Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  “The last time I saw her, she was under here.”

  Lestermeyer grunted from the exertion of twisting his thick body into the proper angle to peer beneath the cart while still helping to hold it up. “No, excuse me, that’s our ducklings.” Balls of yellow fluff flowed toward the shadows. An outburst of peeps was muffled as we eased the upended vehicle back to the ground.

  “What kind of babies are they?” Linda beamed.

  “I hope the pharisee didn’t get his hands on her,” he muttered.

  “So, why do you call him the pharisee, again?” I asked, uncertain if I had missed the explanation.

  He stopped and straightened a pair of glasses that somehow fit around a globular nose. “Because he can quote the letter of the law as fine as the Devil can quote scripture. Had the cops over here twice last week.”

  “The cops?” asked Linda. He was too angry to answer at once. As we followed him up a rise in back of the barn, a raw ditch of a miniature lake snapped into view, a great gouge of earth resembling the scar a meteor might have left behind. An excited stream of water from an angled pipe fed the long and narrow, apparently bottomless pit. Blazing reflected sunlight all but hid the score of ducks that paddled far out in the middle.

  “Our geese make too much noise,” he snarled. “They wake him in the morning. I told the cops I’ve lived here thirty years. You don’t put up a house beside a petting zoo if you want to live the life of Riley. You see the sign out front that says ‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo’? You can see it clean from the intersection. It wasn’t any surprise.”

  “It’s the only way we found our way here,” I told him. “The house numbers don’t make any sense. They go up for a while, then they go down for a while, then they go up again.”

  He nodded happily. “‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo.’ The pharisee erects his temple next door then complains that Noah got here first. There’s your duck, out there.”

  We shielded out eyes but couldn’t see a thing. “What does she look like?” Linda asked. “If she’s a Khaki Campbell, or call duck, or black and white Cayuga, or Blue Swede, or Muscovy, we don’t want one. We could have gotten one from Mr. Murdoch, but we didn’t want to let him know some of the other ducks he sold us are dead.”

  “Raccoons,” I added.

  “We don’t want an Indian Runner duck, either,” Linda said.

  “We couldn’t get her out of there, anyway,” Lestermeyer told us, waving an arm toward the pond. “Not until they go back to the barn on their own about the time it gets dark.”

  “Hours from now,” I explained.

  “Mr. Murdoch doesn’t have anything we want right now. We like his ducks, but we want something different.”

  “Raccoons,” pondered Lestermeyer. “We get skunks after our chicken eggs.”

  “Let’s look around,” I urged Linda. “There must be another duck here you’d like.”

  “How about a Rouen,” he suggested. “A Rouen,” he repeated in response to our blank expressions. “The drakes have got green heads exactly like your mallards.”

  “A Rouen is a domestic mallard.”

  “We can’t have boys,” Linda lamented. “My husband doesn’t want any babies.”

  “No ducklings, either,” I clarified.

  “There’s a female Rouen out there,” he told us, as he squinted into the blinding glare.

  “She won’t come out until it gets dark,” I said.

  “I’ll get her,” he promised. As he walked to the nearest shore of his backyard ocean—a hardened lip of dirt sprinkled with wiry sprigs of grass—three ducks swam toward him, matching his rate of travel. The Rouen hen accompanying a pair of males resembled a slightly larger, fatter version of a female mallard. She quacked briefly and vigorously when Lestermeyer grabbed her, but I missed the miraculous moment of capture; I was transfixed by a vision of mythological proportions. A one-eared goat with a purple scarf tied around her neck appeared from the rise behind Lestermeyer’s barn, followed by four auricularly intact goats so evenly spaced in single-file procession, all five might have been connected by identical invisible lengths of chain. Though I was close enough to nudge any one of them, their slitted eyes didn’t register my presence as they swept along a goat-width path that rounded a rail-fenced pony pen. Just their twitching tails moved unsynchronized. It was the only example of order I had witnessed since arriving at Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo, and the sight took my breath away. I turned to share the moment with Linda, but she hadn’t noticed them.

