Animal Control

A short story with audio; themes: animal wisdom, humor, strange relationships, mishaps, mistakes, Ohio, animal control, love story, prison, snakes

This original and odd love story was originally published in a print journal, Uno Kudo and After the Gazebo approximately a million years ago. It is VERY unlike most of my work. It’s been #1 in Comedy Adaptation on Coverfly’s Redlist.

Animal Control

© Jen Knox

I haven’t been to a dinner party since my divorce, but if I still attended such drudgery, I wouldn’t talk about my cousin Miranda’s botched boob job or the neighbor kid’s crush on the preacher’s new wife. I wouldn’t repeat those talking heads on Fox or CNN, and I wouldn’t ramble on about the dew point. All that blathering is boring, predictable, and, quite frankly, a little sad.

After doing time, so to speak, in the animal control business, I’ve come to realize that people are the most problematic and least interesting of the mammalian species. We’re the predictable ones, always spending too much time trying to control the stuff we can’t. We don’t listen to our instincts.

Don’t get me wrong. Domesticated animals have problems too. Cats really climb trees and get stuck, for instance. A lot of folks think it’s a myth. Not only is it true, but it’s also common. What’s almost as common is the people who climb up after the cats, only to get stuck themselves.

I was never shocked to see some guy sitting up there on a high branch. A cat crying, and the guy looking awkward and stuck right alongside his furry friend. Sometimes the guy would act cool, like he was waiting for us. I’m not being stereotypical when I say he, just so you know. I say he because every time I saw this happen in my years of animal rescue, it was always a man.

Back then, Georgie and I were called if a skunk was wandering around a backyard, or a stray dog was foaming at the mouth. Georgie, my partner, was the cool-headed one. I acted with urgency. If a deer was found with a broken leg or a possum baby was stuck in the doggie door, we were there. We were the best at what we did.  

I had been thinking about quitting the business long before we did. Thing is, I had been asking for a siren from the city because I’ll be damned if our missions weren’t just as important to the community as those of any cop or firefighter. We saved lives, too. There was no precedent for an animal control siren, our boss told us, but I wrote a letter. Then another. Then I pulled a Shawshank Redemption on the city and started writing one a week.

But our little part of the world, tucked away in rural Ohio, is no movie screen. I wasn’t surprised I never got a return letter. Thanks to Amazon, I bought my own siren.

I deducted that purchase, and the tickets we got because of using the damn thing. It wasn’t my usual way—to make excessive purchases. Truth is, we barely got paid enough to afford our rooms at the Budget Nights where we paid rent week to week. I liked staying there with Georgie because our rooms were right next door to each other, and it was as though we were almost sleeping together when I thought about the way our beds were both positioned against the same wall.

The day it all ended, I thought we were on another exaggeration call. People would call at all hours with wolf or rabid dog sightings. We usually arrived at the scene only to find an unassuming, hungry mutt with a slow-wagging tail and sad eyes. Every now and again there would be a real emergency, but more often we’d find a false alarm.

 “It’s a Chupacabra!” a woman screamed at me once, almost blowing out my eardrum as she pointed at an American Tundra Shepherd Dog. The dog was a sweet little thing.

“No worries, ma’am, Chupacabra don’t come to the Midwest,” I told her as I nudged that sweet little dog into the van.

The week before my last day, a woman had reported seeing a black bear, which she said was as big as her Camry. But when we arrived at her door, she invited us in for tea and explained with a hint of apology that the bear had been her familiar coming to tell her to dye her hair red again, and that he only showed up every seven years, so we could go home. Georgie laughed in that deep, loud way he did. But I was irritated. I drank the tea down and fought off the urge to charge that woman for our time.

Looking to Georgie always calmed me down. I often thought Georgie looked like a bear himself, not in a mean way, but he was a big guy with dark hair and a cute face that he kept covered with a coarse beard. He was also quiet like a bear till he got upset. He said he had a past he didn’t like to talk about, but that he thought about it all the time, and that the past was why he was so quiet. Georgie was always real calm but he was also self-conscious about his weight. I don’t see why. I always thought he wore it well. Besides, I would eat and eat and not gain an ounce.

It was a Thursday morning, butt-crack early, before the sun. I think it was around 4:30 a.m., but I don’t exactly recall. Georgie and I were both a little hung over from a night at Ernie’s, drinking some kind of kumquat-flavored vodka that Ernie got as a freebie to test out. It was bad, but the bad stuff means that you drink it faster.

