Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  It was hard not to get caught up in Bobby’s energy, and though he’d hardly touched his lambanog, Benicio felt a little tipsy. He felt as though his life—or at least his night—had become as opulent as the ballroom itself; filled with light and crystal and music and melodrama. It was exciting.

  “I’m going to text him the good news,” Bobby said, removing a cell phone from his jacket pocket. “You should know that he’ll probably want to go someplace more booze-oriented than this. You can still bail out if you need to.”

  “No,” Benicio said, “I’d love to come along.”

  THEY FINISHED THEIR LAMBANOGS while they waited for Charlie to finish schmoozing. Benicio got cozy on his stool and watched as a song ended, giving dancing guests an opportunity to sit and the sitting guests an opportunity to get up and dance. The instructors all stayed standing. As a new song began a woman in the crowd caught his attention and held it. A Filipina in a green dress stood near the edge of the dance floor, tapping lightly on shoulders as she tried to get by. She had black hair and skin a shade darker than most other women in the room. Her dress shimmered a bit as she turned, clinging loosely to her body and to the full swell of her small breasts. He watched her as she went, taken. Not just taken—turned on. She was heading for the bar.

  The woman slid into the open space between him and Bobby. She leaned across the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention. The back of her dress was open and Benicio watched her muscles and shoulder blades move beneath the surface of her skin. Green fabric hung low around her hips—so low that he guessed she must be using some kind of tape to make sure the top of her ass stayed hidden—and then met again in a metal clasp at the back of her neck. The bartender came down to their end and her dress moved as she leaned farther forward to order a gin. He asked for her key and she patted down the sides of the dress, as though there were pockets there, and told him a room number.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t charge to a room without a key. You have cash?”

  The woman snapped at him in Tagalog and to Benicio’s surprise the bartender, who’d been so patient with Bobby, snapped right back at her. She sighed with theatrical exasperation and looked as though she were about to storm off. It could have been the lambanog, or the bright, buzzing feeling that his father’s friends had given him, but Benicio felt something misguided rising inside him. He reached into his pocket, took hold of his key card, and paid for her drink. “She strikes again,” Bobby said, with surprising humorlessness.

  The woman in the green dress didn’t look at either of them—she just watched as ice tumbled into her glass. When the bartender handed over the gin, she turned to Benicio.

  “Thanks,” she said a little flatly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” He couldn’t tell if she was slurring, or if it was just her English.

  “Then you shouldn’t have,” Bobby said. He avoided looking at her with the kind of practiced disdain that older siblings have for younger ones. They must have known each other.

  Benicio, for his part, did not avoid looking at her. She stood so close that her breath cooled his cheeks. Her face had an odd, beautiful economy to it. Her lips, painted chrome red and slightly pursed, the rouge on her cheeks, her plucked eyebrows, the single strand of black hair tumbling down and dividing her expression into unequal halves; they were all collected with a loose precision. Every part of her seemed to fit together like shaved bits of colored glass with no spaces in between and no overlap. She was stunning.

  “Who is your friend, and why is he looking at me like this?” she asked. “Do I know him?”

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Bobby asked.

  “I’m busy for the next …” she held her naked wrist up to her face for a while and stared at it. “I’ll be done soon. Will you still be here, new friend?”

  “No,” Benicio said, gripping his empty glass like an actor grips a prop. “I won’t.”

  She shrugged, took her gin in hand and made her way back through the crowd. It wasn’t an effortless or graceful exit. She took her time, sidestepping the jostling shoulders, trying her best not to spill the gin. Benicio couldn’t look away. He saw her sit at a far banquet table next to an older white man who wore a dark turtleneck against the air-conditioning. He leaned in when she arrived, took the gin from her, and gave her a kiss on the cheek that wasn’t fatherly. He was drunk, but not sloppy drunk.

  “What’s your budget?” Bobby asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you loving. She’s not the most expensive, but she won’t be cheap. At least not in this economy. You’re interested?”

  Benicio looked back at him. “I couldn’t be less,” he said.

