13 Views of the Suicide Woods Read online

  The retreating villagers’ footsteps thundered on the floorboards above him as they were herded out onto the parade ground by guards. Muffled shouts and screams floated down like the dust falling between the cracks. All around, the howls of sirens and alarms screamed, and in the distance, one more sound—a low howl he could feel moving through the ground beneath him.

  Pyotr dropped his head and prayed. He pulled the fetish out of his waistband and, closing his eyes, pictured him standing at the edge of the forest—the god’s black, bearskin cloak absorbing the moonlight as he cast his lupine face upward and howled under the magnificent branches of his antlers. Snow fell from the pine needles as his voice shook the roots of the earth and made the trees tremble with longing and fear. He prayed to the god of his ancestors to deliver him—to raze the camp and deliver his people from captivity and destruction.

  Standing impossibly tall in the low crawlspace, a vision of the god beckoned him to the rear of the building, away from the pounding footsteps and commands of his captors. It drew him to the wall closest the fences and pointed toward freedom. Come now. He felt the words tremble in his guts. Come be with me.

  Pyotr fell on his back and kicked at the boards until one came loose, letting the night wind howl into the crawlspace. He squeezed out and scrambled for the gates. The night was bright and glowed with the snow and ash still hanging delicately in the air like distant stars in space. He pushed through, stumbling for the fence where he would die.

  The gate in the far corner hung open, neglectfully abandoned by a guard rushing to contain . . . him. Pyotr dashed through it into No Man’s Land. A spotlight washed his world in white oblivion. A voice crackled in a loudspeaker: “Target acquired. Southeast quadrant. Assemble in the gap. Assemble in the gap!”

  Off in the distance, near the trees, the Wild God stood, waiting.

  Pyotr leaped up the fence, scaling with a burst of panicked strength. From behind, he heard the muffled sounds of German shepherds being released from their leads. They cut the dogs’ vocal cords to stifle barking, but he still recognized the hungry snapping sounds of their jaws. At least he thought it was the dogs, and not Vlaicu’s people. He caught a whiff of a faintly familiar odor—a corrupted perfume. His stomach cramped again. Go! He heard the rattling of the guards opening the fence gates. The dogs would be on him. He’d seen this play performed before.

  He tore at the fence links, pulling himself up to the concertina wire topping the barrier. He paused, imagining what the razors would do to his hands. It’ll be less than the dogs will do if I fall. On the other side were the field, the tree line, and freedom among the sheltering cathedral of evergreens. Where He waited.

  Another wave of nausea hit him as the stench of the flowers woven from brace arm to brace arm floated down upon him in the light breeze. He tried reaching up above the lines of blossoms beaming in his eyes like powerful red lights. Pyotr’s naked wrist brushed against a bloom; the velvet petals burned. He fell backward off the fence back into the ashen mud in No Man’s Land. The impact stifled his cry and he heard the dogs’ clacking teeth getting nearer.

  The sirens took on a sharper, more painful shrieking—a disorienting new sound that gave him vertigo. The world swam, and he lost his balance as the ground pitched like the deck of a boat in stormy seas. He pushed back up the fence as fast as he could in the yawing, slick yard.

  He leaped up the fence, pausing just below the wire before vaulting himself over the top, grazing past the flowers and cutting razor barbs. His sleeve caught in a barb and tore free as his weary body went over. Behind him, he heard another gate angrily creak open. Looking back, he saw the black dogs clotting through the narrow opening, snapping and quietly snarling at each other. He sprinted for the evergreens, howling along the way as though he were leading His Great Hunt, running down apostates and heretics to be devoured by wolves and shat into Hell.

  Halfway across the meadow, the dogs broke his ecstatic dream. He fell with them in a heap of fur and claws and mouths with teeth-ripping wounds that seared and burned. The guards put the flowers in their food! It’s in their food! Pyotr howled above it all. “Have mercy! Have mercy, Dziki Bożewojtek!”

  Dziki Bożewojtek was not a merciful god.

