Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  We were having dinner at our friend Claudia’s house one evening. Linda was praising the baked vegetables while I slumped in my chair next to the vegetable tureen. Claudia convinced me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist to try Zoloft, which she had just begun taking with good results. “It will make an enormous change in your life,” she insisted. “I heard about this old guy at a nursing home, he was one of these downtrodden guys people love to run over, and Zoloft worked wonders for that little man.” I considered this all the endorsement I needed.

  DR. GLASER CAME close to proving the old saw that psychiatrists have more neuroses than the neurotics they treat. Tall, stiff with unease at being human, and wearing the demeanor of a fussy choral-group leader, along with a mustard-colored suit, he drifted into the waiting room and introduced himself. When I offered him my hand, he took it as reluctantly as if I had presented him with a halibut. Inside a charmless office that might have belonged to a loan officer, I gave him a detailed description of my bedspread concealment during Stanley’s sickness, prolonged sadness at Bertha’s passing, bouts of chair-gripping nervousness at breakfast, and panic attacks dating back to the Ford administration. “I just finished reading Listening to Prozac,” I said, “and it sounds like I’m living in what the author calls ‘the penumbra of depression.’ I would like to try an antianxiety drug and see if it helps.”

  “A parrot?” he inquired, after my outpouring had ended. “Was it a real parrot?” he asked in a tone of voice usually reserved for dealing with dangerous individuals. Immediately I understood the folly of choosing a mental health professional from the Yellow Pages based solely on proximity to home.

  “Yes, it was a real parrot. An African grey parrot.” I answered. “Named Stanley Sue,” I heedlessly added, though he ignored this last ripe piece of Freudian fruit.

  “Which antianxiety medication would you like to try?”

  “I’ve heard good things about Zoloft,” I ventured, amazed that getting brain chemistry–altering prescription drugs should be this effortless. I had anticipated the kind of resistance my physician had mustered when I had asked him about serotonin drugs. Instead of writing me a prescription, he had suggested I take up racquetball instead.

  “Zoloft is an antianxiety drug,” Dr. Glaser agreed, “and the side effects are minimal. What dosage would you like to try?”

  “What would you recommend?” I asked, uncertain how my advice on this point could matter.

  “The lowest clinical dosage is fifty milligrams. Would you like to start out on one hundred milligrams?” His faint smile conveyed a measure of genuine pleasure.

  “You’re the doctor,” I rejoined weakly.

  “I’ll have to ask you a few questions first.” He paused before cracking open his laptop. “Will the computer bother you? Some people don’t like the computer.”

  “The computer doesn’t bother me.”

  “If you’re sure.” On the Formica-topped desk behind him sat a second computer with a full-size monitor displaying the screensaver Johnny Castaway. The cartoon depicted the misadventures of a luckless soul marooned on a desert island, which struck me as a bad choice for a psychiatrist’s office. Reading from a file on his laptop, Dr. Glaser took me through a series of questions concerning my medical history, upbringing, education, and propensity for suicide. At the conclusion of each question, he looked me squarely in the middle of my forehead. I was unsure whether he had a vision problem or was as adverse to ocular intimacy with his patients as he was to shaking hands. Lowering his head as if embarrassed by this aspect of his profession, he delivered the last queries in a monotone. “Do people follow you? Do you hear voices? Do people plot against you?” He spoke so quietly, he might have been talking to himself. I wanted to truthfully answer “sometimes” to each of these poorly worded questions in order to score semantic points, but decided it was better to tell him no and make a fast escape from the island.

  Four days later, I experienced my first Zoloft jolt. Poised on the living room couch with a half-hour to go until Wheel of Fortune, I was enveloped by an energized calm. The world and my outlook on the world became suffused with light. “It’s as if I’ve had this cotton in my head for all these years, and now it’s fallen out,” I explained to Linda, who smiled warily in response. Anxious to share my newly acquired Buddha nature, I strode upstairs and petted Penny. Neither of us exchanged a word, but as I stared at her, I received a revelation. I suddenly saw her as a being. Not as a pet or an underling, but as a complex personality. On the one hand, her face and eyes revealed the same trapped intensity as a human soul stuck in a physical body, but on the other hand her depth far exceeded any anthropomorphizing I might throw at her. She was limitless and unknowable, and I was honored to have her as my friend. Then I changed her litter and floated back downstairs.

