Moondogs (47 page)

“I can go too,” she said. “Would you like to be alone with your dad?”

Benicio didn’t answer, so she stayed there at the edge of the room.
Howard’s breathing sounded like diving. The way the regulator reverberated; the slight wheeze when the current rushed against the purge valve. He died at six in the morning, which would have been just about suppertime back home.

Chapter 31

Reynato Ocampo hates hospitals. He hates being watched. Not five minutes go by without doctors and nurses coming into his room at Makati Medical. They stare and write smutty notes to each other on his chart. When it’s not them it’s his family with adobos and videocassettes, or Charlie Fuentes with insincere condolences, or news crews with unhygienic boom microphones, or his beloved bruha bitching and moaning and breaking his heart. They all make Reynato anxious. Even late at night, when he and Racha are alone in their room, he feels eyes on his skin like a sunburn. Someone peeking in through the third-story window, or kneeling at the keyhole, just watching. Makes it hard to sleep. And when he does sleep his dreams make him wish he hadn’t.

Three days of that is plenty. Reynato slips out of bed during the midday shift change, careful not to rip the stitches keeping his shoulder closed. He cradles his arm in a pillowcase sling and walks barefoot, duckfooted, out the door. The young police lieutenant posted to his room gawks at his open-backed gown and bare ass before running to catch up. He asks Reynato what he needs, and Reynato thinks for a bit before saying: “Pants.”

The lieutenant’s full dress uniform fits Reynato pretty well, just a little tight in the gut and chest. Even though he’s eager to get out of the hospital, he goes down the hall for a quick check on fast-fading Howard. Seeing that he isn’t dead yet, Reynato chokes up. This goes over well
with Howard’s tanned manchild of a son, who looks moved and gives overstudied thanks. Returning to the hall, Reynato avoids the near-nude lieutenant getting ribbed by a superior. He rushes to the elevator and heads down to the basement for a parting visit with Elvis and Lorenzo. They’re laid out on cold metal tables, stacked alongside all the other corpses recovered from Corregidor.

Four days into it and the medical examiner is still pulling bullets out of them. Reynato’s friends lie closest to the door, each bedecked with ribbons, posthumous presidential medals in the nooks between collarbones. Lorenzo came out worse and looks it. His belly unbuttoned, he’d screamed for minutes while his stomach spilled into sand, flowing down toward blue-white waves in red-and-yellow rivulets. His teeth black with ash stains, his jaw locked wide, his chin still scarred from when Efrem hit him with the telephone. Beside him Elvis looks peaceful, more put-together on the table than he’d ever been alive. He must have changed back into a man as he died. The baffled examiner explains that there’s not a scratch on him, but there are two BMG slugs in his neck, beneath the smooth skin. Reynato lingers by their bodies. He clutches their hands, but their hands feel gross, so he stops.

Reynato turns to the six terrorists on the other side of the room, naked and washed out under cool fluorescent light. He examines the faces of those who’ve still got them; the callused palms of those who don’t, hoping there’s been some mistake. Hoping they really did find Efrem’s body, that it’s just been misidentified. He can tell the leader by his white beard and stump, but the others are indistinguishable. One near the wall has some potential. Two holes in the upper back that come out just above the heart—more or less where Reynato remembers shooting Efrem. Height and weight seem about right, but it’s hard to be sure. Seawater has sucked away his color and left the flesh puffy. His face is a mess from where it got propeller chopped during recovery. It could be Efrem or just a similarly built Moro.

“These the only bodies?” Reynato asks. “Should be four more. Or five.”

The examiner does not look up from his scalpel work on Elvis’s
neck. “High tide carried most out to sea,” he mumbles. “Ash in the shallows makes them hard to spot. But crews are still out looking today.”

Reynato nods, slowly. “Call me if more come in.”

HE RETURNS TO HIS HOME
in Magallanes Village that afternoon, where his wife and daughter give him affectionate but concerned hell. They start together but Lorna is louder. “My Lord. My Jesus. My God. Walking out of the hospital? Just
walking
out? I’m surprised you dared come back! This will be the good news …” she gestures to his wounded shoulder without touching it. “Did poor Beatrice fly home, did she give up her internship, her sublet, her deposit, just to watch you make me end you?”

“No.” Reynato kisses Lorna on the cheek and comes away with foundation-dusted lips. “She’s come home to defend me, right Bea-bee?”

