Donkey Man

            Mike herded his twelve donkeys out of the gym after the game, down a hallway of green cement blocks, and into a spacious gray janitor’s room serving as their locker room, where he began removing their harnesses and, for those that still had them, their blanket saddles. He then firmly grabbed two donkeys by their short manes, led them outside under the black sky, and loaded them into his truck— red cab, orange trailer. He repeated this process three times. However, on the fifth trip he brought only one donkey, leaving a female named Dora alone in the janitor’s room amidst the boiler, mops, and buckets.

            When Mike returned, he clutched a greasy white paper bag and a thermos.

            “Was it a good game, Dora?” he asked the donkey, patting her right rump as he walked by.

            She turned and looked at him, and with a not-little sign of excitement began to swat the paper bag with her nose, baring her teeth as she swung her head.

            “Yeah, I’ll get to that. I’ll get to that. God knows you can’t be without a jellyroll more’n five minutes after the work’s done.” Mike lifted a greasy roll with frosting to Dora’s mouth. Seconds later, she punched the bag, asking for more.

            “Now, come on. Dora, you know I got to eat, too. Maybe I’ll save a bite for you, but you can’t have no more now. Just move over t’ the side of the room and let me eat.” Dora, dutifully, moved over.

            “Pretty good crowd tonight. Glad I take a percentage.”

            Dora alternately turned her head to Mike and the white paper bag, her head moving like a pump handle.

            “Yeah, people really turn out to see you. It’s all about Dora. You’re the funniest donkey on earth. And I’ll swear to that. The bikini gag got ‘em laughing, and the twitching like the guy had fleas. Classic.”

            Mike took a drink straight from the thermos and, being a man of few expectations, barely grimaced at the coffee’s bitterness. He wiped his mouth on his green shirtsleeves, and, after a bit of roll himself, wiped his hands on his trouser legs.

            He was accustomed to eating alone, and consequently lacked manners. He had been a donkey man for eighteen years—a man who hires out his donkeys for basketball games and other such dignified functions for small town clubs around the Midwest. Eight months out of the year he was either going to or coming from engagements with Jaycees, Kiwanis, high school faculty, alumni,  women’s clubs, and the occasional sesquicentennial days. The other four months he tended his donkeys and worked odd jobs for a motel near his hometown in Missouri.

            Mike was a five-foot-six-inch, wiry man, grease under his nails nine days out of ten. He had a knack for fixing machinery, and for having it fall apart, the connection between his fixing and the machine falling part never seeming to dampen his enthusiasm or his confidence that he knew what he was doing. He also had a knack for donkeys. It wasn’t easy staying in the business of a donkey man. One had to possess three qualities: a love for donkeys, kindness, and patience. Of course, being a little thick-skinned and wholly inept at other jobs didn’t hurt Mike in his trade, either.

            “You about ready?” Mike asked the stoic Dora, capping his thermos with a spinning twist.

            Dora stared.

            “Hey now, don’t give me that look. I was hungrier than you, that’s why you didn’t get no more. I know damn well what you’re thinkin’, and I ain’t gonna take it. I’m not like that. Come on, Dora, we’ve been together for almost ten years.”

            Dora sidled up next to Mike.

            “Okay, let’s go home.” Mike refrained from grabbing her mane as he had the other donkeys. Rather, he placed his hand squarely on the middle of her back and stroked, trying to keep his hand in pace with his legs, but failing. Every five or six steps he would be out of step. The janitor of the school stood by the last unlocked door leading to the parking lot, turning off the hallway lights as Mike and Dora passed the last standard. Mike tipped his hat to the man, but the man said nothing.

            After loading Dora on the truck, he positioned the rest of the slightly offensive smelling animals towards the rear to permit Dora the open window on the right side of the trailer, which he kept open from spring through fall. While he checked each donkey for heel marks and other sores, he doted over them verbally, often times with a long, moaning, “Ooooohhhhh,” which several donkeys responded to with brays of their own. Indeed, he attributed his business success to this doting and his intimate relationship with the animals, and felt sure that if farmers practiced this with their livestock they could reduce their feed costs greatly, as if the chickens and cows would produce out of love, as if they could produce eggs and milk out of thin air.

            A few minutes short of eleven o’clock, everything packed, Mike pulled the truck out of the small Iowa town, looking for a car wash on his way home to Missouri. He found one on the south side of Mt. Vernon, and removed Dora from the truck before he parked the vehicle in the plastic dome. Before spraying, he closed the trailer window. Dora grew animated at the sight of the nozzle and Mike tethered her to a red, rectangular vacuum cleaner. The trailer and cab received an uneven cleaning and Dora brayed throughout. Mike contentedly went about the wash and when finished, backed the donkey’s dormitory out of the dome, untied Dora, and stationed her in the middle of the car wash. Dora stood still and silent, her skin quivering. Mike dropped another quarter into the selector, placed the dial on rinse, and sprayed Dora, rubbing her body with his hands.