  “I’m not very impressed by the way girl mallards look,” she said, as Lestermeyer grappled with the wing-flapping female, and I feared another search for the mystery duck loomed. But the Rouen revealed sublime color variations when he brought her close to us. Her tan head was streaked with brown, and a thick black stripe interrupted the flow of orange across her bill. Her back was jeweled with glowing shades of brown—each feather exploded in a sunburst of gold against a raw-umber background. Her breast was creamy chestnut. Her folded wings disclosed a band of electric blue bordered by the purest white. Her tail was white. Her feet were as orange as Peggy’s, and she shared Chloe’s inappropriately noble bearing, along with a boisterous voice sure to harmonize with the Khaki Campbell’s quacks during my extensive stretches in bed.

  “She’s a beautiful duck,” Linda decided.

  “I had no idea,” I marveled, still stricken by the bovid apparition.

  “Couldn’t we get a donkey, too?” she asked. “He’s got the cutest little one in the barn.”

  I could only sadly shake my head.

  After we had slipped the duck inside the kitty carrier, Lestermeyer led us around a hissing gang of geese, through a small assembly of pious-faced sheep, and into a boxy, vinyl-sided farmhouse to complete the commercial transaction. All the shades were drawn, possibly in an attempt to pharisee-proof the house. The feeble glow of a table lamp in the living room confirmed the murk rather than dispersing it. We felt our way to overstuffed chairs and sat down in front of a coffee table piled with rolled-up newspapers secured with rubber bands. Either Lestermeyer was behind in his reading, or he supplemented his income delivering papers. A silent shadow that I took to be his wife rose from a couch of uncertain hue and retreated to the kitchen. Staring into my open wallet, I struggled to distinguish between the one- and five-dollar bills.

  “You sure have a lot of animals, Mr. Lestermeyer,” said Linda.

  “It costs me more than I make to feed them.”

  “So, what do we owe you?” I asked.

  “Eight dollars will do.”

  Apparently our mallard wasn’t what Rupert Murdoch would have called a show duck. That also meant Lestermeyer had spent close to an hour with us for less than a ten-dollar payoff. He even refused to keep the change when I handed him a pair of fives.

  “I can’t do that,” he told me, fishing eight quarters from a covered candy dish and stabbing them into my palm. “Thank you, but I can’t take money I haven’t earned. If you want to make a contribution, come back and buy more of our animals. We’ve got a little of everything.”

  “We’re all through accumulating animals now,” I informed him with wholly unfounded optimism. “But we’ll tell our friends about you.”

  “You certainly are a good man,” said Linda, as she leaned over to give him a hug, and my silhouette of a head nodded in agreement.

  “Good luck with the pharisee,” I told him.

  WE SPENT THE drive back home praising Lestermeyer for his dedication to his animals. Over the next couple of weeks, he kept cropping up in conversation. Linda and I would sit down for dinner to feed Stanley, Ollie, and, to a lesser extent, ourselves. Hearing us clatter around in the kitchen, newcomer Maxine would raise her voice from the duck pen. Chloe would quack in counterpoint. Then Linda would say, “Poor Mr. Lestermeyer. He sure does love his animals.” And I would answer, “I don’t know where he gets his energy.” Then I’d add, “I wish he was selling some of that.” These gripping observations typ
ically trickled on after dinner, but they stopped for good during a particular Friday evening when Linda spotted a classified ad in the paper that made her shout at decibel levels rivaling Chloe’s, “What’s this?” It was an ad placed by Jacob Lestermeyer. In addition to introducing children and their families to the pleasures of mingling with tame domestic animals, Lester-meyer’s Petting Zoo provided another service. The same goats, rabbits, ducks, and chickens were also available for enjoyment as butchered meat.

  THAT SPRING AND SUMMER, as visitors to the petting zoo were busy cuddling or cooking Lestermeyer’s livestock, I watched helplessly as we took on additional pets from other fronts. It started with Linda grieving, “Now that Bertha’s gone, I don’t have a little animal to hold anymore.”

  “You’ve got Penny.”

  “She’s your cat. And she hides upstairs all the time.”

  “Okay, then you’ve got Agnes.”

