THE DOG (Salvaged from MySpace... sorry for the Re-Run)

About 6 months into our Peace Corps service we ended up adopting a dog from a fellow volunteer whose end date was fast approaching. The dog’s name was Vita-Lait, named after the top selling brand of powdered milk in Senegal. The dog had been around volunteers for about 2 years and had widely come to be regarded as somewhat of a pain in the ass. People in the know uttered swear words when they heard the name. When the heard of our plans for adoption, they looked alarmed, offered warnings or sympathy towards our impending relationship. We decided to take the dog because we heard through the grapevine that if no one in the volunteer community took it, Cheryl, the current “mother”, was going to have her village brother beat it to death. Her reasoning was that the dog had been raised and spoiled, and consequently protected from less sentimental Senegalese people, by Americans, and that if she was left to fend for herself in the village she’d be beaten to death anyway the first time she tried anything funny, like begging or jumping on someone’s lap. Either that or she’d be tortured by bored children. If Cheryl had the dog killed, she could go back to America knowing that at least Vita-Lait died a relatively quick yet still painful death. It was a strange anti-logic that manifests in a person when they live in the bush for 2 years. Things you would have never considered doing in America suddenly seem like a great and merciful idea.
This chore would have been no problem for a Senegalese person to carry out. Domesticating and loving your pets aren’t concepts that got too far in those parts. Animals are there to protect you and to eat whatever scraps that are left over, if they are lucky. Usually they just eat whatever dead thing they come across and sleep in a literal dog pile outside of the family compound. They are a step away from being totally wild and us Americans are a constant source of amusement and aggravation to the locals with our friendly and spoiled cats and dogs, pampering them and feeding them better than some villagers eat.
As easy as it would have been for Cheryl’s brother to cleave the dog’s head in with a tree branch, our bleeding hearts had to protest. We did have a large compound to ourselves that was kind of fenced in (another story in itself) and we were blessed with a larger than average mud hut, a 5 room mud hut. It was a mansion as far as round huts went. We didn’t live with a host family and we were on the outskirts of town and our neighbors were already used to the fact that we were weird, by their standards, so saving the dog from a brutal death was no problem and wouldn’t impose on anyone but us.
The dog had personality, if I am allotted an understatement, but we seemed to get along. Shoe had the occasional fist fight with the beast and it also loved to roll around in dead animals then lie against our bed at night reeking of death and garbage. She did have her endearing qualities though which saved her from returning to her original planned fate of being beaten to death, only this time by fed up Americans. She was cute in the way she insisted on being a 55 pound lap dog. Any sort of lap animal in 120 degree weather is basically intolerable, but she never caught on to that and daily tried to climb into our laps to cuddle or nap. She was also prone to frequent and unpredictable freak-outs. She’d begin howling and take off across the compound at such a clip, and so desperately, that it appeared her back half was 3 steps ahead of her front half. She’d do this for about 4 minutes, top speed and balls out, then stop, settle down and lick herself or sleep as if nothing strange had ever happened. It was like hell hounds were on her tail. We wondered if she had worms in her brain or something horrendous as her behavior was so disturbing and explosive. I couldn’t help but think of that poor little terrier from The Plague Dogs who was always scratching his head, thinking there were fleas in it.
Her charming habits were evenly balanced by her bad ones. As mentioned before, she enjoyed rolling in the dead livestock that littered the roadside dump right outside our property. There was nothing we could do to make her stop as she didn’t appear to be capable of learning anything. She’d go get smeared with putrefying goat juices, we’d scrub her down with soap and sponges which she hated, then she’d go do it again and we’d wash her again. She got 7 baths one day before we just gave up.
Vita-Lait was also a big fan of attacking our mosquito net. At night she’d come running out of the dark and leap into it, tearing it down and snapping the strings that held it up. Being woken up like this on a regular basis is something that a person simply cannot adapt to. It elicits stark feelings of panic and terror, which are usually followed by pure and uncontrollable rage. As a result she received a lot of punches and was called more than her fair share of curse words. But she was only playing and took the punches as us playing back. She was a tough bastard who played hard and had a heart of gold, but she was like a bull in a china shop.
Her most terrifying personality flaw was that she really got a kick out of charging you at full on freak-out speed when you weren’t looking and taking a nip at your Achilles tendon. You’d be walking along and suddenly hear this galloping sound bearing down on you. A glance back would present Vita-Lait coming at you at full speed, teeth bared, head down, attention placed directly on your heel. Luckily we always heard her so we were able to sidestep her attack or stop her with a screech, so it was never discovered what it was she was actually doing. I suspect she was just playing in her own special psychotic way, but I wasn’t ever in the mood to find out for sure. Having my tendon snapped by a lunatic dog 15 hours from the nearest competent medical help was not on my list of things to do.
