Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  There was an old lady down at the other end of the lake, near the kids in the canoe. She was throwing bread crumbs or something to the swans but she looked pretty busy and I didn’t think she’d notice what I was doing if I waited until it got just a little darker.

  One of the ducks, a mallard, a really pretty male with a bright green head and a big patch of shiny blue on his side, was off alone out in the middle, not doing much with the other ducks, just sort of floating there like he was half-asleep through he didn’t have his head tucked back or anything. He was pretty far away but close enough so I thought I could hit him with a good enough shot.

  Suddenly he started doing that thing that ducks do when they’re real mad at each other or fighting over a female or that the females sort of do when they’re telling all the males to go away and they stick their necks forward with their mouths wide open and charge at each other using their wings to go fast enough so they’re almost running at each other on top of the water. But the weird thing was that the duck wasn’t charging another male, he was charging a whole little group of four or five females—I could tell they were females because they were all brown and speckled and one of them even had some of her black and yellow baby ducklings swimming around her—and he wasn’t making that sort of hissing warning noise that all the other ducks I’d ever seen make when they’re charging like that.

  He didn’t stop when he was close enough to warn them off either, like they usually do. All at once he was in with the other ducks and they were all squawking and beating their wings and trying to fly away. I thought I saw something real bright flash, like a knife blade, only it was too dark for a piece of metal to flash like that, and then all but one of the females that had been trying to get away were up out of the water and flying off and the baby ducklings were running across the water peeping and trying to get away.

  But one of the females—maybe the mother, I couldn’t tell—was floating there with its belly up and its orange legs twitching. Then its legs quit twitching and I could tell it was dead. And the male was gone. It hadn’t flown away with the others and it hadn’t swum away and it wasn’t anywhere I could see in the water. So it must have dived down to the bottom and stayed there or at least not come up until it was a long ways away. Maybe it was lurking down there like a snapping turtle.

  The chicano high school kids were landing their canoe and I tried to get them to take me out in it again so I could get the dead duck and take a look at it and see what the male had done to it but they were already starting to put their canoe back in their pickup and they weren’t interested.

  It was getting too dark to see anything so I walked around for a while. I went down to the wharf to see if the organ-grinder was there with his monkey but he wasn’t—it wasn’t quite the beginning of the tourist season yet and anyway it was the middle of the week, so there weren’t that many people around—so I walked back to McDonald’s and bought a Big Mac with some money I took from Mother’s purse when she left it lying around a few days before, then went the rest of the way home. Father was asleep but Mother was still up watching a movie on TV. I didn’t have any homework so after I fed my turtles and guppies I sat down and watched the movie with her until she told me it was too late and I had to go to bed.

  When I went down to the lake the next morning before school with a pair of binoculars the dead duck was gone. I looked for the other duck for a while, but I couldn’t find it or if I did find it it looked just like all the other mallards and wasn’t doing anything special.

  But I spotted it for sure when I came back again after school. It was just floating around the same way it had the night before and it always stayed out near the middle, away from shore and the shallow water where all the other ducks liked to feed, and it wouldn’t move at all except to keep away from the people on their aquacycles. That was how I noticed it, because when an aquacycle came within maybe fifteen feet of where it was resting it would move away so it stayed just fifteen feet away from the aquacycle, then move back to where it’d been as soon as the people on the cycle were far enough away. And it did the same thing once with some people in a boat.

  And besides it never dived or quacked or preened itself or seemed to be looking for anything to eat and all the other ducks ignored it. They didn’t seem scared of it, they just didn’t pay any attention to it, and all it did was float there and keep away from people.

  But that was only when the sun was shining on it. As soon as things clouded over it would start swimming towards the other ducks, but it always stopped and went back to floating on its own away from everything else when the sun came out from behind the clouds again.

  All except one time, after I’d been there a couple of hours, when a lot of really dark clouds covered the sun and kept it covered for about fifteen minutes. The duck started swimming towards another duck the way it always did when the sun got covered over—the other duck was a male mallard just like it was this time—but it didn’t stop like it had before, the times when the sun came out from behind the clouds again. I was watching it through the binoculars to try to see what it did if it attacked the other male the same way it’d attacked the females the night before.

  Only it didn’t attack the other duck. It just swam closer and closer to it until the two ducks were maybe three feet away from each other, then it put its head down and went forward a little like it was looking for food on the bottom and then it dived.

  A second or two late the other mallard gave a sort of shocked SQUAWK! and got pulled under, just like a giant snapping turtle had reached up from underneath and grabbed it in its jaws and pulled it down. Only I knew it wasn’t a snapping turtle, it was the other duck.

  I watched where it had gone under with the binoculars for a while but there wasn’t any blood or feathers I could see, nothing to make it look like the duck was getting killed or eaten there under the water, except that it never came up again.

  But about five minutes later the duck that had killed it came bobbing up again. It was all muddy and I thought that maybe it had been lying down there on the bottom in the mud eating the other duck and then had buried what was left of its body like a dog with a bone it’s finished with. It preened itself for a while, looking pretty and silly and self-important like any other mallard, then paddled back to the middle and went back to its sunbathing.

