by Brian Hodge
I had been robbed one night within a month of moving here, by a pair of twelve-year-olds with knives. They’d have used them if I’d resisted, I’m sure, but perhaps it was because, still in mourning, I assigned so little value to my own life that I could see how terrified they were, knives or not. They took me for maybe forty dollars and a watch I still haven’t replaced. As they were backing away, brandishing their knives to discourage any heroism, I knelt and took off a shoe and peeled out another bill.
“You missed one,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They took the bill — it was, after all, offered freely — but never was I robbed again. It may only be coincidence … but even I am able to believe in a little magic.
Miguel hurried me along for half an hour, deep into twisting passages and hellish urban bowels, until we arrived at one of those transient settlements of cardboard and packing crates. The moon was a chilly scythe scraping behind the tall silhouette of a tenement, and as Miguel called out with a soft hooting cry of identification, I sensed a quick sinuous movement just beyond us. It flanked us, whipped over and around as if scampering across a mound of garbage, glided down into thicker darkness —
And was gone.
“Down,” Miguel said to me, and for a moment I thought he meant I should drop to hands and knees to enter one of these rude domains. And while I’d have to, it wasn’t what he meant. “Down, to me,” he said. All he wanted was to look me directly in the eye.
He raised his small hands, cupped my face as tenderly and urgently as a doting mother. An eleven-year-old with responsibilities I could never have imagined dealing with at that age.
“You help Rafael, right? Right, Monjito?” It was their name for me, Monjito, roughly meaning ‘Little Monk.’ It was their way of teasing me for living alone.
“I’ll try, Miguel,” I whispered, while from all around us I got the sense of being watched, of life unseen. Small eyes were surely peering from makeshift doorways. “But you haven’t even told me what’s happened to him.”
“You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the policía, right? I trust you.”
I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”
He released my face and dropped to all fours, scurrying into the mouth of one of the hovels they’d tacked together in half an hour’s time, if that. I followed, struck by the sudden reek of sweat and blood inside the six-foot crawlspace. Miguel pushed aside a scrap of burlap coffee bag used for a curtain and we crowded into a miserable little chamber in which one couldn’t even stand up, whose only decor was pictures I’d taken of the kids, over time. It was lit by half a dozen candles of various colors, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of them tipped against a wall, unnoticed.
“Rafael,” he said, pointing.
He was a curly-haired boy near Miguel’s age, maybe a year or two older. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Rafael lay barechested and trembling along one rough-hewn wall, a pallet of rags for his mattress. He was covered to the waist by a thin blanket; the bloodstains atop the grime looked fresh.
Rafael opened his eyes, looked at me without emotion, with neither fear nor relief. I was simply there. He did not shut them until Miguel squatted closer and stroked the boy’s shoulder.
I quit praying three years ago, but for this I resurrected the act. I slowly drew down the blanket until I saw that his naked hip bore the swollen red pucker of a bullet wound. It was obvious that Rafael had shat himself, but not here. It was only a few smears.
Although he would have to be kept warm, I couldn’t leave that filthy blanket on him. Maybe Miguel could run back to my place for a clean one. I tugged the worn cloth off him, to toss it aside —
And I stared at what lay beneath the rest. Beyond acceptance, beyond rejection. What I saw? It simply was.
The boy’s feet and lower legs were not human, but some kind of canine or lupine form, bristling with dark fur and matted with his blood. As Rafael twitched, a claw extending crookedly from between a pair of toe-pads scratched incessantly at the wood. They bent strangely, these haunches, the underlying bone structure consistent with animal origins. The feral hide and muscle melded gradually into his skinny thighs.
“He looks some more normal than he did when I leave for you,” said Miguel. “Soon, he looks like same Rafael again, no different. You help him, okay?”
“He’s been shot,” I murmured. “He needs a doctor, he needs to go to a clinic.”
“No doctor, no clinic. They don’t fix him so good, maybe, they see him like this.” Miguel was very firm. “The bullet, out already. Don’t worry, Monjito. I did a good job.” He pointed at a bloody lump of misshapen lead and twiddled his thin fingers like pincers. He’d dug it out with his fingers.
I worked, trying not to think what I was working on, because it wasn’t the time for questions. All I could try was to keep uppermost in my mind that there was a young boy who’d been shot, and whatever else he may have been didn’t matter. I irrigated and cleaned out the wound, and while swelling had cut off most of the bleeding, I still had to attempt a crude job of stitching closed the hole. I packed it over with a thick bandage, fed him a dose of antibiotics, then resigned myself to the fact that it was the most I knew how to do.
After which I leaned trembling against the hovel’s frail wooden wall. Rafael had dropped into fitful slumber, while Miguel sat on his haunches and, in the warm glow of the candles, watched us with a strangely affectionate pride.
“You did a good job, I knew you would,” he said, smiling, and he must have seen all the questions in my eyes. It was one of the most awful moments of my life, the way he regarded me with not just understanding … but with pity.
