Last Night In Twisted River

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.

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.

“You guys know what I think,” Silvestro said, with an insincere, insouciant shrug; he was handsome and confident, the way you would want your son to be.

The young chef had been struck by the effect of the frosted glass on the lower half of the restaurant’s large front window, facing Yonge Street. Passersby on the street could not see through the clouded glass; the customers, seated at their tables, were not in view from the sidewalk. But the top half of the big pane of glass was clear; diners could see the red maple leaf on the Canadian flag above the Summerhill liquor store, across Yonge Street, and (eventually) those two high-rise condominiums under construction in what would be called Scrivener Square. The lower, frosted portion of the windowpane had the effect of a curtain-such was Silvestro’s convoluted reasoning for the restaurant’s new name.

“ La Tenda,” Silvestro said, with feeling. “‘The Curtain.’”

“It sounds ominous to me,” Dominic had told the young chef. “I wouldn’t want to eat in a place with that name.”

“I think, Silvestro, you should save this name for the very first restaurant you own-when you become an owner-chef, which you certainly will!” Arnaud said.

“ La Tenda,” Silvestro repeated, fondly, his warm brown eyes watering with tears.

“It’s too Italian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told the emotional young man. “This restaurant may not be strictly French, but it’s not Italian, either.” If the former Patrice were given an Italian name, what would Ketchum say? the cook was thinking, while at the same time he saw the absurdity of his argument-he whose Sicilian meat loaf and penne alla puttanesca would, after the Christmas holiday, be added to the more low-key menu.

The baffled Patrice and the shocked Silvestro stared at the cook in disbelief. They were all at a standstill. Dominic thought: I should ask Daniel to come up with a name-he’s the writer! That was when Silvestro broke the silence. “What about your name, Dominic?” the young chef said.

“Not Baciagalupo!” the cook cried, alarmed. (If the cowboy didn’t kill him, Dominic knew that Ketchum would!)

“Talk about too Italian!” Arnaud said affectionately.

“I mean what your name means, Dominic,” Silvestro said. Patrice Arnaud hadn’t guessed Baciagalupo’s meaning, though the words were similar in French. “‘Kiss of the Wolf,’” Silvestro said slowly-the emphasis equally placed on both the Kiss and the Wolf.

Arnaud shuddered. He was a short, strongly built man with closely cropped gray hair and a sophisticated smile-he wore dark trousers, sharply pressed, and always an elegant but open-necked shirt. He was a man who made ceremony seem natural; at once polite and philosophical, Patrice was a restaurateur who understood what was worthwhile about the old-fashioned while knowing instantly when change was good.

“Ah, well-Kiss of the Wolf!-why didn’t you tell me, Dominic?” Arnaud impishly asked his loyal friend. “Now there’s a name that is seductive and modern, but it also has an edge!”

Oh, Kiss of the Wolf had an edge, all right, the cook was thinking-though that wouldn’t be the most salient response Ketchum might make to the restaurant’s new name. Dominic didn’t want to imagine what the old logger would say when he heard about it. “Mountains of moose shit!” Ketchum might declare, or something worse.

Wasn’t it risky enough that the cook had taken back his real name? In an Internet world, what danger did it present that there was a Dominic Baciagalupo back in action? (At least Ketchum was somewhat relieved to learn that, at the height of her phonetic sensibilities, Nunzi had misspelled the Baciacalupo word!)

But, realistically thinking, how would it be possible for a retired deputy sheriff in Coos County, New Hampshire, to discover that a restaurant called Kiss of the Wolf in Toronto, Ontario, was the English translation of the phonetically made-up name of Baciagalupo? And don’t forget, the cook reassured himself-the cowboy is as old as Ketchum, who’s eighty-three!

If I’m not safe now, I never will be, Dominic was thinking as he came into the narrow, bustling kitchen of Patrice-soon to be renamed Kiss of the Wolf. Well, it’s a world of accidents, isn’t it? In such a world, more than the names would keep changing.

DANNY ANGEL WISHED with all his heart that he had never given up the name Daniel Baciagalupo, not because he wanted to be the more innocent boy and young man he’d once been-or even because Daniel Baciagalupo was his one true name, the only one his parents had given him-but because the fifty-eight-year-old novelist believed it was a better name for a writer. And the closer the novelist came to sixty, the less he felt like a Danny or an Angel; that his father had all along insisted on the Daniel name made more and more sense to the son. (Not that it was always easy for a stay-at-home, work-at-home writer, who was almost sixty, to share a house with his seventy-six-year-old dad. They could be a contentious couple.)

Given the disputed presidential election in the United States-“the Florida fiasco,” as Ketchum called George W. Bush’s “theft” of the presidency from Al Gore, the result of a 5-4 Supreme Court vote along partisan lines-the faxes from Ketchum were often incendiary. Gore had won the popular vote. The Republicans stole the election, both Danny and his dad believed, but the cook and his son didn’t necessarily share Ketchum’s more extreme beliefs-namely, that they were “better off being Canadians,” and that America, which Ketchum obdurately called an “asshole country,” deserved its fate.

WHERE ARE THE ASSASSINS WHEN YOU WANT ONE?

Ketchum had faxed. He didn’t mean George W. Bush; Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn’t played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged-“preferably, in a child’s defective car seat”-and sunk in the Androscoggin.

During the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, Bush criticized President Clinton’s use of U.S. troops in Somalia and the Balkans. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” the future president said.

YOU WANT TO WAIT AND SEE HOW THAT LYING LITTLE FUCKER WILL FIND A WAY TO USE OUR TROOPS? YOU WANT TO BET THAT “NATION-BUILDING” WON’T BE PART OF IT?

Ketchum had faxed.

But Danny didn’t relish America ’s impending disgrace-not from the Canadian perspective, particularly. He and his dad had never wanted to leave their country. To the extent it was possible for an internationally bestselling author to not make a big deal of changing his citizenship, Danny Angel had tried to play down his politics, though this had been harder to do after East of Bangor was published in ’84; his abortion novel was certainly political.

The process of Danny and his dad being admitted to Canada as new citizens was a slow one. Danny had applied as self-employed; the immigration lawyer representing him had categorized the writer as “someone who participates at a world-class level in cultural activities.” Danny made enough money to support himself and his father. They’d both passed the medical exam. While they were living in Toronto on visitors’ visas, it had been necessary for them to cross the border every six months to have their visas validated; also, they’d had to apply for Canadian citizenship at a Canadian consulate in the United States. (Buffalo was the closest American city to Toronto.)

An assistant to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship had discouraged them from a so-called fast-track application. In their case, what was the hurry? The famous writer wasn’t rushing to change countries, was he? (The immigration lawyer had forewarned Danny that Canadians were a little suspicious of success; they tended to punish it, not reward it.) In fact, to escape undue attention, the cook and his son had made the slowest possible progress in their application for Canadian citizenship. The process had taken four, almost five years. But now, with the Florida fiasco, there’d been comments in the Canadian media about the writer Danny Angel’s “defection;” his “giving up on the United States” when he did, more than a decade ago, made the author appear “prescient”-or so the Toronto Globe and Mail had said.

It didn’t help that the film adapted from East of Bangor had released in theaters only recently-in ’99-and the movie had won a couple of Academy Awards in 2000. Early in the New Year, 2001, a joint session of Congress would meet to certify the electoral vote in the States; now that there was going to be a U.S. president who opposed abortion rights, it came as no surprise to Danny and his dad that the writer’s liberal abortion politics were back in the news. And writers were more in the news in Canada than in the United States -not only for what they wrote but for what they said and did.

Danny was still sensitive to what he read about himself in the American media, where he was frequently labeled “anti-American”-both for his writing and because of his expatriation to Toronto. In other parts of the world-without fail, in Europe and in Canada -the author’s alleged anti-Americanism was viewed as a good thing. It was written that the expatriate writer “vilified” life in the United States -that is, in his novels. It had also been reported that the American-born author had moved to Toronto “to make a statement.” (Despite Danny Angel’s commercial success, he had accepted the fact that his Canadian taxes were higher than what he’d paid in the States.) But, as a novelist, Danny was increasingly uncomfortable when he was condemned or praised for his perceived anti-American politics. Naturally, he couldn’t say-most of all, not to the press-why he had really moved to Canada.

What Danny did say was that only two of his seven published novels could fairly be described as political; he was aware that he sounded defensive in saying this, but it was notably true. Danny’s fourth book, The Kennedy Fathers, was a Vietnam novel-it was read as a virtual protest of that war. The sixth, East of Bangor, was a didactic novel-in the view of some critics, an abortion-rights polemic. But what was political about the other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies-none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain-if there was one-was more often human nature than the United States. Danny had never been any kind of activist.

“All writers are outsiders,” Danny Angel had once said. “I moved to Toronto because I like being an outsider.” But no one believed him. Besides, it was a better story that the world-famous author had rejected the United States.

Danny thought that his move to Canada had been sensationalized in the press, the presumed politics of their entirely personal decision magnified out of proportion. Yet what bothered the novelist more was that his novels had been trivialized. Danny Angel’s fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect?

In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up. In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer-or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known-more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story-as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the fiction in fiction writing-because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)

Yet who was the audience for Danny Angel, or any other novelist, defending the fiction in fiction writing? Students of creative writing? Women of a certain age in book clubs, because weren’t most book-club members usually women of a certain age? Who else was more interested in fiction than in so-called real life? Not Danny Angel’s interviewers, evidently; the first question they always asked had to do with what was “real” about this or that novel. Was the main character based on an actual person? Had the novel’s most memorable (meaning most catastrophic, most devastating) outcome actually happened to anyone the author knew or had known?

Once again, what did Danny expect? Hadn’t he begged the question? Just look at his last book, Baby in the Road; what did Danny think the media would make of it? He had begun that book, his seventh novel, before he’d left Vermont. Danny was almost finished with the manuscript in March ’87. It was late March of that year when Joe died. In Colorado, it was not yet mud season. (“Shit, it was almost mud season,” Ketchum would say.)

It was Joe’s senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that Baby in the Road had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Danny had almost finished, the child dies when he’s still in diapers-a two-year-old, run over in the road, much as what might have happened to little Joe that day on Iowa Avenue. The unfinished novel was about how the death of that child destroys what the cook and Ketchum would no doubt have described as the Danny character and the Katie character, who go their separate but doomed ways.

Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Danny Angel didn’t write for more than a year. It was not the writing that was hard, as Danny said to his friend Armando DeSimone; it was the imagining. Whenever Danny tried to imagine anything, all he could see was how Joe had died; what the writer also endlessly imagined were the small details that might have been subject to change, those infinitesimal details that could have kept his son alive. (If Joe had only done this, not that… if the cook and his son had not been in Toronto at that time… if Danny had bought or rented a house in Boulder, instead of Winter Park… if Joe had not learned to ski… if, as Ketchum had advised, they’d never lived in Vermont… if an avalanche had closed the road over Berthoud Pass… if Joe had been too drunk to drive, instead of being completely sober… if the passenger had been another boy, not that girl… if Danny hadn’t been in love…) Well, was there anything a writer couldn’t imagine?

What wouldn’t Danny have thought of, if only to torture himself? Danny couldn’t bring Joe back to life; he couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.

When, after that year had passed, Danny Angel could finally bear to reread what he’d written in Baby in the Road, the accidental killing of that two-year-old in diapers, which once began the book, not to mention the subsequent tormenting of the dead toddler’s parents, seemed almost inconsequential. Wasn’t it worse to have a child escape death that first time, and grow up-only to die later, a young man in his prime? And to make the story worse in that way, in a novel-to make what happens more heartbreaking, in other words-well, wasn’t that actually a better story? Doubtless, Danny believed so. He’d rewritten Baby in the Road from start to finish. This had taken another five, almost six years.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn’t change. How could it? Danny had discovered that the devastation of losing a child stayed very much the same; it mattered little that the details were different.

BABY IN THE ROAD was first published in 1995, eleven years after the publication of East of Bangor and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe’s age, twenty-two, when he’s still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, though it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Danny’s seventh novel is drunk at the time of his death; he has also swallowed a shitload of barbiturates. He inhales a ham sandwich and chokes to death on his own vomit.

In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking-what little he did of it-was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little-or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good-better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)

As a novelist, Danny Angel had taken pains to make the arguably suicidal character in Baby in the Road as unlike Joe as possible. The young man in the book is a sensitive, artistic type. He’s in delicate health-from the beginning, he seems fated to die-and he’s no athlete. The novel is set in Vermont, not in Colorado. Revised, the boy’s wayward mother isn’t wayward enough to be a Katie character, although, like her doomed son, she has a drinking problem. In the rewrite, the Danny character, the boy’s grieving father, doesn’t give up drinking, but he’s not an alcoholic. (He is never compromised or incapacitated by what he drinks; he’s just depressed.)

In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. “You’ll feel better if you don’t, Daniel. In the long run, you’ll wish you hadn’t gone back to it.”

“It’s for research, Pop,” Danny would tell his dad, but that answer no longer applied-not after he’d rewritten Baby in the Road, and the book had been finished for more than five years. In the new novel that Danny was writing, the main characters weren’t drinkers; Danny’s drinking wasn’t for “research”-not that it ever was.

But the cook could see that Danny didn’t drink to excess. He had a couple of beers before dinner-he’d always liked the taste of beer-and not more than a glass or two of red wine with his meal. (Without the wine, he didn’t sleep.) It was clear that Dominic’s beloved Daniel hadn’t gone back to being the kind of drinker he used to be.

Dominic could also see for himself that his son’s sadness had endured. After Joe’s death, Ketchum observed that Danny’s sadness had a look of permanence about it. Even interviewers, or anyone meeting the author for the first time, noticed it. Not surprisingly, in many of the interviews Danny had done for various publications of Baby in the Road, the questions about the novel’s main subject-the death of a child-had been personal. In every novel, there are parts that hit uncomfortably close to home for the novelist; obviously, these are areas of emotional history that the writer would prefer not to talk about.

Wasn’t it enough that Danny had made every effort to detach himself from the personal? He’d enhanced, he’d exaggerated, he’d stretched the story to the limits of believability-he’d made the most awful things happen to characters he had imagined as completely as possible. (“So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters,” the novelist had repeatedly said.) Yet Danny Angel’s interviewers had asked him almost nothing about the story and the characters in Baby in the Road; instead they’d asked Danny how he was “dealing with” the death of his son. Had the writer’s “real-life tragedy” made him reconsider the importance of fiction-meaning the weight, the gravity, the relative value of the “merely” make-believe?

