Last Night in Twisted River (41 page)

“Grandpa said you didn’t like Iowa Avenue—that you wouldn’t even drive on the street,” Joe said to his dad.

“That’s right, Joe,” Danny said. Standing close together, they just watched the traffic going by.

“What’s wrong? Am I grounded?” the boy asked his dad.

“No, you’re not grounded—you’re already dead,” his father told him. Danny pointed to the street. “You died out there, in the road. It was the spring of ’67. You were still in diapers—you were only two.”

“Was I hit by a car?” Joe asked his dad.

“You should have been,” his father answered. “But if you’d really been hit by a car, I would have died, too.”

There was one driver in the outbound lane who would see them standing on the other side of Iowa Avenue—Yi-Yiing, on her way back to Court Street from Mercy Hospital. In the incoming lane, one of Danny’s colleagues at the Writers’ Workshop, the poet Marvin Bell, drove by them and honked his horn. But neither father nor son acknowledged him.

Perhaps Danny and Joe weren’t really standing on the sidewalk, facing the traffic; maybe they were back in the spring of 1967. At least the writer Daniel Baciagalupo, who’d not yet chosen a nom de plume, was back there. It often seemed to Danny that he’d never really left that moment in time.

IN AVELLINO, LORETTA BROUGHT
the writer his surprise first course. In the something-from-Asia category, the cook had prepared Ah Gou’s beef
satay
with peanut sauce for his son; the beef was grilled on wooden skewers. There was assorted tempura, too—shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. Loretta also brought Danny chopsticks, but she hesitated before handing them over. “Do you use these? I can’t remember,” she said. (The writer knew she was lying.)

“Sure, I use them,” he told her.

Loretta still held on to the chopsticks. “You know what? You’re alone too much,” she told him.

“I
am
alone too much,” Danny said. They flirted with each other, but that was as far as it ever went; it was simply awful, for both of them, to contemplate sleeping with each other when Loretta’s mom and Danny’s dad were sleeping together, too.

Whenever Danny had considered it, he’d imagined Loretta saying, “That would be too much like being brother and sister, or something!”

“What are you writing?” Loretta asked him; as long as she held the chopsticks, he would keep looking at her, she thought.

“Just some dialogue,” Danny told her.

“Like we’re having?” she asked.

“No, it’s … different,” he said. Loretta could tell when she’d lost his attention; she gave him the chopsticks. The way the notebook was open on the table, Loretta could have read the dialogue Danny was writing, but he seemed edgy about it, and she decided not to be pushy.

“Well, I hope you like the surprise,” she told him.

The cook knew it was what Danny had ordered at Mao’s—maybe a hundred times. “Tell Dad it’s the perfect choice,” Danny said, as Loretta was leaving.

He glanced once at the dialogue he had written in the notebook. Danny wanted the line to be very
literal—
the way an eight-year-old would phrase a question to his father, carefully. (“Why would you have died, too—if I’d really been hit by a car?” the writer had written.)

Dot and May, who were still waiting for their pizzas, had watched everything between Danny and Loretta. It totally killed them that they hadn’t been able to hear
their
dialogue. “The waitress wants to fuck him, but there’s a problem,” Dot said.

“Yeah, he’s more interested in what he’s
writin
!” May said.

“What’s he eatin’?” Dot asked her old friend.

“It’s somethin’ on a stick,” May said. “It doesn’t look very
appetizin’
.”

“I get the feelin’ our pizzas are gonna be disappointin’,” Dot told her.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised,” May said.

“Now look at him!” Dot whispered. “He’s got food in front of him, and he
still
can’t stop writin’!”

But the food was good; Danny liked most of his memories of Mao’s, and he’d liked
all
the food there. The dialogue he’d written was also good—it would work fine, Danny had decided. It was just that the timing was wrong, and he wanted to remind himself of the right time to use the line. Before turning his attention to the beef
satay
, the writer simply circled the dialogue and wrote a note to himself in the margin of the notebook.

“Not now,” Danny wrote. “Tell the part about the pig roast first.”

CHAPTER 10

LADY SKY

S
PRING WAS A BIG DEAL IN IOWA; THE FIELDS WERE A SPECIAL
green. Pig roasts were the rage with the art-department types and the writing students. Danny had avoided most of the Writers’ Workshop parties when he’d been a student, but Katie dragged him to the artists’ parties, which in Danny’s opinion were worse than whatever trouble the writers managed to cause themselves. Katie knew everyone in the Iowa art department, because of her modeling for the life-drawing classes; though he’d been a life-drawing model in New Hampshire, Danny hadn’t been married at the time. In Iowa, it made him uncomfortable to know that many of the graduate students in art—not to mention some of the faculty—had seen his wife naked. Danny didn’t know most of their names.

