Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  She reached out for his hand and placed it on one of her small breasts, his palm first grazing her dark nipple and then pressing hard against it. He was used to girls with heft—even Alice had a soft weight in his hands. Solita’s breast felt firmer, like a muscle after stretching. He forced his hand back to his side and she laughed at him. “You want me to stay,” she said.

  “I don’t.”

  She grabbed hold of the khaki just beneath his belt buckle. “You’re a liar.”

  He stepped back. “Get out of here, please.”

  Solita’s face stayed soft but her top lip curled just a bit. She dropped the towel completely and stepped back into her crumpled green dress. “Howard didn’t say his son was a faggot.”

  “That’s fine.” He took her by the wrist and started to walk her to the door. Her pace quickened, so much so that it felt for a moment like he was holding her back.

  “Fuck you,” she said as he pushed her out of the room. He closed the door on her and locked it. He left his father’s suite, closed the adjoining door to his own and locked that as well.

  FINDING A WOMAN in his father’s room was no surprise. This was the second time it had happened. The first was on the last day of the father and son dive trip they’d taken five years back, a trip to celebrate his graduation and impending move to college in Virginia. Benicio was supposed to be out all day on a resort boat in the Murcielagos, but the corroded purge valve on his regulator got jammed and the boat crew had been unable to fix it or swap it for a spare. So they headed back a few hours early.

  Benicio didn’t knock—why should he have?—before returning to the room he shared with his father. His first thought upon opening the door was that he’d walked in on strangers. The two twin beds had been pushed together to make a king-size with a crack in it. On his knees on the left bed was a nude man draped in fat like fabric. A woman was in front of him, halfway between kneeling and lying on her belly. Her knees made deep indentations in the mattress, her backside bucking up against his looming weight. Both of them looked up at Benicio as soon as he opened the door and surprisingly enough he recognized the woman first. It was the dive instructor with the mannish jaw—the woman he’d been flirting with and dreaming about fucking on the concrete floor of the tank room for years, since he’d first seen her bend over the velcro and hoses of a BCD. The woman with whom his father had promised to put in a good word. Benicio stared the fat man in the face but still didn’t recognize him until he started vomiting out apologies. Howard was actually talking to him while naked and still inside the sweating, broad-backed dive instructor. Benicio walked out of the room and left the door wide open behind him. After a few minutes his father came chasing after him in a white bathrobe that didn’t fit well enough to close properly. Howard wasn’t hard to outrun.

  And, God, how Benicio had made him suffer for it.

  Chapter 15

  BRUHA

  The first thing Monique heard when she woke was something in the kitchen. Amartina was in there making usual morning sounds. Running water. Opening and closing squeaky drawers. Clanging cast-iron crockery. But aside from the sounds, everything else was unusual. Monique wasn’t in her bed. She was naked on the leather couch in the den. Reynato slept on the floor just below her, a blanket coiled around his gut, covering little. Monique’s memory of the night before returned like a houseguest—the earthquake, the sex, the conversation she’d had with Amartina; telling her, very clearly, to go home. But Amartina wasn’t home, with her family, in Cavite. She was in the kitchen.

  Monique slid off the couch and rushed into the master bedroom. The tremor had tipped her dresser over, trapping her clothes. The basin her jacket had been soaking in—along with everything else she’d worn to work the day before—was overturned. Spent suds covered the bathroom tile, snaked out to the bedroom, and seeped into hardwood. Monique edged along the mess, grabbed a robe from the towel rack and put it on.

  Reynato was still asleep when she passed him on her way to the kitchen. She glanced back and saw that while the couch obstructed his body, his bare feet jutted out conspicuously. There was a chance Amartina hadn’t seen them, but if she’d taken even a few steps into the den she’d surely have noticed his shins, his knees, his thighs, his balls. And beyond that, she’d likely heard them the night before. Yelping in fear at the tremor. Fucking a second time on the carpet and a third back on the couch. They’d even had a midnight heart-to-heart in the kitchen, not six feet from Amartina’s closed door, about what they thought was really wrong with their respective spouses. Joseph was petrified of not being impressive. Lorna, Reynato’s wife, was scared of looking like a phony among the “real” society women. This was a disaster.