That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been “wholly imagined.” And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?

But couldn’t it be argued that Danny should have anticipated the personal nature of his interviewers’ questions concerning Baby in the Road? Even nonreaders had heard about the accident that killed the famous writer’s son. (To Ketchum’s relief, the cowboy seemed to have missed it.) There’d also been the predictable pieces about the calamitous lives of celebrities’ children-unfair in Joe’s case, because the accident didn’t appear to have been Joe’s fault, and he hadn’t been drinking. Yet Danny should have anticipated this, too: Before there was verification that alcohol wasn’t a factor, there would be those in the media who too quickly assumed it had been.

At first, after the accident-and again, when Baby in the Road was published-Dominic had done his best to shield his son from his fan mail. Danny had let his dad be a first reader, understanding that the cook would decide which letters he should or shouldn’t see. That was how the letter from Lady Sky was lost.

“You have some weird readers,” the cook had complained one day. “And so many of your fans address you by your first name, as if they were your friends! It would unnerve me-how you have all these people you don’t know presuming that they know you.”

“Give me an example, Pop,” Danny said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Dominic said. “I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week-she might have been a stripper, for all I know. She had a stripper’s name.”

“Like what?” Danny had asked his dad.

“‘Lady Sky,’” the cook had said. “Sounds like a stripper to me.”

“I think her real name is Amy,” Danny said; he tried to remain calm.

“You know her?”

“I know only one Lady Sky.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel-I just assumed she was a wacko.”

“What did she say, Pop-do you remember?”

Naturally, the cook couldn’t remember all the details-just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She’d written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she’d said she was no longer flying, as if she’d once been able to fly.

“Did she want me to write her back?” Danny asked his dad. “Do you remember where her letter was from?”

“Well, I’m sure there was a return address-they all want you to write them back!” the cook cried.

“It’s okay, Pop-I’m not blaming you,” Danny said. “Maybe she’ll write again.” (He didn’t really think so, and his heart was aching.)

“I had no idea you wanted to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel,” the cook said.

Something must have happened to Amy; Danny wondered what it could have been. You don’t jump naked out of airplanes for no reason, the writer thought.

“I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel.” With that, the cook paused. “She said she had lost a child, too,” Dominic told his son. “I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them.”

“Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad,” Danny said.

After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Danny received a few more letters from his fans who’d lost children, but he’d been unable to answer a single one of those letters. There were no words to say to those people. Danny knew, since he was one of them. He would wonder how Amy had managed it; in his new life, without Joe, Danny didn’t think it would be all that hard to jump naked out of an airplane.

IN DANNY ANGEL’S WRITING ROOM, on the third floor of the house on Cluny Drive, there was a skylight in addition to the window with the view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store. This had once been Joe’s bedroom, and it occupied the entire third floor and had its own bathroom, with a shower but not a tub. The shower was adequate for a college kid like Joe, but the cook had questioned the extravagant size of the bedroom-not to mention the premier view. Wasn’t this wasted on a young man attending school in the States? (Joe would never get to spend much time in Toronto.)

But Danny had argued that he wanted Joe to have the best bedroom, because maybe then his son would be more inclined to come to Canada. The room’s isolation on the third floor also made it the most private bedroom in the house, and-for safety’s sake-no third-floor bedroom should be without a fire escape, so Danny had built one. The room, therefore, had a private entrance. When Joe died, and Danny converted the boy’s bedroom into a writing room, the novelist left his son’s things as they were; only the bed had been removed.

Joe’s clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers-even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He’d kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Danny had long been in the habit of finding his son’s double-knotted shoes and untying the laces for him. It was a few months, or more, after Joe died before Danny had untied the last of Joe’s shoelaces.

What with Joe’s wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual shrine to the dead boy. In the cook’s mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic’s would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there-apparently, that was what Danny wanted.

When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy’s kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them-or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook’s bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel’s bedroom-hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.

That guest room and its bathroom had recently been spruced up-in readiness for Ketchum’s expected arrival, the woodsman’s now-annual Christmas visit-and because the bedroom door was open, both Danny and his dad couldn’t help but notice that the cleaning woman had prominently placed a vase of fresh flowers atop the guest room’s dresser. The bouquet was reflected in the dresser’s mirror, making it appear, from the second-floor hall, as two vases of flowers. (Not that Ketchum would have noticed or acknowledged a dozen vases of flowers in his room, the writer thought.)

Danny guessed that the cleaning woman probably had a crush on Ketchum, though the cook claimed that Lupita must have pitied the logger for how old he was. The flowers were in anticipation of how near death Ketchum was, Dominic absurdly said-“the way people put flowers on a grave.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Danny told his dad.

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied-not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Danny Angel’s other writer friends, both from Europe and the United States, often came to visit. Armando and Mary DeSimone were visitors to the city at least twice a year, and they always stayed with Danny and his dad.

Many of Danny’s foreign publishers had slept in that guest room, which reflected the author’s international reputation; the majority of the books in the room were translations of Danny Angel’s novels. Hanging in that guest bedroom, too, was a framed poster of the French edition of Baby in the Road-Bébé dans la rue. (In the connecting bathroom, there was an oversize poster of the German translation of that same novel-Baby auf der Strasse.) Yet, in the mind of the Mexican cleaning woman, only Ketchum merited flowers.

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny’s third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he’d come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called “the Mexican marvel.” They’d had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who’d lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She’d told the cook that she was worried about how Danny was doing, but to Danny she would only say: “Your boy is in Heaven-higher up than the third floor, Señor Angel.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Lupita,” Danny had replied.

“¿Enfermo?” Lupita was always inquiring-not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny never failed to answer her. “Yo sólo soy un escritor.” (“I am merely a writer”-as if that explained how miserable he must have looked to her.)

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn’t speak of it to Danny, but she’d told the cook. There were no details, and there was scant mention of the child’s father, a Canadian. If Lupita had ever had a husband, she’d also lost him. Danny didn’t think there were many Mexicans in Toronto, but probably more would be coming soon.

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Danny and his dad guessed that she was somewhere between their ages, in her sixties, and while she wasn’t a big woman, she was heavy-noticeably overweight, if not fat in a condemnatory way.

Because Lupita had a pretty face, and she was in the habit of leaving her shoes on the ground floor of the house (she crept about the upstairs barefoot, or in her socks), Danny once said to his father that Lupita reminded him of Injun Jane. The cook couldn’t agree that there was any resemblance; Dominic had sternly shaken his head at the suggestion. Either Danny’s dad was in denial regarding the obvious likeness Lupita shared with Jane, or else Danny’s memory of the Indian dishwasher was misleading him-the way fiction writers are often misled by their memories.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, when the cook was busy with the dinner prep at Patrice, Danny often left his writing room on the third floor-just as the last of the sun, if there was any to speak of, was glimmering through the skylight. There was no visible sun on this gray December afternoon, which made it easier for the novelist to tear himself away from his desk. Whatever remaining light there was from the west barely managed to penetrate the second-floor hall. In his socks, Danny padded to his father’s bedroom. When the cook was out, his son often went into that room to see the snapshots Dominic had pinned to the five bulletin boards hanging from the bedroom’s walls.

There was an old-fashioned desk, with drawers, in his dad’s bedroom, and Danny knew there were hundreds more photographs in those drawers. With Lupita’s help, Dominic constantly rearranged the snapshots on his bulletin boards; the cook never threw a photo away, but instead returned each removed picture to one of the desk drawers. That way, twice-used (or thrice-used) photos became new again-once more displayed on the bulletin boards, the only telltale signs of their previous use being the excessive number of almost invisible pinpricks.

On the bulletin boards, the snapshots were intricately overlapped in a confusing but possibly thematic pattern-either of Dominic’s design or of Lupita’s, because Danny knew that without the Mexican cleaning woman’s assistance, his dad could not have managed to unpin and repin the photographs with such evident ardor and repetition. It was hard work, and because of where the bulletin boards were mounted on the walls, it was necessary to perch on the arm of a couch, or stand on a chair, in order to reach the uppermost sections-not a labor that the cook, with his limp, could easily perform. (Given what she weighed, and her estimated age, Danny worried about Lupita undertaking such a balancing act on a couch or a chair.)

In spite of his considerable imagination, Danny Angel couldn’t fathom his father’s logic; the overlapping snapshots defied either a historical or a visual interpretation. In an ancient black-and-white photograph, a surprisingly young-looking Ketchum appeared to be dancing with Injun Jane in what Danny clearly remembered was the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River. That this old photo was juxtaposed with one (in color) of Danny with Joe (as a toddler) in Iowa was inexplicable-except that Danny recalled Katie being in that photograph, and the cook had cleverly overlapped her entirely with a photo of Carmella with Paul Polcari, standing in front of the pizza oven in Vicino di Napoli; either Tony Molinari or old Giusé Polcari must have snapped the picture.

Thus Vermont overlapped Boston, or vice versa- Avellino and Mao’s were apparently interchangeable-and the Asian faces of the cook’s own Iowa interlude appeared alongside more current Torontonians. The early days at Maxim’s, which gave way to Bastringue on Queen Street West, would be captured next to Ketchum in one or another of his virtual wanigans of a pickup truck, or beside Joe as a college student in Colorado-often on skis, or in a mountain-bike race-and there was even one of Joe’s Iowa City friend Max, who (together with Joe) had come close to being killed in that alleyway behind the Court Street house by the speeding blue Mustang. The portrait of the two eight-year-olds was bafflingly pinned next to one of the young culinary maestro Silvestro, being kissed on both cheeks by his female sous chefs, Joyce and Kristine.

Was it possible, Danny wondered, that most of the photographs had been pinned to the bulletin boards not only by Lupita’s plump hands but according to her artless plan? That would explain the seeming randomness of the arrangements-if the collages of snapshots had been almost entirely up to Lupita, if the cook had played next to no part in the overall design. (That might also explain, the writer thought, why no picture of Ketchum was returned to the desk drawers-not since Lupita had come to work for Danny and his dad.)

How had the eighty-three-year-old logger managed to make such a romantic impression on the sixty-something Mexican cleaning woman? Danny was thinking. The cook seemed to be nauseated by the very idea; Lupita couldn’t have encountered Ketchum more than two or three times. “It must be because of Lupita’s ardent Catholicism!” Dominic had exclaimed.

To his dad’s thinking, Danny knew, there could only be superstitious or nonsensical reasons for any woman in her right mind to be attracted to Ketchum.

NOW, IN HIS OWN BEDROOM, Danny changed into his workout clothes. There were no photographs of Joe in Danny’s bedroom; Danny Angel had enough trouble sleeping without pictures of his dead son. Except in the evenings-when he went out for dinner, or to see a movie-Danny rarely left the house on Cluny Drive, and most evenings his dad was working. Dominic’s idea of semiretirement was that he usually left the restaurant and took himself home to bed by 10:30 or 11:00 every night, even when Patrice was packed; that was retired enough for him.

When Danny was on a book tour, or otherwise out of town, the cook went into his son’s bedroom-just to remind himself of what might have been, if Joe hadn’t died. It grieved Dominic Baciagalupo that the only photographs in his beloved Daniel’s bedroom were of the screenwriter Charlotte Turner, who was fifteen years younger than his son-and, boy, did she look it. Charlotte was just twenty-seven when she’d met Daniel-in ’84, when he’d been forty-two. (This was shortly after the cook and his son had come to Canada. East of Bangor had just been published, and Joe was finishing his freshman year at Colorado.) Charlotte was only eight years older than Joe, and she’d been a very young-looking twenty-seven.

She was a young-looking forty-three now, the cook reflected. It pained Dominic to see Charlotte ’s pictures, and to reflect on how fond he was of the young woman; the cook believed that Charlotte would have been the perfect wife for his lonely son.

But a deal is a deal. Charlotte had wanted children-“Just one child, if that’s all you can handle,” she’d told Danny-and Danny had promised her that he would get her pregnant and give her a child. There was only one condition. (Well, perhaps the condition word was wrong-maybe it was more of a request.) Would Charlotte wait to get pregnant until after Joe had graduated from college? At the time, Joe had three years to go at the University of Colorado, but Charlotte agreed to wait; she would only be thirty when Joe got his undergraduate degree. Besides, as the cook recalled, she and Daniel had loved each other very much. They’d been very happy together; those three years hadn’t seemed like such a long time.

At twenty-seven, Charlotte Turner was fond of saying, dramatically, that she had lived in Toronto her “whole life.” More to the point, she’d never lived with anyone-nor had she ever kept a boyfriend for longer than six months. When she met Danny, she was living in her late grandmother’s house in Forest Hill; her parents wanted to sell the house, but she’d persuaded them to allow her to rent it. The house had been a cluttered, messy place when her grandmother lived there, but Charlotte had auctioned off the old furniture, and she’d turned the downstairs into her office and a small screening room; upstairs, where there was only one bathroom, she’d made a big bedroom out of three smaller, practically useless rooms. Charlotte didn’t cook, and the house was unsuitable for entertaining; she’d left her grandmother’s antiquated kitchen as it was, because the kitchen was sufficient for her. None of Charlotte ’s short-term boyfriends had ever spent the night in that house-Danny would be the first-and Charlotte never exactly moved in with Danny in the house on Cluny Drive.

The cook had offered to move out. He saw himself as a potential invasion of his son’s privacy, and Dominic desperately wanted Daniel’s relationship with Charlotte to succeed. But Charlotte wouldn’t hear of “evicting” Danny’s dad, as she put it-not until after the wedding, which was planned (more than two years in advance) for June ’87, following Joe’s college graduation. Joe would be Danny’s best man.

At the time, it had seemed wise to wait on the wedding-and on Charlotte getting pregnant, and on having a new baby in the house. Danny had wanted to “shepherd” Joe through the boy’s college years-that was the writer’s word for it. But there were those in Toronto who knew Charlotte ’s history with men; they might have bet that a wedding as much as two years in the offing was unlikely, or that after leaving for one of her many trips to L.A., the young screenwriter simply wouldn’t come back. In the short three years they’d been together, Charlotte had kept scarcely any clothes in Danny’s bedroom closet, though she more often spent the night in that Cluny Drive house than Danny would at her place in Forest Hill. She did keep her share of toiletries in Danny’s bathroom, and her considerable cosmetics.

