from the lake. I had about an inch of water in the can in
case the duck needed it.
I went down to the lake a long time before the sun
came up and waited for the sky to get pink and for things
to get bright enough so I could see. Not very many cars
drove by and nobody in any of them paid any attention
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to me, except for one police car but I had all my stuff
hidden and they were both friends of my father’s and
already knew me, so it was all right. I told them I liked to
come out and run around the lake and get some exercise
and one of them said my father used to be just like me,
which made me feel bad for a while even after they left.
The sun came up while I was talking to them and it
was already pretty bright by the time they left so I got my
stuff out and put all the bamboo sections of the fishing
pole together and went after the duck.
It wasn’t all that hard to get the noose around the lily
pads and pull them in to shore but when I got them I saw
that they just seemed to stretch all the way back to the
part of the bottom they’d been floating over. I waited a
moment before I touched the lily pads and the stems,
then tried it. They seemed to be made of some sort of
tough plastic, so I got all the stems together in my hands
and started pulling on them. At first they were real easy
to pull in, like that kind of clothesline that goes on a
spring-reel and that you can stretch out a long way, but
after a while I felt them grab, like when you’re fishing
and you finally reel in enough line to feel a big fish or a
snag on it. I pulled and I could feel the duck on the other
end. It was heavy and didn’t want to come when I yanked
but it didn’t seem to be snagged and it wasn’t fighting me
like a fish or anything and when I quit pulling it just
stayed where it was, so I knew it wasn’t trying to get away
or come after me. I tried pulling on the stems again and
the same thing happened, so I kept pulling it in a little at
a time, ready to let go and run if the duck started moving
on its own.
A candy-red Porsche came by, going a lot faster than it
was supposed to. I just stood still, pretending that all I
was doing was looking out at the water. The Porsche
went by without stopping but now I could see another car
over on the other side of the lake and somebody on his
bicycle going up the back way to the college, so I knew
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that everybody was starting to get up and go to work and
I had to start dragging the duck in a lot faster, without
stopping every few seconds to check it like I’d been
doing.
Pretty soon I could see it and it wasn't a duck at all, it
was more like a big piece of dead wood, a branch about
three feet long and maybe a couple of inches thick, with
four or five broken-off little branches sticking out of it. At
first I thought it was just something I’d snagged and that
when I got it in to shore I’d have to get the lily pad stems
from wrapped around it but then I saw that each stem
came out of the end of a different one of the broken-off
branches.
As soon as I had the branch up out of the water and
into the light it started to change. The ends started
slowly humping in to the middle and the middle started
to bulge out, but everything was happening real, real
slow, like a slug creeping up the porch steps after it rains.
I quick threw the sack over it to shut out the light but I
could see it was still changing underneath until I got the
lily pads in under the sack and out of the light too, and
then it moved slower and slower until it stopped.
There wasn’t anyone else around and the thing was
still too long to get into the can, so I pulled the sack off it
again. It started squeezing itself in some more and
humping out all around the middle, still moving real
slow, while I got the sack open and ready to throw over it
again, but this time so I could push it inside the sack with
the pole. I waited until it wasn’t much bigger than a real
duck, though it didn’t look like a duck any more than it
looked like a branch now, just a big lump of mud. I put
the sack over it open and reached in underneath with the
pole and wedged the pole under it so I could tip it back
and make it fall into the sack, then pushed it back more
and more until it was all the way inside the sack and I
could tie the sack closed. I picked up the sack, making
sure it didn’t get too close to my body. The duck was just
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377
a big round lump in the sack and it didn’t move at all. It
wasn’t too heavy either, maybe about twenty pounds, but
that was still heavy enough to make it a lot of work to get
it up to the place where I had the can hid.
