Moondogs (19 page)

“Not starvation,” he said. “Army.”

Everybody nodded. Their village lay some miles due north of Tubigan, itself north of Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago. The short year since martial law had brought gunboats to this place, wakes crisscrossing like chicken wire on the strait. Manileño soldiers inspected cargo and crew. Nervous at the prospect of actually discovering Moro fighters, they were known to shoot out of panic.

Nothing to be done.

The villagers uncircled and saw to their houses, mending pressed bamboo with palm twine. It wasn’t until dusk, when they pulled the dead badjao from their boat so as to better salvage the wood and nails, that they discovered Efrem under burlap in the stern. He screamed and so did they. The old woman, new mother, jumped aboard and took him up. She laid him on a cot above her still-wet floor and fed him starfish.

Talk of curses started that night, before moonrise. The villagers didn’t know he spoke their language and mingled just beyond the walls of his new mother’s home. Boy from a deadboat was no good luck, they
agreed. Lying there for weeks while the sun turned his people into leather, eating God-knows-what.
No good luck at all
. His new mother and uncle talked it over while he feigned sleep, and they agreed with the frightened neighbors. Efrem—the intended name of a neverborn that his adoptive mother carried for eight or nine months as many years ago, a hand-me-down name that replaced his old but not forgotten one—was cursed.

Days later, when he grew stronger and chased after children old enough to be playmates, they said the same thing. They called him deadluck and threw razor-clams at him, defending their tidepool kingdom. “Your new mother’s so old she’s burned up down there,” they jeered. “And your uncle’s the worst fisherman in three provinces. Risking us all because they’ve got nothing to lose.” Efrem answered with shells of his own, sending even the oldest boys home with bleeding heads. His mother promised theirs that Efrem would be beat for it. But she didn’t have the heart, and his uncle didn’t dare.

TODAY EFREM SITS IN A JEEP
as it makes slow progress from the Fuentes family plantation to Davao City. It is thirty-one years since he ran aground north of Tubigan to be adopted by the old, childless woman. In that time the dictator has been exiled, has died, and has had his family’s request that he be buried in the heroes’ cemetery declined. The war in the south is mostly on hold and Western Mindanao has autonomy. Though no longer master soldier-killer among rebels, nor master rebel-killer among soldiers, Efrem is still cursed. He’s felt alone in this until today. But Reynato, steering with one hand and sucking his unlit cigar, explains that they’re all freaks—all
bruhos
. Every member of Task Force Ka-Pow has some kind of magic.

“This motherfucker is the worst,” Reynato says, jabbing a thumb at shirtless, rainwater dappled Elvis. “His trick’ll make you shit, when you see it. He’s a mountain boy of Baguio, the real outdoorsy kind with not a little Ifugao in his blood. He’s loyal as a dog, and smart as one too. Probably because he
is
a dog. Turns himself into one just like you or I might snap our fingers.” Reynato snaps his fingers to demonstrate
how quick it is, and easy. “It’s a deep act. Elvis can do almost anything you like providing he’s seen one before. A bird. A centipede. Took him to the Manila zoo month before last just so he could learn giraffe and emu.” Reynato twists around and seems annoyed by the dumb, blank way Efrem stares at him. “Come on Elvis, show Mohammed I’m no liar. Shock us with exotic.”

Elvis smiles. His orderly white teeth part to reveal the healthy pink insides of his mouth. A long and pointed tongue emerges and goes rigid in what looks like a taunt. A bulge appears in Elvis’s throat and it moves up like backward gulping. A spider, big as a mango seed, climbs out of Elvis’s mouth and marches down his whitening tongue. Reaching the end, it dangles from the tip by a thread of spit-dripping silk, lowering itself down to where Elvis’s lap should be but isn’t, because there is no Elvis, just a spider, big as a mango seed, sitting alone on the vast empty rear passenger seat.

If the men in the jeep appreciate the trick, they don’t let on. Lorenzo crosses his arms over his chest and puffs air out of his cheeks, mustache aflutter. Reynato, hardly watching the road, moves right along with the magical introductions. He grabs the gnarled forearm of the scar-covered man in the front seat. “Racha’s act isn’t so fancy, but it’s just as useful. This poor son of a bitch has the
worst
luck in the world, and the very
best
luck in the world, all at once. He’s our one and only shit magnet, and believe me, before too long you’ll learn to love him the way I do. As members of Ka-Pow we get some doom thrown our way. I promise you right now that one of us will get hurt. Lucky for us, that person is always Racha. He’s been shot more times than I’ve been laid—burned up, sliced, dragged on a rope behind horses and Toyotas. So much that he doesn’t have an inch of baby-skin left—even his belly looks like ballsack. Racha will protect you whether he likes it or not, all the badness meant for you will land on him. And, worst of all, he always lives through it.”