Both Charlotte and Danny were early risers, and while Charlotte was attending to her hair and her skin-she had the most beautiful skin, the cook suddenly remembered-Danny made them breakfast. Then Charlotte would take the Yonge Street subway to St. Clair, where she would walk to her place in Forest Hill; she did a long day’s work there.

Even after they were married, Charlotte always said, she planned to have an office outside the house on Cluny Drive. (“Besides, there isn’t room here for all my clothes,” she’d told Danny. “Even after your dad moves out, I’ll need at least an office-if not an entire house-for my clothes.”)

The clothes could mislead you about Charlotte, Dominic often recalled-especially when he saw pictures of her. However, like Danny with his novels, Charlotte was a workaholic with her scripts-no less so in the case of her proposed adaptation of East of Bangor, which was the reason she and Danny had met.

Charlotte knew all about Danny Angel’s nonnegotiable rules regarding the sale of film rights to his novels; she’d seen the interviews, where Danny had said that someone would have to write a “halfway decent” adaptation before he would part with the movie rights to this or that book.

The tall twenty-seven-year-old-she was a head taller than Daniel, the cook would remember, which made Charlotte closer in height and age to Joe than she was to Danny or his dad-had agreed to write the first draft of a screenplay of East of Bangor “on spec.” No money would change hands, no film rights would pass; if Danny didn’t like her script, Charlotte would simply be out of luck.

“You must already see a way to make a movie out of this novel,” Danny had said when they first met. (He didn’t do lunch, he’d told her. They met for dinner at Bastringue, where-in those days-Danny must have eaten three or four nights a week.)

“No, I just want to do this-I have no idea how,” Charlotte said. She wore dark-framed glasses, and was very studious-looking, but there was nothing bookish about her body; she was not only tall but had a voluptuous figure. (She must have outweighed Daniel by a few pounds, as the cook recalled.) She was a big girl to wear a pink dress, Danny had thought that first night, and her lipstick was a matching pink, but Charlotte did a lot of business in L.A.; even in ’84, she looked more like Los Angeles than Toronto.

Danny had really liked the first draft of her screenplay of East of Bangor-he’d liked it well enough to sell Charlotte Turner the movie rights to his novel for one dollar, Canadian, which at the time was worth about seventy-five cents, U.S. They’d worked together on subsequent drafts of the script, so Danny had seen for himself how hard Charlotte worked. In those days, Danny’s writing room was on the ground floor of the house on Cluny Drive -where his gym was now. He and Charlotte had worked there, and in her grandmother’s house in Forest Hill. It would take fifteen years to get the film made, but the screenplay of East of Bangor was pulled together in four months’ time; by then, Charlotte Turner and Danny Angel were already a couple.

In Danny’s bedroom, which was as much a memorial to Charlotte as the third-floor writing room was a shrine to Joe, the cook had often marveled at how well dusted and sparkling clean Lupita maintained all the framed photographs of the successful screenwriter. Most of the photos had been taken during the three years Daniel and Charlotte were together; many of these pictures were from their brief summer months on Lake Huron. Like some other Toronto families, Charlotte’s parents owned an island in Georgian Bay; Charlotte’s grandfather was alleged to have won the island in a poker game, but there were those who said he’d traded a car for it. Since Charlotte ’s father was terminally ill, and her mother (a doctor) would soon be retiring, Charlotte stood to inherit the island, which was in the area of Pointe au Baril Station. Daniel had loved that island, the cook would remember. (Dominic had visited Georgian Bay only once; he’d hated it.)

The only snapshots of Charlotte that the cook continued to recycle on the bulletin boards in his bedroom were those of her with Joe, because Daniel couldn’t sleep with pictures of the dead boy in his bedroom. The cook admired how Charlotte had been unjealously fond of Joe, and Joe could see for himself how happy his father was with her; Joe had liked Charlotte from the start.

Charlotte wasn’t a skier, yet she tolerated those winter weekends and the Christmas holiday in Winter Park, where the cook had made fabulous dinners in the ski house at the base of the mountain. The restaurants in Winter Park weren’t bad, or they were good enough for Joe and his college friends, but they were beneath the cook’s standards, and Dominic Baciagalupo relished the opportunity to cook for his grandson; the boy didn’t come to Canada often enough, not in Dominic’s opinion. (Not in the writer Danny Angel’s opinion, either.)

NOW WHAT LIGHT HAD LINGERED in the late December afternoon was entirely gone; both the darkness and the contrasting lights of the city were visible in the windows as Danny stretched out on the mat in his gym. Because it had been his writing room before it became his gym-and Danny wrote only in the daylight hours, since he’d gotten older-there were no curtains on the windows. In the winter months, it was often dark by the time he worked out, but Danny didn’t care if anyone in the neighborhood saw him using the aerobic machines or the free weights. Both when it was his office and since it had become his gym, he’d been photographed in that room; he’d been interviewed there, too, because he never allowed any journalists in his writing room on the third floor.

As soon as they were married, Charlotte had said, she was going to put curtains or window shades in the gym, but because the wedding was canceled-with all the rest of it-the windows in that room had remained as they were. It was an odd gym, because it was still surrounded by bookshelves; even after he’d moved his work to Joe’s former bedroom on the third floor, Danny had left many of his books in that ground-floor room.

When Danny and his dad had dinner parties in that house on Cluny Drive, everyone put their coats in the gym; they draped them on the handrails of the treadmill, or over the StairMaster machine, or on the stationary bike, and they piled them on the weight bench, too. Moreover, there were always a couple of clipboards in that room, and a ream of blank typing paper with lots of pens. Sometimes Danny made notes to himself when he rode the stationary bike in the late afternoon, or when he walked on the treadmill. His knees were shot from all the running, but he could still walk pretty fast on the treadmill, and riding the stationary bike or using the StairMaster didn’t bother his knees.

For a fifty-eight-year-old man, Danny was in halfway decent physical shape; he was still fairly slight of build, though he had put on a few pounds since he’d starting drinking beer and red wine again-even in moderation. If Injun Jane had been alive, she would have told Danny that for someone who weighed as little as he did, even a couple of beers and one or two glasses of red wine were too much. (“Well, the Injun was harsh on the firewater subject,” Ketchum had always said; he was not a man who put much stock in moderation, even at eighty-three.)

There was no telling when Ketchum would come for Christmas, Danny was thinking, as he settled into a comfortable pace on the StairMaster; for Christmas, Ketchum just showed up. For someone who fanatically faxed Danny or his dad a dozen times a week, and who still spontaneously phoned at all hours of the day and night, Ketchum was extremely secretive about his road trips-not only his trips to Toronto for Christmas but his hunting trips elsewhere in Canada. (The hunting trips-not to Quebec, but the ones up north in Ontario -occasionally brought Ketchum to Toronto, too.)

Ketchum started his hunting in September, the beginning of bear season in Coos County. The old woodsman claimed that the black bear population in New Hampshire was well over five thousand animals, and the annual bear harvest was “only about five or six hundred critters;” most of the bears were killed in the north and central regions of the state, and in the White Mountains. Ketchum’s bear hound, that aforementioned “fine animal”-by now the grandson (or great-grandson!) of that first fine animal, one would guess-was allowed to hunt with him from the second week of September till the end of October.

The dog was a crossbreed, what Ketchum called a Walker bluetick. He was tall and rangy, like a Walker foxhound, but with the bluetick’s white coat-blotched and flecked with bluish gray-and with the bluetick’s superior quickness. Ketchum got his Walker blueticks from a kennel in Tennessee; he always chose a male and named him Hero. The dog never barked, but he growled in his sleep-Ketchum claimed that the dog didn’t sleep-and Hero let loose a mournful baying whenever he was chasing a bear.

In New Hampshire, the end of the bear season overlapped with the muzzle-loader season for deer-a short time, only from the end of October through the first week of November. The regular firearm season for deer ran the rest of the month of November, into early December, but as soon as Ketchum killed a deer in Coos County (he always dropped one with his muzzle loader), he headed up north to Canada; the regular firearm season for deer ended earlier there.

The old logger had never been able to interest the cook in deer hunting; Dominic didn’t like guns, or the taste of venison, and his limp was no fun in the woods. But after Danny and his dad moved to Canada, and Danny met Charlotte Turner, Ketchum was invited to Charlotte’s island in Lake Huron; it was the first summer she and Danny were a couple, when the cook was also invited to Georgian Bay. That was where and when-on Turner Island, in August 1984-Ketchum talked Danny into trying deer hunting.

DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO DESPISED the imposed rusticity of the summer-cottage life on those Georgian Bay islands-in ’84, Charlotte ’s family still used an outhouse. And while they had propane lights and a propane fridge, they hauled what water they needed (by the bucket method) from the lake.

Furthermore, Charlotte’s family seemed to have furnished the main cottage and two adjacent sleeping cabins with the cast-off couches, chipped dishes, and mortally uncomfortable beds that they’d long ago replaced in their Toronto home; worse, the cook surmised, there was a tradition among the Georgian Bay islanders that upheld such stingy behavior. Anything new-such as electricity, hot water, or a flush toilet-was somehow contemptible.

But what they ate was what the cook most deplored. The mainland provisions at Pointe au Baril Station-in particular, the produce and anything that passed for “fresh”-were rudimentary, and everyone burned the shit out of what they blackened beyond recognition on their outdoor barbecues.

In his first and only visit to Turner Island, Dominic was polite, and he helped out in the kitchen-to the degree this was tolerable-but the cook returned to Toronto at the end of a long weekend, relieved by the knowledge that he would never again test his limp on those unwelcoming rocks, or otherwise set foot on a dock at Pointe au Baril Station.

“There’s too much of Twisted River here-it’s not Cookie’s kind of place,” Ketchum had explained to Charlotte and Danny, after Dominic went back to the city. While the logger said this in forgiveness of his old friend, Danny was not entirely different from his dad in his initial reaction to island life. The difference was that Danny and Charlotte had talked about the changes they would make on the island-certainly after (if not before) her father passed away, and her mother was no longer able to safely get into or out of a boat, or climb up those jagged rocks from the dock to the main cottage.

Danny still wrote on an old-fashioned typewriter; he owned a half-dozen IBM Selectrics, which were in constant need of repair. He wanted electricity for his typewriters. Charlotte wanted hot water-she’d long dreamed of such luxuries as an outdoor shower and an oversize bathtub-not to mention several flush toilets. A little electric heat would be nice, too, both Danny and Charlotte had agreed, because it could get cold at night, even in the summer-they were that far north-and, after all, they would soon be having a baby.

Danny also wanted to construct “a writing shack,” as he called it-he was no doubt remembering the former farmhouse shed he’d written in, in Vermont-and Charlotte wanted to erect an enormous screened-in verandah, something large enough to link the main cottage to the two sleeping cabins, so that no one would ever have to go out in the rain (or venture into the mosquitoes, which were constant after nightfall).

Danny and Charlotte had plans for the place, in other words-the way couples in love do. Charlotte had cherished her summers on the island since she’d been a little girl; perhaps what Danny had adored were the possibilities of the place, the life with Charlotte he’d imagined there.

OH, PLANS, PLANS, PLANS-how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there! In fact, the couple in love wouldn’t wait for Charlotte ’s father to die, or for her mother to be physically incapable of handling the hardships of an island in Lake Huron. Over the next two years, Danny and Charlotte would put in the electricity, the flush toilets, and the hot water-even Charlotte ’s outdoor shower and her oversize bathtub, not to mention the enormous screened-in verandah. And there were a few other “improvements” that Ketchum suggested; the old woodsman had actually used the improvements word, on his very first visit to Georgian Bay and Turner Island. In the summer of ’84, Ketchum had been a spry sixty-seven-young enough to still have a few plans of his own.

That summer, Ketchum had brought the dog. The fine animal was as alert as a squirrel from the second he put his paws on the island’s main dock. “There must be a bear around here-Hero knows bears,” Ketchum said. There was a stiff-standing ridge of fur (formerly, loose skin) at the back of the hound’s tensed neck; the dog stayed as close to Ketchum as the woodsman’s shadow. Hero wasn’t a dog you were inclined to pat.

Ketchum wasn’t a summer person; he didn’t fish, or screw around with boats. The veteran river driver was no swimmer. What Ketchum saw in Georgian Bay, and on Turner Island, was what the place must be like in the late fall and the long winter, and when the ice broke up in the spring. “Lots of deer around here, I’ll bet,” the old logger remarked; he was still standing on the dock, only moments after he’d arrived and before he picked up his gear. He appeared to be sniffing the air for bear, like his dog.

“Injun country,” Ketchum said approvingly. “Well, at least it was-before those damn missionaries tried to Christianize the fucking woods.” As a boy, he’d seen the old black-and-white photographs of a pulpwood boom afloat in Gore Bay, Manitoulin Island. The lumber business around Georgian Bay would have been at its height about 1900, but Ketchum had heard the history, and he’d memorized the yearly cycles of logging. (In the autumn months, you cut your trees, you built your roads, and you readied your streams for the spring drives-all before the first snowfall. In the winter, you kept cutting trees, and you hauled or sledded your logs over the snow to the edge of the water. In the spring, you floated your logs down the streams and the rivers into the bay.)

“But, by the nineties, all your forests went rafting down to the States-isn’t that right?” Ketchum asked Charlotte. She was surprised by the question; she didn’t know, but Ketchum did.

It was like logging everywhere, after all. The great forests had been cut down; the mills had burned down, or they’d been torn down. “The mills perished out of sheer neglect,” as Ketchum liked to put it.

“Maybe that bear’s on a nearby island,” Ketchum said, looking all around. “Hero’s not agitated enough for there to be a bear on this island.” (To Danny and Charlotte, the lean hound looked agitated enough for there to be a bear on the dock.)

It turned out that there was a bear on Barclay Island that summer. The water between the two islands was a short swim for a bear-both Danny and Ketchum discovered they could wade there-but the bear never showed up on Turner Island, perhaps because the bear had smelled Ketchum’s dog.

“Burn the grease off the grill on the barbecue, after you’ve used it,” Ketchum advised them. “Don’t put the garbage out, and keep the fruit in the fridge. I would leave Hero with you, but I need him to look after me.”

There was an uninhabited log cabin, the first building to be assembled on Turner Island, near the back dock. Charlotte gave Ketchum a tour of it. The screens were a little torn, and a pair of bunk beds had first been separated and then nailed together, side by side, where they were covered with a king-size mattress that overhung the bed frames. The blanket on the bed was moth-eaten, and the mattress was mildewed; no one had stayed there since Charlotte ’s grandfather stopped coming to the island.

