Ducky
by Aimee Parkison
Tripping over high heels, curlers, and pastel gowns, I snuck into my father’s house and found it boobytrapped with paisley evening dresses. These dresses haunted me because Mother would never wear them again. They were ghosts of her youth, ethereal yet stylish, like the woman she once was. Attempting to avoid the gowns my father thought I might wear, I felt guilty. Maybe I was a bad daughter? In helping my father to mourn, maybe I should have attempted to become Mother, or at least more like she was. Looking past low square heels with Mary Jane straps, just like doll’s shoes, in shades of baby pink, lime green, mustard yellow, and sky blue, I got a shock.
“When did you get this new floor?” I asked my father in the smoky little kitchen. That Sunday afternoon, several months after Mother’s death, I delivered groceries for our dinner— dog food for Ducky and, for my father and me, steak and new potatoes with ham-hocked greens. I prepared our simple meal in the grease-stained kitchen with vintage avocado wallpaper coated with grime.
“What floor?” my father asked in his kooky voice, the one he used when he had sloshed down one Coors too many.
Groceries spilled out of the ripped bag, which I clutched, hopelessly, while watching my father stumble toward me in just his boots and stained powder-blue boxer shorts. Hand sewn, printed with faded unicorns, so threadbare as to border on translucent, his shorts should have been outlawed for indecent exposure. The material was older than I was. I thought, respect your elders. Trying not to stare, I wondered how long the stain had been there. My mother never would have allowed him to walk around in stained shorts.
A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his paper-thin lips as he squinted beneath thick square-framed glasses. Having recently lost his wife (my mother) and most of his friends to cancer (all smokers like him), my father, a retired mechanical engineer and devout Baptist, lived alone in a Gold Medallion, full electric, brick ranch house on ten acres of stocked ponds in a small town jam-packed with churches in rural Alabama.
In Birmingham, about a half hour away by highway, I lived with my girlfriend, working nights at the hospital with her, but made sure to visit my father at least once a week.
“This new flooring looks expensive,” I said, staring down at the gray spackle.
A muffled quack bellowed beneath the wobbly kitchen table burned by cigarettes, plates of ashes like black snow.
“Ducky,” I said. “Here, Ducky.”
Opening a bag of dog food, I tossed kibbles onto crusted linoleum, waited for Ducky to emerge. Blue eyes and white feathers gleaming, he could barely move his fat ass. Morbidly obese, suffering from the munchies, staggering drunkenly, he waddled, an overfed ivory-feathered American Pekin from a family of domestic ducks reared principally for meat.
“This little guy,” my father said, “don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“No telling,” I said.
“Care for a smoke?” my father asked.
“Yes,” I said, but then realized he was talking to Ducky.
* * *
My father started giving Ducky cigarettes when Ducky was a duckling. These were special cigarettes, not the kind humans smoke, but much smaller and thinner, shaped like hollow paper needles of hash. My father made them by hand, cutting cigarette paper, using a miniature roller. Ducky had to be trained to smoke these cigarettes, which my father connected to a homemade breathing apparatus, a tiny respirator and beak tube. Ducky began to crave cigarettes, to request them with a special quack, deeper, louder, more prolonged the more he smoked. He had a pronounced smoker’s quack.
Because of Ducky, my father survived in unsanitary conditions, a firetrap of old newspapers near smacks of hardened duck poot splattered like a Jackson Pollock painting. Mounds of cracker boxes, feed sacks, dog food, water bottles, and children’s tub toys were thickly bespattered. The house became a giant splatter painting in gray, black, and white, splotches stretching from floors to walls to ceilings.
I could only do so much to tackle the worst biohazards—clogged toilets, bathtubs of stagnant water, half-smoked joints in beds, toilets, and tubs. The sofa so crusted and hardened, I was afraid to sit down.
“Don’t you dare touch it,” my father warned whenever I threatened to hire a cleaning lady. “As Pollock said, Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”
My father encouraged Ducky to let his art come through, saying for Ducky, as for Jackson Pollock, technique was just a means of arriving at a statement. What that statement was, I never quite knew, but years later, after my father died, I began touring galleries and collecting books on Pollock’s work. That’s how I discovered certain walls in my father’s house were near replicas of Autumn Rhythm, The Deep, Convergence, and Number 1 (Lavender Mist).