  It was getting near dinner time so I went home to take care of Father. Mother was still at the police station and he was in a pretty good mood and watching something he liked on TV so it wasn’t so bad. I changed his urine bottle and washed him up a bit, then fed him a TV dinner and connected his drinking tube to a big bottle of one of those pre-mixed drinks—a whisky sour or a gin martini, I forget which—then left him there and went back down to the lake to watch the ducks for a while. I took some bread down with me to feed to the other ducks and swans in case somebody wanted to know what I was doing there. The day was still pretty bright out and the duck that was killing the other ducks was still floating out alone in the middle, though not quite in the same place, so I didn’t have any trouble finding it again.

  It pulled another duck down the same way before the sun went down, a different kind this time, one of those grey and white ones with the chocolate brown heads and necks with a white stripe running up each side. And then, just as the last light was going away, it did the same thing it’d done the night before, when it’d attacked the group of females. Only this time I had the binoculars ready and I knew what I was looking for, so I got to see what it did when it killed the other duck.

  It charged just the way any other duck would’ve again, only it didn’t stop when the other duck tried to get away. The duck it was after was another male mallard again—there were a whole lot of them out on the lake, like there always were—and the duck that was attacking it kept right on going faster and faster with its bill wide open until just before it was going to ram into the other duck something like a pair of shiny steel garden shears came out of its open mouth like a gigantic m
etal snake’s tongue and cut the other duck’s head off.

  The scissors went back into the killer duck’s mouth and it grabbed the dead duck’s head in its bill then dived like it had the other times, when it had pulled the ducks down. Only this time it left the headless duck’s body floating on the water and it didn’t come up again.

  I waited until it was too dark to see, then made sure I knew how to find the spot where the duck had disappeared and went home. Father was asleep in his wheelchair in front of the TV. Mother wasn’t home yet. I changed Father’s urine bag again then wheeled him into his bedroom and got him into bed, then fed the turtles and guppies and went to bed with a book I’d gotten out of the school library about ducks.

  But I was out of bed the next morning before it got light out and by the time the sun came up I was already down at the lake with the binoculars, watching the spot where the duck had disappeared the night before. There was a whole cluster of five or six big water lilies there I hadn’t noticed before but I was still pretty sure I had the right spot.

  About an hour after the sun came up the water lillies disappeared like fishing-line bobbers being yanked down by a big fish and a moment later the duck bobbed to the surface. It was all muddy again but it preened itself for a while until it was all clean, then swam back to the middle of the lake, but not quite the same spot it had been in the day before.

  I went back to the house. Mother hadn’t come home at all last night but Father was already awake. I helped him get dressed and go to the bathroom, then cleaned him up and made us both some scrambled eggs and toast. After I fed him I wheeled him into the living room and put his book in the thing to turn the pages for him, then made myself two liver sausage sandwiches for lunch. Mother came home just as I was leaving and gave me a ride to school.

  It rained all afternoon and I didn’t get to see the duck with the scissors in its mouth, though most of the other ducks were still out in the rain and I looked for it for a long time. But I was down by the lake when it started to get light out again the next morning and I found its group of lily pads—they were cleaner-looking than the other water lilies, not as scummy and ragged, and they were farther out into deep water than they should have been and bigger than most of the others—and was there watching it through the binoculars when it came up. This time I noticed that it seemed to be preening itself real slowly, like it was very tired or something, and that when it swam out to the middle again it was swimming a lot slower than usual.

  Father yelled at me at breakfast when I spilled some cereal and milk on his shirt so I just left him there in his wheelchair and went to school early, without any sandwiches. I had enough money so I could’ve bought myself lunch at school if I’d wanted to but I wanted to save it, so I told Beth I’d forgotten it and she gave me half of one of her sandwiches and bought me a carton of milk with her own money.

  After school I went around to all the sporting goods stores and checked out the prices they wanted for fishing nets. They were all too expensive and anyway the duck could’ve cut its way out of all of them with the scissors in its mouth. Besides, I didn’t know what it did when it pulled the ducks under in the daytime. The scissors in its mouth meant it had to be some kind of machine or maybe it was a real duck that had been changed around so it was part duck and part machine like the bionic man and woman, so it could’ve had all sorts of other ways to break out of the net anyway. Maybe it had some kind of extra claws or a hooked sword or something like that hidden under its feathers that it used to drag the ducks under that it got in the daytime.

  I went home and checked Mother’s purse for some money I could take but all she had was an awful lot of ten- and twenty-dollar bills and even though she had so many I was sure she’d notice if any of them were missing. But she had five or six quarters and a fifty cent piece, so I took three of the quarters and put two nickels back in their place so it would feel like she still had the same amount of money. And that night one of her friends called to ask if I could baby-sit his two kids Saturday afternoon. All Mother’s friends knew how good I was at taking care of Father, even the ones that didn’t really know how bad she was at taking care of him—he never talked about it to anybody when she wasn’t there, though he always made a lot of nasty remarks about the way she treated him when she was in the room with him and his friends and I were there—so I got a lot of offers to do baby-sitting. But Mother liked to keep me home to watch Father when she was working or had something else she wanted to do and she was always working or doing something and she didn’t like to come home very much if she could get out of it, so I didn’t get to do much baby-sitting. But this time she’d already decided to stay home all day Saturday, so she said go ahead and I ended up making seven and a half dollars.

