David Diaz

After we ate lunch, I asked the boys how the monkey was. What monkey? they asked.

I had popped my knee — it sounded like chicken bones breaking when it went, and a sheet of white pain blanked me out. I fell to my side and gasped. Several of the missionaries carted me off to a clinic. Even after six months, my leg was weak, the knee very tender. Sometimes I still limped, especially on days like today, riding 300 miles through the back country, in and out of valleys in the central highlands of northern Baja. Hours spent cramped in a van with other

people, then hauling 100-pound sacks of food into orphanages, made the leg stiff and sore.

I was walking around the end of a low barbed-wire fence, thinking I'd try to climb over it on my way back. The kids at the orphanage had run up to me, shouting something about a monkey on the roof of the school next door. I couldn't believe it — I’d seen a lot of things at the orphanages, but never a monkey.

We climbed up the outside of the building on wooden ladders, and there, on the roof, was a monkey. He was little and black — but skin-black; all his hair was gone. It was a brutally hot day. around noon.

The monkey was screaming. He had a chain around his neck, and a boy had a hold of the end of it and was swinging him around, choking him. I slapped the chain from the boy’s hand, and the monkey thumped to the roof. The kids all stopped laughing and stared at me in disbelief. The monkey ran to my ankle and climbed up my leg, chittering.

“Get out of here!" I said to them. “Go on! Leave him alone!”

They backed away and filtered down, off the roof. The monkey climbed up into my arms and wrapped his tail around my biceps. He put out a hand and stroked my jaw, putting his lips out in a kiss, cooing. My leg was still stiff, so I had trouble sitting down. There was a post in the middle of the roof — his chain was attached to it. I put my back against it and slid down. The cement was hot; the post was the only source of shade up there.

The monkey reclined in my arms. He was trembling, his skin as hot and sticky as overheated vinyl.

The countryside was burned yellow by the sun. In the distance, a truck raised a plume of dust.

Smoke rose from the hills.

I’d blow in the monkey’s face. He would close his eyes, tilt back his head, and stick out his tongue. His tail was thin and surprisingly muscular; it never let go its grip on my arm. He liked my whiskers; he ran his finger across my cheeks.

He was panting. There was a can of water. I gave him one drop, then another. I used my body to shield him from the sun. The truck’s dust hung in the air, unmoving. It looked like trees.

In about an hour, a big boy climbed onto the roof followed by a flock of little kids. The monkey was his. When he reached for it, the monkey tried to bite him. It scrambled up my neck and screamed when they tried to pull it off. The boy dragged it away from me with the chain. As I climbed down, I could hear it shrieking, the chain clanking on the cement.

I wanted to get away from there. One of the orphanage boys climbed on my back. I decided to step over the barbed-wine fence instead of going around it. My knee gave out halfway across, and I fell back into the wire. It tore my thigh open, and blood spurted out.

The boy helped me across the fence with a spooked look on his face. Little boys always stare at blood like it’s a miracle.

I went into the bathroom where Pastor Von was bathing the orphanage boys.

“Drop your pants,” he said.

We could see the fat inside my leg through the cut. “Looks good,” Von said.

One of the gringos in there cried, “Jeez!”

Von washed it out with hot water and held it open with two fingers as he squeezed antiseptic into it. (Such instant medicine was common: once, at the same orphanage, a kid somehow tore a perfect pyramid of meat out of my knuckle. We had no medicine with us, so we poured perfume into the hole.) I still had tetanus vaccine in me — the winter before, I had gotten a two-inch thorn into my foot during a flood at Las Palmas. The tear in my thigh definitely got my attention. For the time being, I forgot about the monkey.

If people have it hard on the border, the animals have it harder. Mexicans are often criticized for being cruel. It has caused me great shame over the years because it’s true. I have seen a donkey stoned to death by Mexican boys for sport, dogs poisoned in the Tijuana hills, cats shot. Americans are horrified to find that it is a common practice in Mexico to kick dogs. I was once shocked to find my father kicking his dog — a dog he loved — savagely. (Yet he — and many Mexicans — were extremely softhearted about animals. He loved cats, which was a rarity in Mexico. He loved birds. In fact, when he was a boy, he had owned a little goat. It followed him everywhere; according to relatives, the goat would walk through town with him and wait outside the door for him to come out. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that someone poisoned it.)

At one orphanage, the much loved dog Whiskey took care of the children. He was part border-collie, and he herded them, always lying nearby in the dust, watching them play. When I’d camp out on the mountain behind the place, Whiskey wouldn't let me go alone; after the kids were in bed. he'd find me and sit at the foot of my bed.

Inexplicably, someone caught Whiskey and lynched him. leaving him hanging from a tree branch at the entrance to the orphanage.

