But it didn’t do anything and I was starting to get really
afraid that I’d broken it somehow.
The sky was beginning to go pink and purple. I picked
the lump up again and took it over to the door and put it
down close enough so the sunlight coming through the
doorway would hit it soon. The door opened into the
shed so I couldn’t put the lump right inside, it had to be
back a bit so I could swing the door shut to keep it locked
up inside if anything went wrong, so I had it maybe two
feet back from the door. I tied a long piece of string to the
door handle so I could stand outside away from the shed
and pull the door shut without coming near the duck if I
had to.
About half an hour after the sun finally came up all the
way the light coming through the doorway started to hit
the duck, and after about ten more minutes it started to
change again the way it’d changed that other time, just
after I pulled it out of the water, only even slower this
time. It humped itself in tighter and tighter, just like it
had when it’d been changing from a log into a lump,
until it was almost the same size as a real duck, maybe
The Lurking Duck
383
just a little bigger, and sort of the shape of a duck, only it
still didn’t have a head or a tail or any wings or feathers
or legs. While it was doing this all the dry mud on it
cracked and fell off so the whole thing was wet-looking
and glistening like it had just come out of the water. That
took almost another hour and it was starting to get late
so I pulled the door shut with the string and then locked
it and hid the rope and went back inside the house.
Mother was already up and in the bathroom. I’d
forgotten to close the curtains to keep anyone from
seeing what I was doing out back and the bathroom had
two big windows beside the skylight, but she hadn’t
noticed me or she would have come out to find out what I
was doing. I put her coffee on for her, then got Father up
and helped him into his wheelchair and took him to the
bathroom while she made French toast for all of us for
breakfast. He was really dirty for some reason so I had to
clean the bathroom up a bit before I took my own shower
and finished getting ready.
The phone rang while I was still in the shower. When I
sat down to eat Mother told me she’d just gotten a phone
call and that a lot of other cops had caught some sort of
weird ten-day flu from a bunch of Australian wine
growers here for a convention and that she was going to
have to be filling in for all sorts of people and that
everyone’s hours were going to be messed up even worse
than usual for a long time and she wasn’t going to be able
to come home very often for the next few weeks. I wasn’t
sure but I thought she was lying to us and that she had
somewhere else she wanted to go for a while, maybe up
to Lake Tahoe again with her mess sergeant. I asked her
whether she’d found out anything about James Patrick
Dubic for me yet and she said she’d forgotten again and
that she was sorry but she was going to be too busy to
check for me for a while now, and why was I so interested
all of a sudden? 1 told her I’d found all the old newspaper
clippings while I was cleaning my room and she seemed
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to think that answered her question because she didn’t
ask me any more about it.
Father said something about liberal judges and parole
boards and how you sometimes had to exaggerate the
truth a little because otherwise they’d ignore half of what
a criminaPd really done and let him out when he was
dangerous and should be kept in jail for a lot longer.
Mother agreed with him and they talked about police
work for a while. Then they talked a while about getting
him a new TV, the kind with the videotape built into it, .
so he could record his favorite programs and movies and
stuff that was on after he wanted to go to sleep, and we all
thought that was a good idea even though Mother said
we’d have to wait a while to get enough money to pay for
it because she already owed too much right now.
She finished her coffee and we wheeled him into the
living room in front of the TV, then I set up his reader so
he could use it if he wanted to and made sure the switch
to change from the TV to the reader was where he liked it
on his shoulder and strapped on tight enough so it
wouldn’t slip back where he couldn’t get at it if he
nudged it too hard with his chin. I still had a little time
before I had to go to school but I wanted to wait until
dark before I opened the shed again so I could see if the
duck had done any more changing or moving around in
the dark after I’d shut the door. So what I did is I took
the binoculars down to the lake and watched the ducks
through them for a while to make sure there wasn’t
another robot duck there already to replace the one I’d
taken, and at the same time I checked to make sure there
wasn’t anybody else down at the lake looking for the
duck the same way I was, or anyone who looked like
James Patrick Dubic. But there wasn’t anybody else
looking and there didn’t seem to be anything special
happening with the ducks on the lake, so I went to
school. After school I checked again but there still wasn’t
anything worth looking at happening.
