Moondogs (46 page)

Howard closes his eyes, enjoying this feeling of wonder. It pulses inside him. It pours. It trickles out into the ash, into the dark silence, into everything falling.

Chapter 30

The water in Manila Bay tasted foul, so Benicio backstroked. He swam about a hundred yards along the seawall and bumped lightly into the outrigger of a moored fishing bangka. Calling out twice and finding it empty, he climbed aboard, shimmied out along the pointed bow and hoisted his soggy self over the wall and back onto the promenade. Electricity along Roxas was still out and the falling ash had thickened. The crowd in front of the club had dispersed, and those who remained stood under the tacky awning for cover. Edilberto was still parked in the same spot, but all the doors were locked. Inside he saw Berto’s feet propped up on the dash and he rapped hard on the glass to wake him.

Edilberto cracked the window open and squinted out groggily. “You’re wet.”

“Open the door.”

“And dirty, too.” He pressed his tongue against the backs of his teeth and drew in three little snaps of breath. “Dirty upholstery is trouble for me.”

“I’ll tell them I made you.”

Edilberto leaned across the gearshift and opened the door for him. Benicio’s clothes squelched as he got inside and sat. Enough ash had settled on his wet skin that he was caked with grime.

“Bring me back to the hotel. Please.”

“Maybe first to hospital?” Edilberto gestured with his chin at Benicio’s temple.

He touched his cheek and traced a tickle of drying blood up to the gash that Solita had left in his high-cropped sideburn. It wasn’t that deep, but the cut stung, and it was filthy. “Yeah, take me to the hospital.” They sat for two minutes in near silence, the only sound being the dry rub of Edilberto’s middle and index fingers against his thumb. Benicio understood now that trying to bribe him was a mistake. He’d insulted him, and Edilberto was getting even. But he was pushing it. “I don’t have any more money,” he said. “I was robbed.”

“Robbed? In this kind of place?” Edilberto aped shock. He reached across Benicio’s lap and opened the glove compartment, producing a little pad of blank invoices and carbon paper. “You can write a tip-slip, and bill to your room. I get them all the time. No one ever asks why.”

Benicio wrote out a tip-slip for another four thousand pesos, tore it out of the booklet and handed it over. Glancing down at the figure, Edilberto balled up the tip-slip and discarded it in the backseat. Benicio took a breath. He signed the bottom of a fresh tip-slip, left the peso amount blank and threw the pad at Edilberto so that it struck him in the chest.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Edilberto drove with the wipers on and took Benicio to a gleaming white hospital in Makati where a nurse cleaned his face, swabbed out his little cut with alcohol and closed it with a single stitch. There was some commotion in the hospital—people ran about with worried and intense expressions and the sounds of helicopters carried to and fro through the ceiling—but Benicio thought little of it. He negotiated to have the bill sent to his hotel and went back outside to meet Edilberto.

It was almost dawn when they returned to the Shangri-La. Alice was fully dressed and waiting in the lobby. She saw the car pull up through the big glass doors and raced toward them before Benicio had
both feet out. She didn’t ask where the hell he’d been. She didn’t ask why he was wet and dirty and bandaged. She told him that they’d found his father, that he’d been shot, and they were bringing him to Makati Medical now to try and save him.

HOWARD WAS ALREADY IN SURGERY
when they returned to the hospital, and he underwent two more operations before Sunday was over. The doctors said he was disoriented but conscious during the helicopter ride from Corregidor, but he hadn’t come back since the first operation. Benicio and Alice made makeshift beds out of plastic chairs in the waiting lounge, and on Monday, when Howard was moved into his own room with a spare cot, they joined him. They napped in shifts all day—or rather Alice did while Benicio tried his best to stay awake all the time. He never left his father’s bedside, and spoke only to the nurses who came to change his IV and write things on his chart. The night nurse was especially chatty. She pronounced
Miracle
like it was three words. Her hair was braided so tight it looked synthetic, her forearms were slightly furry and she signed the cross as a kind of punctuation for life—she would have fit in perfectly among his aunts.