“All goes to prove,” my father once said, “animals can be artists just as artists can be animals.”
Like Pollock, Ducky was an abstract expressionist, creating a unique style of drip painting, his leavings transforming my father’s house into what the neighbors deemed “a work of art,” what the city called “a public health hazard.”
Late at night, my father sat in his living room while rolling one tiny joint after another, attempting to keep the neighbors away from the windows. Fanfare made Ducky nervous. He was highly paranoid, didn’t like photographs. Being a recluse, Ducky was shy of strangers with cameras, though he had a big following in town, his own channel on YouTube until PETA shut it down.
If by chance Ducky fell asleep, my father and I were careful not to wake him. Rolling tiny duck joints in silence, my father and I, once estranged, grew closer. Having always been close to my mother, who was once my best friend, I never understood my father, or perhaps had never bothered to understand him until our Ducky days. I finally got to know my father late in life thanks to Ducky, who blew smoke out his ass, lifting his tail feathers and webbed feet, flipping elegantly to expel smoke with abstract art.
Ducky was, of course, a damaged duckling, “defective.” A rare physical deformity and a problem in his hatching led to developmental anomalies in his internal organs, his plumbing, as my father would say. Ducky’s physical defect gave him the gift of smoking in his unique way. Of course, as with most smokers, the activity that gave him the most pleasure began to shorten his life.
The house would eventually be condemned because Ducky was a poot bandit, and like most ducks, could not be housetrained. The outlandish shits he took, blowing them out his smoking keister, splattered everywhere, even in my father’s scraggly hair, since my father and Ducky slept in the same bed.
Ducky rarely left the house, for safety reasons, but inside the house, he roamed free, pooting prolifically. My father began living in filth for the same reason we initially tried to craft a tiny duck bong carved of horn—love of family, art, animals, and Texas tea. The pipe was a failure, and it was complicated to teach a duck how to get a decent bong going. When we switched to mooking, some people considered what we were doing animal cruelty, but Ducky had a better life than any human, the life of an average duck denied him because of his deformity, making it impossible for him to swim, run, or fly. A crippled duckling probably wouldn’t have lived long in the wild. Nevertheless, some people thought what my father and I did was wrong.
After what happened, I don’t believe in keeping ducks as pets or allowing animals to smoke marijuana, except for medical reasons. Keeping a duck as a pet should be a crime, and is in many cities, for reasons clear to anyone who has ever tried. I’ve come to believe it’s morally wrong, unless a person wants to devote ten to twenty years to caring for a duck. My father was one of the few who truly had the desire.
At night, we sat in his living room, rolling one tiny cigarette after another. If, by chance, Ducky fell asleep, “shhhh,” my father said.
I began to realize Ducky understood my father as his pet and his parent, and my father was fine with this, but I worried they were co-dependent.
* * *
When Ducky had a conniption, he had two choices—smoke the cigarette or stop breathing. Eventually, he grew stronger, more used to his lifestyle of handcrafted motorized miniature wheelchairs and remote-control toy tugboats. As he smoked customized joints of the finest quality medicinal marijuana, my father feared Ducky might get cancer like my mother, a lifetime smoker who, in her last days, had needed a respirator to breathe. Mother’s respirator gave my father the idea of crafting the respirator cigarette, for Ducky.
Ducky imprinted my father’s image upon his heart in a way I never had imprinted it upon my own. Closer to my father than I was, Ducky loved my father more than I ever could. If the feeling was mutual, Ducky was a threat to my father’s mental and physical health.
My father was convinced Ducky needed to smoke to relieve chronic pain. That’s why he created the breathing apparatus, but in creating the apparatus, my father created another addict, another beloved chronic smoker he was in danger of losing. This was why my father designed the miniature motorized wheelchair and the duck-sized tugboat, so Ducky could smoke while following him throughout the house, even in the bathtub.
* * *
A strong and defiant woman, my mother lost her battle with lung cancer, smoking to the very end. That’s why my father gave Ducky a blissful existence, the kind he always wanted for my mother but could never manage.
My father found Ducky after my mother’s funeral, when he happened upon the malformed duckling caught in its shell while hatching. Hearing the duckling’s cries in a feed-store dumpster, he dived in to rescue it.
