The Black Duck of Barstow

Smack!! Went the barroom pool balls, exploding like buckshot from the blunt force break. The sound jolted me from a bourbon malaise and I noticed the tip of a tie hovering over my crotch. The acute reminder I had come straight here from the funeral.

A few hours earlier, we’d sunk our mother’s finished body into the earth. Following the procession of rote condolences and anemic smiles, I needed to get lost and decided to head out of Los Angeles for the night. I hugged my brothers and gassed it toward the highway. Landed in Barstow. Some tavern called Mad Marvin’s.

Here I sat, all heavy bones and blood. I felt my full weight on the bar stool. A muffled voice arose-

“You okay?”

I glanced up, leaving a tracer of refracted light from the edge of my glass. The bartender, a six foot bearded brawler leered at me with trace empathy in his rugged face. I must’ve looked like I needed a friend.

“Yeah. I’m good.”

He knocked his tattooed knuckles on the bar and moved along.
I sat gazing at the shrine of liquor bottles on the wall. Rows of glass soldiers standing at attention, locked and loaded to spill their mercy blood into the local martyrs. How long had I been here? It felt like two days. And this drunk felt different than my usual plunge into warm ambivalence.

I missed Mom. Of course I did. But after the last six year descent; the hospitals, psyche wards, and kicking around in the dark madness, I was relieved she was gone. I received no ironic redemption from that thought.

I scoped the tavern. A typical seeming night.

“Jesus, fuck” I thought. “Give me something new. Shatter this infinite drone. C’mon... give it to me.”

Then... not two seconds later, I felt a mouse scurry across my right shoulder.

No, not a mouse. A tap.

I turned and there she was. The beautiful mistake worth making.

Nora.

She stepped right out of the seventies into the bar. A burgundy cropped leather jacket hung from her shoulders. Underneath, a sheer pink halter top wrapped her petite frame, as painted denim legs dropped into dark suede ankle strap wedges. A lush nest of charcoal hair cast a slight shadow over her mischievous eyes.

She slid onto the bar stool next to me. The next several minutes felt like a hum of chirping insects. We sat in silence, staring at one another. Speaking didn’t occur to either of us. This stranger knew me. And I her. I ordered another round of whiskeys. We sat together, letting the amber medicine warm our guts. A few words were exchanged, not that I’d recall them if you had a blade to my eyeball. It felt like some distant cosmic slingshots launched us through the heavens and landed us side by side on these stools.

I was a lost ghost when it comes to women. Not that I couldn’t handle myself, but below the surface, I think my tortured mother may have fucked me for good. And tonight, as always, there would be no handbook.

“I’ve got a house in Willow Dunes,” said Nora.

“Yeah?” I said, “I’ve got a sailboat in hell.”

She popped a cackle, spitting a mouthful of whiskey at my suit, “Oh shit!!”

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought we were playing a game.”

She grabbed a stack of cocktail napkins, dabbing my jacket and tie; the napkins all ragged in her hand.

“Leave it,” I said.

I snatched the soggy napkins and tossed them on the bar. “Let me square up and we’ll head out.” As I fished a few bills from my suit pocket, a wily smile crawled across Nora’s face. I thanked the barkeep and we shimmied out like twisted lizards.

It had been a while since I’d driven through the back desert roads at night. A trek to Joshua Tree six years earlier with some friends and a stockpile of mushrooms was the last I could remember and the ride to Nora’s filled my mind with that hellish night of fear and fantasy. To shake off the memories, I decided to entertain myself with images of a masterful night of fornication with Nora.

We drove for a while in silence.

“About three more miles, beyond those dunes,” she said.

The sound of her voice was pure anesthesia.

I flicked the radio dial to some old forties standards. It was something I often came back to; basking in the comfort of distant nostalgia. I snaked through the desert accompanied by the brilliant stars, the hum of the engine, and Nora.

Pulling around the final sandy peak, the darkness revealed a rectangular white structure in the near distance. As we drove closer I could see it was a modest one story house slightly sunken in the middle of its own footprint.

“This is it,” said Nora.

