We had a great day in the marshes along the canal and were driving to County Road 183 with $425 of Burmese in the bed. Tammy, my business partner (and my ex’s niece), showed me the bullet tweeters she was going to get for her ‘97 Integra. I wasn’t even going to shower after we got our cash—was going straight to the pawn shop to get back my tattoo gun, then have some beers on the little white table under the gumbo-limbo outside of Stinky Ted’s. It’s funny, because I was never very good at tattoos, but I was good at this.
We always stop on CR 183 to take pictures of our bounties for our socials, because it was half a mile from the FWC station, and this stretch of road was real narrow so it made our dead snakes look extra long. Tammy and I uncoiled the Burmese and I went back to the truck to grab the little anaconda worth an extra $50.
“We got a visitor,” I heard Tammy say, but by the time I shut the tailgate and got back around, there was nothing to see. Tammy had fallen to her knees on the gravel.
She was shaking and then hyperventilating, and I kept asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
I got her into the truck and blasted the vents in her face. She took a few swallows from a Diet Monster and fought against her sobs.
“It was a duck,” she finally said. “It came out of the culvert there, right through the muhly grass, and it was honking at the dead Burmese, and then it got… long. Really long. It kept getting longer and longer…”
She was speaking in pieces and struggling. She said it was confusing in her head now.
“It was like it came from a different world,” she said. “A longer world. Does that make sense? It’s so long you want to die. That kind of world.”
Well I didn’t know what to say to that, so I put the truck right in gear and I said, “Let’s just get our money,” and Tammy agreed.
But when we started driving she kept talking about the long duck. She said it kept walking, even with its rump still hidden back in the sedge. She shuddered all over and said it was like a cobra, the way its body hovered out so far ahead of itself. And then the orange feet had all these long, extra toes with veiny webbing.
“I want to close my eyes,” she sobbed, “but then I see it, as long as my whole brain, filling everything in there.”
The drive was taking too long. We should have been to the FWC station by now. Tammy was close to panicking by then, but the last thing I wanted to do was turn around because of a duck.
“Did you miss the road?” she said. “Can’t we get the bounty tomorrow? Let’s just get out of here.”
We were on the right road, I was sure of that. The FWC station was right ahead and we were going to see it any second. And then I could drop her off back at my ex’s with a fistful of money and she’d be okay.
“We’re almost there,” I said. “And then you can get your tweeters. What are you going to play first on them?”
But she wouldn’t talk about tweeters. Instead she kept ruining our great day with some of the strangest shit I ever heard. Then it got even worse, because she started waggling her finger up and down, holding it right front of her face.
“Is my finger getting longer?” she asked, and got mad at me when I didn’t look away from the road. “Look! Is it getting longer?”
I said no, but that wasn’t good enough, and she kept asking. And the more I looked over at her bouncing that finger, the more it looked it was drooping a little, like it was about to get drippy.
Then I saw a birdwatcher out in the sawgrass marsh along the road, standing out against the sky. I always talk to birdwatchers. There’s no better source of intel—they stand around for hours and they hate snakes. I pulled over.
“I’m going to go talk to her,” I said. “Hell, maybe we can nab us one more while we’re out here. If it’s over four feet, dinner’s on me.”
“We’ve got to get out of here, you don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t understand what’s happening. Look at this.” Then she started flopping that finger in my face again—up and down like it wasn’t attached to her.
I knew she was upset about the duck—I had never seen her like this—but I had my whole plan laid out and wasn’t about to change it because she was having some sort of freakout. So I got out of the truck.
Before I shut the door, I looked back at that finger. Maybe it did look longer.
“Stop waggling it,” I said. “You’re creating some sort of optical illusion.”
I tossed the keys into her lap so she could put on that Japanese noise rock I can’t stand and give herself time to calm down a little.
She screamed out the open window at me. “I’m going to tell her and she isn’t ever going to let you see the triplets again.”
Well that just pissed me off.