“The best thing you can do is take it day by day,” she said as he gazed dully at the green peaks of his father’s heartbeat. Benicio guessed that measuring things in days meant a week was unrealistic. The nurse tapped her pen precisely on the rigid edge of his father’s chart and glanced at the beeping monitors. “How is your wife holding up?” she asked, gesturing to Alice sleeping lightly on the cot.

“We’re not married,” he said. The nurse replaced the clipboard and made to go. “My father’s dying,” he said.

“His body may be.” She touched the collar of her uniform and he guessed that under the fabric was a dangling crucifix.

“The doctors wouldn’t tell me how long.”

“That’s because they don’t know.”

“Will they? I mean, when he starts to?”

“It could be sudden,” the nurse said. “Or they could know. Nothing is certain. Put your faith in God’s hands.”

Benicio shifted in his seat beside the hospital bed. He’d released his father’s hand when the nurse came in, but now he took it again. “Can he hear us?”

“He hears us all.”

“I mean my father.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I like to think he can.” She placed her hand on his and Howard’s. They were like a team, getting ready for a game.

“You
like
to think?”

The nurse paused, not quite sure how to take him but embarrassed all the same. She opened her mouth and closed it. She pulled her hand from their modest stack, capped her pen and left. He listened to her footsteps in the empty hall, fading beneath the beep and hiss of life support. Alice sat up on the cot behind him.

“She doesn’t deserve that,” Alice said.

He was quiet for a while. “No. She doesn’t.”

The cot squeaked as Alice got up. She crossed to him and draped her arms lightly around his shoulders. She kissed his neck and his ear.

“What do you want to say to him?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve gotten so used to saying nothing.” He paused, expecting a gentle admonishment that didn’t come. It was a long time before he made a go of it.

“I don’t know what this means, but Hon wanted me to tell you that the London thing is figured out.” His tone sounded flat and lame in the quiet room. “He came by yesterday. He’d still be here if the hospital would let him …” Benicio drifted. He fixed his eyes on the assisted rise and fall of his father’s chest.

“I’m glad I started talking to you again. I don’t regret stopping, but I’m glad I started again. And I’m sorry if I hurt you.” He turned to Alice. “Fuck, it sounds like someone else said that.”

“Nope, it was you.” She rubbed her hand in slow circles on his back and he shifted his weight a few times to indicate that she should stop. Each breath came close to crumbling.

He tightened his grip on his father’s thick fingers and felt the hard wedding band, still coated with coarse flecks of ash. It was loose—Howard
had lost weight. He was quiet for a long time. “I met her,” he finally said.

“I can leave,” Alice said, “if you want.” The back of his head brushed her cheek as he nodded.

She left.

Benicio turned his father’s wedding band, slid it off and put it back on again. He remembered the last time he’d held Howard’s hand, hardly half a year ago, at his mother’s funeral. It was the first time they’d touched, or talked, in years. What had Benicio said to him? Something to the effect of:
I haven’t forgiven you yet, but I will
. What the fuck was that? What had he been waiting for? Saying he would meant that he already had. He’d wanted to hug his father right there—a real hug, nothing perfunctory. But there had been something in the way. There was still something in the way.

“I don’t know what her name is,” he said. “She told me it was Solita. And I met her kid, June. He was about … I guess I would have been fifteen when he was born. The winter before we got certified, or maybe the one after. If he’s yours. He doesn’t look like yours. And if he was, I think even you would have done better by him.” He paused to breathe. Under the circumstances, “even you” sounded petty, and mean. “This isn’t really fair,” he said. “I had all these things to say to you. I’d practiced them. But they’re not things you say to someone on a respirator. Who’s dying. Or so they tell me.” He let out a little laugh that broke in half. He bit his lower lip, hard. “Mom knew,” he said. “I was too busy being mad at you, at both of you, to ask. I should have asked her a lot of things.” He let his head droop until it rested on the bed. He accounted the way he’d acted to his mother as the worst thing he’d done with his young life. Even confessing this to Howard felt cheap, because Howard probably couldn’t even hear it. “She knew everything,” he said. “Not just about what happened at the resort, but she knew about Solita, and about the money under your bed, and if June was yours or not. She knew, but nobody asked.”

