Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  Four rounds later Katrina turned to Benicio and started saying “karaoke” over and over. She shook him lightly by the shoulders, as though he didn’t understand, but needed to. They split the tab five ways and then, on their way out, Benicio and Ping swung by the men’s room. There was a line, so they waited together in awkward silence. From where they stood they could see Charlie’s table. One of the dwarf waiters had been lifted onto the tabletop, where he kicked and spun in a stubby impersonation of Riverdance. Everybody at the table howled. Benicio chuckled, and rolled his eyes.

  “What?” Ping asked.

  Benicio shrugged, and gestured to the dwarf on the table. “That.”

  “What about that?”

  “Well … come on. I mean, this was fun and all, but that’s pretty skeezy, isn’t it? I mean, this whole place is exploitive. It’s like a carnival from the fifties.”

  “Ah-ha,” Ping said, again stroking his well-groomed beard. “Hey, do me a favor. Check out the picture on the men’s room door.”

  Benicio leaned out of line to get a better look at the door. On the ladies’ room there was a generic photo of a model, all cleavage and eyeballs, in a cheap wooden frame. On the men’s room there was another framed photo of a shirtless teenager on a beach. Benicio recognized the photo. It was a photo of him. His wetsuit was on up to his waist and he was posing beside his assembled dive gear. His torso was leaner and tanner than it would ever be again, and he was mugging goofily for the camera.

  “Daddy owns this place,” Ping said. “Does that make daddy exploitive and skeezy, too?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking right back at Ping. “It does.”

  OUTSIDE IT HAD SOMEHOW gotten hotter. A few car alarms were going off, and someone announced that there’d been a tremor, but Benicio hadn’t felt anything. Katrina grabbed his wrist and they ran—what she did was more of a skip, actually—through three lanes of sluggish traffic. They waited on the sunburned grassy median for Bobby, Ping and the others to catch up before running through another three. Benicio lost track of how long they walked, but he was dripping with sweat by the time they finally entered a little karaoke club with purple light and synthesized music.

  Katrina headed to the front to wait her turn at the microphone while the rest of them tumbled into soft chairs like melting ice. Bobby’s friends ordered drinks, but only so they wouldn’t be hassled about taking up a table, and continued discussing politics with hot, drunk enthusiasm. Ping sat beside Benicio and stared at him like there was something on his mind. Benicio’s hackles were still up from seeing his picture on the men’s room door, and he stared right back, inviting him to spill.

  “Where did you say you came from, again?” Ping finally asked.

  “I didn’t. My family lives in Chicago.” Even as he said this he realized it wasn’t true anymore. His mother was dead, and his father essentially lived here. “I flew out of a place called Virginia.”

  “Where in Virginia?”

  “Around the middle. It’s a smallish town in the mountains.”

  “Ah-ha.” Ping nodded for a long while, staring at Benicio, eyes fixed in his moving head. “Assume, for a moment, that I can understand an answer slightly more complex than that.”

  Benicio shifted in his chair, aware that Bobby and Baby Cookie were listening in. “Charlottesville.”

  “So, you’re a Wahoo?” Ping asked. Wahoo was slang for the collar-popping students at the University of Virginia, among whom Benicio had felt comfortable but never completely at home.

  “You know UVA?” he asked, unable to hide his surprise.

  “Bobby and I were roommates at Georgetown. Sometimes in the fall we’d rent a car and drive down to watch you guys lose football games.”

  “Small world.”

  “Actually, it’s pretty big.” Ping took a tiny swig of his beer. “So, are you as red as your state? Are you a Balikatan man?”

  “A what? I don’t speak—”

  “It’s the name of a military operation in the south,” Bobby said, looking wary.

  “It’s the name of your military operation,” Ping said, directing the your and a rigid index finger square at Benicio’s chest. “It’s been in all the newspapers for a long, long, long time.”

  “Well, I just got here,” Benicio said. “And I haven’t read any newspapers, yet.”

  “They don’t tell you about it back home?” There was surprise in Ping’s expression, but none of it in his voice. “They don’t tell you that your army has troops fighting in our country? Against our constitution. You didn’t know that? Our constitution says no armed foreign troops, but you are here, and you are foreign, and you are armed.”

