TUESDAY MORNING
“This is how we get Lucky.” Vermont state trooper Andre Picard removes the dirty plastic milk jug of mysterious yellow fluid from the back of his pickup truck. “Brace yourself.”
His warning doesn’t prevent the assault to my senses as he pours out the vile-smelling fluid procured from a farmer down the road. The delicate lining of my nostrils sears at the stench of musk, stale urine, ammonia, and dirty sneakers. I have to swallow a reflex to vomit.
“Liquid gold.” Andre smiles as he soaks some rags in nanny goat urine. Or, more specifically, urine from a nanny goat in heat.
Baaaaaah.
Lucky, the elusive billy goat who’s been terrorizing Snowden the past week, destroying compost piles, uprooting newly planted fall bulbs, trampling gardens, and chewing on garages, regards us with new interest from his perch on top of the metal roof of Esther Bolduc’s toolshed. He chews his cud silently, his satanic eyeballs gleaming yellow with intrigue.
As the outgoing town clerk herself, my mother prepared me for the worst when I took over her job: midnight complaints about random animal and/or weapons discharges, angry confrontations over delinquent tax notices, overflowing toilets due to the ancient town hall plumbing, and, lately, unfounded accusations of elections tampering.
But nowhere in her list was assisting the animal control officer in trapping an angry, destructive, and now horny goat, ironically named Lucky, who’s jumped his fence and gone on the lam. I’ve read the town clerk handbook and I have a good inkling this is above my pay grade.
Nevertheless, Lucky needs to be captured and I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when I showed up at Andre’s house this morning to report last night’s shooting. The trooper was halfway out the door, chasing a tip on the fugitive farm animal, when I knocked.
“I could use an extra hand, if you don’t mind,” Andre said, stepping into his official Vermont State Police dark green pickup. “Jump in and you can tell me about it on the drive over to Esther’s house.”
As I detailed the events, however, I began to feel increasingly foolish. I couldn’t describe the shooter or if it was a male or female, because he or she didn’t speak. When Andre asked about a vehicle, I said I hadn’t seen or heard one. The only injury I’d suffered was a scraped knee from falling.
“So, you tripped and fell and got the wind knocked out of you,” he said, one hand on the wheel, his elbow out the open window. “Then what happened?”
What I thought would happen was I’d meet my executioner. What actually happened was—“Nothing.” I stared my hands in my lap, silently adding bruised self-confidence to my list of injuries.
“Any footprints? Tire tracks?” Andre pressed.
“No and no.”
“Bullets you could find, maybe lodged in trees?”
“Nope.”
“Shotgun shells?”
“Nuh-uh.” I thought about this. “You know, the Campbells next door were sighting their rifles. Do you think it could have been them?”
“Could be,” Andre said diplomatically. “We’ve had complaints about that crew before, getting liquored up and discharging firearms after sunset. I’ll go talk to them.”
“That’s okay.” I didn’t want to get my neighbors in trouble. Nor did I want to confess to Andre that, more than likely, I’d worked myself into a frenzy getting paranoid about the Stricklands’ possible reaction. The cheap wine probably didn’t help my mental state, either.
“Tell you what. I’ll alert Fish and Wildlife about the incident once we’re done here,” Andre said, after picking up the milk bottle of urine from a farmer’s house along the way. “My bet is what we have here is a poacher getting a leg up on the season. Every year, illegal takings get to be a bigger and bigger problem because they know we’re short staffed and won’t catch them. In the dark, he might have mistook you for a deer.”
I considered how I must have appeared in Craig’s soft brown coat while I was leaning over the burn pile on all fours, inspecting the cut-up magazines. “I should have known better. Should have been wearing blaze orange.”
“Naw. You were on your own property. There was no reason to think you’d get shot at before rifle season.” He stopped at a light and stared straight ahead. “Then again, when you’re driving down the road there’s no reason you’d expect to be hit head-on by a reckless driver, either. But it happens.”
I shifted on the hard seat, uncomfortable. Goddammit, Andre, I wanted to say, why’d you have to bring that up?
After that little bomb of his, we were silent until we reached Esther’s, where I’m actually glad for the distraction of the horny goat.
Andre dips the rag in the urine and squeezes. Good thing he’s wearing thick rubber gloves.
“Stand back.” Holding the rag above his head, he begins to swing. With his military haircut and built physique, he reminds me of a male stripper who’s just ripped off his chaps and is giving the girls a show until I’m rudely shocked to reality when I’m hit by a spray of urine. There is no choice. I will have to cut off my head.
