Moondogs (44 page)

Reynato pauses here, eyeballing his newest recruit. He links elbows with Efrem and begins walking again, slowly. With his free hand he unbelts Glock and aims it casually at the asphalt.

“Which brings me to the last, the one out of one hundred kind of scenario. Every once in a rare while, I break the rules and I break them just for me. That’s what tonight is about. I’m not going to contrive some bullshit about Howard Bridgewater being the
real
enemy. I’m not going to try to convince you that the world will be better off without him. For all I know, the world will be worse off without him. But I tell you what … Fatty was into some serious problems even before we got involved. And he does
not
get a pass simply on account of being an American and a drinking buddy of that cocksucker Fuentes. Not from me, he doesn’t. That’s why I … why
we
are going to finish that junkie’s half-assed plan. We’re going to sell Howard to the Abu Sayyaf.”

Their footfalls reverberate as they cut through an ivy-draped, ruined barracks. Efrem is dimly aware of being drawn away from the road, out of sight. “They’re on their way now,” Reynato says, “downright giddy at the thought of kidnapping an American from the very edge of Metro Manila. They knocked off two armored cars in Cebu City just to round up the cash. I won’t talk numbers, because you don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of negotiating a cut, but I’ll say that tonight could make you a rich man, by your standards. By a lot of other people’s, too.”

Efrem glances up through a moon-filled hole in the concrete roof, out over treetops on the north shore. A boat approaches, nets covering the deck, cabin and running lights doused. Men sleep head to foot in the stern. He recognizes former rebels among them. An old man with a silver beard smokes in the deckhouse. His one hand sits on his white robed chest. The moon reflects in the dark ovals of his sunglasses. Efrem misses a step, nearly pitching into a knee-deep crater in the floor.

Reynato tightens their linked elbows and quickens his pace through the rubble. “I need to know if you can handle this, Mohammed. I need
you to visualize yourself helping us or visualize yourself without a weapon, handcuffed for nobody’s safety but your own. Visualize a team with shaken confidence.
This
team. Be as honest with me as I’ve been with you. Do you have a problem with this?”

Efrem answers without hesitating. “No, I don’t.”

“I knew you didn’t,” Reynato says, returning Glock to his belt. “I always knew you wouldn’t.”

KA-POW RETURNS
to the topside shore. They collect sobbing Howard from the cave, carry him down a steep pathless slope to the shallows and wait. The fishing boat filled with Abu Sayyaf approaches, near enough now that everybody sees it. Three kilometers out, they kill the engine and coast, silent on the rising tide. Somebody onboard shines a lantern twice. Reynato raises a penlight high and does the same. Then, all in a flash, the boat turns running lights back on. Men appear along the gunwale with long bamboo poles, negotiating with coral and rocks beneath the surface. The Holy Man stands at the bow, his one hand gripping the stem as he stares coastward through dark glasses. Efrem knows he’s unrecognizable on the beach, but being this close still dices his breath.

The boat hits bottom a few meters out and men aboard lower palm-fiber ropes and climb down into the shallows. Two of them help the Holy Man over the gunwale while another carries a large sack that he’s careful to not get wet. More men come over the side until ten stand thigh-deep in the waves. They brandish bolos and antique rifles. Two wear coconut-fiber belts strung with grenades painted like rotten fruit.

Reynato clicks his tongue as they wade closer. It’s five more than they said they’d bring. In a hissed whisper he orders Efrem back up the slope to keep watch, reminding him of the cardinal rule before he goes—
me first
.

Efrem slips away, disappearing into the vegetation beyond the narrow beach. He races up the wooded hillside as quietly as he can and finds a suitable granite outcropping near the top. The stone is cold and wet. It feels good on his belly as he lies flat and steadies his Tingin.
Reynato and the Holy Man shake and banter below. Efrem draws a bead on their clasped hands. He sights his Tingin on the Holy Man. He sights it on Reynato. He wonders if his adoptive mother would be proud of what he’s about to do. She wouldn’t, he decides. She’d have no sympathy for a rich foreigner who probably deserves it. And even though it was the Holy Man who’d bombed her ferry, she’d call Efrem a faithless, fatherkilling traitor. Because that’s what he is. The curse is proven. He really is deadluck. Everyone he’s ever touched has passed. Or is about to.

Down below Ka-Pow lifts Howard Bridgewater to his feet. Efrem hears them count down from three before, in one single movement, shoving Howard at the Abu Sayyaf and catching the money sack hurled in exchange. Efrem takes aim at the space between the Holy Man’s dark lenses. His fingers shake as he squeezes off a shot. When it’s done, the world shakes with him.

Chapter 28

Despite the excitement of the evening before, Monique had a good night’s sleep at the converted BOQ motel, and woke feeling rested and whole. It was late morning already and Reynato was gone. He’d scrawled a note into the back of one of Monique’s business cards and left it beside her pillow.

She was irritated at his having left her just hours after they were assaulted—or rather felt she should be. But an undeniable sense of relief pushed that perfunctory irritation aside. For the first time since Joseph and the kids left, she had a day that was all hers. Eager to make use of it, she dressed in her wrinkled one-button pantsuit from the day before and left the bungalow-style motel room. Reynato’s Honda waited at the far end of the lot, busted left headlight making it look like it was winking. Walking toward it, Monique caught a whiff of the pepper spray she’d emptied the night before and noticed some dried blood speckling the gravel like hearty lichen. The police had searched the bamboo thicket for a good hour and failed to find the scarred attacker. She was strangely unconcerned by this. The whole memory felt surreal, and harmless.

