Moondogs (28 page)

The father began closing the gate but Monique put her fingers on the frame to stop him. “This,” he said, pointing to her fingers, “is trespassing.” He slid the metal gate so that it rested lightly on her knuckles without pushing on them. “I’m calling the police,” he said. “I’m calling them now.”

Monique let go of the frame and the gate slammed shut. On the other side she heard the father speaking Tagalog into his telephone—the skinny shit really was calling the police. She stood there dumbly as he described her to the dispatcher. Then he threw the baggies of pot over the wall and out to the sidewalk. One of them struck her in the shoulder. No. No. Shawn was her son. She wouldn’t let that spoiled bitch do this to her son.

Monique collected the baggies from the sidewalk and threw them back over the wall.

“This is very silly,” the father shouted, exasperated now. He threw the baggies over again, as well as the basketball and a bunch of shirts. They came over fast—his daughter must have helped. “The police are coming. The police have been called.”

She didn’t notice Reynato until he stood right beside her, bracing a galvanized garbage can on his shoulder. “I’m old,” he grunted. “Help.” Monique took hold of half the can and together they hurled it over the wall, a tongue of garbage licking out as it flew. The father shrieked and Monique imagined the can crashing wetly on his landscaping. Reynato hurled the gifts back over, getting a shirt and one of the baggies as far as the terra-cotta roof. He retreated to his Honda and lightly rammed the front gate, shattering a headlight and denting the wrought-iron. The father was out and out screaming now. Monique dove into the car. After wrestling with the gearshift, Reynato peeled out. Monique laughed so hard she cried. Or vice versa.

“Thank you,” she managed. “That was great.”

“Those rich shits got off easy,” Reynato said. “You should’ve
earthquaked
them.”

“Ha.” She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Imagine if I really could. That awful girl deserves it.”

“Yes, she does. And yes, you can.” He winked and it made half of his face look older. “You should have.” He pulled down Calamansi and out onto Palm Avenue. A patrol car stopped them but after just a few words the grinning officers left them alone. No one bothered them as they exited the gated village.

“But that would make me a pretty bad bruha, wouldn’t it?” Monique said.

“It would make you the kind of bruha you already are. It would make you like all other bruhas. Beautiful. Powerful. Scary. And bad.”

Chapter 16

The first thing Benicio did after Solita left was call Bobby and ask if it wasn’t too late to get in on that dive trip. He was eager to get away, not just from the hotel, but from the whole city. And besides, Bobby knew Solita, and he knew Howard, and he could maybe shed some light on how long their fucked-up arrangement had been going on. Since the funeral? Since before the funeral? Since Howard’s first trip to the country, nearly thirteen years ago now?

Bobby picked up after just one ring. “Almost too late,” he said, “but not quite.” Benicio was pleased to hear how pleased he sounded. Bobby was already on the road and had to swing through Alabang to pick up Katrina, but they agreed to meet halfway, at Josephine’s restaurant in Tagaytay. As soon as they hung up Benicio dialed the front desk and booked Edilberto for the day. Then he wrote a note to his father on a clean sheet of hotel stationery and slid it under the adjoining door. Just four words long, it read:
Met her. Done waiting
.

The trip out to Tagaytay took no time at all. Berto was an even greater maniac on the country roads than he was inside Manila—lead-footing the open stretches and braking hard at every turn, unable to maintain a constant speed without the orienting crush of traffic—and he got them there a good half hour before the scheduled meeting. Josephine’s restaurant was large and open on the inside, with floors of glazed granite and tables cut from dark wood. It was arranged more
like a theater than a restaurant, the seating area divided into three steps that all faced the same set of floor-to-ceiling windows. Benicio’s travel guide mentioned this place. On a normal day the windows held a picture-perfect view of Taal volcano, but all he could see today was milky white. Clouds pressed against every square inch of glass, so thick that Josephine’s may as well have been adrift in the sky.

