John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“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.)

“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.)