A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

DIA DE LOS INOCENTES

by Elias Siquerios

How fast could Tito run? And when his legs gave out in this land of splintering stone and crowded cacti, who would he cry out to when they brought him back to the ranch to face that despicable thing?

The night covered him. That was good. He stopped to catch his breath, sitting on the hard ground, feeling the cold December wind on his face and neck. He was heading north, following the road but hidden out of sight. Now and then he could hear voices that came out of the desert. He didn’t think they were real because they vanished as soon as he’d stop to listen. When he forgot about them they would come again.

A vehicle neared along the road. He could hear its wheels on the gravel and crouched. When it passed he stood up and continued his run, knowing he would have to trust someone enough at some point so that he could ask for help. But when could he trust someone? The ranch he had escaped was isolated. He thought that everyone within several miles of the ranch must be affiliated to the men who had kidnapped him and his friends.

He had been on the run all day, the sun stealing life from him. When the sun proved too much he had crawled under an overhanging stone by the side of a small hill and rested until the sun began to set. When the car was gone he continued, closer to the road where the ground was smoother and he could make better time. Tito noticed more cars coming and ducked back into the brush and when he saw that cars were also growing numerous in the opposite direction he could tell there was a town or city near.

He continued on the road when traffic cleared, slowing his pace to a walk. He felt tears well up in his eyes and thought of his mother in El Paso. She had begged Tito not to go to Mexico, had said that it was no longer the same country as it used to be. He thought she was over worrying and said that it was just for the weekend and that he’d bring two friends with him. She argued with him on the phone but it would be impossible for her to talk him out of it, especially as he was six hundred miles away in Austin, TX, twenty-two years old, and as stubborn as his father.

It had all seemed well thought out to Tito. His friend Roger Winslow had a girlfriend from a rich family named Gloria in Monterrey. The parents were away in New York City for two weeks and Roger’s girlfriend had said she’d have the family home all to herself. She spoke of Monterrey’s nightclubs that didn’t close until four in the morning, spoke of her hot girlfriends, of her new Mercedes. Tito and his friends were all from working class families driving beat-up Toyotas and geriatric pickups. They were student aid boys; naturally the pictures she posted on Facebook of herself and her friends would rile them up. They had discussed the dangers. They discussed them for a whole night. They had a simple plan, to cross the border from Del Rio over to Mexico at Ciudad Acuna, thereby bypassing the notorious city of Nuevo Laredo, then proceed with caution, obeying every law, carrying tourist cards, with Tito being the one to deal with any police since he spoke Spanish and was of Mexican descent. The three boys, Tito, Roger, and Michael Hopler, even set aside three hundred dollars for mordida money in case some crooked cops decided to supplement their income at their expense. The mordida money was Gloria’s idea.

They thought they had it all worked out.

Tito saw lights up ahead over a small hill. A glow of homes stretched out several miles in different directions. When he cleared the hill he could see the town itself, not large enough to be a city, but comforting in its size of four to eight hundred people. He tried to think of the maps he had read on the way down here, tried to picture where he was, but no dice. A cattle truck roared by, going toward town. He followed the road into town and hoped for the best. A truck moving toward town approached and he could see a man and a woman sitting within. He flagged them down. They asked him in Spanish what had happened to him. Tito realized how he must look to them in his filthy clothes and raw face. He couldn’t speak. When he tried he almost sobbed. He pointed in the direction from whence he came.

“Do you need to go to the police?” the driver asked.

“No,” Tito managed to say. “No police!”

THE COUPLE DROVE TITO into town and left him at a corner where an auto shop blared norteño music from within. Tito had asked the couple for the time and was surprised that it was barely nine in the evening. He felt as if he had been traveling the darkness of the desert for much longer. He crossed the street toward the storefront of a closed Florist. A man on a motorbike appeared out of nowhere and zipped out of sight, leaving only the smell of burnt petrol in the night air around him.

Most of the businesses were closed. A stray dog sniffed at full garbage cans at the edge of the sidewalk. The trees raised skeletal boughs over the sidewalk and the fallen leaves had long since turned to brown pulp on the ground. Tito turned a corner and saw a bar at the end of the next street. The red heavy door to the bar was propped open and a Rolling Stones song blared from within. There was a painted sign over the door which showed the name of the establishment, Toritos De Oro, written in red lettering over a golden bull.