It was late for lunch but many tables were still full—packed with mothers ladling stew from steaming pots and pudgy boys in wooden booster-chairs drinking from green coconuts with twisty straws. Benicio sat at a table near the glass, ordered a San Miguel, and waited. He thought about going back outside to ask Edilberto to join him but decided against it—not sure what the etiquette was for drivers on the clock—and instead leafed through a menu to look busy and less alone. On the last page was an illustrated picture of the view he should have been enjoying—concentric craters and lakes, a young volcano inside of an older one.

“Boy, you’ve got some bad timing.” Benicio felt a hand on his shoulder, fingers grazing his neck. He turned to see Katrina standing over him. “Taal’s on break now,” she said. “I think the next show starts tomorrow morning.”

“Hi there.” Benicio stood. She turned down his awkward handshake for a quick, awkward hug.

“Bobby’s out parking the car,” she said. “He’ll be with us in a minute.”

“Does he need any help?”

“Probably. He won’t take any, though. Especially from you.” They sat and Katrina put both her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her palms. “So,” she said, “Bobby filled me in on the way here. I guess there was a bit of draaama,” she stretched the word in an attempted drawl, “last night? It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I don’t really remember … well, any of it. That’s embarrassing isn’t it?” She paused. “And you know, I just wanted to say sorry. I mean, I don’t think I was, but just in case I was, you know, one of the chief offenders.”

“You weren’t. It was mostly my fault.”

“That’s what I suspected.” Her grin was oddly manic. “I mean, not
about you, but about me. Because, normally, I’m pretty nice. But you never know. That’s an expectation I’ve been known to defy, from time to time. When drinking. And hey,” she gestured down to his still mostly full San Miguel, “I guess the night can’t have been a total bust. You converted, all the same.”

Bobby Dancer entered the restaurant some minutes later. He must have changed his bandages since that morning, because these were crisp and dry. In addition to layers of gauze he wore an airy cotton shirt and a pair of denim jeans—one of those expensive acid-wash brands that come pre-faded, pre-torn and pre-mended. Bobby waved at them and made his way over. He took the stairs slowly; his feet turned sideways like a mountain climber, one hand gripping the railing and the other balled tight around the head of his cane. Benicio rose to go to him but Katrina grabbed his forearm and pinned it to the table with surprising force.

“Well,” Bobby said when he finally reached them, “it’s good to see you.” He pulled a chair back, lowered himself into it like an old man, and leaned his cane against the table. “I was worried that we wouldn’t get the chance to make second impressions on each other, considering the first one.” He reached across the table and shook Benicio’s hand. “I spoke to Ping. He sends his apologies and would also like me to tell you that you hit like a baby.”

“Don’t tease!” Katrina said, taking Benicio’s wrist in a way that made him a little uneasy and also pleased him. “Given the choice between someone with no practice hitting faces and someone who is really good at hitting faces, I’d rather know, or get to know, the first person. The one with no practice.” She flagged down a passing waitress, pointed at Benicio’s bottle, and stuck two fingers in the air. “Come on, let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“Yes,” Bobby said as he slowly unfolded his napkin and laid it over his lap, “let’s not.” The waitress arrived with two more beers and Bobby lifted his to make a toast. “To America,” he said. “Let no one talk shit about her, lest they have their faces busted in by GI Ben.”

Benicio raised his own bottle. Despite the fight last night, and despite the discovery this morning, he felt himself relaxing. It was
somehow very easy to be in this place, with these people. “Except for you,” he said as he clinked his bottle against Bobby’s. “You can talk all the shit you want because you’ve had your face pre-busted.”

Katrina coughed through an aborted swallow. Bobby lowered his San Miguel without drinking and looked at Benicio. “Well imagine that,” he said. “Who would have thought that there was a sense of humor underneath all that khaki?”

BOBBY ORDERED FOR THE TABLE
and they ate quickly. Benicio found the food—like the language—hauntingly familiar. The pork adobo wasn’t totally unlike his mother’s adobo, and there was some pickled fish with peppers that resembled the ceviche she’d stopped making by the time he got to high school. Bobby let him pick up the check without an argument and led them, slowly, out to the lot.