This particular pig roast had been hard to find. Little Joe cried the whole way to Tiffin on U.S. 6, but Danny, who was driving, wouldn’t let Katie take the two-year-old out of his car seat. They left the highway in Tiffin but were nearer to North Liberty when they got lost; either Buffalo Creek Road didn’t exist, or it wasn’t marked, and by the time they found the dilapidated farmhouse, Danny had spoken sarcastically on the subject of art students. (They were either too nonverbal or too abstract to give good directions, in his opinion.)

“What do you care if we can’t find the stupid farm?” Katie had asked him. “You never want to go to the parties I’m invited to, anyway.”

“I never want to go to the parties
I’m
invited to, either,” he pointed out to her.

“Which makes you loads of fun, fuckhead,” Katie said.

The farmer tended to his pigs in the early morning, and once again in the late afternoon; he lived in one of those motel-looking but expensive ranch houses on Rochester Avenue in Iowa City, and he rented his falling-apart farmhouse to four scruffy young men who were graduate students in art. Katie called them artists—as if they’d already achieved something.

The writer was more cynically inclined; Danny thought of the male graduate students on the pig farm as three half-assed painters and one pretentious photographer. Though Danny did know that the half-assed painters had all drawn Katie in one or another life-drawing class, he hadn’t known that the pretentious photographer had photographed her in the nude—this unwelcome news had emerged in the car, when they got lost on their way to the pig roast—and Danny had been unprepared for the drawings
and
photos of his naked wife in the graduate students’ untidy farmhouse.

Joe didn’t seem to recognize his mother in the first of the sketches the two-year-old saw; in the farmhouse kitchen and dining room, some smudged charcoal drawings of Katie were taped to the walls. “Nice decor,” Danny said to his wife. Katie shrugged. Danny saw that someone had already given her a glass of wine. He hoped there was beer; Danny was always the driver, and he drove a little better on beer.

In the car, he’d said to his wife: “I didn’t know that the life-drawing classes were open to photographers.”

“They aren’t,” Katie had told him. “It was arranged outside class.”

“Arranged,”
he’d repeated.

“God, now you’re repeating everything,” she’d said, “like your fucking father.”

While Danny looked in vain for a beer in the refrigerator, Joe told him that he needed to go to the bathroom. Danny knew that Joe wasn’t yet toilet-trained. When the boy said he needed to go to the bathroom, he meant that it was time for someone to change his diaper.

Katie usually resented carrying diapers in her purse, but she had wanted to go to the pig roast badly enough that she hadn’t complained—until now. “It’s about time the two-year-old was house-broken, isn’t it?” she said to Danny, handing him a clean diaper. Katie called Joe
the two-year-old
as if the boy’s age condemned him to denigration.

In the downstairs bathroom of the farmhouse, there was no curtain for the shower stall, and the bathroom floor was wet. Father and son both washed their hands in the grimy sink, but finding a towel was no more successful an endeavor than Danny’s search for a beer. “We can
wave
our hands dry,” Danny said to the boy, who waved to his dad as if he were saying good-bye—the standard one-handed wave.

“Try waving
both
hands, Joe.”

“Look
—Mommy!”
the boy said. He was pointing to the photographs on the wall behind his father. There was a black-and-white contact sheet and half a dozen enlargements thumbtacked to the wall above the empty towel rack. Katie was naked with her hands hiding her small breasts, but her crotch was fully exposed; it looked as if her modesty had been purposely manipulated or misplaced. Someone’s conscious idea, clearly—a deliberate statement, but of what? Danny wondered. And had it been Katie’s idea or the photographer’s? (His name was Rolf—he was one of the bearded ones, Danny only now remembered.)

“Yes, the lady looks a lot like Mommy,” Danny said, but this strategy backfired. Joe looked more closely at the photos, frowning.

“It
is
Mommy,” the boy said.

“You think?” his dad asked. He’d taken his son’s small hand and was leading him out of the filthy bathroom.

“Yes, it’s really Mommy,” Joe answered gravely.

Danny poured himself a glass of red wine; there were no wineglasses left, so he used a milk glass. There were no plastic cups, either. In one of the kitchen cabinets, he found a coffee mug that looked sturdy enough—if not completely childproof—and he gave Joe some ginger ale. Danny wouldn’t have trusted any milk in the fridge, if he’d been able to find some, and the ginger ale was the only mixer there that could possibly appeal to a child.

The party was outside on the lawn, near the pigpen. Given the late-afternoon, early-evening time of day, Danny assumed that the farmer had already fed his pigs for the day and departed. At least the pigs looked contented, though they watched the assembled partygoers with almost human curiosity; on an average day, the pigs probably didn’t get to observe a dozen or more
artists
.

Danny noted that there were no other children at the party—not too many married couples, either. “Are there any faculty here?” he asked Katie, who’d already refilled her wineglass—or someone had. He knew Katie had been hoping that Roger would come. Roger was the faculty member who taught the graduate classes in life drawing; he was the life-drawing instructor Katie was sleeping with at the time. Katie would still be sleeping with Roger when she told Danny she was leaving, but that event was a couple of days away.

