Enslaved by Ducks (24 page)

“Magicians treat their doves very well,” he assured us. Nevertheless, he promised not to sell the sisters but to introduce them to gallant males eager to encourage the laying of fertile eggs. Our pair was already too old to make good show birds, anyway, he explained.

“You have to start working with them almost as soon as they hatch if you want to win their trust,” he told us.

“Just like call duck ducklings,” I muttered.

Jonathan carried himself with a vibrant confidence that confirmed his claim to be an amateur magician himself. I could imagine his dark brown hair combed and styled to complement a tuxedo with sequined lapels, while his cleanly shaved upper lip cried out for the requisite neatly trimmed mustache. It all fit perfectly, and for all I knew, a cape packed with colored-silk handkerchiefs, tricky decks of cards, and collapsible bouquets huddled mysteriously in the back of his station wagon.

“Who’s this guy?” he asked, as he gravitated toward Howard’s cage. “You’re not thinking of getting rid of him, are you?”

“Always thinking,” I told him. Linda shot me a look. “But, no, we certainly couldn’t deprive ourselves of Howard.”

“He’s a very handsome male.”

“How can you tell that he’s a he?” Linda wondered. “Sometimes
he’s
not even sure what he is,” and she went on to relate the embarrassing tale of Howard’s sexual exploits.

Jonathan explained that male doves possess an apparently wider iris than the females. He held one of the girls close to Howard’s cage as proof. Try as I might, I couldn’t distinguish any relative difference between the colored portions of their eyes, and no other dove authority has subsequently backed up Jonathan’s method for identifying
dove gender—which might actually have relied upon an inter-species mind-reading stunt. Leaving us his phone number, the magician’s breeder put the pair of females in a cardboard carrier, stepped into his car, and disappeared in a puff of smoke that indicated he needed exhaust-system work.

I
HAD BARELY
gotten used to the two doves, when suddenly they were gone. And that loss was negated by our gain of a roughneck Muscovy duck. The day that Linda brought Hector home began pretty much like any other Sunday. After breakfast, I replenished the drinking water, pool water, and scratch feed for the geese and female ducks, let them forage in the yard awhile, then carbon-copied with the male Khaki Campbells. Agnes was rolling around on the cement back deck, so I petted her while Liza and Hailey hogged the pool and the three girl ducks looked on enviously. By the time I had wrapped up my outdoor chores, Linda was finishing braiding her hair in preparation for church in nearby Ionia. The church boasted a full sixteen members, including the pastor’s family.

“’Bye, sweetie, I’m leaving now,” she told me, planting a kiss on my lips and slinging her purse over her shoulder. Less than thirty seconds later, she trotted back into the house to retrieve her back cushion. “’Bye, sweetie, I’m going,” she called, as she darted out the door. I was still struggling to separate the bulky
Grand Rapids Press
Sunday newspaper advertising supplements from their thin news and editorial wrappers when she returned to hurriedly heat up her therapeutic gelatin pack in the microwave. Years of pushing a vacuum cleaner, not to mention other strenuous work throughout her life, had left Linda with a pain in her lower back that marriage to me occasionally sent southward but did nothing to alleviate.

“’Bye, I’m late,” she announced.

“See you in ten seconds,” I said.

“No you won’t.” She laughed as she darted outside. Edging forward on the couch, I watched as she pulled her car toward the road, jerked it to a halt inches before its wheels hit the shoulder, flung herself out the car door and to her feet, and made a fresh assault on the house. Punctuating each door-slamming departure and reentry was a pair of baseball-size jingle bells that Linda had tied to the doorknob a couple of Christmases ago and decided to keep in place as an all-season annoyance. The thud of wood against the hoarse rattle of metal had jolted me from many a nap with nightmarish visions of plummeting headlong into a medieval forge.

Jingle!
“Forgot my church collection money,” she explained, as I pondered a perplexing installment of
The Family Circus
comic strip. “Bye-bye.”
Jingle!

Jingle!
“I need my Bible.” She grabbed it from a wicker basket perched on one of my hi-fi speakers, almost sending the basket and ten pounds of clutter crashing to the floor. “See you.”
Jingle!

Jingle!
“Have you seen Grapey?”