I got the can out of the hedge and put the bag in it, but
even though it wasn’t too big around to go in it was too
long for me to put the top on it, just a little, maybe a
couple of inches, but it was too late to try to open the
sack and let in enough light to make the thing change
some more, so I just left the lid there and carried the can
the rest of the way home and put it in the toolshed
behind the garage, under a bench, before I went back for
the lid. Mother never used the toolshed, it was something
Father’d built for himself back before they had me but
sometimes the mess sergeant would make something out
of wood for us back there, or work on something that
needed fixing. He wasn’t really a bad man, even though I
hated him. So even though there were a lot of cobwebs
and spiders there and it was real dusty and full of other
junk the lights still worked and the shed was in good
enough shape to keep the rain and the sunlight out. It
didn’t have any windows. If you went inside and closed
the door before you turned the lights on nobody could
see that they were turned on from the house.
When I went back to get the lid I decided to check back
at the lake to see if I’d left anything there, but I hadn’t, so
I went back to the shed and put the lid by the can under
the bench, then moved a broken black-and-white TV
that was sitting in the far comer over in front of the can
so that nobody could see the can unless they took the TV
out from in front of it and so that even when the door
was open the light from inside wouldn’t touch the can.
I’d been thinking about what I had to do for a long time
and I had it all figured out, or most of it, anyway.
I even knew whose duck it was. James Patrick Dubic,
the one I’d helped mother arrest and put away in prison.
There couldn’t be two people that hated ducks that
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much, and in some of the clippings Mother’d saved for
me they
talked about how smart he was and how good he
was with computers. I’d figured it out for sure that time
I’d seen The Invisible Boy on TV because I’d already
figured out that the duck had to be a robot or something
just pretending to look like a duck the way it was pretending to look like a lump of mud right now. I got out my clippings just after I saw the movie so I could be sure
what James Patrick Dubic looked like and after that I’d
been watching all the people sitting on the benches and
walking around the lake, but he wasn’t ever there, at least
not unless he’d changed an awful lot.
I locked the shed and left the duck there in its can until
Saturday night. That way if it had solar batteries maybe
they’d run down enough so that even if it wanted to hurt
me it wouldn’t be able to. Also, if it tried to escape I
wouldn’t be there when it tried and so it couldn’t hurt
me.
Saturday night Mother had to work. I asked her before
she left for the station what’d happened to Dubic, if he
was still in prison or if they’d let him out or put him in a
mental hospital or anything. She said she didn’t know
but she’d ask and try to find out for me if I wanted. I said
yes. It was still early when she drove away, about six-
thirty, so it wasn’t nearly dark yet.
We’d all had dinner together and Mother’d wheeled
Father into the living room to watch the movies on the
cable TV chain so I didn’t have anything to do except
watch them with Father until it got dark enough.
Around nine I went back to the shed. I had a flashlight,
so when I unlocked the door and pushed it open I shone
the light in through it before I went in to turn the real
light on, but the duck was still in its can behind the TV
set. I closed the door again and dragged the can out. It
was heavier than I’d remembered, maybe twenty-five or
thirty-five pounds. I pulled the bag out of the can and put
it down, then got between it and the door and opened the
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379
door so I could run out of it and get away from the duck
if it came after me. Then I turned the lights off and used
the flashlight to see by when I dumped the duck out of
the sack.
It was still just a big lump, though some of the mud
was dry and falling off. It smelled like mud and like
sewers. I poked at it with the wooden end of a hoe and it
didn’t do anything even when I poked it again harder, so
I turned on the lights. I was right there by the door with
my hand on the light switch waiting for it to do something but it didn’t do anything, even when I poked it with the hoe again. I watched it for three or four hours but it
never did anything. I was afraid I’d broken it somehow
but if I hadn’t maybe I’d be able to handle it safely at
night with the lights on, which was good. I put the sack
back over it and tipped it back into the sack with the hoe
handle, then pushed the sack back under the bench
behind the TV.
Mother was home all day the next day and she and
Father had some of his old friends from back when he
was on the Marina police force, back before they’d
combined it with the fire department there, over for a
barbecue. They made hamburgers and spareribs in the
black metal cooker in the backyard, then sat around
drinking beer out of cans and talking about what
things’d been like before Father’s accident and how good
a cop he’d been. I couldn’t get back into the toolshed
with them there. Father and Mother seemed to be having
a pretty good time, like they liked each other again.
