Never Let Them See You Cry (16 page)

They stopped a Metro police officer. He led them to an animal hospital. It was closed. He showed them another one five blocks away. It too was closed. “Drive carefully,” he told them and departed. Candy was still alive.

The woman was desperate. She stopped the car and ran to the nearest house.

Gloria Rodriguez was home alone with her children. It was after eight
P.M
. when someone pounded on her door. “She was knocking real hard and screaming like crazy. She said, ‘My husband is dying in the car!' I said, ‘I cannot let you in my house, but give me the number you want to call.' She said, ‘Call 911!' She was going crazy. ‘Please! Please! My husband is dying!'”

The emergency operator dispatched an advanced life-support system and a crew of three paramedics. As they rolled up to the scene, “a woman waved us down,” fire rescueman Keith Tyson said. “She was crying. She wanted us to help her dog; the dog had stopped breathing. Another woman in the car had a small dog in her lap. She was giving the dog mouth-to-snout resuscitation. She admitted lying, saying it was her husband. She said they were willing to pay us any amount of money to take the dog to a veterinarian or a clinic and they would follow us.”

Keith Tyson, who owns a Doberman named Magic and a poodle who answers to Tiffany, refused.

The distraught women drove away. The mother continued breathing into Candy's mouth and massaging her chest. They finally found the animal clinic, after 9:00, but it was too late. Candy was almost five years old. She had been one of the family.

“The firemen just laughed,” her owner said, weeping. “They said, ‘It's only a dog.'”

The paramedics were furious when I spoke to them. Tyson had run red lights and counted seconds responding to the “heart attack” call. “I don't want her to go to jail, but I'd like to see a judge explain the facts of life to her. I like dogs, but I'm not going to risk my life for one.”

I saw his side. Every year firefighters, as well as innocent victims, are killed or injured en route to false alarms. False reports to 911 are against the law. What if a heart attack victim had needed the advanced life-support system miles away?

But I also understood Candy's heartbroken owner.

South Florida's poisonous
Bufo
toads often send animals into fatal convulsions. Here's what to do: Wash out the animal's mouth with a garden hose, fast, then run for the animal hospital.

But first: Be sure you know where it is.

Outright cruelty to animals is common enough to break your heart. Deranged people poison innocent neighborhood pets with cyanide and strychnine. In one neighborhood two dozen dogs and cats died in their own backyards. The killer was never caught. Some smarmy humans kill pelicans and seagulls for sport.

And then there was the man from Canada.

There were half a dozen hungry and homeless stray cats, crying for food at his door. So he began killing them.

He snared each in a noose on the end of a stick, drew it taut around their throats, then plunged them one at a time into a bucket of water, holding them down until they stopped struggling.

An outraged neighbor jumped a fence to stop him and saved the sixth cat.

“It is done all the time in Canada,” Victorian Theoret, sixty-four, blandly explained to the judge, adding that he was a former priest, a Ph.D. and a university professor. He freely testified that he had even killed his own dog in the same manner. An Animal Control officer, summoned by the neighbors, testified that Theoret had handed him the five sodden bodies in a sack, saying, “This is how it's done in Canada.” Autopsies confirmed mat the two healthy gray-and-white tabbies, two spotted tricolors and a half-grown black cat had been drowned.

“With all the shootings and murders, you wouldn't think cats would have that much importance,” defense attorney Leo Greenfield said derisively. In Canada, what his client did is “customary, to get rid of pests,” he said.

Another defense lawyer insisted Theoret's method was humane. The judge responded, “Let me ask you, counselor, how you would like somebody to loop a rope around your neck, pull it tight and then drop you in the water?”

Judge James Rainwater, bless his heart, the same man who locked up errant fathers who failed to pay child support, sentenced Theoret to the max—a year behind bars—for cruelty to animals.

Sounded right to me.

Of course the man never did the time. He served two days in jail until a higher court judge ordered his release. An appeal panel later threw out the conviction.

In Miami it is always something: monkeys, elephants, pigs on the prowl. An irate retired military man, never injured in the service of his country, lost his battle with a neighbor's pet pig.

I saw Pigger myself and loved him.

Lloyd Laughlin, lying painfully in his bed, right leg bandaged, did not.

“Everybody thinks of a pig as a cuddly little thing,” he muttered through clenched teeth, his injured leg elevated and packed with ice. “It was not a cute little pink pig. It was a miserable monster with black hair and yellow fangs.”