The bar was empty save for two tables at which several of the locals had gathered. Tito looked toward them, fearing that they might be the men from the ranch but the faces were all unfamiliar. He passed the bartender without looking at him and found a sign directing him to the bathrooms. He entered the bathroom and squinted from the bright overhead light. The room smelled of old urine. The white paint was peeling off of the ceiling in large patches. Tito went to the sink and looked in the mirror.

He looked like shit.

His lip was cut open at the bottom right side and he had a gash under his nose as well. Both lacerations had stopped bleeding but there was a coat of crusted blood in both places. His left eye was swollen and he had several lumps on his head on that side as well. He had a large lump on the back of his neck which felt warm when he touched it. He ran water from the faucet and wasn’t surprised when only the cold water worked. The cold water felt good on his face. He washed the coated blood from his neck as well, ran water over his hair and talked to himself, unaware of what he was saying. He saw that his shirt was drenched in blood along the collar but there was nothing he could do about that now. He looked at the bloodstain, touched the warm bulge on his neck. He had been bitten there. He shook his head as if to forget the memory.

He tried to piss but nothing came of it. He flushed the urinal anyway. It wouldn’t turn off. He slapped at the handle with the side of his hand several times before the water stopped.

He made his way back out to the bar, walking slowly, looking toward the bartender now who spoke on the phone.

Is he calling them? Tito thought.

A woman sat alone at the bar. She had been texting on her phone and then she put the phone down and stirred her drink. The bartender, a balding heavy man wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, hung up the phone when Tito approached. “Que te paso?” he asked.

Tito ignored the bartender’s question. He sat beside the woman, his hand on the back of his neck.

“Oh my god!” the woman beside him screamed in English. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Tito, oh my god! What are you doing here?”

Tito turned to her. After several seconds of drawing a blank he recognized her. “Gloria. What happened?”

“Do you know him?” the bartender asked her in Spanish.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s a friend of mine. Can you bring him a beer?”

The bartender nodded and walked to the fridge and pulled out a Dos Equis. He opened it and placed a small napkin in front of Tito, placing the beer on it. Tito looked at the beer but did not pick it up.

“What happened to you?” she asked. She ran her hand gently over his face. He pulled away although she had been careful not to touch any of the wounded skin. “What happened? Where are the others?”

Tito shook his head. He tried not to sob. “They’re dead. I got away. You don’t know what they did to us. They killed Roger and Michael. You have to help me.”

“I will. Have a drink. Yes, no, not too quick, yes, slower. Drink it slower.” She was helping him lift the bottle. Some beer missed his mouth and dribbled down his chin. She smiled weakly, motherly. She eyed his wounds, the bulge at the back of his neck. He ran his hand to the bulge and she pulled his hand away, “Careful with that. It looks bad.”

“How did you know where we were?”

“I didn’t. You didn’t make it last night. This is a bad country these days. I figured something happened and I drove the route I knew you’d be taking, looking for any sign of a car wreck. I stopped in a couple of towns and asked the police if some young Americans had come through. I talked to them in this town too but they said nothing happened. I stopped in for a drink before heading north. But tell me what happened. Are you sure they’re dead?”

Tito nodded, drinking hard from his beer, craving the buzz that would come from it.

“Roger’s dead?”

Tito grabbed her hand. “Yes, Roger died. I’m sorry.”

“What the fuck happened!”

Tito finished the rest of his beer and then ordered another. He felt the bulge behind his neck and noticed it was bigger, firmer. The bartender came back with another beer and placed it in front of him. Tito drank, winced at the bitter taste and looked at the bartender who walked away. The bitterness soon vanished as he drank. He felt lighter of head, better. He turned to Gloria. He said that cartel members had pulled them over on the road at gunpoint outside of a small gas station, had tied their hands behind their backs and blindfolded them with electrical tape. They then drove them to a ranch. When the tape was removed the boys found themselves in a large room with a concrete floor. There was a large wooden table at the center of the room and several men lulled about dressed in western clothes.

Because Tito knew Spanish, the leader of the cartel members, a tall man with longish hair and an acne-scarred face, questioned him as to their intentions in the country. When the leader learned that the boys had no other intention than having a good time in Monterrey he smiled, his acne-scarred face stretching to reveal a gold brace over his two front teeth. The leader said, “You boys are innocent. Do you know what today is? It is la Día De Los Inocentes, the day of the innocents. You see, once a year we find boys like you, not always Americans, sometimes boys lost on the street, sometimes a young girl who has strayed from her mother at the Mercado, and we introduce you to Gonzalo. Gonzalo is our leader, our spiritual center. You’ll all meet him tonight. Let’s start with your quiet friend, Michael.”