All said and done, though, we grew to love her.
Part of the deal with us taking her was that Cheryl had to get the dog neutered at the local veterinarian. We were fine with taking on one dog, but not litters of the damned things. One was going to be a lot of work as it was. She took the dog to the doctor but it was right at the beginning of Ramadan, the month long fast that Muslims embark on once a year, and the doctor didn’t feel comfortable undertaking such a procedure while starving himself. The country became intolerable during this time of year as everyone was grouchy and pissed off and spitting all over the place as not swallowing your spit was part of the fast. A few times I’d been nailed with large, morning breath smelling spatterings as some asshole went to spit out the bus window, only to have it whip back in through another window and hit someone. I once saw a girl get douched by some old lady. She must have had a pint of spit saved up in her cheeks. It was rude. Knowing that, and assuming that the Doc would be hungry and tired and not up to par, it was probably a good idea, we agreed, to hold off.
Cheryl was leaving before the holiday was up so I ended up waiting until the holiday was finished and took the dog in myself. During the wait I saw the dog terrorize countless children and a fair amount of adults as well just by being herself. She never meant any malice but Senegalese people aren’t generally used to an animal hanging out and wanting to be pet, or charging them at top speed just for fun. Typically, if a dog was charging you on the street one of you was going to die.
Vita-Lait also got in a few more fistfights with Shoe-- they had their differences. It never happened while I was around, but I’d come home to find Shoe with some new scratch marks and a sore hand and the dog a little stand-offish. All in all, though, it was nice to have a distraction as we weren’t leaving the compound as much as we should have been. Having a dog around made life a little more comfortable, like we had some familiar, American-type thing around when times were desperate or lonely. Her presence also ensured that our daily load of unannounced visitors was cut by a third.
After the conclusion of Ramadan I packed the dog up in the bus, on my lap, and headed off for Tambacounda, the closest regional city. It was between a 40 minute to 4 hour ride, depending on the road and bus conditions. Usually it was a quick ride in a bus packed full (beyond full) of 300 year-old men and women, children who would break into tears at the sight of our white skin (always good for a laugh), and various other kalibantés, beggars, and curious folk who asked a bunch of questions that I only understood about 40% of the time. The appranté tried to hoist the dog up onto the roof to tie her neck to the luggage rack with the various other animals and I had to get firm with him and insist that yes, she was going to sit on my lap, and no, she most certainly wasn’t going to bite anyone. It took a lot of talking and I’ve got good money that says neither he, the chauffer, nor anyone else on the bus had ever seen anything like this before or considered it even remotely safe, decent, or acceptable behavior. This was nothing but funny, terrifying, and repulsive to everyone on the bus. A dog on someone’s lap, on the bus? If there weren’t sappy white people living in the country, they would have never seen such a thing. I had to pay a little extra, which I expected, and off we went with a pissed off and mortified person on either side of me. Vita-Lait sat politely on my lap and didn’t nip or sniff at anyone. It may be that she sensed she was outnumbered and if she tried anything funny I wouldn’t be able to do anything to save her. If she bit some old lady the whole bus would most likely have decided to kill her. No way was I going to get in the middle of that. If she made that bed, she was gonna lie in it as I headed off in the opposite direction.
Luckily it didn’t come to that, and we got to Tambacounda peacefully, leaving the remaining people on the bus to finish their rides in peace, undoubtedly talking all kinds of crazy business about the white guy in the cowboy hat with a dog on his lap.
We got off in the marché and made our way through the maze of people and stands and vegetables. Piles of root vegetables lay stacked on blue tarps, cheap Chinese-made clothes with pictures of famous soccer players, 50 Cent, Yassir Arafat, and Osama Bin Laden covering them hung in wooden stalls, alongside even cheaper radios and flashlights, kids with wheelbarrows full of sliced coconut, sacks of water and juice, whole pineapples rolled through the mass of people, and mountains of giant and cheap mangoes that had become a staple of our diet. Wilted lettuce and enormous cucumbers were for sale as were eggplants and wooden barrels of rice. Old women sold strange sticky-looking lumps of things that I never did end up identifying. It was beautiful chaos, bright fabrics blowing in the wind, women with full 15 gallon buckets on their heads, the little eczema-riddled children begging for change to pay for their Koranic school supplies (or their Koranic teacher’s Mercedes, depending on your opinion). I never got tired of going to the market, if only to wander aimlessly and find something new and peculiar, but usually to experience the overwhelming life of it all, the vivaciousness, the community. It easily beat going to the supermarket in America.
