“I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll say I lied about you breaking in.”
“They won’t listen. White boy makes stink is bad news.”
“I’m sorry. Just let me ask my question, and I’ll go.”
Solita dismounted and squeezed beside him on the loveseat. He felt like he should be relieved, but really he wanted to grab her by the hips and put her right back. He wanted her on the concrete floor of the tank room. He wanted to be the spider.
“I saw Howie on the news,” Solita said. “I saw you, too. They have cable in our dressing room. For the first time, I’m glad we can’t afford it at home. That way June can’t see. My poor Howie.” She stared blankly at the heavy curtains. “My Howie.”
Your June, Benicio wanted to say. My Howie.
“I’m seeing him almost eight years now. June was born in the first year. This is what you want to know?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer before going on. “Howie saw my sister for five years before that, but then she died. Cancer, in her breast. Howie was good to her. He paid for everything. Even a specialist in Shanghai. He loved her. Not as much, with me.”
Benicio blinked. There were worlds in those sentences. His father in love, if that’s what it was. His father grieving, if that’s what he did. He stammered. The only way to get through this was to stick to the trail. “June can’t be his,” Benicio said. “If he was, Howard wouldn’t have let you work here. He can be awful, but not that awful.”
“Shame on you.” Solita scowled at him. “Shame on you to say that, now. Howie is not awful. He is one of the nicest men that comes here. I told you, he gives me some money. But just for June. Enough for school, and clothes, and better food. That’s all that matters.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Prove he gives us money?”
“Can you prove that June is Howard’s son?”
She paused, warily. “Prove how?”
“A birth certificate with my father’s name on it? Some paperwork from the christening, or baptism? Tax forms … anything written down, really.”
She cocked her head and shook it lightly.
“How about pictures. Photos of the two of them or all three of you together?”
“Howie only likes to take pictures … he hates being in them.”
That this was true proved nothing.
“How can you even be sure it was him? Howard wasn’t the only one, was he?”
“No.” She straightened. “But he was the only one who paid extra so he wouldn’t have to use a condom.” This was more information than Benicio was looking for, and she sneered at his reaction. “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
“I don’t want …” He dropped what he was saying mid-sentence—mid-thought. There was something wrong. The shaking that he felt in his fingers had spread wildly through the air. The ground shifted under them. Music in the main room cut off and was replaced by loud banging. Solita stood, fell, and stood again. She staggered to the curtained doorway, pressed her hands against the frame and looked back at Benicio with big eyes. She yelled at him to move, but by the time he stood the earthquake was over. A full ten seconds passed before the lights went out.
Benicio and Solita felt their way through the curtain and out into the main room. The bartenders had flashlights and the patrons who smoked held lighters above their heads like people at a concert. Two of the big floor-to-ceiling air-conditioners had fallen over, crushing empty chairs beneath them, and bottles of San Mig lay shattered and frothy on the floor. Other than that, the club looked more or less as it had when Benicio arrived. He followed the general flow of patrons and girls to the front door and out into a warm night filled with the sounds of car alarms and howling stray dogs. A crowd gathered in the parking lot to wait for aftershocks but Benicio didn’t linger among them. He walked away from the club, out across Roxas Boulevard to the promenade that overlooked the dark bay. Foam splashed against the seawall, haphazard waves butting heads like churned up bathwater.
Benicio sat down on the edge of the crumbling wall, let his legs dangle over the dirty gray water and kept his back to the darkened city. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that Howard would let his baby’s mother work in a place like that. Especially when helping her would have meant nothing—an imperceptible dent in the figure Hon had written on the napkin. But she’s lied before, a part of him cautioned. And she’s stolen. So it could, maybe, not be true. A large wave struck the seawall, splashing some oily foam over his feet. As though the ocean itself was calling him on bullshit.