  BUT THAT WAS A LIE. As Charlie returned to announce, very sadly, that Renny would not be joining them, as he led them out of the hotel, as they caught a taxi in the hot, dark night, Benicio kept thinking of the woman in the green dress. He felt foolish about the drink thing, but not so foolish that he wasn’t still, twenty minutes after the fact, deeply turned on. She reminded him, vividly, of the first woman he’d ever loved. Or at least, the first woman he ever consistently fantasized about—his Costa Rican dive instructor. He remembered watching her pull her wetsuit off under the rush of an outdoor showerhead more clearly than he remembered any of the dives themselves. She was from the Gulf of Papagayo and taught the introductory courses at one of the resorts his father helped manage. At fifteen he’d been just old enough to get an adult certification, and for the next three years fantasies about fucking his instructor in the tank room beside the deep but narrow training pool became an important part of every orgasm he had—including those he arrived at with a high school girlfriend whom he no longer spoke to. The instructor was, in retrospect, not amazing looking—certainly nothing close to the woman in the green dress. She was taller than Benicio by a few inches, she had a broad back, a mannish jaw and thick thighs. She seemed perpetually short of breath and her bust heaved even when she was relaxed. But in her one-piece bathing suit and cutoff denim shorts she was, to teenage Benicio, beyond desirable.

  His father noticed him staring during their first classroom session and said: “I don’t blame you. She’s a hottie. You should stay after. Chat her up or something.”

  “I can’t talk to her,” he’d said, shocked. Because she was, after all, an adult. And he was a kid. And she was Costa Rican. And he was pretend Costa Rican. They were hardly the same species.

  “You can do whatever you want,” his father said. “I tell you what, before our next class I’ll put a good word in for you.”

  And he did.

  Chapter 11

  EFREM’S CURSE

  Efrem Khalid Bakkar remembers it all. He remembers drifting. An unpainted badjao boat. Running aground on the island that would become home. It was a bad tide, overhigh, stranding parrotfish and jellies on the doorsteps of thatched huts. The waves carried his boat up past the tree line and left it near the center of the village; a new house sprung up overnight. Efrem remembers noontime, villagers returning from their dry cliffs to account for washed-out gardens and drowned hens. From his hiding place he watched them circle the boat, listened to them wonder aloud how long the dead aboard had been that way. The old woman who would be his mother was first to climb in. “No rice or fish,” she said, “maybe they starved.” A still older man, he would be Uncle, shook his head and fingered little round holes in the knotted decking.

  “Not starvation,” he said. “Army.”

  Everybody nodded. Their village lay some miles due north of Tubigan, itself north of Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago. The short year since martial law had brought gunboats to this place, wakes crisscrossing like chicken wire on the strait. Manileño soldiers inspected cargo and crew. Nervous at the prospect of actually discovering Moro fighters, they were known to shoot out of panic.

  Nothing to be done.

  The villagers uncircled and saw to their houses, mending pressed bamboo with palm twine. It
wasn’t until dusk, when they pulled the dead badjao from their boat so as to better salvage the wood and nails, that they discovered Efrem under burlap in the stern. He screamed and so did they. The old woman, new mother, jumped aboard and took him up. She laid him on a cot above her still-wet floor and fed him starfish.

  Talk of curses started that night, before moonrise. The villagers didn’t know he spoke their language and mingled just beyond the walls of his new mother’s home. Boy from a deadboat was no good luck, they agreed. Lying there for weeks while the sun turned his people into leather, eating God-knows-what. No good luck at all. His new mother and uncle talked it over while he feigned sleep, and they agreed with the frightened neighbors. Efrem—the intended name of a neverborn that his adoptive mother carried for eight or nine months as many years ago, a hand-me-down name that replaced his old but not forgotten one—was cursed.

  Days later, when he grew stronger and chased after children old enough to be playmates, they said the same thing. They called him deadluck and threw razor-clams at him, defending their tidepool kingdom. “Your new mother’s so old she’s burned up down there,” they jeered. “And your uncle’s the worst fisherman in three provinces. Risking us all because they’ve got nothing to lose.” Efrem answered with shells of his own, sending even the oldest boys home with bleeding heads. His mother promised theirs that Efrem would be beat for it. But she didn’t have the heart, and his uncle didn’t dare.