It had been his cabin, Charlotte said, and after the old man died, no other member of the Turner family went near the run-down building, which Charlotte said was haunted (or so she’d believed as a girl).

She pulled aside a well-worn, dirty rug; she wanted to show Ketchum the hidden trapdoor in the floor. The cabin was set on cement posts, not much taller than cinder blocks-there was no foundation-and under the trapdoor was nothing but bare ground, about three feet below the floor. With the pine trees all around, pine needles had blown under the cabin, which gave the ground a deceptively soft and comfortable appearance.

“We don’t know what Granddaddy used the trapdoor for,” Charlotte explained to Ketchum, “but because he was a gambling man, we suspect he hid his money here.”

Hero was sniffing the hole in the floor when Ketchum asked: “Was your granddaddy a hunting man, Charlotte?”

“Oh, yes!” Charlotte cried. “When he died, we finally threw away his guns.” (Ketchum winced.)

“Well, this here’s a meat locker,” Ketchum told her. “Your granddaddy came up here in the winter, I would bet.”

“Yes, he did!” Charlotte said, impressed.

“Probably after deer season, when the bay was frozen,” Ketchum considered. “I’m guessing that when he shot a deer-and your Mounties would have known when someone was shooting, given how quiet it would be here in the winter, with all the snow-and when the Mounties came and asked him what he was shooting, I expect your granddaddy told them some story. Like he was shooting over a red squirrel’s head, because the squirrel’s chattering was driving him crazy, or that a herd of deer had been feeding on his favorite cedars, and he shot over their heads so they would go eat all the cedars on someone else’s island-when the whole time he was talking, the deer, which Granddaddy would have gutted over this hole, so there wouldn’t be any blood in the snow, and where he was keeping the meat cold… well, do you see what I’m getting at, Charlotte?” Ketchum asked her. “This here hole is a poacher’s meat locker! I told you-there’s lots of deer around here, I’ll bet.”

Ketchum and Hero had stayed in that run-down log cabin, haunted or not. (“Hell, most places I’ve lived are haunted,” Ketchum had remarked.) The newer sleeping cabins were not to the old woodsman’s liking; as for the torn screens in Granddaddy’s cabin, Ketchum said, “If you don’t get bitten by a mosquito or two, you can hardly tell you’re in the woods.” And there was more loon activity in that back bay, because there were fewer boats; Ketchum had figured that out on the first day, too. He liked the sound of loons. “Besides, Hero farts something awful-you wouldn’t want him stinking up your sleeping cabins, Charlotte!”

At the end of the day, Charlotte wasn’t shocked by the idea that her granddaddy had been a poacher. He’d died destitute and alcoholic; gambling debts and whiskey had done him in. Now, at least, the trapdoor in the floor had been given a reason for its existence, and this rather quickly led Ketchum to his suggested improvements. It never occurred to the old river driver that Charlotte had not once been interested in living on her beloved island in the frigid winter months, when the prevailing wind had permanently bent the trees-when the bay was frozen and piled high with snow, and there wasn’t a human soul around, except the occasional ice fisherman and those madmen who rode their snowmobiles over the lake.

“It wouldn’t take a whole lot to winterize the main cottage,” Ketchum began. “When you put in your flush toilets, you just want to be sure you install two septic systems-the main one, and a smaller one that nobody has to know about. Forget about using the sleeping cabins; it would be too expensive to heat them. Just stick to the main cottage. A little electric heat will be enough to keep the toilet and the sink-and the big bathtub you want, Charlotte -from freezing. You just have to heat-wrap the pipes to the small septic tank. That way, you can flush the toilet and drain the dishwater out of the sink-and empty the bathtub, too. You just can’t pump water up from the lake, or heat any water-not in a propane hot-water heater, anyway. You’ll have to cut a hole in the ice, and bring your water up by bucket; you heat the water on the gas stove for your baths, and for washing the dishes. You would sleep in the main cottage, of course-and most of your heat would come from the woodstove. You’ll need a woodstove in your writing shack, too, Danny-but that’s all you’ll need. The back bay nearest the mainland will freeze first; you can haul in your groceries on a sled towed by a snowmobile, and take your trash to town the same way. Hell, you could ski or snowshoe here from the mainland,” Ketchum said. “You just might be better off staying away from the main channel out of Pointe au Baril Station. I don’t imagine that channel freezes over too safely.”

“But why would we want to come here in the winter?” Danny asked the old woodsman; Charlotte just stared at Ketchum, uncomprehending.

“Well, why don’t we come up here this winter, Danny?” Ketchum asked the writer. “I’ll show you why you might like it.”

Ketchum didn’t mean “winter”-not exactly. He meant deer season, which was in November. The first deer season that Danny met up with Ketchum at Pointe au Baril Station, the ice hadn’t thickened sufficiently for them to cross the back bay from the mainland to Turner Island; not even snowshoes or cross-country skis would have been safe, and Ketchum’s snowmobile surely would have sunk. In addition to the snowmobile, and a vast array of foul-weather gear, Ketchum had brought the guns, but he’d left Hero at home-actually, he’d left that fine animal with Six-Pack Pam. Six-Pack had dogs, and Hero “tolerated” her dogs, Ketchum said. (Deer hunting was “unsuitable” for dogs, Ketchum also said.)

It didn’t matter that they couldn’t get to Charlotte ’s island that first year, anyway. The builder wouldn’t be finished with all the improvements before the following summer; Ketchum’s clever winterizing would have to wait until then, too. The builder, Andy Grant, was what Ketchum affectionately called “a local fella.” In fact, Charlotte had grown up with him-they’d been childhood friends. Andy had not only renovated the main cottage for Charlotte ’s parents a few years ago; he’d more recently restored the two sleeping cabins to Charlotte ’s specifications.

Andy Grant told Ketchum and Danny where the deer were in the Bayfield area, and Ketchum already knew a fella named LaBlanc, who called himself a hunting guide; LaBlanc showed Ketchum and Danny an area north of Pointe au Baril, in the vicinity of Byng Inlet and Still River. But, in Ketchum’s case, it didn’t matter where he hunted; the deer were all around.

At first, Danny was a little insulted by the weapon Ketchum had selected for him-a Winchester Ranger, which was manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, in the mid-eighties, and then discontinued. It was a 20-gauge, repeating shotgun with a slide action-what Ketchum called “a pump.” What initially insulted Danny was that the shotgun was a youth model.

“Don’t get your balls crossed about it,” Ketchum told the writer. “It’s a fine gun for a beginner. You better keep things simple when you start hunting. I’ve seen some fellas blow their toes off.”

For the sake of his toes, Danny guessed, Ketchum instructed the beginner to always have three rounds in the Winchester -one in the chamber and two more in the tubular magazine. “Don’t forget how many shots you’re carrying,” Ketchum said.

Danny knew that the first two rounds were buckshot; the third was a deer slug, what Ketchum called the “kill-shot.” It made no sense to load more than three rounds, no matter what the shotgun’s capacity was. “If you need a fourth or a fifth shot, you’ve already missed,” Ketchum told Danny. “The deer’s long gone.”

At night, Danny had trouble keeping Ketchum out of the bar at Larry’s Tavern, which was also a motel-south of Pointe au Baril Station, on Route 69. The motel’s walls were so thin, they could hear whoever was humping in the room next door. “Some asshole trucker and a hooker,” Ketchum declared the first night.

“I don’t think there are any hookers in Pointe au Baril,” Danny said.

“It’s a one-night stand, then,” Ketchum replied. “They sure don’t sound married.”

Another night, there was a prolonged caterwauling of a certain female kind. “This one sounds different from the night before, and the night before that,” Ketchum said.

Whoever the woman was, she went on and on. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” she kept repeating.

“Are you timing this, Danny? It might be a record,” Ketchum said, but he walked naked into the hall and beat on the door of the longest orgasm in the world. “Listen up, fella,” the old river driver said. “She’s obviously lying.”

The young man who opened the door was menacing, and in a mood to fight, but the fight-if you could call it that-was over in a hurry. Ketchum put the guy in a choke hold before the fella had managed to throw more than a punch or two. “I wasn’t lying,” the woman called from the dark room, but by then not even the young man believed her.

It was not how Danny had imagined he and Ketchum would be camping out, or otherwise roughing it, while they were hunting deer. As for the deer, the first buck Danny dropped in Bayfield required all three rounds-including the kill-shot. “Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” was all Ketchum told him.

Ketchum got his buck near Byng Inlet, with one shot from his 12-gauge. The next deer season in Ontario, they shot two more bucks-both of them at Still River -and by then the so-called improvements on Charlotte ’s island were complete, including the winterizing. Ketchum and Danny returned to Pointe au Baril Station in early February, when the ice on the bay nearest the mainland was two feet thick. They followed the snowmobile portage from Payne’s Road, out of Pointe au Baril, and went across the ice and drifting snow to the back dock and Granddaddy’s cabin.

Deer season was over, but Ketchum had brought his 12-gauge. “Just in case,” he told Danny.

“In case what?” Danny asked him. “We’re not poaching deer, Ketchum.”

“In case there’s some other critter,” Ketchum replied.

Later, Danny saw Ketchum grilling a couple of venison steaks on the barbecue, which Andy had hooked up to the propane inside Charlotte’s new screened-in verandah; the verandah was boarded up in winter to keep out the snow, because the outdoor summer furniture and two canoes were stored there. Unbeknownst to Danny, Ketchum had also brought his bow.

Danny forgot that Ketchum was a bow hunter, too, and that the archery season for deer in New Hampshire was three months long; Ketchum had had a lot of practice.

“That’s poaching,” Danny told the logger.

“The Mounties didn’t hear any shots, did they?” Ketchum asked.

“It’s still poaching, Ketchum.”

“If you don’t hear anything, it’s more like nothing, Danny. I know Cookie’s not a fan of venison, but I think it tastes pretty good this way.”

Danny didn’t really like deer hunting-not the killing part, anyway-but he enjoyed spending time with Ketchum, and that February of ’86, when they stayed for a few nights in the main cottage on Turner Island, Danny discovered that the winter on Georgian Bay was wonderful.

From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When new snow was falling, and there were near whiteout conditions-so that where the rocks on shore ended and the frozen bay began were all one-it struck Danny Angel that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival.

Danny sat transfixed in his writing shack, looking at that wind-bent pine; he was actually imagining what it might be like to live on the island in Lake Huron for a whole winter. (Of course he knew that Charlotte wouldn’t have tolerated it for longer than one weekend.)

Ketchum had come into the writing shack; he’d been hauling water from the lake, and had brought some pasta pots to a near boil on the gas stove. He’d come to inquire if Danny wanted to take the first bath or the next one.

“Do you see that tree, Ketchum?” Danny asked him, pointing to the little pine.

“I suppose you mean the one the wind has fucked over,” Ketchum said.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Danny answered. “What does it remind you of?”

“Your dad,” Ketchum told him, without hesitation. “That tree’s got Cookie written all over it, but it’ll be fine, Danny-like your dad. Cookie’s going to be fine.”

KETCHUM AND DANNY went deer hunting around Pointe au Baril in November of ’86-their third and last deer season together-and they went “camping,” as they called it, on Turner Island in late January of ’87, too. At Danny’s insistence, and to Ketchum’s considerable consternation, there was no more bow hunting out of season. Instead of his bow and the hunting arrows, Ketchum brought Hero along-together with the just-in-case 12-gauge, which was never fired.

Danny believed that the bear hound’s reputation for farting was exaggerated; that January, Ketchum again used the dog as an excuse to sleep in Granddaddy’s log cabin, which was unheated. With all the winterizing, the main cottage was a little too warm (and too comfortable) for the old woodsman, who said he liked to see his breath at night-when he could see at all. Danny couldn’t imagine what Ketchum could see at night in Granddaddy’s cabin, because there was no electricity or propane lamps there. The logger took a flashlight with him when he went off to bed, but he carried it like a club; Danny never saw him turn it on.

Ketchum had come to Charlotte ’s island only one time in summer, the same time when the cook had also come and gone. Charlotte never knew that Ketchum had the 12-gauge with him then, but Danny did. He’d heard Ketchum shooting a rattlesnake down at the back dock. Charlotte had taken the boat into Pointe au Baril Station; she didn’t hear the shot.

“The rattlesnakes are protected-an endangered species, I think,” Danny told the river driver. Ketchum had already skinned the snake and cut off its rattles.

In the summer, Charlotte had her boat serviced at Desmasdon’s, the boat works where they dry-docked boats in the winter. Now, when Danny watched Ketchum skinning the snake, he was reminded of a poster on the ice cream freezer at Desmasdon’s-it displayed the various snakes of Ontario, the Eastern Massasauga rattler among them. Those rattlesnakes really were protected, Danny was trying to make Ketchum understand, but the woodsman cut him off.

“Hero’s smart enough not to get bitten by a fucking snake, Danny-I don’t need to protect him,” Ketchum started in. “But I’m not so sure about you and Charlotte. You walk all over this island-I’ve seen you!-just talking to each other and not looking where you’re stepping. People in love aren’t looking for rattlers; they’re not listening for them, either. And you and Charlotte are going to have a baby, isn’t that right? It’s not the rattlesnakes that need protection, Danny.” With that, Ketchum cut off the snake’s head with his Browning knife. He drained the venom from the fangs on a rock; then he hurled the head off the back dock, into the bay. “Fish food,” he said. “I’m a regular environmentalist, sometimes.” He tossed the snakeskin up on the roof of Granddaddy’s cabin, where the sun would dry it out, he said-adding, “If the seagulls and the crows don’t get it first.”

The birds would get it, and they made such a ruckus over the snakeskin early the next morning that Ketchum was tempted to fire off his 12-gauge again, this time to drive the seagulls and the crows off the roof of the log cabin. But he restrained himself, knowing Charlotte would hear the shot; Ketchum went outside and threw rocks at the birds instead. He watched a gull fly off with the remains of the snakeskin. (“Nothing wasted,” as the logger later described the event to Danny.)

That day, the Mounties came by in their boat to inquire about the gunshot the day before. Had anyone heard it? Someone on Barclay Island said that they thought they’d heard a shot on Turner Island. “I heard it, too,” Ketchum spoke up, getting the two young Mounties’ attention. Ketchum even recalled the time of day, with impressive accuracy, but he said that the shooting definitely came from the mainland. “Sounded like a twelve-gauge to me,” the veteran woodsman said, “but gunfire can be both magnified and distorted over water.” The two Mounties nodded at such a sage assessment; the beautiful but unsuspecting Charlotte nodded, too.

