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.
398
Scott Baker
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
The Lurking Duck
399
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. 1 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 leam
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
400
Scott Baker
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
The Lurking Duck
401
its wings wasn’t quite enough to make it really fly it was
still close enough so that the duck was sort of halfrunning and half-hopping across the lawn and it was going as fast as 1 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 en
ough 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
disgusting 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,
402
Scott Baker
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 way 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 to 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.
Unless I killed Father first. He wouldn’t mind, not
really, not if he was drunk enough and I put two or three
Librium in his beer so he wouldn’t feel anything. He
The Lurking Duck
403
probably would’ve killed himself a long time ago, if he’d
been able to and if his mother hadn’t raised him a
Catholic. I’d heard him tell Mother that a lot of times
when he wanted her to really know how horrible she
made him feel.
And then the duck would go back to being just a log
again and I could hide it away until I was fifteen or
sixteen before I used it to get Mother. Nobody’d ever
guess what it was if I kept it hidden someplace dark.
Only what if when the other police came all they found
were my footprints and they took the log in to examine it
because maybe they found blood on it? If they didn’t
figure out what it really was they might blame me and
then be sure it was me when I got Mother later, and if
they did figure out what it was they wouldn’t blame me
but 1 wouldn’t be able to use it again. And all they’d have
to do was pick it up and they’d know it was too heavy to
be a real log.
But what if they never found his body, he just disappeared, like those ducks that my duck pulled under out in the lake?
What did it do with their bodies? Why hadn’t I ever
found even a feather with a piece of skin attached to it?
The thing that came out of my duck’s stomach looked
like some sort of cross between a drill and a meatgrinder.
Maybe it ground up their bodies so small there weren’t
any pieces left.
He wouldn’t feel anything if there was enough Librium
in his beer and he drank enough beer. Or if he did it
wouldn’t be much, not much worse than it was like for
him every day just to be alive anyway.
And with him gone Mother wouldn’t be angry with me
all the time, wouldn’t always be finding something else
for me to do around the house so she could go get away
from him. She might even go back to being more like she
was before, the way he told me she’d been when she
married him.
404
Scott Baker
And if she didn’t, I’d still have the duck. But I had to
find out what happened to the bodies of the ducks my
duck pulled under when it killed them.
Father was watching a football game turned up loud. I
went into the living room, refilled his beer bottle.
The duck was still back in the shed. I went into the
bathroom and checked. It was in the comer of the house,
with big windows on each side and a skylight Father’d
put in when he first bought the house. There’d be bright
sunlight in it for the rest of the afternoon.
I opened the windows as wide as possible, so the glass
wouldn’t screen out any of the sunlight in case that made
a difference like it did when you wanted to get a tan, then
got the sack out of the shed and dumped the log out of it
into the bathtub. It was a big, big bathtub, all long and
deep, made out of that white stuff they use for sinks and
bathtubs and toilet bowls. The only metal in it was the
faucet and the drain plug.
Maybe forty-five minutes later the duck was floating at
the far end of the tub. It didn’t seem bothere
d at all by
the walls around it. Maybe they were pushing the same
on it from all four sides so it didn’t have to try to go
anywhere else.
I put the headless goose in the microwave until it got
hot, then tossed it in the tub. I used the curtain hook to
pull the curtain for the skylight, then quick went back
out into the hall and closed the bathroom door. I ran out
the back door and around and closed the shutters for
both windows, not quite all the way because I didn’t
want the duck to think it was nighttime, but enough so
there wasn’t very much light coming in.
And my duck dipped its bill in the water like it was
taking a drink, then dived down under the goose,
grabbed it in its meathook-claws and used its meatgrind-
er drill to rip it into tiny, tiny pieces. It took about five
minutes, and then the duck left what was left of the goose
on the bottom of the tub like some sort of mud and went
back to floating at the other end.
The Lurking Duck
405
I opened the shutters wide to let the sun in, then got
the hoe so I could hold the metal between me and the
duck, even though I didn’t think it would attack me with
the sun shining on it. 1 went back in the bathroom and
pulled back the skylight curtain with the curtain hook,
then kept the duck at the far end of the tub with the hoe
while I pulled the bathtub plug.
What was left of the goose drained out of the tub with
the water, all except a few small fragments of bone. And
when I picked them up they weren’t at all hard and
brittle like they should’ve been, they were all sort of soft
and rubbery, like pieces of cauliflower. So the duck had
to have something, some kind of poison or acid it used,
to make sure that even the little pieces that were left
dissolved.
But if it could do that I didn’t know why it left the
headless ducks floating on the surface of the water every
night. Unless it was James Patrick Dubic’s way of
making sure that when he got out of jail he could come
back to the park and watch his robot duck killing ducks
for him even if what they’d done to him made it so he
couldn’t touch the ducks to kill them himself.
I ran the water down the drain for a few minutes. It
didn’t seem to be stopped up.
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 50