《The Lurking Duck》作者： - Scott Baker【EPUB】

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THE LURKING DUCK by Scott Baker JULIE: 1981 It was Tuesday evening just before dark a few weeks after my birthday. I was four years old.Mother and Daddy had just had another fight. Daddy used to be a policeman before he gotparalyzed but Mother was still a policewoman and she was very strong and sometimes she lostcontrol and knocked him around a little. That’s what she called it and that’s what happenedthis time but even after she got him to shut up they were still both really mad so she tookme down to the lake to watch the ducks and the swans while she ran around the lake to calmdown. The swans were mean but I liked the ducks a lot. She put me on one of the concrete benches and got out the piece of string she always kept inher pocket when she was with me then made a circle around the bench with it. The string wasabout ten feet long but the circle it made was a lot smaller and I had to stay inside it. Thenshe went off to do her jogging. After a while I noticed there was an old green car with no one in it one of those big bump-shaped cars like the ones in the black-and-white movies on TV parked a little ways away fromme on the gravel up under a tree where it was pretty close to the water. The sun was alreadygone and it was almost dark but I could still see that every now and then one of the duckswould get curious about the car and waddle up to it and stick its head underneath to look atsomething then sort of squeeze down and push itself the rest of the way under the car. Icouldn’t see what happened to the ducks underneath but none of them ever came out again. I sawtwo of the ducks with the bright green heads-mallards-and one brown duck go under the carbefore Mother came back to do her jump-roping. When I told her about the ducks she got real mad again. At first I thought she was mad at methen she went and found a man hiding in the car under a blanket and she arrested him. He wasall dirty and ragged and skinny and he smelled bad. His hands