Four men in the room had stripped Michael nude and tied him face down to the large wooden table. A tall and very muscular man entered the room with a hammer in his hand. It had the appearance of a meat mallet but much larger. While Michael screamed the muscular man begin to hammer his legs, back, and arms. He lifted and dropped the mallet with precise movements, sending a jolt of pain through Michael’s brain that made his screaming seem unreal and when his lungs could no longer produce sound from the pain Michael closed his eyes.

The muscular man then oiled the naked body from a bucket by the table. He was using the end of a small broom to do it and when he satisfied himself he wiped his hands on a rag, picked up the mallet and began hammering Michael’s body again: the arms, the hands which cracked with each thud of the mallet, the legs, buttocks, and back. The muscular man, while Tito and Roger screamed for him to stop, then placed his hand over the boy’s face and said Gonzalo would be pleased.

Roger tried to run when his turn came up. Two of the men caught him before he made it to the door. All three fell to the floor and one of the gangsters pulled out a 9 mm. and hit Roger at the back of the head with it. He was out cold.

The two gangsters dragged him to the table, stripped him and strapped him down. The large muscular man cleaned the oil off of the mallet, raised it, took a deep breath and brought the mallet down at the back of Roger’s legs. Roger screamed himself awake, his eyes wild while scanning the room. The acne-faced leader laughed. The hammer came down again and again. Roger couldn’t handle it as well as Michael. He kept passing out from the pain. The muscular man would reach near the bucket where he had a bottle of ammonia. The ammonia would wake Roger up in time for further beatings.

Then it was Tito’s turn. As they led him to the table his legs buckled but two men held him by the armpits and made sure he made it the whole way. He asked the leader why they were doing this. “Gonzalo is now very old. He can no longer bite from the apple of youth with the teeth of the aged.”

Tito couldn’t remember the beating. He took his mind back to Austin, back to a night he has spent in a hotel with a girl from St. Edwards University who had a boyfriend at the time. He hadn’t felt guilty. He had been madly in love with her for a long time before her boyfriend entered the picture. He had relished every moment, every touch, every smell, and when it was over she broke all ties with him. He was wondering, as the mallet fell on his body, as the oil was placed on his back and legs, what her breath smelled like now, what her hand felt like. Tito had always thought it took a lot of will power to detach your mind from your body but he had been wrong; it took a lot of pain.

The cartel members then dragged the three boys out to the back of the ranch, pulling their limp bodies by the arms toward a tall wooden statue of a man with the head of a goat and a grotesquely enlarged penis. The acne-scarred cartel leader laughed and wiped some spit from his lips. He turned to Tito and said in Spanish, “Now you boys are going to meet Gonzalo. You’ll see how we do things here on la Día De Los Inocentes. Gonzalo isn’t what he used to be in his prime. He doesn’t perform like he used to. His heart is fading and our power is fading too. We get our trucks in without being seen. We get invisibility from him. You…you will get plenty more, hermanito.”

They took Roger before the statue first. Roger had passed out during Tito’s torture and had not yet awaken. They lay him in the grass. Michael and Tito both looked on absently. The ritual of pain had made their bodies useless, their emotions drained of urgency. The muscular man who had beaten their bodies with the mallet neared with a large knife and plunged it deep into Roger’s chest. He cut his heart out quickly as if he had performed the operation numerous times before. He held the heart up to the night sky and said that here was the heart of an innocent. The cartel members lowered their heads and whispered solemn words as if at mass. The muscular man walked toward the statue with the heart in his hand held high. Tito noticed that the statue was licking its lips.

“What do you mean it was licking its lips?”

“I meant the fuckin’ thing licked its lips! A long purple tongue licked the lips and the man held the heart up to its mouth and the fuckin’ thing starting eating it. Blood ran down its mouth! It was eating it!” Tito rubbed the back of his neck again.

“Don’t touch it,” Gloria said.

“It really hurts.”

“Don’t touch it.”

“That’s where it bit me.”

“There, on the neck?” She moved his collar and looked closely. “We’ll take you to a hospital in Monterey. I don’t want to take you to one around here. Just tell me what happened.”

