But then I thought that that was just what the duck did in the daytime when it got cloudy and that it had a whole different way of attacking things at sunset, when it used its wings a bit and went a lot faster over the surface of the water to cut off the other ducks’ heads. So maybe that would work. Only if it did work I didn’t want to be there in the backyard with the duck when it attacked.
For a while I thought about getting a dog or a cat or something and putting it in the backyard with the duck to see what happened but the idea made me sick and I couldn’t do it. Then I thought about going back down to El Estero Lake and catching another real duck but it would probably make a lot of noise when I was catching it unless I killed it, and if I got caught killing a duck what with the way everybody knew how I liked to go down to the lake and watch the ducks all the time everybody’d be suspicious of me and wonder how many other ducks I’d killed and maybe notice that there were a lot less ducks there on the lake than there usually were and think that I was crazy or evil, so that if someone got killed after that they’d be sure I did it.
But then I thought, it didn’t have to be a real duck at all, not a live one, I had more than enough money to go down to the poultry shop in Monterey and buy myself one that was ready to cook, and I could probably even get one with the feathers and head and everything all on it. So I rode my bike down to the poultry shop, but they didn’t have any ducks that weren’t already plucked and the chickens were all plucked too, so I had to buy a goose, which cost a lot more than I wanted to spend. I got it anyway and they put it in a plastic bag for me and gave me a little sheet of paper with instructions for how to cook it even though I said it was for my mother.
I put it in the backyard, about five feet away from the duck so it wouldn’t have to go too far to get it, then changed my mind and put it halfway across the yard, so I could see how fast the duck could go when it was after something.
It was pretty late but the sun wasn’t down yet, so I went back inside and took care of father, then put some fresh clothes on him in case Mother was going to be coming home tonight even though she’d said she wouldn’t, and then fixed us TV dinners. There was a movie on the cable channel, Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and right after it Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich, and I would have liked to have seen both of them even though I’d seen Casablanca before, but it started right after dinner and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to finish it before the sun went down. I tried to watch a little of it anyway with Father but I couldn’t get interested in it at all so I went back into the kitchen where I could watch the backyard out the window just like I could’ve from the living room if I hadn’t closed the curtains there so I could be sure Father wouldn’t see anything.
But when the sun went down and the light went away until it was completely dark out, there wasn’t even any moon, the duck didn’t even try to do anything to the goose. It just turned back into a log and stuck its lily pads a little ways out of the ends of its broken-off branches. I went back into the living room in time to see the very end of Casablanca and all of Shanghai Express. Shanghai Express was pretty good, but not as good as Casablanca had been the time before.
I’d been refilling Father’s drinking bottle with beer all day and he was pretty drunk by the time the movie was over but instead of getting sleepy the way he usually did he was wide awake and something in the movies had made him all angry and sad at the same time. It was really awful.
First he got angry at Mother and started yelling and telling me what a bitch she was, how she treated him like shit the way she did and even brought her mess sergeant home with her as if it didn’t make any difference what Father thought and even told him that at least Don—that was the mess sergeant’s name, but I didn’t like to use it even though he asked me to because that would make it too much like he was my friend or an uncle or something—could help her with him when she had to get his wheelchair into the car to take him to the beach or somewhere else nice and that Don was a lot of help too with getting him in and out of the bathtub and cleaning him up, as if that wasn’t worse, having to let his wife’s lover clean him up when he’d dirtied himself because he couldn’t get out of his wheelchair to go to the bathroom on his own and they were too busy in the bedroom to waste the time to come and help him. Like he was a baby and it was OK if they changed his diaper every day or two.
He’d been yelling for most of this, but then he got real sad again, and that was even worse, he started talking about what a good wife Mother’d been back when he could take care of her and when he’d been handsome and strong and everything Don was now only a lot better and how she would have been a perfect wife to him if only he hadn’t had the accident and it wasn’t her fault that he couldn’t be a husband to her and even if she got angry at him a lot and had to find someone else to do all the things that it’d been his duty to do for her as a husband he couldn’t blame her, because at least she hadn’t divorced him or put him in a home or anything like that.
It went on and on and after a while he was crying, and then he was yelling again. His bottle was empty so I went and got him another one, only I put half a Librium in it like I’d sometimes seen Mother do when she wanted to make sure he got to sleep and after a little while he calmed down and went to sleep.
I went out in the backyard and put the log in its sack and put it in the shed. I didn’t even bother to use the stick or anything this time, because I was sure it wouldn’t do anything to me now that it was late enough at night so the light had been gone for a long time. I put the sack behind the TV set under the bench but I couldn’t really think of what to do with the goose because it would probably rot if I just left it in the shack but if I put it in the freezer or the refrigerator Mother’d probably find it if she came home tomorrow and I couldn’t think of any reason to tell her why there was a goose in the freezer.