  The guards came upon him and pulled away the hounds. Pyotr tried to move; the flesh of his arms and legs burned and sizzled with the dog’s stinging saliva, and he was paralyzed. A man stood over him, the bore of his gun a blind, black eye staring down. Another pushed past the dogs and knelt beside Pyotr, his ruddy, soft face shining like a gilded icon reflecting in the sun. He plucked the fetish from Pyotr’s fingers and threw it away into the night. He looked down at his prey with disgust.

  “I am not this,” Pyotr whispered. “I am not a monster.”

  “Yes you are. You’re a fucking Radeszenie.” Pyotr felt something sharp sting his chest, right above his heart. The guard leaned down on his bayonet. “Soli Deo gloria! Amen!”

  The horned god’s howl silenced. Pyotr heard the rustle of the pine branches in the wind. He turned his head to see the first hint of the blinding sunrise burning the horizon. Ashes fell on his face. He scattered in the light and blew away with them, descending the mountainside on the breeze, cast about the dying night on cold winds that couldn’t be held back by fences and flowers, by men or gods.

  CIUDAD DE LOS NIÑOS

  The child leading Martín down the path looked back over her shoulder at him and, despite the summer heat, he shivered. An oily drop of sweat trickled down her temple, streaking the painted flower design outlining the blackened pockets of her eyes. Martín couldn’t tell if the girl was pretty through the la calavera catrina death mask, but the blankness of her stare was clear enough. Her eyes were solemn and old and she looked at him the way a butcher looks at a Corriente cow—with a little pity, but mostly boredom. She frightened him. He would have dropped her sweaty little hand if she’d let him, but the girl held on tightly. She guided him through the rows of half-sized candy skulls set along the narrow dirt road. The calaveras de azúcar were baking in the hot sun, scenting the air with caramel. “Is it far, niña?” The girl smiled cheerlessly. The teeth painted around her lips framed her own tiny white incisors. She looks like a shark, he thought. Dia de los Muertos isn’t for another five months.

  Farther up the path, he saw more children in unseasonable corpse paint. Martín had always assumed the name of the place she was taking him—Ciudad de los Niños—was poetic, not literal. He had yet to see a single adult, however. He got his own start as a twelve-year-old working the secuestro express in Mexico City steering gringo tourists toward his partners’ taxicabs. Like the girl was doing to him, he’d drag turistas by the hand through a confusing maze of alleyways, warning them along the way that it was imperative to be careful choosing how to get around the city. The drivers would then take the marks to Tepito and demand that they withdraw as much money from an ATM as they could if they didn’t want to be left in the barrio bravo. As he got older, Martín graduated to extorting supplemental money from the families of secuestro express marks before breaking out into his own business for an entirely other class of victim—the kind who came to a trade with a suitcase full of money instead of an ATM card. He considered himself a legitimate businessman now—a broker—willing to serve as a neutral party to bring family members home alive and untouched. For a fee. But he’d never been called to work the Ciudad de los Niños. That didn’t happen. They didn’t bargain. If you went missing there, you were simply one of los desaparecidos—The Disappeared. That’s what he’d always heard. Then his daughter disappeared, and he heard differently.

  An image of Luz’s mother, Narcisa, flitted through Martín’s mind as he made his way to trade a briefcase full of money for his daughter. He remembered her panicked voice, yelling about how her daughter had been taken to Ciudad de los Niños. She told him some bruja—some witch—was holding her hostage. His ex-wife wasn’t the only woman trying to take what was rightfully his. Narcisa was the one who le
t her get snatched in the first place. No. No more Narcisa in our lives!

  Martín and the painted girl walked past a small band of young boys lounging against the side of a red adobe building. Their faces were also ornately decorated with flowers and spider webs, black tears and spades transforming their round babyish features into leering reflections of death. The boys stood guard with Kalashnikov rifles, their eyes tracking Martín as the girl led him by. He felt sized-up and categorized like they were deciding between pasture or killing floor. They let him pass, clearly put into the category of not-a-threat by the casual indifference of hardened soldiers. Not one of whom was older than fourteen.

  A blast of hot air buffeted him with sand, carrying away the caramel smell. In its place he smelled something else.

  Rot.