Then Joe had died, and Danny lost what little taste he had for killing things. And when Danny lost Charlotte, he and Ketchum gave up their dead-of-winter trips to Turner Island in Georgian Bay.

There was something about Pointe au Baril Station that stayed with Danny, though he didn’t go there anymore. In fact, his parting from Charlotte had been so civilized-she’d even offered to share her summer island with him, when they were no longer together. Maybe he could go there in July, and she would go in August, she said. After all, he’d put his money into those improvements, too. (Charlotte ’s offer was sincere; it wasn’t only about the money.)

Yet it wasn’t Georgian Bay in the summer that Danny had adored. He’d loved being there with her-he would have loved being anywhere with Charlotte -but when she was gone, whenever he thought about Lake Huron, he thought mostly about that wind-bent pine in the wintertime. How could he ask Charlotte for permission to let him have a winter view of that little tree from his writing shack-the weather-beaten pine he saw now only in his imagination?

And how could Danny have had another child, after losing Joe? He’d known the day Joe died that he would lose Charlotte, too, because he sensed almost immediately that his heart couldn’t bear losing another child; he couldn’t stand the anxiety, or that terrible ending, ever again.

Charlotte knew it, too-even before he found the courage to tell her. “I won’t hold you to your promise,” she told him, “even if it means that I might have to move on.”

“You should move on, Charlotte,” he told her. “I just can’t.”

She’d married someone else soon after. A nice guy-Danny had met him, and liked him. He was someone in the movie business, a French director living in L.A. He was much closer to Charlotte ’s age, too. She already had one baby, a little girl, and now Charlotte was expecting a second child-one more than Danny had promised her.

Charlotte had kept her island in Georgian Bay, but she’d moved away from Toronto and was living in Los Angeles now. She came back to Toronto every September for the film festival, and that time of year-early fall-always seemed to Danny like a good time to leave town. They still talked on the phone-Charlotte was always the one who called; Danny never called her-but it was probably easier for both of them not to run into each other.

Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant-she was about to have her first child-when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for East of Bangor, at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Danny and his dad had watched Charlotte accept the statuette. (Patrice was always closed on Sunday nights.) Somehow, seeing her on television-from Toronto, when Charlotte was in L.A. -well, that wasn’t the same as actually seeing her, was it? Both the cook and Danny wished her well.

It was just bad luck. “Bad timing, huh?” Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it’s likely Danny would have already gotten Charlotte pregnant. It had been bad timing, indeed.)

JOE AND THE GIRL HAD TAKEN some of the same courses in Boulder-she was a senior at the university, too-and their trip to Winter Park together might have been a belated birthday present that Joe decided to give himself. According to their mutual friends, Joe and the girl had been sleeping together for only a short time. It was the girl’s first trip alone with Joe to the ski house in Winter Park, though both Danny and his dad remembered her staying at the house for a couple of nights over the last Christmas holiday, when a bunch of Joe’s college friends-girls and boys, with no discernible relationship with one another (at least that the cook and his son could see)-were also camping out at that Winter Park house.

It was a big house, after all, and-as Charlotte had said, because she was closer in age to Joe and his pals than Danny and Dominic were-it was impossible to tell who was sleeping with whom. There were so many of them, and they seemed to be lifelong friends. That last Colorado Christmas, the kids had taken the mattresses from all the guest bedrooms, and they’d piled them in the living room, where both the boys and the girls had cuddled together and slept in front of the fire.

Yet, even with such a mob of them, and amid all the taking turns in the showers-it had surprised Danny and his dad that some of the girls took showers together-it was the cook and his son who’d noticed something special about that girl. Charlotte hadn’t seen it. It was for just the briefest moment, and maybe it meant nothing, but after Joe died with the girl, the writer and the cook couldn’t forget it.

She was pretty and petite, almost elfin, and naturally Joe had made a point of telling his father and grandfather that he’d first met Meg in a life-drawing class, where she’d been the model.

“One look at the girl doesn’t suffice-it isn’t nearly enough,” the cook would tell Ketchum, shortly after that Christmas.

It wasn’t just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg clearly was that; as had been the case with Katie, Danny had seen for himself the first time, you simply had to look at Meg, and it was almost painful not to keep looking. (Once you saw her, it was hard to look away.)

“What a distraction that girl is,” Danny said to his dad.

“She’s trouble,” the cook replied.

The two older men were making their way along the upstairs hall of that Winter Park house. The wing where the guest bedrooms were was a curious L-shaped addition off that hall-so architecturally strange that you couldn’t pass the junction without at least glancing at the guest-wing hallway, and that was why Danny and Dominic noticed the slight commotion. Then again, their heads might have turned in that direction at the piercing shrieks of the young girls’ laughter-not an everyday occurrence in the lives of the cook and his son.

Meg and another girl were emerging from one of the guest bedrooms, both of them wrapped in towels. Their hair was wet-they must have come directly from a shower-and they ran awkwardly in their tightly wrapped towels to the door of a different guest bedroom, the other girl disappearing into the room before Meg, who was left alone in the guest-wing hallway, just as Joe came around the corner of the L. It all happened so suddenly that Joe never saw his father or grandfather, and neither did Meg. She saw only Joe, and he clearly saw her, and before she slipped inside the guest room and closed the door-to more shrieks of laughter, from within the room-Meg had opened her towel to Joe.

“She shook her little titties at him!” as the cook would later describe the episode to Ketchum.

“A distraction, indeed,” was all Danny had said at the time.

It was what Charlotte would have called “a throwaway line”-a reference to any extraneous dialogue in a screenplay-but after the accident that killed Joe and Meg, the distraction word lingered.

Why hadn’t they been wearing their seat belts, for example? Had the girl been giving him a blow job? Probably she had; Joe’s fly was open, and his penis was poking out of his pants when the body was discovered. He’d been thrown from the car and died immediately. Meg wasn’t so lucky. The girl was found alive, but with her head and neck at an unnatural angle; she was wedged between the brake and the accelerator pedal. She’d died in the ambulance, before reaching the hospital.

What had led Joe and Meg to cut two days of classes in Boulder, and make the drive to Winter Park, at first seemed pretty obvious; yet two days of new, nonstop snow wasn’t the prevailing reason. Besides, it had been a typical late-March snow, wet and heavy-the skiing must have been slow, the visibility on the mountain treacherous. And from the look of the ski house in Winter Park -that is, before the cleaning lady rushed in and made some attempt to restore order-Joe and the girl had spent most of their time indoors. It didn’t appear that they’d done much skiing. Perhaps it had no more significance than most youthful experiments, but the young couple seemed to have made a game out of sleeping in every bed in the house.

Naturally, there would remain some unanswerable questions. If they weren’t in Winter Park to ski, why had they waited until the evening of the second day to drive back to Boulder? Joe knew that after midnight and before dawn, the ski patrol was in the habit of closing U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, whenever there was any avalanche danger; with such a heavy, wet snow, and because it was the avalanche time of year, possibly Joe hadn’t wanted to risk leaving before light the next morning, when they might still be blasting avalanches above Berthoud Pass. Of course the two lovers could have waited until daylight of the following morning, but maybe Joe and Meg had thought that missing two days of classes was enough.

It was snowing heavily in Winter Park when they left, but there was next to no ski traffic on U.S. 40 in the direction of I-70, and that highway was well traveled. (Well, it was a weekday night; for most schools and colleges that had a March break, the vacation was over.) Joe and Meg must have passed the snowplow at the top of Berthoud Pass; the plowman remembered Joe’s car, though he’d noticed only the driver. Apparently, the plowman hadn’t seen the passenger; perhaps the blow job was already in progress. But Joe had waved to the plowman, and the plowman recalled waving back.

Only seconds later, the plowman spotted the other car-it was coming in the other direction, from I-70, and the plowman presumed it was “a goddamn Denver driver.” This was because the driver was going much too fast for the near-blizzard conditions. In the plowman’s estimation, Joe had been driving safely-or at least slowly enough, given the storm and the slickness of the wet snow on the highway. Whereas the Denver car-if, indeed, the driver was from Denver -was fishtailing out of control as the car came over the pass. The plowman had flashed his lights, but the other car never slowed down.

“It was just a blue blur,” the plowman said in his deposition to the police. (What kind of blue? he was asked.) “With all the snow, I’m not really sure about the color,” the plowman admitted, but Danny would always imagine the other car as an unusual shade of blue-a customized job, as Max had called it.

Anyway, that mystery car just disappeared; the plowman never saw the driver.

The snowplow then made its way downhill, over the pass-in the direction of I-70-and that was when the plowman came upon the wreck on U.S. 40, Joe’s upside-down car. There’d been no other traffic over the pass, or the plowman would have seen it, so the plowman’s interpretation of the skid marks in the snow was probably correct. The other car-its tires spinning, its rear end drifting sideways-had skidded from the uphill lane into the downhill lane, where Joe was driving. From the tracks in the snow, the plowman could see that Joe had been forced to change lanes-to avoid the head-on collision. But the two cars had never made contact; they’d traded lanes without touching.

On a wet, snowy road, the plowman knew, a car coming uphill can recover from a skid-just take your foot off the gas, and the car slows down and stops skidding. In Joe’s case, of course, his car just kept going; he hit the huge snowbank that had buried the guardrail on the steep side of U.S. 40, where the drivers coming up Berthoud Pass don’t like to look down. It’s a long way down at that section of the road, but the soft-looking snowbank was densely packed and frozen hard; the snowbank bounced Joe’s car back into the uphill lane of U.S. 40, where the car tipped over. From those skid marks, the plowman could tell that Joe’s car had slid on its roof down the steepest part of the highway. Both the driver’s-side door and the door on the passenger side had sprung open.

How had one of Danny Angel’s interviewers asked the question? “Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Angel-regarding how slowly your son was driving, and the fact that he didn’t hit the other car-that, in all likelihood, it was an accident your son and the girl would have survived if they’d been wearing their seat belts?”

“In all likelihood,” Danny had repeated.

The police said it was impossible to imagine that the driver of the other car hadn’t been aware of Joe and Meg’s predicament; even with all the fishtailing, the so-called Denver driver must have seen what had happened to Joe’s car. But he didn’t stop, whoever he (or she) was. If anything, according to the plowman, the other car had sped up-as if to get away from the accident.

Danny and his dad rarely talked about the accident itself, but of course the cook knew what his writer son thought. To anyone with an imagination, to lose a child is attended by a special curse. Dominic understood that his beloved Daniel lost his beloved Joe over and over again-maybe in a different way each time. Danny would also wonder if the other car ever had a driver, for surely it was the blue Mustang. That rogue car had been looking for Joe all these years. (At the time of the accident on Berthoud Pass, it had been almost fourteen years since that near accident in the alleyway in back of the Court Street house in Iowa City, when Max-who’d seen the blue Mustang more than once-and the eight-year-old Joe himself had sworn there was no driver.)

It was a driverless blue Mustang, and it had a mission. Just as Danny, in his mind’s eye, had once imagined his slain two-year-old in diapers on Iowa Avenue, so had the plowman from Winter Park found Joe’s actual body-dead in the road.

CHAPTER 13. KISSES OF WOLVES

AT 7:30 ON A SATURDAY EVENING-IT WAS DECEMBER 23, the last night before the restaurant closed for the Christmas holiday-Patrice was chock-full. Arnaud was jubilant, greeting everyone at each table as if they were family. The owner’s excitement was infectious. All the diners were informed of the upcoming changes ahead for the restaurant; a more casual atmosphere and menu awaited them in the New Year. “Lower prices, too!” Arnaud told them-shaking hands, bussing cheeks. When the restaurant reopened, even the name would be different.

“No more ‘Patrice,’” Arnaud announced, gliding from table to table. “The new name is one you won’t easily forget. It has, I think, a certain edge!”

“The new restaurant is called Edge?” Ketchum asked the Frenchman suspiciously. The old logger was increasingly hard of hearing-especially in his right ear, and Arnaud was speaking at the woodsman’s right side. (There was a noisy crowd that night, and the place was crammed.)

Too much gunfire, Danny Angel was thinking. Ketchum had what he called “shooter’s ear,” but the writer knew that Ketchum was chainsaw-deaf in both ears. It probably wouldn’t have mattered which ear Patrice was addressing.

“No, no-the name isn’t Edge, it’s Kiss of the Wolf!” Arnaud cried, loudly enough for the new name to register with Ketchum.

Danny and the logger had a window table for two, overlooking what they could see of Yonge Street -above the frosted glass. When the restaurateur had glided on to the next table, Ketchum gave Danny a penetrating stare. “I heard what the Frenchie said,” the old river driver began. “Kiss of the fucking Wolf! Shit-that sounds like a name only a writer would have thought up!”

“It wasn’t me,” Danny told him. “It was Silvestro’s idea, and Patrice liked it. Dad didn’t have anything to do with it, either.”

“Mountains of moose shit,” Ketchum said matter-of-factly. “It’s as if you fellas are trying to get caught!”

“We’re not going to get caught because of the restaurant’s name,” Danny told the logger. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ketchum. The cowboy can’t find us that way.”

“Carl is still looking for you-that’s all I’m saying, Danny. I don’t know why you want to help the cowboy find you.”

Danny didn’t say anything; he believed it was crazy to think that Carl could ever connect Kiss of the Wolf to the Baciagalupo name. The retired deputy sheriff didn’t speak Italian!

“I’ve seen wolves. I’ve come upon their kill, too,” the old woodsman said to Danny. “I’ll tell you what a kiss of the wolf looks like. A wolf rips your throat out. If there’s a pack going after you, or some other critter, they get you turning to face them, every which way, but there’s always one who’s getting ready to rip your throat out-that’s what they’re looking for, the throat-shot. Kisses of wolves aren’t so pretty!”

“What do you feel like eating?” Danny asked, just to change the subject.

“I’m fairly torn about it,” Ketchum said. He wore reading glasses-of all things!-but they failed to lend him a scholarly appearance. The scar from the eight-inch cast-iron skillet was too pronounced, his beard too bushy. The plaid shirt and fleece vest had too much of Twisted River about them to give Ketchum even a vestige of city life-not to mention fine dining. “I was considering the French-style grilled lamb chops, or the calf’s liver with Yukon frites,” the woodsman said. “What the fuck are Yukon frites?” he asked Danny.

