Duck

Author's Note: This memoir piece stands on its own as a complete story, while also belonging to a larger mosaic I’m building here on The Violet Storm. Each piece is like a Tarot card — rich in meaning on its own, yet also part of a fuller spread still to come. Thank you for reading.~SA

Duck

“Outside. Now.” My mother stood in the doorway to my room, her gaze locking onto mine. Curled up in the corner of the lower bed of my bunk, cradling a book, enchanted by a winged horse and a woman with snakes for hair. I had washed, dried and folded the laundry, washed, dried and put away the dishes, cleaned the sink and toilet, and then cracked open Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Despite the alacrity with which I had fulfilled my household duties, she had found me, leaned against the door frame, a Gorgon from which I had no protection. I wished I had Athena’s shield. Mother looked at the air conditioner humming away in my window. Houston was undergoing another heat wave, the air dry and humid, sticking clothes to skin, beads of sweat clinging to everything exposed. 

Mother sighed and tucked some loose tendrils of hair behind her ears. “Turn that air conditioner off and go play with your sister. She’s near the slide.” 

I closed my book and shook my head. “I don’t get a choice on what I do, even on my birthday.” I dragged my body out from under the bunk bed, careful not to hit my head as I had done so many times. My parents got it for me and Ruth over a year ago. I had grown a lot since then, was skinnier than ever, and Ruth finally had her own room. 

“I want you both outside so I can get the house ready for your birthday dinner. Your carpet needs vacuuming. It’s filthy.” 

“Okay,” I said, inching past her. “I’ll get the Hoover.”

“No, I’ll do it. This whole apartment needs a onceover. You go watch your sister. We don’t know anyone here yet.”

I shrugged and walked down the hall toward the front door. 

“Oh, Luke, wait! Check on Peepers and make sure he’s cool enough.”

I rolled my eyes and turned around. I looked through the screen door.

Our apartment, like all of them in our complex, had a small fenced in backyard--if you could call it that--with a small patch of grass and a concrete square for grilling. At least that’s what the manager said when she showed it to us. My folks didn’t grill. Instead we had a large metal tub filled with water and a small dog house. 

We didn’t have a dog, but my sister had a duck—a little awkward thing—bright yellow with a large bill the exact shade of dried mustard. I had no idea where Ruth found it. She was always finding animals; frogs, lizards, beetles, a mouse. Mother made her get rid of all of them. But the day my sister came home cradling the baby ball of bright feathers, pleading with her big blue eyes, crying at the thought of having to let it go, our Mother relented, allowed the duck to stay, even sent my father to the hardware store to pick up the galvanized tub. The duck spent most of the time in that tub, swimming in circles, clucking every now and then. There wasn’t much more to see. 

I could see he was wilted. I stuck my hand in the water to gauge the temperature. Much longer and we’d have a boiled duckling. 

“Okay, Peepers,” I said. “Out of the pool!”

The duck floundered around, flustered. He had a habit of biting exposed fingers or toes. I’d already been subjected several times to his tiny jagged teeth. He never acted like that to my sister. I decided to take charge, grabbing the tub by the handles and dumping out the water and the duck in one fell swoop. “Baby’s out with the bathwater!” I said. Peepers squawked and ran into his doghouse. I filled up the tub again with the hose, splashing myself with the water. 

Our complex consisted of a row of two story apartments facing another row, with a children’s playground in between. If it wasn’t for the slide, the jungle gym, and swings standing in their vast sand pit, the apartments would be mirrors of each other, winking with their brick faces. A few scattered poplars grew around the playground, too thin to provide the weight of children, too short to provide shade. Most apartment complexes had a pool, being that this was Houston, but ours did not. There was no central air conditioning in the buildings, most folks relying on window units, everyone relying on fans. School had just started back and my birthday fell on a Saturday this year. Mother had invited some people over from our church. None of them were my age, none of them were friends. Not enough time to make friends yet. Was I embarrassed because my parents were religious and strict, that we were poor? Sure. But it was easier this way. I didn’t try to make friends anymore. I knew we would just move again. 

Ruth was the only constant companion in my life. Only she understood the strange outside world I lived in. I think she might have even understood my interior life, knowing that it existed, even if she was not privy to it. She was out front, next to the slide with a plastic beach bucket and shovel, creating a castle. I walked over to her. 

“Your duck has fresh water. He asked about you.” 

Ruth looked up from her castle-making,  “Peepers wouldn’t talk to you.”

“Well, you’re welcome. Another hour or so and we’d have duck for dinner.”

Ruth stood up, balled her hands. Her blue eyes blazed, like the hottest part of the flame in science class. “You shut up! Don’t talk about Peepers like that or I’ll tell--”

“Hey, hey!” I raised my hands up in surrender. 

Then I noticed the action figures littered around the sand. My action figures.

“Why are my toys out here? I didn’t tell you--”

“Mom said I could.”

“No, she didn’t!”

Ruth looked away, down the long expanse of playground equipment toward the chain link fence separating our complex from a storage lot. My mother hated that place, said, “If people have too much stuff to put in their houses, then they should get rid of it! Makes no sense to pay for a brick closet on a parking lot.” I didn’t care one way or another about it, although I wished there was a real wall between us and them, something to separate people who lived with their possessions and those who didn’t.

