The Duck  

 Actually, it was a Canadian 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 greenskeeper'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 Canadian 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 ended 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...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 Canadian goose. The body was found by the maintenance crew, horribly mutilated. Mr. Arnold Sacci, head of maintenance, said that..."

R.F. Marazas has been doing this longer than he cares to remember, between stints at the nine to five career thing which takes too much time away from what's really important. He's published in little magazines.

Contact R.F. Marazas at seagoat1@earthlink.net

October 29, 2001
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