John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“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 the night table as he got into bed. Katie wasn’t back from seeing Roger, if that’s who she was seeing.

Whenever Danny closed his eyes, the bedroom began to spin. He fell asleep with his eyes open-or he imagined that he did, because his eyes were open, and they felt very dry, when he was awakened in the morning by a man shouting.

“There’s a baby in the road!” some idiot was yelling.

Danny could smell the marijuana; he must have been half asleep, or only half awake, because he imagined that the shouting man was stoned. But the smell of the pot was beside Danny, on the nearest pillow. Katie was sleeping naked there, the covers thrown off and her hair redolent of marijuana. (It was Danny’s impression that Roger smoked dope all the time.)

“Whose baby is this?” the man was shouting. “This baby’s gotta belong to someone !”

Maniacal shouting would occasionally reach them from the noisy sorority house farther west on Iowa Avenue, or from the downtown area, but not during what amounted to the morning rush hour.

“Baby in the road!” the maniac kept repeating. It was cold in the bedroom, too, Danny only now realized; he’d passed out with the windows open, and whenever Katie had come home, she’d not bothered to close them.

“It’s not our fucking baby,” Katie said; her voice was slurred, or she spoke into her pillow. “Our baby’s in bed with us, fuckhead!”

“He is?” Danny asked, sitting up; his head was pounding. Little Joe wasn’t in the tousled bed with them.

“Well, he was,” Katie said; she sat up in bed, too. Her cheeks were a little roughed up, or red-looking-the way your face can get when you’re kissing someone with a scratchy beard, the writer supposed. “The kid was fussing about something, so I brought him into bed with us,” Katie was saying.

Danny had already headed down the hall. He saw that Joe’s bed was empty, with the rails in the lowered position; Katie was so short, she could never lift the boy out of his bed without first lowering the rails.

The traffic was backed up on Iowa Avenue -all the way east, to the bend on Muscatine -as if there’d been an accident in the avenue, directly in front of Danny’s ground-floor apartment. Danny ran out the front door of the duplex in his boxer shorts. Given his state of undress, the writer must have struck the driver of the dirty-white van, which was blocking the incoming traffic to town, as a likely candidate for the neglectful parent.

“Is this your baby?” the van driver screamed at Danny. The handlebar mustache and bushy sideburns may have frightened little Joe as much as the man’s ceaseless shouting-that and the fact that the van driver had managed to corral Joe on the grassy median strip in the middle of Iowa Avenue without actually picking the boy up, or even touching him. Joe stood uncertainly on the grass in his diaper; he’d wandered out of the house and across the sidewalk, into the lane of incoming traffic, and the dirty-white van had been the first vehicle to almost hit him.

Now a woman from the car that was stopped behind the white van ran into the median and scooped the baby into her arms. “Is that your daddy?” she asked Joe, pointing to Danny in his boxer shorts. Joe started to cry.