  The next day, my mood was even brighter. Under a spell of unusual ambitiousness, I devoted my Saturday to long neglected tasks around the house rather than glumly avoiding work per my usual weekend schedule. I carted animal cages outdoors and washed them to a shine with a high-pressure hose nozzle. I revved up the gasoline-powered trimmer and decimated an army of weeds between the side yard and the barn. The evergreen tree under which we’d buried Bertha had succumbed to an unknown blight, and Linda had repeatedly encouraged me to hire a man to chop it down. Now, wielding my chain saw for only the sixth time since I had purchased it and somehow mastering my timidity at its ability to maim, I lopped down the tree, cut the trunk and branches into matchsticks, and scattered them to the winds beyond our fence. Toppling the evergreen revealed a three-foot-high redbud tree standing almost on top of Bertha’s grave. Neither of us had ever seen the tree before.

  “It’s a gift from God,” said Linda.

  The Zoloft, as it turned out, was not. As the day progressed, I burned too intensely with energy that was not my own, a 110-volt bulb spliced into a 220-volt line. By Sunday, my nerves were acting up. By Monday, I was a blubbering wreck barely able to quiver into the office. En route to an out-of-town relative’s house the following Saturday, I vaulted out of the car and collapsed wailing on the grass next to a freeway mileage marker. A call to my psychiatrist brought a surprisingly lighthearted response. “You might want to play with your dosage a little bit. Try cutting it in half.”

  The half dosage turned out to be just the half ticket I needed to feel half human again. Events like eating an egg at breakfast felt substantially less threatening, and I could actually make it through an entire morning sitting at my desk at work for periods of up fifteen minutes at a continuous stretch. While I couldn’t claim to have achieved the meditative state of mind I had hoped pharmaceuticals might bestow upon me, neither was I any longer a teakettle on rolling boil. I happily made due with simmer.

  Things could have been a lot worse. I could have been a duck. A phone call from my sister, Joan, brought the news that her husband, Jack, had rescued a Muscovy duck from the parking lot of the automotive-parts business where he maintained the inventory database. The escaped domestic animal had blundered onto the property to search beneath a Dumpster for tidbits from employee lunches. Jack’s coworkers welcomed the hungry visitor with a mirthful stone-throwing contest until Jack eased the competition to a halt. Flinging a jacket over the bird, he caught her easily, stashing her in his truck until quitting time.

  Stretching our kitchen phone cord to the limit, Linda relayed Joan’s description on a sentence-by-sentence basis of how they had managed to obtain the duck, while I sat in the bedroom, eyes foolishly brushing the same two sentences of a mystery novel. “Now they don’t know what to do with the poor thing,” Linda reported. “They would love to keep the duck, but they don’t have anywhere to put her,” she relayed. “She wants to know if we could possibly take her.” She pointed the handset at me from the doorway to the living room. “Here, talk to your sister.”

  I waved off the phone in surrender. “Okay.”

  “Don’t we have room for a duck?” Linda urged, certain she h
ad misunderstood my answer. She tightened the phone cord even more to move a step into the bedroom, giving new meaning to the concept of a telephone extension.

  “I’m perfectly happy to take the duck,” I assured her. At that moment, a lifetime with a duck seemed a small price to pay for avoiding her otherwise inescapable argument that a duck wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Having heard that line of reasoning speciously applied to a rabbit and a parrot, I never wanted to hear it again. Anyway, two factors stood in the duck’s corner. First, we owned a barn large enough to house a family of duck-billed dinosaurs. And the barn was situated far enough from the house that with luck I would have little involvement in the duck’s upbringing, maintenance, and walks at the end of a leash. Second, we had visited a farmer who extolled the quiet voices of his female Muscovies. According to him, they made a gentle rasping sound inaudible at fifty feet.

