Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)

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Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 45

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )


  an enormous difference in the lives of the people it did

  affect, and save the taxpayer some money in the process.

  “But there’s another kind of shut-in this kind of set-up

  could help, and help in a way that could quite possibly do

  all of us an enormous amount of incidental good. I’m

  talking about convicts, convicted criminals, all those

  men and women that society has been forced for its own

  protection, and in the hope of reforming them, to put

  behind bars. And there are a lot of them, make no

  mistake of that, all our jails, prisons, penitentiaries and

  work farms are not only full but dangerously overcrowded with men, women and adolescents whose care and keeping is paid for by the rest of us, all of us who pay

  taxes.

  “And what we’re paying for, really, is a kind of school

  system or fraternity where all the petty criminals— the

  kids who hot-wired cars to go joyriding or the clerk who

  for the first and only time in his life needed money so

  badly that he took a hundred dollars out of his employer’s cash register and got caught at it— where all these people who have nothing better to do with their time

  than break rocks or stamp out license plates learn from

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  the other prisoners, the real hardened criminals, how to

  become hardened criminals themselves. And when they

  finally do get out the only people they know are criminals, they can’t get a job because of their records and because, especially if they were pretty young when they

  went in, all they know how to do is break rocks or make

  license plates or hang around with criminals. And so

  what their stay in prison has really done for them is just

  to put them on the road to becoming far more dangerous

  and expensive to society than they might ever have

  become on their own.

  “But think about a convict who gets the training he

  needs to be a computer programmer of some sort in

  prison. He’s already learned a skill that will be useful to

  society and that has a good chance of taking him away

  from the poverty and bad influences that may well have

  been what turned him to crime in the first place.

  “So far, so good. But now let’s assume that some

  company or group of companies has arranged to have

  some of its data terminals installed within the prison

  walls, in much the same way as the terminals for the

  shut-in patients I mentioned earlier would have been

  installed in their homes, and that this company agrees to

  accept qualifying prisoners for some sort of apprentice

  program, so that they can not only be gaining useful

  skills and on-the-job training while still in prison, but

  they can already have a job waiting for them when they

  get out AND have a bank account they’ve built up from

  what they were being paid during their apprenticeship

  waiting for them outside. That way, they’ll be able to

  sidestep the whole grinding cycle of poverty and humiliation and living on welfare that right now drives so many ex-convicts straight back to a life of crime.

  “Of course, there are still a few safeguards we’re going

  to have to work out before we can put our pilot program

  in practice because these are, after all, convicted criminals we’re talking about. To give you just one example of the kinds of things we’re going to have to guard against,

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  you wouldn’t want to put a genius embezzler or even

  safecracker in total control of Bank of America’s computer system. . .

  Ju lie : 1 9 8 8

  ______________

  It was a really hot night even though it was still only

  April and the air conditioner was broken again. Mother

  was yelling at Father and he was whining back at her

  again. Pretty soon he’d start yelling and then she’d start

  hitting him again. They’d been drinking a lot too, both of

  them, like they always did. I was eleven and they’d been

  doing the same thing ever since I could remember. I

  couldn’t stand them, either of them.

  I put my slingshot— the hunting kind you get at

  sporting goods stores that shoots steel balls, not one of

  those homemade rubber band things for little kids— into

  my bag and went down to the lake to sit around for a

  while. We lived about four blocks away, up by the Naval

  Postgraduate School. Sometimes when there wasn’t anyone else at the lake I’d try to get one of the swans or even one of the ducks with my slingshot—-I’d killed a swan

  once, one of the black ones with the red beaks, and hit

  one or two others and a couple of ducks— but there were

  a lot of people out on the lake on those stupid little

  two-person aquacycles, those boat-things you pedal like

  bicycles. Couples mainly, some high school kids but

  mainly old people, tourists and golfers. Some fathers

  with their kids. They all looked stupid.