  Martín refused to look down again, not wanting to know why the skulls were getting larger or why they no longer smelled like caramelizing sugar. He stared instead at the back of the girl leading him over the next hillock. Her bare shoulders were brown from the sun and coated with pale dust kicked up from the dried river bed that encircled the encampment. She looked like she hadn’t bathed in weeks and carried a heavy scent of corruption along with her which the unmerciful wind swirled around him. He marched forward, toward his meeting, clutching his suitcase, reminding himself that it was only business.

  Over the next rise, a small chapel surrounded by a series of smaller outbuildings appeared. Two more boys with Kalashnikovs guarded the entrance while other children milled about in the street. So many. Drawing closer, the guards sized him up. This time, he did not feel dismissed. He felt cowed. Itching sweat ran down his back in a constant rivulet like rain on a windshield. He wanted to rub at the small of his back, but he kept his hands at his sides where the children could see them, knowing beyond certainty that the gesture of reaching for the small of his back would get him killed. Normally he would have his gun nestled in the small of his back. But in his haste to get the ransom for Luz to the drop, he’d forgotten it in the car. Everything’s different when it’s your own child.

  The guard to his left looked no older than eleven—the one on the right, maybe thirteen. Both boys were slender and wiry, dirty like his guide, their round faces padded with baby fat, and half his height. Still, they exuded the kind of menace he had felt from dealing with cartel soldiers and guerillas—the willingness to commit an act of violence was just a single misstep away—except these kids seemed without the limitation of conscience. Life isn’t cheap to them. Cheap still has some value. Life here is worthless. Even if I had my gun, could I kill a child? These children. Yes, I think I could kill them if it came to it.

  Around a corner appeared a group of girls and boys playing with a black and red soccer ball. As a boy kicked the ball toward Martín, another intercepted it, punting it away. The ball careened into the side of an outbuilding, bounced back and sent one of the painted skulls lining the street lolling out into their path. The boys squealed with delight and abandoned the ball for the head. Another kicked it in front of Martín. The group stopped and waited, staring silently at the adult in their midst, looking expectant like they wanted him to kick the new ball back into play. He looked down at what had been offered to him. The head was painted white in the same Dia de los Muertos style as the children’s faces. It was not made of sugar, however. A roughly hewn neck, caked brown with dried blood and mud faced him. The ivory color of a budding vertebra peeked through behind the collapsed fold of a trachea. Martín’s guide scowled disapprovingly and kicked the severed head back to the boys, barking in a little girl’s squeak, “¡Ponla donde estaba!” They immediately did as they were told and put it back before returning to their game.

  “Por aquí,” the girl said. “La Bestia le espera adentro.”

  La Bestia! Martín wanted to ask if he couldn’t just give the girl the money instead. But he kept it to himself. ¡Sé hombre! he told himself. Be a man! You’ll pay, and you’ll get Luz back and everything will be fine because you were a fucking man and you did what it takes to protect what’s yours. “Por aquí,” his guide repeated, pointing with the machete she held in her other hand. Jesus! Was she carrying that the whole time? Why didn’t I see it? She still hadn’t let go of him, and Martín wondered whether he’d be able to break her tiny grip if she tried to pull him into a machete swing.

  Willing his legs to work, he took a step forward. The girl nodded, commanding the boys standing guard outside the chapel to open the doors. Together they walked through the portal and up the aisle like a father leading his daughter to her waiting fiancé. Except, the girl was leading him toward a wooden throne atop the dais where, in any other church, there would be an altar. She was pulling him toward the woman who held his daughter captive. Delivering him to La Bestia.

  The woman’s head was framed in a garland of red roses woven into the thick black hair cascading down her bare shoulders and over her red ruffled bosom. Thorns scraped tiny crimson lines in the skin of her exposed alabaster cleavage. Martín’s gaze would have lingered at the buxom chest that rose and fell softly with La Bestia’s breath if it weren’t for the fact that her tattooed face terrified him and kept him in thrall. Delicate white lines like the outlines of teeth were permanently drawn on her full lips. Her nose and eyes were tattooed black, while around them soft swirling lines drew attention to the intricate roses tattooed on her chin and at her forehead where her hair parted. Cold blue eyes stared out from the black holes.

