Hot Dogs and Cool Cats
Or Friends and Neighbors, This is How I Got This Way
It was hard to hear clearly in a pet crematory. The burners roared like jet planes, and the carcasses crackled and hissed as they burned down from meat to ash. The dead weren’t quiet; but they rarely complained.
So, when I heard the noise, I wasn’t sure it was real. It was barely at the threshold of audibility. High-pitched. Intermittent. A cry for help. I opened the trash cans and searched among the bodies. Nothing. There was a garbage bag on the stained concrete floor. I knelt to open it. It was full of puppies.
The crematory at the Oak Veterinary Hospital (not its real name) was my responsibility once, part of a job I walked into during the fall of my sophomore year in high school. I’d worked plenty in the years prior -- mowing lawns, haying, raking blueberries, babysitting stock, pets, and kids -- but real jobs, ones you filed taxes for, were scarce in my home town, population 1,200 with twice as many cows. To get a real job, I had to go into the city.
The vet hospital was in the capital, across the street from a Chinese restaurant, fifteen long miles from home. The hiring process had been intense. The practice owners were a father-son team, I'll call them Drs Paul and Lincoln Sanders, and they both sat in on the grilling.
“How are your grades?” they said. “Why do you want to work here?”
My grades were fine, I said. As for why I came to the Sanders for a job, I blamed James Herriot, the pen name of a writer/vet in northern England. I’d read all of Herriot’s folksy books about his life as a country veterinarian, and watching the show on public television Sunday nights was a family pastime. I was already a certified dairy-cow judge through the 4-H Club, and I loved animals. It stood to reason my skills might lend themselves to the veterinary sciences.
After the interview, Doctor Paul gave me the tour. We hit the ward first, rows of two-level steel cages filled with sick or boarding animals. My role there would be to feed the dogs and cats twice a day, exercise them in shifts, and clean and disinfect the cages. The next stop was the washroom, where I would bathe the ailing and befouled.
The exercise room looked like a prison yard, rows of concrete-block runs topped with chain-link and shut tight with steel gates. The vet showed me the safety pole I could use to move potentially rabid dogs around. I remembered the final scene of Old Yeller, where Travis tearfully guns his faithful hound down, and nodded understanding. The hydrophoby was not on my to-do list.
The last stop on the tour was the crematory. The door was at the end of a dark hallway and led to a long, tunnel of dirty, white-washed cinder block. The roof was made of translucent green fiberglass panels; the light they let in was flu-like.
The corridor sloped to a space about the size of my bedroom back home. On one side was a claw-foot tub on blocks with a grate across the top of it. That’s where the messy carcasses went — autopsies, road kills, and rabies suspects — to drain. On the other side were a row of plastic garbage cans. All the animals that fit went in there. Doctor Paul lifted the lid of the nearest one.
Inside the trash can was a tumble of fur and paws, dogs and cats locked in a stiff embrace they never would have allowed in life. At the very top, a gray-haired terrier snarled, his pale lips and yellow teeth locked in a final grimace of defiance against the reaper. Some intangible part of me whimpered and fled, tail between its legs, and never returned.
Doctor Paul showed me the burner controls. There were two: one for the top burner, one for the bottom. “You’ll want to light it up as soon as you come in,” he said. “Put the smaller animals in first. Once it gets hot, you can put the bigger ones in. Don’t let it smoke.”
If it smoked, we’d get complaints. The Chinese restaurant would call and report the smell of roasting dogs and cats was overpowering the food. If the wind was right, the smell would carry across town to the supermarket, and we’d hear from them, too.
“Check the smokestack,” Doctor Paul said. “If you can see the smoke, they can smell it.” We went back to his office, and the doctor went over the benefits of joining the team. I’d work Saturday, Sunday, and the major holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day). On holidays, I’d make triple time. On regular days, I’d make $3.65 an hour. As a bonus, I’d get a fresh turkey for my family’s Thanksgiving dinner.
“How about it?” he said.
“Sounds good.”
After my father dropped me off for my first day, Doctor Paul handed me a brown lab coat to wear, and I went right to the crematory to light the burners. With the oil burners roaring away, I checked the trash cans. The day before had not been a good day to die, apparently, as there were few animals to burn. Most of the stuff in the cans was actual trash: wrappers, boxes, bio waste, and used hypodermic needles. In the bathtub, though, was the headless body of a Saint Bernard who’d been suspected of rabies. The only way to a sure diagnosis was to cut off the animal’s head and send the brain to the state lab. The Saint Bernard was nearly as big as I was and stiff as a board.