“Big potatoes,” Danny answered. “They’re Yukon Gold potatoes, cut on the large side.”

“The côte de boeuf kind of caught my attention, too,” the logger said.

“The côte de boeuf is for two,” Danny told him.

“That’s why I noticed it,” Ketchum said. He had been drinking Steam Whistle on tap, but he’d switched to Alexander Keith by the bottle; the ale had a little more to it. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum suddenly exclaimed. “There’s a wine that costs a hundred and sixty-eight dollars!”

Danny saw that it was a Barolo Massolino, from Piedmont. “Let’s have it,” the writer said.

“Just so long as you’re paying,” Ketchum told him.

OUT IN THE KITCHEN, it was bedlam as usual. The cook was helping Scott with the profiteroles, which were served with caramel ice cream and a bittersweet-chocolate sauce; Dominic was preparing the croutons and the rouille for Joyce and Kristine’s fish soup as well. It had been the cook’s task, earlier, to make the tagliatelle for the veal scallopini, and tonight the pasta would also be served with Silvestro’s duck confit. But Dominic had made the tagliatelle long before the restaurant (and the kitchen) got busy; he’d started a red-wine reduction with rosemary, too.

It was noisier in the kitchen than usual that Saturday night, because Dorotea, the new dishwasher, had a cast on her right wrist and thumb, and she kept dropping the pans. Everyone was taking bets on what Ketchum was going to order. Silvestro had suggested the special cassoulet, but Dominic said that no sane woodsman would willingly eat beans-not if there was another choice. The cook predicted that Ketchum would have the côte de boeuf for two; Joyce and Kristine said that the old river driver would probably order both the lamb chops and the liver.

“Or he’ll split the côte de boeuf with Daniel, and have either the lamb chops or the liver, too,” Dominic speculated.

Something about the feel of the warm handle on the skillet with the red-wine reduction was distracting him, but the cook couldn’t locate the true source of his distraction. Lately he’d noticed that his old memories were clearer-he meant more vivid-than his more recent memories, if that was actually possible. For instance, he’d found himself remembering that Rosie had said something to Ketchum just before, or just after, they’d all gone out on the ice together. But had Ketchum first said, “Give me your hand”? The cook thought so, but he wasn’t sure.

Rosie had very distinctly said: “Not that hand-that’s the wrong hand.” She’d quickly created a little distance between herself and Ketchum, but was this before or somehow during the damn do-si-doing? Dominic did but didn’t remember, and that was because he’d been drunker than Rosie and Ketchum.

Anyway, what was the wrong-hand business about? the cook was wondering; he didn’t really want to ask Ketchum about it. Besides, Dominic was thinking, how much would the eighty-three-year-old logger remember about that long-ago night? After all, Ketchum was still drinking!

One of the younger waiters ventured a guess that the old riverman wouldn’t order anything for dinner. He’d already had three Steam Whistles on tap and a couple of Keiths; the old logger couldn’t possibly have room for dinner. But the young waiter didn’t know Ketchum.

Patrice popped into the kitchen. “Ooh-la-la, Dominic,” Arnaud said. “What is your son celebrating? Danny ordered the Barolo Massolino!”

“I’m not worried,” the cook replied. “Daniel can afford it, and you can count on Ketchum drinking most of the wine.”

It was their last night in the kitchen before the long vacation; everyone was working hard, but they were all in a good mood. For Dominic, however, the unknown source of his distraction lingered; he kept feeling the familiar handle of the warm skillet. What is it? he was wondering. What’s wrong?

In the cook’s bedroom in the house on Cluny Drive, the bulletin boards with those countless photographs all but eclipsed from view (or consideration) the eight-inch cast-iron skillet. Yet that skillet had crossed state boundaries and, more recently, an international border; that skillet surely belonged in the cook’s bedroom, though its once-legendary powers of protection had probably passed (as Carmella once speculated) from the actual to the symbolic.

The eight-inch cast-iron skillet hung just inside the doorway to Dominic’s bedroom, where it went almost unnoticed. Why had the cook been thinking about it so insistently-at least since Ketchum had arrived (in his usual unannounced fashion) for Christmas?

Dominic wasn’t aware that Danny had lately been thinking about the old frying pan, too. There was a certain sameness about that skillet; it was unchanged. The damn pan just hung there in his father’s bedroom. It was a constant reminder to the writer, but a reminder of what?

Okay, it was the same skillet he’d used to kill Injun Jane; as such, it had set Danny and Dominic’s flight in motion. It was the same skillet Dominic had used to whack a bear-or so the myth began. In fact, it was the same eight-inch cast-iron skillet Danny’s dad had used to clobber Ketchum-not a bear. But Ketchum had been too tough to kill. (“Only Ketchum can kill Ketchum,” the cook had said.)

Danny and his dad had been thinking about that, too: Even at eighty-three, only Ketchum could kill Ketchum.

The young waiter now came back into the kitchen. “The big man wants the côte de boeuf for two!” he announced, in awe. Dominic managed a smile; he would smile again when Patrice popped into the kitchen a little later, just to tell him that his son had ordered a second bottle of the Barolo Massolino. Not even a côte de boeuf for two, and uncountable bottles of Barolo, could kill Ketchum, the cook knew. Only Ketchum, and Ketchum alone, could do it.

IT WAS SO HOT IN THE KITCHEN that they’d opened the back door to the alley-just a crack-though it was a very cold night, and an uncommonly strong wind repeatedly blew the door wide open. In the cold weather, Crown’s Lane, the alleyway behind the restaurant, was a hangout for homeless people. The restaurant’s exhaust fan blew into the alley, creating a warm spot-a good-smelling one, too. An occasional homeless person appeared at the door to the kitchen, hoping for a hot meal.

The cook could never remember whether Joyce or Kristine was the smoker, but one of the young women chefs was once startled by a hungry homeless person when she was smoking a cigarette in the alley. Since then, all of those working in the kitchen, and the waitstaff, were aware of the homeless people seeking warmth and a possible bite to eat in the near vicinity of the kitchen door. (This was also Patrice’s delivery door, though there were never any deliveries at night.)

Now Dominic once more went to close the door, which the bitter wind had again blown wide open, and there was one-eyed Pedro-Patrice’s most popular homeless person, because Pedro never failed to compliment the chef (or chefs) for whatever food he was given. His real name was Ramsay Farnham, but he’d been disowned by the Farnham family-a fine, old Toronto family, famous patrons of the arts. Now in his late forties or early fifties, Ramsay had repeatedly embarrassed the Farnhams. As a last straw, at an impromptu press conference at an otherwise forgettable cultural event, Ramsay had announced that he was giving away his inheritance to an AIDS hospice in Toronto. He also claimed to be finishing a memoir, explaining why he’d half-blinded himself. He said he had lusted after his mother his whole adult life, and while he’d never had sex with her-nor murdered his father-he had truly wanted to. Hence he’d blinded himself only in one eye, the left one, and had renamed himself Pedro-not Oedipus.

No one knew if Pedro’s eye patch covered an empty eye socket or a perfectly healthy left eye, or why he’d picked Pedro for his new name. He was cleaner than most homeless people; while his parents would have nothing to do with him, perhaps there were other, more sympathetic members of the Farnham family who allowed Ramsay (now Pedro) to have an occasional bath and wash his clothes. Of course he was insane, but he’d received an excellent education and was preternaturally well-spoken. (As for the memoir, either it was forever a work-in-progress or he’d not written a word of it.)

“Good evening to you, Dominic,” one-eyed Pedro greeted the cook, while Dominic was dealing with the windblown kitchen door.

“How are you, Pedro?” the cook asked. “A little hot food might do you some good on a cold night like this one.”

“I’ve been entertaining similar thoughts, Dominic,” Pedro replied, “and while I’m aware that the exhaust fan is most imprecise, I believe I detect something special tonight-something not on the menu-and unless my nose deceives me, Silvestro has outdone himself, yet again, with a cassoulet.”

Dominic had never known Pedro’s nose to deceive him. The cook gave the homeless gentleman a generous serving of the cassoulet, warning him not to burn himself on the baking dish for the beans. In return, Pedro volunteered to hold the kitchen door open-just a crack-with his foot.

“It is an honor to smell the aromas of Patrice’s kitchen firsthand, unadulterated by the exhaust fan,” Pedro told Dominic.

“Unadulterated,” the cook repeated quietly, to himself, but to Pedro he said: “You know, we’re changing our name-after Christmas.”

“‘After Christmas’ is a curious name for a restaurant, Dominic,” the homeless man said thoughtfully. “Not everyone celebrates Christmas, you know. The duck is exquisite, by the way-and I love the sausage!” Pedro added.

“No, no-we’re not calling the restaurant After Christmas!” the cook cried. “The new name is Kiss of the Wolf.” The homeless man stopped eating and stared at the cook. “It wasn’t my choice,” Dominic told him quickly.

“You have to be kidding,” Pedro said. “That is a famous porn film-it’s one of the worst porn films I’ve ever seen, but it’s famous. I’m certain that’s the title.”

“You must be mistaken, Pedro,” Dominic said. “Maybe it sounds better in Italian,” the cook added meaninglessly.

“It’s not an Italian porn film!” the homeless man cried. He handed the unfinished cassoulet back to Dominic, the baking dish for the beans sliding across the plate of duck and sausage. (The baking dish briefly burned the cook’s thumbs.)

“Kiss of the Wolf can’t be a porn film,” Dominic said, but Pedro was retreating into the alley, shaking his huge mane of hair, his grizzled beard wagging.

“I’m going to be sick,” Pedro said. “I can never forget that film-it was disgusting! It’s not about sex with wolves, you know, Dominic-”

“I don’t want to know what it’s about!” the cook cried. “I’m sure you’re wrong about the title!” he called after the homeless man, who was disappearing down the dark alleyway.

“There are some things you can’t forget, Dominic!” Pedro called, after the cook could no longer see him. “Dreams of incest, desiring your mother-bad oral sex!” the crazy man shouted, his words whipped by the wind but audible, even over the deep drone of the exhaust fan.

“Pedro didn’t like the cassoulet?” Silvestro asked, when the cook brought the full plate and the baking dish back into the kitchen.

“He was bothered by a name,” was all Dominic said, but the incident struck the cook as a bad omen for Kiss of the Wolf-even if Pedro had been wrong about the title of the terrible porn film.

As it would turn out, neither the cook nor his writer son could find a porn film called Kiss of the Wolf. Not even Ketchum had seen such a film, and Ketchum claimed to have seen everything-at least everything pornographic that was available for viewing in New Hampshire.

“I think I would have remembered that title, Cookie,” the old logger said. “In fact, I’m sure I would have sent it to you. But what happens in it that’s so special?” the woodsman asked.

“I don’t know what happens in it-I don’t want to know!” the cook cried. “I just want to know if it exists!”

“Well, don’t get your balls crossed about it,” Ketchum said.

“Apparently, it doesn’t exist-at least not yet,” Danny told his dad. “You know that Pedro is nuts, Pop-you know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I know he’s nuts, Daniel!” the cook cried. “Poor Pedro was just so convinced-he made it sound plausible.”

That Saturday night before the Christmas break-the last night that Patrice would be Patrice-Danny and Ketchum had ordered three bottles of the Barolo Massolino. As the cook had told Arnaud, Ketchum drank most of the wine, but Ketchum had also been counting.

“You may say you have a couple of beers, and one or two glasses of red wine with your dinner, Danny, but you’ve had four glasses of wine tonight. Even three glasses of wine, on top of two beers, is kind of a lot for a little fella.” There was nothing accusatory in Ketchum’s tone-he was simply setting the record straight-but Danny was defensive about it.

“I didn’t know you were counting for me, Ketchum.”

“Don’t be like that, Danny,” the logger said. “It’s just my job to look after you fellas.”

Ketchum had complained about Danny’s tendency not to lock the house on Cluny Drive after he came home from dinner. But most nights the cook came home later than his son, and Dominic didn’t like fumbling around with the door key. The cook preferred to lock the front door after he’d come home, and before he went to bed.

“But wine makes you sleepy, doesn’t it, Danny?” the woodsman had asked. “Most nights, I expect, you fall sound asleep in an unlocked house-before your dad is back home.”

“Mountains of moose shit-as you would say, Ketchum,” Danny had replied.

That was just the way they did things in Toronto, the cook and his son explained to the veteran river driver. Danny and his dad had locked each other out of the house before; it was a nuisance. Now, when they went out, they left the house on Cluny Drive unlocked; when they were both back in the house for the night, the last one to go to bed locked the damn door.

“It’s the red wine that troubles me a bit, Danny,” Ketchum had told the writer. “With red wine, you fall asleep like a rock-you don’t hear anything.”

“If I drink only beer, I’m awake all night,” Danny told the logger.

“I like the sound of that a little better,” was all the woodsman had said.

But the red wine wasn’t really the problem. Yes, Danny would occasionally drink more than a glass or two-and it did make him sleepy. Still, the wine was no more than a contributing factor, and the restaurant’s new name wasn’t part of what went wrong at all. The problem was that after all their efforts to elude the cowboy-and the dubious name changes, which would prove to be pointless-Ketchum had simply been followed.

THE COWBOY HAD FOLLOWED Ketchum before, but Carl was none the wiser for it. The retired deputy had twice trailed the logger on his hunting trips to Quebec; Carl had even tracked Ketchum all the way to Pointe au Baril Station one winter, only to assume that the younger man the old woodsman was camping with was just some Ontario hick. The cowboy had no idea who Danny was, or what Danny did; Carl had wildly concluded that possibly Ketchum was “queer,” and that the younger man was the old logger’s lover! No little fella with a limp had materialized on these adventures, and Carl had essentially given up on following Ketchum.

One word would change everything-the word and the fact that both Ketchum and the cowboy did their tire business at the same establishment in Milan. Tires, especially winter tires, were important in northern New Hampshire. Twitchell’s was the name of the tire place that Ketchum and the cowboy frequented, though the grease monkey who did the important talking was a young Canuck named Croteau.

“That looks like Ketchum’s rig,” Carl had said to the French Canadian-this was a week or more before Christmas, and the cowboy had noticed Ketchum’s truck on the hoist in the garage at Twitchell’s. Croteau was changing all four tires.

“Yup,” Croteau said. The retired deputy observed that the Canuck was removing Ketchum’s studded tires and replacing them with un-studded snow tires.