  The kitchen was a disaster, too. Dishes lay broken on the floor and the cupboards had disgorged cookware onto countertops. The spice rack had fallen from its nail perch, glass jars shattering where they landed. Amartina didn’t turn when Monique entered, but she must have sensed her. She walked barefoot through the mess, smashing ruined plates into a garbage pail and slamming cupboard doors, grumbling as she did so—a performance for Monique’s benefit. So much for feeling her out.

  “I told you to go home last night.”

  Amartina turned and faced her. The tear streaks down her cheeks made Monique incredibly uncomfortable. “It’s all a mess.”

  “What?”

  Amartina looked around the kitchen. She held the garbage pail in one hand and a chipped drinking glass in the other, and shook them as though explaining to a simpleton. “Look at this,” she said, marching out of the kitchen, pail and glass still in hand.

  Monique followed, repeating, “I asked you to go home” a little lamely. Amartina opened the door to Leila’s room and stepped aside so Monique could see. The flat-screen computer monitor was wedged between the desk and the wall, and the lovebird’s cage had toppled over. The miniature wrought-iron door was open and the cage was empty.

  “Gone. I don’t know where.” Amartina turned, walked through the den, right past Reynato, and into Shawn’s room. Monique raced after. Her son’s room was almost as clean as usual, but the terrarium had toppled off the bed-stand and broken into a few large pieces. The heat lamp seared a neat rectangular burn into the carpet. The gecko was nowhere to be seen and feed-crickets hopped everywhere. “Gone. You made a big mess,” she said, as though she blamed Monique not just for the nude man in the den, but for the earthquake itself: for shattered belongings and escaped pets.

  Monique’s cheeks filled with hot blood. What an incredible pain in the ass this woman was. Why couldn’t she have just listened? Why spout reflexive, meaningless yeses? The maid’s quarters were tiny, the bed narrow as an ironing board, and still she’d insisted on staying when Monique had asked her—told her!—not to. Now the only choices left were bad ones. Monique could threaten her and spend the next year worrying she’d spill, or fire her and feel guilty for maybe much longer than that.

  Out in the den Reynato stirred. He got up and wrapped the blanket around his waist. His eyebrows, his mustache, even the silver hair ringing his nipples was wild and matted. He forced a smile and said, “Magandang umaga.”

  Amartina spun on him. “I don’t care who you are,” she said in sudden Tagalog, “you don’t open your mouth to me.” She got in his face, garbage pail raised as though she meant to use it as a weapon. She called him filth. She called him cheat. She called him parasite and devil. Reynato took the pail from her and set it down on the floor, but other than that he averted his eyes and accepted the assault.

  “No. No. No,” Monique said, her whole body burning under the horrible awkwardness of it—she used to speak that way to the cat, before it died. “You don’t talk to anyone like that when you’re in my house.” She grabbed Amartina’s knobby elbow but Amartina pulled away, spinning on her heels, slapping Monique clean across the face. For a moment they could have been each other’s reflections—shocked and still.

  “That’s enough,” Reynato said, in English.
r />   Amartina blinked first, charging into her quarters off the kitchen. She emerged seconds later with an already packed bag, more bloated than usual for a weekend at home. “Shame on you,” she said without looking back at them. “I cannot work here anymore.” She fumbled with the deadbolt. She went out into the landing and rang for the elevator. A sound like a bicycle bell announced its slow approach. “I won’t be back on Monday,” she called, the steel gone from her voice. She sounded stressed, and distracted, and only slightly less determined.

  MONIQUE SAT ON THE COUCH, staring dumbly at Joseph’s overturned speakers, catching her breath even though she hadn’t lost it. Reynato dropped his blanket and joined her. He began to have trouble restraining his giggles.

  “This is funny to you?”

  “Certainly not.” He pursed his lips and made a show of stopping. One of the escaped pets—or maybe both of them—twittered in the hall. Reynato smoothed out his mustache and looked about the wrecked apartment like an appraising buyer. “She’s right about one thing, though. You really made a mess.”

