Last Night in Twisted River

"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 needed no help getting over the fence. Danny was looking all around for Joe, but the little boy wasn't with Katie; he saw his wife standing with Rolf and the three painters.

"Those are the four guys you want," Danny told Amy, pointing to them. "The ones with the small woman, but not the woman--she wasn't in on it. Just the two guys with the beards, and the two without."

"This pig doesn't bite," Danny thought he heard his son say in a quiet, contemplative voice.

"Joe!" the writer called.

"I'm right here, Daddy."

That was when Danny realized that little Joe was in the pigpen with him. The boy stood next to one of the pink-and-black pigs; it must have been running, because it was clearly out of breath, though it stood very still. Only its harsh breathing made the big pig move at all--except for the way it inclined its head toward the boy, who had hold of the animal's ear. Maybe it felt good to a pig to have its ear rubbed or gently pulle

d. In any case, the more the two-year-old stroked its ear, the more the pig tilted its head and lowered its long ear in Joe's direction.

"Pigs have funny ears," the boy said.

"Joe, get out of the pen--right now," his dad said. He must have raised his voice more than he'd meant to; the pig snapped its head in Danny's direction, as if it deeply resented the ear-rubbing interruption. Only a low-to-the-ground feeding trough separated them, and the pig hunched its shoulders on either side of its huge head and squinted at him. Danny stood his ground until he saw Joe climb safely through the slats in the fence.

The drama with the skydiver, and then with Joe, prevented Danny from seeing how low in the sky the small plane had circled. The pilot and copilot probably wanted to be sure that Amy had touched down without mishap, but Amy gave the plane the finger--both fingers, in fact--and the plane dipped a wing to her, as if in salutation, then flew off in the direction of Cedar Rapids.

"Welcome to Buffalo Creek Farm," Rolf had said to the skydiver. Regrettably, Danny missed seeing this part, too--how Amy had grabbed the photographer by both his shoulders, snapped him toward her, and head-butted him in his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Rolf staggered backward, falling several feet from the spot where Amy had made contact.

She knocked down the painter with the beard with a left jab followed by a right hook. "I don't jump into pigs!" she shouted at the two painters left standing.

Both Danny and Joe saw the next bit. "Which one of you artists is going to get my parachute?" she asked them, pointing to the pigpen. By now, the pigs had calmed down; they'd returned to the fence and were once more observing the artistic crowd, their snouts poking through the slats. The pig whose ear had been stroked, to its apparent satisfaction, was now indistinguishable from the others. Way out in the muck, the trampled red-white-and-blue parachute lay like a flag fallen in battle.

"The farmer told us never to go in the pigpen," one of the graduate-student painters began.

Danny carried Joe over to Katie. "You were supposed to hold him," he said to her.

"He peed all over me when you went into the pigpen," Katie said.

"He has a diaper on," Danny told her.