Suicide Woods by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy [Percy, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-105-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Suicide Woods

Once a month, we shrug on our backpacks and follow Mr. Engel along the trails stitching the four hundred acres of firs and hemlocks and cedars in Forest Park, which everyone calls Suicide Woods. This is on the outskirts of Portland, in the Tualatin Mountains, and within its canyons we have learned to traverse a series of switchbacks, to drop out of sunlight and into shadow. The honk and grumble of the city are replaced by the rush of Balch Creek. The wind never stops blowing here, damp and cool, shivering the branches and hushing our ears. When we talk, we whisper.

At night, some say, ghosts hang like rags in the trees. But even in the daytime we find bodies so often that Mr. Engel seems to have them marked on a map. They lie in beds of moss. They dangle from branches. We find them alone and together, clothed and naked.

The forest is so thick that weeks can pass before the dead are discovered. We leave the trails and hike ten feet apart, parting the sword ferns with walking sticks, peering into blackberry brambles. When we hear the angry buzz of flies or the crack of a gunshot, when we see vultures roosting, when we come upon a face as pale as a mushroom gaping from the undergrowth, we clump together and circle the body and hold hands and cry.

Mr. Engel says it’s good to cry. He says that it’s like lancing a boil, that it gets out the poisons stewing inside us. He says we need to face our emotions, and that’s why he takes us here, to share with us the reality of death—the bloated faces, the soiled underwear, the skin the shade of a green-black thunderhead. He tries so hard. He wants to make us better.

There are ten or twelve or fifteen of us, our number ever fluctuating, because one of us might be in the hospital or in rehab or curled up in a corner clutching a tattered doll. Or one of us could very well be dead. Death is always a possibility. That’s what unites us. That’s what drew us to Mr. Engel’s website—and later his home, where he hosts his weekly meetings. In all of us there is a want to drink antifreeze, to dive in front of a semi, to bring butcher knives to our wrists.

Mr. Engel wears Chuck Taylors, tight black jeans with the hems rolled up, skull T-shirts, thrift store cardigans. He dresses like he’s in his twenties, but his lined face and spotted hands might indicate he’s in his sixties. “Sadness ages you,” he says, and he is right; though our ages vary from nineteen to seventy-two, we all suffer from the bent faces and collapsed postures of the elderly.

His wrists carry white lines on them. We are all similarly marked. There is Jean, whose neck healed crookedly after she hanged herself. There is Sam, his skull dented and bald-patched from the bullet still seeded deep in his brain.

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