Jim Dodge - Fup

"Well how do you figure it then you old geezer?" Lonnie shot back.

"I didn't get to be 99 years old by fool speculation," Granddaddy replied. "It's hard enough separating the good stuff from the bullshit without adding to the whole mess by wanting to know what you ain't gonna know."

"But you haven't told us what you know," Lub Knowland offered. "Which as near as I can make out on the subject of ducks ain't diddleyshit."

Granddaddy picked up the pile of money in front of him and showered it out onto the center of the table: "I'll bet that much that you don't even know what kind of duck that is"- he pointed a gnarled and shaking finger at Fup, asleep in a cardboard box under the woodstove.

"I suppose you do," Lub said dubiously, "though I'd say it's a mite early to tell."

"That's true," Ed Bollpeen added softly. "They all look pretty much alike till they feather out."

That started it. It ended with everybody except Tiny and Happy putting $100 and their prediction in a general pool: whoever named Fup's species and sex correctly took it all, with any dispute to be settled by John Coombes, the local vet.

There was no dispute. In two months' time it was plain that Fup was a hen mallard. Granddaddy Jake took the money with a crass, gleeful laugh of satisfaction.

It was apparent in her first few weeks of recovery that Fup was an unusual duck. She refused to eat or shit in the house. She would wobble to the door, peeping frantically, and pound on it with her bill like a deformed woodpecker until one of them let her out.

Her appetite was omnivorous and immense. Pancakes, cheese, cracked corn, deer meat, onion peels, whatever: it got devoured. And as she ate, she grew. In four months she weighed nearly 20 pounds. Granddaddy Jake, partial to excess in any form, was so impressed he invited neighbors over to watch.

"Goddamn," Willis Hornsby muttered as Fup gobbled a pound of link sausage and started on a coffee can of cracked barley.

"Nothing the matter with her eater, is there?" Granddaddy gleamed. "Goes after it like a feathered vacuum cleaner."

Willis shook his head: "I never saw nothing like it."

"Makes me think we should've named her Electrolux," Jake opined. "Or hell, even better, Dolly P."

"Dolly P.?" Willis asked, "Sounds like a fishing boat."

"Naw, Dolly Pringle. Big redhead I run around with up in Coos Bay. A woman of amazing talents. She could suck a golfball through 25 yards of garden hose. Seen her siphon gas uphill. Why, you might not believe it, but I won a $1000 bet with Big Dave Stevens one night when we took ol' Dolly out in the parking lot and she sucked the chrome completely off a trailer hitch in fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds."

Granddaddy sighed with a forlorn fondness. "Just thinking about that gal makes my ol' pecker twitch."

"Better hope that duck don't see it," Willis mumbled, watching as Fup speared the last few flecks of barley.

It was a judicious warning, for Fup proved as fierce as she was hungry. Early on, when she could still be weighed in ounces, she had ventured out to join Granddaddy for an afternoon of sipping on the porch. Buster, a usually comatose Bluetick hound, bayed her up under the tattered green couch where she'd scurried for refuge. When the dog had finally yielded to Granddaddy pounding on its head and had sprawled back out on the porch to whimper itself back to sleep, Fup, with a single kamikaze PEEEEEP! charged from hiding and clamped her bill like a pair of eternal vise-grip pliers on Buster's sagging scrotum, hanging on fiercely as the hound spun around in howling circles, snapping at the half-pound duckling swinging on his sack. Granddaddy laughed so hard he had to crawl out in the front yard and beat his head on the ground to stop.

Besides her appetite and temper, Fup was distinguished by her walk and her talk. Her walk was foolishly graceful, a hunched, toppling waddle that barely managed to sustain itself, a wobble continuously and precariously balanced by her outstretched neck, head swaying like a charmed cobra: a movement somewhere between a clumsy sneak and a hypnotic search. She was ungainly, yet effortlessly so; she proceeded at a steady lurch. Mass fueled momentum, but her bright orange webbed feet were not designed for such velocity, and though her progress was sure, it always seemed doubtful, and always bore that melancholy discord between biology and terrain. She showed absolutely no inclination to fly.

Her talk was more straight-forward, if by talk we mean a somatic or sonic response to one's environment. Her vocabulary was small, but rich. One quack indicated agreement. Two meant rapport. Three signified heartfelt approval. Four or more-uttered in a sharp, excited series: QUACK-WHAK-WHAK-WHAK-WHAK-WHAK-was total and joyous accord. If she opened her bill without making a sound, a gesture somewhere between a bored yawn and an attempt to retch, it signified sharp disagreement; if it was accompanied by a low hissing sound with her head lowered and wings slightly spread, it indicated profound disagreement and imminent attack. If she tucked her head under her wing, you, the proposition, and the rest of the dreary world were dismissed.

From the first few weeks she was with them, Fup displayed a strict passion for balance and order in the daily life of the household. She slept on a large foam cushion in the hallway, equidistant between Tiny's room and Granddaddy Jake's. She woke Tiny precisely an hour before sunrise by hopping up and down on his chest. She ate her pail of pre-breakfast corn while Tiny cooked the sausage, eggs, and sourdough pancakes for breakfast, which they split half and half, Fup eating outside on the porch, Tiny joining her on clement mornings. After breakfast, just at daybreak, they would set out for the day's work on the fences. Fup would watch Tiny work, adding a quacked comment here or there. Sometimes she helped, checking the plumb of a post with a cocked eye, plucking at a strand of wire to test its tautness, or occasionally holding the end of a tape, but just as often she would poke around, spear an errant insect, or rest. When Tiny dug postholes, she tucked her head under her wing.

Exactly between sunrise and mid-day they would take a half-hour break for the sandwiches and iced tea Tiny had prepared the night before. After the break, they resumed work till mid-day, then returned to the house for lunch. Tiny started the meal while Fup woke Granddaddy Jake by nibbling at his toes. After lunch Tiny returned to his fence work while Granddaddy and Fup repaired to the porch to sip a little Death Whisper, be still, and generally consider the drift of things. Fup drank from a shallow saucer; Jake straight from the jar. It pleased Granddaddy deeply that both Tiny and Fup enjoyed his whiskey. Tiny, he knew, used it to help his insomnia and to ease his dreams. He was convinced in Fup's case that the emergency dropper of Ol' Death Whisper had saved her life, and was sure she continued to use it in celebration of its life-giving powers. She drank about three tablespoons a day, and seldom more than five unless it was cold or foggy. Her only apparent reaction to the whiskey was to pound her bill on Granddaddy's shins when she wanted more.

About an hour before dusk Granddaddy Jake would rise and stretch and go in the house to start dinner while Fup waddled down to her pond and floated gracefully through the sun's setting, sometimes silently, sometimes quacking softly to herself. They had built her a pond in the first month of her recovery. It was on the same scale as Tiny's sandbox. According to Pee Wee Scranton, who'd done the excavation, the pond was more properly a small lake, or at least large enough to water most of the livestock between Santa Cruz and Petaluma.

For awhile, after dinner Tiny and Grand-daddy Jake had tried to teach Fup to play checkers, but after a few months they gave up. It wasn't that she didn't comprehend the nature of the game-even, perhaps, its nuances-she just did not like it when they tried to remove one of her checkers from the board.