  TODAY EFREM SITS IN A JEEP as it makes slow progress from the Fuentes family plantation to Davao City. It is thirty-one years since he ran aground north of Tubigan to be adopted by the old, childless woman. In that time the dictator has been exiled, has died, and has had his family’s request that he be buried in the heroes’ cemetery declined. The war in the south is mostly on hold and Western Mindanao has autonomy. Though no longer master soldier-killer among rebels, nor master rebel-killer among soldiers, Efrem is still cursed. He’s felt alone in this until today. But Reynato, steering with one hand and sucking his unlit cigar, explains that they’re all freaks—all bruhos. Every member of Task Force Ka-Pow has some kind of magic.

  “This motherfucker is the worst,” Reynato says, jabbing a thumb at shirtless, rainwater dappled Elvis. “His trick’ll make you shit, when you see it. He’s a mountain boy of Baguio, the real outdoorsy kind with not a little Ifugao in his blood. He’s loyal as a dog, and smart as one too. Probably because he is a dog. Turns himself into one just like you or I might snap our fingers.” Reynato snaps his fingers to demonstrate how quick it is, and easy. “It’s a deep act. Elvis can do almost anything you like providing he’s seen one before. A bird. A centipede. Took him to the Manila zoo month before last just so he could learn giraffe and emu.” Reynato twists around and seems annoyed by the dumb, blank way Efrem stares at him. “Come on Elvis, show Mohammed I’m no liar. Shock us with exotic.”

  Elvis smiles. His orderly white teeth part to reveal the healthy pink insides of his mouth. A long and pointed tongue emerges and goes rigid in what looks like a taunt. A bulge appears in Elvis’s throat and it moves up like backward gulping. A spider, big as a mango seed, climbs out of Elvis’s mouth and marches down his whitening tongue. Reaching the end, it dangles from the tip by a thread of spit-dripping silk, lowering itself down to where Elvis’s lap should be but isn’t, because there is no Elvis, just a spider, big as a mango seed, sitting alone on the vast empty rear passenger seat.

  If the men in the jeep appreciate the trick, they don’t let on. Lorenzo crosses his arms over his chest and puffs air out of his cheeks, mustache aflutter. Reynato, hardly watching the road, moves right along with the magical introductions. He grabs the gnarled forearm of the scar-covered man in the front seat. “Racha’s act isn’t so fancy, but it’s just as useful. This poor son of a bitch has the worst luck in the world, and the very best luck in the world, all at once. He’s our one and only shit magnet, and believe me, before too long you’ll learn to love him the way I do. As members of Ka-Pow we get some doom thrown our way. I promise you right now that one of us will get hurt. Lucky for us, that person is always Racha. He’s been shot more times than I’ve been laid—burned up, sliced, dragged on a rope behind horses and Toyotas. So much that he doesn’t have an inch of baby-skin left—even his belly looks like ballsack. Racha will protect you whether he likes it or not, all the badness meant for you will land on him. And, worst of all, he always lives through it.”

  His eyes on Efrem as they are, Reynato doesn’t see the knee-deep pothole ahead. They take it hard and Racha, unbelted, pitches face-first into the windshield. A trickle of purple blood unfolds, rolling thick down the bridge of his nose. He checks himself in the side mirror and wipes the blood off in a business-as-usual sort of way.

  “What about me?” Lorenzo is reticent in the backseat, arms still tight across his chest, good ear cheated toward Reynato.

  “Saving least for last,” Reynato says, his smile not bereft of affection, but not full of it either. “If you’ve ever seen the act of a cheese-ass stage-magician, you’ve already got a fair idea of Lorenzo’s sorry talents. He’s a treasure at parties. I’m talking the full package—balloons in animal shapes, white rabbits, sawing a full-grown woman in half and putting her back together again. He can untie tricky knots, make fizzy water come out of flowers and even pluck coins out of a birthday-boy’s ear. I know it sounds impossible, and call me a liar if you must, but it’s God’s honest truth. The man’s an asset, I tell you.”

  Lorenzo assumes a shocked, offended, put out expression. “Ha ha ha,” he says. “You don’t ever tell it right.” Turning to Efrem: “I’ll show you myself.” He uncrosses his arms and makes a show of demonstrating, with pinched fingers, that there’s nothing up his nonexistent sleeves. Then he reaches into the folds of his transparent rain poncho and produces a tattered deck of cards. “Pick one,” he says, fanning the deck.