“A man stood at the side and hacked Roger’s body to pieces. They brought pieces of Roger to the statue, pieces it could eat. The statue was able to eat some, other pieces fell out of its mouth. At that point it was Michael’s turn. Michael was fighting. Seeing that fuckin’ statue take a bite out of Roger got us out of our stupor. Michael broke free but the muscled man tackled him and put him in a headlock while other men punched and kicked at him. It was too much for Michael. He was too weak from the beating. They then tore his heart out too. I started to scream at that point. I turned away. I could hear the fuckin’ thing chomping though, I could hear it. I tried to get away but they dragged me to it. I fought hard. I even snapped the muscular man’s head back with a punch. I almost broke free but one of them kicked at my legs and knocked me down. I couldn’t fight them off anymore. I thought they would do the same to me as the others but they picked me up and carried me to the statue. They placed me in front of it. I felt its arms come alive and they were strong, they embraced me and wouldn’t let me go… Then, then…the thing…it penetrated me with its dick. From behind. It put it in there and then it bit my neck.” Tito grew quiet. “My head.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s really weird right now. Something’s not right.”

“Do you remember how you got away?”

Tito shook his head, feeling the lump on the back of his neck. It was much bigger now. He would have been alarmed had not the drink stolen that emotion from him. He then turned to Gloria. It started to come back to him.

The statue had let him go and he collapsed on the ground in a fetal position. The cartel members did not approach him but a woman did. In his state of bewilderment he vaguely recognized her face. She cradled his head on her lap and said consoling words in Spanish, moving the hair back from his forehead which she kissed. He then knew it was Gloria and smiled up at her. That’s when the drug runners approached, helping Gloria with the young man, carrying him to her car where they placed him in the backseat with his clothes.

“I feel really bad!” Tito said, standing from his barstool.

The bartender watched from far away but did not approach.

“You were there!” Tito yelled, pointing at Gloria as he clutched at the back of his neck with his other hand. “What did you do to me? It’s moving!”

Indeed, underneath the rise of flesh at the back of his neck there was movement, a squishing sound, a thrust of weight.

“Oh god! Gloria, what did you do to me!” His legs gave out from under him and he collapsed.

Gloria then looked to the other men sitting at the bar and said, “He’s going to hurt it.”

“No,” the acne-scarred leader said. “He won’t.”

Tito looked at the cartel members. Where did they come from? He shook his head. The drug in his drink was kicking into overtime. He tried to stand but collapsed again.

“Hermanito,” the acne-scarred leader said, “you’re a fool. You know what December 28^th is? It is our fool’s day. And you, hermanito, are the biggest of fools. You didn’t believe them when they said not to come to my country, didn’t believe me when I told you about Gonzalo, and didn’t believe me when I said he gave us the gift of invisibility. But he is old now, hermanito.”

Tito felt his eyes grow heavy, his limbs relax. The cartel members lit up cigarettes and ordered drinks. Gloria said her two dogs back home were probably missing her.

TITO AWOKE ON THE ranch as dawn streaked the eastern ridge with red and yellow clouds. He saw the muscular man bent over him, holding Tito’s head up several inches off the ground. Tito felt an extreme pain in his neck. He cried out and could not understand why his body would not move. He realized that he was in the field where his friends had been murdered. He looked for the statue but could not locate it. Then he realized it had been taken down. A stone pedestal remained on which the object had rested.

Tito screamed as his neck seemed to have been torn open. His eyes moved to his wrists which he saw were tied to what looked like tent pegs at either side of him. He looked down and saw his legs were tied in the same fashion. The muscular man said something to someone. He sounded content. There were people behind Tito but he couldn’t see them. They began to give applause.

The muscular man rose and Tito’s head fell backwards, blood gushing from the back of his neck. Tito could now see the people behind him. It was the cartel. They were all dressed in suits, their hair carefully combed. Gloria was there as well, wearing a white dress. She had fixed her hair so that it fell in curls over her shoulders. The muscular man laughed. He cradled something in his arms. Tito realized that it had come from his neck. The muscular man held it up for all to see, a small wooden child with the head of a goat. The muscular man pulled a large dagger from his belt and knelt close to Tito, plunging the blade deep into Tito’s chest while Tito saw the lifeless wooden child with the goat’s head lick its lips in anticipation.

Tito smiled. A tear ran down his face. He felt strangely proud as the sight faded from his mind and as his head tilted glassy-eyed to the side. It was his after all. It was new to the world, to be fed by a world of fools. And it was his.