Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  After an hour Monique was still awake. She went into the den and saw that Joseph was, too. He didn’t protest when she squeezed onto the couch beside him and put a hand on his rising chest. His body filled itself with air, breathing deep and slow, trying to force sleep by mimicking it. She counted his gusts. She matched his rhythm and felt herself begin to drift. Together their breaths surged above them. Monique lifted her hand from Joseph’s chest and ran her fingers over it. Their lungs filled, and they emptied.

  Chapter 34

  REYNATO WAITS

  And what of heartbroken, harried Reynato? He goes home after trying to kill Racha and finds, at bedtime, that sleep is an impossibility. It remains so for the next night, and the next. Reynato moves through the house trying different places and positions—curled up next to Lorna on an imported and as yet unpaid for Swedish foam, sprawled out on the big leather sofa in the living room, atop a pile of pillows in the kitchen, even in the enormous guest bathtub—but everywhere he goes he feels Efrem’s eyes skitter over his skin like ants. In his paranoia he’s sure that the holier-than-thou gun savant is alive, watching him lather up and shave, wipe himself on the toilet, distract himself with soft-core Internet pornography. It’s guilt, Racha writes when Reynato returns to the hospital to make a third go at it. It’s a natural thing for you to feel. You’re a lousy person. Take it from me; just put the knife down and you’ll sleep like a baby tonight. But Reynato knows guilt, and this isn’t it. This is straight-up fear—so intense it infects his blameless family. So deep it wrecks his self-control, leaving him blubbering like a baby at Howard’s funeral.

  More than a week goes by without proper sleep. Reynato tries hotel rooms and foldout sofas. He tries a sleeping bag under calamansi trees in the front yard. One night he remembers, with sudden hope, the expensive air mattress made into a pool toy by Bea. He finds it in the pool house, shakes it dry and spends half an hour hacking air into it before realizing it’s busted. A clean hole, big enough to accommodate a garden hose, runs right through. Reynato fingers the hole. He remembers Bea riding the mattress in the pool, waving up at him. He remembers the way it sank under her so suddenly, as though someone pulled the tap. Stripping down to his briefs, he jumps into the pool, chlorine burning his wounded shoulder through the gauze. He empties his lungs and floats along the bottom, fingering blue tiles. One near the middle feels different. What at first looks like a coin turns out to be the ass-end of a fifty-caliber BMG slug. With some wriggling he works the slug out, surfaces and fits it through the hole in the air mattress. Well. At least it’s settled.

  Still dripping in his briefs, Reynato goes inside. He treads lightly on the stairs, careful not to wake Bea or Lorna up, and enters his study. It’s a mess. The window is riddled with bullet holes. His computer lies in pieces on the floor, all wires and plastic. The hanging uniforms on his wall have all been shot through their left breast pockets. Never mind. Reynato takes a big framed photo off the desk—the one with Erap, third president after the revolution, ousted by a smaller one himself—and writes three words across the back in permanent marker. He returns to the yard, stopping by the kitchen to light his frayed cigar on the gas range.

  It’s quiet outside. The moon tunnels above through cavern and vault, spilling blue light onto leaves. Reynato stands in the middle of the yard and holds the framed photo over his head. I Dare You, it says. He imagines he can hear the airy sound of something falling. Lights on the pool house go dark one by one. Underripe fruit falls from his papaya tree. A passing pigeon lands dead at his angled feet. Reynato is patient. He puffs deep, and waits.

  Chapter 35

  AFTER THE FUNERAL

  Benicio stayed in the Philippines long enough to get a special investor’s resident visa, legalizing his ownership of his father’s local estate. He sold his stake in the business to Hon at about half the value and listed all the properties at motivated prices. He spent his days in meetings or waiting for them. He tried his best to call Alice only every few days or so. As September rolled into October she wrote to let him know that the school was firing him, but that he should please try to cheer up. He did try to cheer up. On Saturday afternoons he drank mini-bar vodka and laughed his ass off to international versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on BBC World. At nights he cried a lot, wishing that he’d been able to do more of it when his mother died and less of it now.

