Jim Dodge - Fup

After two stubborn months of teaching, one day Fup began flapping her wings in concert with his mad flailings. Granddaddy Jake rejoiced.

When Fup had the flapping down pat, Granddaddy reasoned the next step was the takeoff, and to practice that they moved into the front yard. Jake made a few short half-speed runs across the yard to demonstrate the basic technique. Fup understood immediately, and soon they were both hauling ass downhill toward the pond, their wings and arms respectively pounding the air for lift-but though flight whispered to their bodies, beckoning, neither quite left the ground on the first couple of tries. On the third attempt, as Jake let go for all he was worth, legs pumping, his arms flailing wildly, he felt the first tremor of ascent break loose within him; like any good teacher would, he looked back for a moment to see if Fup was airborne yet, and in that slight split of attention he ran full-tilt into the walnut tree and got knocked colder than absolute zero.

When he came to, strangely calm, Fup was waddling around him quacking with concern. He reached out a hand to comfort her, sat up, and began to assess the damage, an act, he thought, that was beginning to recur with depressing regularity. His nose was broken or loosened up good. His upper lip was split pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as it had been when Alma May, his third or fourth wife, had hit him with a potato masher when he'd suggested doing it dog-style on the kitchen table. The lip, like the nose, would heal. But it depressed him to discover that he'd knocked out the last two teeth that met, and as he dully ran his tongue over the tender, salty sockets, he felt a melancholy weariness seep through his blood. To spend eternity toothless was a dismal prospect-but who could tell, maybe after a couple of hundred years his gums would get tough enough to work over a rack of ribs. You just had to be still and have faith, that was the main thing. There was no heart in giving up. But he was glad that tomorrow was Sunday and he wouldn't have to give Fup her flying lesson. He was tired. He felt a powerful need for rest. He was getting the shit knocked out of him something fierce lately and he needed to think on it, figure out what in the name of heaven was going on. Something was, that was for sure. But he was also sure that he would probably never understand it, and that contributed heavily to his sense of exhaustion. It was a puzzle where not all the pieces fit. He knew he'd better get used to it if he was going to be serious about immortality. He was nearly a hundred years old now. He was almost out of teeth and running low on breath; and, he thought to himself, if things kept on like that, it wouldn't be long before he'd need a whole new body just to keep up with his spirit.

Tiny and Fup left the house next morning at first light. They cut around the top of Rifkin's Draw and then down along the southern fence that Tiny had built when he was sixteen. They paused for a minute to let the dawn-light brighten, then, with Fup in the lead, they began to follow the fenceline along the edge of a tanoak thicket, heading toward a seep-spring where Lockjaw was fond of wallowing. They hadn't gone a hundred yards when Fup began nosing the trail like a pedigree hound; in moments she was quacking excitedly. Tiny shifted the weight of his.243, easing his thumb to the safety. He couldn't see down the fenceline on his side because a small stand of pepperwood sprouts blocked the line of sight. Fup plunged straight through them, her neck snaked out flat, still wildly quacking, and Tiny crashed through right behind her. When they finally cleared the pepperwoods, they both stopped in a sudden split second of silence: Lockjaw was lying twenty feet away, on his belly, staring at them, his left hind leg caught in the twisted mesh of fencewire.

Tiny raised the gun to his shoulder, his concentration locked on the pig. Fup was quacking incessantly at his feet, shrill, hysterical. He centered the bead directly between the pig's unwavering eyes. It was Lockjaw, he was sure, but he looked old or diseased, no tusks, ears tattered, the jet black bristles along his spine turning a ghostly grey. Tiny took a deep breath, trying to shut out Fup's maniacal quacking; he let the breath out slowly, holding the bead steady between Lockjaw's eyes, and started to squeeze the trigger. Fup, flapping frantically at his feet, saw his finger tightening and bit him as hard as she could on the leg.

"It's Lockjaw, Lockjaw!" Tiny bellowed, kicking at her. Fiercely quacking, she scurried out of range to the right. Oblivious, Tiny quickly brought the bead back to a dead hold between Lockjaw's eyes. As he pulled the trigger, Fup hurled herself upward at the barrel, knocking Tiny off balance. He tripped backward, Fup in front of the muzzle as the gun fired. The blast and shock of the bullet tore her apart.

Tiny couldn't breathe. On hands and knees he crawled toward her shattered remains. Gasping, he reached out to gather her in his hands, gather her back together, but his hands refused. When he finally touched a mangled wing and her blood smoked on his fingertips, he heard, far away, a great, wracking cry torn from his body. He sat back on his haunches and wept.

Then he stopped. He felt Lockjaw staring at him; he turned, ready. Lockjaw's head was stretched out flat, resting on his forelegs. His gaze was direct, vast, utterly indifferent. Slowly, the eyes began to cloud and film over, lose themselves behind a dull silver glaze, the color of the sky just before it rains, a color like the back of a mirror.

Tiny got to his feet, walked over to the pig's body, took the fencing tool from his back pocket, and cut Lockjaw's leg free from the fence. The huge, gaunt body slumped over on it side. Tiny knelt beside the body and delicately touched the left eye, leaving a faint, bloody fingerprint on its filmed surface. It didn't blink. He moved his hand down and pressed his palm firmly against the pig's rib-cage just behind the shoulder. There was no heartbeat under the coarse, stiff bristles against his damp palm. For a moment he thought he felt a movement inside, a dull pulse, but he wasn't sure. The last quiver of nerves, maybe; the involuntary movement of smooth muscle that lasts beyond death. Then he felt it again, certain this time, and carefully began moving his hands over the pig's body feeling for the source of the pulse.

A hand's breadth above its penis, against the lower ribs, he felt a steady movement. He put both his hands on the bare belly and gently pressed. It was a steady pulse against his palms, not the sporadic twitch of guts. He rolled Lockjaw over on his back, the pig's legs, already stiffening, awkwardly protruding into the air, then laid his head against its belly. He felt the steady pulse resonating in his cheekbones.

Bracing the pig's body against his leg, he took out his pocketknife and opened the long slender blade he used for gutting. He started the cut at the pelvic bone and ran it alongside the penis on up to the sternum, blood feathering in the wake. When he let the pig fall back on its side the guts spilled loose. Within the coils of warm guts was a thin, slick, membranous sac, blood orange, throbbing. Deftly, using just the tip of the knife, Tiny slit it open.

Inside, he saw what his mother had seen shining on the bottom of the lake: a point of light; rich, steady, dense. It divided into two. Into four. Eight. Beginning to whirl as it instantly multiplied through the blinding trajectory of form toward some new coherence, the arc of energy into matter, the white parchment of a scroll unfurled flashing in the sun.

The whirling light, as if consolidated or absorbed, faded into the form of a duckling. Fup shook herself free of the clinging membrane, fanning her wet wings as she issued a few soft tentative quacks. Growing by the moment, she continued to fluff herself under Tiny's astonished gaze; fullgrown, she uttered a triumphant burst: QUACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK.