“This is it?” she asked him unbelievingly.
A shabby little diner sat on one corner, a gas station on another. Three pickup trucks took up the restaurant’s parking lot, such as it was. A mongrel dog wandered along the middle of the main street. Late afternoon sun was pouring down in long yellow rays on the silence.
“I had a feeling your love affair with Iowa wouldn’t last,” Jake said lazily. “Not that you can judge any state by the view from its highways. Tomorrow will be quite different, Anne, but I have a feeling the campground will surprise you. I’ve been here before.”
The campground did surprise her. There were trees.
Gingerly, Anne stepped out of the motor home as Jake sauntered into a wooden A-frame building to check in. She felt like a toddler just learning to walk as her feet touched solid ground.
The A-frame and huge maples blocked her view of the actual campground. She’d already decided the trees were imported. Across the road were another five trillion acres of farmland and nothing else. At least there was a huge green tractor to relieve the monotony, but she had no real hope for the view behind the thick row of bushes and maple trees.
She glanced toward the door of the A-frame. Jake was taking forever. Smells assaulted her nostrils, the scents of rich brown earth and green leaves, not unpleasant. Rubbing at a kink in her neck from all the traveling, she wandered around one side of the building. A cool breeze had picked up the hint of a September night; a few of the maple leaves had started to turn gold and russet. The campground owners had planted a wild profusion of marigolds and asters, their perky colors splashing over the stone walk as she meandered farther. The place wasn’t totally uncivilized…
A fat white duck suddenly waddled in her direction, squawking belligerently. Startled, Anne glanced up. Her eyes widened in surprise. A narrow creek wandered like a serpent between shaded campsites; in the middle of the creek was a strange redwood structure that looked like a miniature fort mounted on wooden stilts with a rustic ladder leading up to its entrance. The place was almost pretty; the ambience had clearly been created to provide a quiet night’s rest for a stranger…barring the ducks.
White duck had friends. All of them seemed to catch sight of her at the same time, and instantly waddled forward to welcome her. There seemed to be thousands of them… Well, four dozen, anyway. Fat ducks, skinny ones, some white and some brightly feathered, all quacking unlyrically. Laughing helplessly, Anne bent down to pet one, and found a dozen yellow beaks very gently trying to devour her hand.
“It sounds good, but don’t believe a word you hear,” Jake suggested dryly from behind her.
“They’re obviously hungry.” She blinked. The squawking cacophony reached a dangerous decibel level. “Jake, they’re terribly hungry…”
“We’re just an hour ahead of the usual camper trade. By eight o’clock, those ducks will be so full they’ll sink if they try to swim, and Rochester-the owner of the campground-will pocket mucho dinero for every wee handful of feed he sells.”
“Oh? He sells the feed?” Anne questioned absently, her hand still stroking the silky feathers of the closest duck. She glanced up a moment later to find Jake studying her with one of his half-baked grins.
“Anne, don’t you think you’d better free yourself from your admirers before they nibble your immaculate nylon stockings to shreds?”
Anne threw him a speaking glance and waded through the ruffled feathers and outraged quacks to head for the door of the A-frame office. The screen door clapped shut behind her as she entered. Inside was a dizzying array of products for sale, from milk to Penthouse magazine, from ivory chess sets to canned soup. Behind the long counter, she noticed travel guides, diapers next to spark plugs, sunglasses next to aspirin. A short, cigar-smoking man stood waiting; a plaid shirt was stretched tightly over his watermelon-sized stomach. “Well, hi, little honey.”
“Hi.” She spotted the cardboard box filled with cellophane-wrapped packages of duck feed. Fifty cents for a handful. Robbery, sheer robbery. Instinctively, Anne clutched her purse in tight fingers for a second. She never even allowed pennies to collect in the bottom of her purse; it wasn’t in her nature to let herself be taken in by the owner of a tourist trap. On the other hand, it wasn’t in her nature to let the poor ducks be victimized, either.
“One or two, ma’am?”
Her voice seemed to come from a distance as her left hand forced her right hand to release its hold on her purse. “I’ll take all of it,” she told the man grimly.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
“If they eat all of what you have in that box in a day, I’ll take it all,” Anne enunciated clearly.
Jake burst out laughing when he saw her emerge from the building laden with little cellophane packages, but the ducks bore down on her like an attacking little army. “Darn it! Don’t you say one word,” she ordered Jake.
He reached her side in seconds and dived for the two bags she dropped, at the same time shooing away the persistent white duck who wanted her skirt hem for dinner. She tossed a cascade of mixed corn and other grain to the ground. The ducks dived for it with their beaks, their fat, feathered bottoms wiggling furiously in the air. Anne heard herself helplessly giggling, but there wasn’t time to enjoy the scene. Suddenly, dozens of beaks were poised expectantly in her direction again. Jake reached in front of her with another bag. She started laughing again as she tossed another handful of grain on the ground. “You don’t have to tell me this is ridiculous. It just went against the grain to know the poor creatures had to wait for a bunch of tourists to dole out their dinner. It’s cruel, Jake…”
“Went against the grain?” Jake groaned.
That started more giggles. The white duck sat on Anne’s foot. She ripped open three bags at once, and then had to swoop down and chase one brightly feathered bird who was taking off with an empty cellophane package in its beak, like a prize. When all the bags were empty, she held up her empty hands. “That’s all,” she told the ducks. “You guys are supposed to be full.”
Full or not, the ducks were irritated. They waddled off to splash one by one in the S-shaped creek beyond the maple trees, with a loud chorus of disgruntled quacks. “Did you hear that?” Anne brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, put her hands on her hips and suddenly whirled to face Jake indignantly. “They’re maligning my character. After going through all th-this…”
Her tongue seemed to trip. Jake was no longer smiling. He was staring at her, his silver-gray eyes intensely warm on hers. Boldly warm, vibrant. She caught her breath in sudden confusion. “I-I know it was…foolish,” she said hesitantly. “I don’t know what got into me. That man is a thief. Lord, I don’t even know anything about animals, let alone ducks.”
“Yes, you do. You had a puppy once, don’t you remember?” Jake crumpled the empty cellophane packages and tossed them into the closest litter bin, then brushed against Anne’s shoulder as he led her back to the motor home. “You and that puppy were inseparable. Then, when your mother married what’s-his-name, you had to give the pup away. The next time I saw you, I tried to give you a kitten. Have you forgotten that, too, Anne? But you wouldn’t take it. You said you’d never again accept anything that could later be taken away from you.”
“Well…” She remembered, unwillingly; that hadn’t been the happiest time of her life. She gave a short, quick, cover-up laugh as Jake started the motor home to drive them to their campsite. “You have a good memory, Jake,” she said lightly. “I couldn’t have been more than seven, and you were no more than ten at the time.”
“You adored that puppy. And you’re right, I was exactly ten, but I can still remember wishing your mother would fall into a deep, dark pit.” Jake flashed her a crooked smile so fast she thought she’d imagined the flecks of steel in his eyes, and the unexpectedly bitter comment about her mother. “You were very pretty when you were seven.”