  On his last evening in the country he called Bobby Dancer and invited him out to the nearby Café Havana for a drink. Benicio arrived first and sat at a table outside, under newly slung Christmas lights. When Bobby approached he did so without the slightest trace of a limp. His face was finally the same color all over and looked as healed as it was ever going to get.

  “I didn’t know you were still in town,” Bobby said. He lowered himself into a chair, slowly.

  “Just for a few more hours. I leave early tomorrow.”

  “Well, imagine that. I was the first to say mabuhay, and now here I am to bid you pamamaalam. That means farewell.” He summoned a bereted waitress over. “What are you drinking?”

  “I wasn’t, yet.”

  “Well, why not go out how you came in? We’ll have two lambanogs,” he said. “I wish I’d known you were still around. Charlie had this thing yesterday honoring the two surviving policemen who rescued Howard. I mean, they used to be surviving. One of them is missing, and the other died last weekend.”

  “I’d heard.”

  “I would have invited you, for sure.”

  “I’m not sure I would have come,” he said. “But thanks.” The waitress returned with their drinks and Benicio took his from her hand before she had a chance to set it down. He took a long sip of the mouthwash-tasting lambanog, holding it in his cheeks before swallowing. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea before the funeral. I did what I did so we could have the service. But I’m giving—I’ve given her half of everything. It wasn’t about the money.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Bobby asked. “Then why not give her everything?”

  Benicio laughed at this. Then he saw that Bobby wasn’t joking. “Maybe it was a little about the money. But it was also about my dad. Whatever he had with her, he was my dad. I wasn’t about to give him up.”

  Bobby ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “So you don’t know, then, if Howard is the father of her kid.”

  “I don’t,” Benicio said. “But whether he was or not, he treated her wrong. She and the kid will be taken care of. They’re rich now, by most standards. I think it’s worked out as well as it could have.”

  Bobby looked down at the table and nodded, seeming to consider this. “You look like shit,” he said.

  They shared a moment of quiet, and then they both laughed. “Well, you look great,” Benicio said.

  “I know, right?” Bobby sipped his drink and made a face at it. “Word is out among the barboys. Dancer is back.”

  “Any pain?”

  “Nope. I don’t think so, at least. It’s hard to remember what I felt like before. But I think this is normal.” Bobby shook a cigarette from his pack, lit it and took short drags. “It was a really nice service. I hope it wasn’t weird—Charlie can’t go anywhere without making an entrance.”

  “It wasn’t weird,” Benicio said. Looking at Bobby, he found it impossible to keep the article he’d read from springing up in his mind. The conjecture that they’d made Bobby watch as the tops of his dogs’ heads were cracked open with hammers. The evidence that he’d been forced to swallow hunks of their testicles along with shredded campaign posters and kerosene. “Actually, that’s a lie,” he said. “It was very weird. There were four TV crews on the hill. Nothing about it wasn’t weird.”

  Bobby smiled. “Well, I hope you don’t blame us. You’re implicated. You brought as much weird along with you as you found here. Or like, forty-sixty at least.” His cigarette wasn’t a quarter done but he crushed it into the ashtray. “Do you know when you’re coming back?”r />
  “No. I mean, I’m not. Not ever. No offense.”

  Bobby’s expression turned quizzical. “Well … since this is our last conversation, where’s my incentive not to be offended? I’m good at marching off in a huff. I’ve done that shit before.”

  “It’s not the city. It’s who I am here.”

  “Who are you here?”

  “I’m …” Benicio crossed and uncrossed his legs. He found the sudden edge in Bobby’s voice disconcerting. “It’s like my father. He was a different person, not just here but whenever he left home. A worse person. He cheated on my mother here, years before she died. He had this whole hidden life that he never told us about. I mean, for all I know June really is his kid, and he let June’s mother work out of a filthy goddamn brothel. It could be that June’s not even the only one.”

