R.F.'s winning entry appears below and will be featured in the annual scratch
anthology. Both runners up will be strongly considered for inclusion.
We thank you all for the opportunity to read your clever and innovative stories and are grateful for the pleasure it gave
us. This month's judge, Marc Fitten of The Chattahoochee Review called The Duck "a substantial and
imagined piece that the writer sustains with good writing."
Now enjoy, R.F. Marazas' The Duck.
The Duck.
Actually, it was a Canada goose, but the distinction was lost on Laffer.
The
committee members pierced him with hard stares. This didn't faze him. His return stare was haughty, condescending, disbelieving.
They had never liked him. From the very moment that Merkle sponsored him for admission into the club, they had shown reluctance
and even disdain. But he had done brilliant work on Merkle's teeth and Merkle owed him. Merkle had come through. What
puzzled Laffer was that the man hadn't spoken two words to him since, and he always seemed to have something else to do
when Laffer needed a partner.
"Let's take a little stroll out to the thirteenth." The other members agreed
and Laffer felt a shudder of wariness slide up his spine.
The day was bright and clear with little wind. To his surprise,
there were few people on the course. Up ahead the committee members walked together, muttering in low tones. Laffer walked
alone and a few paces behind, wishing he had brought his clubs. He should be practicing his swing instead of trailing after
these dolts.
It was painful to recall. He saw himself that day, confidently approaching his tee shot, dead center on
the fairway, peering forward, setting himself for the approach shot, pausing, club back, then arcing, hearing the solid thwack
of club on ball. He had thought that his slice was under control, but he watched in horror as the ball curved right like a
boomerang, arrowing toward a dense stand of trees. He practically ran to the disaster.
The duck (as he came to think
of it) lay unmoving where his ball should have been. Its great curved neck was twisted grotesquely. Frantically, he searched
for his ball, and as an afterthought, dragged the duck by the neck with him into the trees and dropped it in the knee-high
grass. The body was heavy. He searched and searched, growing more irritable at the thought of losing his ball.
As he
completed his circle through the trees he heard a thrashing noise. Next to the dead duck stood another, craning its head downward,
tentatively poking the body. Suddenly it let out a high pitched keening sound, which rose to wailing and squawking and honking.
Laffer stood transfixed. And then it turned, fixing its malevolent eye on him, and charged, wings flapping. He plunged back
into the trees, hid for an hour, retrieved his golf bag, and swore all the way back to the clubhouse.
"Doctor Laffer?"
They were all standing on the patch of green where it happened. With them was a fat man with a bushy mustache, dressed in
a baggy greens keeper’s uniform. He kept tossing something into the air and catching it, but his beady eyes never left
Laffer.
"That's him, he's the one killed the goose, blasted him with this ball, look it's still got
blood on it, he's the one, he did it, then hid the poor goose in the woods, but I seen it all---"
"This---person
is obviously deranged," Laffer said. "I would like to have my ball back, please."
The committee chairman
cleared his throat and spoke in a clear, no nonsense manner. "Security will escort you to your locker. You will be allowed
an hour to clean it out. They will then escort you off the grounds. Your membership is terminated. And believe me, Doctor
Laffer, there will be serious consideration at tonight's meeting whether or not to press criminal charges."
Laffer
turned to see the two security guards approaching. They were very big. "You'll hear from my lawyer in the morning."
At home, Laffer went directly to his study and phoned his attorney, who was not available. Nevertheless, he slept the sleep
of innocence wronged that night.
He drove to his office as usual, his sense of balance restored. Life was a question
of balance. He would simply not allow this minor annoyance to upset his balance. Mentally he practiced his swing, solving
the slice problem.
The office was unusually quiet, the waiting room empty. His receptionist, a dour faced woman, announced
that every one of his morning patients had canceled. She refused to look at him, hunched over her keyboard, and her voice
seemed sharper than usual. He strode into his office. The local paper was squared in the center of his desk. It was eerie
standing there reading about the local dentist who had killed a Canada goose on the golf course and then tried to cover up
his crime. The grainy photograph on the front page didn't even resemble him; where had they gotten it.
Ah yes, his
lawyer would be a busy man. He dialed the number but was told again that the man was unavailable. Very odd. He looked up to
find his receptionist standing there with a letter, which she practically flung onto his desk. She was already backpedaling
out the door.
"What's this?"
"I'm resigning today, I have to leave. Oh, and all your patients
for this afternoon canceled, so it's not like there's any work to do…“
"Wait!" But she
was gone. He sat stunned for a moment, then sneered. She had never liked him.
Finally, he went home, after repeated calls
to try to find his lawyer. He had left messages everywhere. He went directly to his study to make more calls. He passed the
living room and stopped. His daughter was cowering at one end of the couch, her accusing stare drilling into him. On the other
end his wife was trying to soothe his son, who was a bloody mess, with torn clothes and battered face. He wept in a high keening
wail
"They beat him up!," his wife hissed. "His classmates! They said his father was a killer! And
they chased poor Susie all over the playground and screamed at her!"
"The school boards will hear from my lawyer!"
he cried above the din.