  “We can take her?” asked Linda delightedly, when she understood that I had caved in. “He said we can take her,” Linda told my sister. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to have a duck.” Averting her face from the phone, she passed along the news to me. “I’ve always wanted a duck.”

  It had been just after dinner when Joan called, but in the inky recesses of the barn it seemed closer to midnight. Instead of expecting a duck to settle into such gloomy accommodations, we cordoned off the workroom from the rest of the basement with a plastic kitchen gate that Binky had once chewed through, establishing an equally gloomy area for the Muscovy that was at least inside the house. Linda spread two weeks’ worth of newspapers on the floor while I studied a wall bristling with six hand tools that had so far seen employment only in pen- and fence-building projects. I had hoped I’d never have to pick them up again, but I now experienced a twinge of foreboding.

  Wearing a buckskin fringed jacket, Joan swept in with a beer in one hand and a large pet carrier in the other—a much larger pet carrier than I had anticipated.

  “Didn’t you say, ‘a poor little duck?’” I asked her. She dismissed me with the joyful laugh of an older sister not only relieving herself of a burden, but also putting that burden onto her brother.

  “Let’s see her!” Linda cried.

  “Come on out, duck,” commanded Joan, setting the carrier on the workroom floor and stepping back behind us to enjoy the fun.

  “I think the duck needs room,” I explained as an excuse to step behind Joan. A serpentlike neck capped with a salt-and-pepper head emerged from the open door. As the Muscovy regarded us, a crest of sparse feathers atop her skull shot up like a quiver of arrows. As I regarded the Muscovy, I was morbidly transfixed by a fleshy red mask that extended from the base of her upper beak to encircle both wild eyes. She drew herself out of the carrier, raising her head to its normal height, doubling her dimensions to my expectations. This was a formidable duck. Populations of escaped Muscovies have established themselves in parks across America and in the Falcon Dam region of Texas, prompting an entry in Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Birds, which calls the species, “a clumsy, black, goose-like duck.” The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America describes the Muscovy as “bulky.” Our duck was twice as large as a female Mallard and far more massive from her chest to the flat, wide tail that wiggled nervously as her head tilted and swiveled to appraise us from various directions.

  “Hah!” laughed my sister. “That’s one grateful-looking duck.”

  “She looks annoyed to me,” I answered, calculating the height of the plastic gate behind me in relation to the angle of my tensed body.

  If the staff at National Geographic was correct about the “bulky” epithet, Roger Tory Peterson was even more on the mark with the “clumsy.” Fearlessly approaching the duck, Linda set out a ceramic soup bowl of water. Then, in charming innocence, I watched her scoop out and into another bowl a mixture of cracked corn and grains—known as scratch feed—from the first bag of hundreds and hundreds of bags I was destined to eventually lug into the basement. She set the bowl on the floor next to the water. Rather than scarf up the food as expected, the duck ran underneath the wooden workbench, turned around, ran through the bowls of food and water, knocking them over, and hid in an especially dark area beneath the aluminum workbench. Linda dutifully cleaned up the scattered grain, spread another week’s worth of newspapers on top of the spilled water, and replaced the cereal bowls with more substantial, less unstable plastic buckets.

  Before bedtime, the two of us crept downstairs to dowse the lights, only to find the Muscovy dunking her head in the water, splashing the room and ruining a second helping of scratch feed.

  “We’ll have to buy a pool for the barn,” Linda announced.

  “A pool?”

  “A plastic wading pool. I saw some up at the dime store.”

  “They’ve got them at the hardware store, too. Half price. End of summer sale.”

  Linda shook her head. “Those are with the stupid Ninja Turtle patterns. I don’t like the way they look.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I volunteered to carry the Muscovy, which Linda had named Daphne, to the barn while Linda cleaned up the disaster area that had formerly been our workroom.

  “Be careful,” she cautioned me, when I bent over to pick up the duck.

  “Do you think she’ll bite?”

  “It’s her wings you need to be careful of,” she warned, relating the story of how a goose had almost knocked her out with a pinion to the jaw years ago.

