It was a typical day in the village during the hot season. I was doing everything I could do to avoid spontaneously combusting (the thermometer broke and jammed at 125 degrees Fahrenheit the week before). I was doing nothing but sitting, breathing shallow, and trying to avoid any contact with my own body, a feat that is as hard to accomplish as it sounds. The town was dead as it typically was in the middle of the day, everyone too hot and tired to risk the unrelenting violence of the Sun.
I noticed in the field behind the house, about 70 yards from where I was sitting, that a pack of elementary school kids were gathered beneath the big neem tree. I stopped doing absolutely nothing in order to observe them, because no matter where you are on this planet, a pack of school kids in a field on the outskirts of town, unsupervised and without any sort of sporting equipment, equals bad news. I’d been marveling at these particular children’s behavior for the past 15 months, and I never seemed to be able to get a grip on their amazing lack of consideration for their own safety or for the lives of anything that wasn’t human. They tortured and murdered anything frail and slow enough to be captured, they mouthed off to me no matter how many times I thumped them on the back or on the head, they sucked on used mercury batteries, they NEVER looked both ways before crossing the streets (adults were guilty of this too), etc. I was curious on this blazing and miserable day to add to my list of evil/stupid/repugnant things they did for lack of anything else to do, so I shifted in my sliver of shade and just watched.
They seemed to be excited and agitated about something, all clustered in a lump and constantly moving and screaming. From the center of their hooting and hollering pack a donkey broke free and bolted. A few kids swung at it with sticks and one of them lunged at the fleeing creature and trapped the rope that was tied around its neck. It never ceased to amaze me how fucking cruel they were to the donkeys. When pulling carts the drivers would routinely crack them on the flanks or spine, full force, with sticks that were as big around as an adult’s wrist, even if the poor beast was running as fast as it could. As the cliche goes, donkeys are as stubborn as an animal can get and they understandably aren’t too keen on dragging around heavy carts and plows. You’d think that after hundreds of years of beating them in order to motivate them, with no obvious results, that people would have given up and just started using packs of dogs to drag their shit around. That would make sense, but this was Africa where things never did ending up making any sense whatsoever to me, and people continued to beat the hell out of the donkeys out of sheer frustration. They lived miserable lives with a constant collection of open, oozing sores on their backs that never healed because they just kept getting hit.
I pitied all of the donkeys and considering this particular one’s situation I knew that he was in for a bad time. It was like the Rodney King beating, the kids kept at it, thwaking it, busting sticks over its spine, kids were all around shoving and pushing, punching it towards a culvert that went under the paved road. From my angle I couldn’t see into the culvert, but I knew that if the kids succeeded getting the donkey into it and out of sight of the entire town, then it was more than likely going to be in an even bigger, all encompassing world of shit than usual.
The donkey knew this as well and it wasn’t going to go easily. They had it surrounded, hitting and punching it from all sides and its hooves were dug in to the dirt pretty good, but it didn’t seem to be good enough. I wondered as I usually did why the damn things didn’t just start kicking and biting. They are big animals and can kick like a motherfucker. If it had thought for a second, it would have realized that it could have easily reared back and fucked all those kids up in a nanosecond and then leisurely pissed on their crippled and concussed bodies. Unfortunately all of the fight had been beaten out of the species; their DNA is now permanently encoded with a victim strand. It’s pretty sad.
Amongst the madness I noticed an adult in the group and confusion set in. Though the grown-ups beat the donkeys as well, they usually didn’t sink all the way into full blown and mindless torture. They were vaguely aware that donkeys cost money and that if you beat you means of transportation to death then you’ll be out a few bucks.
