Last Night in Twisted River

  Joe wanted to be picked up--maybe the size of the pigs had intimidated him. Two of the pigs were a muddy pink, but the rest had black splotches. "They look like pink-and-black cows," Danny said to Joe.

  "No, they're pigs. Not cows," the boy told him.

  "Okay," Danny said. Katie was coming over to them.

  "Look at the pigs, Mommy," Joe said.

  "Yuck," she said. "Keep watching the plane," Katie told her husband. She was going away again, but not before Danny caught the scent of marijuana; the smell must have clung to her hair. He'd not seen her smoking any pot--not even one toke--but while he'd been changing Joe's diaper, she must have had some. "Tell the kid to keep his eyes on the airplane," Katie said, still walking away. It sounded wrong, how Katie called Joe the kid, Danny was thinking. It was as if the boy were someone else's kid--that's how it sounded.

  THE LITTLE PLANE wasn't climbing anymore; it had leveled off and was now directly above the farm, but still high in the sky. It appeared to have slowed down, perfectly suspended above them, almost not moving. "We're supposed to watch the airplane," Danny told his small son, kissing the boy's neck, but Danny watched his wife instead. She had joined the painters at the smoking fire pit; Rolf was with them. They were watching the plane with anticipation, but because Danny was watching them, he missed the moment.

  "Not a bird," he heard little Joe say. "Not flying. Falling!"

  By the time Danny looked up, he couldn't be sure--at such a height--exactly what had fallen from the plane, but it was dropping down fast, straight at them. When the parachute opened, the painters and Rolf cheered. (The asshole artists had hired a skydiver for entertainment, Danny was thinking.)

  "What's coming down?" Joe asked his dad.

  "A skydiver," Danny told the boy.

  "A what in the sky?" the two-year-old said.

  "A person with a parachute," Danny said, but this made no sense to little Joe.

  "A what?"

  "A parachute keeps the person from falling too fast--the person is going to be all right," Danny was explaining, but Joe clung tightly to his father's neck. Danny smelled the marijuana before he realized that Katie was standing next to them.

  "Just wait--keep watching," she said, floating away again.

  "A sky something," Joe was saying. "A para-what?"

  "A skydiver, a parachute," Danny repeated. Joe just stared, open-mouthed, as the parachute drifted down to them. It was a big parachute, the colors of the American flag.

  The skydiver's breasts were the first giveaway. "It's a lady," little Joe said.

  "Yes, it is," his father replied.

  "What happened to her clothes?" Joe asked.

  Now everyone was watching, even the pigs. Danny hadn't noticed when the pigs began to be aware of the parachutist, but they were aware of her now. They must not have been used to flying people dropping down on them--or used to the giant descending parachute, which now cast a shadow over their pigpen.

  "Lady Sky!" Joe screamed, pointing up at the naked skydiver.

  When the first pig squealed and started to run, the other pigs all snorted and ran. That may have been when Lady Sky saw where she was going to land--in the pigpen. The angry skydiver began to swear.

  By then, even the drunk and the stoned could see that she was naked. Fucking art students! Danny was thinking. Of course they couldn't just hire a skydiver; naturally, she had to be a nude. Katie looked unconcerned--quite possibly, she was jealous. Once she realized the skydiver was naked, maybe Katie wished that she could be the skydiver. Katie probably didn't like having another nude model at the art students' pig roast.

  "Christ, she's going to end up in the fucking pigpen!" Rolf was saying. Had he only now noticed? He must have been the one who was smoking dope with Katie. (Rolf was definitely stupid enough to need saving--if not from the war in Vietnam, Danny would one day find himself thinking.)

  "Hold him," Danny said to his wife, handing little Joe to Katie.

  The furious naked woman passed overhead. Danny jumped and tried to grab her feet, but she drifted just above and beyond his reach, swearing as she went. For all of them on the ground, people and pigs, a traveling vagina had hovered over them--descending.

  "Someone should tell her that's an unflattering angle, if you're a woman and you're naked," Katie was saying. Probably to Rolf--her remark wouldn't have made any sense to Joe. (Katie never had much to say to the kid, anyway.)