Well, anyway, we drank it down, and neither of us felt too keen on driving out to Mansfield to catch a snake that was in someone’s backyard pool, but we didn’t have much of a choice. We were dedicated.

“Don’t need that siren you wanted this early in the morning,” Georgie said. My head agreed.

We drove in silence the rest of the way, except for when Georgie started snoring and I poked him with the snake-grabbing tongs. I told him he needed to buy more of those strips for his nose because I couldn’t hear myself think over that snoring. “Yeah, well, you wanted to drive,” he said. We always ribbed each other like that. Nowadays, Georgie calls it throwing slugs.

“I did not. I volunteered to be nice. Look, anyway, we’re almost there. Put your game face on.”

Georgie did just that. He stretched one way and the other then he did what I love most that he does—he growled, just like a damn bear. He looked in the mirror and squinted. “Let’s do this! Snake wrangling time!”

“That’s my boy,” I said, and Georgie blushed.

We pulled up to the address to find the kind of house that looked like the perfect set for a horror movie, and just like a horror movie, there was a cute little girl on the front porch in a sundress. I about turned the van around. The little girl waved to us, then turned and knocked on the hulking wood door. The door looked like a custom-made deal, with different designs carved into it.

“You here to get rid of the snake?” she asked me. “Nancy’s inside. She refused to come outside till you all got here. I’m not afraid though.” She knocked again, and that’s when my stomach got all riled up, the way it gets after I eat a French dip sandwich at Lou’s diner. I knew something was about to go down. The girl called to Nancy, then closed the door after pointing around the side of the house.

“A polite person would offer us some lemonade,” Georgie said.

“Oh well,” I told him. “Let’s just do this fast and move out.”

A grown woman, probably the one who’d called, arrived out back and pointed. Like she said, there was a snake in the pool, which had been drained of water save an inch, but it was just a garden snake, a tiny little thing. The woman was pointing at it, saying she couldn’t believe her luck that this snake would end up in her pool—“Of all pools!”—and just as I was about to tell her to calm down, this would only take a minute, that little girl pounced like a cat on a red light, and landed right next to that snake.

She landed on her knee, which got scraped up, but she was a tough little thing and said it didn’t hurt more than she could take. Georgie and I eased down the pool steps so as to not skin our own knees, and by the time we did, the little girl had the snake in her grip. She handed it to me.

“Well you didn’t need us at all, now did you?” Georgie said.

“I think you have a future in animal control,” I added.

“Yeah?” She sounded excited, as one should about a career in animal control.

“Yeah,” we both said. It was synchronous. And right then, I locked eyes with Georgie, just the way I always hope for.

“Oh, no, you have a future as a doctor, maybe a veterinarian. We’ll talk.”

The mother or sister or whatever had her hands on her hips. Her curls were all the same size, and I was confused by the symmetry of her face. She didn’t look completely real. I guess most people would consider her pretty, but I just thought she looked odd. The girl ran inside the house as we wrote out the bill of service and the woman, Nancy, I guess, told us that she wasn’t sure if she’d call again since we’d taken so long. I bit my tongue then.

When we thought it was over, with that little snake in my hand (we planned to drop it off 100 feet away, in a nice patch of grass), something strange happened. We were driving, and we heard a banging sound in the back of the van. We were almost to the freeway, so we stopped. I let that little snake loose as Georgie checked out the back, saying, “Maybe I left the carrier back there.” But when he opened the door, he yelped like I had never heard Georgie yelp.

“Let me come with you,” a small voice said.

“How’d you? Why?” Georgie asked. I ran to his side to see that little snake wrangler with the scuffed knee was sitting on our chicken cage blankets.

I gave her my most maternal smile, cocked my head and sternly told her that what she’d done was wrong.

“I know, but please?”

“Wish we could, little one, but I don’t think your mom would be too keen on that.”

“She’s not my real mom. She’s a stepmom. The kind like in Cinderella, but I don’t think there are any princes around here to save me. You guys are my only shot. Now that my daddy’s gone.” She began to cry. “I need to go find me a new one.” She gave Georgie a powerfully sad look, and then the little troublemaker started to bargain through her tears. “How about for just a few hours then? A breakfast?”

I remember Georgie once saying that he wouldn’t mind having a kid but worried he’d be a bad father. The girl was tugging on his heart, I could tell, and I had to intervene. “Little girl, we don’t even know your name,” I said, “and it’s rude to invite yourself to breakfast.”

“I’m Laura.”

