Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  They sit idle, the driver eyeing him in the rearview mirror. He’s thin and has bags under his eyes. There’s a small green Mary statuette on the dashboard, as well as a cluster of bright feathers from a parrot or something. The driver looks from Howard, to the street, to Howard again. An empty bus passes, the shirtless conductor leaning out a window like a silent banshee. Howard puts his fingers under the door handle. “Makati Ave, you know the way?” he asks in a polite voice.

  The driver smiles, revealing a mouth full of nubby gray teeth. He switches the meter on with a skinny finger and bright red numbers spring up on the dash.

  “Meter plus fifty, boss?”

  “Meter plus a hundred if you get me home soon,” Howard says. The bargaining puts him at ease.

  “Very nice,” the driver says. “Very nice of you.” He smiles again and eases onto the accelerator. The taxi continues in reverse, back to the intersection with the dogs, and then turns left hard. The animals are startled and chase after, nipping at the air behind the tires. Howard watches them out the back window—watches the bay lights fall away and then disappear as they make another turn. This doesn’t feel like the most direct way, but what the hell. Obscure shortcuts are a point of pride with these taxi drivers. And if he’s trying to run up the meter—who cares? Howard can afford it.

  Hon calls back a few blocks later, and they speak as the car weaves through side streets. Richard in London wants figures on materials and labor for the restaurant, and Hon can’t talk him out of sending his own cocksucker architect down. “You back home yet?” he asks. “I need the kind of nasty message that only Howie can write.”

  “I’m not back yet, but I can see Makati up ahead,” Howard says, lying just a bit. Makati is actually to his right, receding. This driver is pushing his luck.

  “Are you all the way out in Ermita again?” Hon asks. “I told you not to take the Aussies to that place. It’s not classy.”

  “The Aussies didn’t mind,” Howard says.

  “Well shit. What am I supposed to say to Richard?”

  Howard tells Hon to open up his e-mail. He dictates a nasty message.

  “Fuck me. That’s filthy,” Hon says, delighted. “Send!”

  “Can I go now?”

  The taxi hits a speed bump too fast and Howard lurches forward and drops his phone. It lands on the floor mat, illuminating the bottom of the cab. Reaching down, he sees that the floor is blanketed with green feathers—the same feathers that decorate the dash. When he puts the phone back to his ear he finds that Hon has hung up.

  “Easy buddy,” Howard says to the driver, forcing a smile. “You’ll get what’s on the meter plus a hundred no problem. No need to rush so much.”

  The driver sniffs. He rubs his face with his wrist. They come to a red light and stop beside a little white cathedral in stucco Gothic style—Iglesia Ni Kristo written in grand yellow letters above the door. The light turns green, but the taxi does not move. The driver looks down each street, as though making up his mind, and then turns. Makati is ahead of them now, the skyline blurred by smog. He must have decided to stop jerking Howard around.

  The road widens and it begins to drizzle. A cloth billboard advertising skin whitener whips and drips like a sail. The taxi driver tailgates a brightly decorated jeepney—the only other vehicle on the road. Even through the rain Howard can clearly read Ethel, Gemini and Bless Our Trip hand-painted on the rear mudflaps. Then, just as they emerge from under a series of overpasses, just as Howard recognizes the pink obelisk of his hotel not two miles away, the driver turns onto a quiet residential side street.

  “Enough,” Howard says, his patience at its end. “Makati Ave is back that way. You want your hundred, or not?”

  The driver ignores him. The rain thickens and the taxi slows. It shudders to a sudden halt beneath a broken streetlight. The driver stares at the wheel. He stomps on the clutch and shifts jerkily through each gear.

  “You hear me?”

  “Something’s wrong,” the driver says.

  “Yeah? What?”

  The driver gives a kind of shrug. “Broken,” he says. He scratches his cheeks and upper lip. He looks out the windows. The rain sounds like stones on the dented taxi roof. The street is quiet and dark, little town-houses on each side sealed up like ship hulls against the ocean.

