Quack!

I once overheard a teacher tell his students that to succeed in life all a person needed was a single clear focus. At that same time, I had a friend who could... uhm...

Somehow these two threads ran together for the quirky short story below.

Which was a candidate for my online collection, The Keeper of Dragonflies, but did not make my self-imposed, 12-story limit.

Instead, I put it aside for some future collection, to be aimed solely at humor.

When did I write this? I dunno. 2005? 2010? Later? I don't recall.

The variety show segment hints I had notions of marketing this in Japan. I knew a publisher who would buy almost anything I wrote within his word limit, as long as it featured some local perspective.

Yet, I would have had to scrub my language, as he did not allow profanity. That I wished to keep my dirty words is perhaps the reason I never submitted this for sale.

A jody call, as used in the story, is a military marching cadence that most people know from boot camp scenes in movies. Here’s a sample:

Troop Leader: I know a girl whose name is Beth!

Troops (marching behind): I know a girl whose name is Beth!

Leader: Love her cooking but I hate her breath!

Troops: Love her cooking but I hate her breath!

Leader: Sound off!

Troops: One, two.

Leader: Sound off!

Troops: Three, four.

Leader: Sound off!

Troops: One, two (pause) three, four!

And now…

---

Quack!

He was a typical child.  That is, if you take “typical” as “nondescript.”

For nothing about him stuck out. His working-class family was average through and through, and he was of decidedly plain appearance, not tall, nor short, nor handsome, nor ugly. In sports, he was fairly uncoordinated and in schoolwork, moderately unmotivated. The other areas of youthful industry – comic books, baseball cards, video games and what not – left him uninspired. As he aged, he displayed tepid interest in music and art and even held cars and girls with guarded curiosity.

Oh, cars and girls were nice. He wanted one of each. Someday. But as a boy, his attention turned to somehow escaping the monotonous drip of his ordinary existence.

At school, he heard a teacher say that if a person could be successful in one endeavor – only one – then their entire life would ultimately succeed. He thus focused on discovering his one special gift. Before long, he found it.

Nothing about him stuck out. Except this…

He could talk like a duck.

Truly. He stumbled on this talent one day when he and some friends were trying to imitate cartoon characters. Most could handle Yogi Bear and one could nasalize a decent Bugs Bunny. But when it came to Donald Duck all they could produce were scratchy quacks and spit.

In the next magic instant, he was neither quacking nor spitting. Rather it was as if the spirit of the great duck itself had descended and now possessed his body – or at least his vocal cords.

There was no trick to it. He didn’t have to twist his tongue about in a curly-q or wrench his mouth to one side or speak with his throat in knot. All he had to do was will himself… “Talk like Donald Duck.”

And just like that, he did.

It was a miracle. It was… his gift.

His buddies went berserk with laughter.

Of course, he had to repeat the trick at school. Of course, he soon became celebrated.

Older students would stop him on the street, and say, “Hey, kid! Talk like a duck!”

And he would. To then bask in their laughter and admiration.

Mothers of friends would see him at the supermarket and ask for a demonstration.

“Billy says you can talk like a duck. Really? Can I hear?”

And soon there would be a crowd of women, half of them in hair curlers, clapping their hands and shouting requests, like: “Sing ‘Love Me Tender!’” or “Do the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’!”

He enhanced his skill by practicing at home. He would grab any reading material he could find – textbooks, the TV Guide, encyclopedias, even the Bible – and read aloud in front of his bedroom mirror. His favorite was Betty Crocker. Soon he could render a dozen recipes by heart as Donald Duck.

By the end of the school year, his talent began to wear on his friends. No one would laugh anymore when he answered questions like a duck. His friends began to yell, “Aw shuttup!” and twice the teacher made him go to the principal’s office.

Kids took to making fun of him. Eventually, they got rough. Once, in 7^th grade, when he greeted a fellow classmate with a duckly, “Good Morning,” the boy lost his temper and cracked him in the nose.

“Goddamn you! Can’t you just once talk like a normal human being!”

Why, yes, he could. But talking like a duck was his gift, his only gift. He couldn’t give it up.

He lost friends. He became a loner. His studies suffered. Only in front of the mirror with his books was he genuinely happy. And those who would venture past his open window on summer’s nights would hear the fowl tones of a duck offering instructions, a la…

“Heat oven to 375ºF. Grease bottom and sides of an 8-inch square pan with shortening.”

His grades hit rock bottom and he flunked out of high school. He had no choice but to enlist in the army. There, he soon regained his fame. Everyone, including the general (and the general’s wife), craved to hear him do jody calls like a duck.

