"And you say the posthole you found him in was all chomped up?"
"Torn to hell."
"Well goddamn," Granddaddy wagged his head, "I 'spect ol' Lockjaw spent the night trying to eat this poor fucking bird." He chortled with delight. "Must've drove him total crazy, a tender little morsel just outa reach."
Tiny grinned. "I can just see him with his snout rammed down that posthole, slavering and chomping."
"Probably wasn't so funny to this sad little bastard though," Granddaddy gestured toward the mud-smeared duckling stretched out on the red and white oil cloth covering the table. "Must've been like looking up the business end of a double-barrel.12 gauge." The duckling stirred weakly, as if recalling the sight.
Granddaddy quickly bent over it and pressed an ear to its chest. He listened intently. "Sweet-leaping-jesus," he barked, jerking upright, "its heart is commencing to quit. Tiny, fetch a jar of Death Whisper from the cabinet-this calls for some emergency first-aid."
While Tiny got a jar of Granddaddy's best, the old man was taking the dropper off a bottle of Vick's nosedrops. When Tiny unscrewed the lid and set the jar on the table, recoiling slightly from the fumes, Granddaddy squeezed up a dropper-full and, prying the duckling's bill open, administered it with a decisive pinch of the bulb.
The effects were instantaneous: the duckling, eyes bulging, began to flop around on the table, cheeping wildly.
"Well, we got its heart pumping good," Granddaddy beamed. "Now we best get him washed off and see how he looks."
An hour later the duckling, dried to a fluff, was running around on the tabletop waving its stubby wings and peeping happily.
"How do you think it got in that posthole anyway?" Tiny asked as he and Jake watched it frolic.
"Damned if I know… I don't even have an interesting theory."
"Don't make any sense at all."
"Sure wouldn't be the first time/' Grand-daddy grumbled. Then, more sharply, to Tiny: "We gonna keep him? Or her, as the case may be."
"At least till he's healed up, sure."
"Shitfire, he looks healed up fine right now-look at him romping on that table."
"I mean till he's grown up enough to take care of himself."
"Well then, we better give this critter a name so he knows who we're talking about."
"Tiny smiled. "I thought up a good one already." He paused for effect: "Posthole."
"That is pretty good," Granddaddy agreed, "but I got a real good one: Fup."
"Fup." Tiny repeated blankly.
Granddaddy gave him his full, five-toothed grin: "Fup Duck. Ya get it? Fup… Duck."
"That's a terrible name," Tiny groaned.
Terrible or not, and despite Tiny's resistance, Fup became the duckling's name, a decision rendered by common usage at the next Saturday night poker game. The players-Ed Bollpeen and his boy Ike; Lub Knowland; the Stranton brothers, Happy and PeeWee; and Lonnie Howard-laughed at Jake's addled wit, but also appreciated its strange accuracy, for something was indeed fucked up. They assumed that the duck's ultimate origin was an egg and believed that Tiny had found it in his diggings up on the North Fork ridge, but nobody could figure how it got from the egg to the posthole.
"Maybe its mama dropped it when she was flying through the storms," Lonnie Howard suggested as he peeled back his hole card for a look.
"You ignorant dunghead," Granddaddy barked scornfully, "ducks don't fly around with their young'uns tucked under their wings-that'd be like trying to piss and whack off at the same time."
"Well how do you figure it then you old geezer?" Lonnie shot back.
"I didn't get to be 99 years old by fool speculation," Granddaddy replied. "It's hard enough separating the good stuff from the bullshit without adding to the whole mess by wanting to know what you ain't gonna know."
"But you haven't told us what you know," Lub Knowland offered. "Which as near as I can make out on the subject of ducks ain't diddleyshit."
Granddaddy picked up the pile of money in front of him and showered it out onto the center of the table: "I'll bet that much that you don't even know what kind of duck that is"- he pointed a gnarled and shaking finger at Fup, asleep in a cardboard box under the woodstove.
"I suppose you do," Lub said dubiously, "though I'd say it's a mite early to tell."
"That's true," Ed Bollpeen added softly. "They all look pretty much alike till they feather out."
That started it. It ended with everybody except Tiny and Happy putting $100 and their prediction in a general pooclass="underline" whoever named Fup's species and sex correctly took it all, with any dispute to be settled by John Coombes, the local vet.
There was no dispute. In two months' time it was plain that Fup was a hen mallard. Granddaddy Jake took the money with a crass, gleeful laugh of satisfaction.
3 Fup
It was apparent in her first few weeks of recovery that Fup was an unusual duck. She refused to eat or shit in the house. She would wobble to the door, peeping frantically, and pound on it with her bill like a deformed woodpecker until one of them let her out.
Her appetite was omnivorous and immense. Pancakes, cheese, cracked corn, deer meat, onion peels, whatever: it got devoured. And as she ate, she grew. In four months she weighed nearly 20 pounds. Granddaddy Jake, partial to excess in any form, was so impressed he invited neighbors over to watch.
"Goddamn," Willis Hornsby muttered as Fup gobbled a pound of link sausage and started on a coffee can of cracked barley.
"Nothing the matter with her eater, is there?" Granddaddy gleamed. "Goes after it like a feathered vacuum cleaner."
Willis shook his head: "I never saw nothing like it."
"Makes me think we should've named her Electrolux," Jake opined. "Or hell, even better, Dolly P."
"Dolly P.?" Willis asked, "Sounds like a fishing boat."
"Naw, Dolly Pringle. Big redhead I run around with up in Coos Bay. A woman of amazing talents. She could suck a golfball through 25 yards of garden hose. Seen her siphon gas uphill. Why, you might not believe it, but I won a $1000 bet with Big Dave Stevens one night when we took ol' Dolly out in the parking lot and she sucked the chrome completely off a trailer hitch in fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds."
Granddaddy sighed with a forlorn fondness. "Just thinking about that gal makes my ol' pecker twitch."
"Better hope that duck don't see it," Willis mumbled, watching as Fup speared the last few flecks of barley.
It was a judicious warning, for Fup proved as fierce as she was hungry. Early on, when she could still be weighed in ounces, she had ventured out to join Granddaddy for an afternoon of sipping on the porch. Buster, a usually comatose Bluetick hound, bayed her up under the tattered green couch where she'd scurried for refuge. When the dog had finally yielded to Granddaddy pounding on its head and had sprawled back out on the porch to whimper itself back to sleep, Fup, with a single kamikaze PEEEEEP! charged from hiding and clamped her bill like a pair of eternal vise-grip pliers on Buster's sagging scrotum, hanging on fiercely as the hound spun around in howling circles, snapping at the half-pound duckling swinging on his sack. Granddaddy laughed so hard he had to crawl out in the front yard and beat his head on the ground to stop.