“I don’t keep track of your hats.”

The errant stocking cap was exactly where it belonged, on the top tier of the coat rack next to the “night-night hat.”

“That everything?” I asked.

“Drink of water.” She thundered into the bathroom and out again. “’Bye!”
Jingle!

Jingle!
“Don’t forget, I’m going to try to talk that farmer into giving us that duck.”

“Jeez.”
Jingle!

I had forgotten all about the duck. Ceasing to purchase new animals no longer saved us from acquiring new animals. Without warning, we had slid across an unmarked border into the territory of animal rescuers. It was a realm that demanded a high state of alertness lest we join a group that thought nothing of devoting every waking moment, dollar of income, and square inch of property
to caring for the unstoppable tide of unwanted pets. As pet owners, we were way over the edge of excess with our bird, cat, and rabbit menagerie. I couldn’t see myself joining the ranks of animal rescuers without descending into a bottomless hell of crabbiness. But I did find myself agreeing to take in animals, especially when their lot in life was as pitiful as Hector’s.

The drive from Lowell to Ionia along M-21 always provided a wealth of interesting sights. My favorite was an ancient Standard Oil gas-station sign embedded in the bank, or perhaps the Dumpster built to resemble a miniature house. Linda’s favorite had been a complex of pens containing tame white-tail deer near the village of Saranac, until the owner blocked her view with a stockade fence to protect them from trigger-happy, beer-besotted hunters. She also enjoyed a barnyard where white Charolais cattle ate constantly from their trough. One Sunday, as she drove to church, she noticed a tiny enclosure on the Charolais property with a large bird inside. On her way home, a closer look revealed a dirty white Muscovy duck confined to a cage so small he didn’t have room to flap his wings. Never one to shy away from promoting animal welfare—especially when it involved the chance to knock on a total stranger’s door and engage in conversation—Linda decided to ask the farmer to sell her the duck.

I met Linda in our driveway after church. Peering through her car window, I noticed that the animal carrier had migrated from her trunk to the backseat, but I couldn’t tell for sure if the duck was inside. “Did you talk to him?”

“He was a really nice guy.”

“Then why was he keeping a duck in a cramped little cage?”

“We might not know what to do with him, either,” she answered.

“Why is that?”

“He didn’t want to sell him to me. I offered him ten dollars, but he wouldn’t take it. He said he was a really mean duck that they
originally got as a Christmas present for the grandchildren, and they used to fuss over him all the time. Then when he got bigger, he started hissing at the kids—he hisses at everyone—and chased them around the yard. He became such a nuisance trying to bite people, he eventually had to put him in a cage. He used to be in with another duck, but he thinks he might have killed it, because they woke up one morning and the other duck was dead.”

“Well, we don’t want that kind of duck, either.”

“He looked so pathetic in that cage, I asked the farmer, ‘Would you sell him to me?’ and I tried to give him ten dollars, but he told me no. He said the duck was only worth twenty-five cents, and that’s all he would take. He made me give him a quarter. But he told me not to take any chances, to keep the duck away from us and keep him away from the other ducks. So you’ll have to put up a fence to keep him separate.”

“What do you mean, ‘a fence’?”

“Like the loop you put in the pen to separate the call ducks,” she answered cheerily. “I want to call him Hector.”

“I don’t want him at all. He sounds too dangerous to keep.”

“He looks like a Hector.”

“I’ve still got the loop,” I conceded. “I saved it.”

“Make sure he can’t get out of it,” Linda said. “I don’t want any of our ducks getting killed.”

With trepidation, I trudged briskly to the lower level of the barn, where I had left the wire loop curled up next to the disassembled tree-branch “teepees” that had supported Linda’s pole beans the previous year. Even the geese seemed nervous when I dragged the fence into their pen, and honk restlessly as I nailed it to the wooden posts with poultry staples. Finishing the task with a couple of hammer whacks, I brooded about a sociopathic twenty-five-cent Muscovy possibly disrupting our peaceful duck and goose society.
Hector’s introduction also put my own well-being at risk, as defined by Dr. Glaser. Despite the occasional bouts of animal injury or illness, pet care had settled into a series of routines and rituals, from bedtime vocal concerts to elaborate parrot feedings. Hector stood poised to add an element of chaos. He threatened to complicate rather than simplify my life. What would come next after taking in a killer duck? Living with bears in the hollowed-out side of a hill?