  “I’m not anywhere,” Benicio said.

  “Cop-out!” Baby Cookie singsonged from across the table.

  “That’s right,” Ping said. “Everybody’s somewhere. Everybody’s either active or complicit. Are you going to tell me that you only use that harsh judgment on daddy?”

  Benicio leaned closer to him, trying his best to steady his voice. “If you’re trying to pick a fight, you’ll get one.”

  “Oh, that’s classic.” Ping was uncowed. “That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it? You sure know how to be nasty, don’t you? Tell us, nasty—why, after so many years, have you finally decided to grace your father with a visit? What caused this sudden generosity of spirit?”

  “Guys,” Bobby interrupted, “enough. It’s a happy night, and you’re all officially in violation of the no-assholes policy I’ve just instituted.”

  “We’re not being assholes,” Ping said. “We’re talking about them. There’s a difference. And don’t pretend you don’t feel the same way.”

  “You don’t know what I feel,” Bobby said. “So don’t try to guess.”

  This caused an awkward silence to descend on the table. When Ping started talking again it was, ostensibly, just about politics. Benicio went to the bathroom to wash his face and cool off, but when he got back they were still at it. Bobby’s friends hopped between topics like reliable stones in a frequently crossed stream. Iraq. Trade and unfair trade and downright evil trade. Global warming and the poisoning of the world. Iraq. All those crazy whack-jobs with wide brimmed hats who need gun racks to hold all their guns because they have so many guns. Iraq. Benicio didn’t even try to participate. He sensed with a kind of articulate drunk certainty that they wouldn’t have let him share in the warmth of a common opinion even if he had one and wanted to. Instead he watched the stage, where Katrina was in an open-mouth kiss with the microphone, mangling something from Paul Simon—diamonds on the shoals of her choose. She paused to wink at him, as if to say: I may be hamming it up now, but it’s a choice. I can also be very serious. Looking at her, he felt angry and drunk and a little turned on. He decided it was time to go.

  “Off so soon?” Ping said as Benicio got up, even though it wasn’t soon—he’d been out and drinking for hours. “I guess it’s easier not to listen, right? I mean we’ve hardly touched the good stuff. Guantánamo and—”

  He fell into shocked silence as Benicio reached over and fished the pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his black dress shirt. He opened the pack and turned it upside-down, sending the cigarettes rolling across the table, some tumbling down to the dirty floor and others waylaid in pools of condensation around the bases of warming San Miguels. “Anyone have a pen?” Benicio asked. Bobby handed him a ballpoint and he wrote, Suggestion Box, USA, on the front of the now-empty pack. He held it up so Ping could read it. “Tell you what,” he said. “Just write down everything I miss. Put it all on little strips of paper, and put the paper in the box. Then, when I go back home, I can share your thoughts with everyone. I’ll go door to fucking door.”

  Bobby, and even Baby Cookie laughed at this. Ping looked from Benicio, to the floor, to Benicio. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Those were my cigs.”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Benicio said to Bobby. “Thanks for inviting me out.”

&nbs
p; Ping stood and took him roughly by the collar. “Those were my cigs,” he said.

  “Let go of me.”

  Ping let loose a string of Tagalog words that Benicio couldn’t understand, punctuated by a spit-flecked and familiar “Puta!” He brought his open palm to Benicio’s cheek—not quite a slap, more like a loose, soggy pat. It could almost have been friendly, had they been friends. But it was all the provocation, all the excuse he needed.

  His fist came out quick, catching Ping right in the nose. Ping didn’t fall or let go of his shirt, but after Benicio punched him a second time he did both. Everybody was looking at them now. Bobby stood and started to walk Benicio to the door at a fast limp. Bong and Baby Cookie held Ping’s arms to keep him from coming after. It was hot outside the karaoke club. The night was bright, smudged and stumbling.

