an enormous difference in the lives of the people it did
affect, and save the taxpayer some money in the process.
“But there’s another kind of shut-in this kind of set-up
could help, and help in a way that could quite possibly do
all of us an enormous amount of incidental good. I’m
talking about convicts, convicted criminals, all those
men and women that society has been forced for its own
protection, and in the hope of reforming them, to put
behind bars. And there are a lot of them, make no
mistake of that, all our jails, prisons, penitentiaries and
work farms are not only full but dangerously overcrowded with men, women and adolescents whose care and keeping is paid for by the rest of us, all of us who pay
taxes.
“And what we’re paying for, really, is a kind of school
system or fraternity where all the petty criminals— the
kids who hot-wired cars to go joyriding or the clerk who
for the first and only time in his life needed money so
badly that he took a hundred dollars out of his employer’s cash register and got caught at it— where all these people who have nothing better to do with their time
than break rocks or stamp out license plates learn from
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the other prisoners, the real hardened criminals, how to
become hardened criminals themselves. And when they
finally do get out the only people they know are criminals, they can’t get a job because of their records and because, especially if they were pretty young when they
went in, all they know how to do is break rocks or make
license plates or hang around with criminals. And so
what their stay in prison has really done for them is just
to put them on the road to becoming far more dangerous
and expensive to society than they might ever have
become on their own.
“But think about a convict who gets the training he
needs to be a computer programmer of some sort in
prison. He’s already learned a skill that will be useful to
society and that has a good chance of taking him away
from the poverty and bad influences that may well have
been what turned him to crime in the first place.
“So far, so good. But now let’s assume that some
company or group of companies has arranged to have
some of its data terminals installed within the prison
walls, in much the same way as the terminals for the
shut-in patients I mentioned earlier would have been
installed in their homes, and that this company agrees to
accept qualifying prisoners for some sort of apprentice
program, so that they can not only be gaining useful
skills and on-the-job training while still in prison, but
they can already have a job waiting for them when they
get out AND have a bank account they’ve built up from
what they were being paid during their apprenticeship
waiting for them outside. That way, they’ll be able to
sidestep the whole grinding cycle of poverty and humiliation and living on welfare that right now drives so many ex-convicts straight back to a life of crime.
“Of course, there are still a few safeguards we’re going
to have to work out before we can put our pilot program
in practice because these are, after all, convicted criminals we’re talking about. To give you just one example of the kinds of things we’re going to have to guard against,
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you wouldn’t want to put a genius embezzler or even
safecracker in total control of Bank of America’s computer system. . .
Ju lie : 1 9 8 8
______________
It was a really hot night even though it was still only
April and the air conditioner was broken again. Mother
was yelling at Father and he was whining back at her
again. Pretty soon he’d start yelling and then she’d start
hitting him again. They’d been drinking a lot too, both of
them, like they always did. I was eleven and they’d been
doing the same thing ever since I could remember. I
couldn’t stand them, either of them.
I put my slingshot— the hunting kind you get at
sporting goods stores that shoots steel balls, not one of
those homemade rubber band things for little kids— into
my bag and went down to the lake to sit around for a
while. We lived about four blocks away, up by the Naval
Postgraduate School. Sometimes when there wasn’t anyone else at the lake I’d try to get one of the swans or even one of the ducks with my slingshot—-I’d killed a swan
once, one of the black ones with the red beaks, and hit
one or two others and a couple of ducks— but there were
a lot of people out on the lake on those stupid little
two-person aquacycles, those boat-things you pedal like
bicycles. Couples mainly, some high school kids but
mainly old people, tourists and golfers. Some fathers
with their kids. They all looked stupid.
I didn’t like the park all that much but I didn’t have
any friends that lived close and I didn’t feel like walking
or even riding my bike very far, especially not all the way
up Carmel Hill to where Beth lived. But I couldn’t stand
staying home any longer either, not while they were still
fighting. It would be OK later on, when something they
both wanted to watch came on TV or when Father had a
little more to drink. After a while he just got quieter and
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quieter until he went to sleep. Which was why I was glad
he drank all the time, even though he got pretty nasty in
the evening and when he first woke up in the morning.