  “It’s not broken,” Howard says, unable to believe he has to go through this bullshit again. He’s been robbed twice this year already—three times if you count pickpockets. “Let’s get this over with,” he says. “How much do you want?”

  The driver smiles sheepishly and says: “Wait. I fix it.” Without another word he jumps out and hurries across the street. He pounds hard on a closed door, yelling something in Tagalog, getting soaked by the rain.

  Howard looks out the back for signs of life, but everything is empty. He calls the police and tells them he’s getting robbed. No, he hasn’t been hurt. He doesn’t think he will be. Where is he? In a taxi. Somewhere north of Makati—he can see the Shangri-La from here. The license plate? Hold on, he’ll check.

  Howard puts a foot out of the taxi, keeping an eye on the driver as he does so. The banged-upon door suddenly opens and light pours out from inside, illuminating a corridor of raindrops. A large, rectangular face juts out into the rain. The two men speak and look back at the taxi. The large man disappears and emerges seconds later with a length of PVC pipe in his hand. Nausea hits Howard hard. This is not a petty-theft situation. The depth to which he’s misjudged it opens below him like a hole in the asphalt. He has just enough time to slip his foot back inside and lock all four doors before the driver and his enormous friend reach the cab. They try each of the handles, tugging hard and cursing. Howard realizes that the driver, in his haste, has left the keys in the ignition. He reaches and stretches, but it’s no use. He’s too big to slide up to the wheel; he’ll never fit between the seats.

  “They’re going to kill me,” Howard says to the dispatcher. “They’re going to kill me.”

  “You’ll have to stop shouting,” the dispatcher says. “I can’t understand you.”

  But it’s not Howard that’s shouting. It’s the men outside the taxi. Saying: “Open the door or we open you!”

  “I’m sorry sir,” the dispatcher says, “will you please stay on the line, please?”

  Howard does not stay on the line. He hangs up and begins scrolling through numbers again. Why are there so fucking many of them? Why save the numbers for three florists? Why not just pick his favorite florist—would that be so hard? Outside the big man kicks Howard’s door and the taxi bobbles on its shocks. It gets hard for Howard to see because his contacts are hurting him and because he’s crying a lot. His big, stupid fingers have trouble finding the buttons.

  The large man kicks the cab again, and then whips the rear passenger window with the length of PVC pipe. Howard puts his free hand on his ear to block out the sound of cracking glass. Through his tears he finds Benny’s number and calls again. It rings once, twice, how many times before he hears his son’s recorded voice? “Sorry! I’m away right now. I’ll do my best to hit you back!” The window shatters before the beep. Chips of glass and raindrops rush onto his lap. A big hand reaches in, opens the door from the inside and grabs the phone from him. The men pull Howard out into the street. He tries to land on his elbows so he won’t cut his palms up on the glass. They whip the pipe along his back, and legs. He pushes himself up and the pipe catches his cheek, breaking skin and knocking the molars loose. “You don’t need to,” he tries to shout, his hands in the air to demonstrate how he’s not fighting. “You don’t need to.” They hit his hands and the air around his hands. They hit him in the ribs and on his knees. They stop for moment and talk to each other—or rather the big one gets talked at by the little one. Howard closes his eyes and opens them. He feels rain, and glass, and everything falling.

  Chapter 6

  THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE

  There was something that Benicio had never told
Alice about his mother. He’d shared it with no one, not even with Howard back when the two of them still spoke—not just regularly, but with warmth and eagerness. His mother was off. She thought she could see the future in her dreams. She believed it the same way that she believed that communion wine became the blood of Christ before passing through her lips, which is to say, with every ounce of her conviction. Benicio couldn’t remember when she’d first told him about what she called her gift, but it must have been when he was very young because for the longest time he’d believed it, too. Maybe that was why he’d never told the story to Alice—or to his father, which was conceivable now that the two were speaking again, however tentatively—because there was no way of telling it without including the fact that until his middle teens he’d believed something so foolish. Something that belonged to comic books or the summer movies based on them. He’d believed in superpowers.

