Moby-Duck Read Online Free PDF Page A

fight in a classmate’s backyard, his glasses had disappeared into a snowdrift. This wasn’t the first time they’d gone missing. Afraid to ask his parents to buy a new pair, he’d decided to wait for the snow to melt and his glasses to resurface, which they eventually did. In the meantime, he’d spent three weeks stumbling through the halls, his face contorted into a squint. He lost Luck Duck for a while too, and the loss inspired what appeared to be genuine distress.
    While researching his essay, Big Poppa had happened on a newspaper report, perhaps the very same one that Eric Carle had happened on. In a paragraph cataloging rubber duck trivia, he’d included a four-sentence synopsis—the container spill, the oceanographers in Seattle, the journey through the Arctic. The toys were supposed to have reached the coast of New England by the summer of 2003. It was now March 2005. Had they made it? Big Poppa didn’t say. Neither did he mention anything about beavers, turtles, or frogs.
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    It was well after midnight by the time I finished marking his essay, and because I am prone to nocturnal flights of fancy, I sat there for a while at my desk thinking about those ducks. I tried to imagine their journey from beginning to end. I pictured the container falling— splash! —into the sea. I pictured the ducks afloat like yellow pixels on the vast, gray acreage of the waves, or skiing down the glassy slopes of fifty-foot swells, or coasting through the Arctic on floes of ice. I imagined standing on a beach somewhere in Newfoundland or Maine—places I had never visited or given much thought. I imagined looking out and seeing a thousand tiny nodding yellow faces, white triangles glinting in their cartoon eyes, insipid smiles molded into the orange rubber of their clownish bills. I imagined a bobbing armada so huge it stretched to the horizon, and possibly beyond. I imagined them washing ashore, littering the sand, a yellow tide of ducks.
    Getting ready for bed that night, I noticed anew the rubber ducks roosting on our bathroom shelf. For years they’d perched there, between a jar of cotton balls and a bottle of facial cleanser, two yellow ducks of the classic variety and one red duck with horns. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d acquired them. I picked one of the yellow ones up and gave it a squeeze. Air hissed from an abdominal hole. “Quack,” I said, and returned it to its shelf.
    At work the next day, I noticed as if for the first time the several yellow ducks of diminishing sizes processing single file across a colleague’s desk—gifts from students, she explained when I asked. I began seeing them everywhere. In the course of a single afternoon, I came upon a great, neon rubber duck aglow in the window of an Old Navy store and a mother-duckling pair afloat in the margins of a brochure on vaccinations that our health insurance provider sent. My wife and I that spring were, as the euphemism has it, “expecting,” and the baby outfitter where we’d registered for shower gifts—across the blue awning of which yet another duck swam, a pacifier abob like a fishing float beside it—appeared to be the epicenter of this avian plague. In addition to rubber ducks themselves, the store sold yellow towels and sweatshirts with orange bills for hoods, yellow rubber rain boots with beaks for toes, yellow pajamas with orange, webbed feet. There was the Diaper Duck, a duck-shaped dispenser of odor-proof trash bags, as well as numerous other implements—brushes, soap dishes, etc.—that incorporated the likeness and the yellowness of the duck.
    Elsewhere, in drugstores and catalogs and the bathrooms of friends, I spotted exotic varieties in which strange, often ironical mutations had occurred—momma ducks with ducklings nested on their backs; black ducks, sparkly ducks, ducks with the face of Moses or Allen Iverson or Betty Boop; ducks