“I thought Roger would be here, but he isn’t,” Katie said with disappointment. She was standing next to Rolf, the bearded photographer; Danny realized she’d actually been speaking to him, not Danny. Roger also had a beard, Danny recalled. He knew Katie was sleeping with Roger, but it only now occurred to him that she might be sleeping with Rolf, too. Maybe she was going through a
beard
phase, the writer imagined. Looking at Rolf, Danny wondered how and where they had
arranged
the photographs.

“Nice pictures,” Danny told him.

“Oh, you saw them,” Rolf said casually.

“You’re all over the place,” Danny said to Katie, who just shrugged.

“Did you see your mom?” Rolf asked Joe, bending down to the boy, as if he thought the child were hard of hearing.

“He barely talks,” Katie said, which was totally untrue; Joe was exceptionally articulate for a two-year-old, as only children tend to be. (Maybe because he was a writer, Danny talked to the boy all the time.)

“Mommy’s right there,” the boy said, pointing at her.

“No, I meant the pictures,” Rolf explained. “They’re in the bathroom.”

“That’s
Mommy,” Joe insisted, pointing to his mother again.

“See what I mean?” Katie asked the photographer.

Danny didn’t yet know about Katie’s plan to save another stupid boy from the war in Vietnam; that revelation was also a couple of days away. But when Danny did learn of Katie’s intentions, he would remember Rolf’s attempt to communicate with little Joe that day at the pig farm. While Rolf certainly seemed stupid enough to need saving, the beard didn’t fit with Danny’s image of the
boy
word. Danny would never know the boy who became Katie’s next Kennedy father, but the writer somehow didn’t picture him with a beard.

The three graduate-student painters were circling the fire pit, where the pig was roasting. Danny and Joe were standing nearby.

“We started the fucking fire before dawn,” one of the painters said to Danny.

“The pig isn’t done yet,” another painter said; he also had a beard, which made Danny regard him closely.

They had built a wood fire—according to the bearded painter, “a roaring big one”—and when it was reduced to coals, they’d lowered the springs for a double-bed mattress into the pit. (They’d found the bedsprings in the barn, and the farmer had assured them that the stuff in the barn was junk.) They’d put the pig on the red-hot bedsprings, but now they had no way of getting more wood under the bedsprings and the pig. When they’d tried to raise the bedsprings, the pig started to fall apart. Because of how utterly destroyed the roasting pig looked, Danny thought better of calling it to little Joe’s attention—not when there were
live
pigs present. (Not that the mess on the smoking bed-springs remotely resembled an
actual
pig—not anymore. Joe didn’t know what it was.)

“We’ll just have to wait until the pig is done,” the third painter told Danny philosophically.

Joe held tightly to his dad’s hand. The boy didn’t venture near the smoldering fire pit; it was bad enough that there was a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it.

“Want to look at the pigs?” Joe asked, pulling on his father’s hand.

“Okay,” Danny said.

It seemed that the pigs in the pen were unaware that one of their own was roasting; they just kept staring through the slats of the fence at all the people. Every Iowan Danny had met said you had to watch yourself around pigs. Supposedly, pigs were very smart, but the older ones could be dangerous.

The writer wondered how you could tell the older pigs from the younger ones—just by their size, perhaps. But all the pigs in the pen seemed huge. That must have been a suckling pig in the fire pit, Danny thought, a relatively small one, not one of these enormous creatures.

“What do you think of them?” Danny asked little Joe.

“Big pigs!” the boy answered.

“Right,” his dad said.
“Big
pigs. Don’t touch them, because they bite. Don’t stick your hands through the fence, okay?”

“They bite,” the boy repeated solemnly.

“You won’t get close to them, okay?” his father asked.

“Okay,” Joe said.

Danny looked back at the three painters standing around the smoldering fire pit. They weren’t watching the cooking pig—they were staring at the sky. Danny glanced up at the sky, too. A small plane had appeared on the horizon to the north of the pig farm. It was still gaining altitude—the sound probably wouldn’t reach them for a little while. The pig farm was due south of Cedar Rapids, where there was an airport; perhaps the plane had taken off from there.

“Plane. Not a bird,” Danny heard Joe say; the boy was also watching the sky.

“A plane, yes. Not a bird,” his dad repeated.

Rolf passed by, refilling Danny’s milk glass with red wine. “There’s beer, you know—I saw some in a tub of ice somewhere,” the photographer said. “You drink beer, don’t you?”

Danny wondered how Rolf knew that; Katie must have told him. He watched the photographer bring the bottle of wine over to Katie. Without looking up at the airplane, Rolf pointed at the sky with the wine bottle, and Katie began to watch the small plane. Now you could hear it, though it was very high in the sky—too high to be a crop duster, Danny was guessing.

Rolf was whispering in Katie’s ear while Katie watched the plane. Something’s going on, the writer thought, but Danny was thinking that something was going on with Katie and Rolf—he wasn’t thinking about the plane. Then Danny noticed that the three painters at the fire pit were whispering to one another; they were all watching the plane, too.

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.)