Ptar the Donkey - Chapter Two

Chapter 2

Forsaking Expectations and Other Rash Decisions

Silon walked Ptar and Sephie the rest of the way to the failed four-lane highway.  Before turning back and returning to the village, she embraced her daughter, and without looking at him, Silon said to Ptar, “I’ll go back now.  You should deal with the man alone.”

Ptar looked at his feet and kicked at a nonexistent dirt clod. 

To her daughter, Silon said, “Your father and I love you very much.  Never forget that.  We’d do anything to change these circumstances.”

“I know, Mother.”

Silon embraced her daughter one last time.  She turned to leave her husband and daughter but then stopped and kissed Ptar on the cheek before she did, she said, “I’ll be home waiting for you.”

Ptar and Sephie watched as Silon walked back to the village, and continued watching her until she dropped entirely out of view.  Then they turned around and started waiting for the pimp from The Capital to arrive.  After twenty minutes of waiting and still no pimp, Ptar began to wonder if they had the date right.

“It is your birthday, right?” Ptar asked his daughter.

“Yes.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain.”

She was certain.

Two hours passed and still there was no pimp.  Time continued to pass and eventually afternoon came.  It was, by this time, for Ptar at least, unbearably hot.  Sephie handled the heat better than her father, but still, even she grew weary of the afternoon sun beating down on them with no pity.  They could clearly see a large patch of very enticing shade under a tight clump of palm trees roughly fifty yards away, but they did not go sit under it.  As Sephie wisely pointed out — any big city pimp, after seeing no one waiting on the side of the road, would do nothing more than just drive on past without stopping.  Ptar cursed the sun and the idiocy of the failed developer that had come through a few years ago and had a wide swath of trees and foliage cut down, leaving Ptar on this day sitting in the blazing heat with no respite.  This failed developer envisioned a glorious paved four-lane thoroughfare that would run from the busy seaports in the south all the way to The Capital in the north.  For decades there had already been a small dirt road connecting the two that was passable only in the dry season, but it had little traffic.  The developer, after doing little to no research, really doing nothing more than taking a short walk down the small dirt road and asking himself, “How the hell does a big-rig get by on this sad excuse for a road?” and from that moment on, he, in his own mind, had reconciled that the lack of traffic was all due to the confinements of the little dirt road and its requirement for good weather to traverse it.  And he erroneously and wholeheartedly believed that a man — a man such as himself — could make a very large fortune as a shipping magnate, running goods up a down a wider and paved road.  The socioeconomic and political issues resulting in nearly all the trade from The Capital moving north and seaports shipping their goods almost entirely to the south eluded the developer.  Still, the developer, fighting against man, beast, and nature, hired two rag-tag crews to start in the middle, one going north and the other going south, to chop and burn and steam-roll over anything and everything that was in their way.  Within days the developer realized he’d made a terrible mistake.  The destruction crew he sent to the south cleared only a few miles of vegetation before growing tired of the whole affair.  They sold off their equipment and disappeared into night.  But the northern crew, led by a zealous and dynamic foreman, whom naively believed the developer when he told them that their pay day was most assured, and at the end of the road, cleared trees from their starting point all they way up to The Capital.  By the time the northern crew reached The Capital, the developer was long gone, owing more people more money than he bothered to keep track of.  He ran off to try his hand at making a fortune in textiles half a world away, leaving the northern crew behind all alone and bewildered and penniless and with nothing to show for their effort but a giant scar cut into the jungle reminding all the people near it to not dream too big.

It had never occurred to Ptar that the pimp might be late, or worse, never show.  If it had he would have at the very least brought the bottle of rice wine he had left at home.  He asked Sephie to trot back and get the wine for him, but she felt it might be smarter if she remained with him on the side of the road in case the pimp showed.  And Ptar knew she was right.  Patience was not a virtue pimps were normally known for.  Sephie had put a couple of bottles of fresh water in her satchel and had wrapped two rice cakes from this morning’s breakfast in banana leaves.  Ptar sipped some water but still couldn’t bring himself to eat.