“It’s done,” I told Linda, who waited outside the duck pen with the animal carrier in tow. “You might as well grab him out and bring him in.”

“I’m not picking him up!”

“Then put the carrier inside the loop.”

The carrier entered the circular enclosure as I stepped out of it. Leaning down, I popped the latch with as little finger contact with the front grate as possible. Clutching the top handle and the smooth plastic back, I tipped the carrier forward, releasing the Muscovy in the same way I had released the raccoons. My first glimpse of Hector shocked me. He was as wiry and tough a duck as I could have imagined. His feathers were white but soiled by streaks of dirt. Patches of yellow on the flat of his tail suggested a recent dabbing with iodine. But his face was the immediate attention getter. While Daphne wore a demure mask of bare facial skin, the entire front of Hector’s head was encased in a bright red fleshy, knobby mass that no stretch of the imagination could term visually appealing. He didn’t need defenses against rivals or predators. Appearance alone would discourage attack. Compounding the effect of this visceral hood, a narrow crest of feathers rose from his head in a series of connected spikes. Beak wide open, steely eyes flashing, he panted a gravelly succession of hisses whose vehemence made me retreat from the fence, swallow hard, back out of
the pen, and wish the other residents the best of luck.

The spectacle of Hector compelled me to reconsider Dr. Glaser’s insight to my dreams. Maybe they didn’t reflect my love of habit and routines after all and were as bland as unbuttered toast for a far more obvious reason. My days included such improbabilities as a parrot that could reason, a dove-breeding magician, bunny songs, the night-night hat, a duck that personified a raging id, and my role as a tree for our birds. With waking hours that outrageous, who needed an excursion to Xanadu after dark?

Sweetheart, come out here quick! Hurry, sweetheart.” A fresh layer of snow tried to muffle Linda’s voice. But her summons still reached me upstairs from the backyard, penetrating two panes of glass, thirty feet of diagonal space, and the pleasant
whoosh
of heated air through the furnace duct. I was lounging in my office enjoying a cup of ginger tea and savoring the fact that Linda was taking care of the ducks on a frigid January afternoon while I read a detective novel with a warm cat pressed against my leg.

“Sweetie, come quick, it’s Hector!”

Bolting out of my chair, I thudded down a flight of stairs, dodged a twenty-five-pound bag of rabbit food in the living room corridor, and bounded toward the basement. Various unpleasant scenarios crowded my brain. The farmer who had sold us Hector three months earlier was right about our Muscovy’s mercurial personality. Hector could have injured one of our ducks, though so far he had reserved his aggressive attitude for people. That meant he might be chasing Linda. When gripped by a darker mood, he
would not be deterred from latching on to a leg or article of clothing with his wickedly serrated beak. Or the blowhard could have clashed with our neighbor’s dog or a raccoon on snack break from hibernation. Clomping across the basement floor, I expected the worst as I threw open the back door. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

Dressed in a nylon jacket and crowned with the inevitable stocking cap, Linda stood beaming on the back deck with a large white duck perched on her shoulder.

“What is he doing up there? Are you okay?” I demanded, fearful that Hector might have bitten my wife silly.

“He flew up there himself. Well, he didn’t exactly fly. I was bending down to pick up the hose, and he sort of climbed up all on his own.”

“You must be very proud,” I muttered above the hammering of my heart. “Both of you.”

“Take a picture of us, sweetie!”

W
E HAD AT FIRST
treated Hector with such extraordinary caution, he might as well have been a fer-de-lance. Isolated in his wire loop, he was safely prevented from inflicting any evil on our geese and ducks that his Muscovy mind might devise. I was especially wary of him. When dangling an arm into his loop to give him water or a fresh bowl of feed, I moved in exaggeratedly slow motion, speaking in the same reassuring voice that Dr. Glaser had used successfully with me.

“Now, I’m just giving you something nice to eat, Hector,” I’d quietly explain. “Here, I’m setting down the bowl, and in no way should my fingers remind you of edible pink worms. They are far too bony to enjoy, not succulent like Linda’s, if you get my drift.”