  The next morning I was up early again. I blew up a big white balloon and put it on the end of a long bamboo fishing pole made out of five sticks that screwed together we had out in the garage, but when I found the duck’s lily pads they were too far away from shore for me to put the balloon by where the duck was going to come up and hold it there so I could see what he was going to do with it. They didn’t rent out aquacycles until way too late and anyway the pole was long but it wasn’t quite fifteen feet long so an aquacycle wouldn’t have done me any good and there wasn’t anything I could do.

  It was the same way Monday and Tuesday and then it rained Wednesday and Thursday, so I didn’t get to see the duck at all. But Friday even though it was too far out from shore for me to put the balloon next to its lily pads I saw it get a white duck and a black swan, which made me very happy.

  Beth came over Saturday and we rented one of the aquacycles and I went pedaling after the duck but it just kept itself away from me. I didn’t want to tell Beth what I was doing and she got really bored and angry with me after a while but I made her keep on pedaling until our time was up.

  And then Saturday the robot duck finally killed another duck close to shore with the scissors in its mouth so that Sunday I had my balloon right by its lily pad when it came up in the morning. But the day was all sunny and starting to get hot and the duck just ignored the balloon and went off to float in the middle of the lake. And by that time I’d realized that even when it got cloudy out the duck never attacked another duck if the other duck was near an aquacycle or one of the aluminum canoes. So there wasn’t any real way I could find out what it would and wouldn’t attack, and anyway I was getting scared that people might be beginning to notice me, out there with my balloon on a pole every morning. So I stayed away from the lake for a week and I was glad I did, because there was a movie on TV that Saturday afternoon that I watched over at Beth’s house, The Invisible Boy with Robbie the Robot, where this evil computer takes control over Robbie and makes him do things he doesn’t want to do. And that made me think about those kids with their radio-controlled toy sailboats and I started wondering if there was someone who came down to watch the duck after it came up and who kept the controls he used to make the duck kill the other ducks hidden in his pocket or something. So after I’d stayed away from the lake for a week I came back and didn’t do anything, just watched, but though there were some people who came down almost every day to watch the ducks and feed them, there wasn’t anybody I could see who was there every day when the duck killed something by pulling it under and I watched for more than two weeks to make sure. Besides, the little old man who was there the most often even came when it was raining out and the duck stayed underwater.

  By this time I had enough money from Mother’s purse and my baby-sitting and even one time five dollars from the mess sergeant’s wallet to buy a net if I wanted one but not one with a long handle. The only way I’d figured out to catch the duck was to wade or swim out to where its lily pads were some night when it was resting or turned off at the bottom and then scoop it up in the net and hope it would stay turned off or asleep or whatever until I got it into something dark and strong, like the ten-gallon grease can I’d already gotten from the gas station down on Del Mont
e by the Navy School. But I was scared to try it because for all I knew the duck never really turned itself off, it just went down to hide in the mud on the bottom of the lake where it could cut the ducks it had killed into little pieces with the scissors in its mouth so that nobody would ever find their bodies, and I couldn’t think of any reason it couldn’t kill me the same way it killed the ducks and swans, either with its scissors or with whatever it used when it got them from underwater. Besides which, I was afraid somebody’d come driving by and catch me. Or that a car would come by and the light from its headlights would turn the duck back on even if it had been turned off and then it would get me.

  But I didn’t want to give up, I wanted that duck a lot, especially after I found the headless body of one of the white ducks washed up early in the morning. I took it away and put it in somebody’s garbage can a ways away from the lake, under the garbage so nobody else’d see it and figure out what was going on, and from then on I tried to check the shore as much as I could to make sure that none of the other bodies washed up but either the rest of them must have just sunk or dogs or cats came by in the nighttime and ate them as soon as they washed up.

  I spent a few more days down by the lake feeding the ducks and pigeons and even the swans a lot of stale bread and other garbage to give myself an excuse for being there before I got the idea of putting some sort of noose at the end of the bamboo pole and using it to snag the whole group of lily pads. They had to be connected to the duck and made out of plastic or metal or something like that and be pretty strong, so I could use them to drag the duck up out of the water. The thing is, I didn’t know if that would wake the duck up or not, or if the stems were really strong enough to pull the duck out of the water without breaking it somehow. If it was all made of metal except for its feathers it had to be very heavy. And if I woke the duck up dragging it out like that, I didn’t know if it would just try to get away from me or if it would try to kill me to make me stop and keep anyone else from learning about it. I’d never seen it up on shore like the other ducks so for all I knew it couldn’t even walk and I’d be safe as long as I didn’t go in the water with it.