Dog Catcher – The Final Chapter

The officer. I’ll call him Brad. Since when I asked for his name and badge number he ignored me. So Brad.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I wasn’t in a great mood to begin with when I stepped out of the house. You can imagine almost falling on the ice didn’t help. Funny, isn’t it, how self-arrest to avoid a fall can piss you off almost as much as an actual fall can, and so already this had the feeling of something that wasn’t going to end well, but I tried to stay positive. When I got to the end of the driveway I saw Brad already had a leash in his hand.

“What’s up,” I said.

“This your dog?” I should’ve lied and said yes and the whole thing might’ve have ended right there, gone into the garage and grabbed a treat, coaxed Kaya inside, and given Brad a reassuring wave  — “Thank you officer. We’ll make sure she’s never left out front again. ‘ppreciate your concern. Bye now.”– and that might’ve been the end of it.

Instead.

“No, it’s the neighbor’s dog,” I pointed to their house, and then followed with a bit of local knowledge, “You’re not going to get Kaya to come to you with that leash in your hand, she’s pretty skittish that way.”

It was friendly advice, an olive branch, a way to get on Brad’s good side, earn his trust, more bees with honey they say. Brad looked up from Kaya and turned slowly to look at me with the full force of his stare, his impeccably starched forest green shirt and matching creased pants held perfect, unchanged, like it was armor, and then I saw the assortment of unknown objects in leather cases attached to his belt, his hand moving over the contour of a black night stick dangling at his side. Brad was in his element now, oozing officialdom.

“I got other ways to get the dog,” he said.

“Look”, I said, “you don’t need to do this. She’s not a problem, she lives right over there, roams around here all the time. She’s not a problem. How ’bout if I take responsibility for her.”

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step back and not threaten me.”

Threaten? If I was standing within five feet of Brad I’d have been surprised.

“I’m not threatening you. Look, I’ll take responsibility for her, okay?”

“If it’s not your dog sir I can’t allow that. She was wandering near the street, off her property, that’s why I had to stop. She’s not your dog sir and I need you to step back.”

“But she does this all the time,” I said. And right then I wished I could get that one back — probably not a good idea to goad a dog catcher, especially one you’re trying to mollify, with the news that a serial lawbreaker has escaped his notice all these years.

By now Brad was pulling a long pole with a loop of thick cable at the end of it from the back of his truck, a neck snare. Thinking maybe he’d gone back there to fetch a treat, Kaya had followed him. Wagging her tail. Shit. I ran to the neighbor’s house, rang the doorbell and pounded on the door. No answer, of course. And then I heard Kaya yelp and cry, must’ve been two or three times. I ran off the porch, almost crashed on the ice again and started sprinting shuffle-skating back to my house to fetch my cell phone. On the way I spot Brad near the back of his truck holding the pole, Kaya at the other end with a cable cinched around her neck, struggling, trying in vain to get free. I shuffled over to Brad.

“Can’t you see she’s traumatized for chrissakes!”

“Sir, YOU NEED to back up and not threaten me. I will call APD if I have to.”

“So call ’em. I’ll stay right here. This is ridiculous. I want your name and badge number.” He ignored me as he fumbled with the lock on one of the cage doors. I quickly shuffled back up the driveway into my house and got my cell phone, dialed my neighbor and, wouldn’t you know it, he was in Juneau at a funeral. Great.

“Jim, I said, “we got a problem here. Animal control is taking Kaya away.”

“What can I do, Rod?” I held the phone out to Brad.

“Look, I got Kaya’s owner on the line. He’ll give you permission to release her to me. The owner, did you hear me? He wants to talk to you.” By now Brad had stuffed Kaya in a cage and was re-stowing the pole.

“When I’m done here sir I will speak with the owner. Sir, you need to back up, get on your own property, I am not comfortable with your threatening position.” Brad, it seemed, had never experienced a real threat. I was standing at least five feet from him, easy.

“I am on my property,” I said.

“No sir, you’re in the street.”

“Nonsense, there’s an easement here. I’m standing in the easement.” Okay, that was a reach, but it appeared to have duped Brad. The look on his face suggested to me an acknowledgment that I’d bested him in this battle of legal wits, and that maybe, given what I presumed by then was his exaggerated reverence for law and order, maybe I’d earned a point of respect from him. I tried again.

“Here,” I held the phone out to him, “will you please talk to the owner?”

He never even acknowledged me, slammed the rear door of his truck, shuffled past me, got in the driver’s side door which had been hanging open the entire time, and slammed it.

I pulled the phone back and held it to my ear, “Jim, you there? Jim?” Great. His phone had died, as he had warned me it was about to when he first answered. But Brad didn’t know this so I just stood there near the back of his truck, holding the phone, listening for Kaya, a whimper, anything.

Don’t recall a lot of what happened next. Brad did a y-turn at the dead end of the street and rolled past me, a real threat to behold I was, dressed in plaid pajama bottoms and fur-lined slippers insolently waving my cell phone at him. To no avail, he pulled into the street and that’s the last I saw of him and Kaya. Already the neighborhood felt empty without her, which is funny, because earlier in the week Happy Wife and I had finally agreed we needed to call or text Jim, tell him he needed to prevent Kaya from sitting in our driveway all day long barking for treats, and now, with her speeding down the road in a dark cage in the back of Brad’s truck headed for the confines of the pound, I felt terrible.

Later on a friend of Jim’s stops by and says Jim reached him by phone and they got everything worked out. He was on his way to the pound to free Kaya and stopped by to thank me on Jim’s behalf for caring about her.

Well, I had gotten to meet Brad so it wasn’t a total loss! Sheesh.

I called Brad’s supervisor and bent his ear about the abysmal job one of his officers had done, how the entire situation might easily have been avoided, and how ol’ Brad might benefit from a little sensitivity training, dealing with the public and better estimating the threats they pose.

“Sir,” he said, “would you mind putting this in writing, what you just told me?” I decided I would, but I didn’t take it lightly. As pissed as I was at him I didn’t want Brad to lose his job. As despicable as he was at it I could understand it must be a thankless one, having to round up aggressive strays that pose real threats to people or property. But fulfilling his quota at day’s end on Kaya, which is what it felt like to me at the time, that was crap.

Jim called me from Juneau and thanked me again for caring for Kaya. He said Brad had called him (his number was on Kaya’s collar tag) and was as polite and respectful as could be. “On a scale of one to ten, Rod, he was a ten.”

That gave me pause. I re-considered the letter, showed it to Happy Wife who had just arrived home to hear me spill about the whole ordeal. She convinced me I was right to want to hand deliver it to Brad’s boss. “Do it,” she said, “he deserves to know what happened. It’ll go in his file and if there have been other complaints lodged against this guy maybe something will get done.” Seemed like a hail Mary to me but what the hell, might as well, I’d taken the time to write it, so we drove to animal control together and I left the letter with Brad’s boss, who politely thanked me. And that was it.

We drove to Fridays for chicken wings and cheap cocktails. No regrets.