It doesn’t make sense. Mexico is full of dogs that are loved like sons and brothers, but their lives are often utter hell. Sometimes it’s the fault of well-meaning Americans. Church groups will occasionally appear at an orphanage with a dog for the kids. This is usually a dog the gringos don’t want, and they figure the orphans always need a pup. But when you’re trying to feed 30 or 60 kids, spending money on a dog is insanity. Orphanage dogs learn to live on scraps, bread, rotten fruit, bones. If there is a dead animal nearby, they will eat it. Some groups of good conscience think to provide the orphanages with dog food. Certainly if an American gives a dog to an orphanage, it is his duty to keep the dog fed; the dog's suffering, the strain on the orphanage, and the heartbreak for the children are on his head if he doesn’t.

At one orphanage, we were astounded to find a huge, gorgeous St. Bernard. Everyone was delighted with this dog — a California church had sent him down. He taught me a terrible lesson about food. There was no way that dog could eat enough. No way. They tried to feed him too.

But a 150-pound dog eats a ridiculous amount. Over the weeks, I noticed him getting slower and slower, ragged and dull-coated. I didn't think much about him; we were there to work, and we didn’t often dawdle. Near the end, I realized that there wasn't any dog left under the fur. Soon he died, slowly starved to death.

Often, animals suffer because their masters suffer. Capi is a good example of this. He was a rangy young German shepherd. Capi (short for "Capitan,“ captain) was exceptionally bright and well mannered. He was curious, always poking around investigating. He was also playful, ready to romp at all hours. Unfortunately, this was a fairly poor place, and he had no toys. There were no balls to waste on a dog, for example. No Frisbees.

Capi devised a game with which to keep himself entertained. He discovered that if he picked up a rock and flung it with his head, it would bounce across the yard. He would then chase the rock, catch it, growl at it, shake it, and throw it again. Capi had taught himself to fetch. Late at night, when all the boys were asleep, Capi could be found outside, chasing his rock.

One night, though, he picked a rock that was too small. He swallowed it and choked to death in the dark.

As usual. Mexico offers continual bafflement: a middle-class woman I know who didn't like a neighbor's cat’s meowing poisoned it; Juanita, in the garbage dump, cuts some of her own food to feed the dump puppies. And the worst animal atrocity I ever saw was perpetrated by a gringo grandpa, and it so outraged the Mexican farmer who was used to butchering hogs and drowning unwanted kittens that he couldn't even come out of his house for fear he would do violence.

A sweet-faced old American man had come to the orphanage with a goat in his trunk. The goat was to be a barbecue for the kids. A barbacoa was not uncommon — the goat is butchered and roasted on a bed of hot coals in a pit; the meat comes out tender and succulent, and you eat it with tortillas and beans.

The little goat was nervous, tied to a fence post. I went over and petted it. The kids were milling around, obviously fascinated that the animal was about to be killed.

“You should get the little girls away from here,” the grandpa said.

“What we’re going to do here is called 'cold dressing' the meat. Makes it taste less goaty.”

“ ’cause what we’re ’bout to do to this goat isn’t too pretty.”

He led the goat up the hill with a rope knotted around its neck.

There was a plank bridged between two greasy oil drums. He picked up the goat and stretched it, kicking, over the plank.

"Done this all the time back at the farm. Dad ’n’ me.” he said.

The knife was rusty and dark as blood.

“Let’s begin.”

He cut a rough hole in the animal's side. The boys, gathered in a circle, tittered in fear as it screamed, little ape-laughs of terror. The old man cut through its two back legs, took a length of rope, and ran it all the way through the holes. It shrieked.

The old man threw the end of the rope over a cross-beam above the drum and hauled on it. The little goat jerked up, head down, and swung, a pendulum counting out vast seconds of pain. Hat tipped back, the old man whistled.

You like to think you’ll do something at moments like that. If anyone had told me I’d be seeing this scene, I would have told them the old man would be picking up his teeth off the ground. But it doesn't work that way. All I did was stand there, mouth open, shoulders hunched up near my ears.

There was a spigot near us. Attached to it, a long green hose with the end cut off. Grandpa jammed the rubber into the hole in the goat’s side. He worked the hose in deep. Then he walked over to the spigot and turned it on.

Water roared out of the well to the guts, full-flood, bloating the entire body. During all this, the goat continued to scream. In midbleat, the old man took the knife and cut its throat, brown red and pink spattering his feet. The goat, still struggling, began blowing dark brown bubbles out of its nose like blind eyes, still screaming, though now choking on its own blood.

Fans of water squirted through the gash in its throat.

Grandpa said, “We used to fill ’em with ice, back when I was a kid. But. well, no ice around here!”

The goat's cries fell to gurgles, and the man took the knife and pried open the heart. The pendulum circled and slowed, became still. All you could hear was the dripping.

Two weeks after my encounter with the bald monkey, we pulled back into the same orphanage. I had my knee in a tight Ace bandage. There was gauze taped around my thigh. After we ate lunch, I asked the boys how the monkey was. What monkey? they asked. The bald monkey, on the roof. We don’t know about any monkey, they said.

I let it go right away. Sometimes you just learn to shrug and forget. Sometimes it’s best. Sometimes you just have to focus on what’s in front of you, freeze out the rest — he called it “cold dressing,” the old grandfather. If you want to sleep, if you want to laugh, if you want to go to church again and believe, ironically, you have to cold-dress your heart. Then press on.