“Look, here, Loren,” my father said, cradling Ducky in his palms. Ducky was tiny—downy, slimy, covered with dried egg and blood. Shell attached to his bottom half wouldn’t fall, though the duckling’s head and much of its upper body had already broken through.
“What’s that?” I whispered.
My father moved his hands into sunlight behind the feed store and splayed his fingers to reveal the encrusted creature nesting between his palms.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s suffering.”
“They dumped him into the dumpster—alive.”
“Put it out of its misery. Please?”
“What some people call misery,” my father said, “others call life.”
It was a speech he had given many times about my mother in her last days when the only thing that made her feel better was the cigarette my father rolled for her by hand.
My father cooed at the duckling. Covered in bird scat and feathers from dumpster diving, my father stank, but he smiled for the first time in weeks while the little damaged duckling wheezed and quacked in his big trembling hands, so full of gentleness.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go inside and talk to the owner.”
“No,” I said, wondering if what he was doing would only lead to more pain. I wondered if in losing my mother, after caring for her in a hopeless situation, he needed to care for another creature doomed to suffer. What could he be thinking, inviting this hurt?
The duckling, with sweet blue eyes and a perfectly formed head and upper body, was tragically deformed. It had been tossed into the dumpster for a reason. It shivered in my father’s large-veined, callused hands. I could see from the determined look in my father’s eyes he was set on taking it home.
Because my father was now the child in our relationship, I became the mother. If a woman lives long enough, if her father enjoys longevity, this is bound to happen.
“These might be its last moments,” I whispered. “Let it go?”
“How?” he whispered.
I thought of my mother, the way my father held her after she died and didn’t want to let the ambulance take her body.
“Hank,” my father said, approaching the feed-store owner. “Could I purchase this duckling?”
As if swallowing a bug, Hank gasped, asking, “Where did you find it?”
“The trash,” I said. “Your dumpster out back.”
“Damned shame,” Hank said, and my father started kissing the duckling.
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said.
“Why do I even have employees?”
“To end its suffering?” I asked.
“We have lots of healthy ducklings to choose from,” said Hank, lighting a cigarette, casting a glance at his son, the assistant manager, John.
“No,” my father said. “I’ll take the duckling. How much do you want for him?”
I sighed, watching Hank smoke. His lungs were probably like my mother’s, or would be in time—damaged, enlarged air sacks causing breathlessness, doing nothing to decrease the craving for cigarettes that caused emphysema in the first place.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
The little duckling stopped crying, drifted to sleep in my father’s hands.
“Couldn’t sell it,” Hank said. “Johnny, why don’t you do like I told you?”
Hank puffed his cigarette, and John smiled in an embarrassed way, adjusting his cap.
“Wait,” my father said, stepping back, clutching the sleeping duckling to his chest as he stared down at John’s steel-toed boots. “Give me a minute,” he said.
I sighed, pretending I was smoking a cigarette. I had quit smoking only months before, to fulfill my mother’s dying wish, knowing I would miss it for the rest of my life.
My father told me to pay for three bags of feed and a warming light, then to unlock the car for John to load the bags. “I’ll just go to the trees to smoke,” he said. I stood with Hank, watching my father steal the duckling in his hat.
“That’s that,” Hank said. “Sorry to hear about your mother, Loren.”
“What do we owe you?” I asked.
“Not a damn thing,” he said, lighting another cigarette while walking away.
* * *
Being so young, living away from his own kind, Ducky came to recognize my father as not only his parent but also an object of habitual trust. Afraid to be without my father, even for short periods of time, Ducky quacked hysterically whenever my father left him to go to the kitchen or bathroom. My father began to carry Ducky everywhere in the pocket of his robe, even when he went to the toilet. He showered with Ducky and snuck him into banks, grocery stores, and doctor’s offices, resting Ducky inside his jacket.
Ducky slept on the pillow my mother once slept upon, and my father focused the heat lamp to keep Ducky warm.
Since Ducky was tiny and covered in scabby shell, we thought we were just keeping him comfortable, that he could slip away any day. This was why my father fed Ducky by hand, let Ducky sleep in bed with him. We didn’t know about imprinting then, the reason why Ducky quacked mournfully and struggled to follow my father.
Ducky was eating and drinking well, but I didn’t think he would survive because shell was still attached to his body, the crust along his translucent belly.
“What’s that, Dad?” I asked.
“Shell.”
“I know. Why is it there?”