It's all how you look at things.

Pigger had been the beloved pet of Suzanne Banas, twenty-five, since the porker was a day-old orphan the size of a puppy. Pigger rode in the family car, lived indoors and was house-broken.

Feed a pig and you'll have a hog, the saying goes. Pigger soon grew too large to clamber into the car or the house. Though she now lived in a pen inside a fenced-in yard, Pigger, at three hundred pounds, still thought of herself as a family pet. She still slept with a blanket and still frolicked with the nine-pound Italian greyhound. They grew up together. Once they were the same size.

“She still tries to sit in my daughter's lap,” said Norma Banas, Suzanne's mother, “and rolls over with her feet in the air to have her tummy scratched.”

Suzanne Banas wanted to free Pigger in the wild after she outgrew the car and the house, but no wildlife officials could guarantee her safety from hunters. “So we had to keep her,” Norma Banas said.

Made sense to me.

The freedom Banas could not give her, Pigger seized for herself. She took off for the outside world while her owners were at work. Her home, a former horse pen, is electrified so she cannot break out, but a fallen tree had disconnected the wires. Pigger found a rain-weakened fence post and forced her way out of the acre-sized yard. Free at last, she trotted down Ninety-third Avenue just before one
P.M
.

Neighbors knew what had happened at once. Pigger is popular with their children, who love to feed her and watch her eat (like a pig). Lloyd Laughlin saw her in the street. His wife even snapped a photo of Pigger's stroll down the avenue. Then Pigger wandered into a neighbor's yard. “It was rooting a hole in their grass,” Laughlin accused.

The husky retiree, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, marched out to put a stop to it. “I went to within six feet of it and yelled.” He denied provoking the pig. All he did was say “Yaaaaahhhh!” trying to scare the animal off the neighbor's lawn. When he turned away, he said, Pigger charged.

“It hit me in the rear and knocked me down. I've never been hit by a car. I think this is what it feels like.”

He lay still, a tactic learned in military training. The creature stood over him, staring malevolently with little piggy eyes, he said. “It was rooting around my body with its nose, a big nose.” Then it sank a fang into his leg “right between the calf and the ankle.”

A neighbor ran to the rescue, hurling dirt and sand into the creature's face to distract her. It worked. “She just walked off,” Laughlin said. His leg bloodied, he ran to dial 911. Laughlin alerted Animal Control and wildlife officers. Metro police dispatched two cars and a helicopter.

Laughlin, fifty-nine, suffered badly bruised buttocks as well as the bite. “I told the policeman at the hospital that if I had what he was wearing on his hip, I would have blown its head off.”

Neighbors had called Pigger's mistress on her job at Miami Children's Hospital to report her pig on the prowl. She rushed home. So did Pigger, she said. ‘Two guys were following her. She couldn't wait to get back in her pen.”

Pigger was a legal resident—the neighborhood is agriculturally zoned—but police cited Banas for “permitting livestock to run at large.” There is no leash law for pigs, but there are livestock laws. Pigger was quarantined for ten days.

“Pigger is no attack pig,” Banas insisted. Laughlin, she said, “probably scared her, or maybe Pigger was just coming over to say hello and bashed into him accidentally.”

“It was not coming to say hello,” Laughlin swore, swallowing a pain pill. “It's fat and it's big. It's not like having a little dog. It was walking up the middle of Ninety-third Avenue. It deliberately wanted to knock me down; I know it wanted to bite me.”

“The pig probably didn't like this guy for some reason,” an Animal Control officer said. “They are very smart.”

Irene was a bigger problem, by seven hundred pounds. The baby Burmese elephant ran amok through a Miami neighborhood, ramming two cars, kicking down fences and bursting through a plate-glass window during a twenty-minute, mile-long spree.

The one-thousand-pound pachyderm panicked at the sound of an ambulance siren and broke away from her trainer as she and a baby baboon were being unloaded for a benefit show at a nursing home.

Elderly patients caught only a fleeting glimpse of Irene as she lumbered into careening traffic.

“She got spooked and ran. She's really a perfect elephant,” said the trainer, who worked for Hoxie Brothers Circus.

Irene, age four, stands on her head, waltzes, sits and kneels on command. This time, however, she ignored commands, knocked down her trainer half a dozen times and tried to bite him during the wild chase. A ragtag posse of police, dazed motorists who abandoned their cars, pedestrians, barking dogs and a Miami politician took up the pursuit, scattering for cover several times as Irene charged them, trumpeting angrily.