  It was very muddy in the pigpen, but Danny had run in mud before--he knew you had to keep your feet moving. He paid no attention to where the pigs were; he could tell by the way the ground shook that they were also running. Danny just followed the drifting woman. When her heels struck the ground, she slid through the shitty mud with her chute collapsing after her. She fell on one hip and the chute dragged her sideways, on her stomach, before Danny could catch up to her. She was almost as surprised to see him as they both were shocked by the awful smell, and by how big the pigs were when they were this close to them. There was also the constant grunting. One of the pigs trampled over the parachute, but the feel of the chute, under its hooves, appeared to panic the animal; it veered, squealing, away from them.

  She was a big skydiver, of Amazonian proportions--a virtual giantess. Danny couldn't have carried her out of the pen, but he saw how she was trying to free herself from the harness that attached her to the parachute, which was hard to drag through the muck, and Danny was able to help her with that. The naked skydiver was covered with pig shit and mud. The back of one of Danny's hands brushed against her dirty nipple as he struggled with the strap of the harness that divided her breasts. Danny only then realized that he'd fallen a few times; he was spattered with pig shit and mud, too.

  "No one told me it was a fucking pig farm!" the skydiver said. She had closely cropped hair, and she'd shaved her pubic hair, leaving just a vertical strip, but she was a strawberry blonde, top to bottom.

  "They're a bunch of asshole artists--I had nothing to do with this," Danny told her.

  From her scar, he could see she'd had a cesarean section. She looked a decade older than Danny, in her thirties, maybe. Evidently, she'd been a bodybuilder. Her tattoos were indiscernible in the muck, but she was definitely not the nude the art students had been imagining; maybe she was more than they'd bargained for, the writer hoped.

  "My name's Danny," he told her.

  "Amy," she said. "Thanks."

  When she was freed from the chute, Danny put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her ahead of him. "Run to the fence--just keep running," he told her. He kept his hand against her damp skin the whole way. A pig blundered past them as if it were racing them, not chasing them. Possibly it was running away from them. They almost collided with another pig, this one running in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was the parachute that had upset the pigs--not the naked lady.

  "Lady Sky!" Danny could hear Joe shouting.

  Someone else started yelling it: "Lady Sky!"

  "Be sure you show me the asshole artists," Amy said, when they reached the perimeter of the pigpen. She needed no help getting over the fence. Danny was looking all around for Joe, but the little boy wasn't with Katie; he saw his wife standing with Rolf and the three painters.

  "Those are the four guys you want," Danny told Amy, pointing to them. "The ones with the small woman, but not the woman--she wasn't in on it. Just the two guys with the beards, and the two without."

  "This pig doesn't bite," Danny thought he heard his son say in a quiet, contemplative voice.

  "Joe!" the writer called.

  "I'm right here, Daddy."

  That was when Danny realized that little Joe was in the pigpen with him. The boy stood next to one of the pink-and-black pigs; it must have been running, because it was clearly out of breath, though it stood very still. Only its harsh breathing made the big pig move at all--except for the way it inclined its head toward the boy, who had hold of the animal's ear. Maybe it felt good to a pig to have its ear rubbed or gently pulle
d. In any case, the more the two-year-old stroked its ear, the more the pig tilted its head and lowered its long ear in Joe's direction.

  "Pigs have funny ears," the boy said.

  "Joe, get out of the pen--right now," his dad said. He must have raised his voice more than he'd meant to; the pig snapped its head in Danny's direction, as if it deeply resented the ear-rubbing interruption. Only a low-to-the-ground feeding trough separated them, and the pig hunched its shoulders on either side of its huge head and squinted at him. Danny stood his ground until he saw Joe climb safely through the slats in the fence.

  The drama with the skydiver, and then with Joe, prevented Danny from seeing how low in the sky the small plane had circled. The pilot and copilot probably wanted to be sure that Amy had touched down without mishap, but Amy gave the plane the finger--both fingers, in fact--and the plane dipped a wing to her, as if in salutation, then flew off in the direction of Cedar Rapids.

  "Welcome to Buffalo Creek Farm," Rolf had said to the skydiver. Regrettably, Danny missed seeing this part, too--how Amy had grabbed the photographer by both his shoulders, snapped him toward her, and head-butted him in his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Rolf staggered backward, falling several feet from the spot where Amy had made contact.