It had been years since she drove stick, but the empty roads afforded her some practice. She had her route all figured out. Heading northeast, she looped around the old Binictican Golf Course where she used to watch her father hit balls into trees. Further north she saw that the commissary was still standing, as was the Kalayaan elementary school that she’d attended off and on during her father’s deployments. She stopped in Onongapo for lunch, eating pancit from a cart and feeling conspicuous, like a tourist. Then it was back south to the airport on Cubi Point. She swung around All Hands Beach, cut back up behind the converted BOQ motel and finally stopped at the married officers quarters. Reynato had been wrong. Her house was still there, sulking darkly downhill at a short remove from the other quarters. The windows were boarded up and many of the flagstones had been salvaged from the front walk. Part of the roof had caved in, and waxy leaves climbed out of the hole like smoke from a chimney. Seeing it brought a lingering worry to the front of her mind—that seeing it might not change anything.

Monique parked the car and picked her way down the muddy hill. The front door was unlocked, but humidity had swollen the frame so badly that she had to tug hard to get it open. There was nothing inside. The floor was speckled with sunlight, broken glass and the droppings
of a small animal. There was some graffiti on the walls and a used condom so old it looked like snakeskin. Rather than walk through the filth, she cut around the side and found that the back porch was still there, rotting peacefully. Monique kicked dead leaves off the splintered wood and sat, looking out on the same view she’d had as a child. Sagging, vine-heavy woods. A dirt trail that ran from the bus stop on the main road down to the huts and bangka moorings on the water. The same trail had brought the cleaning woman to their home three times a week. It was spotted today, as it had been years ago, with intermittent foot traffic. A teenager walking a bicycle like it was a crippled friend. Two men hauling sacks of something. A woman and child who stared at Monique through the leaves with expressions of concern.

And that was it. Just a tiny wreck of a house and a column of strangers. Could it really be that she’d dragged her family to the Philippines for this? Was this rotten little box really the sense of home she’d been longing for? Monique wasn’t stupid—she knew that her memories were idealized and exoticized. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t pushed harder to come back in the whole year they’d been stationed in Manila; for fear of having those memories invalidated. Maybe that’s why Joseph never insisted; because he knew they would be. Still, Monique didn’t expect this total emptiness. She could just as well have been on the meticulously preserved movie set of a film she’d enjoyed once or twice as a little girl. It wasn’t home. It was hardly familiar.

She was about to get up and return to the car when someone on the trail caught her attention. It was a woman, not ancient but very old, picking her way up in the direction of the main road. Her hair was dyed black but was silver about the roots, making it oddly match her black flats with white soles. She had a walking stick of dried bamboo that she used every other step, as though favoring a good leg. Monique slipped off the porch, cut through the trees and got on the trail, telling herself all the while that this was silly. The similarities were superficial. There was no way this was
her
.

But why couldn’t it be? She remembered the cleaning woman cutting fresh walking sticks for each of them whenever they set out on one of their adventures. And there was something in this woman’s face,
something in her posture that was undeniable. She followed the old woman a short ways up the trail, debating whether or not to say anything. The chances were so infinitesimal—but what the hell? At worst she’d look foolish and that shame would fade by the time she got back to the car.

“Tiya?” Monique called.

The woman kept walking at her irregular pace.

“Tiya?” Louder this time.

The old woman stopped and turned. She put her hand up in a “just a moment” motion and plucked little plastic headphones out of her ears. Frank Sinatra’s voice boomed out of them so loud that Monique could hear it from where she stood. The cleaning woman had loved Sinatra! “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. You probably don’t …” Monique stammered. Not knowing the woman’s first name was incredibly embarrassing. “I don’t want to bother you, but I used to live here when I was a little girl. And you look—”

The old woman shushed her again, this time with both hands in the air. Her eyes widened like opening mouths. Seeing recognition spread over her face made Monique’s knees shake a little. The old woman closed the distance between them and actually put a hand on each of Monique’s cheeks.

“My goodness,” she said. “My goodness. My goodness. It’s you, isn’t it?”

Monique choked on her own breathing.

“Anna. You’re
Anna
.”

A bird flew noisily through the foliage above, and somewhere in the woods a branch fell. Monique took a step back and the old woman’s hands stayed where they were, cupping air.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“No. I’m Monique.”

“But you look just like Anna. Your hair. Your freckles. She was a beautiful little girl. Her daddy was a geologist and they had a house in Olongapo.”

“My parents lived on the base. Just up there.” Monique pointed. She
didn’t know why. “There was a woman who came over three times a week to clean.”

“Clean?” The old woman dropped her hands to her sides and wrinkled her nose like a cruel joke had been played on her. “I never cleaned for anyone. You must have me mistaken for someone else.”

“I know. I’m very sorry.”

Monique turned and walked back up the trail. She cut through the woods to her old backyard. She kicked the porch once and the wood crunched under her feet like slushy ice. She climbed back up the muddy hill, sat in Reynato’s car and locked the doors. She’d been wrong about the shame, the feeling of foolishness, fading by the time she got up there.

IT GREW DARK
. Monique turned the key in the ignition and flipped on the one remaining headlight. In its beam she could see bats flitting over the treetops, as well as the occasional gangly shape of a flying fox. Her phone was nearly out of battery, but she figured it had enough juice left for her to say what she had to.

“Hey. Baby? Are you all right?” Joseph’s voice sounded drowsy on the other end and she realized she must have woken him up. But that was good news. It meant he was sleeping again.

“I’m fine, Joe,” she said. “I’m sorry to wake you. I love you.”

“I love you, too, darling. What’s going on?”