  “Bienvenidos.” La Bestia held out a lace-gloved hand to Martín. The girl gave him away, placing his hand in hers. Martín did his best to hold the contents of his bladder at the rough scratch of the woman’s grip. “Me complace que usted está aquí,” she said. Behind the death mask, she actually did look happy to see him. As happy as a wolf about to eat a jackrabbit. Without releasing her hold on him, La Bestia leaned back in her chair forcing him to half-kneel on the step in front of her if he didn’t want to sprawl across her lap. He definitely did not want to touch any more of the woman than he had to. His guide pried the suitcase from his other hand and stepped back to the first row of pews.

  “Tengo t-tu dinero.”

  “Si. ¿Y por lo tanto . . . ?” She challenged him to ask her for something. To beg.

  “Please. I do not . . .”

  “Do you know who we are?” she asked.

  “You are The Beas—”

  “Who we are.” She tightened her grip, grinding his knuckles painfully against each other.

  “Esta es la Ciudad de los Niños.”

  “And what is the City of Children to you?” she asked. Kneeling near her legs, Martín’s senses were overwhelmed. She was all he could see. He smelled the roses in her hair—her sweat, her sex. He felt caught in a web next to a sac of eggs waiting to hatch.

  “This is where the lost—”

  “None of my bebés are lost,” she said. “They are all seen and heard.”

  Martín wanted to fall back—to scramble away—but she held tight. He winced at the strength of her hot dry grip. “But this place . . .”

  “Is the womb of a new nation. Every child here is a wanted child.”

  “The heads . . .”

  “Each one is a birth from death.” La Bestia gestured to her left at a painted head resting on a shelf beneath a reclining porcelain doll. “That is the head of Padre Marcial Evaristo. From that óvulo I gave birth to my sons, Raul, Ricardo, and Carlos. Evaristo was scheduled to be sent back to Rome, but instead, he resides here where he can watch my sons grow.” She pointed at another skull on a shelf beneath Evaristo’s. “This cabeza belonged to a pimp named Israel Fonseca Moreno. He gave me the girl who stands behind you now and a half a dozen others. All baptized in blood. All risen from the graves these men and women dug for them and reborn from my body. All of the men and women who decorate my city are paying the price for betraying la sangre de la Raza.” She took a deep breath and cocked her head at an angle, considering him for a small moment.

  “Jus
t like you,” she said.

  Martín’s heart raced. A spike of pain shot through his left armpit. Better to have a heart attack or my head chopped off? “I haven’t betrayed anyone,” he protested. “I get people back to their families. I get them back alive. I’m a neutral broker.”

  “After you extort them for their life savings and leave them destitute. You think you are a predator. But you are just a parasite drinking la sangre de la nación.”

  “I brought you money.”

  “And for that you want what exactly?”

  “The deal. To leave here. To take my daughter and leave.”

  “That she is the second thing you mention explains why you will never leave.” La Bestia released Martín’s hand and gestured toward the rear of the chapel. The guide who led him tossed aside the suitcase and opened the door. On the other side waited a congregation of children who filed into the building, taking seats in the pews. Martín considered making a run for it, pushing through, but he knew that the boys with the rifles waited just on the other side of the door.

  “Are you ready to pay for your sins?” La Bestia asked.

  “I brought you the money you demanded.”

  “And the tribute is apreciado. Your money will buy food for the children and ammunition for their weapons. But money is not the only debt you owe.”

  Martín looked over his shoulder at the child approaching him. He barely recognized his daughter dressed in a delicate white dress with her face painted in a death rictus like the other children. “¿Mi Luz?”

  A pair of children marched behind her holding a white silk pillow upon which rested a gleaming new machete. La Bestia stood up and spread her arms wide in a gesture of welcome toward her soldiers. Martín tried to feint sideways, but three children from the front pew leaped up to stop him. He wondered how many kids it would take to hold him. He couldn’t wait around to find out. He bucked off their small hands, grabbed Luz by the arm, and rushed toward the front doors plucking the machete off the pillow as he passed. A howl of anger went up among the children. He swung the machete menacingly, but none of them backed away. They could not be intimidated.