  She knocked down the painter with the beard with a left jab followed by a right hook. "I don't jump into pigs!" she shouted at the two painters left standing.

  Both Danny and Joe saw the next bit. "Which one of you artists is going to get my parachute?" she asked them, pointing to the pigpen. By now, the pigs had calmed down; they'd returned to the fence and were once more observing the artistic crowd, their snouts poking through the slats. The pig whose ear had been stroked, to its apparent satisfaction, was now indistinguishable from the others. Way out in the muck, the trampled red-white-and-blue parachute lay like a flag fallen in battle.

  "The farmer told us never to go in the pigpen," one of the graduate-student painters began.

  Danny carried Joe over to Katie. "You were supposed to hold him," he said to her.

  "He peed all over me when you went into the pigpen," Katie said.

  "He has a diaper on," Danny told her.

  "I could still feel how wet he was," she said.

  "You weren't even watching him," Danny told her.

  Amy had the painter who'd spoken up in a headlock. "I'll get your fucking parachute," Katie suddenly told her.

  "You can't go in there," Danny said.

  "Don't tell me what I can't do, hero," she said.

  Katie had always been competitive that way. First the nude skydiver had taken the art students' attention away from her; then her husband's act of bravado had upstaged her. But of course what Katie really wanted to do was undress. "I'll just keep the pig shit off my clothes, if you don't object," she said to Danny; she began handing her clothes to the one painter who'd been untouched by the shit-smeared skydiver. "I would give them to you," she told Danny, "but you're covered with shit--you should see yourself."

  "It wouldn't be good if something happened to you in front of Joe," Danny started to tell her.

  "Why?" she asked him. "A two-year-old won't remember it. Only you will--you fuckhead writer."

  Seeing her naked and defiant made Danny realize that what had once attracted him to Katie now repelled him. He'd mistaken what was brazen about her for a kind of sexual courage; she'd seemed both sexy and progressive, but Katie was merely vulgar and insecure. What Danny had desired in his wife only filled him now with revulsion--and this had taken a mere two years to transpire. (The loving-her part would last a little longer; neither Danny nor any other writer could ever explain that.)

  HE'D CARRIED JOE BACK to the downstairs bathroom so that they could clean up, or try to. (Danny didn't want Joe to see his naked mother devoured by a pig; surely the two-year-old would remember that, if only for a little while.)

  "Is Mommy giving Lady Sky her clothes?" Joe asked.

  "Mommy's clothes wouldn't fit Lady Sky, sweetie," Danny answered his son.

  Amy didn't want any clothes; she told the asshole artists that all she wanted was a bath. The pilot and copilot were bringing her clothes--"or they better be," the skydiver said.

  "I hope your bathroom is cleaner than ours," Danny said to Amy, as she was following the unassaulted painter up the farmhouse stairs.

  "I'm not counting on it," Amy told him. "Was that your wife--that little thing who was going to fetch my parachute?" the skydiver called down the stairs to Danny.

  "Yes," he answered her.

  "She's got balls, hasn't she?" Amy asked him.

  "Yes--that's Katie," Danny said.

  He'd forgotten that there wasn't a towel in the downstairs bathroom, but getting the pig shit off himself and little Joe was what mattered. Who cared if they were wet? Besides, the boy's clothes had somehow managed to stay clean; Joe's pants were a little damp, because he'd really peed like crazy in his diaper.

  "I guess you liked that ginger ale, huh?" Danny asked the boy. He'd also forgotten to ask Katie for a dry diaper, but that didn't really matter as much as getting the pig shit off little Joe's hands. There was shit all over Danny and his clothes--his running shoes were ruined. If his wife could take off all her clothes, Danny guessed that no one would mind if he wore just his boxers for the remainder of the artists' party. It was a sunny spring day--April in Iowa--warm enough to be wearing only a pair of boxers.

  "You call this a clean towel?" the skydiver was shouting.

  Danny undressed himself and little Joe, and they both got into the shower. There was no soap, but they used a lot of shampoo instead. They were still in the shower when Katie came into the downstairs bathroom, carrying her clothes and a towel. She was not as shit-spattered as Danny had expected.

