bob was doing laundry one night. god bless him, he liked to do laundry. but that might have been because he knew he'd have nothing to wear if he waited for me to do it. i was sitting in the living room when he passed through, laundry basket on his hip, and i heard him open the basement door, flick the light switch. and then roar "What the FUCK is a DUCK doing in the basement?" abruptly the door slammed shut as if he'd seen a ghost. and in a way he had.
naturally, the idea of a duck in the basement was curious to me and so i got off the couch to go see what the raving and ranting was all about. bob stood there in the kitchen, laundry basket toppled over on the floor, gesticulating wildly. "there's a dead fucking duck at the bottom of the stairs!" naturally, the idea of a DEAD duck in the basement piqued my interest even more. i opened the basement door and peered down and, sure enough, there at the base of the stairs, posing as if left as a sinister message by some duck-killing Godfather, was a dead duck. sure enough. it was incongruous, puzzling, baffling, mystifying. i remember that night like a film reel whirring in my head. bob, usually the Big Brave Man of the House, was quite unnerved by this duck while i thought it was the most hilarious and bizarre thing i'd ever seen.
we have CATS for god's sake! FIVE CATS and not one of them noticed a duck in the basement? and how did we not hear so much as a quack? bob wracked his brain. we'd been in the basement several times in the past week doing laundry and never suspected the presence of Dark Wing Duck haunting an already spooky cellar. the windows are not only all closed but sealed with plastic to keep out the cold and the damp. the vent for the dryer was quite intact. there was no conceivable way for a duck to wriggle into our basement that we could see. sure, bob had the hatchway open about 2 weeks before....but we've never even seen a duck overhead much less in the yard, so how could one have waddled its way down the steps unnoticed as he did whatever it was he'd done with the hatch open? there was no good reason for a duck to be on the ground, in the weeds, near our house much less in it.
but there it was. dead at the bottom of the stairs. bob was convinced someone had broken in and left the duck as a warning of some kind. yeah, the mafia is using ducks these days, bob. sure. and what could we have possibly done to deserve an incomprehensible message in the form of a dead duck anyway?
bob had the heebie-jeebies something fierce and found my uncontrolled laughter very disturbing. but come on! it was the craziest thing i've ever seen! i wasn't terribly concerned about how it got there, nor did i believe it was some evil prank, i was just insanely amused. but bob. he was not.
he got a snow shovel and scooped the pretty iridescent and speckled duck up off the cement floor and really, about then it did take on a certain "blair witch project' element. i opened the hatchway and followed him, still giggling uncontrollably, out to the woods out back, guiding his way with a flashlight.
then bob got a pitchfork and i must say he was looking a tad deranged at this point, scratching his head in the flashlight's beam and digging a shallow grave for a duck. he wanted to banish it from his life. it was too disturbing for him to wrap his mind around.
we never solved the mystery of the dead basement duck, though he spent the next hour examining every nook and cranny of the cobwebby realm where a duck had, apparently, waddled around for what may be days quacking amid the heater and the rusty paint cans and the washer and dryer. and we and five cats never suspected a thing.
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