And that was OK anyway, because he had a right to get
angry even if not at me, the way Mother treated him. She
treated him like shit and he never did anything wrong, all
he did was sit around all day watching television and
reading magazines and detective stories and drinking a
little beer through his tube. He didn’t hurt anybody and
it wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t wash himself and if
sometimes he smelled bad and that he’d gotten all sort of
fat and droopy-faced and pasty-looking, not at all like he
looked in those pictures Mother still had of him from
before the accident, when he still looked a lot like that
mess sergeant Mother sometimes brought home with her
from Fort Ord, the one who kept telling me he was going
to fix the air conditioner but never did. Only Father’d
been a lot cleaner and handsomer and younger than the
mess sergent was, then.
The sun was going away even though it wasn’t quite
dark yet and it looked like it was going to rain pretty
soon. A lot of people were coming back in to shore and
turning in their aquacycles to the man that rented them
out, though there were still a couple of chicano-looking
kids in an aluminum canoe who didn’t look like they
were going to quit before dark. And I had to be careful, I
could still remember sitting there on that bench watching Mother arrest that man who’d been killing the ducks under his car. I still had all the clippings that Mother’d
>
saved for me from that, including the ones with my
picture in them from the Post-Sentinel and the RAG, and
the other one where they’d had me talk a bit for the Pine
Cone.
The highschool kids in the canoe were down at the
other end of lake. I was watching the ducks and the
swans out on the lake feeding— I didn’t want to try
anything with any of the ones up on shore, where
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somebody could see what happened to it and where there
wouldn’t be that much skill involved anyway— because I
had to know where they all were so I could find them
again if I had to wait until it was almost all the way dark
before everybody else went away. The swans were mean
but I didn’t dislike the ducks or anything— though I
didn’t much like them either, with their mean little
suspicious eyes and the way they walked around when
they were on land like they thought they were the most
important things in the world— but there wasn’t anything else I could do to go get back at something when I felt like this. Just like Father yelling at Mother whenever
he got to thinking about how really bad it was to be
paralyzed and that we had to feed him and help him go
to the bathroom, or Mother hitting him whenever she
couldn’t stand to look at how horrible it was for him
anymore.
A lot of the ducks and swans were up on the shore near
me looking for food somebody might have left and
quacking and honking at each other or lying down on
their stomachs with their heads tucked in and sleeping.
The swans that were in the water were down at the other
end of the lake but the ducks in the water were all
paddling around in groups and quacking at each other. A
lot of the male mallards were doing that thing they do
together when they all swim after one of the brown
females without ever catching her and then they all take
off together and they chase her through the air but they
still don’t catch her, and a few of them every now and
then were doing that thing where they beat their wings
and sort of get up out of the water like they were standing
on their tiptoes and beating their chests like Tarzan. But
most of them were just swimming around and sticking
their heads down underwater the way they do when
they’re looking for something to eat down there but
don’t feel like diving for it, or doing that thing where
they turn all the way upside down like they’re standing
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on their heads with their tails sticking straight up out of
the water.
There was an old lady down at the other end of the
lake, near the kids in the canoe. She was throwing bread
crumbs or something to the swans but she looked pretty
busy and I didn’t think she’d notice what I was doing if I
waited until it got just a little darker.
One of the ducks, a mallard, a really pretty male with a
bright green head and a big patch of shiny blue on his
side, was off alone out in the middle, not doing much
with the other ducks, just sort of floating there like he
was half-asleep though he didn’t have his head tucked
back or anything. He was pretty far away but close
enough so I thought I could hit him with a good enough
shot.
Suddenly he started doing that thing that ducks do
when they’re real mad at each other or fighting over a
female or that the females sort of do when they’re telling
all the males to go away and they stick their necks
forward with their mouths wide open and charge at each
other using their wings to go fast enough so they’re
almost running at each other on top of the water. But the
weird thing was that the duck wasn’t charging another
male, he was charging a whole little group of four or five
females— I could tell they were females because they
were all brown and speckled and one of them even had
some of her black and yellow baby ducklings swimming
around her— and he wasn’t making that sort of hissing
warning noise that all the other ducks I’d ever seen make
when they’re charging like that.