His eyes on Efrem as they are, Reynato doesn’t see the knee-deep pothole ahead. They take it hard and Racha, unbelted, pitches face-first into the windshield. A trickle of purple blood unfolds, rolling thick
down the bridge of his nose. He checks himself in the side mirror and wipes the blood off in a business-as-usual sort of way.

“What about me?” Lorenzo is reticent in the backseat, arms still tight across his chest, good ear cheated toward Reynato.

“Saving least for last,” Reynato says, his smile not bereft of affection, but not full of it either. “If you’ve ever seen the act of a cheese-ass stage-magician, you’ve already got a fair idea of Lorenzo’s sorry talents. He’s a treasure at parties. I’m talking the full package—balloons in animal shapes, white rabbits, sawing a full-grown woman in half and putting her back together again. He can untie tricky knots, make fizzy water come out of flowers and even pluck coins out of a birthday-boy’s ear. I know it sounds impossible, and call me a liar if you must, but it’s God’s honest truth. The man’s an asset, I tell you.”

Lorenzo assumes a shocked, offended, put out expression. “Ha ha ha,” he says. “You don’t
ever
tell it right.” Turning to Efrem: “I’ll show you myself.” He uncrosses his arms and makes a show of demonstrating, with pinched fingers, that there’s nothing up his nonexistent sleeves. Then he reaches into the folds of his transparent rain poncho and produces a tattered deck of cards. “Pick one,” he says, fanning the deck.

Efrem picks a card. The designs on the back are floral; intricate blue and white, like the inlay accompanying Arabic verse in the mosque his uncle used to take him to. The card is a king of hearts. Lorenzo snatches it and returns it to the deck. He shuffles in a vigorous, complicated way that makes the cards travel up and down his forearm, then along his shoulders and finally back into his left hand. He removes his straw cap, dumps the cards inside, shakes them about and plucks one out. Efrem stares blankly at the king of hearts.

Reynato laughs from the driver’s seat. “What did I tell you? Damn near indispensable. Can you imagine this boy in a gunfight?”

His chuckling cuts short when a bird strikes the base of the windshield, slides up its length and topples dead into the open-backed jeep. Lorenzo picks up the bird—a warbler just passing through—and opens its thin beak with his fingernails. He squeezes the bird and a playing
card, rolled tight as a cigarette, pops wetly out of its gullet. He hands the card to Efrem, who unrolls it. It’s the king of hearts—but now the illustrated king is Efrem’s own spitting image, leering up at him like a shadow self.

“Now you’re just showing off,” Reynato says, sounding proud.

Efrem looks from the card to Lorenzo. “How did you do that?”

“Shit, don’t Moros do birthdays? If I say how, it’ll ruin—”

“No … that’s not …” Efrem glances up at Racha, still bleeding lightly, at Elvis, who is no longer a spider, and asks the same question he’s never been able to answer of himself. “How are you this way?”

“How did we get our magic, you mean?” Lorenzo asks, not relinquishing the spotlight. “That’s easy, I got mine from the
people
. From the People Power Revolution. I’m a child of EDSA, born in the last hour before Dictator Marcos left our soil aboard a GI-Joe helio. Mom, a lefty, left my sisters at home for a February march; never mind she was nine months full of me. She stacked sandbags, laid down flat in front of tanks and led seven million with her rendition of “Bayan Ko.” I was born to the sound of cheering, the sound of Cardinal Sin on Radio Veritas, the sound confetti makes in your hair.” He puts on a contemplative look, sort of sad-happy. “The way I see it, People Power has a special kind of meaning for me. Can’t help but think I represent—”

“Don’t listen to his bullshit,” Reynato interrupts. “He’s teasing you, Mohammed. People Power has nothing to do with it. You want the truth?” He pauses to glance back through the rearview. “We are the way we are on account of gamma rays. The ones we all got exposed to in space. Out on the
Balut Thirteen
, first Pinoys to land on the moon. Maybe you saw us up there, with those eyes of yours. Planted flags all over that motherfucker.”

The bruhos of Task Force Ka-Pow bray wildly, and they roll on. The road turns to asphalt. Trees thin. They hit light traffic and Reynato switches on a siren to get by.