  I encircled the duck with both arms, clutching her tightly to my chest, but aside from managing a couple of energy bursts that gave me an indication of her strength, she didn’t put up a struggle. Once I was inside the barn, the thought struck me that I was actually using the building for its intended purpose. Previously I had viewed the barn the same way a visitor to Italy might view the ruins of Pompeii—as a relic of a lost way of life. Surveying the architecture of cow stanchions and smaller pens had never failed to fill me with a grateful superiority to the agrarian beings who had come before me. Now I was one of them.

  When I followed Linda back to the barn later that afternoon, we were surprised to find Daphne perched on top of a wooden stanchion four feet off the ground. “My chickens used to roost in trees every night,” Linda told me, adding to my storehouse of information I could never use. As she spun the plastic pool into the duck’s part of the barn, I attached a hose to an all-season hydrant that had waited its entire life near the middle door of the barn for this very moment. The duck watched with disinterest as we filled the blandly blue non–Ninja Turtle pool, then flapped heavily to the cement floor when I wandered over to check the progress of the water. Linda’s gleeful smile faded as the moments ticked by without the portable pond attracting Daphne. Linda opened the waist-high gate to urge the duck to take to water, but almost instantly this act evolved into Linda’s chasing the duck around the pen and in and out of the pool. Of the gallons of water displaced by Daphne’s plunges, the majority was absorbed by Linda’s aqua dress.

  “At least she knows where the pool is now,” I pointed out.

  A couple of hours later, we checked on the duck again. The floor was dry, the pool unused, her food uneaten. “She’s not happy in here,” Linda decided. “She needs an outdoor pen.”

  I didn’t like the way this was going at all. “We’ll let her run around the backyard during the day and put her in the barn at night.”

  “Who’s going to catch her and carry her back and forth?” That gave me pause. “And what if a dog got in our yard during the day? A large dog like a German shepherd dog could jump right over our fence and kill her.”

  Other than the dogless family that lived behind us on the river, our nearest neighbor was almost a mile away. “And where might this German shepherd dog come from?”

  “We can use Binky’s old pen. We’ll hire a handyman to fix it up. Unless you want to do it yourself,” she added.

  “A handyman,” I sputtered in thickening despair, envisioning an otherwise unemployable eccentric with a priso
n record and hair sprouting from his ears.

  In the main, my fears seemed to ring true. After Linda placed an ad in the local shopping newspaper, we were deluged with disconcerting phone calls. A gravelly voiced man wanted to know the name of our business and what kind of benefits we offered. A fellow who was friendly with the bottle wondered if we could offer him night work. Three people were confused as to why they had called our number, two were abusive when I explained we wanted a duck pen, and another phoned to hone his English-language skills. Anyone remotely qualified wouldn’t touch a job so small. “Let me see that ad,” I demanded, convinced that Linda must have written a wildly misleading description of a Mackinaw Bridge–scale project, but her prose was on the nose. Just as we were giving up, a chipper and plain-spoken fellow named Dell asked to come over and look at the job, surprised us by showing up, and then shocked us by quoting a reasonable price.

  I learned fast to stay out of Dell’s way. It wasn’t that his attitude was unfriendly. He spoke to me with a pleasant singsong delivery I accepted as his natural voice until I heard him engaged in clipped dialogue with his son. An ex-missionary in his early sixties who had spent years among the Yanomami people in Venezuela, Dell had seen a little of everything in life, but nothing as ridiculous as this fish-out-of-water city boy and his duck-pampering wife. “Sure, we can fix it so that the snow won’t pile up on top of the pen and cause it to collapse,” he responded exuberantly. “Of course, we wouldn’t expect too much snow to accumulate on top of a wiremesh roof, now would we, Bob?” His excessively affable tone suggested that he was talking to an idiot for whom everything had to be clearly laid out in the most positive terms possible. “Can we put a latch on the door?” he exclaimed so forcefully on another occasion, mocking a question I had asked, that I took a startled step backward, nearly knocking down the fencing he had tentatively tacked in place. “Sure, we’ll put a latch on her. You bet we’ll do that, Bob. But how about if we wait until we put the door up first?”