He didn’t stop when he was close enough to warn them
off either, like they usually do. All at once he was in with
the other ducks and they were all squacking and beating
their wings and trying to fly away. I thought I saw
something real bright flash, like a knife blade, only it was
too dark for a piece of metal to flash like that, and then
all but one of the females that had been trying to get
away were up out of the water and flying off and the baby
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365
ducklings were running across the water peeping and
trying to get away.
But one of the females— maybe the mother, I couldn’t
tell— was floating there with its belly up and its orange
legs twitching. Then its legs quit twitching and I could
tell it was dead. And the male was gone. It hadn’t flown
away with the others and it hadn’t swum away and it
wasn’t anywhere I could see in the water. So it must have
dived down to the bottom and stayed there or at least not
come up until it was a long ways away. Maybe it was
lurking down there like a snapping turtle.
The chicano high school kids were landing their canoe
and I tried to get them to take me out in it again so I
could get the dead duck and take a look at it and see what
the male had done to it but they were already starting to
put their canoe back in their pickup and they weren’t
interested.
It was getting too dark to see anything so I walked
around for a while. I went down to the wharf to see if the
organ-grinder was there with his monkey but he wasn’t
— it wasn’t quite the beginning of the tourist season yet
and anyway it was the middle of the week, so there
weren’t that many people around— so I walked back to
McDonald’s and bought a Big Mac with some money I
took from Mother’s purse when she left it lying around a
few days before, then went the rest of the way home.
Father was asleep but Mother was still up watching a
movie on TV' I didn’t have any homework so after I fed
my turtles and guppies I sat down and watched the
movie with her until she told me it was too late and I had
to go to bed.
When I went down to the lake the next morning before
school with a pair of binoculars the dead duck was gone.
I looked for the other duck for a while, but I couldn’t find
it or if I did find it it looked just like all the other
mallards and wasn’t doing anything special.
But I spotted it for sure when I came back again after
school. It was just floating around the same way it had
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Scott Baker
the night before and it always stayed out near the middle,
away from shore and the shallow water where all the<
br />
other ducks liked to feed, and it wouldn’t move at all
except to keep away from the people on their aquacycles.
That was how I noticed it, because when an aquacycle
came within maybe fifteen feet of where it was resting it
would move away so it stayed just fifteen feet away from
the aquacycle, then move back to where it’d been as soon
as the people on the cycle were far enough away. And it
did the same thing once with some people in a boat.
And besides it never dived or quacked or preened itself
or seemed to be looking for anything to eat and all the
other ducks ignored it. They didn’t seem scared of it,
they just didn’t pay any attention to it, and all it did was
float there and keep away from people.
But that was only when the sun was shining on it. As
soon as things clouded over it would start swimming
towards the other ducks, but it always stopped and went
back to floating on its own away from everything else
when the sun came out from behind the clouds again.
All except one time, after I’d been there a couple of
hours, when a lot of really dark clouds covered the sun
and kept it covered for about fifteen minutes. The duck
started swimming towards another duck the way it
always did when the sun got covered over— the other
duck was a male mallard just like it was this time— but it
didn’t stop like it had before, the times when the sun
came out from behind the clouds again. I was watching it
through the binoculars to try to see what it did if it
attacked the other male the same way it’d attacked the
females the night before.
Only it didn’t attack the other duck. It just swam
closer and closer to it until the two ducks were maybe
three feet away from each other, then it put its head
down and went forward a little like it was looking for
food on the bottom and then it dived.
A second or two late the other mallard gave a sort of
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shocked SQUAWK! and got pulled under, just like a giant
snapping turtle had reached up from underneath and
grabbed it in its jaws and pulled it down. Only I knew it
wasn’t a snapping turtle, it was the other duck.
I watched where it had gone under with the binoculars
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 45