  THE NEXT MORNING BENICIO woke sprawled on a wicker couch with a blanket wrapped around his legs. He was in a sitting room with white tile floors, lying beneath the lazy swing of a ceiling fan. The room was spotlessly clean and filled with inward-facing chairs. Beside the wicker couch was a coffee table that was bare save a shallow bowl filled with ice cubes. The space would have felt sterile if not for the bright doggy chew-toys scattered across the floor—rubber squeakers in the shapes of hotdogs, chicken drumsticks and cats—and the crooked tilt of three landscape paintings on the wall. Benicio tried to sit up, realizing as he did how dizzy and nauseous he still felt. His whole body was slick with sweat, and the only place that felt dry was the inside of his mouth.

  An older man entered the room and even though Benicio was fully dressed he pulled the blanket up to his chest. The man wore a robe and had a newspaper tucked under his arm. He acknowledged Benicio with a small nod and then turned to the wall, grumbling a bit as he straightened each of the paintings. The man said something loud in Tagalog and Benicio heard Bobby answer from somewhere behind him. The man wrinkled his nose and left.

  “My father,” Bobby said, coming around the couch and taking a seat in a chair across from Benicio. His bandages looked slightly moist, and wilted, and he shuffled slowly without his cane. “It’s polite here to stand when an older man enters the room,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice.

  Benicio held his breath as he sat up. “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “Why would you have?” They looked at each other for a while, the fan clicking away above. The night before Bobby had insisted he come back to his family’s home in Dasmariñas. Benicio regretted it now, wishing he’d stepped out of the cab at the first red light or bottleneck and found one of his own. He could have pointed the driver to the hulking pink hotel on the dark horizon and avoided this awkwardness.

  “Hey …” he ran his throbbing hand though his hair. “I was a jerk last night.”

  Bobby just looked at him for a while. “Yeah, but they were jerks first. Ping especially. Believe me, if you’d said anything about his family he’d have reacted worse.”

  “Well, I’m really sorry.”

  “I know. You told me in the taxi. And while I was opening up the gate. And while I looked through the closet for a blanket. You’re even better at staying on message than Charlie is.” He grinned and drummed his hands on his thighs. “Is Ping all right?”

  “Yes, believe it or not he’s alive. The doctors say it was a close one, but he’ll pull through, thank Jesus.” The beat on Bobby’s thighs quickened and he slapped Benicio’s knee a few times like a high-hat. “Lighten up.”

  “I don’t feel light.”

  “Well, you’re just a short taxi ride from your hotel. It’s early yet. You can go back, sleep for a few hours, and wake up with the whole day ahead of you. Any plans?”

  “Not really. My father should be in by now. So we’ll probably just be visiting.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  Benicio paused, thinking this possibility over. “I guess I’ve kind of wanted to see what Corregidor really looks like,” he said.

  Bobby shrugged. “You could,” he said. “The tours are a little hammy, but it’s not a bad trip. Or, if you want, you could come south with us. Katrina and I are going to take a break from Charlie’s parties and do a little diving. Well, she is, at least. It’ll be an overnighter, but we’d have you back by lunchtime on Sunday. And you don’t have to worry—we’re not inviting any of the jerks. Well, actually, we’re inviting one. But that jerk is you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I don’t think so. My father will be in, I’m sure.” He reached down for his shoes at the foot of the couch and pulled them on. They felt stiff and too small, like they would after a long flight. “What kind of dogs do you have?” he asked, gesturing to the toys scattered across the floor.

  “No kind,” Bobby said. His smile slackened almost imperceptibly. “They used to be Labradors.”

  Benicio focused on tying his shoes. As he finished he heard a kind of singing drifting through the hallway. They were joined by a stocky woman in an apron. She hummed loudly to herself and went straight for the paintings on the wall. She turned each one about fifteen degrees crooked.

  “My mother,” Bobby said.

  Benicio shot to his feet a little too fast and said “Good morning,” very loud. The woman spun and said something in Tagalog.

  “English, mother,” Bobby said. His mother turned to him and said more things that Benicio couldn’t understand. “Yes,” Bobby said, “I feel much better. Mother, speak in English please.”

  She started in Tagalog again but changed midstream. “I can have the girls make some eggs, or toast, and we have juice or coffee, or they could fry sausages—”

  “Any breakfast?” Bobby cut in.