We headed towards Dr. Lo’s office, a cavernous one room block made of cement and steel. I walked in a greeted him in my bad French, he greeted back in his bad English. The room had one cement counter, behind which was a desk, a filing cabinet, an old refrigerator and some shelves sparsely stocked with various drugs. On the walls were posters advertising rabies vaccines ( a poster of a pissed off Rottweiler and some terrified children. As far as I knew , there were no Rottweilers in Senegal) and one for a cow vaccine that was totally indecipherable to me. I could tell someone how to go eat shit in French and Pulaar, but veterinary terminology in French was way beyond my scope.
I had wondered briefly if he even knew how to neuter a dog or cat. I assumed that vet training in Africa focused mainly on inoculations and treatment of farm animals, creatures that provided transportation, muscle, or food of some sort. I couldn’t imagine many Senegalese people would even consider dropping $70 to get a pet fixed, as they shouldn’t. This was purely a 1st world concept, but Lo assured me he had studied this in school and knew exactly what he was doing.
He said something to his assistant, i.e. the guy who mopped the floors two times a day and waited around on the front steps to be sent on an errand and/or keep the beggars out. He acknowledged the doctor’s words and walked out the heavy metal doors, shutting them behind him from the outside. I heard the unmistakable sound of the door being padlocked. This told me that I was locked in here with the Doc and Vita-Lait and that I presumably wasn’t going to be leaving until this was over. If the building hadn’t been entirely constructed of cement and metal, I would have been a little nervous about some electrical fire breaking out and immolating all of us as the ‘assistant’ sat outside smoking Houston cigarettes and sexually harassing girls.
I resigned myself to what ever fate had in store for me and hunkered down for the duration. The Doc shot Vita-Lait up with something that I wouldn’t have minded getting a little bit of myself. As she got woozier and woozier I gazed out the window. Past the bars on the window and in the adjacent yard was a soap making operation. About 20 strapping young men were carrying out the various tasks that go into making the rounded balls of peanut soap one could purchase just about anywhere in the country for a quarter. Big steaming cauldrons of science were stirred constantly, guys with gloves working hot lumps of soap into balls and laying them out in symmetrical designs on cooling boards, large bags of strange powders were emptied. It was a mesmerizing scene, these guys doing what they did every day, creating things that I took for granted, and doing it in ways that were essentially ageless. No machines, just fire, sticks, gloves, and wood. It was awesome and I let myself sink into it as sweat trickled down my torso in the 100 degree afternoon heat.
My trance was broken by Lo telling me that the dog was out. I looked over and she had collapsed under the lone plastic chair that was in the ‘waiting’ area. Seeing her out cold really hit home that she was going to be operated on, and I suddenly wondered where exactly the operation was going to take place. The only horizontal surfaces were the chest high counter and the desk, a huge institutional thing that would provide adequate cover in the event of an atomic blast. It was covered with the usual desk items–strewn papers, pen holder, a rarely if ever used in/out basket, a small calender and other things that one typically finds on a desk but could not recall specifically when later interviewed.
Lo walked to his desk and quickly shoveled everything to the side and into an empty box. He told me to pick the dog up and put her on top of the desk. OK, I thought, no frills here. I hoisted her up, she was like a bag of wet sand, 10 times heavier than I remembered. Not a movement or a sound as I transported her; she was out. I got her to the desk and laid her down. Lo rolled her over and balanced her on her back, spreadeagled. I wondered how this was going to work. There was no way in hell she was going to stay balanced on her spine like that for any length of time, she was a floppy hunk of doped-up dog meat. My unvoiced question was answered by the Doc when he pulled a few pieces of ratty rope from one of the desk drawers. It was that nasty, synthetic kind that had splinters sticking out all over and liked to jab you under the finger nails. The kind that could be used to saw off a child’s head without much effort, and it was stiff, impossible to fold back on itself, either from age or from intrinsic cheapness. This was a rope that had no time or love for sturdy knots. It was put on this Earth to rip and tear and provide an example to all those who cared to pay attention that this was most definitely NOT the way to make a quality length of rope.