            “Got to keep you clean, don’t we girl. You like this. Gee, Dora, I think you like takin’ a shower more than a man after haying.”

            Dora exhibited her appreciation with ripples of pleasure running down her back and an occasional flick of her head to rid her face of unnecessary water. Her color turned from an off-tan to a dirty brown under the water, and when Mike stripped the excess water from her hide, she looked like a sleek, oversized rat, or a fat, short, over-the-hill horse with grotesque ears. But not like a donkey.

            Mike placed her back in the trailer, reopened the window for her, and started for home a second time. He had a habit of singing at the top of his lungs when he was on the road, so he rolled up his cab window, desiring not to scare some passing motorist off the highway. Not that he had a bad voice. In fact, he felt his voice was equal to most of his favorite country singers’ voices. He knew he could hold his own on any sad song you could think of, and also knew he could improve on nearly every truckin’ or railroad song every recorded, except for “Six Days on the Road.”

            Singing got him his donkey business. He had been out of school, a dropout, for three years. His father’s farm had gone into receivership after two years of drought reduced it to nothing more than a fire patch. Working at a gas station as a grease monkey, singing louder than a jackhammer and as badly, Mike was approached by a man who asked him if he would watch his truck full of donkeys while he got something to eat, which Mike did eagerly.

            “Say,” the man said on his return, “those donkeys of mine are usually pretty unruly. Seems they liked you. If they like someone, they don’t squall.”

            Mike rolled his head from side to side as if embarrassed.

            “You know, I’ve been trying to sell this business and I want to make sure that a man with a natural feel for animals gets it, you know what I mean? There’s money in it for the right man, you know. You know what I mean. You got any money?”

            Mike said yes, and the man explained the business to him, and went on and on about the opportunities for the right man.

            “I don’t know if I should or not,” Mike told the man. “I’m getting married and we’ve been thinking about buying a small ranch, cuz both of us got booted off our farms by the bank, but it would take a long time at my salary.”

            “Yeah, that’s the problem, you know what I mean?” the man said. “Young folks are scared and just don’t know what business prospects stare them in the face. I always said that a man who knows when opportunity knocks is the wisest man in the world.”

            Wisdom. Money. All in one tight little package called a donkey business. All contained in one trailer. The bait was set, and Mike rode the line to the hook gladly. By sundown, he had purchased the donkeys and the trailer and had rented several acres of land with all of his savings. His fiancée disowned the transaction, but still agreed to marry him.

            Before the man left, he gave Mike a list of his contacts, and promised to send him a list of future engagements he had booked, and then unloaded his last piece of advice: “If you need to stay awake at night during a trip, the best thing to do is eat sardine and onion sandwiches. Many a time it kept my eyes wide open with the smell alone. Another thing. If you go to fallin’ asleep and run off the road, keep that trailer locked, because catching a donkey is like trying to catch the tail of a tornado.”

            Mike had never regretted his decision. In eighteen years, he had a steady business, a trailer home, rented twenty acres of land, a good truck, and a good-sized savings account. His wife had gone to college and become an accountant. Of course, he had lost some things, too. His wife never spoke to him except to call him a mule, by which she meant both sterile and some combination of donkey and human. Intimacy was a thing of the past. She had a boyfriend that Mike had caught more than once at home. But he was a proud man, a free man. He owned his own business, and Dora, and eleven other donkeys. Without the donkeys, he would have bounced around from odd job to odd job, and his wife would never have lived in a home, albeit a trailer home, nor gone to college and become an accountant, and probably have never met her boyfriend either.

            Around one in the morning, in northern Missouri, Mike passed two female hitchhikers, then turned around in a gravel driveway and picked them up. They were probably teenagers, but both said they were twenty-one, chewing gum to disguise alcohol on their breaths, and giggling, giving each other secret looks every few seconds and then bursting out with a nervous laugh. Mike didn’t enjoy conversation, so he didn’t speak. There was something wrong about asking people why they were where they were, and how they got there. Nor did it really matter where they were going. What mattered was the night was dark, they were walking, and he had room for both in his cab.

            Hitchhikers interested Mike. His theory was that people could be categorized according to what they thought of hitchhikers. There were those who thought hitchhikers were out for trouble, those who through hitchhikers were in trouble, and those who thought hitchhikers needed a ride and gave them one. That he himself passed up most hitchhikers, and thus didn’t fit any of his own categories, failed to bother him. He had decided years earlier that if information didn’t fit the system, you either discarded the information, or lived with the surplus that didn’t fit…but never got rid of a system that worked. Or almost worked.

            The young women were dressed in all black, had multiple piercings in their ears and lips, and one, with a bare stomach, had a rather large black teardrop earring in her navel. Despite the dim light of the cab, the black teardrop stood out like a lighthouse. The other young woman noticed Mike peeking down at it, and asked him if he liked it.

            “Sure, it’s pretty.”