THAT EVENING THEY ARRIVE
at what Reynato calls a safehouse, but it isn’t a house at all, it’s a suite in the luxurious Secret Valley Hotel in Davao City. Lorenzo and Racha claim beds first, leaving Efrem to
drop his bedroll on the floor. Still full from lunch, he follows his new friends downstairs and across the street to a dingy grill operated by a pink, peeling Australian. A thick waitress takes their order and returns Lorenzo’s sex-eyes. After they eat, Ka-Pow orchestrates a party that they are the life of. Reynato sings with the house band on stage while Elvis commandeers the drums. Efrem accepts a single mug of warm beer—his first—but stops drinking when he discovers a raw pork cutlet floating near the bottom. He rushes to the bathroom with a finger down his throat. Lorenzo blames the bartender for the prank, so Efrem puts the bartender on the floor. The police are called and Reynato talks them down, autographing their billy clubs with a fancy pen that has glitter in the ink. They return to the Secret Valley an hour before dawn, where they’re told by sleepy telephone voices that the kitchen is closed, and there will be no room service. Lorenzo, a man of solutions, produces a white rabbit and a brace of Mindanao doves from his straw hat. Racha butchers them in the bathtub, Elvis roasts them over sinkfire, and they all have something to eat come breakfast time.

By midmorning the air is heavy with promise, and the day begins much like Efrem’s beloved Ocampo Justice movies. Reynato summons Task Force Ka-Pow to the roof of the hotel where, free from prying eyes and perked ears, he goes over the finer points of their upcoming sting. They’ve come to Davao City to arrest a pair of bald and toothless shabu dealers—brothers, twins. The two run a low-profile operation, just a handful of corpses to their credit, if you don’t count the junkies in unmarked graves throughout the province, mangled from the inside out by the twins’ rotgut shabu. They also spread their earnings generously enough that the local police, the barangay sentinels, even would-be rivals have allowed them to operate with impunity.

“This ends today,” Reynato says, in an inspiring tone of voice. But no sooner has he spoken than his cell phone hollers madly. Charlie Fuentes requests his presence at a rally by the port, and tomorrow, at a town hall meeting all the way out in Zamboanga. He did
promise
, after all. Reynato hangs up, looking dour. “This ends shortly,” he says. Lorenzo and Racha and Elvis cheer. The bender is reinstated.

For days on end Efrem lingers in the plush safehouse while his
fellow bruhos, unsupervised by Reynato, stretch long nights of boozing into mornings spent retching up their sins out the open hotel window. They bring home girls, and whores, and new friends who invariably become enemies by dawn and find themselves on the losing ends of elaborate fistfights. Lorenzo orders meals on rolling trays and sends them hurtling downstairs when the food is unsatisfactory or too meager. Elvis watches dirty videos on a VCR annexed from the front desk and twice defended from terrorized bellhops charged with recovering it. Racha, bleary with drink, stares into the bathroom mirror for hours, sometimes shouting in fright and anger, other times exclaiming, “It really isn’t
that
bad.”

Efrem doesn’t participate in this fun—as they describe it. He spends his days seated at the foot of Racha’s unmade bed, casting his long gaze out the open window. Though Reynato left him with no explicit orders, he keeps watch on the shabu dealers, emptying bottles of eyedrops into his hardening pupils, hoping to see something that will be of use when the time finally comes to arrest them. Elvis and Racha let him be, avoiding him almost instinctively. But Lorenzo mocks him, drunk or sober. “How did we ever manage a stakeout before we got this magic Muslim?” he asks no one in particular. “You guys remember all those hours with binoculars? Always having to hole up close by to the baddies, usually a shit nest with no air-con? Like the fucking
dark ages
! I bet you know all about the dark ages, don’t you, Mohammed? Growing up in some Basilan backwater, and all.”

Efrem ignores Lorenzo as best he can, concentrating on the task at hand. He spies on the distant dealers, reporting the domestic minutia of their lives into a little tape recorder. They have a cat that is well cared for. They are loving gardeners. They enjoy sugary drinks. In the afternoons they take naps on either side of a girl bound at the wrists and ankles with synthetic rope.

IT’S A FULL WEEK
before the aggravating routine ends. Reynato returns from the campaign trail, appearing in the doorway of their safehouse suite with to-go coffees and a bottle of aspirin. Efrem has already
taken up his watchful perch at the foot of the unmade bed, and Reynato looks at him with such pride and approval that Efrem feels as though his full lungs have crystallized. He helps Reynato apply heavy makeup and a fake beard, and then watches as he heads across town to meet the dealers. In a sting one week delayed, Reynato begs the twins to sell him millions of pesos worth of their finest shabu. Efrem presses his back against Racha’s bed and shoulders his Tingin, just in case the meeting goes awry. Racha, draped across a stack of dingy pillows, pays Efrem no mind. He whittles foot-calluses with a penknife, collecting the skin in a neat pile on the nightstand. Neither of them speak.