"I have a son, Ketchum--he's American, remember?" Danny said to the old woodsman.
"Joe is going to be in college in Colorado," Ketchum reminded him. This was a sore point with Danny: That Joe would be going to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, was something of a disappointment to his dad. In Danny's opinion, his son had gotten into better schools. Danny believed that Joe was going to Colorado for the skiing, not an education; the writer had also read that Boulder was a big party town. "Carl doesn't even know you have a child," Ketchum also reminded Danny. "If you're out of the country, I'll look after Joe."
"In Colorado?" Danny asked.
"First things first, Danny," Ketchum said. "Get the fuck out of Vermont--both you and your dad! I can look after your boy in the interim--before he goes off to Colorado, anyway."
"Maybe Pop and I could go to Colorado, too," Danny suggested. "It's a little like Vermont, I imagine--there are mountains, just bigger ones. Boulder is a university town, and we all liked Iowa City. Writers can fit in, in a university town. A cook could fit in, in Boulder--couldn't he? It wouldn't have to be Italian--"
Ketchum cut him off. "You must be as simple-minded as a pinch of coon shit, Danny! You guys ran the first time--now you have to keep running! Do you think Carl cares that you're a family? The cowboy doesn't have a family--he's a fucking killer, Danny, and he's on a mission!"
; "I'll let you know our plans, Ketchum," the writer told his father's old friend.
"Carl doesn't know shit about foreign countries," Ketchum said. "Hell, Boston wasn't foreign enough for him. You think Colorado would be too far away for the cowboy to find you? Colorado's a lot like New Hampshire, Danny--they have guns out there, don't they? You could be carrying a gun in Colorado, and no one would look at you twice--isn't that right?"
"I suppose so," Danny said. "I know you love us, Ketchum."
"I promised your mom I would look after you!" Ketchum shouted, his voice breaking.
"Well, I guess you're doing it," Danny told him, but Ketchum had hung up. The writer would remember the song that was playing on the radio; it was Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," a song from the seventies. (When Danny had switched stations from the Red Sox game, he'd inadvertently found Greg's Oldie-But-Goldie music.)
I was thinking about what a
Friend had said.
I was hoping it was a lie.
Danny saw that his father was once more stirring his sauces; the cook then started rolling out the dough for what looked like three or four more pizzas. Greg was grilling something, but the sous chef paused to take a dish out of the oven. Neither waitress was in the kitchen, but the busboy was busy filling a couple of bread baskets.
The dishwasher was waiting for more dirty dishes; an earnest-looking boy, he was reading a paperback. Probably an assignment for school, Danny thought; nowadays, kids didn't read much on their own. Danny asked the boy what he was reading. The young dishwasher smiled shyly, showing the author a dog-eared mass-market edition of a Danny Angel novel. But that was such a tough night, when Dot and May made their disruptive appearance in Avellino, the writer would never remember which book the kid was reading.
And the bad night was far from over; for Danny, it was just beginning.
"YOU'LL FIND SOMEONE," Kurt Vonnegut had said to Danny when the young writer was leaving Iowa City the first time; Katie had only recently left him. But it hadn't happened--not yet. Danny supposed there was still time for him to find someone; he was only forty-one, and he never would have claimed that he'd sincerely been trying. Did he think Lady Sky was going to drop into his life again, just because he couldn't forget her?
As for what Vonnegut also said to the then-unpublished writer--the part about "maybe capitalism will be kind to you"--well, Danny was wondering (as he drove home to Putney from Brattleboro) how Kurt had known.
On the night of Dot and May's visit to Avellino, when Danny and his dad would soon be on the move again, the famous writer's compound in Putney was ablaze with lights. To anyone driving by on Hickory Ridge Road, the lights that were on--in every room, in each building--seemed to advertise just how kind capitalism had been to the bestselling author Danny Angel.
Was the compound overrun with revelers? Was every last room of the old farmhouse (now the guesthouse) occupied--as was, evidently, the new house that Danny had built for himself and Joe? The lights were also on in the famous writer's so-called writing shack, as if the partygoers were even partying there.
But Danny had left only the kitchen light on, in the new building; he'd left the other rooms (and the other buildings) dark. The music was loud and conflicting--it was coming from both the new building and the guesthouse, and every window must have been open. It was a wonder that someone hadn't called the police about the noise; though the writer's compound had no near neighbors, almost anyone driving by had to have heard the clashing music. Danny heard it, and saw all the lights ablaze even before he turned in to his driveway, where he stopped his car and turned off the engine and his headlights. There were no other cars around, except Joe's. (It was parked in the open garage, where Joe had left it the last time the boy had been home from school.) From the far end of his driveway, Danny could see that even the lights in the garage were on. If Amy were ever to forgo arriving via parachute, the writer was thinking, maybe this was how she would announce herself.
Or was it a prank? Pranks weren't Armando DeSimone's style. Other than Armando, Danny had no close friends in the Putney area--certainly no one who would have felt comfortable coming on the writer's property uninvited. Had Dot and May already called Carl? But those bad old broads didn't know where Danny lived, and if the cowboy had somehow managed to find Danny Angel, wouldn't the retired deputy have preferred the dark? Surely, the former constable and deputy sheriff wouldn't have turned on all the lights and the music; why would Carl have wanted to announce himself?
Furthermore, there was no occasion for a surprise party--not that the writer could think of. Maybe it was Armando, Danny was reconsidering, but the choice of music couldn't have been Armando's or Mary's. The DeSimones liked to dance; they were Beatles people. This sounded like eighties' music--the stuff Joe played when he was home. (Danny didn't know what the music was, but there were two separate sounds--both of them terrible, at war with each other.)
The tap-tap of the flashlight on the driver's-side window made Danny jump in the seat. He saw it was his friend Jimmy, the state trooper. Jimmy must have turned off the headlights of his patrol car when he'd slipped into the driveway and had parked broadside, behind Danny's car; he'd cut the police car's engine, too, not that Danny could possibly have heard the trooper's arrival over the music.
"What's with the music, Danny?" Jimmy asked him. "It's a little loud, isn't it? I think you should turn it down."
"I didn't turn it on, Jimmy," the writer said. "I didn't turn on the lights or the music."
"Who's in your house?" the trooper asked.
"I don't know," Danny said. "I didn't invite anyone."