            “The earring or the tummy?”

            “Well, both!” Mike blurted, embarrassed.

            “Maybe you’d like to see one of my piercings,” the young woman said. The woman closest to Mike tittered and pushed her friend on the shoulder.

            “I suppose,” Mike said, “but I’ve got to look straight ahead to stay on the road. You understand. No offense.”

            Mike looked straight ahead and did not speak. The two women laughed at him and whispered to each other until Mike stopped at a red light in Macon and they got out.  

            Near twilight, no one else on the highway, Mike rolled down the window and began whistling. His whistling changed to a bellowing monotone of a Kris Kristofferson song from a Kansas City station. To accent the chorus he pounded on the horn at rhythmic intervals. This tendency to emphasize the beat had brought a bullet burning through his stomach and out his back via a kidney in Kansas City once. He had interfered in a fight in a bar between a white man and a black man, seeing no reason for any type of fighting to occur, and no good reason that a good man wouldn’t stop a fight. Outside the bar, he had apparently antagonized the white man by beating his sides to the tune filtering out from the bar, and as the black man, also antagonized, held Mike, the white man pulled out a handgun and shot him. The bullet went through him, just missing the black man, and pinged off a Miller Lite sign. When the cops arrived, they told him in the future not to interfere in anything, but he filed that under surplus information when they thanked him for redirecting the bullet away from the black man or Kansas City might have had another ugly racial incident.

            His wife had been hopping mad at him when he came home from the hospital. She told him about the ways of the world and continued bawling him out for several months after the incident, and she pushed the newspaper clipping of the shooting in front of his face every now and then. He didn’t put much weight on what the newspaper said. He was proud and free, and no news could destroy that.

            He operated his business the same way. No matter how bad a particular year, he never lied to a client or raised his prices just to even things out for having fewer engagements. His motto was, “Don’t promise the sun if all you have is yellow paint.” No matter how much his wife protested, he stuck by his motto.

            The truck, laden with donkeys and donkey shit, pulled into a driveway leading to Mike’s trailer home and his leased acreage. Mike noticed his wife’s name maliciously scratched off the mailbox. Coming over a hill, he saw to his amazement that the trailer home was gone—only the electrical wiring and plumbing indicating a trailer had been there at all. On the cement apron sat a desk, a dresser, a bed, and two black, four– shelf file cabinets containing his business records.

            A note on the electrical meter from his wife said she had left him. No time was given to indicate for how long. No place was mentioned for her new address. The savings account was hers for “hard times.” He wondered if it meant for hard times in the past or whether she faced hard times in the future.

            Mike was shocked, but not enough to deeply disturb him. He missed the outline of his home against the skyline. He folded the note back into the envelope and reattached it to the electrical meter, leaving it flopping in the morning wind. He let out the donkeys, again grabbing them firmly by the manes two-by-two and releasing them into the fenced paddock, cooing to them, rubbing them, patting them, making sure that their water troughs were full and the feed out. Last, he brought out Dora, who stayed with Mike and followed him as he paced around the trailer pad.

            Since he had not slept for two days, he went to the cab and curled up on the seat, leaving the cab open and Dora staring at his feet.

            Around noon, he woke. The day was bright and warm, dusty, and he took the cab into town, stopping at the bakery to buy a few jellyrolls. On the way back he stopped at a café and had the thermos filled with coffee, cream, and sugar, and bought a BLT. Before he ate lunch, he tried to bathe, using the hose for the trough, spraying his torso gingerly, standing in his undershorts and boots, praying that his neighbors on the farm up the road would not see him. While struggling to pull on clean jeans over his boots, he thought of how his wife called him mule man. In frustration, he pulled off his boots and threw them, pulled on his jeans, and then feeling foolish, retrieved his boots and pulled them on again.

            He decided he could not worry about his wife. He had three months left of his eight-month season. He had another contract to fulfill in three days, with a long loop into Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and then back into Missouri for a Rotary basketball game in a St. Louis suburb. Mike would not allow The Rotarian he had contracted with to ride Dora. The man was extremely serious and over two hundred and fifty pounds.

            Mike sat at his desk in the wide blue open and drank from his thermos, ate a jellyroll and prepared one for Dora, who had been staring at him from four feet since the bag had hit the desk.

            “You know, Dora, I’ve been thinkin’ of buildin’ a home right here. Something of wood, you know.” He drained the thermos, one tan drop appearing at the left corner of his mouth.

            Dora stuck her nose to the bag. Mike gave her a roll and then patted her head.

            “Well, girl, you won’t be seein’ the home you used to and you won’t be seein’ the woman inside it any more neither. Nope.”

            Dora stuck her nose to the bag once more.

            Mike broke a roll in half, jelly sliding off his fingers, and gave half to Dora, tucking the other half into his mouth, and then licking his fingers. He would not attempt to find out where his wife went or the man she went with. There were just some things, Mike thought, one didn’t need to know.

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