As we pulled up, a dose of reality landed on me and I began to consider my circumstances objectively; I was in the middle of the desert in Barstow. I didn’t know this girl at all. She never mentioned if she lived alone. I started to wonder who else could be crawling through this remote desert house. All the windows were dark and my mind began to originate some sick thoughts. I conjured a rabid meth junky with a penchant for castration lunging at me with a machete. “That would certainly dampen the evening,” I thought.

We pulled into the gravel driveway and parked. Nora looked over at me with the same smile from the bar and this time I could feel the warm hormones pooling into my guts. I was willing to face a machete only to see her slide off the leather jacket to reveal the pale soft skin of her shoulders.

“Give me two minutes,” she said.

Nora slid out of the car, scurried up the front walk, and pulled jangling keys from her handbag. Before unlocking the door, she stopped and glanced back at me. The smile was displaced by a different expression. Ambiguous, but darker. Then she disappeared into the house.

I turned off the ignition and rolled down the window. A waft of warm desert air drifted in. I eased back into the car seat and relaxed, lingering there for what seemed well longer than two minutes, the downside of my whiskey buzz began to pull me into a slight slumber.

Then-

The sound.

The sound that came from the direction of the house... was not of this world.

I couldn’t tell if it came from an animal or a machine.

The fenders on my car warped and rattled and my bones shook, it sounded like all the world’s fear, fury, chaos and sadness just detonated from a massive mortar shell.

The sound echoed out, then evaporated into the desert sky. The front door creaked open and there was Nora.

She grinned.

I sat staring at her for what seemed like an eternity, then eased out and stood beside the car.

“What the holy fuck was that?” I asked.

“That was Gil.”

As I tried to wrap my head around her answer, she continued- “I have a special bottle that’s going to blow your mind,” she said. “Care to imbibe?”

There was no denying the night had taken a fearful turn, but despite feeling unnerved, something was telling me to keep going. Like a fly covered horse, I shook off the festering anxiety and walked to Nora. For the first time, her pale green eyes revealed that she was not unwounded. She took my hand, and we crossed the threshold into her house.

The first thing I heard was some kind of East Indian or African music echoing from a distant room. Nora led me through a dark hallway into a living space, splayed with vintage bohemian furniture. A single light source cast a burnt orange glow over the room. On the wooden coffee table was a bottle surrounded by strewn fragments of leaves and flower petals.

“First, we drink.” said Nora.

We crossed to the couch and made ourselves comfortable. Nora slid the cork from the bottle and began to pour, releasing a saffron aroma into the room.

“Is this wine?”

“Not really. It’s from Indonesia.”

As we raised our glasses to toast, she straightened her posture- “To the fallen shadows of this dimension, may their stars burn brightest in the ever after.”

There was no way in hell she could’ve known I had just buried my mother earlier that day. Must’ve been she had just lost someone herself. We clinked glasses and drank. I had no reference point for the flavor seeping over my tongue. Suddenly I felt a beautiful explosion of warm endorphins rush through my chest and plunge down my spine. We leaned back silently as the liquid saturated our veins and neural pathways.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered.

Nora smirked, “I thought you deserved an anesthetic.”

“Why’s that?”

“You said goodbye to someone, no?”

I looked at her curiously, “How did you know?”

“Don’t you know by now, there’s something very special about me?” Nora smirked. Then- “I was across the parking lot smoking a joint when you pulled in. Watched you walk inside. I walked past your car and saw the funeral program sitting on your back seat.”

I stared into Nora’s eyes. It felt at that moment that we’d been together for a thousand years. The thought of being without her strangely terrified me.

Nora laced her fingers through mine.

“Come with me, I want to show you something.”

We started down another dark hall leading toward the back of the house. With the plush runner under my feet and the Indonesian potion still coursing through my body, I felt something akin to floating. We continued down the hall and came to a stop at the last door on the left.

“How do you feel?” asked Nora.

“I feel calm.”

Nora opened the door.

A luminous emerald green glow burst out in a flood, engulfing her silhouette in front of me. Partially shielding my eyes, I followed her into the room which appeared to be a blank vacuous space. As my eyes adjusted to the intense hue, I saw a dark rectangular shape rising from the floor in the far right corner. A few steps more and I could now see there was a dark silk fabric covering something underneath. Then I heard... breathing.