The guy turned and I saw who it was. The second I saw his face my dread for the donkey’s well being peaked. It was Doro, one of the seven or so mentally disturbed people that wandered about our little town. He was a big guy with a build that told me he could easily snap me in two if the urge struck him; could pop my pancreas with one well-placed punch. Every time I saw him he’d jump straight up in the air, land solidly with both feet wide apart, hold down his hat with both hands and scream, “Americain ” then go on about his business like nothing had happened. A friend told me that he routinely beat his mother and he was also compelled by some crossed neurological wire to write in a billowing, faux arabic script on walls and in the sand. Lately he had been collecting a ton of rocks, walking off into the bush and returning with his shirt cradling 20 or so pounds of the red laterite that made up our region of the country. He made piles of them all over town and I’m hoping I will be long gone when he finally decides to finalize whatever plan he has for them.
Seeing him with the kids and one terrified donkey that was being forced into a water drainage tunnel made my tongue get fuzzy and thick in the back of my mouth, the same reaction I get when I think about the taste of lemons. The donkey was almost out of sight now with Doro following the pack and I decided that I needed to go over and try to stop whatever it was that was about to happen.
As I headed towards the gate my brain was yelling at me. It had a hunch as to what was going on but I chose to ignore it. I didn’t really want to hear. I was content with thinking I was going to find the kids shoving needles into the donkey’s eyes or something innocent like that. I went out of the yard and headed down the road to the overpass. A few kids ran past me back into town, a few others upon seeing me coming yelled some warnings in Jaxanke that I didn’t understand.
I got to the overpass and one of the kids, a 9 year-old pain in my ass named Kow, stood below and said, “Amadou, come look.,” and pointed to the tunnel. I couldn’t see from above so I sidestepped down the steep embankment, knowing deep in my heart exactly what it was that I was going to see.
I looked onto the dark and there it was... Doro, pants around his ankles, holding the donkey’s tail up, and fucking it hard in the ass. Kow laughed and the kid holding the donkey’s rope dropped it and ran out the other side of the culvert when he saw me.
If ever there was something that I didn’t want to see, this was most certainly it.
I shook my head and uttered a long, breathy, “Christ,” and walked back up to the road, back towards home, thinking seriously about the bottle of hot cheap whiskey that was sitting on the shelf.
I was struggling with whether or not I should do something– a crazy, violent man humping a donkey. I put him in the same category with sleepwalkers, figuring it is probably beneficial for my own longevity on this planet to leave him be. An ass kicking I can take, probably, even on a hot day like this. An ass kicking by a psychotic man with a throbbing, donkey poop smeared penis was a whole other can of worms. Yes, I definitely had better things to do than have that as a story to tell as well.
I got back to the yard and saw that the donkey had escaped when the kid had dropped the rope, but the few brave souls who hadn’t fled with my arrival had recaptured the rope and were leading it back to the tunnel of love, presumably so Mr. Donkey Raper could finish up. It put up less of a fight this time, apparently resigned to its fate.
What are you gonna do? I’d bet that bestiality, while not exactly smiled upon or encouraged, isn’t in the law books here, so I couldn’t go to the cops. I couldn’t really hate the guy. His love affair with poopy donkey asses was really the least of his problems– he is, after all, ape-shit insane. The only real discomfort the donkey probably felt was the beating it endured to get it into the tunnel. I’ve seen donkey asses, they can accommodate a basket ball and a freight train traveling side-by-side. I couldn’t hate the country, mainly because that would be stupid, but also because people all over the world hump animals. It probably (I can’t pass judgement) isn’t right, but it happens.
Really, in the end the only people I could be upset with were those goddamned kids. They were the ones who drove it into the culvert. They knew better and it wouldn’t have happened (well, that particular time anyway) if they hadn’t pummeled and dragged the poor fucker (fuckee?) to its rendevous.
And even knowing that, having someone to put some blame and disappointment on, what am I gonna do? The only kid I recognized was Kow and his family hates me so I can’t go to them. There was no recourse. The donkey walked away and was eating weeds and cardboard seconds after the money shot. The kids all dispersed. Cassinova presumably went off to write on a wall somewhere, and I am now the unwilling and not to proud owner of a mental video depicting an insane man plugging away at a donkey as a group of sadistic school children cheered him on.
-March 8, 2005