  “Nothing, thank you. I think I should get going.”

  “You’re sure?” Bobby’s mother came over and took Benicio’s bruised hand between her chubby palms. “We can’t ask you to stay? Bobby, ask him to stay.”

  “He has to leave, mother,” Bobby said. Then his tone changed a bit and he went on in Tagalog.

  “English, Robert,” she said, holding hard onto Benicio’s hand and looking up at him. “Oh dear. You know it shouldn’t be long now at all.” She leaned in and almost whispered. “Those bandages will be off before you know it.”

  “Thank you mother,” Bobby said, moving in to gently pry her hands off of Benicio. “He’s got to go.”

  Bobby walked him through the house and out to a walled-in, lush garden. A guard in a blue uniform opened the gate for them and they waited in silence for an empty taxi to roll by. Benicio examined the garden out of the corner of his eye while they waited. A sprinkler spun between piles of mowed grass. A big tree in the corner wept yellow flowers onto the roofs of two freshly painted doghouses. Bobby caught him staring, and he looked away.

  “So, why the crooked paintings?” Benicio asked.

  Bobby searched the road for empty cabs. “She does it so that devils can’t sit on the frames. If the frames are crooked, the devils slide off.” He demonstrated by holding his left forearm out and walking the fingers of his right hand up and down it. He dipped the forearm down sharply and his walking hand fell.

  Benicio took a moment to mull this over. “The devil?”

  “Not the devil, as in the one and only, but devils. That’s not even a very good word for them, but it’s one you’d understand.”

  “Ah.” Minutes passed without a taxi. “You know …” he trailed off, his voice hoarse. “My mother used to have this thing. She used to say that she could tell the future. Said she could see it in her dreams.”

  “Really,” Bobby looked from the street back to Benicio. “Could she?”

  WHEN BENICIO GOT BACK to the hotel, he realized that his father was finally home. Music thrummed dully through the adjoining door to Howard’s suite, and when he opened it he saw that the bed was slept in and some of the lights were on. He stepped inside, expecting to find Howard hunched over papers in his study. But the first thing he noticed was a dress. A green dress, crumpled at the foot of the bed. There
were high heel shoes beside it, but no business loafers or slacks. Not a shred of men’s clothing anywhere, in fact.

  The sound of a high-pressure shower spattered and hissed behind the music, and thin wisps of steam emanated from the open bathroom door. Benicio approached the door and saw, through the bathroom mirror, a lithe shape blurred behind the translucent shower curtain. He returned to the bedroom and switched the music off. A moment later, the shower switched off as well.

  “It’s about damn time,” the woman called from inside the bathroom. “I’m getting sick of this—I waited up for hours last night.”

  Benicio didn’t say anything. He sat on the edge of the bed, and then stood again. From the bathroom came the downy, frictive sound of a towel on skin.

  “Quit fuming,” she said after a moment of silence. “I didn’t touch anything, you big baby. But next time, I will. Next time you’re not here when you’re supposed to be, I’ll rob you blind.” She laughed at this. A moment later she emerged from the bathroom, wearing a towel around her bust. She was, indeed, the woman from the night before. Water still beaded her dark shoulders, making her skin look sequined. Her fingers rested as lightly on the doorframe as the towel rested on her.

  “Howard’s not here,” he said.

  She was startled to see him there, but not as startled as he felt she should be. “Who are you?” she asked without so much as shifting her weight.

  “I’m his son,” Benicio said. He watched her collarbones rise and fall as she breathed. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Solita.” She let go the doorframe and took a step toward him. “When does Howard come back?”

  “I don’t know. When he does I’ll tell him you were here.”

  Solita took another step toward him. Her wet feet left prints on the carpet. “I know you,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. You haven’t met me. I’d like you to leave now, please.”

  “Last night,” she said, “you were with Bobby. You bought me a drink.” Then, without the kind of announcement that he felt himself entitled to, Solita lowered the towel down below her waist. Her skin was the same color all over and smooth save a long scar below her belly button and a little tattoo that sat low on her right hip. It was a black sun, dipping below the nubby towel like a horizon.