Doc pulled on some latex surgical gloves then told me to tie the dog, spreadeagled, to the desk. I looked at him out the corner of my eye, looked at the rope, and back at the Doc. I was never a Boy Scout and anything beyond my own shoelaces was profoundly mystifying to me. How in the hell was I supposed to tie a dog up to ensure that it stayed perfectly balanced on its spine? In a sparsely furnished room? With this cheap goddamned rope?
He tried to explain it to me but his small amount of English, much like my small amount of French, didn’t cover the technical aspects of knot tying. I managed to make a loop and hooked it over one of the dog’s legs. He told me to tie the other end to a bar in the window 7' away. I looked at him to see if he was serious. He was. I did what I could but as you may or may not know, a dog’s leg affords no real place for a loop to grip. I got the one end tied to the window but the part on the dog just slipped up and off her arm. He stood there for a few more minutes, and I made a few more attempts, but finally I dropped the rope on the desk by the dog’s head and said, “Look, you take the fuckin’ gloves off and do it.” He had no choice but to comply because I was irritated, sweaty, bleeding from a stab from a rope fiber and really not liking where this whole deal was headed.
He took off his gloves and set about fixing the dog in place. When he was finished the room was a drunken spider web of natty rope and dog legs; I was utterly amazed at the spectacle of it. One rope was tied to the window, one to a desk leg, another to a chunk of rebar that was sticking out of the counter, and the last was tied to the refrigerator clear on the other side of the room. In order to walk around the operating space you had to crawl under and high step around. It was truly one big spider web with Vita-Lait in the middle like a fuzzy black widow waiting for some asshole to fly into it so she could rip their heels out.
With that finished, the Doc put his gloves back on, gloves that were less than sterile now what with all the rope fiber and dust on the table where he put them. He picked up a bottle of Betadine and proceeded to swab down a huge patch of Vita-Lait’s belly. He threw the lump of brown/orange cotton down and unwrapped a scalpel from its packaging. At least that’s a good sign, I thought. Sterile equipment was something I wasn’t really expecting. He took it and made a small 1" incision and stuck his thumb and forefinger in to find her tube. Standing there watching my dog’s blood slowly dribble out of the wound I morbidly, but not seriously, wondered what I would do if she ended up dying. It wasn’t a serious thought path, just one of those things you do when you want to feel that little tinge of pain in your heart, to remind you that yes, you are still alive and yes, you can still feel things. When you want that self-indulgent and purely selfish pain of mourning for something that is still alive, be it a person or a relationship or a animal.
“Swapping up these bloods.”
The sentence meant nothing to me.
“What?”
“These bloods,” he pointed to the general area of his incision with his tongue (a trait of the Senegalese, probably invented by women who always seem to be balancing something on their heads and without a finger to point with). “Wipe these bloods. There are cotton.” There was a package of cotton swabs on the counter so I grabbed it, tore it open and soaked up the blood that was coming out in a greater stream as he fished around in her abdomen for the tube. This was getting weird(er).
“You...metter... uh, put liquid in the seringue.”
“The what?”
“The seringue, the, the needle,” he stuttered, pointing once again with his tongue to a syringe and a little glass bottle, the ones you see doctors sticking the needle into, turning upside down, and withdrawing 5c.c.s of morphine for some burn victim. Doctors do this kind of stuff, not hibernating drug addicts floundering in West Africa. The feeling had been growing stronger, but now I knew for certain that this more than likely going to end in a bad way.
“What the fuck, Lo? I know shit about this stuff Where’s your assistant? Your appranté?”
The realization was sluggish and had been right out in the open for me to see the whole time. I was the assistant. My self-indulgent and morbid hypothetical musings regarding the murder of my dog had jumped out of my idiot head and into the room with us.
Lo wasn’t quite baffled by my outburst so much as he was by the fact that I didn’t know I’d be lending a helping hand. He presumably thought, “Fuck, it’s got to get done, he wants it done, let’s do it together.” I had no choice but to concede. Indeed, “Fuck it, it’s got to get done.”
“Filling it to middle,” he indicated again with his tongue. What could I do but go along with it? She was already out and cut open, and the door was locked so I couldn’t leave. I’d have to ride this out and file it in the “Experience” file it–call it a story to tell. That’s what I had to tell myself.
I gingerly unwrapped the syringe and stuck the tip through the diaphragm of the jar. The needle was so damn thin. I hoped to hell I didn’t end up breaking it off in the bottle. I slowly drew back the plunger and only half of what I needed came out. Shit Now if I tried to put more in I’d end up with a huge air bubble. It was here, in a mild panic, baffled, that I foresaw no possibility of heroin addiction in my immediate future. Indeed, I’d make a terrible needle jockey.
