Twenty One Duck Salute
“There is no such thing.”
It’s the first thing I say to the woman on the stool next to me at the bar but not the first thing I think. You’re out of my league, that’s what I’m thinking and not saying. Because she so clearly is.
On the tall side, in a pantsuit of green silk that covers pneumatic flesh with rosy overtones. White spiky heels. Hoop earrings you could heave a bluebird through. Russet hair in cascades like a glorious dark Niagara. A long face on which wounded dignity sits like it belongs there.
She’s been going on about how much she wants to see a twenty one duck salute before she gets too old to enjoy it. She’s addressing herself to the bartender. How can I not eavesdrop?
This is at the Amethyst. The owner-operator is named Ruby. Or is it the other way around? I lose track.
Separately, the woman and I are drinking more or less the same amount, at more or less the same pace. For me it’s too much. For her it appears not to be enough.
It’s early. Not much of a crowd yet. Smoky jazz on the sound system; irreverent horns and brushy percussion. Ruby has her eye on us. It’s a spectacular dark eye in an urban face with flattened angles, by which I guess I mean to say that she has seen it all. The parrot in a cage behind the bar has forgotten all the words it used to know.
The Amethyst is downtown on Cayuga Avenue in a city you know only too well. It’s spring, coming up on May. Ninety-four percent of the local residents polled the other day have had it with winter.
“Listen, Benito,” says the woman, “just because you personally don’t know about a thing doesn’t mean it can’t exist. Your horizons are narrow, that was the first thing I noticed about you.”
My name is Jerry. If she wants to call me Benito, I’m all for it.
I’m about to look up twenty one duck salute on my phone, but she leans over and puts a hand on my arm.
“Don’t take the coward’s way out.”
She’s right, of course. I put the phone away. I ask Ruby to serve her another shot. Bourbon, that’s her drink. She looks at me as if I’ve just put my hand down her blouse. In a good way.
If case you’ve forgotten, the Amethyst makes you, the patron, feel as though you’re in an aquarium. It’s done with mirrors, and clever lighting, and strategically placed plant clusters that suggest the quiescent mystery of underwater flora. Kind of cool except you can’t escape the sensation that you are being gawped at by tourists beyond the glass.
“Okay,” I say, “how do they work?”
“How does who work?”
“Twenty one duck salutes.”
“I’m not going to waste my time on a skeptic.”
“I’m not a skeptic, I’m just curious about the mechanics.”
“Done right, it’s a feat of organizational genius.”
“I bet.”
So now we’re drinking together, to Ruby’s relief. I slow down because it would be easy to overdrink the situation.
Penelope. Her name.
“Let’s get one thing straight.”
“Okay.”
“Never call me Penny.”
Words are cheap. I promise I won’t. There’s something else on her mind.
“Gloom and doom,” she says, practically spitting the words.
“What about them?”
“I’m fed up to here with all of it. Pessimism, depression, apocalyptic dread. Whatever happened to plain old having a good time?”
“Take a blowtorch to all the negativity, that’s what I say.”
“I wish I could believe you mean that.”
“Me too.”
She sizes me up for the first time. “You’re okay, Benito.”
“Euphoria,” I say. “That’s what we need more of.”
“Don’t forget about exuberance.”
Ruby’s eye darkens a little, listening to our banter. Don’t let anybody tell you bartenders are not judgmental. They generally keep it to themselves, but they are bursting with social criticism.
I lose track of pretty much everything, time included, trying to keep up with Penelope. Not so much the drinking as the wave she’s riding. It’s real. It is absolutely real. By force of will she has obliterated pessimism, defeatism, all the downers we have made our daily bread. She is a burst of happy, a river of delight, a star pulsing in the sky of possibility. As best I can tell, in my condition, the bar seems to be filling up with people who burble and gush, gush and burble. Ruby gets busy. The parrot stutters a couple of syllables, then gives up and sulks with its head down. If there is any sort of desperation underneath Penelope’s joyful drive, I can’t see where she has hidden it.
