All Guts, No Glory

The sagacity of this advice becomes apparent as Marts pulls up in front of a Kendall house. No carcass is in sight, only a feline-shape scar, equipped with tail, darkening a nearby lawn. The few bones that remain are connected, not by tendons or muscle, but flies. "This," Marts admits, brandishing her log book, "is when you write, `Decomposed.'"

But it is Dettman who claims bragging rights to the week's most disgusting retrieval. On her last call Friday afternoon, she pulls off the road at NW 22nd Avenue. Before her lies something that can no longer fairly be called a dead animal. No, it is something too monstrously rank, a monumental refiguration of bone and membrane, adipose and fur. "This guy got hit a few times," she says unnecessarily, surveying the 30-foot spatter of browned blood that tails the mess.

Just a few minutes earlier, Dettman had tried to evoke the horror of just such a sight: "You should see the ones where you can't even tell where its head is or its tail is and its guts are twisted and twisted and twisted like a wet towel." Here she had offered a visual aid, pumping her arms like a lunatic crankshaft. Now, face to tissue with the creature, she does not tarry, grabbing at a mealy, fibrous tube - the colon? - and dragging it into her polyurethane sarcophagus. "I've seen worse," she says, pausing to let the image sink in. "It's worse when they're bigger." And so ends her eulogy.

Back at Animal Services, Dettman parks near the incinerator and unloads a few bags onto a concrete slab. Nearby two grocery carts sit stacked to overflowing with pets that have been "put to sleep" - or, to bludgeon the euphemism - poisoned. The larger ones lie on the ground, toppled rigor mortis statues bathed in the effluvium of disenfectant.

Today, even the hulking incinerator is full, bones petrified in the unnatural skew of death, a set of sepia ribs resting like a gutted ark on a sizzling bed of carcasses. Dettman throws a couple of roadkills in before the chamber's door clogs. Plastic vanishes from the first corpse like an uncertain apparition, revealing the limp spaniel form of Cindy.

Eager to start the weekend, Dettman turns away from the furnace, marches to her truck, and, while Cindy floats overhead in gossamer smoke, scrubs the bed with the muscled intent of Lady Macbeth.