Fup

by Jim Dodge

  "And you say the posthole you found him in was all chomped up?"

  "Torn to hell."

  "Well goddamn," Granddaddy wagged his head, "I 'spect ol' Lockjaw spent the night trying to eat this poor fucking bird." He chortled with delight. "Must've drove him total crazy, a tender little morsel just outa reach."

  Tiny grinned. "I can just see him with his snout rammed down that posthole, slavering and chomping."

  "Probably wasn't so funny to this sad little bastard though," Granddaddy gestured toward the mud-smeared duckling stretched out on the red and white oil cloth covering the table. "Must've been like looking up the business end of a double-barrel.12 gauge." The duckling stirred weakly, as if recalling the sight.

  Granddaddy quickly bent over it and pressed an ear to its chest. He listened intently. "Sweet-leaping-jesus," he barked, jerking upright, "its heart is commencing to quit. Tiny, fetch a jar of Death Whisper from the cabinet-this calls for some emergency first-aid."

  While Tiny got a jar of Granddaddy's best, the old man was taking the dropper off a bottle of Vick's nosedrops. When Tiny unscrewed the lid and set the jar on the table, recoiling slightly from the fumes, Granddaddy squeezed up a dropper-full and, prying the duckling's bill open, administered it with a decisive pinch of the bulb.

  The effects were instantaneous: the duckling, eyes bulging, began to flop around on the table, cheeping wildly.

  "Well, we got its heart pumping good," Granddaddy beamed. "Now we best get him washed off and see how he looks."

  An hour later the duckling, dried to a fluff, was running around on the tabletop waving its stubby wings and peeping happily.

  "How do you think it got in that posthole anyway?" Tiny asked as he and Jake watched it frolic.

  "Damned if I know… I don't even have an interesting theory."

  "Don't make any sense at all."

  "Sure wouldn't be the first time/' Grand-daddy grumbled. Then, more sharply, to Tiny: "We gonna keep him? Or her, as the case may be."

  "At least till he's healed up, sure."

  "Shitfire, he looks healed up fine right now-look at him romping on that table."

  "I mean till he's grown up enough to take care of himself."

  "Well then, we better give this critter a name so he knows who we're talking about."

  "Tiny smiled. "I thought up a good one already." He paused for effect: "Posthole."

  "That is pretty good," Granddaddy agreed, "but I got a real good one: Fup."

  "Fup." Tiny repeated blankly.

  Granddaddy gave him his full, five-toothed grin: "Fup Duck. Ya get it? Fup… Duck."

  "That's a terrible name," Tiny groaned.

  * * *

  Terrible or not, and despite Tiny's resistance, Fup became the duckling's name, a decision rendered by common usage at the next Saturday night poker game. The players-Ed Bollpeen and his boy Ike; Lub Knowland; the Stranton brothers, Happy and PeeWee; and Lonnie Howard-laughed at Jake's addled wit, but also appreciated its strange accuracy, for something was indeed fucked up. They assumed that the duck's ultimate origin was an egg and believed that Tiny had found it in his diggings up on the North Fork ridge, but nobody could figure how it got from the egg to the posthole.

  "Maybe its mama dropped it when she was flying through the storms," Lonnie Howard suggested as he peeled back his hole card for a look.

  "You ignorant dunghead," Granddaddy barked scornfully, "ducks don't fly around with their young'uns tucked under their wings-that'd be like trying to piss and whack off at the same time."

  "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.

  3 Fup

  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.

  She did like it when she jumped one of theirs and got to pick it up with her bill and drop it on the floor, but when one of hers was jumped she would jump too-up and down on the board with her webbed feet wildly stomping, scattering the pieces so that it was necessary to declare the game a draw and start over. Collectively, they eventually gave up.

  The only exceptions to daily routine were part of a larger accord. The two primary deviations were the Friday Night Drive-In Movies and the Sunday Morning Pig Hunt.

  They all enjoyed going out to the movies. The closest theater (to give it a dignity description could not bear) was the Rancho Deluxe Drive-In near Graton, some forty miles and two hours away. Fup rode in the cab, on top of the seat between them, Tiny driving, Grand-daddy Jake riding shotgun.

  The first time they'd taken Fup, the plump redhead in the ticket stall had squinted into the cab of the pick-up, smacked her Juicy Fruit, and asked, "What's that?"

  "A duck-a female mallard," Tiny said. "And my Granddaddy."

  "That's the biggest damn duck I've ever seen."

  "Yes ma'am… and we wouldn't mind paying extra for her even though the sign out there says $2 a carload."

  Fup lowered her head and made a hissing/retching sound.

  "No, there's no extra charge-she's part of the load. Go on in. I'll talk to the manager, and if there's any problem with codes or like that, he'll come talk to you."

  Grandaddy leaned across the seat. "If there's any problem, there's two problems. You savvy?"

  She sighed and smacked her gum. "I kinda figured that."

  The manager, a short, dour man in a Robert Hall suit, sporting a pencil moustache that just nudged being mousy, saw Tiny looming in the driver's seat and made the mistake of choosing Grandaddy's side of the truck instead.

  When Grandaddy cranked down the window, the manager peered in, confirmed Fup's presence with a glance, and demanded, "What's this duck doing in my establishment?"