“Does Ketchum have an inside tip that it’s gonna be a mild winter?” Carl asked Croteau.

“Nope,” Croteau said. “He just don’t like the sound of the studs on the interstate, and it’s mostly interstates between here and Toronto.”

“ Toronto,” the cowboy repeated, but that wasn’t the word that would change everything.

“Ketchum puts the studded tires back on when he comes home after Christmas,” Croteau explained to the deputy, “but you don’t need studs for highway drivin’-out on the interstates, regular snow tires will do.”

“Ketchum goes to Toronto for Christmas?” Carl asked the Canuck.

“For as long as I can remember,” Croteau said, which wasn’t very long-not in the cowboy’s estimation. Croteau was in his early twenties; he’d been changing tires only since he got out of high school.

“Does Ketchum have some lady friend in Toronto?” Carl asked. “Or a boyfriend, maybe?”

“Nope,” Croteau replied. “Ketchum said he’s got family there.”

It was the family word that would change everything. The deputy sheriff knew that Ketchum didn’t have a family-not in Canada, anyway. And what family he’d had, the old logger had lost; everyone knew that Ketchum was estranged from his children. Ketchum’s kids were still living in New Hampshire, Carl knew. Ketchum’s children were grown up now, with kids of their own, but they had never moved away from Coos County; they’d just cut their ties to Ketchum.

“Ketchum can’t have any family in Toronto,” the cowboy told the dumb Canuck.

“Well, that’s what Ketchum said-he’s got family there, in Toronto,” Croteau insisted stubbornly.

Later, Danny would be touched that the old logger thought of him and his dad as family; yet that was what gave them away to Carl. The cowboy couldn’t think of anyone whom Ketchum had absolutely taken to-or had seemed at all close to, in the manner of family-except the cook. Nor had it been hard for the ex-cop to follow Ketchum’s truck, unnoticed. That truck burned a lot of oil; a black cloud of exhaust enveloped following vehicles, and Carl had wisely rented an anonymous-looking SUV with snow tires. That December, on the interstate highways of the northeastern United States -they would cross into Canada from Buffalo, over the Peace Bridge -the cowboy’s car was as nondescript as they come. After all, Carl had been a cop; he knew how to tail people.

The cowboy knew how to stake out the house on Cluny Drive, too. It wasn’t long before he was familiar with all of their comings and goings, including Ketchum’s. Of course the cowboy was aware that Ketchum was just visiting. While Carl must have been tempted to kill all three of them, the deputy probably didn’t want to risk going up against the old logger; Carl knew that Ketchum was armed. The house on Cluny Drive was never locked during the day, or at night, either-not until after the last of them, usually the cook, had limped home to go to bed.

It had been easy for the cowboy to get inside and have a good look at the house; that way, Carl knew who was sleeping in each room. But there was more that he didn’t know.

The only gun in the house was the one in the guest bedroom, where it was clear to Carl that Ketchum was staying. The cowboy thought it was an odd gun, or at least an unsophisticated weapon, for Ketchum to be carrying-a youth-model Winchester 20-gauge. (A friggin’ kid’s shotgun, Carl was thinking.)

How could the deputy have known that the Winchester Ranger was Ketchum’s Christmas present for Danny? The old logger didn’t believe in wrapping paper, and the 20-gauge, pump-action shotgun was loaded and stashed under Ketchum’s bed-exactly where the cowboy would have hidden a weapon. It never occurred to Carl that the 20-gauge wouldn’t be going back to New Hampshire with the veteran river driver, whenever it was that Ketchum eventually returned to Coos County. The cowboy would just wait and see when that would be-then make his move.

Carl thought he had several options. He’d unlocked the door to the fire escape in Danny’s third-floor writing room; if the writer didn’t notice that the door was unlocked, the cowboy could enter the house that way. But if Danny saw that the door was unlocked, and re-locked it, Carl could come into the house through the unlocked front door-at any time of the evening, when the cook and his son were out. The cowboy had observed that Danny didn’t go back to his third-floor writing room after he’d had dinner. (This was because of the beer and the red wine; when the writer had been drinking, he didn’t even want to be in the same room with his writing.)

Whether Carl entered the property via the third-floor fire escape or walked in the front door, he would be safe hiding out in that third-floor room; the cowboy only had to be careful not to move around too much, not until the cook and his son were asleep. The floor creaked, Carl had noticed; so did the stairs leading down to the second-floor hall. But the cowboy would be wearing just socks on his feet. He would kill the cook first, Carl was thinking-then the son. Carl had seen the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging in the cook’s bedroom; of course the cowboy knew the Injun-killing history of that skillet, because Six-Pack had told him. Carl had amused himself by thinking how funny it would be to be standing in the cook’s bedroom, after he’d shot the little fucker, just waiting for the kid to come to his dad’s rescue with the stupid skillet! Well, if that was how it worked out, that would be okay with the cowboy. What was important to Carl was that he kill them both, and that he drive across the U. S. border before the bodies were discovered. (With any luck, the cowboy could be back in Coos County before then.)

The old sheriff was a little worried about encountering the Mexican cleaning woman, whose comings and goings weren’t as predictable as the cook’s-or the no-less-observable habits of his writer son. Compared to Lupita suddenly showing up to do a load or two of laundry, or compulsively attacking the kitchen, even Ketchum’s routine was reasonably consistent. The logger went to a Tae Kwon Do gym on Yonge Street for a couple of hours every day. The gym was called Champion Centre, and Ketchum had found the place by accident a few years ago; the master instructor was a former Iranian wrestler, now a boxer and a kickboxer. Ketchum said he was working on his “kicking skills.”

“Dear God,” the cook had complained. “Why would an eighty-three-year-old man have an interest in learning a martial art?”

“It’s more mixed martial arts, Cookie,” Ketchum explained. “It’s boxing and kickboxing-and grappling, too. I’m just interested in finding new ways to get a fella down to the ground. Once I get a guy on the ground, I know what to do with him.”

“But why, Ketchum?” the cook cried. “How many more fights are you planning to be in?”

“That’s just it, Cookie-no one can plan on being in a fight. You just have to be ready!”

“Dear God,” Dominic said again.

To Danny it seemed that Ketchum had always been getting ready for a war. Ketchum’s Christmas present to the writer, the Winchester Ranger, with which Danny had killed three deer, appeared to emphasize this point.

“What would I want with a shotgun, Ketchum?” Danny had asked the old logger.

“You’re not much of a deer hunter, Danny-I’ll grant you that-and you might never go back to hunting deer,” Ketchum began, “but every household should have a twenty-gauge.”

“Every household,” Danny repeated.

“Okay, maybe this household especially,” Ketchum said. “You need to have a quick-handling, fast-action gun around-something you can’t miss with, in a close situation.”

“A close situation,” the cook repeated, throwing his hands in the air.

“I don’t know, Ketchum,” Danny said.

“Just take the gun, Danny,” the logger told him. “See that it’s loaded, at all times-slip it under your bed, for safekeeping.”

The first two rounds were buckshot, Danny knew-the third was the deer slug. At the time, he’d handled the Winchester appreciatively-not only to please Ketchum, but because the writer knew that his acceptance of the shotgun would exasperate his father. Danny was adept at getting Ketchum and his dad riled up at each other.

“Dear God,” the cook started up again. “I won’t sleep at all, knowing there’s a loaded gun in the house!”

“That’s okay with me, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “In fact, I would say it would be ideal-if you don’t sleep at all, I mean.”

The Winchester Ranger had a birch-wood forestock and butt-stock, with a rubber recoil pad that the writer now rested against his shoulder. Danny had to admit that he loved listening to his dad and Ketchum going at it.

“God damn you, Ketchum,” the cook was saying. “One night I’ll get up to pee, and my son will shoot me-thinking I’m the cowboy!”

Danny laughed. “Come on, you two-it’s Christmas! Let’s try to have a Merry Christmas,” the writer said.

But Ketchum wasn’t in a merry mood. “Danny’s not going to shoot you, Cookie,” the logger said. “I just want you fucking fellas to be ready!”

“IN-UK-SHUK,” Danny sometimes said in his sleep. Charlotte had taught him how to pronounce the Indian word; or, in Canada, was one supposed to say the Inuit word? (An Inuk word, Danny had also heard; he had no idea what was correct.) Danny had heard Charlotte say the inuksuk word many times.

When he woke up the morning after Christmas, Danny wondered if he should move the photograph of Charlotte from above the headboard of his bed-or perhaps exchange it for a different picture. In the photo in question, Charlotte is standing, wet and dripping, in a bathing suit, with her arms wrapped around herself; she’s smiling, but she looks cold. In the distance, one can see the island’s main dock- Charlotte was just swimming there-but nearer to her tall figure, between her and the dock, stands the unreadable inuksuk. This particular stone cairn was somewhat man-shaped but not really a human likeness. From the water, it might have been mistaken for a mark of navigation; some inuksuit (that was the plural form) were navigational markers, but not this one.

Two large rocks atop each other composed each manlike leg; a kind of shelf or tabletop possibly represented the figure’s hips or waist. Four smaller rocks composed a potbellied upper body. The creature, if it was intended to have human features, had absurdly truncated arms; its arms were as disproportionately short as its legs were overlong. The head, if it was meant to be a head, suggested permanently windswept hair. The stone cairn was as stunted as the winter-beaten pines on the Georgian Bay islands. The cairn stood only as tall as Charlotte ’s hips, and given the perspective of the photograph above the headboard of Danny’s bed-that is, with Charlotte in the foreground of the frame-the inuksuk looked even shorter than it was. Yet it also appeared to be indestructible; maybe that’s why the word was on Danny’s lips when he woke up.

There were countless inuksuit on those islands-and many more out on Route 69, between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, where Danny remembered a sign that said FIRST NATION, OJIBWAY TERRITORY. Not far from those summer cottages around Moonlight Bay, where Danny had driven in the boat with Charlotte one scorching day, there were some striking inuksuit near the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.

But what were they, exactly? the writer now wondered, as he lay in bed the morning after Christmas. Not even Charlotte knew who had built the inuksuk on her island.

There’d been a carpenter from the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve on Andy Grant’s crew, the summer the two sleeping cabins were under construction. Another summer, Danny remembered, one of the guys who brought the propane tanks to the island had a boat named First Nation. He’d told Danny he was a pure-blooded Ojibway, but Charlotte said it was “unlikely;” Danny hadn’t asked her why she was skeptical.

“Maybe Granddaddy built your inuksuk,” Danny had said to Charlotte. Perhaps, he’d thought, the various Indians who’d worked on Turner Island over the years had rebuilt the stone cairn whenever the rocks had fallen down.

“The rocks don’t fall down,” Charlotte said. “Granddaddy had nothing to do with our inuksuk. A native built it-it won’t ever fall down.”

“But what do they mean, exactly?” Danny asked her.

“They imply origins, respect, endurance,” Charlotte answered, but this was too vague to satisfy the writer in Danny Angel; he remembered being surprised that Charlotte seemed satisfied with such a nonspecific description.

As for what an individual inuksuk meant-“Well, shit,” as Ketchum had said, “it seems to matter which Injun you ask.” (Ketchum believed that some inuksuit were nothing but meaningless heaps of rocks.)

Danny peered under his bed at the Winchester. Per Ketchum’s instructions, the loaded shotgun lay in an open case; according to Ketchum, the case should remain unzipped, “because any fool intruder can hear a zipper.”

It was obvious, of course, which fool intruder Ketchum meant-an eighty-three-year-old retired deputy sheriff, all the way from fucking New Hampshire! “And the safety?” Danny had asked Ketchum. “Do I leave the safety off, too?” It made a sound, a soft click, when you pushed the button for the safety, which was slightly forward of the trigger housing, but Ketchum had told Danny to leave the safety on.

The way the old logger put it was: “If the cowboy can hear the safety click off, he’s already too close to you.”

Danny looked first at the photograph of Charlotte with the inuksuk standing behind her, then at the 20-gauge shotgun under his bed. Perhaps the stone cairn and the Winchester Ranger both represented protection-the 20-gauge of a more specific kind. He was not unhappy to have the gun, Danny was thinking, though it seemed to him that every Christmas ushered in a morbid preoccupation-sometimes initiated by Ketchum (such as the Winchester) but at other times inspired by Danny or his dad. This Christmas Eve, for example, the cook could be blamed for beginning a downward spiral of gloominess.

“Just think of it,” Dominic had said to his son and Ketchum. “If Joe were alive, he would be in his mid-thirties-probably with a couple of kids of his own.”

“Joe would be older than Charlotte was when I first met her,” Danny chimed in.

“Actually, Daniel,” his father said, “Joe would be only a decade younger than you were-I mean, at the time Joe died.”

“Whoa! Stop this shit!” Ketchum cried. “And if Injun Jane were still alive, she’d be eighty-fucking-eight! I doubt she’d even be speaking to any of us-not unless we somehow managed to elevate our conversation.”

But the very next day, Ketchum had presented Danny with the 20-gauge shotgun-not exactly an elevation of their prevailing conversation, or their overriding fixation-and the cook had, seemingly out of the blue, begun to complain about “the sheer morbidity” of Daniel’s book dedications.

True, Baby in the Road (as might be expected) was dedicated as follows: “My son, Joe-in memoriam.” It was the second dedication to Joe-the third, overall, in memoriam. Dominic found this depressing.

“I can’t help it if the people I know keep dying, Pop,” Danny had said.

All the while, Ketchum had continued to demonstrate the sliding action of the Winchester, the ejected shotgun shells flying all around. One of the live shells (a deer slug) would be lost for a time in the discarded wrapping paper for other Christmas presents, but Ketchum kept loading and unloading the weapon as if he were mowing down a horde of attackers.

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves,” Danny said aloud to himself-as if he were writing this down, which he wasn’t. The writer was still contorting himself in bed, where he was transfixed by the photo of Charlotte with the mysterious inuksuk-that is, when he wasn’t drawn to the dangerous but thrilling sight of the loaded shotgun under his bed.

IT WAS BOXING DAY in Canada. A writer Danny knew always had a party. Every Christmas, the cook bought Ketchum some outdoor clothing-at either Eddie Bauer or Roots-and Ketchum wore his new gear to the Boxing Day party. Dominic never failed to help out in the kitchen; the kitchen, anybody’s kitchen, was ever the cook’s home away from home. Danny mingled with his friends at the party; he tried to remain unembarrassed by Ketchum’s political outbursts. There was never any need for Danny to feel embarrassed-not in Canada, where the old logger’s anti-American ranting was very popular.