  His mother insisted that her dreams weren’t just symbolic premonitions open to interpretation—Benicio had since come to find that Catholics, and Latinas chief among them, were especially skilled at this kind of kitchen-table fortune-telling—but visions of real people in real places doing things that would come to pass days, months and even years after the night they first marched into her sleeping head. He remembered a sunless afternoon, his mother tearing plastic wrap and translucent skin from a store-bought chicken, telling him with a rapt expression the story of how she met Howard in a dream before meeting him in San José. “It was three years,” she said. “Three years before I ever saw him, and I knew exactly what he would look like. I wasn’t even properly sleeping. It happened during a nap.” She dropped a handful of skin into the wastebasket and began to cut the bird in half with a knife from the drawer Benicio wasn’t allowed to open, working the heels of her palms over the back of the blade, throwing her shoulders into the job. They were just back from Christmas with his aunts, and as usual she returned from Costa Rica firmly resolved to cook more often and to experiment less while doing so. Benicio, who had been watching from the doorway, pulled up a stool and put his elbows on the cool marble slab of their kitchen island.

  “Mom,” he said, trying to use his most reasonable and grown-up voice. “We’re back home now. Can you please speak in English?”

  His mother let out a grunt as the blade finally struck the plastic cutting board, the chicken halves jumping a bit as they separated. “You’re making a joke?” she asked. “You’re trying to be funny?” She aimed the knife, handle first, in his direction. “After the last two weeks you think you need less practice than you already get? Today, all day, English is worse than Chinese. I don’t speak it.”

  His mother returned to the chicken, first snapping the thighs between her knuckles and then using a fillet knife to cut away the flesh and tendons holding them limply to the body. “I was napping,” she continued after a time, “on the bus. It was a hot bus, a long trip into San José. Your abuela had bought me a lace blouse for my interview and I sat hunched over it, trying to keep it from wrinkling, making sure no dirt or cigarette ash could stain the collar. And I just fell asleep.”

  She dropped the chicken pieces, still bigger and with more bones than Benicio liked, into a deep saucepan and washed her hands with water so hot that it steamed. “Your father was alone, in a nice new suit.” She dried her hands and smiled, briefly. “A gray one. He’d had a spill, and knocked over a tray of drinks at a restaurant. He was blushing awfully.” She placed the cutting board in the sink and faced him, the shiny slab of marble between them. “It was a short, plain dream. The bus stopped and I woke up. But I knew it. I knew he was the one I was going to marry. I knew a lot of things. I knew about you before you were here,” she placed a finger on her belly, “or even here,” she placed another on her forehead. “I knew that you’d come earlier than the doctors said, but that you’d be healthy. I knew you’d be a rubio at first, but that every year you’d look more and more like us. I even know …” she paused, looking sly and a bit playful, “what your daughters are going to look like.”

  Benicio wrinkled his nose. She’d teased him about this before. “No te creo.”

  “You do too,” she said, shifting her weight in a way that seemed girlish. “You’ll have two of them. The first won’t be born until you start to turn gray here,” she reached across the island and stroked the hair over his right ear, “and here,” she ran her finger just above his cold-chapped upper lip. “Que te pasa, mi hijo?” she asked after a long pause. “Why would you wait so long? I would have loved to know my grandchildren.”

  It wasn’t until after Benicio graduated high school that he accepted how full of crap his mother was. How could she possibly be able to see the future when she couldn’t even see what was going on right in front of her—couldn’t see, for example, that she was being humiliated by a cheating husband. And if she really could see the future, then why would she have stepped out into that crosswalk just as the girl behind the wheel of the oncoming sedan was about to have a convulsive seizure. Obviously she hadn’t seen herself in dreams the way the paramedics had seen her, pinned between a bumper and a brick wall. Or the way Benicio had seen her when he was called in to identify the body, lying on a metal table with half of her face and all of her body draped in blue blankets that he was instructed not to move for his own sake. If she could see the future she would have scheduled the salon before grocery shopping and not after. She would have crossed a block up from where she did, or a block down, or five blocks down. She would have gotten a divorce and moved to another city, maybe even back to San José. He would have visited her twice a year and he would have begrudged her nothing.

