Last Night In Twisted River

“Oh, you mean this asshole,” Armando said, when Da

“You know him?” Da

“You know him!” Armando said. “I’m sure he was one of your students.”

“At Windham?”

“Of course at Windham,” Armando said.

“I didn’t recognize him. I don’t think he was ever a student of mine,” Da

“Do you remember all your mediocre students, Da

“He’s just another hippie carpenter-or noncarpenter, as the case may be,” Da

“Perhaps he’s a writer carpenter,” Armando suggested. Da

A HUSKY-SHEPHERD MIX is generally no match for a purebred German shepherd, but there were two of them. Then again, maybe no two dogs were ever a match for Rooster. Da

Armando called Rooster, and Da

THERE ARE THINGS I’LL MISS about Vermont, if I ever have to leave, Da

As the three friends swam in the pool at Da

Rooster would one day be killed on a back road-struck by a car while he was mindlessly chasing a schoolbus. Violence begets violence, as Ketchum and the cook already knew, as one nearly forgotten hippie carpenter, with one dead dog and one momentarily alive, might one day figure out.

Da

BOTH THEIR HUSBANDS had retired from the spruce mill in Milan. A world of small engine repair, and other tinkering, lay ahead of them. The fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-took every occasion that presented itself, no matter how much driving was involved, to leave town and their tiresome husbands. Retired men made a nuisance of themselves, the two old ladies had discovered; Dot and May preferred their own company to anyone else’s. Now that May’s younger children (and her older grandchildren) were producing more children, she used the excuse of being needed when whatever mother (and whoever’s new baby) came home from the hospital. Wherever “home” was, it was a way to get out of Milan. Dot was always the driver.

They were both sixty-eight, a couple of years older than Ketchum, whom they spotted occasionally-Ketchum lived in Errol, farther up the Androscoggin. The old logger never recognized Dot or May, nor would he have paid them any attention if he did recognize them, but everyone noticed Ketchum; the woodsman’s reputation as a wild man had marked him, as surely as the scar on his forehead was a vivid advertisement of his violent history. But Dot had put on another sixty pounds, or so, and May another eighty; they were white-haired, with those weatherworn faces you see in the north country, and they ate their way through every day, the way some people in cold climates do, as if they were constantly starving.

They’d come across northern New Hampshire on the Groveton road, through Stark-much of the way, they were following the Ammonoosuc-and in Lancaster they crossed the Co

About the time those bad old broads were passing McIndoe Falls on I-91, the cook and his staff were finishing their midafternoon meal at Avellino. To have fed his staff a good meal, and to watch everyone cleaning up and readying themselves for the evening’s di

In Iowa City, Tony Angel had worked as a sous chef in the Cheng brothers’ Chinese restaurant out on First Avenue -what the cook called the Coralville strip. The Cheng brothers might have had more business if they’d been closer to downtown; they were too upscale for Coralville, overlooked among its fast-food joints and cheap motels, but the brothers liked their proximity to the interstate, and on those Big Ten sports weekends when an Iowa team was competing at home, the restaurant attracted lots of out-of-towners. It was too expensive for most students, anyway-unless their parents were paying-and the university faculty, whom the Chengs considered their target clientele, all had cars and weren’t limited to the bars and restaurants nearer the center of the campus, downtown.

In Tony Angel’s opinion, the name of the Chengs’ restaurant was another questionable business decision-Mao’s might have worked better with politically disenchanted students than it did with their parents, or the out-of-town sports fans-but the Cheng brothers were completely caught up in the anti-war protests of the time. Public opinion, especially in a university town, had turned against the war; from ’72 till ’75, there were many demonstrations outside the Old Capitol on the Iowa campus. Admittedly, Mao’s might have worked better in Madison or A