It had cooled outside, and a breeze spilled fog up from the basin of the crater and out over the road. Benicio retrieved his dive bag from the Shangri-La sedan and followed Bobby and Katrina to a big white Expedition that took up two handicapped spaces right in front of the restaurant. “Hey,” Bobby said as he opened the back so Benicio could hoist his gear inside, “at least the parking’s better lately.” He shot Katrina a grim smile that she didn’t return and then took his time getting into the high driver’s seat. Benicio found space in the back between mesh bags overflowing with fins and wetsuits. He looked back as they pulled out of the lot, hoping to catch a glimpse of the volcano, or at least the inner rim of the crater. All he could see was a warm spot behind the clouds.

Their trip south brought them back along Taal’s outer rim and then down through fields of pineapple and palm. After about an hour, once the ground evened out and everybody’s ears popped, Bobby turned onto a dirt road cut jagged by tiny dry riverbeds. He winced as the Expedition bounced and jostled, but he didn’t slow down. The brush thickened about the road; a mix of bamboo and tree trunks that looked like premature driftwood, broken here and there by hand-painted signs advertising dive hotels. “That’s us,” Bobby said through gritted teeth, pointing out the window to a piece of plywood reading:
Balayan Bay
Dive Club—Welcome Friends!—Management not responsible for vehicles parked overnight
. The lot was just a clearing of tire-flattened grass, and theirs was the only car.

They were still a few hundred feet above the water, and narrow concrete stairs snaked down a wooded slope to the beach below. Benicio looked down and saw the thatched roofs of whitewashed hotel bungalows—their backs to the dense hillside jungle and their doors opening upon the alternating indigo and turquoise of reef and sandy bottom. The deeper water was marked by the moving shadows of clouds, vast smudges that could just as well be the backs of great things that traveled beneath the surface.

“I’ll go first and get someone to help us with the bags,” Katrina announced. Bobby, who’d just managed to lower himself from the driver’s seat and was dabbing sweat from the exposed parts of his face, watched as she took the stairs two and three at a time.

“You’ll be all right to get down?” Benicio asked.

“Just fine,” Bobby said without looking at him. “I’ll take it slow.” Behind them a skinny goat emerged from the grass and blinked at the tracks left by the Expedition. Bobby made a puckered kissing sound like you might to a dog, and the goat swished its tail but didn’t look at him. He took out a cigarette, lit it and blew a plume of smoke at the animal. “It’s just going to be you and Katrina today,” he said. “On the dive, I mean.”

“I figured as much.”

Bobby shook his pack of cigarettes in Benicio’s direction and pocketed it when the offer was refused. “Normally I’d be going, too …” he sounded almost apologetic. “We got certified together a few years back and we try to go whenever we get the chance. I made this reservation about two months ago … I thought, hey, if Charlie wins then this trip’ll be a damn good way to celebrate. If he loses, it’ll be a chance to get wet, get drunk and get the fuck over it. A man needs a break either way, right? But lately I’ve been less,” he stabbed his cane into the long blades of yellowing grass, “graceful. Katrina wanted to cancel at first.” Bobby took a long drag and held it inside. “It’s good you came.”

“You had an accident,” Benicio said. It sounded more like a proclamation than the question he intended it to be.

“You could call it that. I sure as hell didn’t do it on purpose.” He reached down, plucked up a handful of grass and held it out to the goat in offering, making that same kissing sound. The goat eyed him with its horizontal cat pupils and shuffled backward. “I’m sorry about Katrina,” Bobby said, his tone suddenly much lighter. “She’s not bothering you, is she?”

“What do you mean?” Benicio asked.

“She comes on strong. The flirting thing can be a bit much.”

Benicio nodded slowly for a while. “She’s really nice,” he said. He wanted to be polite, but clear. “She’s not my type.”