“This is so weird,” Pita said in awe. “I mean, look at all the dolls. They’re everywhere.”

I was looking. And they were everywhere, literally. They adorned not only the trees but fence posts, railings, clotheslines, even the collection of ramshackle huts—especially the huts. They were almost buried beneath the dolls.

“They’re like…dead babies or something,” she added.

“Hey, I like that one with no shirt,” Nitro said. “She got curves just the way I like them.” He made a slithering motion with his hands.

I said, “Can’t get any living, breathing women, Muscles?”

“Shut up, Jack Goff.”

“Ugh,” Jesus said, pointing to a doll nailed to one of the pier’s timber piles. “Are those maggots?”

We shuffled closer for a better view.

“They’re ladybugs,” I said.

“They’re not ladybugs, Jack,” Jesus grumbled.

They weren’t, I realized. But they definitely weren’t maggots. They were black, beetle-like, with red diamonds on their backs. However, I could see why Jesus might have thought they were maggots from a distance. They were a squiggling mass that covered much of the doll’s torso and half its face. They were clumped together particularly thickly over the doll’s right eye. In fact, I think the eye might have been missing, and they were spilling out of the empty cavity in the head.

Pepper produced from his bag an SLR camera with a big lens and told us to give him some room so he could take a picture.

We started down the dirt path. After a brief congress in Spanish, Jesus, Nitro, Pita, and Elizaveta turned right over a crude bridge. I continued straight ahead, glad to be on my own.

Birds chirped and squawked all around me from hidden roosts, while cicadas put up a wall of cryptic noise. The heat had left the afternoon, and now I found myself almost cold. The forest was still and dark. I walked slowly, swatting absently at flies and turning my head this way and that, as if it were on a swivel. Dolls decorated nearly every tree. Most appeared to be secured to the trunks with nails or wire, though some were tied to branches by their hair.