tagliatelle with duck confit and porcini mushrooms, rabbit with polenta gnocchi. (Dominic made a few familiar contributions to the menu, too.) The restaurant at 1158 Yonge Street was new, but it wasn’t entirely French—nor was it as big a hit in the neighborhood as Arnaud had hoped.

“It’s not just the name, but the name sucks, too,” Patrice told Dominic and Silvestro. “I have totally misread Rosedale—this neighborhood doesn’t need an expensive French restaurant. We need to be easygoing, and
cheaper
! We want our clientele to come two or three times a week, not every couple of months.”

Over the Christmas break, Patrice was normally closed—this year from December 24 until January 2, enough time for the renovations Arnaud had planned. The banquettes would be brightened, completely recovered; the lemon-yellow walls were to be freshly spackled. Posters from the old French Line would be hung. “Le Havre, Southampton, New York—Compagnie Générale transatlantique!” Patrice had announced, and he’d found a couple of Toulouse-Lautrec posters of the Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue and singer Jane Avril. Fish and chips were going to be added to the menu, and steak tartare with frites; the prices for both food and wine would drop 25 percent. It would be back to bistro, again—like those fabulous recession days at Bastringue—though Patrice wouldn’t use the
bistro
word anymore.
(
“
Bistro
is so overused—it has become meaningless!” Arnaud declared.)

Reinvention was the essential game with restaurants, Arnaud knew.

“But what about the
name
?” Silvestro had asked his boss. The Calabrese had his own candidate, Dominic knew.

“I think
Patrice
is too French,” Patrice had answered. “It’s too old-school, too old-money. It has to go.” Arnaud was smart and suave; his style was casual but debonair. Dominic loved and admired the man, but the cook had been dreading this part of the changeover—all to accommodate the preening Rosedale snobs.