The next thing I lose track of is how we come to be in Penelope’s car. It’s a silver bullet of an electric sedan with leather seats. I know, I know, neither one of us has any business being behind the wheel. Stifle, if you will, your urge to criticize. Here we are; stay with us.
“Better go slow,” I say.
“My thought exactly.”
This seems to be part of a conversation we are having, or possibly it’s the entire conversation. It might also just be what I’m thinking we ought to be saying. She looks over at me. Zoom, she says, Let’s zoom.
It feels like hours, and quite possibly it is, that we drive around the city managing not to be pulled over by a late-shift cop. Maybe Penelope is driving with more care than I am in a position to appreciate. I want to say that our trajectory is aimless, but it’s not.
For one thing, I pick up a few basic biographical facts about the woman sitting next to me. She works in some kind of online marketing business. She has been married twice. She knows what it’s like to be spurned.
For two, at some point we turn into the parking lot of Northanger Park. Northanger is a popular hangout, but the city fathers and mothers close it after dusk. Which explains why Penelope switches off her headlights, going in. The park sits on the west edge of the city and boasts the usual accoutrements: a playground and picnic tables, an acre of tame woods, an exercise trail geared to the sedentary. Also, a lake of manageable proportions.
“Now I get it. This is where they keep the ducks.”
“Have you not been taking me seriously, Benito?”
We open our doors. Then close them again. In the overhead light’s momentary glow she appraises me.
“You puzzle me. I don’t know what to make of you.”
I shrug. There’s not much to make. Like her, I have been married. And I too know what it feels like to be spurned.
“That’s okay,” she tells me, “it’s not the kind of night for complicated relationship stuff. What we’re after is simple.”
We kiss. Once. It’s long. It’s perfect. Inside that single kiss is everything from Hello to You left toast crumbs in the bed to Goodbye.
“How did we get here?” I want to know.
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Me neither. It might be divine intervention.”
She opens her purse and takes out a baggie of cocaine. It’s been quite some time now since we stopped drinking. The wave of hilarious intoxication has crested.
I put my hand on her arm and tell her, “Don’t take the coward’s way out.”
I’m not sure whether she remembers having said those words to me back at the bar. Regardless, she recognizes the wisdom of her own advice and puts away the coke.
So now it’s time to get out of the car and confront the challenge — I won’t call it a problem — of collecting twenty one ducks.
“I read up on this,” Penelope informs me. “There are regulations governing how many ducks can be in a lake. On a lake? A body of water this size, we shouldn’t have any difficulty.”
Well, yes and no.
We wander in the dark down to the edge of the sleeping lake guided by the flashlight in Penelope’s phone. And lo and behold, we do indeed come upon some ducks: a mother and four ducklings resting in a tiny sliver of an inlet. Penelope does not hesitate. Before the mother can organize her defense she has snatched her out of the water, which induces the ducklings to clamber out after her. There is confused squawking, and the mother duck resists being held. It pecks Penelope’s arms and wriggles like crazy. The babies are distressed. Penelope holds on.
“Ouch,” she hollers, and again, “It hurts, goddamn it.”
“Wait.”
I run to a spot I noticed coming down where the parks department is doing some kind of water-line repair. They’ve dug a hole in the ground down to pipe level. To protect park-goers they have surrounded the hole with that orange temporary fencing material with holes in it. You know what I’m talking about, you’ve seen it. I grab the fencing and the poles to which it’s attached and race back to water’s edge where Penelope and the duck continue to fail to reach an understanding.
I jab the poles into the earth, no easy feat because the ground is harder than I wish it was. Then I weave the orange stuff around the poles and make a fence. Penelope deposits the mother duck inside. I go after the ducklings and place them inside with their mother. Talk about being puzzled. But after a minute or two they decide the duckverse has changed, this is what existence looks like now. The mother settles on the ground, and the ducklings crowd against her for warmth and comfort.