In his study, his phone calls went unanswered. He meditated, took out his clubs, practiced
his swing, his putting, played the whole course in his mind. He looked forward to getting back there, being re-instated after
those fools on the committee understood that he was not to be trifled with.
The first thump came at just after ten o'clock.
Then another, and another, until they seemed to be coming from a machine gun. A window shattered, another window, and another.
After his initial astonishment, he raced to the front door and threw it open. Except for the faint sound of a car's exhaust
speeding away, the street was quiet. He almost tripped over something and reached inside the door to flip on the porch light.
He gaped. There were dead birds on the porch, everywhere; chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, and some birds he could not name.
Nailed to the porch post was another bird, with a sign hanging from its scrawny neck. Killer. He went back inside to find
his family huddled together in the vestibule. They were wailing again.
"We're leaving," his wife said coldly.
"Tomorrow morning, we're leaving, we can't stay here with you, how could you?---you're a monster!”
"My daddy's a killer!," Susie wailed.
The screaming drove ice picks into his temples and he fled to his
study, where he sipped scotch and planned his revenge and finally fell into a fitful sleep.
He overslept. His family
had left. There was faint noise outside, occasionally rising, but his headache blotted out any detail. He called his lawyer.
This time his secretary announced that Mr. Jaffrey would no longer be able to keep Dr. Laffer as a client. His records, two
boxes of his various lawsuits, would be sent to him. She hung up. He found his phone book and went down the list of attorneys
in town. Then he tried neighboring towns. He would show Jaffrey; the man obviously had never liked him.
The din outside
intruded. He went to one of the broken windows, kicked aside the dead bird, and peered out. There were people marching back
and forth on the sidewalk, chanting, waving signs. A minister with a bullhorn was urging them on. By the time he had showered,
changed clothes, and clicked the garage door open, the crowd had swelled to a hundred. They trampled his lawn, clogged the
street, filled the sidewalk. They were loud. He moved his car slowly through them, blaring his horn, racing his engine. They
parted reluctantly, always screaming at him, pointing their fingers. He recognized his neighbors among them and sneered; they
had never liked him. As he picked up speed after parting the mob, a rock cracked against his rear window, sending a spider
web of lines across it. A chorus of rocks followed, pinging on the hood and the roof.
At his office he found the
glass doors bashed in, the reception area trashed, and his office in chaos. The file cabinets were overturned, their
contents scattered over the room. His bathroom was flooded, the pipes ripped from the walls. He hunkered over the telephone
for the rest of the afternoon, calling lawyers, and the paper, and the mayor, and the police, and the local television station.
As a result of ninety-seven calls, he babbled to ninety-six machines and one irate secretary who told him that he should be
shot.
Suddenly he sat straight in his chair. Balance, life was balance. He ran to his closet, yanked the door open, and
heaved a sigh of relief. They hadn't found his extra set of clubs behind the long raincoat he rarely wore. He grabbed
them, hugged them to his chest. He knew what he had to do. He must reclaim his balance.
Outside he ignored the
swelling crowd. He honked his horn and raced his engine and moved them out of the way, hardly hearing their screams or the
bullhorn or the rocks bouncing off his already pockmarked car. He drove like the wind, whistling off key as he watched the
sky begin to dim down toward twilight.
The side road paralleled the fence at the far edge of the course, exactly where
the thirteenth fairway lay. Laffer pulled off the road as far as he could, up against the fence. With his clubs in hard, he
climbed onto the hood and then the roof, tossed the bag over the fence, and swung his leg up and over. His snagged his pants
on the fence top and ripped them along his thigh trying to yank himself free. Finally he dropped to the grass and grinned,
stretching his arms wide to encompass the whole course. He put on his golf shoes and chose his club and walked to the center
of the fairway, dropping his ball in front of him.
There was no one else on the course, as he had suspected.
Darkness was beginning to threaten but he still had time. He took a deep breath. He approached the ball, peered down at the
stand of trees. His swing was perfect. He watched the ball loft and arc and plummet dead center onto the fairway, no slice,
no wavering, dead on. He grinned again and almost skipped to where his ball lay. It would be dead on to the pin.
His
eye caught movement in the trees.
The duck came hell bent out of the trees, wings flapping wildly, zeroing in on the
ball. Laffer's grin faded. He slammed his iron deep into the turf. "Hey you stupid duck get away from my ball!"
He charged, yelling, brandishing his iron. The duck turned, squawking, and leapt into the air.
Colin Theron was much
beloved among his viewing audience. Viewers trusted him; with his slightly affected British accent, his distinguished good
looks, and his graying temples, he was the perfect anchorman, a kind of wise uncle to those starved for news. That evening
the viewers noticed that he seemed to rush through the national headlines, and then paused dramatically, his eyebrow arched
in that familiar gesture of skepticism.
"And now for the local news. In a bizarre incident at the Arrowhead
Country Club, a local man was pecked to death by a duck---uh, correction, it was a Canada goose. The body was found by the
maintenance crew, horribly mutilated. Mr. Arnold Sacci, head of maintenance, said that---"