I took the needle back out and discreetly depressed the plunger to empty it so I could try again. I stuck it back in, not as far this time, keeping it below the surface of the upturned bottle, and succeeded in getting what I needed. I took it out, held it up to eye level, and tapped it like I saw on the T.V. I wanted to squirt some out to remove any bubbles but I had already wasted a bit. I had no idea as to what this shit was. I didn’t want to be shooting morphine or liquid cocaine all over the place. If it was good stuff, I had already wasted a bunch and wasn’t about to blow any more onto the floor. In the end I got the excess air out without wasting but a drop of whatever this stuff was. I figured that a little wasted narcotics was worth ensuring that the dog didn’t end up having a massive brain aneurysm at my fumbling and unlicensed hands.
I set the bottle down and turned back to Doc, hoping like hell that he wasn’t going to ask me to inject the dog. I was only going to play at this ‘assistant’ game for so long. A man has to draw a line somewhere.
What I saw when I turned thickened the doom that was getting heavy in the air. The 1" incision had become a 5" incision and the Doc had his whole hand inside the dog. He found the tube he was supposed to be working on and was pulling it up, slicing the membrane that was underneath it, holding it to all the other insides.
“Squirting water then...siwb, siwb? Sawb? Sawb the blood.”
“Squirt what water and what?”
“The needle,” he said impatiently like I was supposed to know all of this, like we went to vet school together.
Oh... water. It was just water that I had been trying to get into the needle. At least I didn’t waste any good drugs in the messy process, and though things were getting weird I was pretty confident that I wasn’t going to be required to inject the dog with anything. She was already out cold, why else would she need to be shot up again?
So I swabbed and squirted and he sliced and dug around the edges of her guts. He pointed to 2 metal claw-looking tools and told me to hold the incision open (it was more of a gash at this point). I just looked at him. What the fuck was this? I was pretty amazed at the magnitude of the assumptions that this guy was throwing around. What if I was the squeamish sort and had passed out at the first sight of blood? What then? The dog would be cut open, we’re locked into this cement box, the assistant is probably down the road drinking tea. The next thing he’d be asking me to hold the dog open and finish up the operation while he went and prayed.
Beyond my exasperation and confusion, I was stuck and we were in this together, for good or for ill. This was not the time to lay into Lo what with the dog half gutted and trapped in a k-hole. So I grabbed the claws, angled myself over the desk, around the ropes and through Doc’s arms. I got a precarious grip on flesh and fat, slippery with blood, and the claws kept losing their grip. Doc started pulling ropes and sacs out of the dog, gently, and laid them on the table next to Vita-Lait. He kept telling me to hold her open in an irritated tone of voice, like I was fucking around as a joke or because I came to work drunk. All I did was show up here, to this cell, to get my dog fixed and now half of her guts were hanging out and laying on the table beside her. If anyone should be getting short with anyone, it should be me towards him.
He kept digging, slicing, and pulling guts out as I did what I could to hold her open and swabbed up the ever-increasing amounts of blood that were showing up. Her insides smelled like fresh-caught fish.
Eventually the cut went from her lower stomach to the bottom of her rib cage and her entrails here just sitting there, the occasional fly landing on them to lick up some good flavor. The cut was about as long as it could get due to the boundaries of a rib cage and an asshole. His hand had disappeared up into her chest cavity. As we know, I am by no means any sort of veterinarian, my veterinary knowledge consists of only a hazy understanding of ketamine as a anesthetic and a recreational drug that is not all that recreational. Regardless of my lack of schooling, I did know that this was, beyond any sort of doubt, a fucking mess and that if this guy pulled this kind of operation in America he’d be killed.
He got a tenuous grip on some sort of tube that he pulled out of her chest, God only knows if it was the right one. He went to cut the membrane underneath it and it slipped and shot back into a mess of other tubes. He made a clipped “whoop” sound and tried to get it back but it proved extremely elusive. I sat there, watching all of this unfold, holding the dog open as his hands dug frantically around deep inside of her. I couldn’t help but notice that she was slowly filling up with blood.
He stopped digging and without looking up at me he said, “I am sorry.”
“Sorry?” I asked, not quite registering why he had said this. Was it because that with this 12" scar she’d never be a beauty queen? That the other dogs would make fun of her?
After a moment of me looking stupidly at him, he began to work again. He finally got a hold on the tube again as blood started brimming over Vita-Lait’s opening. Pulling up a bit of string, he tied a knot awkwardly around the tube, and when he pulled it tight, it cut through the tube and she started filling up with blood at a faster rate.
