Last Night In Twisted River

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.