The late afternoon sun continued to pound down on them.  Ptar paced back and forth, muttering to himself.  Sephie sat quietly and wondered what The Capital, a place she’d never been, was like.  Ptar eventually tired himself out — his exertion from fighting the sirens in the ocean the night before and his poor night’s sleep on the beach had finally caught up with him.  He sat down next to his daughter and pulled his knees to his chest and tried to bury his head into his arms, but his legs, being so short made this uncomfortable for him, causing him great lower back pain.  Eventually he sprawled out, flat on his back, and constantly found himself fighting between falling asleep and being jerked awake when sweat would roll down his bedewed forehead and sting his eyes.

A car finally approached them from the south, the first one to come by all day.  Ptar sat up and found himself light headed and his vision blurred from having his eyes closed.  He wiped the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve.  As the car got closer it slowed.  Both Ptar and Sephie stood up and intently watched and waited for the car, which was just idling now, to get to them.  The man inside the car looked at the odd pairing of Ptar and his youngest daughter, Sephie, as he went past.  He was not the pimp they were looking for, just some traveling salesman passing by, who would never forget Ptar and Sephie standing there on the side of the road for as long as he lived, they being such an odd sight.  Just after the salesman’s car got passed them he punched the gas, kicking up a huge cloud of dirt, which engulfed Ptar and Sephie.  After the cloud of dirt passed, they both sat back down.  Ptar begrudgingly drank some water and choked down a couple of bites of rice cake before falling back into his cycle of napping and being stirred awake by the sweat in his eyes.  Sephie sat upright and stayed alert, not wanting to miss the pimp, if he ever came.

As it turned out, the pimp from The Capital drove up the dirt road from the south just after the sun started its downward fall into dusk.  He came roaring up in a gigantic and dilapidated Cadillac that had at one time been painted a brilliant sky-blue but was now so rusted, so dented, so long ill-treated that the original paint job was nothing more than a vague memory.

The pimp slowed as he drove past Ptar and Sephie, pulling over to the side of the road, pumping his breaks, having to ease the car to a stop.  Once the Cadillac came to a full stop, the engine sputtered two times and then died, seemingly from exhaustion.  The pimp got out of his car and walked over to Ptar and Sephie and stood with the setting sun behind him.  They had to squint to look upon him.  The pimp took two steps forward, blocking the sun from Ptar and Sephie’s eyes, for the pimp was a giant of man, in both height and width.  His name was Isaac.

Isaac said, “Well, what exactly do we have here?  Ptar the donkey, I see.  And who is this here with you?”

“This is my youngest daughter, Sephie,” Ptar said.

Isaac pulled a pristine handkerchief out of his back pocket and ran it all over his enormous head.  He wasn’t perspiring.  The gesture seemed to be propagated more out of habit or expectation rather than necessity.

“Well greetings there, young Sephie.  Sorry to keep you waiting.  How goes it?  Let’s get a look at you.”  Isaac took a single giant step forward and in one fluid motion, picked up Sephie from the ground by gingerly sticking his hands under her armpits, for despite his large size, Isaac handled himself with the poise and expertise of a much smaller man.  He brought Sephie’s face up to his face and inspected her quickly yet thoughtfully.  He turned her fully around in his hands, still handling her carefully and softly, and then set her back down on the ground and patted her on the top of her head.

“Why don’t you walk up and down a little bit for me?” he said.

Sephie walked up to Isaac’s car, turned around, and walked back, all the while doing her best to lessen her limp, but still unable to completely hide it.

To Ptar, Isaac said, “This acorn certainly fell closer to your oak, my friend.  She is nothing like her sisters.”

Ptar nodded, Sephie was nothing like her sisters, both of whom Isaac had picked up on the side of this very road a few years ago and had taken to The Capital, an endeavor Isaac was both excited and scared to undertake.  For as it happened, Ptar’s two eldest daughters were, through no genetic fault of his own, the two most beautiful girls ever to be born in this hemisphere, or any hemisphere, for that matter.

“It’s a sad day for my family,” Ptar said to Isaac.

