Last Night In Twisted River

The novel was praised for seeing yet another dimension of how the war in Vietnam did permanent damage to America, and how the country would long be divided by that war. The young fathers in the novel might (or might not) turn out to be good fathers, and it was too soon to say if those children-those “tickets out of Vietnam,” as Da

But the novel really pissed off Ketchum and the cook. They had hoped to read a hatchet job on Katie. But Da

One letter Da

The letter was from a self-described “single parent” living in Portland, Oregon -a man named Jeff Reese. The letter began: “Like you, I am a Ke

Da

At seventeen, Joe Baciagalupo often looked like he needed a shave, and he had the more defined facial features of a young man in his early twenties; yet there was something expectant and open in his expression that reminded his father of a more childlike Joe, or of the “little” Joe the boy had been. This might have made Da

“But it’s not just a role, is it?” Joe asked his dad; he was still holding the letter about his mother dying from an overdose, and Da

“Yes,” was all the writer could say; when he talked to young Joe, Da

“I just want to be sure you’re okay,” Da

The day he showed Joe the letter about Katie, it struck Da

“AT LEAST HE HASN’T WRITTEN about Rosie-not yet,” Ketchum wrote to his old friend.

Tony Angel had liked Ketchum’s letters better before the old logger, who was now sixty-six, had learned to read. That lady he’d met in the library-“the schoolteacher” was all Ketchum ever called her-well, she’d done the job, but Ketchum was even crankier now that he could read and write, and the cook was convinced that Ketchum no longer listened as attentively. When you don’t read, you have to listen; maybe those books the woodsman had heard were the books he’d understood best. Now Ketchum complained about almost everything he read. It also might have been that Tony Angel missed Six-Pack’s handwriting. (In Ketchum’s opinion, by the way, the cook had gotten crankier, too.)

Da

Da

The young man was almost eight inches taller than his dad and grandfather. Katie, the boy’s mother, had been a noticeably small woman, but the men in the Callahan family were uniformly tall-not heavy but very tall. Their height went with their “patrician airs,” the cook had declared.

He and Carmella had hated the wedding; they’d felt snubbed the whole time. It had been a lavish affair, at an expensive private club in Manhattan -Katie was already a couple of months pregnant-and for all the money the party cost, the food had been inedible. The Callahans weren’t food people; they were the kind of ice-cube suckers who had too many cocktails and filled themselves with endless hors d’oeuvres. They looked like they had so much money that they didn’t need to eat-that was what Tony Angel told Ketchum, who was still driving logs on the Ke