“Brilliant,” says Penelope.
It’s not. Not really, but I have to admit I feel pretty good, having improvised a rudimentary duck pen under pressure of time and limited resources.
We split up, going in opposite directions along the bank looking for more ducks. And we find them. More than I, for one, would have expected. Of course I never did the research on the lake-to-ducks ratio that Penelope has. Anyway it takes a fair amount of time to amass the necessary number of quackers.
And we don’t quite get there.
Eighteen. After much patient searching, we have captured and relocated eighteen ducks, all of them females with ducklings. I did find a few males as I went. But unencumbered by family responsibility, they flew off as I grabbed for them, disappearing in the darkness in flapping noisy alarm.
We meet at the pen. For the first time since I’ve met her, Penelope is cast down.
“Obviously if you’re going to do a twenty one duck salute, you need twenty one of the damn things,” she says, unable to keep the lament out of her voice.
“We can keep looking.”
“It’s getting late,” she said. “I mean early.”
In fact, back toward the city the sky is just beginning to lighten. It won’t be long before the shapes of buildings emerge, and people wake into another dream of day. I feel a pang of anticipatory loss. Much as I want it to, this — whatever it is — is not going to last forever. Say what you will, time is inexorable.
I have an idea. “Let’s do a practice salute. We can practice with the eighteen.”
But she instantly shoots down the idea. “We don’t have time for a rehearsal, Benito.” She too is feeling the moving intransigence of time. “This is it, this is our one chance.”
She’s right, of course.
Partly to make her feel better, I come up with the idea of using my shoelaces to tie the mother ducks together.
“That way,” I explain, “when the time comes, they’ll act in concert.”
“It might work,” she says.
And, surprisingly, it does. With more patience than I am accustomed to demonstrating in daily affairs I carefully link the ducks with shoelace. With more patience than I would have expected, they submit.
The sky is definitely lighter now than it was when I removed the laces from my shoes. I feel a sense of panic building. I want this, now, as much as Penelope does. But it’s the precursor of light that allows me suddenly to make out the silhouettes of a duck and four babies stirring underneath a picnic table in one of those roofed-over enclosures of the type people reserve for family get-togethers.
I race toward the enclosure. Without any laces, my shoes flop, and loping on the cold ground I lose the left one. I keep going. I bear down on the mother and make a command decision. I reach to scoop her. She squeals and scoots. I reach again. This time I snag her, but I only take two of her ducklings with me before running back to the pen where Penelope stands admiringly.
“I feel bad about the two I left behind,” I admit.
“They’ll get over it. Remember, we’re doing this by the book.”
I wonder which book.
Once again here we are. Inside the temporary orange fence are twenty one ducks, the legs of the mothers tied together with my shoelaces. The light causes them to stir. Like me, they are wondering what happens next. For some reason I have faith.
Penelope stands facing the ducks, secure and confident, calmly in control. Any minute now, the sun will stick the tip of its red forehead up over the eastern horizon.
And then, rather suddenly, it does.
There’s no time to run back and get my left shoe. It’s happening.
Penelope raises her arms like a maestro with a baton before a well drilled orchestra. Then in a single crisp motion she lowers the baton, and with the arrival of the new day the ducks start quacking. Loudly, and all together. All twenty one of them, best I can tell. There is more exultation than triumph in the look Penelope gives me. As experiences go, this one is pure. The moment won’t last. It can’t. But while it does, it’s big enough to hold us, ducks and all. Inside its warm embrace I will take what I am given.
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Mark Jacobs is an American literary treasure. I’ve read him for years in various venues. Never disappointed. Thank you for publishing him. Thank you, Mark, for writing.
I too, have been reading Mark’s stories for years. He is constantly creating tales of sorrow, love and wonder that take you to far away places, as well as to his home town of Buffalo, New York. Every story is unique, intriguing, and magical to to read.