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,
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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 metal 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
The Lurking Duck
369
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
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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 piec
e, 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 Lurking Duck
371
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,
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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 Monte 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
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373
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.
But then again I’d already seen it do that half-flying
thing where it came partway up out of the water when it
attacked the other ducks so for all I knew it could fly all
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the way. And I didn’t really know how it dragged the
ducks and swans under or what it did to them there.
Perhaps it had big knives hidden in its wings or hooks, or
maybe even it had some sort of built-in spear gun it used
to harpoon them from the bottom so it could reel them
down and then cut them up into little pieces there in the
mud.
But the real thing that was wrong with trying to catch
it at night in the dark was that 1 wouldn’t be able to see it
unless I used a light, so I wouldn’t know what it was
doing; and if I did use a light that might wake it up, and
anyway, somebody might see the light and come to find
out what I was doing. So I finally decided that what I had
to do was try to pull it out some real bright morning
when it was near to shore, just after the sun came up but
before it was ready to come up to the surface on its own.
That way, maybe it would still be only half tumed-on
again, and even if it was all the way awake, maybe it
would just try to swim back out to the middle and start
sunbathing a little early.
I bought some plastic rope, the kind you use to tie
things on cars and trailers, and a heavy khaki sack from
the Army-Navy surplus store to keep the duck dark in
while I got it away from the lake and into the ten-gallon
can. I’d cleaned the can out a long time ago, right after I
got it from the station, and it had a lid on it, so I could
shut the duck tight inside it where none of the light could
get in to turn it on when I took it home.
I waited until one night when I saw it was down in the
mud close enough to shore on my side of the lake, then
hid the can in somebody’s hedge about half a block up
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 46