Last Night In Twisted River

now.

“The gray one?” Joe asked, because his dad had stopped walking on the sidewalk in front of the house, which was on the downtown-heading-traffic side of the street. The cars veering off Muscatine onto Iowa Avenue were more numerous now.

“Yes, the gray one,” Danny said; he turned his back on the house and faced the avenue. He noticed that the plantings in the median strip had been prettified in the six years since he’d moved away from Iowa Avenue.

“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

SPRING 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