“Weren’t we having such a good day?” I said, as venomously calm as I could. “And you fucked it up because you saw a duck. So now you need a few minutes to stop acting crazy and I need to go talk to someone normal. I’ll be right back.”
I got the snake hook from the bed and slid down the earthwork berm, into the shallow marsh. The birdwatcher pivoted around her right leg like it was rooted, and looked at me through a long camera lens. She had suspender waders, and a mesh vest with pens and notepads. Her white hair came out from under a straw hat.
“Seen anything strange?” she asked, when I was close enough.
“I’m a python removal agent so I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Nope, haven’t seen any sign of snakes. I guess they nest around here? What I’m looking for is a duck,” she said. “I listed a snail kite out here last week, but never seen a CMF like this before. I’ve got to get a picture.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but she had a laminated ID badge hanging on a lanyard around her neck. It was mostly hidden in her vest, so I couldn’t get a clear look.
“What’s a CMF?” I asked, feeling unsettled.
“It means a Cosmic Mind Fuck. It’s a birdwatching thing,” she said, then became grave. “Have you seen the duck?”
I hadn’t wanted to admit that the day had changed. I was going to get hundreds of dollars, and then I was going to Stinky Ted’s because I was celebrating the day instead of surrendering it for once. But something in the world had turned over, was awake now, and everything was different. I had to get back to Tammy.
“Lady, there’s all sorts of ducks out here, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Anas fulvigula, brown and mottled, they’re like the swamp rats of ducks. But this one is smeared across too much time, so you live with it now and in your future simultaneously, across more of yourself than the human body can experience,” she said simply. “Have you seen a duck like that?”
Then she started laughing, right at me, and lifted the long camera lens to her eye and pointed it. I tried to sputter a response and could only impotently throw my middle finger at her camera. Somehow, I thought, this birdwatcher did something to Tammy. I almost fell back on my wrists into the marsh trying to pivot away from her.
I squelched back through the shallow grass, but then my leg kicked something, just under the surface of the water. It was fleshy and roughly cylindrical—about the girth of a green anaconda, I recognized. I had my snake hook, but that was better for managing the animal’s head, so I pinned the rod under my armpit and reached down to wrap my arms around the snake. It was a big one, maybe ten feet by the feel. I thought about how I might coax Tammy back out here for help.
But what I lifted above the water didn’t have smooth, olive scales. It was rubbery and black. I pulled up more of the body. It sagged in my hands like slack muscle. Then I found the boot. At first I didn’t understand, and couldn’t think around the birdwatcher, who had begun laughing again. I whipped around on her. She was maybe ten yards away. She shook her rooted right leg, and the thing in my arms quivered and leapt.
“Stop it!” I shrieked, and pulled on the strange appendage in my arm as if I could yank it away from her. But it only stretched out, revealing kinks and curves as her long leg, clad in rubber waders, pulled up from beneath the water’s surface. I dropped it with disgust and slopped as fast as I could away from her and back toward the road.
My head rang with confused, animal terror as I lunged for shore. As I approached I saw, leering out from the cypress stand further up the shoreline, the FWC station—a hangar with chipped paint, decommissioned sometime after the Korean War and now used by the county. We had been so close. But I turned away from it.
Something was hanging out the passenger side window of my truck. When I got the door open, I saw that Tammy had neatly arranged her long fingers on the dashboard, lining them back and forth on the vinyl like rolled out dough. Her right elbow hung in drapes and folds out the window, while her left piled at her feet in front of her seat. Her mouth was open down to her lap in a long scream, and she had spent her last breath on it.
I yanked my keys from her lap, but my truck key wouldn’t sink fully into the ignition. I pulled it out: it was too long. I tossed them away like they were burning hot.
It was time to get out of there, before the long duck came back. But first I got the Burmese from the truck bed, and draped its dead neck over mine—there was no use in throwing away good money.
I started back down the unpaved road, the way we had come, but no matter how much of the dead snake I coiled around my shoulders, there was still more dragging behind me. As I plodded forward I wondered if I was walking away from the truck at all, or was I only getting longer from it.