This Same Road by Shane Bondi (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) One of the Muscovy ducks was hit by a car. There had been two of them, and three white geese, waddling along my parents’ gravel road, or floating on the shallow river at the end of the driveway, under the shadows of birches and white pines. Each year, when I visit my parents in these western North Carolina mountains, the number of birds seems the same, though I’m sure some fatalities are replaced by births when I’m not watching. The Muscovy ducks, with their hamburger-meat faces and mottled black-and-white feathers, always seem to be lurking like creepy uncles as the slender-necked white geese preened gracefully, ignoring them. I drove past the mangled body on my way to town to visit my friend Jerry, who owns a produce stand. Around the next bend in the road I waved to my father, out for his daily post-lunch three- mile walk. He’d been walking that road every morning and every afternoon since retiring here nineteen years ago. Almost twenty thousand miles, give or take. He turned seventy this year, and leans a little more on his walking stick than he used to. Seems like every year, Jerry has a new photo of a grandchild taped to the wall behind him, next to the old-fashioned decorative thermometers with Elvis, Coca-Cola or John Deere themes. He keeps an acoustic guitar behind the counter with him, sometimes he plays me a new song he’s written, strumming the guitar as we sip cans of Natural Light, hiding them from customers who stop by for peaches, tomatoes, sourwood honey or jars of chow-chow. Today a short man with grey hair came in with some magazines for Jerry to display on the counter. “Did you hear about that fellow drowned in his car Saturday night?” Jerry asked. “Was my best friend,” the man said. “Poker buddy for thirty-six years. Went on vacations together. His wife and granddaughter were in California. Hell of a flight back.” I waved the fruit flies away from my face. Turns out the man drove off a small bridge, flipped his car, and drowned in the early hours of morning. A woman came in looking for muscadine grapes, but Jerry said he wouldn’t have any until later in the week. I watched a saloon shoot- out between some Bonanza characters on the muted TV next to the cash register. “That’ll be too late,” the woman said. Jerry nodded, and the woman left. We finished our beers, and had another one each, after the man with the magazines had gone. A young couple from out of town stopped in on their way to visit the Blowing Rock, from which, legend has it, a heartsick boy leaped in despair, but the winds from beneath the rock blew him back up to the arms of his lover. They bought sodas: a bottle of Nehi grape for her, orange soda for him. When I drove home, the surviving Muscovy duck was standing on the side of the road, its head bent toward the black and white feathers sticking out in disarray from the gravel and dirt. It didn't even move as I drove by, and I found that I had to look away.
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