USK | Prose | Pettus | Jimbo, the Duck Who Sold Out

Jimbo, the Duck Who Sold Out

It was Spring, and the United Duck Group of Upper Wisconsin were on their way home again, after yet another winter of hunting and gathering in the southern United States. And, as always, they had stopped for a visit at Chicago,s Lincoln Park Zoo, a kind of Disney World to them, where they could be waited on hand and foot while catching up with other ducks all around the region. This was the first Chicago visit for Jimbo, a very bright duckling whom many in the group considered the top of the batch this mating season. After a long winter of foraging for food, laborious building of nests and relatively little payoff for their hard work, Jimbo marveled at this Utopian atmosphere, where humans were literally throwing food at them, allowing them to leisurely walk and swim about and remain satiated.

"Why, this is easy!" Jimbo thought. "All I have to do is exploit my natural duckiness and I'm made in the shade!" Which, by the way, Jimbo was particularly good at. He would swim around in the ponds and wiggle his tail, and every so often would bob his head underwater, then occasionally walk up to the picnic table and let out an adorable little "quack!" and before he knew it he had more popcorn and bread crumbs and little zoo-bought pellets than he could eat.

When the group announced one day that it was time to head to Wisconsin, Jimbo decided he was going to stay. "Why should I go up there?" he asked the elders. "Up there, we work all day long, building and hunting, and for what? To barely survive! Here, I can expend just a little energy and get all my food for the day quickly. Then I have the rest of the day to swim and fly and quack and ponder the great mysteries of life."

After a pause, the eldest of the elders spoke. "Well, Jimbo," he said, "as you know, it's your right to leave the group whenever you want. But let me give you a piece of advice. What you call toiling -- the day-to-day work we all perform -- is what we consider the inherent activity that keeps the duckiness to us ducks. You will find after a little while that foraging and hunting is what allows us to ponder the mysteries of life, not idle time."

The elder paused, then said, "Are you sure you don't want to join us?"

"Positive," Jimbo said. "This is too good an opportunity to pass up."

"Jimbo has made his decision," the elder said to the group. "And now, ducks -- we fly!" And with that, they were gone.

And so Jimbo spent the summer being a zoo duck, and it was great. So great, in fact, that he soon lost track of how many times little kids chased him through the park, trying to grab ahold of him so that they could rip his wings off. He learned not to mind when people would throw the food pellets at him as hard as they could, hitting him in the face and eyes and stinging him. He learned to not even get fazed when the macho teenage boys would flick lit cigarettes at him, yelling, "Hey, eat this, you stupid fuckin', bird! Ha, ha, ha!"

To Jimbo, the immense material rewards of his cushy job warranted any kind of abuse he had to take, so much so that after a while, he forgot that the things being done to him were abuse at all.

Finally, the air started turning crisp and the leaves started turning colors and Jimbo's old group of ducks made their farewell visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo before heading off to warmer, greener pastures for the winter.

"Jimbo!" one young duck yelled when he was spotted. "Hey, Jimbo! How you doing?"

"Do I know you?" Jimbo said.

"Sure!" the duck said. By now a whole group had gathered. "We're your old friends! We stopped by to see if you wanted to go south with us this year."

"I don't know you," Jimbo said. "I don't know any of you."

"Ah, come on, Jimbo! We hung out all winter last year. Remember? We foraged, we hunted, we worked and built..."

"Look," Jimbo interrupted. "Whatever I may have done then was in my youth. I was crazy and immature then, and God only knows what I did. But I'm a grown-up now. I work for a living. And I can't have you all coming in and screwing up my schedule."

"But Jimbo!" the duck cried. "What about going south for the winter?"

"Look," Jimbo said, "You all need to learn to grow up. Carousing around and drifting from place to place is fine when you're young, but you're adults now. You have to start thinking about the future. You need to start thinking about saving. Now me, whenever I get a handful of popcorn thrown at me, I take one kernel and put it in a hole on the far side of the pond, and if I stay here at the zoo all year long for, oh... say twenty or thirty years without ever, ever leaving once, then when I'm old I'll have a whole basket of popcorn and I'll never have to work again!"

The ducks just stood there, about as confused as they'd ever been in their life, when a child and his mother came walking by.

"Look, mommy!" the boy said. "The ducks are all quacking at each other."

"Oh, aren't they cute," the mother said. "Billy, why don't you throw them some food?"

The child took a handful of pellets and threw them as hard as he could, showering the ducks and making most of them run for cover. But not Jimbo. He ran around in the middle of the chaos, getting pelted and stung over and over.

"Hey! Hey, you!" he yelled at the other ducks as he ran around. "These are mine! QUACK! I worked hard for these pellets and you assholes aren't going to come waltzing in here and take what's rightfully mine! QUACK QUACK QUACK! I swear, you let down your guard for one minute and everyone around here's trying to stab you in the back, trying to take all the credit for your work and push you out of the loop! QUACK QUACK!"

The younger ducks looked to the eldest of the elders for guidance, but the wise old duck just sadly shook his head and said, "Come, ducks. We fly." And the last sight the ducks saw as they flew away was Jimbo, desperately trying to scoop up all the pellets, hoard them from the other animals, and push them with his beak towards the far side of the lake.

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