“I told you to stand back,” he says, slowly approaching the billy goat.
The buck requires little persuasion. Sniffing the air, he clambers off the roof and gallops toward Andre, who climbs into the pickup’s bed, dangling the rag of romance just out of the goat’s reach.
“Get behind him, Kim. Give him a push if you can.”
Clutching the animal’s furred butt, I lean to the side to avoid a rear kick. Andre instantly grabs him by the horns and yanks him up and in, tying him securely with a rope affixed to the cab. I glance down at my lovely jacket smeared with mud, urine, and lord knows what else.
“Excellent work.” Andre jumps off the truck, closes the rear door, and tosses the rag into a bucket. “I’ll take this guy back to his home and cite the owner for violation of 20 VSA section 3341, and that’ll be that.” He rips off his gloves. “You still interested in filing an official report?”
“I’m good. You guys have enough on your hands. And you’ve gone above and beyond already for the town.”
Andre isn’t Snowden’s official animal control officer. Our official animal control officer used to be a wonderful woman who “got done,” as we say around here, after fielding too many calls about an animal hoarder’s “petting zoo” down on the River Road. Cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, an obnoxious tom turkey, rabbits, one peacock, and Lucky the goat proved to be too much last summer, and she handed in her notice.
Like other troopers, Andre ends up doing jobs that used to be left to local authorities, whether that’s catching dogs or goats or responding to nighttime noise complaints. Those responsibilities use to fall to the constable, but we haven’t had a constable in years, which means it can be like the Wild West in this part of Vermont.
On the drive back to his house so I can get my car, he says awkwardly, “I’m sorry if you took what I said the wrong way. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I took it the way you meant it.” I’ve known this kid since he was in kindergarten. He can’t pull one over on me. He used to hang out at our house snarfing down boxes of Hot Pockets with Erika and their close circle of friends—every single one of whom eventually dropped her like a hot potato after the accident. “You’re still angry. I get it.”
“Not angry.” He parks in his driveway, shifting into neutral, the engine running as he keeps his gaze straight ahead. “Just sad.”
* * *
“Thank you for coming to work today,” Doreen deadpans as I arrive at town hall a little before noon.
“Andre asked me to help him catch a runaway goat.” I hang up my bag, the Stricklands’ tax-sale file, intact and complete, inside. “Had to go home and stand under a hot shower for twenty minutes to get the stink off.”
“These people want to talk to you and only you.” She hands me a piece of scrap paper with a list of phone messages from the morning. “Too bad you weren’t here a few minutes ago to see me put a couple of trustafarians in their place.”
I wince. This is the danger of leaving Doreen to her own devices. While she’s the most warmhearted person when it comes to helping humble folks in need, she has no truck with our more privileged visitors. “What happened?” I ask, dreading the answer.
“Don’t worry. Nothing bad. The couple who bought the Rothmans’ house came in complaining about the internet around here, said they worked remotely from their jobs in the city and a three-megabyte DSL was unacceptable.”
This is exactly the kind of urban whine that raises my assistant’s hackles. “Aaaand?”
“And the woman in the North Face jacket said, ‘Who do I call to get it upgraded?’” Doreen snickers. “Big mistake.”
Yes. Yes, it was. The woman was probably perfectly nice and had absolutely no idea that complaints about our primitive internet happens to be one of Doreen’s triggers.
“I said, ‘Have you tried calling God? Maybe he’ll flatten the mountains for you if you slip him an extra twenty.’ Then I told her to contact Bill Iverson, who’s doing that whole internet co-op thing, and she left satisfied.”
“Sounds like you handled it well.”
“Of course.” Doreen points to the last name on the list. “Andre the cop called right before you got here.”
I turn my attention to ANDRE VSP. CALL ASAP. “Must have left something in his truck.” I pick up the phone to dial the first number on the message list: Dr. Emmons, the dentist with the S&M parlor. Not a call I’m eager to make, especially since there’s nothing I can do for the man.
“It’s not about something you left in his truck.” Doreen taps the ASAP. “Apparently, it has to do with Erika.”
I freeze and hang up the phone just as someone answers the dentist’s number. Cops + kid is every parent’s nightmare equation, and, from personal experience, my thoughts shoot to the worst. “Oh, my god. Is she okay?”
“I’m sure she is. I mean, he’d have been here in person if she were dead, right?”
Doreen’s bluntness sometimes can be a little much to take. “What did he say, exactly?”
“He said exactly to give him a call.” She taps the message again. “He needs to know how to reach Erika. He wouldn’t say why or what it was about, but he did say it was important. Like, urgent.”