She crashed through hedges, trampled flowers and rampaged through several garages. No one was badly hurt, though several persons were knocked off their feet by Irene, who suffered a bloodied trunk.

“Here comes an elephant!” screamed a woman employee as Irene smashed through the plate-glass window at the Miami Board of Realtors.

“We heard a godawful crash,” public relations director Rose Light said. “Someone in the front office yelled, ‘My God, it is an elephant!' The staff was in a state of shock.”

Trapped in an apartment-house trash bin by two would-be big-game hunters, the five-foot-tall creature shoved their pickup truck back ten yards, crushing the right front fender before she fled.

City Commissioner J. L. Plummer dodged the irate elephant and scaled a parked tractor screaming, “I'm a Democrat!”

The chase ended in a backyard. Irene shook off four husky men and did a fancy step out of the chains around her pudgy front legs, but she soon met her match. Miami Police Lieutenant Walter Rodak, a mounted patrol veteran, snatched her ear and talked gently until she calmed down.

“She's just a baby,” Rodak said soothingly.

Hobbled by the chains now double-wrapped around her legs, Irene struggled in vain to escape, until she was finally locked inside the circus van.

Police knew where Pigger and Irene came from. Sometimes, though, you never know.

Close to midnight there was a knock at their apartment door. Gilbert Maseda, forty-three, opened it, and his wife watched.

There stood a two-foot-tall black monkey.

Startled, Maseda slammed the door. The couple scrambled to the window and peered out at the creature. That made the monkey angry, so angry that he began screaming, then jumped up and smashed the window.

Screams from the monkey and the Masedas aroused neighbors, who rushed out to chase the intruder away. He refused to go. Then he saw Estella Pena, forty-three, leave a friend's home to walk to her car. The monkey leaped onto Pena, who ran away screaming.

Three times she dashed for her car. Three times the monkey intercepted her as she shrieked and cried and neighbors ran and shouted.

“He had great big eyes,” she told me. “There were lots of people there, but he kept chasing me. I never saw him before,” she swore.

Finally she dove into her car and slammed the door, safe at last, or so she thought. A window was rolled down three inches. The monkey leaped onto the car, trying to wriggle inside as she screamed and neighbors ran and shouted.

Somebody called Animal Control and the police as Estella Pena shook the monkey from her car and sped into the night. The monkey eluded the Animal Control officer and the impromptu posse of crazed neighbors.

After an hour-long chase, Miami policeman J. K. Fitzgerald and passerby Louis Moldinado, thirty, cornered the monkey under the hood of a car a block and a half away from where it had originally appeared.

The monkey, suffering from cuts and bruises, was taken to Animal Control and booked into solitary at two
A.M
.

The owner was never found.

And nobody knows why the monkey knocked at the Masedas' door.

A bird in the hand makes a bit of a mess
.

—A
NONYMOUS
B
IRDCATCHER

He came into my life in January, along with all the other snowbirds. He was short and beady-eyed, with a waddle, and I loved him on sight.

He meandered across my front yard trailing a length of purple cloth in the dust. Thinking he was hungry, I fed him Tender Vittles and went back inside. Preoccupied, I vaguely wondered why he was there but paid no more attention until a friend arrived.

“Did you know there is a duck in your front yard?” my friend Patsy asked. Also a city girl, she was excited.

On closer inspection we could see that somebody had bound his wings with that purple cloth, apparently to keep him from flying. Even if I could hold him, I was afraid to try to remove the intricately tied binding for fear of hurting him. He was skittish anyway, but he loved those Tender Vittles.

Next morning he was still there, still hungry. There was only one thing to do: I got out the cat carrier and dropped a trail of Tender Vittles leading to a dish inside. He greedily ate his way into captivity. I slammed the door, and we were off to the vet.

A woman in the waiting room with her dog said she had seen a duck tied just like that, with the same purple binding, near her bayfront home. She was certain it was not the same bird.

Something bizarre, as usual, was happening in Miami Beach.

Why was somebody tying up ducks? People have been arrested for sexually assaulting ducks; Santeria cultists sacrifice them along with other creatures, and some people fatten them up for Sunday dinner. I didn't want to think about it. The veterinarian had never treated a duck before. No problem—all I wanted, I said, was to set him free.

Oh, said the doctor. He picked up his scissors, severed the purple binding with a single snip and billed me ten dollars.

I will never forget the expression of relief and delight on the bird's face as he stretched out his wings and flapped them ecstatically. An impressive and beautiful sight—who knows how long they had been uncomfortably bound. He willingly stepped back into the carrier, which I took home and placed out on my little dock. I opened the door and said goodbye. He stepped out and stood for a moment, getting his bearings. I didn't wait to watch him fly away. I left home for several hours, returned and went to fetch the empty carrier.

The duck came running, webbed feet making slapping sounds on my patio, begging for some Tender Vittles.

He took up residence in the backyard. The dog was no threat, but I worried at first about the cats. No problem—the first time he was stalked he merely extended his neck and expanded his wings to full width, and the cats backed off. This bird was bigger than they were. Soon he and Sharkey the cat were eating Tender Vittles together out of the same dish.

It did occur to me that ducks should be wet. Writing at home, on leave from the
Herald
, I took breaks several times a day to go out and spray him with the garden hose. He loved it, running back and forth through the spray like a city kid at an open fire hydrant, and I observed for the first time why people say, “Like water off a duck's back.”

Doubting that Tender Vittles was a balanced diet for a bird, I switched the menu to day-old bread, bagels and lettuce. My bird book said that ducks eat corn but was not more specific. This duck did not like fresh corn off the cob, canned corn or frozen niblets, but he did relish corn muffins. He probably would have liked dried corn, but none was to be found at Miami Beach supermarkets.

The bird book called ducks fresh-water fowl. The waterway behind the house branches in off the bay and is brackish, and I worried that he probably should have more access to fresh water. I had the perfect answer: a giant kitty-litter box, deeper and twice the normal size—a perfect swimming pool for a duck. Splashing furiously, he kicked his feet, flapped his wings, ducked his head and threw water into the air. I had to refill it several times a day.

Extensive remodeling was under way next door. Some of the workmen were refugees, and I was alarmed to see them gazing hungrily at my duck, busy in his bath. He had become quite corpulent on his diet of day-old bread, bagels, lettuce, corn muffins and Tender Vittles. I started to work with one eye out the window, on guard for any false moves. When the duck perched atop my chain-link fence to look at the water and caught his webbed foot on a wire, I had the fence removed. The view is better without it anyway.

He slept on a piling at the corner of the dock, head tucked under his wing. Each night before retiring I would deliver his midnight snack—a handful of Tender Vittles—stroke his glossy feathers, and we would look at the stars.

He never quacked, but he cooed while gently nibbling at my clothes and fingers. And he was intelligent. When I emerged one chilly morning wearing a long flannel nightgown instead of the usual shorts and T-shirt, he did a double-take and waddled around nibbling at the hem, looking up at me in mock surprise.

He had a roguish personality. Soon he no longer wanted me to hand-feed him his bread, he wanted to play with it. He liked me to wad it up and toss it in the air so he could catch it. Better yet, after he got his little swimming pool he wanted me to toss the bread into the water from afar. He would back up, get a running start, leap into the pool and dive for it. Then he would clamber out, back away and wait for me to toss another morsel. He was hilarious.

How can anybody ever shoot a duck—or eat one? Veal was already off my menu because of the big-eyed baby calves. So was tuna, because of the murdered dolphins. Now ducks were too.

His play was so much fun that I even considered buying him a child's wading pool, but things changed the week before Palm Sunday. He grew restless, pacing up and down, staring out over the water. He flew off one day and was gone for more than an hour. I was concerned, but he returned, landing out on the water and streaming straight to the dock leaving a widening V on the mirror-bright surface behind him. Next day he flew away again and was absent longer. But still he came back. I talked to him as usual out on the dock, where he cooed and settled down on the piling for the night.

The following day he soared again into the sky, following the waterway north. When he did not return by nightfall, I almost regretted not having his wings clipped as the vet had suggested, but that wouldn't have been right.

I looked at the stars alone that night, but in the morning, there he was, running eagerly to greet me as usual. Later, the pacing began once more. He stood in the shade under the ficus tree, staring skyward for a long time. I went out and stroked his handsome head and fat little belly.

I watched later, from my Florida room, as he took to the sky.

This time he did not come back.

He left me with a fridge full of day-old bread and lettuce. The story of my life.