By Jessie Beck

The cheap, warm beers we had been drinking all day roiled in my stomach, threatening to come up as I glued my eyes to the puddle of blood that had begun to pool around the twitching goat laying hog-tied in the dirt. “He’s already stabbed it three times,” I thought, “why isn’t it dead yet?”

I glanced at Mike, my friend of roughly twenty-four hours, and could see that he too was becoming anxious. As a paramedic of ten years he was no stranger to blood, guts, and death, but the goat’s refusal to die was beginning to wear on him. He flashed me an awkward, goofy smile before trying to slit the half-dead animal’s neck again, this time to a chorus of jumbled instructions in Spanish from several of the Nicaraguans watching his attempts. Morbidly captivated by the scene, I sat motionless in a cheap plastic chair, dumbly gripping the camera I had been instructed to take photos with and letting my face betray my gut-retching disgust.

The night before, Mike had explained over mojitos in the balmy, lake air of Grenada that he had always wanted to slaughter an animal himself. As a meat eater, he felt obliged to see his food from source to plate rather than live in the sheltered perspective that all meat comes prepackaged in neat cellophane wrappers. So when he decided to give a goat to a family he’d befriended while surfing the “insane waves” of Popoyo, Nicaragua, he had only one condition: he wanted to be the one to kill it. “My friends and I are going back tomorrow morning,” he had told me, “you should come.” So less than ten hours after his initial invitation, we piled six still-drunk Americans into a pair of taxis that ran as though only a paperclip held them between a functioning and non-functioning state. Once out of the city, we bounced along the poor, unpaved roads to the coast, inhaling clouds of dust and salty, muggy air wafting in through the rolled-down windows.

With bruised bums and sweat-drenched clothes we finally arrived at the coastal town and coveted surf spot of Popoyo, Nicaragua. We paused, drank a beer, and set off on a couple of rusty, borrowed bikes to the family’s house where our to-be-barbeque was waiting for Mike, still alive and bleating nervously in their backyard.

“Give me that, you’re doing it all wrong,” the diminutive but incredibly pregnant teenage daughter said, snapping me out of my stupor, and snatching the knife from Mike. Swiftly, she crouched down and reached both knife and hand into the goat’s neck. It gave one last twitch before finally laying limp, eyes still bulging and panicked, underneath the yard’s single tree in the stifling afternoon heat.

“Damn,” Mike said giving a laugh, and in recognition that his part was done, lit up a cigarette.

Although I still couldn’t tear my gaze away from the dead animal – now being skinned and butchered by the potbellied father who’s bare and protruding stomach competed in roundness with his pregnant daughters’ – I suddenly realized the women lined up in a row of plastic chairs next to me hadn’t been paying attention for awhile. As I was totally entranced by the scene in front of me, they had grown bored watching Mike’s incompetency and had begun gossiping.

“I can’t believe she said that!” One woman exclaimed as the father tossed the first half of the goat’s skin to the side.

“Is she married?” Another asked as he slung the goat over a tree branch, letting it dangle from its hind legs so he could finish skinning it without letting the raw meat touch the dirt.

A voice saying “Que malo” rose above the others as the father slit the goat’s belly and let its stomach and liver drop to the ground. A pair of dogs who had been waiting eagerly on the sidelines rushed towards the opportunity and quickly dragged their loot off to a corner of the yard.

I glanced over and noticed several empty chairs in a row that had been full. To me, the event was chaotic and gripping, but for the other onlookers, it was background noise to the monotony of everyday life in rural Central America. They had lost interest. For them, Mike’s performance was pitifully unentertaining.

Tearing my gaze away from the tree for the first time in what felt like hours I noticed a woman emerged from the dark, cavernous kitchen with two large metal bowls. The father plopped the fresh slices of meat into one of the bowls and until it was piled high with raw, bright, red flesh and he finished the last slice, separating the back hooves from its legs. He rinsed his hands in the second bowl with a casualness that reminded me of suburban American dads everywhere satisfactorily turning over the last crisp, brown hamburger on a charcoal grill. Without a festival or special occasion to pin to the event, I realized Mike’s idealistic endeavor was in some ways just another way to pass the time.

“It’s done. They’re going to start cooking it now and his daughter will bring some over tonight when she goes home. Her husband owns the hotel we’re staying at,” Mike said.

Without saying anything else, our group of gringos shuffled out of the backyard, through the family’s concrete house to our bikes. Although we were silent, the constant chatter of life being lived – women cooking dinner, men getting boisterously drunk, and children shrieking as they ran around the streets – surrounded us as we left the town, slowly dying down as we approached our beach-side bungalows and returned to the sheltered and serene ambiance of an American-run surf lodge.

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