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.But next morning Father woke me up yelling because I was late withhis breakfast and he had a hangover and because I’d put him to sleep soearly the night before he’d had all of yesterday’s beer still in him and he’d wet his bed in the middle of the night and when he woke up the bed was all sticky and wet and disgusting and he had to yell and yell and yell to get me to wake up and come help him.He was really angry with me just the way he was always angry with Mother, even after I cleaned him up and got himbreakfast and set him up for the day in front of the TV with his reader.And when he yelled at me again at lunch I realized something that Ishould’ve realized a long time before.With Mother gone there’d be no oneleft to take care of him except for me and pretty soon he’d hate me just like he hated Mother and I’d hate him just the way Mother hated him.Withmaybe a little love left that would come to the surface now and then when we remembered what it had been like before, but less and less until all we had left was that we hated each other.Only it would be even worse, because they’d put me in a foster homeand him in some sort of nursing home- and that was the one thing Mother’d promised never to do to him where she’d kept her promise.Then when Iwas old enough to go back to taking care of him I’d have to pay for himalong with me for the rest of his life, and I’d never be able to go away or get married or even have boyfriends or do anything because he’d be jealous of me the same way he was of Mother.He hated what he was and the only way he could stand hating himselflike that was to take it out on someone else.It wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t do anything about it, but that’s what it was, he had to hate somebody and make them miserable and if it wasn’t Mother it was going to be me.I thought about it some more and then I knew I’d have to kill Fatherfirst.He wouldn’t mind, not really, not if I put three or four librium in his beer so he wouldn’t feel anything.He probably would’ve killed himself a long time ago if he’d been able to and if his mother hadn’t raised him to be a Catholic.I’d heard him tell Mother that a lot of times.And then the duck would go back to just being a log again and I couldhide it away again until I was fifteen or sixteen before I used it to get Mother.Nobody’d ever guess what it was if I kept it hidden someplace dark.Only what if when the other police came by all they found were myfootprints and they took the log in to examine it because maybe they found blood on it? If they didn’t figure out what it really was they might blame me and then be sure it was me when I got Mother, later, and if they did figure out what it was they wouldn’t blame me but I wouldn’t be able to use the duck again.All they’d have to do was pick it up and they’d know it was too heavy to be a real log.But what if Father just disappeared, like the ducks my duck pulledunder? The thing that came out of its stomach looked sort of like ameatgrinder.Maybe it ground up their bodies so small there wasn’t anypieces left.He wouldn’t feel anything if there was enough librium in his beer.Or if he did it wouldn’t be much worse than it was like for him just to be aliveevery day anyway.With him gone Mother wouldn’t be angry with me all the time.Shemight even go back to being like she was before, the way he always toldme she’d been when she married him.And if she didn’t, I still had the duck.But I had to find out whathappened to the bodies of the ducks my duck pulled under.Father was watching a football game turned up loud.I refilled his beerbottle then checked out the bathroom.It was in the corner of the house, with two big windows.There’d be bright sunlight in it for the rest of the afternoon.I opened the windows so the glass wouldn’t screen out any of thesunlight in case that made a difference like it does when you want to get a tan, then got the log out of the shed and dumped it into the bathtub.It was an oversized bathtub, all long and deep, made out of the white stuff they use for bathtubs and sinks and toilet bowls.The only metal in it was the faucet and the drain plug.Maybe forty-five minutes later the duck was floating at the far end ofthe tub.It didn’t seem bothered by the walls.Maybe they were pushing the same on it from all four sides so it didn’t have to try to go anywhere else.I put the goose in the microwave until it got hot again, then tossed it in the tub and quick went out into the hall and closed the door.I ran outside and closed the shutters for both windows, not quite all the way because I wanted the duck to think it was cloudy but not that it was night time.And my duck dipped its bill in the water like it was taking a drink, then dived down under the goose, grabbed it in its meathook claws and used its meatgrinder drill to rip it into tiny, tiny pieces.That took about five minutes and then the duck left what was left of the goose on the bottom of the tub like it was some sort of mud and went back to floating.I opened the shutters wide to let the sun in, then got the hoe so Icould hold the metal end between me and the duck, even though I didn’tthink it would attack me with the sun shining on it.I went back in and pulled the bathtub plug.What was left of the goose drained out of the tub with the water,except for a few little pieces of bone.When I picked them up they were all soft and rubbery, like cauliflower, so the duck had to have some kind ofpoison or acid it used to make sure even the little pieces that were left dissolved.But if it could do that I didn’t know why it left the headless ducksfloating on the surface every night.Unless that was Dubic’s way of making sure that when he got out of jail he could come watch his robot killing ducks for him even if what they’d done to him made it so he couldn’t touch the ducks to kill them himself.I went back into the living room.Father was still watching the football game.His bottle was empty.I emptied his urine bag, refilled his bottle with beer and added four librium.He was still half-awake when he finished the bottle, though he was passing out fast, so I gave him three more librium by telling him they were vitamins he was supposed to take.He was too groggy to wonder why I wanted him to take them just then.I went back to thebathroom and filled the tub two-thirds full.With him in it it would be all the way full.Then I pushed his wheelchair into the bathroom and got him out of it into the tub.The duck stayed down at the far end, floating over his ankles.I closed the door and went outside and shut the shutters.Not all theway, just enough to cut down the light like it was a cloudy day.I didn’t watch, just walked around the yard looking up at the sky, out at the fences, over them to the neighbor’s houses, anywhere but at the bathroom windows.Then I closed the shutters completely, but I still didn’t look in through them.I went back inside, turned off the TV, turned it back on again, walked around, finally opened the bathroom door and turned on the light so I could see what had happened.The bottom of the tub was covered with red-brown mud.The log washalf-buried in it.I pulled the plug.The sludge drained out.I kept the water running along time to make sure the drain wasn’t going to get plugged up, thenpushed the log under the running water so I could clean the last of thesludge off it.When it was clean I picked it up and put it back in the shed, under the floorboards this time
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