  "She wants to watch the movie," Tiny said amiably, cutting off his Granddaddy who was already starting to froth.

  "We don't want anything unusual," the manager said firmly, if without immediate reference.

  Granddaddy erupted, "Well that really narrows the shit out of your life, don't it? This happens to be a Kung Fu Attack Duck, specially bred by the Tong Society. We'd leave her home, but she's killing all the coyotes."

  "That's not really true, sir," Tiny said quickly. "We found her in a posthole and raised her up. She's kinda family."

  "Listen," the manager said, raising his hands in either exasperation or surrender, "we are willing to be reasonable about this but…"

  "I'm not," Granddaddy snarled, grinding the two teeth that met. "If you don't go away and leave us alone to enjoy our evening at this shithole excuse of a drive-in, we will come back tomorrow night with the bed of this truck full of wild pigs and a couple of troughs full of fermented corn mash, and if that doesn't sway your intelligence we'll come back the next night and my son Tiny will tear off your arms and pound on your head with them until you get the idea."

  "I'd only do that if I was really mad," Tiny assured him.

  Fup tucked her head under her wing.

  "I won't be threatened," the manager shrilled.

  "No, you'll be hurting," Granddaddy promised. Then he added, still sharply but somewhat softer, "A duck. A duck. What possible fucking difference could it make to your stunted heart or the world at large?"

  "Alright, alright," the manager relented, backing away. "But keep it in the car. And if there's anything unusual, you're out. And no refund."

  There was no trouble with admission after that.

  Tiny and Granddaddy Jake were both partial to Westerns, especially those featuring gunslingers against a good-hearted Marshall.

  Granddaddy, who was usually pretty well into his second jar of the day, pulled hard for the outlaws and other forces of disorder, often leaning out the window to holler advice at the screen-"No, no, you dumb shits. Don't meet him on the streets… bushwhack the sum-bitch from behind a watering trough!" He was also highly critical of the gunslinger's choice of weapons, ranting to Tiny and Fup, "Goddamn why do they want to use them pistols all the time? Can't hit jackshit with 'em past 10 yards. Situation like that requires a sawed-off.10 gauge and nine or twelve sticks of dynamite. Idiots! No wonder they never win!"

  Tiny quietly rooted for the Marshall.

  Fup was generally indifferent to Westerns, except for seemingly arbitrary scenes when she would quack excitedly. It took Tiny and Granddaddy Jake about five months to figure out what all the scenes had in common were horses, and after discussing it they decided to buy her a colt for company when Bill Leland's mare foaled the coming spring. Tiny started roughing out drawings for a ten foot high split-rail corral when they got home that night.

  Fu
p's favorite movies were romances, whether light and witty or murderously tragic. She watched intently from her roost on the back of the seat, occasionally tilting her head to quack in sympathy at the problems assailing love. She would not tolerate Granddaddy's derisive and consistently obscene comments, and after she'd almost torn off his ear a few times he settled for quiet mumbling. Tiny watched without comment.

  Granddaddy Jake liked horror movies almost as much as Westerns. He thought they were hilarious. Tiny and Fup didn't like them at all. Tiny shut shis eyes at critical points. Fup paced the back of the seat, occasionally hissing at the monster or quacking frantically to warn an unsuspecting victim, who was usually quite innocently exploring a radioactive cave or wandering around pressing buttons in a laboratory on a lightning-streaked night.

  Considering the range of their tastes, it was fortunate that the Rancho Deluxe always had a double feature. Between movies Tiny would walk across the humped asphalt to the concession stand and buy them some snacks. The order was usually the same: two pieces of beef jerky for Granddaddy to work on, eight bags of salted peanuts and two large root beers for himself, and for Fup the $2.99 Family Tub of buttered popcorn and a large orange drink. They munched away as the second movie began.

  * * *

  The drive-in was fun. The Sunday morning pig hunt was serious work-at least for Tiny and Fup. Since they started at dawn, Grand-daddy didn't go with them, seeing no reason to disturb his dreaming or, he claimed, show them up. He did, however, offer endless advice.

  There was considerable argument among the local folks whether Fup was truly a pig-duck, a pig-duck in the sense that Boss had been a pig-dog. With her snake-necked waddle, beak working the ground like a bloodhound's nose as she weaved to cut fresh track, she looked like she was hunting. She didn't find many pigs, though, but either nosed down or blundered on enough to make it seem she knew what she was doing. To Tiny, who followed her with his.243 cradled in his arms, there was no question. When she hit fresh track she would start quacking to herself, and as the track got hotter, the volume and intensity increased. He considered it proof that she was indeed tracking and not just casting about. He was also convinced that she had an excellent nose, and though no one but Grand-daddy Jake agreed, he believed Fup could have trailed any pig she wanted. But she was after one pig in particular: Lockjaw. It was Tiny's notion that the few pigs she did nose out, while not the silent boar himself, were directly related to him, off-spring, that had a similar scent. Of course, he couldn't prove it, and that frustrated him. Granddaddy told him there was no need to prove it, that most things spoke for themselves, but to not necessarily assume he'd got the reasons right. The reasons for things, Granddaddy cautioned, were tricky.