  Monique let out a laugh-grunt and put her head in his lap. He ran his small fingers through her hair.

  “Anything like this ever happen before?” he asked.

  “You mean did I ever screw up this badly before? Did I ever get caught cheating? Did I ever ruin my marriage?”

  His fingers stopped and started again. He worked his thumbs behind her ears, soothingly. “This is a featherweight screwup. Totally fixable. What I meant was: Did you ever make weird shit happen before?” He pointed an accusing finger at the overturned speakers.

  “Ha. You’re blaming me for that?”

  “Should I?” Reynato glanced about the room again. “I think your maid does. Caviteños can be superstitious. I’m pretty superstitious myself.” He quit stroking her hair and placed his hand on her chest, as though to keep her from sitting up. “Could be she thinks the Duwendes saw us last night, and got pissed. You know what Duwendes are?”

  Monique nodded. The cleaning woman in Subic had told her all about those sometimes troublesome, sometimes lucky little goblins. An especially mean one supposedly lived in the eaves above their single-family house. The cleaning woman was terrified of him.

  “Those little fuckers hold a grudge. You’re getting off easy if they quit after breaking your shit. When I was young my mother sat on a Duwende and to get even they ganged up and pushed her down the stairs. She was on crutches for months and never sat down again without saying: Lookout, here I come, get off my chair, please.” He stared down at her, sunlight glinting in his braces and eyes. “Or, it could be she thinks you’re a bruha. Shaking the place up with some black magic. Look at you, bruha. Making earthquakes when you get off.”

  Monique sat up. “I don’t care what she thinks. I care what she says and doesn’t say. What if she calls Joseph?”

  Reynato was quiet for a moment before speaking. “Again, this is a small-scale problem. Just call him first and say you canned her. You caught her stealing, or something. Then, on the off chance she says anything, he’ll chalk it up to disgruntled.”

  “I’m not going to lie about her.”

  “You lie about me all the time. Listen, if you’re feeling guilty about it, I could offer her a job. I’ll add a grand a week to whatever you were paying. Everybody wins.”

  “What about your wife?”

  He laughed—a big, round sound. “If my wife believed the help I’d have been divorced years ago.”

  REYNATO HAD A BUSY DAY AHEAD, but he stayed to help Monique clean. They swept broken glass and repotted overturned plants by the window. He righted Leila’s computer and got the Internet working again. Monique chased the lovebird and the gecko, trying to trap them under a plastic colander, without any luck. Reynato offered to bring his cat over—he had this incredibly obedient, incredibly smart black cat. But the kids would have been devastated if anything happened to the pets. Sooner or later they’d get tired, and Monique would catch them.

  They cleaned Shawn’s room last. Reynato crawled around on all fours, catching feed-crickets in unbroken spice jars. Monique vacuumed mulch and wood-chips out of the burned carpet. Just being in there made her feel like some kind of intruder. Joseph thought it essential that the children’s rooms be a “private space” and Shawn defended his as though life and honor depended on it. Only Amartina was allowed in to get laundry, make the bed and feed the gecko when Shawn let it starve.

  Reynato chased a cricket under the bed and stayed there for a moment, his butt and legs protruding. When he spoke his voice had a muffled, echoing quality. “Do you want bad news you can ignore or bad news you should probably know about?”

  Monique shut the vacuum off. “I want both.”

  “All right. Well, the bad news you can ignore is that I’ve found your son’s porn stash. Hardcore but not scary-freaky. And … how to put this delicately … well used.”

  “What’s the other bad news?”

  Reynato’s legs twisted as he shimmied out from under the bed. He stood, his left hand cupping something translucent—a zip-lock baggie. Inside was a stubby little glass pipe, a plastic lighter and a tiny smattering of gray-green pot. Monique felt punched in her abdomen. “Hey,” he said, “hey, no need to get so upset.”

  She snatched the bag from him and sat on Shawn’s perfectly made bed. “I’m going to murder him.”