I hustled away to the ward to feed the animals, taking careful note of their dietary requirements. Most just needed a scoop or two of food, but some were on special diets. One dog, a cocker spaniel whose owner was on vacation, ate only chicken and rice from a Tupperware container in the fridge.
After the feeding, I went back to the crematory to put the first few animals in. I chose a small beagle-looking thing and two cats to start with. I watched the flames lick their fur for a moment or two then heaved the heavy hatch shut.
I put the first wave of dogs into the exercise yard and cleaned their cages with a pressure hose and disinfectant. The cats moved to clean quarters while I made their cages sparkle, then moved back. By the time the first dogs were back in their cages, the runs re-disinfected, and the second wave barking and scratching at the exercise yard, it was time to check the crematory again.
The beagle compatible and his cat pals were curled and black, their guts thrusting out of their bellies and roasting alongside. It smelled like barbecue. I put in another dog and went back up to clean more cages before lunch.
I was eating my peanut-butter sandwich in the break room when Doctor Paul dropped by. “I’ll give you a hand with the big one down there,” he said.
I nodded.
He waited.
I set my sandwich aside and followed him down to the fire. I took the back end of the big dog, and he took the front. The dog had shit itself and pipes of feces fell around my feet as we shuffled it toward the furnace. The doctor’s end leaked blood but less than I expected. Together, we heaved the carcass through the hatch and dropped it on top of the burning meat.
“He’s not going to fit, is he?” the veterinarian said. The Saint Bernard was too big for the hatch, and all four of his paws were sticking out. “Grab that shovel over there.” I handed him the shovel and watched as he used it to break the dog’s legs. They folded easily after that, and I tucked the big paws in with the rest of the body. “Keep it hot,” Doctor Paul said. “He’ll take the rest of the day to burn down.” I threw the rest of my sandwich away, and punched back in early. I had three cats to bathe and a dog to cover with an oily goop that combated mange, and, after that, I had the second round of feedings and cleanings.
In days to come, I learned the job end to end. The ward was lit with germ-killing ultraviolet lights, so I had a constant low-grade sunburn. The smoke got into my clothes, even though my protective lab coat, which had a tendency to drape into the fire and catch. I learned how to clean the crematory out and went home with ashes in my hair. On Sundays, the hospital was closed to new business, and I could take an hours-long lunch break if I wanted. I usually walked downtown for a pizza and a stack of comic books and sat at the front desk to enjoy both.
In time, I bought myself contact lenses and paid for my driver’s-ed classes and driver’s license. I triumphantly brought home my turkey and shared it with my family for Thanksgiving. I had a real job. Sixteen years old with responsibilities and money in the bank.
The puppies in the bag were dead, of course, and they were young enough that their eyes had never opened. They were mutts, part Rottweiler, maybe, and someone hadn’t wanted them. For $15 a pop, one of the doctors had injected them with a drug cocktail that looked exactly like Windex and put them to sleep. I’d seen it done dozens of times. The doctors had shown me how to hold the dogs’ front legs to best expose the big vein inside their elbows. I’d hold the dogs as the needle went in, and they slipped bonelessly into death. It was quick. Easy. The dogs barely noticed it was happening.
I heard the whimper again and dug deeper in the bag. One of the pups was still alive, snuggled up to his dead brothers and sisters. I pulled him free, the only warm body among the cold and held him to my chest. I already had three dogs at home, two of them rescued from the doctors’ needles.
The foundling squirmed in my arms, trying to get closer to my heart. He was probably hungry. He missed his mother. Likely she was missing him, too, wondering what had happened to the litter she’d spawned. He yawned, flashing his pink tongue and untried teeth.
I carried the pup up the white corridor, through the scarred door, and up the dark hallway. I shouldered open the door to the treatment room where Doctor Franken, a woman new to the practice, was working on an unconscious Labrador with a dislocated shoulder. “You missed one,” I said. I held the puppy up.
“Ohhh,” her mouth twisted in sympathy, “he’s a little fighter.” She rubbed one of the pup’s silky ears between her fingers. “Hold him a minute.”
A few minutes later, I laid the pup back down among his chilly siblings. They’d all be warm enough soon, but it took a while to get the chill out of my bones.
That summer I worked full time and moved up to $3.90 an hour. The morning of my second Christmas in the ward, I’d walked into a full kennel, dozens of dogs and cats barking and scratching for my attention. I couldn’t hear myself think, and the stench was incredible. I fled to the quiet of the unlit crematory. The animals there weren’t asking for much. It’s hard to disappoint the dead. The living, though ...
I gave notice later that day, deciding I wasn’t cut out to be a vet.