And it wasn’t just the ocean—the sky was up to some strangeness, too. The moon looked different than it should have. A bright, clear and unbroken ring glowed all around it, two thumb-to-forefinger lengths on either side as measured by his outstretched arm. There was also something like a cloud, but thicker and blacker than a cloud, rolling in from the east. It swallowed the peaks of ocean-facing towers as it marched past the city and out over the bay. It filled up the sky and blotted out the ringed moon. Benicio watched it for a long time. A single downy flake materialized above and landed on his knee. More followed.
“Ash,” Solita said. She’d joined him at the edge of the empty promenade, the beam of her flashlight illuminating a column of falling flakes. “This is like when I was younger,” she said. “When we had Pinatubo.”
Benicio turned so his legs dangled on the city side of the wall and his back was to the water. She set the light beside him, cupped his cheek in her palms and kissed him. He kissed her back. She brushed welling tears from under his eyes, because he was crying now. Because this ash looked just like snow. And because his mother had been right—he was kissing a skinny muñeca at the ocean while Alice slept. He pulled Solita closer and let his arms settle around her hips. He felt those hips swing. He heard concrete scrape beneath her sandals as she put some weight into the strike. The flashlight went dead as it hit him on the temple. He tried to stop the second strike but by the third he was helpless. Solita turned his khaki pockets inside out. She pulled his shoes off, and his socks, and with a shove sent him tumbling backward like a diver into Manila Bay.
Chapter 26
KILLING KELOG
The television is unbearably loud. Louder than it needs to be to muffle Howard’s calls for help. Newscasters’ voices ricochet around the room and glance roughly off his skull. He tries to turn the volume down, but Ignacio comes inside and hurts him. He tries to cover his ears, but that hurts too, because one of his ears is a bloody, bandaged hole. Days pass like this. News, and commercials, and news.
On Monday—he thinks it’s a Monday—the television begins talking to him. No … that’s not right. Talking about him. He listens to his story break live. He’s thrilled, at first. At least people will finally know what’s happened to him, because the police, those fuckups, have dropped the ball. But then the coverage becomes exceedingly morbid. Turns out that Ignacio and Littleboy are trying to sell him to the Abu Sayyaf group. The news anchors spell out what this means, exactly, and what it means is horrible. They even bring in this expert who knows all about the particular cultural significance of beheadings.
For the rest of the day Howard cringes as he is invoked in various grand contexts: the War on Terror, southern separatism and potential damage to the tourism sector. The afternoon anchor interviews a Palawan resort owner who is very concerned that his business will be devastated if Howard’s kidnapping causes wary vacationers to stay home. The resort owner lists many other local businesses that will also be devastated if his business is devastated. The boatmen’s union, the ferry operators, the various markets where his cook buys produce and fish. To say nothing of his seasonal staff, who he’ll have to lay off, and who all support family in other provinces and whose families all use their remittances in turn to support other, faraway businesses. It’s a whole interconnected system, the resort owner explains. In his delirium, Howard feels very sorry for this man, and for his seasonal staff, and their relatives, and he hopes tha
t things work out for them. Then he yells for a while and elbows the walls and cries.
HE THINKS ABOUT HIS SON A LOT. Then, on Friday—again, it mostly feels like a Friday—he actually hears his voice. It’s like Benny’s right there in the room with him, talking. Yelling. Howard wonders for a moment if he’s hallucinating or maybe dying and hearing Benny’s voice on his way to heaven. But that’s silly. He doesn’t believe in heaven and even if he did he wouldn’t believe he’d go there. It’s just the TV again. Benny’s on TV.
He feels oddly proud of this.
Howard sits up and tries to listen. His son is giving a news conference, but it’s hard to make out exactly what he’s saying. The damned set is so loud that it all comes out as a booming static ring. Fuckit, he thinks, reaching for the volume knob. He doesn’t care if they cut his other ear off. He’s going to listen to Benny.
Howard turns the volume way, way down. Down to a normal, human, living room level. Down to where he can concentrate on Benny answering questions. Yes, the local authorities have been incredibly helpful. Yes, of course, he’s very worried. Yes, he’s praying. His tone is forced, even unconvincing, and Howard doesn’t believe for a second that he’s really praying. But he doesn’t mind the lie. Benny could hardly know he’s watching.
