Choppers

Before commercial airlines banned pet rabbits in the mid-aughts, I sometimes used to fly with my rabbit in a little plaid bag under the seat. After the ban, I had to find other ways to transport her when she couldn’t stay behind. I once placed an ad on New York Craigslist: “Wanted: Pet Transportation.” I found a man willing to pick up and drop off my rabbit along the route he was driving anyway for a hundred dollars. He said he’d done this before; it was a great way to make gas money. I took a photo of his driver’s license and said a prayer. In my early twenties, creative and unguarded, I solved many such problems with Craigslist.

A year or so after that, when my boyfriend and I were ready to leave New York for good, we came up short on cash. “Maybe we could just take someone’s pet,” I suggested, thinking kindly of the gentleman who’d done the same for me. I put up an ad, and three days later I received my first email from Emil. “I have a small pet that needs to be transported to Cincinnati. Will you be able to stop and feed him once on the way?”

Initially, I was untroubled by the vagueness of his message. On Craigslist, it’s wise to give as little personal information as possible. Mostly, I was relieved to have found some unexpected income.

In his next email, Emil gave me more but still not all of the details: He would pay us three hundred dollars to transport “Choppers,” who weighed seventy pounds, and his food would be live. “I will provide you with a separate box to keep a baby rabbit in,” he wrote. “Then he will stay sedated all the way.”

I was disturbed by the size of this still-unspecified pet. Why wouldn’t Emil just tell us it was a snake? It had to be. That would explain his vagueness: A lot of people, myself among them, don’t particularly like snakes. But then, some people don’t like rabbits. That included Emil, who wanted to us to feed one to Choppers. This for me, was the more troubling development. My own rabbit would not accompany us on the trip, so it wasn’t that I worried for her safety. But I did not want to feed a baby rabbit to anything or anyone. I hadn’t eaten rabbit myself in many years—it was just too weird, seeing as I spent my evenings feeding sprigs of parsley to the one in my apartment.

On the other hand: three hundred dollars! To us, it was a fortune.

I wondered if the rabbit was negotiable.

“I don’t think it’s a snake,” my friend Nathan said. “I think it’s a dragon.”

“I don’t think you should go through with this,” said pretty much everyone else.

“Emil,” I wrote, “would some other kind of animal be possible for the food? Maybe a rat? Also, what kind of animal is Choppers, exactly?”

“Choppers is a very rare baby albino alligator,” he wrote back. “He has a steel crate that I will keep him in and that goes to his new owner as well. The new owner will meet you right off the exit.”

An alligator! Clarissa Darling, the teenage heroine of my favorite childhood TV show, Clarissa Explains It All, had kept a mellow pet alligator in a plastic baby pool in her bedroom. His name, I remembered, was Elvis. Everything would be fine.

Emil wrote:

Perfect. I will bring Choppers and a baby rabbit to you the morning of, I will feed him the night before so he is calm, just make sure to drop the rabbit in his cage sometime during the trip so he doesn’t get cranky . . . not fun to deal with. We will drape a small cloth over top of his cage just in case . . . so he remains hidden from officials . . . Talk to you soon.

Here I began to have doubts. I did some research and learned that while alligators were legal to possess in some of the states we were passing through, they were illegal in others, or illegal to transport across state lines. I learned that albino alligators are both rare and creepy, with their red eyes and translucent skin, but not endangered. Leucistic alligators, on the other hand, have snow-white bodies and bright blue eyes. There are thought to be only twelve in the entire world. I had just wanted gas money. What color eyes does Choppers have? I considered asking.

For years afterward, I tried to write a story about an all-white alligator and the mysterious Emil. In one version, the alligator grabbed my boyfriend’s arm during the feeding and yanked him into his cage. In another, the alligator escaped his crate and we couldn’t find him, but we knew he was there, watching us. The stories became fantasies of a more reckless self who lives only in fiction now that I am a little older and infinitely more cautious.

My rabbit, nearly eleven, is done with danger, too.

In my best story, in which I didn’t back out like I did that day, Emil was an elderly man, eccentric but gentle, and inside the huge steel crate was a white plastic dustpan. “This is Choppers,” he told me. “Be very careful.”

“I will,” I said solemnly, taking the money, taking the baby bunny to raise as my own.

Names have been changed.

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