Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online Page A

entirely with an interior landscape.
    "Abbot Pastor said, 'Get away from the man who argues every time he talks.' He also said, 'He who gets angry is no monk.' "
    I began to see some of the desert peeking through the sayings I recalled. Nick and I were no monks, but we were good friends. Friends who had been about to come to blows over a rabbit a few hours before, in the season of our least want.
    I prattled on a bit about the Desert Fathers, committing some fractured theology, I imagine. It seemed to me that the twenty-four-hour cycle of waxing and waning wants suggested a spiritual

    significance in the calculus of human need. Something. I was still trying to work it out.
    We got into Darwin after dark, slept on the street near an abandoned gas station, and woke with the sun. There were people in the town—about forty of them, I learned later—and we moved into the old barroom for a little privacy. An hour later I was awakened by God's executioner.
    Nick was sitting on the bar itself. "I met David on the street," he said. "David is a preacher."
    David shook his head violently. He was not a preacher. He had strong beliefs; he didn't mind talking about them, but he wanted to be careful. "People around here say I preach too much," he explained.
    There was the mechanical click of a camera shutter, and David literally jumped. He turned to face Nick, who was composing another shot. "Don't," he said. "I don't like pictures." He squatted again and stared into my face. "They took my picture in Colorado," he said. There seemed to be tears in his eyes. "The police." David was a stout, solidly built man—he walked around in the desert barefoot—and I felt the unmistakable presence of something powerful and out of control.
    Nick did too. He said, "Well, I think I'll go walk around a bit."
    "And they hit me with their sticks," David said. "For no reason. I wrote the president. I said that I was willing to renounce my citizenship. All I wanted was five thousand dollars and an airplane ticket somewhere else. Anywhere." David was trembling with some powerful emotion. "He never wrote back."
    "Uh, Nick," I said, "maybe you should stay here. This is fascinating stuff."
    "I want to shoot some pictures," he said. David turned and glared at him. "Outside," Nick added. I struggled to my feet, just in case I needed to protect myself. David, it seemed, was highly sensitive to what I had thought was a secret defensive posture. "Powerful emanations," he said, not at all taken aback.
    "See you guys," the traitor, Nick, said lightly. And then he was gone: I considered his exit the Revenge of the Rabbit.

    PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 40
    David had a triangular shard of glass in his hand. I stepped back. He held the glass to his eye and peered through it. "This is on the dollar bill," he said. "The all-seeing eye. In the pyramid." David's blue eye seemed to spin wildly behind the broken glass.
    "God tells us not to forget our first love. Doesn't he?"
    "Sure He does," I said, not at all sure.
    "And what is our first love?"
    I said I didn't know. David seemed to lose control of the muscles of his face. He dropped the glass and stared at his hands in wide-eyed wonder. He gurgled happily. I realized that David was showing me an infant.
    "Our body is our first love," he said.
    David discussed love, as he understood it, for three more hours.
    Five miles outside of Darwin, in the purple breeze under a setting sun, Nick said, "You know, there are about fifteen artists that live in that town. Do good work, too."
    After a time I said, "You left me alone with David."
    "Well, people said he's all right, just a little intense."
    "A little?"
    In The Wisdom of the Desert Thomas Merton said of the Desert Fathers that "if we were to seek their like in Twentieth Century America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way places."
    I wondered if the Desert Fathers, concerned with their own Game of Living Things, seemed just a tad mad to those who encountered them.