  Efrem picks a card. The designs on the back are floral; intricate blue and white, like the inlay accompanying Arabic verse in the mosque his uncle used to take him to. The card is a king of hearts. Lorenzo snatches it and returns it to the deck. He shuffles in a vigorous, complicated way that makes the cards travel up and down his forearm, then along his shoulders and finally back into his left hand. He removes his straw cap, dumps the cards inside, shakes them about and plucks one out. Efrem stares blankly at the king of hearts.

  Reynato laughs from the driver’s seat. “What did I tell you? Damn near indispensable. Can you imagine this boy in a gunfight?”

  His chuckling cuts short when a bird strikes the base of the windshield, slides up its length and topples dead into the open-backed jeep. Lorenzo picks up the bird—a warbler just passing through—and opens its thin beak with his fingernails. He squeezes the bird and a playing card, rolled tight as a cigarette, pops wetly out of its gullet. He hands the card to Efrem, who unrolls it. It’s the king of hearts—but now the illustrated king is Efrem’s own spitting image, leering up at him like a shadow self.

  “Now you’re just showing off,” Reynato says, sounding proud.

  Efrem looks from the card to Lorenzo. “How did you do that?”

  “Shit, don’t Moros do birthdays? If I say how, it’ll ruin—”

  “No … that’s not …” Efrem glances up at Racha, still bleeding lightly, at Elvis, who is no longer a spider, and asks the same question he’s never been able to answer of himself. “How are you this way?”

  “How did we get our magic, you mean?” Lorenzo asks, not relinquishing the spotlight. “That’s easy, I got mine from the people. From the People Power Revolution. I’m a child of EDSA, born in the last hour before Dictator Marcos left our soil aboard a GI-Joe helio. Mom, a lefty, left my sisters at home for a February march; never mind she was nine months full of me. She stacked sandbags, laid down flat in front of tanks and led seven million with her rendition of “Bayan Ko.” I was born to the sound of cheering, the sound of Cardinal Sin on Radio Veritas, the sound confetti makes in your hair.” He puts on a cont
emplative look, sort of sad-happy. “The way I see it, People Power has a special kind of meaning for me. Can’t help but think I represent—”

  “Don’t listen to his bullshit,” Reynato interrupts. “He’s teasing you, Mohammed. People Power has nothing to do with it. You want the truth?” He pauses to glance back through the rearview. “We are the way we are on account of gamma rays. The ones we all got exposed to in space. Out on the Balut Thirteen, first Pinoys to land on the moon. Maybe you saw us up there, with those eyes of yours. Planted flags all over that motherfucker.”

  The bruhos of Task Force Ka-Pow bray wildly, and they roll on. The road turns to asphalt. Trees thin. They hit light traffic and Reynato switches on a siren to get by.

  THAT EVENING THEY ARRIVE at what Reynato calls a safehouse, but it isn’t a house at all, it’s a suite in the luxurious Secret Valley Hotel in Davao City. Lorenzo and Racha claim beds first, leaving Efrem to drop his bedroll on the floor. Still full from lunch, he follows his new friends downstairs and across the street to a dingy grill operated by a pink, peeling Australian. A thick waitress takes their order and returns Lorenzo’s sex-eyes. After they eat, Ka-Pow orchestrates a party that they are the life of. Reynato sings with the house band on stage while Elvis commandeers the drums. Efrem accepts a single mug of warm beer—his first—but stops drinking when he discovers a raw pork cutlet floating near the bottom. He rushes to the bathroom with a finger down his throat. Lorenzo blames the bartender for the prank, so Efrem puts the bartender on the floor. The police are called and Reynato talks them down, autographing their billy clubs with a fancy pen that has glitter in the ink. They return to the Secret Valley an hour before dawn, where they’re told by sleepy telephone voices that the kitchen is closed, and there will be no room service. Lorenzo, a man of solutions, produces a white rabbit and a brace of Mindanao doves from his straw hat. Racha butchers them in the bathtub, Elvis roasts them over sinkfire, and they all have something to eat come breakfast time.