Last Night In Twisted River

“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.)

“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