Last Night in Twisted River (43 page)

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.”

Merle Haggard was singing “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” on the car radio; probably someone had changed the station. Out on the lawn, Katie had been dancing by herself—or with her glass of wine—but she stopped now. Everyone was curious about the pilot and the copilot, if only to see what would happen when they arrived. Amy walked over to the car before the two men could get out.

“Fuck you, Georgie—fuck you, Pete,” the skydiver greeted them.

“We were too high up to see the pigs, Amy—we couldn’t see them when you jumped,” one of the men told her; he handed her some clothes.

“Fuck you, Pete,” Amy told him again. She took off her towel and threw it at him.

“Calm down, Amy,” the other man said. “The guys on the farm should have told us there were pigs.”

“Yeah, well—I made that point to them, Georgie,” the skydiver told him.

Georgie and Pete were surveying the artists in the pig-roast crowd. They must have noticed that Rolf was bleeding, and the painter with the beard still held a wet T-shirt to his face; the pilot and copilot surely knew this was Amy’s work.

“Which one ran into the pigpen to help you?” Pete asked her.

“See the small guy in the boxers? The little boy’s daddy—that’s the one,” Amy said. “My
rescuer
.”

“Thanks,” Pete said to Danny.

“We appreciate it,” Georgie told the writer.

Lady Sky was only slightly less formidable-looking when she was dressed, in part because she dressed like a man—except for her underwear, which was black and skimpy. Amy wore a blue denim workshirt, tucked in, and jeans with a belt with a big buckle; her cowboy boots had a rattlesnake pattern. She walked over to where Danny was holding little Joe. “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky told the boy; she bent over him, kissing his forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy,” she said to Joe.

Katie was dancing by herself again, but she was watching how the skydiver made a fuss over her husband and little boy; Katie never took her eyes off the big woman. There was a song from The Rolling Stones’ album
Between the Buttons
on the radio, but Danny could never remember which song it was. By then, he’d had a third beer and was working on his fourth—this was on top of the red wine, and he still hadn’t eaten. Someone had once again changed the station on the car radio, the writer had noticed. He’d watched Lady Sky kiss his son, sensing that the kiss was meant for him; Amy must have known there was no better way to make an impression on a parent than to be nice to the beloved child. But who
was
she? Danny wanted to know. The scar from her cesarean section must have made her someone’s mother, but Danny wondered if one of the stooges with her was her husband or boyfriend.

“Can we get anything to eat here?” Georgie was asking.

“Believe me, Georgie, we don’t want to eat here,” Amy told him. “Not even Pete,” she added, without looking at him—as if Pete couldn’t be trusted to make his own food decisions. Danny didn’t think she was sleeping with either of them.

The pilot and copilot tried to be careful how they stuffed the parachute and the skydiver’s harness into the trunk of the car, but it was impossible not to get some pig shit on themselves in the process. Amy got into the driver’s seat of the car.

“You driving, Amy?” Georgie asked her.

“It looks like it,” she told him.

“I’ll get in the back,” Pete said.

“You’ll
both
get in the back,” Amy told them. “I’ve smelled enough pig shit today.” But before the men could get into the car, the skydiver said: “You see that pretty little woman, the dancer, over there? You can see her tits through her shirt—that one.”

Danny knew that both Georgie and Pete had already noticed Katie; most men did.

“Yeah, I see her,” Georgie said.

“What about her, Amy?” Pete asked.

“If you ever lose me—if my chute doesn’t open, or something—you can ask her to do anything. I’ll bet you she’d do it,” the skydiver said.

The pilot and copilot looked uneasily at each other. “What do you mean, Amy?” Pete asked.

“You mean she’d jump out of an airplane without any clothes on—you mean that kind of thing?” Georgie asked the skydiver.

“I mean she’d jump out of an airplane without a
parachute,”
Amy told them. “Wouldn’t you, honey?” she asked Katie.

Danny would remember this—how Katie liked it when the attention came to her, for whatever reason. He saw that his wife had found her sandals, though she wasn’t wearing them. She held the sandals in one hand, her wineglass in the other, and she just kept moving her feet—she was still dancing. “Well, that would depend on the circumstances,” Katie said, lolling her head and neck to the music, “but I wouldn’t rule it out—not categorically.”

“See what I mean?” Amy asked Georgie and Pete, as the two men got into the backseat. Then the skydiver drove away, giving the artists the finger out the window of the car. Patsy Cline was singing on the radio, and Katie had stopped dancing; someone must have changed the station again.

“I don’t want to eat the pig,” Joe told his dad.

“Okay,” Danny said. “We’ll try to eat something else.”

He carried the boy over to where his mother had stopped dancing; Katie was just swaying in place, as if waiting for the music to change. She was drunk, Danny could tell, but she didn’t smell like marijuana anymore—he’d shampooed every trace of the pot out of her hair. “Under what circumstances would you
ever
jump out of an airplane without a parachute?” the writer asked his wife.

“To get out of a boring marriage, maybe,” Katie answered him.

“Since I’m the driver, I’d like to leave before dark,” he told her.