But, again, his acceptance was short-lived. Within weeks his fellow soldiers were voicing sentiments like:

“I don’t want that asshole duck freak anywhere near me!”

Military discipline crumbled. Sergeants screamed at him whenever he spoke. Other enlisted men shoved him around. The unit to which he was assigned didn’t matter. The paratroopers, the infantry, the armored brigade – they all hated him.

No place more than in kitchen duty, where one day he was found bound hand and foot with his socks rammed halfway down his throat. Another cook later confessed. 

“I don’t need a duck to tell me how to make scrambled eggs!”

The cook got five days in the brig. He himself, they discharged.

He roamed from town to town, looking for work. Talking like Donald Duck opened plenty of doors. But those same doors soon slammed shut when people wearied of his voice, and he was tossed back on the street.

He had similar luck with women, who could put up with a duck for a one-night stand but not for any longer, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was homeless and desperate, yet still unable to surrender the only thing in his life he could do with exception.

Then he hit upon his master plan! Why hadn’t he thought of it before!?

He got work at the information counter in a department store and gave duckie directions to the sporting goods section, the toy floor and so on until they finally fired him, but in the interim he earned enough money to buy a new suit and a plane ticket to Orlando, Florida.

Where he presented himself to the personnel section at Disney.

The interviewer scanned his resume and looked up at him over the sliding frames of her eyewear.

“Okay, so… What do you do?”

He beamed at her. “I can talk like a duck. Wanna hear!”

And for the rest of the interview, he used his other voice.

“That’s nice,” she said. “But we have a duck guy already.”

“But you must need two. I mean, what if the other one gets sick or something? You got to have a back-up, right?”

She eyed him. “We prefer our voice personalities to be versatile. It’s sort of like baseball, where one guy can play multiple positions. Can you do Goofy too? Or Mickey?”

He paused. “I just do a duck. That’s all I know.”

“Sorry,” she told him. “It’s not enough.”

He left Disney in tears. Yet, he soon rebounded to visit other animators. He didn’t have to be Donald Duck. He could be Gary Gander. Or Dickie Drake. Or Medwick Mallard. Or anybody. Any-ducky-body.

They all shook their heads. They didn’t need a funny chord from the past, they told him. They needed one from the future. Something new. If he could invent a fresh comic voice, then they’d listen.

He retired to his motel room, stood before the mirror and tried his best to talk like a poodle or a chimpanzee. But his tongue ended up in curly-q’s, his mouth froze to one side and his throat got sore.

“Let’s face it. I’m a duck.”

But what he became was a wino, living in cardboard box off an alleyway by a seedy row of bars. He would beg for money as a duck – “Hey, buddy, can you spare some change?” – and sooner or later someone would feel sorry for him or just want him to go away.

He developed some local notoriety as the “Duck of 14^th Street.” Enough that one day – he was 40 now – a Japanese TV crew gave him 15 minutes of fame in a documentary exposing the sordid under-down of American culture.

The program was a hit and he was invited to Japan to appear on variety shows. He had guest shots on nine programs in all, in which the entire Land of the Rising Sun marveled at his gift. During this time, he was roomed in a five-star hotel in the Ginza and discovered cutesy-cute Japanese girls were all eager for an evening with Donald Duck.

And there were thousands of them.

The novelty wore off there too and he was almost grateful when it did. He returned to skid row, worn out, yet somehow satisfied with how his life had unfolded.

He viewed other men his age as mere assembly line copies, all overweight and balding with two whiny kids and a mortgage, not to mention an even plumper wife with a list of wants as long as their family car. The men ran every which way in the daily rat race, but ended up nowhere, from what he could tell. Nowhere at all. What a phony existence.

“I can do one thing only, but I do it well. And it has separated me from the pack and made me what I am.”

He took a low profile and lived humbly in his box. The folks on 14^th street treated him as a legend. Often people would tap his cardboard door and call him out.

“Mr. Duck? Uh, this is my cousin Jimmy from Atlanta. I told him about you. Could you, like, sing ‘Dixie’ or something?”

To which he would respond: “Fuck you, you sonsabitches!”

But he did it as a duck, so they loved it.

He died in the winter of 06’. He caught pneumonia and grew delirious, coughing out assorted lines from Betty Crocker. The hospital staff said it went on for hours and hours (and hours!) before he finally succumbed.

Although some say one of the nurses could no longer take it and suffocated him with a pillow.

© Thomas Noah Wood

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