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“I thought Roger would be here, but he isn’t,” Katie said with disappointment. She was standing next to Rolf, the bearded photographer; Da
“Nice pictures,” Da
“Oh, you saw them,” Rolf said casually.
“You’re all over the place,” Da
“Did you see your mom?” Rolf asked Joe, bending down to the boy, as if he thought the child were hard of hearing.
“He barely talks,” Katie said, which was totally untrue; Joe was exceptionally articulate for a two-year-old, as only children tend to be. (Maybe because he was a writer, Da
“Mommy’s right there,” the boy said, pointing at her.
“No, I meant the pictures,” Rolf explained. “They’re in the bathroom.”
“That’s Mommy,” Joe insisted, pointing to his mother again.
“See what I mean?” Katie asked the photographer.
Da
The three graduate-student painters were circling the fire pit, where the pig was roasting. Da
“We started the fucking fire before dawn,” one of the painters said to Da
“The pig isn’t done yet,” another painter said; he also had a beard, which made Da
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, Da
“We’ll just have to wait until the pig is done,” the third painter told Da
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,” Da
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 Da
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, Da
“What do you think of them?” Da
“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.
Da
“Plane. Not a bird,” Da
“A plane, yes. Not a bird,” his dad repeated.
Rolf passed by, refilling Da
Da
Rolf was whispering in Katie’s ear while Katie watched the plane. Something’s going on, the writer thought, but Da
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,” Da
“No, they’re pigs. Not cows,” the boy told him.
“Okay,” Da
“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 Da
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,” Da
“Not a bird,” he heard little Joe say. “Not flying. Falling!”
By the time Da
“What’s coming down?” Joe asked his dad.
“A skydiver,” Da
“A what in the sky?” the two-year-old said.
“A person with a parachute,” Da
“A what?”
“A parachute keeps the person from falling too fast-the person is going to be all right,” Da