Bea sits at the kitchen counter, legs crossed, hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea. The corners of her bottom lip, heavy with fat, pinch to resist a smile. “I won’t help her kill you,” she says, “but I won’t turn her in when she does.”

Reynato gingerly hoists himself onto a stool beside his daughter—moving stiffer and slower than he needs to—and runs fingers under her cool, grapefruit-smelling hair. Lorna trundles behind the counter and serves him green tea in a mug bearing his name, Charlie Fuentes’s likeness and numerous inspirational messages. “Enough with the sad face,” she says. “I ran out of sympathy when you ran out of the hospital. And those doctors have no manners on the phone. Yelling like I went there myself and pulled you out of bed. I’m not talking to them again, but you should call to tell them you’re alive.”

He sips tea smilingly. Beatrice works her neck, the base of her skull, into his callused palm. Lorna refills his mug even though he’s hardly had any. “Does anything hurt?” she asks.

Reynato points at his heart and his wife and daughter go still. “You’re breaking it,” he says.

“God forgive you.” Lorna takes his free hand in hers and kisses his
knuckles. “And if he doesn’t, let him at least not punish you too badly.” She releases him. “You smell. Did your doctors say if you can shower yet? Did they say if you can eat real food?”

“Didn’t say I couldn’t.” He stands and makes for the stairs. Bea and Lorna try to help him up but he shoos them away. He only makes it a few steps up before calling them back.

Reynato basks in special privileges the rest of the afternoon. Lorna makes a pinakbet with calabaza and lechon, and lets him eat in his bathrobe. Bea finds an extension cord and rolls the television into the dining room. They put on
Ocampo Justice VII
, thinking it’s what he wants to watch. Reynato uses his pork-tipped fork to point out inaccuracies in the script, and in Charlie’s performance, and his wife and daughter coo and coddle him with questions. They miss punchlines and laugh when they shouldn’t. Reynato blushes at the deathless timber of their voices, at how little they know of him, and finds he misses Monique. He wishes she could meet them, but that’s impossible, of course.

It’s not until dessert—a full-blown halo-halo with purple ube ice cream, whole milk, frosted flakes, sweet beans and Nata de Coco—that the conversation becomes serious. Lorna reveals that she is starting up a fund—with some seed money of their own, or course—to bring Elvis’s and Lorenzo’s people in from the provinces in time for the funerals. “Those poor, poor men,” Lorna says in a lamenting voice, holding her head back so tears won’t smear her eyeliner. “Those poor
boys
. A person isn’t just a person,” she says. “He’s everybody who ever loved him.” In that case, Reynato thinks, Lorenzo and Elvis were nobodies. His cheeks burn a little at his own dishonesty. He amends his thought: they weren’t nobody, they were
me
. “I pray that the American knows how much has been sacrificed for his sake.”

“He may never,” Reynato says. “The nurses are talking miracles.”

“The Lord have mercy. I saw his son on the news last week, a sweet-looking boy. And what about Racha?”

The small, upside-down Reynato in his spoon stares up at him. “I don’t think he’s going to make it, either,” he says.

• • •

AFTER THE MEAL
he excuses himself to his study. The room overlooks their machete-trimmed back lawn and is chock-full of documents, tax forms, unpaid bills and those scraps of memorabilia that he hasn’t yet sold. All the uniforms he’s ever owned—some worn just once—hang on hooks along the walls like shed skins. Medals presidential, congressional, departmental, civil, honorable, charitable and military lie rusting in glass cases on the dusty floor. His desk is decked with framed photographs of him and the last four presidents, none of them as glorious as the shot of him and Marcos playing cards in Malacañang—a shot he destroyed shortly after the revolution. Newspaper clippings of his exploits fill shoeboxes that sit atop and beside a complimentary DVD boxed set of the Ocampo Justice Series—the only perk he’s seen out of the whole film franchise in the last five years. He blames himself, of course—he’d been young and stupid enough to make a bad deal during a good year—but he blames the producers, and Charlie, even more.