“I’m sure,” Isaac said with sincerity.  “Still, I wish you would have told me she was so…what’s the word?  Unique.  I’ll go with unique.”

Sephie now joined the two men.  All three of the transactors avoided making eye contact with one another.  Finally, Isaac said, “Well, I should probably get going.  Donkey, I will take your daughter with me, as a favor to the father of those two lovely girls that I took to The Capital years ago.”

“Thank you,” Ptar said.

“I’m not going to be able to pay you, though,” Isaac said, looking over Sephie one last time.  “To be honest, I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”

“Pay me what you think she is worth.”

“Well, in your telegram you were a little less than forthcoming in your description of her, my friend.  I mean we certainly can’t use her as a whore — you know with the lip and all.  And with the gimped leg...I tell you, I’m just not sure what to do with her.”

“She’s a good worker, despite her ailments.”

“I’m sure she is.  Look, I’ll take her off your hands for you.  It’s probably best if you don’t know what happens to her.”

Ptar bowed his head and shook it gently.  Sephie put her hand on her father’s shoulder.  “It’s alright father.  I no longer want to burden you or mother.”

“You were never a burden.”

Isaac clapped his two gigantic hands together once and said, “Well, that is all be it as it may, or whatever, but I really has gots to be getting a moving.  I still have a mean piece of driving to do.”  And with that, Isaac took Sephie by the hand and led her to the Cadillac.

“No deal,” Ptar said very quietly.

“What’s that you say?” Isaac asked, genuinely not hearing him.

“I said, ‘No deal,’” Ptar answered, more loudly this time, but still with little conviction.  Ptar took at step toward them.  “No, I’ll take her to The Capital myself,” he said, which even shocked him.  He had never been more than a mile in any direction from his village his entire life.  He took one more step toward Isaac and Sephie and with that one step his plans had solidified in his mind.  “I’ll take her myself and sell her to someone who wants her.”

“Now, look here, Donkey,” Isaac said.  “I appreciate that this is difficult and tough and what not on you — it always is.  Let me take her with me and I will see that, if nothing else, she doesn’t suffer.  Which is a lot more than you can promise her, Donkey.  Believe me, you’ll thank me.”

Ptar and Sephie’s eyes met.  Sephie’s eyes pleaded with her father to just let her be taken away with this man, and then they could part from each other in this world with the love and respect they shared at that very moment.

“Okay then,” Isaac said.  He put Sephie safely into the Cadillac’s passenger seat.  Then he went and got himself into the driver’s seat, saluting curtly to Ptar before he got in.

Getting Isaac’s old Cadillac started was complicated and much more of an art than a science.  And Isaac was too busy in the middle of turning the key gingerly in the finicky starter for the third time as he pumped the gas twice to notice that Ptar had come up along the side the car.  Isaac never saw Ptar as he cocked his arm back and punched him on the side of the head through the car’s open window.  The punch startled Isaac, even though it didn’t hurt.  In truth it hurt Ptar’s hand more than anything else.  But Isaac still didn’t much like being punched on the side of the head, so he grabbed Ptar by palming his entire face in his giant paw and pulling him halfway through the car window.  Ptar was so startled that he only made a little peeping noise and then closed his eyes tight, anticipating the beating he was sure to come.  And Isaac pulled back his hand, ready to not only punch Ptar, but to punch entirely through Ptar.

But just then, Sephie laid a gentle hand on Isaac’s fist and said, “Please, sir.  My father knows not what he is doing.  Don’t harm him.”

This touched Isaac, this love between these two misfits.

He released his grip on Ptar and pushed him back outside the car.  He then leaned over Sephie and opened the passenger side door and told her to get out.  The sun was now setting and filling the sky with majestic oranges, reds, yellows, blues, and purples.

Isaac turned his full attention back to starting his car.  Within three tries it had fired up and was running smooth enough for him to ease the transmission into drive.  He started off, leaving Ptar and Sephie alone on the side of the road.  Suddenly, he stopped the car and leaned out the window.  “Godspeed, Donkey and daughter,” he called back to them.  “I wish you luck.”  And he meant it.