Miguel squirmed slowly across the cramped room, lifted aside the clean blanket he’d come back with while I doctored. Rafael’s strange legs looked even more like a normal boy’s than they had earlier, mended by some creeping transformation. Miguel traced a slow finger through the thinning patches of fur.
“Happens now, to some of us,” he said dreamily, with neither sadness nor joy. “Few months, must be, maybe, that’s all. Was a long time before we could do it any time we want. I can do it now for you, but I think you don’t so much want to see me … so, no, right?”
I almost laughed, softly. “No. Not … not now.” I thought back to what I’d seen a few nights before in my alley, how it had seemed so out of place, and yet so right. It may even have been Miguel himself, thinking to come bring me a bloody gift the way a housecat will deliver a torn mouse. “Miguel? Do you … the rest of you … do you kill?”
“Some try killing us,” he said solemnly. “Some pay, and some, they look for us. Not wrong, fighting back, okay?”
“No,” I whispered. “You have to protect yourself. And the ones you love.” I closed my eyes against the threat of tears summoned by my failures. And I knew where these candles had come from, which shopkeeper no longer had need of them, had no need of anything, not even the policías he reportedly paid to rid himself of pests. Oh, I believed rumor. Pedro’s word was gospel.
From beyond the makeshift walls came the soft sounds of movement, of careful feet shifting with more stealth than tender years should be forced to acquire. I heard muttering throats and clicking teeth, and breath in hot feral sighs. For a moment I wondered if they’d come to silence me, a witness to their camp.
Miguel sat at rapt attention, head tilting up as he sharply sniffed the air, a movement so unchildlike it was like seeing the instinctive animal within ripple beneath his brown skin.
“They want in,” he said. “For Rafael they feel sad.”
I shrank against the wall as Miguel drew the burlap curtain aside. The smelly den could accommodate no more than
two at a time, but they were patient, waiting their turn. I just watched them, saying nothing as ragged boys and girls and slinking beasts came in to nuzzle the sleeping Rafael. Among those I didn’t already know, their interest in me was minimal, some looking over me with flat eyes, some smiling shyly, others seemingly unaware of my presence. They curled next to Rafael, to warm him with their body heat. They tugged the bandages away to lick his wound. Rafael’s ribs rose and fell with a smooth new rhythm. Two by two they came, as if they all could give of themselves to restore the life that had almost been taken from him, taken because he was … what? A scavenger?
They must have numbered close to thirty.
After they left, drawing back to their own junkyard dens, and even Miguel fell prey to exhaustion, I cradled the wounded boy in my arms. In his adolescent body I tried to feel the bones a younger child might have grown into, a son I’d not held for three years, a son who, for me, would forever remain five. I wondered if he had a sister somewhere, and if she still loved him, or if she too lay buried somewhere, like that five-year-old’s big sister, nothing but unfulfilled potentials and precious memories.
They kill children here. But I suspect it’s the same all over.
I held Rafael until late the next morning, long after I had looked at his legs and saw that he was only a kid again, just a bruised and wounded kid who needed so many things, but of those things, had only time.
*
My hair is gray, but sometimes I want to be older still, very very old, so old that nothing new can surprise me, because I’ll recognize that it really isn’t new at all. If I live that long, I will welcome it, but until then I’ll have to content myself with friends like Pedro Javier.
I told him about Miguel and Rafael and the others, told him in a Plaza del Oro flooded with the light of a sun that struggled in and out of clouds. Pedro’s face was luminous one moment, mysterious and thoughtful the next. I told him not because I really expected him to believe, but because I had to tell someone, and he was the only one I knew who might not laugh at me.
“The world,” he said, “it forces children to become terrible things sometimes, so that they may live. Makes new things of their nature. For every loss, a gain, I think, but not every gain is worth its cost.”
He seemed very sad. Pedro has never married, never fathered children, and at times like this I wonder if he’s glad, or regrets it all the more. He’d have made a wonderful father.
I have him to thank for suggesting a way to get closer to the kids when I first began to notice them, take an interest in their plight — surrogates, I’m sure, for the ones I couldn’t save at home. Give them pictures of themselves and their friends, Pedro suggested. He has done so himself for many years. They like this not only because it makes them feel more like a family — see, they have proof — but because when one of them dies, or disappears after the shadow of the policía is seen, then the rest have something by which to remember the lost one. They have no marker and no grave, but at least they have images preserved for all time, and some believe that in pictures there lives a sprinkle of magic.
From my pocket I pulled one such picture. I’d done a terrible thing, taking this from the wall of Rafael’s shack, stealing from someone who has less than nothing, but I planned to give it back.
I showed it to Pedro, positive he would recognize it.
The picture showed the fountain in the center of the Plaza del Oro, from the same vantage point that Pedro must have photographed tens of thousands of times. The Plaza was deserted, glowing with soft light that can only come at dawn. A half-dozen gangly-limbed kids were crowded together, Rafael among them, and at their waists rose the hackled head of some lupine animal, at play, with happily lolling tongue. But at their side was someone of adult stature, a blur of gray lost to motion the moment the shutter had clicked, a sweep of dark hair covering most of her face. She knew what they were — I had convinced myself of this in the days since stealing the picture. Where might they have been in the hours before dawn?