On his belly shell, ragged yolk dried in blood.
“Maybe we should pull it off?” I asked, offering tweezers.
“He’s not ready.”
Ducky squawked, rolling off the pillow. Still small enough to fit in my hands, he only trusted my father, so I gave up on tweezers.
Days later, a twisted webbed foot emerged from the crusted shell, and my father created a tiny swimming pool, a mixing bowl filled with warm tap water. Ducky swam for hours, exhausting himself so he had to be occasionally lifted out of the water. I noticed something floating beneath Ducky as he paddled. It was shell, no longer attached, bobbing in the water as Ducky quacked. Soon, more shell washed away, the last bits falling onto his pillow as he slept through the night.
As Ducky matured, my father informed me Ducky couldn’t walk or take care of himself or be alone or go outside and seemed to be in chronic pain.
“Ducky needs your mother’s medicine,” he said, and I suspected he was talking about himself, his own pain, the ailments of aging and smoking, the depression he attempted to hide.
“What?” I asked, realizing that not only would I not be getting my mother’s marijuana, but my father would waste it on a duck.
“I just need to find a way to get him to smoke it,” my father said.
“You’re kidding?”
“I never kid about pain, kid.”
I had already planned to appropriate mother’s medical marijuana. I thought it would go to waste in her dusty jewelry box, but soon discovered there was even more of it in her pantyhose drawer.
To teach Ducky, my father and I smoked cigarette after cigarette, demonstrating what had to be done. Ducky couldn’t hold the joint properly.
“This is wrong,” my father said. The more my father smoked, the more he reverted to the thick accent of his roots. I was delighted because, for once, I agreed with him.
I said, “I just want to smoke with you, Dad.”
“No, I mean these roaches are the wrong size. He needs small ones to fit his beak.”
My head crashed down to the pillow, launching Ducky so he landed on my face. He quacked. I coughed, trying to breathe, inhaling feathers.
“Careful, careful,” my father said, rolling little cigarettes, as I lifted my head before setting Ducky back on the pillow.
These new cigarettes almost worked, but not quite, so we stayed up all night fashioning a duck bong carved from horn and attached to a respirator with a clip to help Ducky hold the bong in his beak. I worried for Ducky: would smoking be good for him? But, mostly, I worried for my father: would he lose his only friend, after losing his only love? I could still hear her voice, one of the few times Mother talked to me about her smoking. “This stuff keeps me sane and happy,” she said. “I’d say it’s a great drug, but obviously not very healthy.”
Within hours of my father’s adjusting the tiny clip bong, Ducky caught on. He smoked joint after joint until his pain seemed gone. It was a miracle—the only miracle I had ever witnessed. Or, so it seemed. He even began to walk, hobbling over pillows until the tubes in his respirator tangled around his crippled limbs and had to be unwound. Eventually, my father and Ducky began to smoke together, leaving me out, no longer needing me for company or having any weed to spare. Whenever Ducky’s cigarette ran out, he nestled into the crook of my father’s neck to breathe in my father’s smoke.
It went on like that for almost two years, until Ducky’s vitality began to slip away.
“My best friend is dying,” my father said, not long before he lost Ducky, who was not moving or quacking the way he used to.
* * *
When Ducky died, my father had him cremated and kept his ashes in a cigar box near my mother’s urn, beside Ducky’s pillow, my mother’s pillow. For days, I was picking clumps of duck poot out of my father’s greasy hair. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I just want sleep.”
My father didn’t leave the house or get a new duckling. He became a recluse. Five months later, he died peacefully in bed, a full ashtray on his nightstand.
Finding my father’s eldest sister, a lifetime smoker, I confronted her at his wake.
There was nothing I could say.
“Cigarette?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
She passed me the soft pack and let me borrow her silver lighter.
AIMEE PARKISON holds an MFA from Cornell University and is the author of five books of fiction. Her most recent book, Girl Zoo (FC2/University of Alabama 2019), is a collaborative experimental story collection co-authored with Carol Guess. Parkison’s fourth book, Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman (FC2/University of Alabama Press 2017), won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and was named one of Brooklyn Rails’ Best Books of 2017. Parkison writes to explore voices and characters, opening doors to unusual journeys through language. Parkison is widely published and known for revisionist approaches to narrative. Her fiction has won numerous awards, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship.