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THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO received his M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in June 1967. Together with his two-year-old son, Joe, the writer left for Vermont almost immediately upon his graduation. Despite his troubles with Katie, Da
He told only one of his teachers (and no one else) at Iowa about the nom-de-plume idea-the writer Kurt Vo
“It doesn’t matter what your name is,” Vo
The one criticism the author of Slaughterhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vo
But the semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place. He’d seen the titles and the authors’ names on the novels his mother had left behind-the books his father had bequeathed to Ketchum in Twisted River. Da
He’d been somewhat alone among his fellow workshop students at Iowa, in that he loved these older writers far better than most contemporary ones. But Da
“You’ll find someone,” Vo
That last thought was the one Da
“You better find a place with a spare room for your dad,” Ketchum had told him, when they’d last talked. “Although Vermont isn’t far enough away from New Hampshire -not in my opinion. Couldn’t you get a teaching job out West somewhere?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Da
“ Vermont ’s too close-I just know it is,” Ketchum told him, “but right now it’s a lot safer for your father than staying in Boston.”
“I keep telling him,” Da
“I keep telling him, too, but he’s not listening worth shit,” the woodsman said.
“It’s because of Carmella,” Da
“Don’t say that, Da
Da
“Well, it looks to me like I’ll just have to haul Cookie’s ass out of Boston -one way or another,” Ketchum said, after there was silence for a while.
“How are you going to do that?” Da
“I’ll put him in a cage, if I have to. You just find a house in Vermont that’s big enough, Da
“Ketchum-you didn’t kill Lucky Pinette, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t!” Ketchum shouted into the phone. “Lucky wasn’t worth murdering.”
“I sometimes think that Carl is worth murdering,” the writer Daniel Baciagalupo ventured; he just floated that idea out there.
“I find that I keep thinking about it,” Ketchum admitted.
“I wouldn’t want you to get caught,” Da
“That’s not the problem I’m having with it,” the woodsman said. “I don’t imagine that Carl would care if he got caught-I mean for killing your dad.”
“What’s the problem, then?” Da
“I would like him to try to kill me first,” Ketchum answered. “Then I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”
It was just as the writer Daniel Baciagalupo had imagined; the conundrum was that although the cowboy was exceedingly stupid, he was smart enough to stay alive. And he’d stopped drinking-that meant Carl wouldn’t completely lose control of himself. That might have been why he hadn’t beaten up Six-Pack in two whole months, or at least he hadn’t beaten her enough for her to leave him and tell him what she knew.
Six-Pack still drank. Ketchum knew she could easily and completely lose control of herself-that was also a problem.
“I worry about something,” Da
“You haven’t met my dog, Da
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” Da
“Hell, when Six-Pack left me, I needed someone to talk to.”
“What about that lady you met in the library-the schoolteacher who’s teaching you how to read?” Da
“She is teaching me, but it’s not a very conversational experience,” Ketchum said.
“You’re actually learning to read?” Da
“Yes, I am-it’s just slower going than counting coon shit,” Ketchum told him. “But I’m aiming to be ready to read that book of yours, when it’s published.” There was a pause on the phone before Ketchum asked: “How’s it going with the nom de plume? Have you come up with one?”
“My pen name is Da
“Not Daniel? Your dad is real fond of the Daniel. I like the Angel part,” Ketchum said.
“Dad can still call me Daniel,” Da
“How’s that little Joe doing?” Ketchum asked; he could tell that the young writer was touchy about the nom-de-plume subject.
ON THE TRIP BACK EAST, Da
THAT WINDHAM COLLEGE would turn out to be a fu