Reynato eases himself into his swivel chair to catch up on e-mail. His accountant, half his age, has started writing to him in all capital letters.
IT’S TIME TO CONSIDER ANOTHER AUCTION
. Little prick.
W/ FUENTES IN SENATE, INTEREST SHOULD BE HIGH. UR OLD GUN COULD FETCH 10K AT LEAST
. Fat chance.
THAT OR BEA FINISHES DEGREE HERE. UR CALL BOSSMAN
. Reynato’s hand strays to the pride of his collection, as though to protect it. His first personal weapon—an old Colt Peacemaker. He spins the empty cylinder and runs his fingers along the barrel, tracing out engraved lettering. Not Truth, from those idiotic movies, but the inspiration behind it. He’d bought the Single Action Army, a genuine west-winning antique, at a trade show in El Paso while on a police exchange arranged by the American Embassy. The trigger stuck and sometimes the hammer did too, but hell, that big heavy beauty was a shitspiller. Just the sight of her sorted cowards from those too dumb or desperate to realize they should be. He’d never sell, and even if he ever did, ten thousand was a flat-out insult. Reynato puts the barrel in his mouth and takes a picture of himself with his webcam. He sends the picture to his accountant—
sooner do this
as the subject line. The response comes minutes later.
SUIT URSELF. DRAMA QUEEN
.

Someone yells in the yard below. Reynato peers out the window and sees Bea wearing a one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt running low about the waist. She’s in the pool, floating on an expensive air mattress, waving up at him. “Hi Daddy!” Reynato sets his smile and waves back. He just bought that air mattress a month ago to replace the one she took to the States. The one that now sits in her two-bedroom apartment at Sarah Lawrence. The apartment that she rents alone because her roommate—Reynato knew they were more than just roommates but kept up appearances for Lorna’s sake—moved out. The apartment that’s as empty now as the loft she’s subletting in Manhattan, just a subway stop away from her socially conscious internship. The internship that she’s skipping out on now, to be here with him. Because she loves him. Bea shifts positions on the mattress and it suddenly sinks, as if someone pulled the tap. She goes down with it, butt touching bottom, and bursts back to the surface laughing. She waves again and Reynato waves back. He wonders if he can salvage the expensive mattress. With his luck, probably not.

HE SLEEPS BADLY THAT NIGHT
, waking once to see eyes in the doorway, twice more to stand in front of the toilet, unable to pee. He leaves the house at dawn, goes straight to the bay and boards the first Sun Cruise boat to Corregidor. He sits in the rocking head, dry-swallowing Vicodin. When they arrive he waits for the tourists to disburse before starting the lonely hike from the south dock to the northwest part of the island. He picks his way through ruins and down densely wooded slopes, tripping through the underbrush in search of the little topside beach where it all happened.

Reynato doesn’t find the spot till lunchtime and even then it’s hard to tell. The tide has tidied it of shell casings and blood, but Reynato recognizes big trees emerging from the bramble. He sees the rock ledge he’d sent Efrem to. This is the spot where he’d almost died.

He’d known what was happening, of course. The moment the bearded terrorist took one to the face, shattered sunglasses carried aloft on roiled blood, he knew Efrem had turned on them. He’d have reacted
sooner if not for the eruption. Reynato fell flat on his butt. Lorenzo fell beside him in a burst of colored kerchiefs and freed doves, grabbing a gut wound, talking in fluids. Everybody shot everywhere. Reynato put two into an adolescent ready to pull the pin on a grenade painted like a mango. The kid went down, groping at his belt, and Reynato gave him another. Next person he aimed Glock at was himself. The muzzle burned when he pressed it to his shoulder. He put a round clean through and collapsed onto the beach.

The pain was bad but he managed to keep the shakes away. Heat flowed out over his shirtfront. Men stumbled across his chest and belly as they ran for safety. Reynato watched them go. He saw wounds bloom on their foreheads like Ash Wednesday crosses. He saw Elvis pitch his arms forward to become a black dog as big as a pony. He saw the dog gallop for the treeline and get skewered through the neck by Efrem’s flashing Tingin. He saw Racha square off with Efrem atop the rock ledge, watched as they rolled downhill. Racha filled with holes, Efrem yelling in a language Reynato never heard him speak before. They landed hard on the beach and beat each other’s faces with rocks. Efrem scrambled away, took up a dropped rifle and unloaded it into Racha. Racha kept coming. Efrem found another and unloaded that also. Racha swayed and fell to his knees, his remaining eye still full of fight. In the end Efrem had to pile stones on him just to stop him crawling.