“I just wanted to play with you. Mom said you would.”

I sat down on the sand. “Okay, okay. But don’t take my figures out again without asking me. I don’t want them all to get sand in them, especially the G.I. Joes. The Star Wars figures are different. They don’t have parts that can get rusty.” I picked up a female figure with a gaunt face and cropped red hair. “You wouldn’t want to ruin Scarlett, would you?”

Ruth beamed. “I was making them a fairy tale castle. Like the ones we see in the clouds sometimes.” 

I surveyed her handiwork. “Let’s add a moat around the castle,” I said, “That will fortify it when Cobra attacks.”

Ruth looked at me with a grave expression. It was so at odds with her bouncy blond curls that I almost laughed. “No. All the bad guys have made a peace treaty with G.I. Joe and the good guys,” she said. “Everyone gets to live in the castle together as friends.”

“Then who are they going to fight?”

Ruth looked into my eyes.

“No one,” she said, “Nobody’s going to fight nobody. But we can still make the ditch.”

I smiled. “Moat. We can still make the moat.”

“Right,” Ruth said. “It’s basically a big ditch.”

“Yeah,” I said, distracted by a station wagon pulling up at the storage lot. The front of the car faced the fence. I could hear a man and woman arguing in the front, could see two children in the back.

Ruth dug her shovel into the ground around her castle, sending sand onto my legs. The couple continued to argue.

“Look, Luke! There’s clay in here!”

Ruth had dug a deep trench, uncovering four round balls compressed together, now disturbed, they fell apart. A distinctly unpleasant odor filled the air. 

“Ruth, don’t! It’s cat poop!” 

Ruth looked at the black balls and sniffed her finger. “Pee-yew!”

“Go inside and wash your hands. Don’t tell Mom.”

“How come?”

“If you tell her that the neighbor’s cats poop out here, she’ll never let you play out here again.”

“I won’t tell her,” said Ruth, and ran to our door. 

“Just say you need to use the bathroom!” I yelled after her. 

Over at the storage lot the yelling had stopped. The man got out of the station wagon and slammed the door. One of the kids started to cry, but the man shouted at them and they stopped. The sun’s heat on the blacktop made it look like he was burning. He stomped away to the storage unit building. Ruth came running back. 

“I decided we don’t need a moat,” she said.

“I agree. No need to fortify if there aren’t any enemies anyway.” 

“Is that lady crying in that car?” Ruth craned her neck toward the storage lot.

“What kind of story are we going to play? You still want to be Yoda?”

I didn’t know what to say about the lady in the car. no matter where we were, we couldn’t get away from people fighting. 

“Yeah, I wanna be Yoda and R2-D2 and Daisy Duke and Wild Bill.” 

“And what are they going to do?” I asked.

“They are going to throw a surprise picnic for everybody!” Ruth jumped up, her face bright and exultant. “We’ll have to make more castles tops though.”

“Turrets,” I said. “They’re called turrets.” I took the shovel and filled in the moat, covering up the cat poop. “And maybe we should build again in a different place.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ruth said. “I hope the cats didn’t do it everywhere.”

A shot rang out, then another, loud, explosive, reverberating throughout the courtyard. Ruth and I jumped, looked over at the storage unit. The man was standing behind the open driver’s door. He was pointing his arm at the children in the passenger seat, but I couldn’t see his hand, it was covered by the door. I couldn’t see the children either. The woman was screaming. The man pointed at her and another shot rang out. The woman slumped over. The man’s arm rose and I could see the small black gun in his hand. He pointed it into his mouth. Another shot and blood and bone splattered into the air. His body jerked backwards and he fell to the asphalt. His leg buckled under him at an odd angle before he dropped. 

Ruth leapt to her feet, dropped the action figure she’d been holding and ran toward the scene. 

“Ruth! Don’t--” My words died in my throat as I realized I had to run after her. She was already halfway across the courtyard. When she got to the chain link fence, she threw herself upon it, climbed up a bit to get a better viewpoint. 

“Luke! Look at all the blood!” she said.

I was finding it hard to breathe. I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t speak. “Get down from there,” I thought, “Mom’s going to kill me for letting you see this.” I reached out to grab Ruth by the waist, but she clung to the fence. I could see it now too, the dark liquid oozing from the man’s head, pooling around his body and flowing towards us, steam rising off the rivulets that couldn’t soak into the pavement. The blood was coming for us. I wanted to scream but there was no sound. 

“Please, Ruth,” I said, my words a croak in my throat. “Please come down. Mother--”

And as if I’d conjured her, Mother came running to us, bellowing our names, her shrill voice a foghorn above the voices of our neighbors as they piled out of their homes onto the sidewalks. Everything sounded fake and far away. I looked up, saw a blackbird fly across the sky, a black mark against the blue expanse. I felt my knees fold up beneath me. 

When I woke up, I was laying on a quilt on the bottom bunk of my bed. There was a glass of water on my end table. I drank it all in one gulp. I could hear my mother talking in the living room. There were long moments between her words and no one answered her. 

“It’s unbelievable!” she said, “And on my son’s birthday too!”

~SA

Author's Note: Want more? Check out Horse, The Red Ball, and Baptism. ~SA