by John Irving
Merle Haggard was singing "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive" on the car radio; probably someone had changed the station. Out on the lawn, Katie had been dancing by herself--or with her glass of wine--but she stopped now. Everyone was curious about the pilot and the copilot, if only to see what would happen when they arrived. Amy walked over to the car before the two men could get out.
"Fuck you, Georgie--fuck you, Pete," the skydiver greeted them.
"We were too high up to see the pigs, Amy--we couldn't see them when you jumped," one of the men told her; he handed her some clothes.
"Fuck you, Pete," Amy told him again. She took off her towel and threw it at him.
"Calm down, Amy," the other man said. "The guys on the farm should have told us there were pigs."
"Yeah, well--I made that point to them, Georgie," the skydiver told him.
Georgie and Pete were surveying the artists in the pig-roast crowd. They must have noticed that Rolf was bleeding, and the painter with the beard still held a wet T-shirt to his face; the pilot and copilot surely knew this was Amy's work.
"Which one ran into the pigpen to help you?" Pete asked her.
"See the small guy in the boxers? The little boy's daddy--that's the one," Amy said. "My rescuer."
"Thanks," Pete said to Danny.
"We appreciate it," Georgie told the writer.
Lady Sky was only slightly less formidable-looking when she was dressed, in part because she dressed like a man--except for her underwear, which was black and skimpy. Amy wore a blue denim workshirt, tucked in, and jeans with a belt with a big buckle; her cowboy boots had a rattlesnake pattern. She walked over to where Danny was holding little Joe. "If you're ever in trouble, I'll be back," Lady Sky told the boy; she bent over him, kissing his forehead. "Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy," she said to Joe.
Katie was dancing by herself again, but she was watching how the skydiver made a fuss over her husband and little boy; Katie never took her eyes off the big woman. There was a song from The Rolling Stones' album Between the Buttons on the radio, but Danny could never remember which song it was. By then, he'd had a third beer and was working on his fourth--this was on top of the red wine, and he still hadn't eaten. Someone had once again changed the station on the car radio, the writer had noticed. He'd watched Lady Sky kiss his son, sensing that the kiss was meant for him; Amy must have known there was no better way to make an impression on a parent than to be nice to the beloved child. But who was she? Danny wanted to know. The scar from her cesarean section must have made her someone's mother, but Danny wondered if one of the stooges with her was her husband or boyfriend.
"Can we get anything to eat here?" Georgie was asking.
"Believe me, Georgie, we don't want to eat here," Amy told him. "Not even Pete," she added, without looking at him--as if Pete couldn't be trusted to make his own food decisions. Danny didn't think she was sleeping with either of them.
The pilot and copilot tried to be careful how they stuffed the parachute and the skydiver's harness into the trunk of the car, but it was impossible not to get some pig shit on themselves in the process. Amy got into the driver's seat of the car.
"You driving, Amy?" Georgie asked her.
"It looks like it," she told him.
"I'll get in the back," Pete said.
"You'll both get in the back," Amy told them. "I've smelled enough pig shit today." But before the men could get into the car, the skydiver said: "You see that pretty little woman, the dancer, over there? You can see her tits through her shirt--that one."
Danny knew that both Georgie and Pete had already noticed Katie; most men did.
"Yeah, I see her," Georgie said.
"What about her, Amy?" Pete asked.
"If you ever lose me--if my chute doesn't open, or something--you can ask her to do anything. I'll bet you she'd do it," the skydiver said.
The pilot and copilot looked uneasily at each other. "What do you mean, Amy?" Pete asked.
"You mean she'd jump out of an airplane without any clothes on--you mean that kind of thing?" Georgie asked the skydiver.
"I mean she'd jump out of an airplane without a parachute," Amy told them. "Wouldn't you, honey?" she asked Katie.
Danny would remember this--how Katie liked it when the attention came to her, for whatever reason. He saw 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 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.
"He's mine--I was asleep," Danny told them. He crossed the pavement into the median strip, but the woman--middle-aged, glasses, a pearl necklace (Danny would remember nothing more definitive about her)--seemed reluctant to give the baby up.
"Your baby was in the street, pal--I almost ran over him," the van driver told Danny. "The fucking diaper, its whiteness, just caught my eye."
"It doesn't appear that you were looking for this baby, or that you even knew he was missing," the woman said to Danny.
"Daddy," Joe said, holding out his arms.
"Does this child have a mother?" the woman wanted to know.
"She's asleep--we were both asleep," Danny told her. He took little Joe from the woman's tentatively outstretched arms. "Thank you," Danny said to the van driver.
"You're st
ill wasted, man," the driver told him. "Is your wife wasted, too?"
"Thank you," Danny told him again.
"You should be reported," the woman said to him.
"Yes, I should be," Danny told her, "but please don't."
Now cars were honking their horns, and Joe started to cry again. "I couldn't see the sky from the house," the boy was sobbing.
"You couldn't see the sky?" his dad asked. They crossed the pavement to the sidewalk, and went into the house to the continuous honking of horns.
"I couldn't see if Lady Sky was coming down," Joe said.
"You were looking for Lady Sky?" his father asked.
"I couldn't see her. Maybe she was looking for me," the boy said.
The divided avenue was wide; from the middle of the road, or from the median strip, Danny realized that his two-year-old had been able to see the sky. The boy had been hoping that Lady Sky would descend again--that was all there was to it.
"Mommy's home," Joe told his dad, as they came into the apartment, which the two-year-old called the umpartment; from the moment he'd begun to talk, an apartment was an umpartment.
"Yes, I know Mommy's home," Danny said. He could see that Katie had fallen back to sleep. On the kitchen table, the writer also noticed that the rum bottle was empty. Had he finished it before going to bed, or had Katie downed what was left in the bottle when she'd come home? (It was probably me, Danny thought; he knew that Katie didn't like rum.)
He took Joe into the boy's room and changed his diaper. He had trouble looking at his son's eyes--imagining them open and staring, unseeing, as the two-year-old in his bright-white diaper lay dead in the road.
"AND THEN YOU stopped drinking, right?" young Joe asked his father. For the duration of the long story, they'd kept their backs to the house they had lived in with Katie.
"The last of that rum was the end of it," Danny said to the eight-year-old.
"But Mom didn't stop drinking, did she?" Joe asked his dad.
"Your mom couldn't stop, sweetie--she probably still hasn't stopped," Danny told him.
"And I am grounded, right?" young Joe asked.
"No, you're not grounded--you can go anywhere you want, on foot or on the bus. It's your bicycle that's grounded," Danny said to the boy. "Maybe we'll give your bike to Max. I'll bet he could use it for a backup, or for spare parts."