  BENICIO’S DREAMS, like his mother’s, were the most typical sort of nonsense. Like the one about snow falling among palms and vines on Corregidor Island that he had for a second time as he dozed in a hard chair with torn and taped-over upholstery in the Osaka airport and that he forced out of his mind as soon as he awoke. His chair faced a big picture window that overlooked crisscrossing runways, and warm light poured through it from a sun that was still refusing to set after twenty long hours. Someone a few seats over from Benicio greeted him with an accented “good evening.” He turned to see that it was an old man, slim and bald, draped in orange robes. A monk. Benicio ran a sleeve across his chin and returned the greeting. He checked his watch and saw that only ten minutes had passed since he’d decided to nap. Osaka was the last of his three layovers on the way to the Philippines, and though it was the shortest it certainly didn’t feel that way.

  His history of the Philippines lay open on his lap, but even though he was just a few chapters away from finishing—he’d left the Second World War behind and was now deep into the Marcos dictatorship—he was too exhausted to read. He shoved it into his bag and got up to stretch his stiff legs. He began a slow lap around the terminal. Even though the roaming charges were sure to be outrageous, he dialed Alice on his cell phone. She wasn’t home, so he left her a message, keeping track of how many times he said: “I love you.” He limited it to two.

  She hadn’t stayed over the night before he left. This by itself wasn’t all that unusual, she tended to spend at least one night a week at her place, but still it caught him off guard. The evening seemed to go as well as any other, which is to say that they play fought just hard enough to keep themselves entertained without graduating to real fighting. Alice copied the details of his itinerary into a yellow steno pad and helped him pack, filling his suitcase with neatly folded clothes still warm from the dryer. Benicio tried his best to appear somber as they did this, but the truth was that he’d become more excited about his trip to the Philippines than he’d expected, or cared to admit to. It started on the afternoon they picked up his dive gear and had gained momentum since. Squeezing his regulator, fins and BCD into his mesh duffel bag brought back that comforting and almost forgotten smell of neoprene and salt, a stink that would stick to his skin and hair for days after returning from a dive trip with his father. They used to go out twice
a year, once during summer holidays and again over Christmas, always returning to the same Costa Rican resort on the Gulf of Papagayo. For a long time Benicio had only allowed himself to remember what had happened on their last trip—the sight of his father naked, hunched over, bare brown feet sprouting out from between his thighs, their soles to the ceiling—but now, as he tried his best to roll up his wetsuit, fonder memories snuck past. Like the flutter that danced through his chest as he sat on the edge of the dive boat, mask on and mouthpiece in as he awaited the final OK sign from the dive master before rolling backward, fins over head, into the cold water. Or the sinking, nauseous satisfaction he would take in slow-motion underwater acrobatics, spinning upside-down with a single scissor kick, coasting low over the reef like a cargo plane over high trees. Since making his reservations he’d been reluctant to think of this trip as a vacation and wary about raising his expectations too high, but despite his best efforts both were starting to happen.

  Alice cooked up a big pot of soup once they were done packing, putting in all the things that she said would spoil while he was away. They ate in the living room in front of a muted television. She was quiet, and he figured he’d better say something. “I’m going to be really careful. And I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Alice nodded. “It’s not like you’re going to Iraq,” she said. “Take it easy. Have fun. And try not to be a jerk.” This stung him, and she noticed. “What I mean is, go easy on him. I don’t know a lot about it, but I know your dad wants this trip to go well.”

  “So do I,” he said.

  “That’s good. Because it’s important for you. It’s important to have some family in your life.”

  Benicio wondered for a moment if she was fishing for him to say something like: You’re all I need. But then, thinking about it, he decided she wasn’t. That’s not at all what she wanted to hear. “It will go well,” he said. “He and I both want it to.”