Something moves in the other room and the tiles vibrate as the loveseat barricade is pushed across the floor. Howard braces himself. The door opens and he’s surprised to see not Ignacio or Littleboy, but the slender, fuzzy outline of Ignacio’s wife—the woman who gives him his meals and occasionally changes his bandages.
“I’m sorry,” Howard says, his muscles still tense in expectation of a beating. “But my son is on TV. I couldn’t hear with it so loud.”
The woman stares at him for a while and says: “What the heck? I could use a break, myself. Besides, it’s lunchtime. You can keep it down while you eat.”
She walks into the room, picks up the bucket with some of Howard’s pee in it and exits again. She leaves the door open behind her, and some rooms off, a toilet flushes. The open door distracts Howard, and by the time he turns back to the television his son has quit speaking. There’s someone else speaking now. Some policeman.
“So is your son an actor or something?” the woman asks. She’s returned with a dish of rice, garnished today with a little eggplant.
Howard gives her a look, and she gets it, and says: “Oh. Of course. Sorry. This is still new to me.”
She sets down the rice and then jerks her head a bit, as though casting her eyes about the room. To Howard’s sudden horror she steps toward his dirty shirt in the corner, which is hiding the bowl with his contact lens in it. She picks up the shirt, notices the bowl and picks that up also. She begins to walk away with both in hand.
“Water, please,” Howard says. “Can I please have that water?”
“This is gross. I’ll bring you some fresh,” she says.
“Give it to me, please,” he says, sitting up on his haunches. He’ll tackle her if he has to.
The woman shrugs a bit. “Suit yourself.” She squats and puts the bowl to Howard’s lips. She tips it up and he tries not to wince as the rancid, salty water slides into his mouth like dead jelly. His tongue probes the liquid, searching out the texture of his soft lens. He pins it against the inside of his cheek and swallows. He nods thanks, worried that if he says anything he might gulp down this last sliver of eyesight.
The moment she leaves he jams fingers in his mouth to scoop out the lens. He puts it delicately in his eye. It feels awful—at once a sting and an unbearable tickle—but for the moment his relief at being able to see again is the stronger feeling. Everything around him is sharp. Things have edges that begin and end. And he can see Benny on the TV, shifting his weight, staring at the floor. The policeman has finished his remarks and now a foxy, not-so-young blonde is behind the podium. She speaks into a cluster of microphones huddling beneath her chin, giving one-word answers to rambling questions. The policeman stares at her and, from time to time, so does Benny.
“This is better,” Ignacio’s wife says, returning with a bowl of clear, fresh water. She sets it down beside Howard’s food, and then sets herself down beside Howard. That’s strange. Other than the day when she taped a newspaper to his chest and snapped a photo of him, they’ve hardly exchanged more than a peep. He wonders if Ignacio knows she’s going easier on him. He wonders where Ignacio even is.
“Which one is your son?” she asks.
He looks from her, to the door, which is still open. Out in the living room Kelog the rooster walks to and fro, dragging his spur across the tile, looking strung out. It strikes him odd that he knows the rooster’s name and not hers. He’s never heard anyone use her name.
“That one …” he scooches forward and touches his son’s face on the screen, leaving a smudge.
“He’s good-looking,” she says.