I still don’t know why we did it. I remember looking at Georgie, then the little girl, and thinking about what it would be like to have a family. I felt a little uneasy in my stomach, but I also felt that if we were to have a little one she’d be just like little Laura.

Georgie asked what the harm was in taking her to a quick breakfast. I agreed, so long as Laura called her stepmom first to ask permission. I gave her my cell phone, and she dialed. She sounded convincing, saying yes, it’d only be a few hours and, of course, she’d make sure not to drink any coffee.

But after eggs and toast and French toast with whipped cream for the little one, my phone started buzzing with the notice of an Amber alert. I didn’t make the connection right away, but ten minutes later, Georgie and I were in cuffs.

Apparently, that little one had called time and weather.

She told the officers her stepmom was evil and we were rescuing her, but that didn’t do much to help our case. Little Laura would cry at my trial, and I bet she did the same at Georgie’s. I tried to give her a scolding look from the stand, but I felt for Laura, so I gave her a half-smile instead.

A lot is revealed in court. For instance, Georgie had priors. I knew he had a past, but I never could have imagined he held up a gas station when he was younger; of course, it made a little more sense when I found out he had his finger in his pocket and pointed at the cashier pretending it was a gun. Still, it was bad. It explained his quietness—an outlaw’s type of quietness. I think it might be why he never pursued our relationship; maybe he had some kind of deep-reaching guilt.

Georgie ended up in Ross County. I went to Marion. We were about 40 minutes away from each other. I didn’t stay in too long, and I met a lot of nice women who’d been through a lot. I missed helping out the animals, but I spent time in prison telling these women stories about my rescues. My stories and my age kept me pretty safe. But Georgie had priors and a warrant for not paying his tickets. He got seven years.

When I started writing him, he said he missed saving animals. I told him I got a few cats and five dogs, and that I was thinking about breeding dwarf rabbits in the shed out back. He wrote back that he’d help out when he was released. We’d be old, Georgie and me, when he would finally be released, but I was still looking forward to it.

I spent my post-prison days taking long walks. I couldn’t get my old room at the Budget Nights because management stopped renting to long-term patrons after a few shoot-outs, which made me feel a little better about having spent some days in jail. Things were tough for a while, and I was even desperate enough to ask the ex-husband to wire me a thousand dollars till I found a job, which he did gladly because he loves feeling better than me, but I’ll pay him back one day.

I got a job at a gas station part-time, which wasn’t bad because I had a lot of downtime and could read about animals. I told Georgie what I found out, and sometimes we’d have long, slow discussions through our letters. I told him, for instance, that crickets can hear with their stomachs; and he went to the trouble of fact-checking me then said that was pretty cool when he found out it was true; he wondered if people do too, in a way.

My stomach sure told me things. Like when I saw the house I’d start renting, I knew I’d one day buy it by the way my stomach seemed all riled up. And when one of my dogs wasn’t feeling right, I’d feel my gut twist sideways before the first whimper. Once, I wrote to Georgie while I was at work, and I was pretty bored. I had become management there and was good at delegating, so I had next-to-nothing to do. I was thinking about random stuff and writing accordingly. I told him that it’d be ironic if someone tried to rob our gas station with a finger in his jacket. I meant it as a joke, but right after I mailed that letter, my stomach told me to take it back. I tried, but that mailbox was impenetrable.

He didn’t write back.

Months went by. Then, one day, I felt it in my stomach and knew there’d be a letter. My stomach was churning something awful, but not in a painful way. It felt kind of like when you drive down a hill too fast. I checked my mail, and there was no letter, but the feeling kept on. I had that feeling for days. And I knew something was coming.

I might not want to know about the gossip around town, and I might never go to those dinner parties all the other women seem to go to. But if I did, I’d tell the table about how Georgie and I were good with animals but not people, how we were so bad with people that we managed to accidentally kidnap a little one. I’d tell the story like it was a tragedy, maybe even talk about the tougher days in prison (not everyone was nice). But then I’d really wow the table. I’d stop the dinner when I would start on about the day that, with my stomach moving in circles and the dogs sleeping around my feet as I read a two-day-old community newspaper on my porch swing, Georgie appeared out of the shadows. He was big, dark and hairy, and still with that perfect, chubby face. He had one of my bunnies cradled in his arm and said, “This one’s rogue.”

And I’ll tell you like I told him. I knew he’d be back. I heard him coming with my gut, felt this stomach rumble like I just ate one Lou’s French dip sandwiches. My instincts tell me that Georgie won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. 

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