Then I thought, what I’ll tell her is I bought it with my savings because since she’d been away working all that time I wanted to cook it for her for a kind of celebration when she got home and I’d gotten all the directions for cooking it and everything, only they looked too hard. And if she asked me why I’d gotten a goose instead of something like a turkey I’d tell her it was because I’d never had a goose and I’d heard that they were something special that people had for Christmas in England and that I wanted this to be very special. She’d have to believe me even though it was a pretty silly story because she wouldn’t be able to think of any other reason why I’d have a goose to put in the freezer. Unless I’d stolen it, and I had the receipt and the piece of paper with the instructions on it to show her and she could always check back with the man at the poultry store if she was really suspicious.
Then I put fresh sheets on Father’s bed and got him out of his wheelchair and into it. It really was like he was a baby, only even though I was real strong for how big I was he was twice as heavy as I was and I almost dropped him like I’d done a few times before, but I didn’t.
And anyway I was growing fast so it was getting easier all the time. I was taller than all but one or two of the other girls in my class, and I was real strong and muscular just like Mother was and like Father’d been in the pictures when he used to be on the Police Basketball Team. I was good at sports, too, especially gymnastics and swimming and soccer, but Mother said I’d have to start being careful about what I ate and about doing real exercises and not just playing around pretty soon if I didn’t want to end up getting fat and flabby like Father, though she said that right now everything was OK and I was still just solid.
I still wasn’t sleepy, even though it was pretty late. What with getting up early every morning and everything I’d gotten into the habit of not sleeping too much. I took a bath and washed my hair and tried to watch TV but there wasn’t anything on worth watching, and I didn’t feel like reading or anything like that, so I went and got another TV dinner out of the freezer and put it in the oven.
It was a fried chicken dinner and when I took the tin foil off at
the end and saw it I thought, maybe that’s how the duck figures out whether something’s alive or not, because if it’s alive it’s got a temperature just like I do, 98.6, though it probably wasn’t the same thing for birds. But even if it wasn’t the same the duck had chased me just like it had chased the ducks and swans so that wouldn’t make that much difference.
Unless the reason it hadn’t tried to kill the goose was because the goose had just been lying still there on the grass and not moving at all. But some of the real ducks I’d seen the robot duck attack hadn’t been moving, at least not so I could see, and part of the time my duck had been flopping across the lawn after me I’d just been standing still watching it, not moving at all. So if Mother still wasn’t home tomorrow I’d put the goose in the microwave just before sunset and get it out in the yard all hot right when the sun went down to see if that would make the duck attack it.
Mother called in the next morning while I was cleaning up after breakfast to say she was going to be gone at least two more days because she had to take over liaison duty with the state police on an arson charge. I asked her if she’d had a chance to find out anything for me about James Patrick Dubic. She said, yes, he was still in prison, but even though his behavior there was very good and he was not only doing some sort of on-the-job-training program for some outside company that would look good to the parole board but had also volunteered for something called Aversion Therapy that was going to make it impossible for him to ever touch another bird again without getting sick and passing out, they still weren’t going to let him out for at least three or four more years.
It wasn’t quite eight in the morning yet but I could still hear what sounded like a party in the background, a lot of drunks and yelling and music and laughing, or maybe she was in a bar or a gambling casino in Lake Tahoe or Reno or Las Vegas or wherever she was. I could tell she wasn’t anywhere close like she pretended she was because there was so much static on the line I could barely hear her.
She told me to go down and see one of her friends at the station after school, Desk Sergeant Crowder, and he’d have twenty-five dollars for what she called my “baby-sitting time.” That made me really angry again, not that she was trying to bribe me to keep me on her side but that it was Sergeant Crowder who was covering up for what she was doing with the mess sergeant because even though he didn’t come around to see us nearly as much anymore as he used to, he’d always been one of Father’s best friends and Father thought he still was.
After Mother hung up I told Father that she wasn’t going to be home for another two days but I didn’t mention anything about Sergeant Crowder. He looked unhappy, more miserable and hopeless than angry for a minute, but then he grinned at me even though I could tell he was making himself do it and said that in that case maybe I’d better dial the school for him so he could tell them that even though I was starting to feel a little better he wanted to keep me home with him for two more days to be sure.
After the phone call I wheeled him into the living room and set everything up right for him and put a beer in his bottle, then I went back to the shed and got the duck. I didn’t bother to be extra careful this time, I just picked up the sack and dumped the log out of it into the middle of the backyard, then made sure the backyard gate was locked. I waited until the log started to hump in on itself then went back inside and drew all the curtains and locked the back door, so that nobody who happened to come by would see the duck.
I played checkers and cards with father most of the morning—I moved all the checkers for him and we had a little rack set up so he could see the cards in his hand even when I couldn’t that he used when his friends came over to play poker—and I let him win a lot, even though I was better than he was. I fixed him a hot lunch around noon and refilled his bottle with beer two or three times and cleaned him up a bit before I left him in the living room with a new Ed McBain mystery in his reader because the afternoon TV looked pretty boring.