“Lady Sky is an
angel
, Mommy,” Joe said.

“I doubt it,” Katie said to the boy.

“She told us she was an angel
sometimes,”
Danny said.

“That woman has never been an angel,” Katie told them.

JOE WAS SICK
in his car seat on their way into Iowa City. A Johnson County sheriff’s car had followed them the whole way on U.S. 6. Danny was afraid he might have a taillight out, or that he’d been driving erratically; he was thinking about how much to say he’d had to drink if the police car pulled them over, when the sheriff turned north on the Coralville strip, and Danny kept driving into downtown Iowa City. He couldn’t remember how much he’d
actually
had to drink. In his boxer shorts, Danny knew he wouldn’t have been very convincing to the sheriff.

Danny was thinking he was home free when Joe threw up. “It was probably the potato salad,” he told the boy. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be home in just a couple of minutes.”

“Let me out of the fucking car,” Katie said.

“Here?” Danny asked her. “You want to walk home from here?” He saw she’d already put on her sandals. They were still downtown.

“Who said I was coming home?” she asked him.

“Oh,” Danny said.

Just before dark, he’d seen her talking to someone on the phone in the farmhouse kitchen—probably Roger, Danny now decided. He pulled over at the next red light, and Katie got out of the car.

“Lady Sky really is an angel, Mommy,” Joe said to her.

“If you say so,” Katie said, shutting the door.

Danny knew she didn’t have any underwear on, but if it was Roger she was seeing, what did that matter?

SIX YEARS LATER
, the early-morning traffic had subsided on Iowa Avenue. Yi-Yiing had long been back on Court Street—she was home from the hospital. (She’d probably told the cook about seeing Danny and young Joe on Iowa Avenue at such an early hour of the morning.)

“Why would you have died, too—if I’d really been hit by a car?” the eight-year-old asked his father.

“Because you’re supposed to outlive me. If you die before I do, that will kill me, Joe,” Danny told his son.

“Why don’t I remember her?” the boy asked his dad.

“You mean your mom?” Danny asked.

“My mom, the pigs, what happened next—I don’t remember any of it,” Joe answered.

“What about Lady Sky?” his father asked.

“I remember someone dropping from the sky, like an angel,” the boy told him.

“Really?” Danny asked.

“I think so. You haven’t told me about her before, have you?” Joe asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Danny said.

“Then
what happened?” Joe asked his dad. “I mean, after Mom got out of the car downtown.”

Naturally, the writer had told young Joe an
edited
version of the pig roast. After he drove the two-year-old home from the farm, there was less that the storyteller had to censor from the tale. (No doubt because Katie hadn’t come home with them.)

In the early evening—it was just after dark—only the occasional passerby, and not one of Danny’s neighbors, had seen the writer in his boxer shorts carrying his two-year-old into the ground-floor apartment of the duplex on Iowa Avenue.

“Can you still smell the pigs?” little Joe had asked his dad, as they came inside.

“Only in my mind,” the writer answered.

“I can smell them, but I don’t know where they are,” the boy said.

“Maybe it’s the throw-up you smell, sweetie,” Danny said. He gave the boy a bath, and washed his hair again.

It was warm in the apartment, though the windows were open. Danny put little Joe to bed wearing just a diaper. If it got cooler in the night, he could put the boy’s pajamas on then. But after Joe had fallen asleep, Danny imagined he could still smell the pigs or the puke. He put on a pair of jeans and went out to the car; he brought the car seat into the kitchen and washed the vomit off it. (It probably would have been safer for little Joe to have eaten the pig instead of the potato salad, his dad was thinking.)

Later, Danny took a shower and had another shampoo. It was likely he’d had five beers, on top of the wine. Danny didn’t feel like another beer, but he didn’t want to go to bed, either, and he’d had too much to drink to even think about writing. Katie was gone for the night, he felt certain.

There was some vodka—it was what Katie drank when she didn’t want her breath to smell like she’d been drinking—and some rum from Barbados. Danny found a lime in the fridge; he cut a chunk out of the lime and put it in a tall glass with ice, and filled the glass with rum. He was wearing a clean pair of boxers when he sat for a while in the darkened living room by an open window, watching the diminishing traffic on Iowa Avenue. It was that time in the spring when the frogs and toads seemed especially loud—maybe because we have missed them all winter, the writer was thinking.

He was wondering what his life might have been like if he’d met someone like Lady Sky instead of Katie. Possibly, the skydiver had been closer to Danny’s age than he’d first thought. Maybe some bad stuff had happened to her—things that made her look older, the writer imagined. (Danny didn’t mean the scar from her cesarean section; he meant worse things.)

Danny woke up on the toilet, where he’d fallen asleep with a magazine on his lap; the empty glass with the chunk of lime stared up at him from the bathroom floor. It was cooler. Danny turned the light off in the kitchen, where he saw that he’d had more than one glass of rum—the bottle was nearly empty—though he didn’t remember pouring himself a second (or a third) drink. He wouldn’t remember what he did with the near-empty bottle, either.