  Bobby leaned back in his chair. “Wow. I see you’re taking this whole consequence-free last conversation thing to heart.”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to unload on you.”

  “No, it’s fine. But as long as those are the rules—Manila didn’t make your father shitty. People are who they can afford to be. When your father was here he could afford to be Mr. Playboy. Maybe at home he could afford less. That doesn’t mean he was different. And it’s the same with you—you can afford to be Mr. Goddamn Generous. You can afford to spend a fuckload on peace-of-mind, because you’ve got a fuckload to spare. But don’t tell me, or yourself, that leaving will make you better. Whatever you see peeking out right now, whatever it is you don’t like; well I’ve got news for you. That’s Benicio.”

  Bobby turned halfway around and drew a rectangle in the air with his index finger to signal for the bill. Benicio fumbled in his pocket and placed some cash on the table. They waited in silence. When Benicio spoke his voice was dry and pitchy. “I never said it wasn’t.”

  TWO DAYS LATER HE WAS HOME, unpacking while Alice boiled noodles in the kitchen. He carried his dive bag to the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water and prepared to rinse out the gear he’d only used once. The black velcro and rubber hoses were crusted over with a thin layer of grit that dissolved as he lowered everything under the clear surface. He cleaned the gear the way he’d been taught—purging mouthpieces, keeping the dust-cap tight, filling the BCD with water and shaking it above his head to rinse it from the inside out. He added his wetsuit and fins to the tub, holding them under the surface, submerged to his forearms. Spray from the tap rushed over his fingers and left little bubbles that clung to his arm hair. It reminded him of the dives with the Costa Rican instructor. The way you could be made a beginner again by the current.

  Benicio pulled the water-heavy gear from the tub and slung it over the bar above. He ran his hands along the wetsuit legs, squeezing them dry as best he could. He’d owned this same suit for almost ten years and there was hardly a rip or tear in it. He remembered the long procession of colors and brands that his father had gone through; how he’d torn each new wetsuit with his expanding belly and clumsy bottom-scraping. How the constantly replaced gear gave him a different look on almost every trip. Once, when Benicio was seventeen, he actually lost track of who his father was. It was a gentle drift dive with a hefty tour group from Arkansas. At sixty feet Benicio noticed an outline in the sand—a flounder, big as a loveseat—and grabbed at what he thought was his father’s wrist to point it out. But it was a stranger. She pulled her hand back and shot him beady annoyance through her prescription mask. Benicio swam out ahead of their party and looked back at them. The divers were all big, bright shapes. He couldn’t pick his father out.

  He only found him at the end, when they all floated atop a high ridge of coral to decompress before ascent. Howard was hugging the base of a barrel sponge, kicking his feet out now and again to keep himself stationary. Near the base of the sponge was a crust of dead coral, and sprouting from that was a single blue-and-yellow Christmas-tree worm no bigger than a child’s thumb. Howard waved his hand in front of the worm and—shump!—it retreated into its hole. He waited, rapt. The worm remerged, its short little tendrils splaying out one by one. He waved his hand and again it shot back inside.

  Howard looked up at Benicio with delight. With wonder. He pointed to the worm—which was emerging yet again—and signed OK, which meant “not dying” but also “this is good.” Benicio returned the OK. The master unsheathed her dive knife and banged it against her tank to get everybody’s attention. She thumbed up at the surface for them to ascend. Howard drifted away from the barrel sponge, but Benicio lingered there for a moment, staring at the tiny animal. He didn’t get what was so special about it. But he sensed, at least, that it was special. Then, with a kick, he floated weightlessly away. He looked straight up to keep his airway open. He felt his breath expand. Up above Howard was already near the surface—his arms extended, like they’d been trained, so those above would see him coming.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexander Yates grew up in Haiti, Mexico, and Bolivia. He graduated from high school in the Philippines, where he returned to work in the political section of the U.S. Embassy after receiving a BA in English from the University of Virginia. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University. His short story “Everything, Clearly” appears in the 2010 edition of American Fiction: the Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers.