A ringtone that was not a ringtone
Button’s notebook has a rule written on the inside cover in Professor Gruff’s grease pencil: If the truth is already funnier than the fiction, file the truth and go to supper.
Kansas City police stopped a stolen car in August and heard what they took for a goat ringtone. The driver said the quiet part with unfortunate clarity: no, those are real goats; they are in the trunk. The trunk contained two baby goats. They were thin. They had a parasite load that would make a county agent sit down. They were still on the bottle.
KC Pet Project took them. A foster kitchen learned the 2 a.m. math of milk replacer. After the hold that the law requires, the kitchen kept them. Their names are Denver and Aspen, which is a lot of mountain for two kids who started in a trunk, but Button has decided not to file a protest. A good name is a kind of fence. It keeps a story from blowing back into the road.
What Button wants the Ozarks to do with this is small and specific. Look in the places you would not look. A bleat is not always a joke and not always a notification. If you buy a kid from a parking lot, you have bought a future you have not budgeted. If you find a kid in a place a kid should not be, you call the people whose job is the calling, and then you stay until the water is in the bowl.
Denver and Aspen will not remember the trunk. They will remember the bottle and the hands that did not flinch at the math. That is as close as this paper comes to a happy ending on a Thursday. The rest of us can keep our trunks for spare tires, which is the original and correct use of a trunk and should have been written down sooner.
Professor Gruff’s marginal note: “A goat in a trunk is not transportation. It is a sentence fragment. Finish the sentence at a clinic.”