  I didn’t like the park all that much but I didn’t have

  any friends that lived close and I didn’t feel like walking

  or even riding my bike very far, especially not all the way

  up Carmel Hill to where Beth lived. But I couldn’t stand

  staying home any longer either, not while they were still

  fighting. It would be OK later on, when something they

  both wanted to watch came on TV or when Father had a

  little more to drink. After a while he just got quieter and

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  quieter until he went to sleep. Which was why I was glad

  he drank all the time, even though he got pretty nasty in

  the evening and when he first woke up in the morning.

  And that was OK anyway, because he had a right to get

  angry even if not at me, the way Mother treated him. She

  treated him like shit and he never did anything wrong, all

  he did was sit around all day watching television and

  reading magazines and detective stories and drinking a

  little beer through his tube. He didn’t hurt anybody and

  it wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t wash himself and if

  sometimes he smelled bad and that he’d gotten all sort of

  fat and droopy-faced and pasty-looking, not at all like he

  looked in those pictures Mother still had of him from

  before the accident, when he still looked a lot like that

  mess sergeant Mother sometimes brought home with her

  from Fort Ord, the one who kept telling me he was going

  to fix the air conditioner but never did. Only Father’d

  been a lot cleaner and handsomer and younger than the

  mess sergent was, then.

  The sun was going away even though it wasn’t quite

  dark yet and it looked like it was going to rain pretty

  soon. A lot of people were coming back in to shore and

  turning in their aquacycles to the man that rented them

  out, though there were still a couple of chicano-looking

  kids in an aluminum canoe who didn’t look like they

  were going to quit before dark. And I had to be careful, I

  could still remember sitting there on that bench watching Mother arrest that man who’d been killing the ducks under his car. I still had all the clippings that Mother’d
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  saved for me from that, including the ones with my

  picture in them from the Post-Sentinel and the RAG, and

  the other one where they’d had me talk a bit for the Pine

  Cone.

  The highschool kids in the canoe were down at the

  other end of lake. I was watching the ducks and the

  swans out on the lake feeding— I didn’t want to try

  anything with any of the ones up on shore, where

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  somebody could see what happened to it and where there

  wouldn’t be that much skill involved anyway— because I

  had to know where they all were so I could find them

  again if I had to wait until it was almost all the way dark

  before everybody else went away. The swans were mean

  but I didn’t dislike the ducks or anything— though I

  didn’t much like them either, with their mean little

  suspicious eyes and the way they walked around when

  they were on land like they thought they were the most

  important things in the world— but there wasn’t anything else I could do to go get back at something when I felt like this. Just like Father yelling at Mother whenever

  he got to thinking about how really bad it was to be

  paralyzed and that we had to feed him and help him go

  to the bathroom, or Mother hitting him whenever she

  couldn’t stand to look at how horrible it was for him

  anymore.

  A lot of the ducks and swans were up on the shore near

  me looking for food somebody might have left and

  quacking and honking at each other or lying down on

  their stomachs with their heads tucked in and sleeping.

  The swans that were in the water were down at the other

  end of the lake but the ducks in the water were all

  paddling around in groups and quacking at each other. A

  lot of the male mallards were doing that thing they do

  together when they all swim after one of the brown

  females without ever catching her and then they all take

  off together and they chase her through the air but they

  still don’t catch her, and a few of them every now and

  then were doing that thing where they beat their wings

  and sort of get up out of the water like they were standing

  on their tiptoes and beating their chests like Tarzan. But

  most of them were just swimming around and sticking

  their heads down underwater the way they do when

  they’re looking for something to eat down there but

  don’t feel like diving for it, or doing that thing where

  they turn all the way upside down like they’re standing

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  on their heads with their tails sticking straight up out of

  the water.

  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 though 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 squacking 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

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  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

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  the night before and it always stayed out near the middle,

  away from shore and the shallow water where all the<
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  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

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  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

 

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