There was some sort of cage under there.

I hovered at the center of the emerald room, remaining very still. “Would you like to meet Gil?”

I wasn’t sure.

Nora kneeled down next to the cage. She closed her eyes and softly recited some sort of prayer. She then reached for the silk and gently pulled it toward her. As the fabric came sliding off the edge of the metal cage... I saw it.

It wasn’t a rabbit. Or a hamster. Or a bird. But it could’ve been some mutated version of any of those things. It didn’t have a mouth. Or a beak. But something akin to both. It adorned no fur. No feathers. No skin. But was wrapped in some sort of elusive texture I’d never seen in a book or a photograph. It appeared mainly black, but with dark gold eyes that swelled wider as it took in each breath, then reverted as it exhaled.

I stared at this thing for a very long time.

“What... is it?”

Nora was serene now. Solemn, even.

I kneeled down next to her, and could now see, whatever this thing was, it had suffered a profound amount of damage. Deep gouges and scarred wounds distorted its form. It made no sound. Except breathing. Each breath sounded like its last.

We kneeled at the cage in silence, communing with this... creature. It was the most tragic living thing I'd ever seen. Almost alien in appearance, yet I couldn’t deny feeling something warmly earthbound. And eternally good.

Then Nora spoke.

“I had a son once. Rustin. I met his father ten years ago. He was a soldier. He was killed on his motorcycle the night Rustin was conceived. Something must’ve gotten into his blood, or his mind during the war. Rustin started out a beautiful perfect boy. A mother’s dream. Hardly ever cried and never threw tantrums. He was serene. When he turned six, he asked if he could have a pet. The neighbors down the road had a pond where a raft of ring necks used to swim. That year, one of the mothers had bore a flock. There was one duckling, different from the others. He was small. And black. The runt. When I brought Rustin over to see them, that little black duckling leapt right into his hands. Rustin looked up at me with the most joyful smile I’d ever seen. We took the baby duck home and from that day, Rustin never went anywhere without it. Took it for walks to the playground and out to the dunes. We attached a basket to the front of Rustin’s bicycle and the duck rode with him everywhere. Every single place he went, that duck was with him. Then one day, I heard a strange wailing coming from the shed in the back yard. I headed outside toward the sound. The sound of a nightmare. A sound I wished I never heard and prayed I’d never hear again. It was a mixture of machine and animal. When I opened the shed door. Rustin had him. The duck. Pinned down on the circular saw table. The motor howled and Rustin moved the blades into the duck’s neck and head and body ever so gently- he was torturing it. I screamed so hard I seared my throat and I ran at Rustin. Right before I got to that saw table, Rustin looked up at me with a smile I’ll never understand and I wanted to die. I pulled his bloody hands away from the saw and left that torn creature, almost dead behind as I dragged Rustin by his hair out of the shed. We collapsed into the grass and I just wept as I held him. Something broke inside of him. I think it was the soldiers blood.”

Nora fell silent.

I continued to stare into the cage and felt a warm ocean crawl up my shoulders, into my head and my eyes became liquid. Every single moment I’d ever endured watching my mother’s tormented life tore into me like mad razor blades.

I wept next to Nora.

She let me.

As I looked up to find her eyes, she grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled me in. We melted into one another and the ancient pain in our emerald room swirled and morphed into molten ecstasy as we tore at each other’s clothes till the paper skin of our bodies careened and mashed and sailed and shined. I slid myself slowly into her and she pulled me deeper, unleashing a primal wail that expanded the room. We were in it now. Writhing, rolling, diving for the dream. The metal cage began to creak and rattle and I heard what sounded like a steam train just outside the walls. Nora’s eyes went gold and they shot into mine as we snaked together, swooning like a rising tide- the cage now violently shaking beside our bodies as the sound of the steam train breached our world, combusting into a symphonic maelstrom - the sound... had arrived... Nora and I released ourselves as the black duck of Barstow howled his mad fury once again. The dimension shook- and the emerald room vacuumed into blackness...