“Do you know who she is, Pedro?”
He calmly looked at the picture with soft eyes that betrayed nothing more than, perhaps, what he wanted me to see. It compelled me to wonder how much Pedro, having spent nearly every day out here for forty years, had really seen.
“Some, they call her a bruja.” A witch. He handed the picture back. “But me, I think she is just lonely.”
*
Over the next weeks I paid special attention to the strange and brutal deaths one always hears about in a city of millions. People live, people die, and neither can always be peaceful. On a few I dwelled longer: another shopkeeper, with his throat torn out; a policía officer, disemboweled in an alley. A few more.
I recognize survival and I recognize vengeance, and sometimes the two exist like fist in glove. Whenever I encounter Miguel and his friends, or seek them out to make sure they’re well, I’m aware of these things inside their hearts, but we never speak of them.
I’m new to this city, still, but it wasn’t always this way down here. Even Pedro admits that. And I wonder what process has been wrought, what set it into motion. If it was a deliberate act, or something waiting to happen, inevitably, that finally came to pass.
The woman in the picture was known as Doña Mariana. After I’d summoned enough nerve I went to see her. She lived on a quiet street in one of those areas that most cities have, that reek of history rather than mere age, and seem further removed from the city’s chaos than the few blocks between would imply. Her apartment was on the third floor of a building steeped in subtle European flavors, bracketed top to bottom by balconies and lattices of dark wrought-iron.
Doña Mariana was about my age, but she wore it with more dignity. Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, long wisps curling free, and the fine lines at her mouth and eyes were cut as if by a loving sculptor who had no choice but to season her with an air of tragedy that would make her beauty all the more poignant. She stood as tall as I and elegantly big-boned, with a robust underlying sensuality that immediately set me to wondering how she would feel lying with me — how powerful her body must be, and how exquisite her touch.
Bruja, some said, according to Pedro. Witch. It would’ve been easier to expect a hag.
I showed her a picture I’d recently taken of some of the kids, Miguel and Rafael and others. “I believe we have some young friends in common,” I said.
She stared at me, so bold, so direct, her eyes so deeply brown. “Monjito?” she said, and I nodded. “If they trust you, then so will I. You do not judge them?”
I knew what she meant, but judge seemed so inappropriate a term. Least of all it wasn’t my place to judge. They were children and they were something more, something bloody they’d been forced to become. They frightened me and they fascinated me, and I suppose that’s an accurate description of the beginnings of love.
“I just want to understand,” I told her.
Doña Mariana took me into her home, full of polished wood and crystal and lush green ferns. We spent hours drinking sangria and talking about children, and what a terrible place the world can be for them, how they can only heal from so much before something else sets in and takes them over. You have to wonder sometimes if the survivors are lucky after all.
We shared our losses, Mariana and I. I told her of the family I’d failed to bring through the fire, and as I did, I had to wonder if that’s why I’d not done anything more for the street kids beyond giving to the few needy ones I knew by name. Certainly I was in a position to help. Back in the States I knew editors all over the country who would run whatever I wrote, should I decide to emerge from retirement. Americans love a good cause, as long as it comes with plenty of pictures. So why hadn’t I done more? Could it be that I feared my best wouldn’t be enough?
And then where would I be, losing not two kids, but hundreds?
Mariana knew my heart, I think, knew it as only one can who has lost her own children after already losing a husban
d. All three of hers — a daughter and two sons, none older than fourteen — had been killed last year in the massacre that had left the eleven dead in the street. I didn’t ask if they were delinquents or had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surprisingly, I didn’t even wonder until much later. Not that it mattered.
We grieved for ourselves, mourned for each other, long after the afternoon sun had gone to evening moon, long after Pedro would have packed up his camera and bid another day farewell. We held each other against the night, and soon she took me to her bed and we loved each other in the sad passion of tears, loved each other as only two who intimately share some mutual anguish can love. I knew the powerful rapture of her body, and it exhausted mine. I groped for her soul, and it left mine feeling less abandoned.
We slept some, but late in the night she awoke with a start, trembling, and when I tried to hold her, Mariana gently pushed my hands aside. Her beauty became ethereal by moonlight, a silvery flood that came through the open door to her balcony. Her hair was now unbound, a lush tangle across the pillow, deeply black with silver threads that glimmered under the moon.
“No touching,” she said, “not now. Please?”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no,” and she shook her head. “You came to understand.”
I smiled, a moment’s self-derision in realizing how little time we’d actually spent talking about Miguel and the others. The smile faded when I realized that she sounded as if I now might be learning something new.
“I do not understand what gets into me some nights,” she said. “But I let it in anyway.”
From beneath the balcony came small sounds of scramble, of feet and hands bracing on wrought iron and pulling themselves up, up. Higher. Closer. Doña Mariana showed no fear, so I, naked and defenseless though I was, promised myself I’d feel none either.