  “She’s become an outdoor cat. And she doesn’t even like to look at us.” That was true. Whoever had briefly owned our small black cat before dropping her off on our property had apparently mistreated her. Whenever I scolded her for paying too close attention to the parakeets, or if I made an abrupt grab for a bag of tortilla chips sitting near her on the couch, she would cringe as if expecting a whack. She grew incrementally less fearful as time passed. Penny, on the other hand, had taken Agnes’s intrusion into our house personally. She would flee from me rather than suffer the betrayal of inhaling Agnes’s scent upon my person. She had developed as many hiding places as Binky, secreting herself behind the file cabinet, under the bed, or on top of a slide-projector box nestled in a storage shelf. Whenever I wanted to pet her, I was forced to lie upon the floor and stretch an arm into her hidey-hole. As long as just my fingers reached her, she would purr and roll and, at her wildest abandon, even lick my hand. Catnip occasionally lured her out into the open, though once the euphoria dissolved, it seemed to leave her with a heightened sense of vulnerability.

  I didn’t take Linda’s assertions seriously about wanting another pet until the day I arrived home from work and was horrified to find a pair of guinea pigs occupying Bertha’s old cage. When Bertha had died, both Linda and I vowed never to get another rabbit, because we simply didn’t have good luck with them. From what I had read about guinea pigs, their constitutions were even more fragile, and their cranial activity, to put it politely, was significantly less intense. I raised a ruckus, and the guinea pigs promptly went back to the store. My position stressed two unassailable tenets. First, no pets were to be brought into the house without the permission of both husband and wife. Second, okay, we would get another rabbit. Two rabbits? Fine. My guinea-piggish reasoning went as follows: as long as we were falling down the rabbit hole, two bunnies would undoubtedly be less trouble than one. Rather than amusing themselves eating our baseboards and pulling up the living room carpet strand by strand, they would romp and play with each other, freeing up hours of leisure time for us. We decided to look for a pair of Netherland dwarfs.

  As a starting point—and for the sheer aggravation of the exercise—Linda phoned our local Lowell pet shop, Betsy’s Beasts, and asked Carl (of “No refund without fish carcass” fame) if he had any Netherland dwarf bunnies at the store.

  “I only stock dwarf Dutches and French lops, and only one breed at a time. Right now, we don’t have either one, but I could order one or the other, depending on which breed has the best availability.”

  Linda plowed on cheerfully. “I really want a pair of Netherland dwarfs like Bertha,” she explained, although he could have no idea who Bertha was. “Would you happen to know of anybody in the area who raises them?”

  “If I did,” he answered, “I’m not going to tell you who they are. I never discuss my suppliers with the public. I don’t make a profit when you buy a product somewhere else.”

  “What if I promise to pay you a commission on any rabbit we buy?”

  “I have no way of verifying that,” he told her wearily. “You might turn around three months from now, buy another ten rabbits, and I wouldn’t see a cent.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything like that,” Linda said. “My husband doesn’t want ten rabbits, he only wants two of them like Bertha.”

  “If I take you at your word that you really want just two, I can have two animals in the store within a week. But you’ll have to stop in first and put down a deposit on them. That’s store policy.”

  “But what if I don’t like the two rabbits you happen to get in? They might not have a temperament like Bertha. We bought Binky without making sure he enjoyed being held, and he had an attitude. We really want a couple of Netherland dwarfs, but I can’t tell which ones are right for us unless I have several to choose from.”

  The barrage of rabbit names brought out the worst in Carl. “A customer just walked in the door,” he fumed, as if he couldn’t believe the imposition of two individuals requesting his services at once. “When you make up your mind about what you want, give me another call. Actually, don’t call. I’d rather you came into the store when I’m not so busy.”

  Carl was less busy a few months later when Betsy’s Beasts gave up the ghost, leaving Lowell without a pet shop and fish carcasses with nowhere to go.

  Perhaps because rabbit breeder Warren was plagued by guilt for having once sold us Binky, he acted happy to receive Linda’s call and even more happily recommended a woman named Carrie who specialized in Netherland dwarfs. In contrast to Carl, Rupert Murdoch, and Jacob Lestermeyer, Carrie didn’t exhibit any of the obvious eccentricities we had come to associate with people who sell animals. She might have revealed a few oddball traits had we spent more than an uninterrupted minute in her presence. Hard at work at an undisclosed project inside her house and warily attentive to the teenage son whose muscle car crouched in the driveway, she took us out to a double-stall garage stocked with a row of rabbit cages and disappeared. She returned to point out the parents of her newest batch of rabbits—or kittens, according to the rarely used technical term for bunny babies—before disappearing again. Just as we were deciding which of the young rabbits to put to the hold-and-cuddle test, she whisked between us to open the cage.