“Sawbs,” he said and we rapidly started opening swab packs but there weren’t many left. He apparently bought them that day and had no others on hand. I suppose it didn’t matter, considering the amount of blood involved. What we really needed was a wet/dry vac.
He stopped, hands full of soaking red cotton, and said it again.
“Sorry. I am sorry.”
I knew it then. This foot-long gash, the pile of fish-smelling entrails, the canyon of her chest and abdomen filling up with a lake of dense red liquid... it was all over. Dead dog, incompetent fucking doctor, stupid goddamned white person trying to neuter a dog in West Africa.
I crouched by the dog, letting go of the globs of bloody cotton, metal claws clanking to the table. This was going to hurt. As silly as it seemed, this was a close to repugnantly blood-soaked death that I had been, and even though it was a dog, it still was like a rusty coat hanger jabbing at my heart. I scratched her gently on the neck, where her kick spot was occasionally located, the spot that was more often than not coated with the crusty liquids of dead goat or donkey scum that she rooted in. The tears came, a lot of them. The Doc looked wrecked. Though he was an idiot (not as big of an idiot as I was embarking on this hair-brained scheme), this still hurt him and he was probably a little freaked out to see a grown white man crying over a dog.
Her chest was still slowly moving up and down, she was still flying high, alive but not here in the room with us. Her tongue was drooping out the corner of her mouth. It had stuck slightly to the table, pretty dried out after sticking out for 20 minutes. I poked it back to its nest and closed her mouth. It popped back open, her tongue lolled back out onto the table because she was so stoned. I crouched there scratching her neck, silently sobbing for a good 10 minutes. It times like this when you forget all the bad things about a person or animal, and your heart rips wide open as if it were a flawless angel laying in front of you, mortally wounded, and soon to no longer be a part of your daily experience.
Since Lo had bought all of the supplies today for the operation and couldn’t return them, and he probably didn’t foresee any dog neuterings any time soon, he shot the remaining 3 needles of painkiller into Vita-Lait. All I could do was weep. I felt hollow, dead, ruined, damaged, completely fucking responsible. I didn’t blame the Doc (well, I suppose a did a little), I blamed myself. What the hell was I thinking, bringing this whole dog-fixing concept, this zero-population growth idea for animals to fucking Africa? A place where domesticated pets exist primarily in the volunteer and ex-pat community. Lo had probably only studied the procedures in passing. Who would think that a bush doctor would ever need to tie a dog’s tubes where the 35.000 CFA price tag could feed a small village for a month or two? I suppose he could have been up front about it and said, “Hey, yeah, I heard about this in class years ago and saw a few pictures, we laughed about the concept, but really, this may not be the best idea.”
I blew it, so I sat and I cried and pet the dog and felt guilty. The Doc stood silently by and let me mourn.
Finally I got up, wiped my eyes. She was still breathing slowly.
“Sometime... it take long time,” he said, referring to her lethal injection.
I reached back down to the dog, gave her a scratch, a kiss on the snout, and said, “O.K.”
I stood at the counter and cried lightly for awhile. Doc tucked her insides back in, then stuffed the rubber gloves, the used cotton, and the wrapping for all the various things we tore open into her stomach cavity. He sewed 6 or 7 quick stitches into her that would serve to hold her closed for awhile, until the scavengers got a hold of her. He stuck her in a rice sack to be taken, hopefully by the assistant, because I’d punch him in the neck if he asked me to, to the dump.
That hurt the most as she was still breathing but essentially dead. Stuffed with garbage and thrown out with the garbage. I hoped the drugs took her somewhere pleasant and eternal, I know they did.
As bleak as the whole thing was, I knew that the Doc had dropped a bunch of money on this and I took out my wallet to offer to pay for the supplies. I could afford it, and even though he fucked up, I didn’t want him going under financially. I’m sure he worked wonders on sick cows and goats. Dogs just weren’t his forté. He wouldn’t take the money though, didn’t even think about it, looked at me like I was insane for even offering. I admired that and was happy because I knew that if he took the money then later on, when I was drunk, I would have gotten pissed and contemplated coming back and kicking his dick.
I put my wallet away, said goodbye to the rice sack, the doctor, and walked out, never looking back. I went back to the regional house and got good and drunk on shitty Senegalese beer with a friend who, like all of us, hated and loved Vita-Lait and would end up missing her more than we ever would have expected.