Last Night In Twisted River

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.

He thought he’d better have a look at Joe before he staggered off to bed, and perhaps he should put some pajamas on the boy, but Danny felt he lacked the necessary dexterity to dress the sleeping child. Instead, he closed the windows in the boy’s bedroom and checked to be sure the rails on the child bed were secure.

Joe couldn’t have fallen out of bed with the rails in the lowered position, and the boy was that age when he could climb out of the bed if the rails were in either the raised or the lowered position. Sometimes the rails weren’t securely latched in either position; then the rails could slip, pinching the boy’s fingers. Danny checked to be sure the rails were locked fast in the raised position. Joe was sleeping soundly on his back, and Danny leaned over to kiss him. This was awkward to do when the bed rails were raised, and Danny had had enough to drink that he couldn’t manage to kiss his son without losing his balance.

He left Joe’s bedroom door open, to be sure he would hear the boy if he woke up and cried. Danny left the door to the master bedroom open, too. It was after three in the morning. Danny noted the time on the alarm clock on