  "If you don't try to run in that muck, you don't fall down, fuckhead."

  "So you just walked out to the parachute, and walked back?" Danny asked her. "The pigs didn't bother you?"

  "The pigs were spooked by the chute," Katie said. "Move over--both of you." She got into the shower with them, and Danny shampooed her hair.

  "Mommy got pig poo on her, too?" Joe asked.

  "Everyone's got pig poo on them somewhere," Katie said.

  They took turns with the towel, and Danny put a dry diaper on Joe. He dressed the little boy before putting on his boxers. "That's all you're wearing?" Katie asked him.

  "I'm donating the rest of my clothes to the farm," Danny told her. "In fact, I'm not touching them--they're staying right there," he said, pointing to the pile of clothes on the wet floor. Katie threw her bra and panties on the pile. She slipped into her jeans; you could see her breasts through the white blouse she was wearing--her nipples, especially.

  "Is that all you're wearing?" Danny asked her.

  Katie shrugged. "I guess I can donate my underwear to the farm, if I want to," she said.

  "Is everything a contest, Katie?"

  But she didn't answer him. She opened the bathroom door and left them with the pile of clothes and Danny's discarded running shoes. "I lost my sandals somewhere," she told them.

  Outside, the skydiver was wearing just a towel around her waist and was drinking a beer. "Where'd you find the beer?" Danny asked her. He'd already had too much wine on an empty stomach.

  Amy showed him the tub of ice. Rolf was sitting on the ground beside the tub, repeatedly dunking his face in the icy water. There was blood from his nose everywhere. He had a pretty good gash on one eyebrow, too--all from the head-butt. Danny took out two beers, wiping the necks of the bottles on his boxers. "That was a terrific idea, Rolf," Danny told the photographer. "Too bad she didn't land in the fire pit."

  "Shit," Rolf said, standing up. He looked a little unsteady on his feet. "No one's watching the pig in the pit--we got distracted by all the heroics."

  "Is there an opener?" Danny asked him.

  "There's one in the kitchen somewhere," Rolf answered. The bearded painter who'd been hit with Amy's jab and hook was holding a
wet T-shirt to his face. He kept dipping the T-shirt in the icy water and then putting it back on his face.

  "How's the roast pig coming along?" Danny asked him.

  "Oh, Christ," the painter said; he hurried after Rolf in the direction of the smoking hole.

  There was potato salad and a green salad and some kind of cold pasta on the dining-room table, together with the wine and the rest of the booze.

  "Does any of this food look interesting to you?" Danny asked Joe. The writer hadn't been able to find an opener in the farmhouse kitchen, but he'd used the handle on one of the kitchen drawers to open both beers. He drank the first beer very fast; he was already halfway through the second.

  "Where's any meat?" Joe asked.

  "I guess it's still cooking," his dad said. "Let's go look at it."

  Someone had turned on a car radio, so they could have music outdoors. Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" was playing. Rolf and the painter with the beard had managed to lift the bedsprings out of the fire pit; the painter with the beard had burned his hands, but Rolf had taken off his jeans and used them as pot holders. Rolf's nose and the cut on his eyebrow were still bleeding as he put his jeans back on. Some of the roast pig had fallen off the bedsprings into the fire, but there was plenty to eat and it was certainly cooked enough--it looked very well done, in fact.

  "What is it?" Joe asked his dad.

  "Roast pork--you like pork," Danny told the boy.

  "Once upon a time it was a pig," Rolf explained to the two-year-old.

  "A pretty small one, Joe," Danny told his son. "Not one of your big friends in the pen."

  "Who killed it?" Joe asked. No one answered him, but Joe didn't notice--he was distracted. Lady Sky was standing over the blackened pig on the bedsprings; little Joe was clearly in awe of her, as if he expected her to take flight again and fly away.

  "Lady Sky!" the boy said. Amy smiled at him. "Are you an angel?" Joe asked her. (She was beginning to look like one, to Danny.)

  "Well, sometimes," Lady Sky said. She was distracted, too. A car was turning in to the long driveway of the pig farm--probably the little plane's pilot and copilot, Danny was thinking. Amy took another look at the roast pig on the bedsprings. "But there are other times when I'm just a vegetarian," she said to Joe. "Like today."