  “He takes after his father; he’s very mellow,” Carrie told me, when I picked up a fat black rabbit with stubby ears and huge black eyes. He didn’t wiggle, bite, or pee on me when I held him to my chest. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it.

  “He takes after his mother, he’s pretty hyper,” Carrie explained, when Linda attempted to subdue a caramel-colored bunny disinclined toward human contact. She returned him to the cage in favor of a Bertha clone that briefly tolerated Linda’s advances before kicking to signify his hankering for solid ground. Carrie took him from Linda. “This coloration is called Silver Marten.” She blew upon a small section of fur on the bunny’s back. “See the silver coloring that comes through under the black? That’s how you tell a Silver Marten. Go ahead and take your time,” she shouted, as she intercepted a lanky high-school-age boy wearing a basketball shirt and a sour expression, then disappeared into the house with him.

  “Isn’t he a doll?” Linda cooed over the Silver Marten. Bertha had been unhealthy for such a significant portion of her time with us that this bunny’s bright eyes were a revelation. So were his sleek black coat with the tan stripe between his ears, his silver ring around each eye, and his silver flecks, which gained momentum as his fur flowed toward his feet. His stomach and nether regions were also silver and possibly martinized, too. I opted for the plump black charmer but was instantly vetoed.

  “Can’t we get the brown one instead? I don’t like the looks of a solid black animal.”

  “Agnes is solid black,” I reminded her uselessly, adding in the same breath, “Do what you want to, they’re your rabbits.” Before leaving with the two brothers that Linda had chosen (one Silver Marten, one brown) and a wallet forty dollars lighter (show rabbits apparently going for twice the price of show ducks), I asked Carrie if we could assume our bunni
es would remain best buddies.

  “It depends,” she said. “Sometimes they get along. Sometimes they don’t.”

  “Shouldn’t they get along because they’re brothers?” Linda asked.

  “They might,” she shrugged. “They might not. Puberty is when everything changes, and these guys are just a week or so away.”

  I hadn’t even slammed my driver’s-side door when Carrie’s screen door banged shut and she was back inside the house. Maybe she was allergic to rabbits. I feared I had developed a weird physiological reaction of my own to the Netherland dwarfs the next day, when I said good-bye to a Silver Marten and a caramel-colored bunny on my way to work, then said hello to a Silver Marten and a fat black bunny when I returned in the afternoon. In my absence, Linda had driven the thirty miles back to Carrie’s to make the exchange. She must have been plagued by guilt over my not getting the rabbit I had wanted, I hypothesized.

  “The black one has a better personality,” Linda pointed out.

  AT BINDER PARK ZOO in Battle Creek, the cereal-producing city where Linda’s mother lives, the children’s zoo area includes an expansive outdoor rabbit pen. Clumps of full-grown rabbits play together on the grass, groom one another, and stretch out side-by-side for a nap in the sun. In our many visits to the zoo, we never saw a single instance of discontent among the bunnies. They appeared inherently as well suited to social interactions as ducks. And Silver Marten Bertie and roly-poly Rollo seemed headed down the path of sibling bliss. They loved jumping in and out of an Easter basket together that Linda had set up on the floor of our porch or friskily chasing each other around the dining room and kitchen. They shared the same cage, eating out of the same bowl at the same time. They were closer than two peas in a pod, more gregarious than mushrooms on a log.

  One night after Linda and I had just settled into bed, we heard a loud thump from the dining room. It was the sound of hormones kicking in. After two more contained explosions, we flicked on the light to find Bertie and Rollo clawing and biting each other with such intensity, they had skidded their cage several inches across the linoleum. Then, as abruptly as the aggression had begun, the pair reverted to a peaceful coexistence that carried through the following day. By nightfall, hostilities began anew. Soon the brothers couldn’t occupy a room together without uniting in a rolling ball of mayhem that left half-dollar-size patches of fur scattered across the floor and a musky wild-animal scent in the air. By then we had already purchased a second cage, ending our dreams of mutually sustaining rabbit buddies and replacing them with the burden of feuding family members that we had to sequester at all times. We had hoped that getting the brothers “fixed” would remedy the problem, but their territorialism was too deeply ingrained.