This duck walks among men. He is thin and wiry and stalks with an awkward gait the crowded footways of busy towns where everystranger knows his name.
He was hatched in Albuquerque, raised along the sunwashed shores of the river Rio Grande. There aged three in garments ashen was he baptized a pastor's son, instilled with holy words recited softly as the wind upon the waves. But he is nothing in the eyes of God.
Rung by rung this duck climbs ladders. He is loud and boorish and apathetically ambitious. He values self, he wields his ego like a saber. He leaves lasting impressions.
By and by he comes to know people. Paper friends abused. Gullible peers exploited. Followers follow. True friendships never fade. He has but a few true ones left. Legions of enemies regard him with terrible eyes.
Ten years later he is in California. He has grown. He paces in the golden streets at night and frequents all the clubs. Women are cheap and plentiful here. They speak in foreign tongues and kiss his bill with cherry lips. Under their heavy limbs he sleeps through noon in the silken beds of unquiet brothels. He is trendy. People like him. They call his phone. They lend him money.
In three years' time he discovers art. He escapes to the north and rents a lodge high in the copper hills and regales himself with drink and simple company. See him on the rocks with drums of paint chiming at his sides. See him stooped in the midday sun dashing colors across an empty canvas.
There is no form, no rhyme or reason to what he calls art. There are swirls and scribbles and splotches and he does not use paintbrush or palette. He flings paint everywhere, spatters it and pours it, becomes immersed in it until he is coated from head to toe in an ugly graybrown varnish. When he returns home he reeks of oil and pastel and tracks smudgy watercolors through the lodge.
For three paintings he nets three hundred thousand dollars and buys a house in the city. This is where he belongs. Here the rhythm of the night pulses as the rhythm of his heart. He lies in sex and booze. He hates everything and everyone. Old friends are long gone, all moved on. He feels alone because he is. He has not painted in a very long time.
By chance he meets a woman and back into his life creeps purpose. He buys her yellow roses, greeting cards and candy. One night they are married in a hollow chapel on the road to Graceland. A charlatan disguised as a pastor conducts the ceremonies. Their vows are haughty and extemporaneous. Words are left unsaid, rings unexchanged.
They live together in a cozy townhouse near the waterfront. He paints more frequently now. They bear a son. For eight years he watches that boy grow, eyes alight with questions in the bluedark of his mind.
He sells more paintings, accepts donations from wealthy connoisseurs. Not even thirty and already they await his death with baited breath.
His profits drunk and gambled he admonishes his own pretentious visage in the garish covers of arthouse magazines. They call him prodigy, pioneer, genius, the greatest that ever lived, that ever will be. He reviles them, is disquieted. He does not talk much, not anymore. There is no sense in it. He has no patience for words.
In time he begins to paint his masterpiece, the canvas propped slantwise against the outer wall of the house. Oily speckles dribbled from the top pull in long uneven strands toward the cool democratic grass below. Bright veins of color opened to the quiet sage of balmy country air. Like his wife's tears he watches solemnly as they fall, like autumn rain trickling down the foggy windowpanes of homes abandoned. This image is more a part of him than any other. He finishes in five days, sells it in six.
Exploitation.