Mother had Father’s shirt off so he could get a bit of a tan
and one of the other men had his shirt off too. After a
while I got really bored and uncomfortable so I went up
to Beth’s house. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, not like
I usually did, so I put my swimming suit on under my
clothes and rode my bike up to her house but her brother
had all his friends over to use the pool and her cousin
was there too so she couldn’t go away with me even
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though she didn’t like any of them any more than I did. I
went down to Thirty-one Flavors and got myself a
double cone and a banana split before I went down to the
wharf. I watched the tourists there for a while. It was a
very nice day, all hot and clear, and there were two sea
otters playing in the water. There was some sort of
convention at the Doubletree Inn too, so there were too
many people on the wharf and even though the organ-
grinder had his monkey passing the tin cup and everything the tourists were all old and drunk and boring, worse than the golfers always were even. One of them
threw a beer can at one of the sea otters but he missed. I
told the traffic cop who was keeping them from driving
out on the wharf when they weren’t supposed to anyway,
and he made the man leave.
After that I went over to the secret beach behind the
Navy School that nobody’s supposed to use and went
swimming for a while. The water wasn’t all that cold but
it was still pretty cold, so when the sun started to go down
I went back home. Mother and Father were still out back
with their friends. Father had his shirt back on and he
was starting to make nasty comments about Mother
every now and then even though he still seemed to be
having a pretty good time. I didn’t understand everything he said but I understood most of it, and when I didn’t understand something I could tell whether or not
it was mean from the look on Mother’s face. One of his
friends didn’t look very happy but the other one’d drunk
as much as Father or maybe even more and he was all
loud and happy. Mother was pretending she loved Father
a lot and that the only reason he was saying all those
awful things about her was because he wasn’t grateful for
all she did for him but I don’t think anybody but Father
and me noticed what she was saying.
After a while I asked her about Dubic but she said she
hadn’t had a chance to check up on him yet and she’d
find out for me Monday.
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381
Monday she didn’t have to go to the station until late. I
tried to tell her I was sick and couldn’t go to school but
she had a hangover and got really angry and hit me, she
said she had enough sick people in the house without me
trying to get away with things by pretending to be sick
too when I wasn’t, so I had to go anyway.
She wasn’t home when I got back but she’d put
Father’s wheelchair by the window because there wasn’t
anything he wanted to watch on TV and that way he
could watch the birds and the squirrels and the flowers in
the backyard if he didn’t feel like reading. I couldn’t go
back into the toolshed with him there so I put another
magazine in his reader, then went down to the lake and
The next morning I got up before it was light out and
went back to the shed. The hinges on the door were rusty
and made some noise when I opened it but not enough to
wake anybody up. I used the flashlight to make sure the
bag with the duck in it was still under the bench before I
closed the door behind me and turned on the lights, then
I oiled the hinges before I got the duck out from under
the bench. I turned the lights off again and used the
flashlight to see by while I got it out of the sack. It still
looked like it was wet, even though the mud on it was
almost all dry on both sides when pieces of it fell off.
I wasn’t sure whether it was safe to touch it or not even
after I poked it with the hoe again and it still didn’t do
anything, but I already knew I had to learn more about
how it worked if I was going to be able to make it do what
I wanted, so I opened the door again. It was still dark
outside. I got on the door side of the duck before I
reached out and touched one of the spots where it was
still coated with dry mud real quick.
It didn’t do anything. I pushed it a little, to see if I
could feel it react to me, but no motor started running
inside it or anything. I pushed it again a little harder, still
on one of the mud-covered spots, then touched it for just
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a second on one of the spots that looked like it was made
out of wet muck. But it wasn’t really wet at all, just a
little cold and all smooth and slick and sort of greasy,
like the bottoms of those nonstick frying pans when you
just rinse them out for a few days without using detergent on them. And it still hadn’t done anything.
I looked at it for a while, trying to see if I could tell any
difference between the different parts of it, but it was still
just a lump and the same everywhere. So I touched it
again in a different place and then in still another place,
but the third time I let my hand stay there touching it a
lot longer, maybe almost a minute, before I took it away.
Then I pushed it again, only a lot harder this time.
I sat down and looked at it again for a while, trying to
get my courage up, then I picked it up real quick before I
dropped it and ran back to the door to see what it did.
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 47