The Lurking Duck
385
Father was asleep in his chair. I closed all the curtains
so he couldn’t see out to the backyard, then went back
and tied my string to the shed door again and unlocked it
and pushed it open.
The duck had changed in the dark this time, but just a
little. It was still in almost the same place but something
had started to push out where its neck and tail were going
to be and it looked a little different where its wings were
going to be. It was starting to look like a real duck or one
of those wooden decoys, but all covered with mud. But it
was too late in the day and the sun wasn’t coming
directly in through the door anymore so it didn’t do any
more changing.
I heard the telephone ringing and yanked the door to
the shed shut by pulling on the string real hard but didn’t
have time to lock it before I ran back into the house. It
was Mother, saying she wasn’t going to be home that
night or all the next day and asking me if I had everything I needed and if there was enough food in the refrigerator and freezer. I checked and told her there was
and she said if I ran out of anything or needed help to
come down to the station and one of her friends there
would take care of it for me, she’d tell them I might be
coming in so it would be all right. I said OK and she hung
up.
I was really tired because I’d been getting up so early
&nb
sp; for so long so I set the alarm clock to wake me up in time
to fix dinner for Father and took a nap. When I got up I
made him macaroni and cheese with tuna fish in it then
stayed up and watched television with him until it was
time to put him to bed. He said it was a good thing I was
superstrong for my age and not just tall and skinny when
I was getting him into the tub, because even though he
was still mainly skinny he was awful flabby and he’d be
getting fat pretty soon, so moving him would be getting
to be a lot of work before I was much older. I told him the
exercise was good for me and anyway all I had to do was
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Scott Baker
wheel his chair from one room to another every now and
then and then help him in and out of the bath and
anyway I was used to it. He said, thank you for saying
that Julie, but I know how hard it is on you and your
Mother with me like this, and then he started talking
about how wonderful Mother had been before the accident, when she hadn’t had to take care of him all the time, and that made me feel bad for him again and at the
same time like Mother a little more, even though I knew
that half the reason he was telling me all this was because
even though he knew it was true he wanted me to tell him
it wasn’t so he could pretend to himself it wasn’t his
fault.
Wednesday morning when the sun came in through the
door and hit the thing and its lily pads it finally finished
changing all the way back into a duck. The head and the
tail and the wings pushed their way out from inside until
the duck was the right shape, even though it still didn’t
have any legs and was all smooth and brown, like one of
those pottery ducks people use for sugar bowls.
It started reeling the lily pads in. The stems got shorter
and shorter and at the same time the lily pads themselves
were closing up like flowers that had been open going
back to being buds, only they were even tighter than that,
like rolled up pieces of paper, so that by the time the
stems had been reeled all the way back into the duck they
weren’t any bigger around than the stems had been and
they just followed them into the duck.
And while the duck had been reeling in the stems its
skin had been changing. First all over its surface a lot of
things like tiny doors had opened, only none of them
were much bigger than the lead in a pencil and they were
all over the surface, everywhere, so it was like the whole
duck was a Venetian blind that somebody had opened.
Then the doors all closed again, but on the other side, so
what had been on the back of them and hidden inside the
duck before was now on the outside where you could see
The Lurking Duck
387
it and you could see that the duck had what looked like
feathers again.
And then the orange legs came pushing out from the
bottom of the duck and it started to try to swim. It
wasn’t trying to stand up or anything like a real duck on
land, it was trying to swim like it thought it was underwater and had to get to the surface.
A few seconds later it stopped making swimming
motions, either because it thought it had made it to the
surface or because it had figured out it wasn’t in the
water. I couldn’t tell which. But it still wasn’t standing or
lying like a duck on land, it had its feet sticking out
backwards under it so it was tilted forward a bit with its
tail in the air. That didn’t seem to bother it, though, and
it started preening itself like it always did after it came
up out of the mud in the morning even though there
wasn’t any mud on it.
When it finished preening itself it looked all around
just like a real duck deciding what direction it wanted to
swim in, only it was still tilted forward like a wheelbarrow. It kept looking around for a long time and I wondered what it thought about being in the shed, if it
knew there was anything wrong or what to do about it.