Benicio had to stop there. Thinking about his mother made him cry. He loved her, and his father, too.

LATER THAT MORNING
Benicio and Alice returned to the Shangri-La together. They hadn’t gone back since Howard’s arrival at Makati Med and couldn’t go any longer without a shower and maybe an hour or two of sleep in a real bed. As they waited outside for Edilberto to pick them up, Alice touched the cut on Benicio’s head and asked if it hurt. “No,” he said. He’d taken off the bandage and the single stitch was already halfway dissolved into a little scab. This was the closest they’d come to talking about his disappearance on the night of the eruption.

Edilberto wept as he drove. Alice, warmed by how hard he was taking things, consoled him at red lights. He kept trying to make eye contact with Benicio in the rearview as he said how sorry he was. When they pulled up to the security checkpoint outside the hotel he popped the trunk and hood for the guards and turned around in the driver’s seat. He took Benicio’s hand in both of his. “Your father was always good to me,” he said, holding tight. “He doesn’t deserve this. You don’t either. I’m so sorry.” Benicio felt something moist in the hollow of their clasped hands, and when he looked down he saw that Edilberto was trying to palm him a wrinkled mess of thousand-peso bills. Alice, who’d been watching the security guard roll his mirror around the undercarriage, turned and saw blue notes blossom out of their clasped fingers. Edilberto’s wet eyes widened.

“Why are you giving me this?” Benicio asked, doing a passable job of keeping his voice even.

“It’s okay.” Edilberto pulled his hands back and let the bills splay out on Benicio’s lap. It wasn’t as much as he’d given him on the night of the eruption, but almost. “It’s all right. No problem. I don’t need it.” He let out a tremulous laugh and turned to Alice. “He’s great. I needed some money, and he lent it to me. Last week. But now I don’t need it anymore. But he’s great to lend it. Very kind.”

“Oh.” Alice looked from one of them to the other. “That’s good.”

Benicio collected the bills in his lap, stacked them and folded them once over. “You’re sure you don’t need it? No problem, if you do.”

Edilberto looked relieved and shook his head. He didn’t see the guard waving them through with exaggerated, whole-body motions.
When the sedan behind them honked he spun forward and accelerated quickly up the ramp to the big glass doors.

Benicio showered first. Then, when it was Alice’s turn, he picked up the hotel phone and called the front desk. He canceled their reservation with Edliberto for the afternoon and reserved another driver. The front desk asked if something was the matter and he said no, they just wanted another driver. Edilberto had done nothing wrong. He said it a few times, but they still sounded wary. “We’ll talk to him,” they said.

Alice came out of the shower and set the alarm beside the bed for early afternoon. They both got under the covers. Benicio told her that if he made any noises in his sleep, or twitched even, that she should wake him right up. She said she would.

HOWARD HAD A LOT OF VISITORS—CHARLIE
, Hon, Monique, the ambassador, an almost imperceptibly limping Bobby Dancer, and Reynato Ocampo in an ill-fitting dress uniform. Only family was allowed into Howard’s hospital room, so Benicio and Alice were obliged to take turns receiving people outside the closed door or—in the case of press—in the waiting lounge. By the middle of the week Howard had faded so much that the hospital began keeping his visitors away entirely. This was a small relief.

Just before dawn on Thursday, five days after Howard’s helicopter ride from Corregidor, Benicio watched the night nurse taking extra care with her regimen. She left and returned with a doctor. They both left and returned with a priest and an extra chair. Benicio shook Alice awake and took his seat beside Howard. He didn’t look any closer to death than he had the day before, or the day before that. The priest produced a bookmarked Bible and dangled rosary beads from his knuckles. “Does your father have a favorite passage?” he asked. Benicio said that he didn’t know and the priest opened to Romans and began reading aloud. Something about being buried with Christ, through baptism, into death. Then rising, glory and new life. After a while Alice said that he should maybe go, so he rushed to the last rites, and left.