Then I went down to the lake to watch the ducks for a while and think about my duck and what I was going to do with it, but also to keep a lookout and find out if there was anybody else there watching and trying to learn what’d happened to my duck. I didn’t think there would be, not with Dubic still in prison, and there wasn’t.
About four o’clock I rode my bike over to the station and got the money from Sergeant Crowder. One of the other cops, somebody I didn’t know, came over just as if it was something he’d thought of doing on the spur of the moment and told me what a good job my mother was doing and how much she was sacrificing for her work and how they hoped that pretty soon she could get the kind of rest she needed and stay at home like she wanted. I said that it was OK for me, I had school and everything, but that Father got a little lonely sometimes and Sergeant Crowder said it’d been too long since he’d come by to see us and that he’d drop in on us as soon as he had a few hours free. I said that would be nice.
I got Father cleaned up before dinner, then put a whole Librium in his beer so I could cook the goose and everything without him smelling it or noticing I was doing anything strange. He fell asleep right at the table and I took him into his bedroom and put him to bed with plenty of time to get the goose cooked before sunset.
I waited until the sun was almost entirely down, then put the goose in the microwave and turned it on to get it really, really hot. All the feathers got singed and it smelled really awful when I took it out because I had to leave it in a little longer than I’d planned so that I didn’t get it out in the yard too early, or it would have been too cold for the duck to attack it when the light went away. And I didn’t want to risk putting it out there too late, because then the duck might attack me, and I didn’t know how fast it could go on land when it was doing its scissors thing and not the thing where it came up from underneath the ducks like some sort of meatgrinder with claws.
I propped the goose’s head up in position with toothpicks and then ran out and put it down at least ten yards away from the duck, then ran as fast as I could back into the house and slammed the door.
The duck was already getting ready to attack the goose by the time I got turned around again with the door closed so I could watch it out the window. It had its neck stuck forward with its mouth wide open and it was doing its paddling thing and even though the way it was beating its wings wasn’t quite enough to make it really fly it was still close enough so that the duck was sort of half-running and half-hopping across the lawn and it was going as fast as I could have run or maybe even faster until it got to the goose and then the scissors came out of its mouth and I was close enough this time to see the scissor blades were all jagged-edged like the saws butchers use before the duck cut the goose’s head off.
The scissors went back into the duck’s mouth and it closed its bill and did that thing it’d done before, when it’d tried to dive down through the ground to get at me, only this time after it paddled a little it just stopped and turned back into a log.
So I knew that all I had to do was get Mother out in the backyard away from any metal or the fences or the house when the sun went away and the duck would kill her. I could do it tomorrow night when she came home if I wanted to, or whenever I wanted to after that.
It made me feel good. I wrapped the goose in tin foil and put it back in the freezer in case I found another use for it, then put the log back in its sack and hid it back in the shed. I was real excited and I rode my bike all the way to Lover’s Point and the Asilomar beaches in Pacific Grove because I felt so good and I was laughing to myself all the way there and back. Then I watched a late movie on TV, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and it was sort of stupid but fun anyway and I even laughed two or three times.
But the next morning Father woke me up yelling, because I was late with his breakfast and he had a hangover and because I’d put him to sleep so early the night before all of yesterday’s beer had still been in him and he’d wet his bed in the middle of the night and when he woke up and his bed was all sticky and wet and dis
gusting he had to yell and yell and yell to get me to wake up and come help him. He was really angry with me just the way he was always really angry with Mother, even after I cleaned him up and got him breakfast and set him up for the day in front of the TV with his reader.
And when he yelled at me again at lunch I realized something that I should’ve realized a long time before. He really was just like a big baby, and with Mother gone there’d be no one left to take care of him but me and pretty soon he’d hate me just the same way he hated Mother and I’d hate him just the same way Mother hated him. With maybe a little love left that would come back to the surface every now and then when we remembered what it’d been like before, but less and less until all that we had left was that we hated each other.
Only it wouldn’t even be that, because they’d probably put me in a foster home and put him in some sort of nursing home, the one thing Mother’d promised never to do him where she’d kept her promise, until I was old enough to go back to taking care of him. I’d have to get a job and pay for him along with me for the rest of his life, and I’d never be able to go away or get married or even have boyfriends or do anything because he’d be jealous of me the way he was of Mother even though he loved me.
He hated what he was and the only way he could stand hating himself like that was to take it out on somebody else. It wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t do anything about it, but that’s what it was, he had to hate somebody and make them miserable and if it wasn’t Mother it was going to be me.
I couldn’t get away with just running off and leaving him, either, not with the new interstate runaway laws they’d been lecturing us about at school, at least not until I was fifteen or sixteen. Besides, I didn’t have anywhere to run to, not yet, and no way to keep myself alive even if I got away.
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