Then it started swimming for the door, out into the light,
only it wasn’t using its wings to help it and it wasn’t
walking, just paddling its legs, but even so that pushed it
slowly across the floor so that maybe ten minutes later it
came to the doorsill and then it hopped over the sill just
like a duck in the water hopping over something even
though it went back to trying to swim as soon as it was
outside in the backyard.
It looked around again as soon as it was out of the shed
and then changed its direction, paddling across the grass
to the center of the yard as far away from the fence and
the shed and the house as it could get, with its chest still
pointing down and its legs sticking out behind it and its
tail up, so it looked more like it was trying to dig its way
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Scott Baker
into the lawn than like it was walking. But it got to the
center of the yard finally and stayed there, all stiff and
fake-looking now that it was out of the water.
I was way back at the other end of the yard, maybe
thirty feet away from it, but since the sun was shining
bright I knew it wouldn’t attack me if I got closer to it, so
I came forward a bit, until I was maybe twenty feet away
from it, and then a little more, until I was fifteen feet
away from it, then ten, but I was afraid to get any closer
right then and I went back to the toolshed and closed the
door, then went in and got Father up and fixed his
breakfast for him, then put him in the living room with
the TV and his detective novel. I had him facing away
from the window and I had the curtains closed anyway,
so there was no way he could see what I was doing in the
backyard.
I told him I wasn’t feeling Very well and didn’t want to
go to school today and he said, OK, if the school called
just give him the phone and he’d say I was sick and he
wouldn’t tell Mother. It was the only thing he was really
ever able to do for me and he did it whenever he could,
even though Mother sometimes got real mad at him for it
and yelled at him and even hit him.
It was still bright out so I went back out into the yard
and tried coming close to the duck again. I came up
behind it and got maybe ten feet away from it again but it
still didn’t seem to notice me, even when I circled
around so I was beside it and then in front of it where a
real duck would have been able to see me.
Then I thought about those old men and women you
see with their metal detectors looking for money
people’ve dropped on beaches so I went back into the
shed and got the hoe out and came at the duck with the
metal end, real slowly. I got a lot closer than fifteen feet,
maybe even less than a foot away from it before it started
to try to get away, and then I spent a while just chasing it
around the yard, but always making sure I kept it out of
&
nbsp; The Lurking Duck
389
the bright sunlight and away from the shade near the
house and fence and under the trees, even though it
looked so clumsy and pompous and stupid, even stupider than a real duck. When I finally quit chasing it it worked its way back into the middle of the yard.
Only that wasn’t good enough because out in the lake
I’d watched it go away from two or three rowboats made
out of wood. So maybe it had two systems, some sort of
metal detector and some sort of thing to keep it away
from wood. (And a third system, too, to find the ducks
and swans with.) I tried it with the wooden end of the
hoe and it wouldn’t do anything until I actually touched
it with the wooden end of the hoe, and then it just tried
to move a few feet away before it stopped, just far enough
so that if the hoe’d been a branch the duck wouldn’t have
gotten snagged on it.
Maybe it had some sort of radar or sonar system to
keep it from getting too close to big objects, like boats or
piers. So I tried to use the metal end of the hoe to herd it
close to the side of the fence that was still in the sun, but
it wouldn’t go close to the fence, when it was maybe ten
feet away from it the duck would start to go off at an
angle sideways so it never got any closer.
The phone rang. I ran inside and got it and took it into
the living room and held it up to Father’s ear and mouth
without saying anything. It was the school, asking why I
wasn’t there. But we had an agreement, even though we’d
never come right out and talked about it. He said I was
sick, some sort of flu, that it probably wasn’t serious but
that even so I wouldn’t be able to come in until at least
tomorrow or maybe the day after and that, no, I hadn’t
been to a doctor and I wouldn’t have a doctor’s excuse
because he was my father and it was his decision to make
whether or not he let me go to school, he knew perfectly
well what a flu was like and what you had to do to get
better from one and he wasn’t going to pay a doctor just
to write me a note and say that there was a lot of that
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Scott Baker
going around so not to worry, and, no, he wasn’t going to
write a note for me either, because my mother was away
working for a few days and he happened to be paralyzed
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 48