“Some fella from the CBC wanted me to go on a radio show,” Ketchum told Danny and his dad, when the cook was driving them home from the Boxing Day party.

“Dear God,” Dominic said again.

“Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie-you best let Danny and me handle the conversation while you pay attention to the mayhem in the streets.”

The cowboy could have killed them all that night, but Carl was a coward; he wouldn’t risk it, not with Ketchum in the house. The deputy didn’t know that the youth-model 20-gauge was under Danny’s bed, not Ketchum’s, nor could Carl have guessed how much the old logger had had to drink at the party. The cowboy could have shot his way into the house; it’s doubtful that Ketchum would have woken up. Danny wouldn’t have woken up, either. It had been one of those nights when the supposed one or two glasses of red wine with his dinner had, in reality, turned out to be four or five. Danny woke once in the night, thinking he should look under his bed to be sure that the shotgun was still there; he fell out of bed in the process, making a resounding thump, which neither his dad nor the snoring logger heard.

Ketchum never lingered long in Toronto once Christmas was over. A pity he hadn’t brought Hero with him and then-for some reason-left the dog with the cook and his son after Ketchum went back across the border. Carl couldn’t have entered the house on Cluny Drive, or hidden himself in the third-floor writing room, if Hero, that fine animal, had been there. But the dog was in Coos County, staying with Six-Pack Pam-terrorizing her dogs, as it would turn out-and Ketchum left early the next morning for New Hampshire.

When Danny got up (before his dad), he found the note Ketchum had left on the kitchen table. To Danny’s surprise, it was neatly typed. Ketchum had gone up to the third-floor writing room and used the typewriter there, but Danny hadn’t heard the creaking of the floor above his bedroom-he hadn’t heard the stairs creak, either. Both he and the cook had slept through the sound of the typewriter, too-not a good sign, the old logger could have told them. But Ketchum’s note said nothing about that.

I’VE SEEN ENOUGH OF YOU FELLAS FOR A TIME! I MISS MY DOG, AND I’M GOING TO SEE HIM. BY THE TIME I’M BACK HOME, I’LL BE MISSING YOU, TOO! EASY ON THE RED WINE, DANNY. KETCHUM.

Carl was happy to see Ketchum’s truck leave. The cowboy must have been growing impatient, but he waited for the Mexican cleaning woman to come and go; that way, the deputy had no doubt. With the guest bedroom empty-Lupita had made it up as good as new-Carl was convinced that Ketchum wasn’t coming back. Yet the cowboy had to wait another night.

The cook and his son ate their dinner at home on the evening of December 27. Dominic had found a kielbasa sausage in the meat market and had browned it in olive oil, and then stewed it with chopped fennel and onions and cauliflower in a tomato sauce with crushed fennel seeds. The cook served the stew with a warm, fresh loaf of rosemary-and-olive bread, and a green salad.

“Ketchum would have liked this, Pop,” Danny said.

“Ah, well-Ketchum is a good man,” Dominic said, to his son’s amazement.

Not knowing how to respond, Danny attempted to further compliment the kielbasa stew; he suggested it might make a suitable addition to the more bistro-like or low-key menu at Kiss of the Wolf.

“No, no,” the cook said dismissively. “Kielbasa is too rustic-even for Kiss of the Wolf.”

All Danny said was: “It’s a good dish, Dad. You could serve it to royalty, I think.”

“I should have made it for Ketchum-I never made it for him,” was all Dominic said.

THE COOK’S LAST NIGHT ALIVE, he ate with his beloved Daniel at a Portuguese place near Little Italy. The restaurant was called Chiado; it was one of Dominic’s favorites in Toronto. Arnaud had introduced him to it when they’d both been working downtown on Queen Street West. That Thursday night, December 28, both Danny and his dad had the rabbit.

During Ketchum’s Christmas visit, it had snowed and it had rained-everything had frozen and thawed, and then it all froze again. By the time the cook and his son took a taxi home from Chiado, it had started to snow once more. (Dominic didn’t like to drive downtown.) The imprints of the cowboy’s footsteps in the crusty old snow on the outdoor fire escape were faint and hard to see in the daylight; now that it was dark, and snowing, Carl’s tracks were completely covered. The ex-cop had taken off his parka and his boots. He’d stretched out on the couch in Danny’s third-floor writing room with the Colt.45 revolver clasped to his chest-in the scenario he’d imagined, the old sheriff had no need of a holster.

The voices of the cook and his writer son reached Carl from the kitchen, though we’ll never know if the cowboy understood their conversation.

“At fifty-eight, you should be married, Daniel. You should be living with your wife, not your father,” the cook was saying.

“And what about you, Pop? Wouldn’t a wife be good for you?” Danny asked.

“I’ve had my opportunities, Daniel. At seventy-six, I would embarrass myself with a wife-I would always be apologizing to her!” Dominic said.

“For what?” Danny asked his dad.

“Occasional incontinence, perhaps. Farting, certainly-not to mention talking in my sleep,” the cook confided to his son.

“You should find a wife who’s hard of hearing-like Ketchum,” Danny suggested. They both laughed; the cowboy had to have heard their laughter.

“I was being serious, Daniel-you should at least have a regular girlfriend, a true companion,” Dominic was saying, as they came up the stairs to the second-floor hall. Even from the third floor, Carl could have singled out the distinguishing sounds of the cook’s limp on the stairs.

“I have women friends,” Danny started to say.

“I’m not talking about groupies, Daniel.”

“I don’t have groupies, Pop-not anymore.”

“Young fans, then. Remember, I’ve read your fan mail-”

“I don’t answer those letters, Dad.”

“Young-what are they called?-’editorial assistants,’ maybe? Young booksellers, too, Daniel… I’ve seen you with one or two. All those young people in publishing!”

“Young women are more likely to be unattached,” Danny pointed out to his dad. “Most women my age are married, or they’re widows.”

“What’s wrong with widows?” his father asked. (At that, they’d both laughed again-a shorter laugh this time.)

“I’m not looking for a permanent relationship,” Danny said.

“I can see that. Why?” Dominic wanted to know. They were at opposite ends of the second-floor hall, at the doorways to their respective bedrooms. Their voices were raised; surely the cowboy could hear every word.

“I’ve had my opportunities, too, Pop,” Danny told his dad.

“I just want all the best for you, Daniel,” the cook told him.

“You’ve been a good father-the best,” Danny said.

“You were a good father, too, Daniel-”

“I could have done a better job,” Danny quickly interjected.

“I love you!” Dominic said.

“I love you, too, Dad. Good night,” Danny said; he went into his bedroom and quietly closed the door.

“Good night!” the cook called from the hall. It was such a heartfelt blessing; it’s almost conceivable that the cowboy was tempted to wish them both a good night, too. But Carl lay unmoving above them, not making a sound.

Did the deputy wait as long as an hour after he’d heard them brush their teeth? Probably not. Did Danny once more dream about the windswept pine on Charlotte ’s island in Georgian Bay -specifically, the view of that hardy little tree from what had been his writing shack there? Probably. Did the cook, in his prayers, ask for more time? Probably not. Under the circumstances, and knowing Dominic Baciagalupo, the cook couldn’t have asked for much-that is, if he’d prayed at all. At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son “find someone”-only that.

Did the floorboards above them creak under the fat cowboy’s weight, once Carl decided to make his move? Not that they heard; or, if Danny heard anything at all, he might have happily imagined (in his sleep) that Joe was home from Colorado.

Not knowing how dark it might be in the house at night, the cowboy had tested those stairs from the third-floor writing room with his eyes closed; he’d counted the number of steps in the second-floor hall to the cook’s bedroom door, too. And Carl knew where the light switch was-just inside the door, right next to the eight-inch cast-iron skillet.

As it turned out, Danny always left a light on-on the stairs from the kitchen to the second-floor hall, so there was plenty of light in the hall. The cowboy, slipping silently in his socks, padded down the hallway to the cook’s bedroom and opened the door. “Surprise, Cookie!” Carl said, flicking on the light. “It’s time for you to die.”

Maybe Danny heard that; perhaps he didn’t. But his dad sat up in bed-blinking his eyes in the sudden, white light-and the cook said, in a very loud voice, “What took you so long, you moron? You must be dumber than a dog turd, cowboy-just like Jane always said.” (Without a doubt, Danny heard that.)

“You little shit, Cookie!” Carl cried. Danny heard that, too; he was already kneeling on the floor, pulling the Winchester out of the open case under his bed.

“Dumber than a dog turd, cowboy!” his dad was shouting.

“I’m not so dumb, Cookie! You’re the one who’s gonna die!” Carl was hollering; he never heard Danny click the safety off, or the sound of the writer running barefoot down the hall. The cowboy took aim with the Colt.45 and shot the cook in the heart. Dominic Baciagalupo was blown into the headboard of the bed; he died instantly, on the pillows. There was no time for the deputy to comprehend the cook’s curious smile, which stretched the white scar on his lower lip, and only Danny understood what his dad had uttered just before he was shot.

“She bu de,” Dominic managed to say, as Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had taught him-the she bu de that means “I can’t bear to let go.”

The Chinese was, of course, meaningless to Carl, who, as he wheeled to face the naked man in the doorway, must have half understood why the cook had died smiling. Not only did Dominic know that all the yelling would save his son; the cook also knew that his friend Ketchum had provided Daniel with a better weapon than the eight-inch cast-iron skillet. And maybe there was a margin of last-minute recognition in the cowboy’s eyes, when he saw that Danny had already taken aim with Ketchum’s Winchester -the much-maligned youth model.

The long barrel of Carl’s Colt.45 was still pointed at the floor when the first round of buckshot from the 20-gauge tore away half his throat; the cowboy was flung backward into the night table, where the lightbulb in the lamp exploded between his shoulder blades. Danny’s second load of buckshot tore away what remained of the cowboy’s throat. The deer slug, the so-called kill-shot, wasn’t really necessary, but Danny-now at point-blank range-fired the shotgun’s third and final round into Carl’s mangled neck, as if the gaping wound itself were a magnet.

If Ketchum could be believed-that is, if he’d been speaking literally about the way wolves killed their prey-weren’t these three shots from the 20-gauge Ranger exactly as kisses of wolves should be? Weren’t they, indeed, not so pretty?

Still naked, Danny went downstairs. He called the police from the phone in the kitchen, telling them that he would unlock the front door for them, and that they could find him upstairs with his father. After he’d unlocked the door, he went back upstairs to his bedroom and put on some old sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Danny thought of calling Ketchum, but it was late and there was no reason to be in a hurry. When he reentered his dad’s bedroom, there was no overlooking the kisses of wolves that had ripped the cowboy apart-leaving him like something sprayed from a hose-but Danny only briefly regretted the mess he’d made for Lupita. The blood-soaked rug, the blood-spattered walls, the bloodied photographs on the bulletin board above the shattered night table-well, Danny didn’t doubt that Lupita could handle it. He knew that something worse had happened to her: She’d lost a child.

Ketchum had been right about the red wine, the writer was thinking, as he sat on the bed beside his father. If he’d been drinking only beer, Danny thought he might have heard the cowboy a few seconds sooner; Danny just might have been able to open fire with the shotgun before Carl could have pulled the trigger. “Don’t beat up on yourself about it, Danny,” Ketchum would tell him later. “I’m the one the cowboy followed. I should have seen that coming.”

“Don’t you beat up on yourself about it, Ketchum,” Danny would tell the old logger, but of course Ketchum would.

When the police came, the lights in the neighboring houses were all ablaze, and lots of dogs were barking; normally, at that hour of the night, Rosedale is very quiet. Most of the residents who lived near the double shooting had never heard gunfire as loud and terrifying as that-some dogs would bark until dawn. But when the police came, they found Danny quietly cradling his dad’s head in his lap, the two of them huddled together on the blood-soaked pillows at the head of the bed. In his report, the young homicide detective would say that the bestselling author was waiting for them in the upstairs of the house-exactly where he’d said he would be-and that the writer appeared to be singing, or perhaps reciting a poem, to his murdered father.

“She bu de,” Danny kept repeating in his dad’s ear. Neither the cook nor his son had ever known if Ah Gou and Xiao Dee’s translation of the Mandarin was essentially correct-that is, if she bu de literally meant “I can’t bear to let go”-but what did it matter, really? “I can’t bear to let go” was what the writer thought he was saying to his father, who’d kept his beloved son safe from the cowboy for nearly forty-seven years; that had been how long ago it was when they’d both left Twisted River.

Now, at last-now that the police were there-Danny began to cry. He just started to let go. An ambulance and two police cars were parked outside the house on Cluny Drive, their lights flashing. The first policemen to enter the cook’s bedroom were aware of the rudimentary story, as it had been reported over the phone: There’d been a break-in, and the armed intruder had shot and killed the famous writer’s father; Danny had then shot and killed the intruder. But surely there was more to the story than that, the young homicide detective was thinking. The detective had the utmost respect for Mr. Angel, and, under the circumstances, he wanted to give the writer all the time he needed to compose himself. Yet the damage done by that shotgun-repeatedly, and at such close range-was so excessive that the detective must have sensed that this break-in and murder, and the famous writer’s retaliation, had a substantial history.

“Mr. Angel?” the young homicide detective asked. “If you’re ready, sir, I wonder if you could tell me how this happened.”

What made Danny’s tears different was that he was crying the way a twelve-year-old would cry-as if Carl had somehow shot his dad their last night in Twisted River. Danny couldn’t speak, but he managed to point to something; it was in the vicinity of his father’s bedroom doorway.

The young detective misunderstood. “Yes, I know, you were standing there in the doorway when you shot,” the homicide policeman said. “At least, for the first shot. Then you came closer into the room, didn’t you?”

Danny was violently shaking his head. Another young policeman had noticed the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging just inside the doorway of the bedroom-an unusual spot for a frying pan-and he tapped the bottom of the skillet with his index finger.

“Yes!” Danny managed to say, between sobs.

“Bring that skillet over here,” the homicide detective said.

While he didn’t relinquish his hold on his father-Danny continued to cradle the cook’s head in his lap-he reached with his right hand for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet, and when his fingers closed around the handle, his crying calmed down. The young homicide detective waited; he could see there was no rushing this story.

Raising the skillet in his right hand, Danny then rested the heavy pan on the bed. “I’ll start with the eight-inch cast-iron skillet,” the writer finally began, as if he had a long story to tell-one he knew well.