Howard nods, looking at his good-looking kid. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on Benny’s face. There’s something else going on there. Something he got a hint of when he heard Benny speaking. His son looks … off. Not torn up. But weirded-out. Like he thinks he shouldn’t be there. Like he’s doing a favor for a not-so-close friend—a favor that leaves him reluctant and chilly. And there is no doubt in Howard’s mind, now. Benny knows about Solita, knows—he’s sure—about her kid. She has found him and told him. Just when Benny was getting over the story of Howard the scumbag cheat, just when he was moving past Costa Rica, just when it looked like the two of them could become close again, Solita has fucked it up. Not that Howard blames her. Fucking things up is what she should do—no one is going to stick up for her otherwise. Never mind that June probably isn’t even his. The timing works, sure, but come on—the kid’s darker than even his mother. It’s no skin off Howard’s back to give them some cash every few weeks. As far as he’s concerned he’s doing her a favor by letting that shoddy claim of paternity go unchallenged. But Benny, he’s sure, will not see it that way. Without Howard there to say his piece, Benny will become permanently committed to the weirded-out, distant bullshit they call a relationship. And that won’t do at all. They’ve already wasted too much time on this stupidity.
Howard pushes up off the floor and stands. His knee is still stiff, but he hobbles out to the living room with little trouble. Ignacio’s wife rushes after.
“Hey!” she yells. “Hey! If he sees you doing that he’ll break your fingers. He’ll cut your nose off.”
“Ignacio’s not here,” Howard says. “Is he?”
“He’s here.” Her voice is wobbly. “Get back inside or I’ll call him.”
“No … he would have come in as soon as I turned the TV down,” Howard says. He feels like such an idiot. He’s already squandered ten minutes—enough time to have saved his life a few times over. He goes for the nearest door and pulls it open. Closet.
“Which way is out?”
She doesn’t answer. She runs into the kitchen and comes back with a wok in her hand, lifted like a clumsy mace. He takes the wok out of her hand. She slaps him on the wound that used to be his ear and he howls, pushing her, roughly, onto the loveseat. He rushes out of the living room, down a short hallway with unfinished walls. There’s a door at the end that looks to have natural light leaking under the crack. Just as he’s about to reach for it Kelog appears, placing himself with a flapping jump between Howard and the door. Howard looks down at the rooster. It leaps up at him, wings beating his face, beak pecking at his bruises. He tries to push it away but feels a shocking, intense, unreasonable pain. He backs up, trips over his heels and falls ass over head to the floor.
Howard’s forearms are covered in a hot mess of deep cuts. Kelog approaches him, talons clicking horribly on the tile floor, cockfighting spur bright with blood. Howard tries to kick the bird as it approaches but it sidesteps, gazing at him with patient evil. Howard feels as though he’s losing his mind. “I’m going to kill you,” he says to the rooster. “I’m going to break you open with my hands
.”
He swings out and catches the rooster with an open-palmed slap that sends it tumbling across the hall and hangs a constellation of green feathers in the air. He stands and stumbles after the dazed bird, momentarily more determined to kill it than he is to get out of this apartment. He lifts the wok over his head and is just about to finish it off when he feels another, incredible, unfair, at this point even redundant, pain. Ignacio’s wife has stabbed him in the back. Not with a knife, but with something multi-pronged and kitcheny. Like one of those roasting forks. Leaning into the fork, she kicks the side of his bum knee and he knows that’s it. Game over. His knee gives out, and he goes down.
IGNACIO AND LITTLEBOY come for him early the next morning. They tie him at the wrists and stand him up. Ignacio switches off the television, and it looms silently in a way that feels very final.
Sweating, fidgeting, grinning, they lead him out of the apartment, into the pre-dawn dark. The residential street is empty save a truck idling by the curb, cab light on and driver’s seat empty. Through Howard’s crusty lens he sees a big advertisement for chicken feed painted across the truck. A cartoon rooster with boxing gloves on his wingtips poses beside an enormous sack of grain, while all around delirious hens with lipstick on their beaks bustle to get his autograph. Bubble letters below the rooster’s feet read: Feed Your Champion Like a Champion!
Ignacio and Littleboy open the back of the truck and heave Howard inside. It’s no bigger than a small moving van, about ten feet deep by six wide in the rear box, and empty save a layer of dry grain spread evenly over the bed. Howard sits up and looks out the open back. He sees Ignacio’s wife standing in the doorway to the apartment. She waves at him, and he waves back, because why not?
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