  “This is nothing.” He sat beside her and rubbed a hand up and down her back. “There’s hardly an hour’s worth of fun in here. And the pipe looks new, no resin burns and no ash. Either he cleans it like a pro or he’s only used it a handful of times.”

  “He’s thirteen.”

  “That’s young. But I’ve seen younger do worse.”

  If only Joseph were here, she thought. He’d feel so fucking vindicated. She unzipped the baggie and took the pipe out, turning it over in her hands. Reynato took it from her. He put all the pot into the bowl and it was hardly half full. He lit it, puffed and coughed.

  “Oh my. Can’t get this just anywhere.” He offered her the pipe.

  “I could lose my clearance for that.”

  “You could lose your clearance for a lot of things. Many of which are things you’ve done. With me. In that room and in others.” He offered again. The pungent, familiar smell ringed their bodies. She shook her head. “Suit yourself.”

  Reynato puffed and coughed. He scrutinized a framed photograph of Shawn hanging lopsided on the wall. He scrutinized Monique.

  “He must take after his father.”

  “Not after Joseph. Shawn and Leila are adopted.”

  “Oh. But … you’ve had at least one of your own.” She looked at him and he put both palms in the air, contrite. “Hey, I’m no stalker. Bea, my daughter, was a breech birth. I know what the scar looks like.”

  “We had a son, named Walter. He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. He was gone before we knew him.”

  They were quiet for a while, but Reynato kept rubbing her back, hitting the pipe occasionally. The smell reminded her of dates with Joe that ended with a joint in his overpriced Georgetown studio. He used to wear a full beard, and the scent would linger about his face until the next morning. Reynato finished the bowl. He put it back in the baggie, which melted around the hot glass pipe, and placed the plasticky mess on the end table. The lovebird hopped past the open door, retreating through the den, doing its best to fly with clipped wings. The gecko chased after, chirping. Music began to play. A synthetic beat, cymbals, and a voice singing Tagalog a few octaves deeper than it should. “Villie Manilie,” Reynato said. “My daughter loves them.”

  The music was coming from Shawn’s closet. Monique opened it and jumped a little—one of his hanging shirts trembled as though dancing. She reached into the pocket and pulled out a vibrating, singing mobile phone that she’d never seen before. It was thinner than a candy bar and had a silver trim that made it look swanky and mean. She waited for it to quiet
down before flipping it open. A picture of a girl in a too-tight sweater greeted her; the same girl who’d invited Shawn to the prom and financed his ear piercing. There were seven missed calls, all from her, and the inbox was full of bubbly texts addressed to Shugs.

  Monique tossed the phone to Reynato, who held it up to the light and whistled like he was impressed. “That girl must have given it to him,” she said, chewing her bottom lip. She looked around her son’s room, so much emptier and cleaner than his room in Washington had been. The desk, the walls, the closet; all orderly and spotless. Even the shirt she still held with one hand was ironed, fashionable and new—so new she didn’t recognize it. She slid the shirt down the bar and went through Shawn’s other hanging clothes, the way she used to before they had a maid, before it was an unforgivable intrusion. She couldn’t remember buying most of these clothes, and she felt a little sick as she realized that maybe she hadn’t. Everything she didn’t recognize she pulled off the bar, tore from its plastic hanger, and piled on the floor. Wrinkled pants four sizes too big, scuzzy metallic button-downs, and jackets that he’d never need in a country like this. She added white sneakers that looked like they’d never been worn, as well as a basketball and pump that she found, overtaken suddenly by a nervous dawning, in the back of the closet. She went back to the desk and pulled the drawer out, emptying its contents on the bed. There were cuff links in there, an empty leather wallet, two pairs of oversized sunglasses and a blinged-out necklace with links cut to look like dollar signs—Joseph would have had a field day with this. Monique put both hands under Shawn’s mattress and told Reynato to move his butt. He got up and helped her flip the mattress, sending it crashing against the far wall. She had to sit then to control her breathing. Three ziplock baggies lay on the box spring, each filled with a fistful of twisted leaves and seeds. So much for hardly ever smoking it.