An American Duck

What  can you say about a Rubber Duck, well for better or for worse it's all here in my journal the loneliness, the battered romantic, the tough Duck that some think is more comfortable with a smoking gun than a loving person, the love/hate relationship with the other toys, the corruption that exists in all levels of society. 

Quack . . . Quackity . . . QUACK . . . Quack . . . but I digress. It is a nasty night tonight and my face is as red and raw as first unrequited love. Let me start from the beginning. 

1/2 a cup of GOOD coffee lay abandoned in a trash can and I was not far behind. Things were going badly for me. Corduroy that louse and Noddy had taken the easy way out, pulling the cute and dumb card and getting an easy ride with some rich kids who would sew on their buttons and display them for the world to see until they matured into the harder more deadly callings of adolescence. Abandoning their childhood friends, to shelves in forgotten family homes. 

Sure the temptation was there but I wasn't going to go that way, all the other toys in the store were being taken out of their boxes and being displayed on shelves for a future life of quiet desperation. Tub toys for a day, a week a year and then offerings to the family dog as a chew toy, a recycling plant or the incinerator. I wasn't that kind of Duck, I took a chance. I was bigger than the other ducks coming out of the box and it might have been that or my quick, sarcastic cynical cracks that caught the eye and ear of the  dame making last checks for defects before display.

Anyway, it was only a matter of time before it was her lunch break and we were in the parking lot sharing a cigarette and talking about our hopes and dreams. She was a good kid who it turned out had gotten into a little bit of trouble, she agreed to let me go and cover my missing presence on the shipping invoices if I would try to help her out. What can I say I've always been a sucker for a woman in trouble, and I am a duck.

It seems as though she had been running with some shady characters and had gotten into some gambling debt. She had started out with something she had known plenty about the Rubber Duck races but had gotten side tracked by a smooth operator with a smile and had started betting on the ponies and the puppies as well. Should have stuck with the ducks, they won't let you down.

I floated into town and made a few inquiries, found the smooth operator who was working the girl and tailed him. What's to know in a big city, just another average Rubber Duck going about his business, it was a snap, we wound up at a casino, it didn't take a rocket scientist to see that he was a small fish in a cesspool of a pond, they were running a crooked operation so they were fair game. I hung out and made a few bad bets and watched the sharks circle me. I caught the operators eye and laid on my best dumb duck from the country impression. He bought it hook line and sinker. I told him that I'd been to the fights and won a small bundle on an up and coming kid from queens and was looking for some action. He takes me across the  border and it wasn't to long before we were in a private game, the shark, two fellows with bulges where a shoulder holster might hang another mark and me the rubber duck. The drinks are flowing but I am staying sober and watching the cards, the other mark isn't so lucky, he's beginning to lose big and wants to leave. Seems like no problem and we all drive back over the border the best of friends until the heavies start to turn uglier than they already are, so I sap them, nobody ever expects this from a duck.

The smooth operator pulls out a gat so the kid gloves are of and I give him the better part of the leather, he staggers back across the border and meets his destiny. Turns out I sapped him a little to hard, he won't be bothering anybody ever again. I wasn't so worried about taking on the syndicate it was obvious that the smooth operator was free lancing. I go for a drink in a seedy little sports bar called O'Malley's where the whiskey is cheap and the company cheaper when the chief of police rousts me. I don't want to give up the girl so I play innocent which isn't to hard for a rubber duck . I have committed no crime, at least directly so the police release me from custody but my name is mud in this town from here on in.

. . . People say that I have an ambiguous moral code, but I don't care I am a duck. I run a single duck operation and am big and bright enough to take care of myself, I like liquor, women, reading, chess and working alone, I can speak English if I have to. I am a duck.