Moondogs (29 page)

Bobby turned to him, the ember of his cigarette a slow pulse. “No?” The word came out as smoke. It floated between them, changed shape a few times, and disappeared. Benicio returned his gaze, wondering how best to bring up the Solita thing. But Katrina was back before he could say anything. Two shirtless boys trailed behind her and they exchanged big grins at the sight of Benicio. “You see that?” Bobby asked. “They like you, too.”

“Who likes who?” Katrina asked, still panting a bit from her jog back up the stairs.

“Nobody,” Bobby said. “Nobody likes anybody else. Except for me. I like everybody else. I’m loving.”

“You are.” Katrina gave Bobby a very light pinch on the tip of his nose. “I could eat you up and shit out puppies.” She opened the hatchback trunk and handed off dive gear to the shirtless boys, each of whom donned mesh duffel bags like backpacks, hand straps slung over their shoulders. “You mind checking us all in?” she asked. “If Ben and I get going now we can probably still fit two dives in before it gets dark.”

“Go ahead.” Bobby dropped his cigarette in the grass and extinguished it with the rubber tip of his cane. “I’ll see you when you surface.”

Katrina took Benicio’s hand and, together with the shirtless boys, they headed down toward the beach.

BENICIO’S FIRST DIVE
, the one with his father in Costa Rica, had not gone well at all. Not for either of them. Within the first minute he’d almost ruptured a lung and by the end of the dive his father had managed to get thoroughly drugged on the nitrogen in his tank. As Benicio thought about it now, he blamed those early mistakes on his hard-on for the Costa Riqueña dive instructor. Days earlier, when she’d lined them up beside the training pool to go through each and every piece of gear, all he’d learned was that it was nearly impossible to hide an erection in a wetsuit.

The instructor started slow. “This is a mask,” she said. “It goes on your face.” She put it on to demonstrate. She stripped down to a modest one-piece bathing suit—a few sizes too small for her slightly chubby frame—and began donning the rest of the dive gear, taking time to explain the uses of each device. By the time she got to: “This is the first stage regulator,” all Benicio saw was a mess of metal bulbs and hoses that blocked his view of the gully that ran between her tits. “It connects directly to your tank and sends air to the mouthpiece, your pressure gages, your octopus and into your buoyancy control device, which we’ll get to in a minute. The mouthpiece goes in your mouth.” Again, she demonstrated. “Da thick ith doo juth breathe noomal.” Her breasts moved when she laughed, which sounded a little like panic through the mess of rubber and plastic. When she pulled the mouthpiece out she looked grave and serious. “Whatever you do, do not, not ever, hold your breath. That’s what your instincts will say, but your instincts are wrong.”

But sure enough, after doing a backward roll into the cold water on his first checkout dive, Benicio did what came natural. He held his breath. It wasn’t until his depth gauge read
25 feet
that he realized what he was doing. Claustrophobia and panic set in quick. He took a single gulp of air through his mouthpiece and began to kick wildly for the surface, his eyes shut tight and tearing. A pain rose inside his chest—only later would he understand that it was the air expanding in his lungs, looking for a place to go. Something grabbed his ankle and
when he opened his eyes and looked down he saw the dive instructor staring up at him with an expression of forced calm. She held him tight with one hand to keep him from ascending further. With the other she removed the regulator from her mouth. A steady stream of small bubbles poured out of her puckered lips and she pointed to them. “Respira,” she mouthed. “Breathe out.” Benicio exhaled and felt his insides scraped as air rushed out of his deflating chest. Then he took a single breath in. Out again. In again. Slowly, and not without embarrassment, he let her pull him back down to the sandy bottom where the other students were arranged in a clumsy, swaying semicircle.

The rest of the dive passed uneventfully for Benicio—he even redeemed himself a bit by being the first to be able to take his mask off, put it back on and fill it with air from his purged mouthpiece—but just before it was time to surface his father fell into his own trouble. They were drifting over a ledge of coral when his father, who’d loaded his weight belt to make up for the natural buoyancy of fat, began sinking much faster than he should have. He didn’t seem to notice at first, and even when he looked up and saw that the other members of the group had become vague silhouettes above, he didn’t try to swim back to them. In fact, to Benicio’s horror, he did the opposite. He started swimming down, kicking with a wild determination. Benicio made to follow him but the dive instructor gave him a very unambiguous hand signal indicating that he should wait with the other students. She disappeared into the haze below and returned some minutes later towing Howard behind her like a small parade float. Benicio pressed himself to his father’s mask and saw behind it two eyes that rolled about euphorically. His father pulled his mouthpiece out and let it float freely until the instructor put it back in. Once they surfaced she explained that he’d gotten himself stoned—that was her word, not Benicio’s—on the nitrogen in his tank by descending too quickly and too deeply. She also told them, in private back at the resort, that they both had to take all of the classroom sessions over again before she would let them back in the open water.

• • •

BUT THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO
. Benicio was a much better diver now, and despite his lack of practice, the excursion with Katrina went well. They stayed shallow, hit swift but manageable current and flirted casually on their decompression stop. It was twilight when they got back to the hotel. They rinsed their gear in barrels of brackish water and left it drying on bamboo racks. Benicio was urgently hungry—diving, he remembered now, always did that; whatever you felt, you felt more after diving; whatever you needed, you needed more—so he and Katrina put their day clothes on over their swimsuits and headed straight to dinner. They walked down the narrow beach to the two-story main building of the Balayan Bay Dive Club. Whitewashed and thatched like all the bungalows, it housed an open-air restaurant on the lower level and an observation deck that supported a slow cascade of purple bougainvillea on the upper. Bobby was already there when they arrived, helping himself to the small buffet. “Fuck,” he said, his plate wobbling slightly. “I’ve ordered beers. Catch up.”

The meal was awkward. Bobby was already very drunk, and he got drunker at a pace that neither of them cared to match. He toasted to them both, first individually and then as a pair. He toasted to the shirtless boys who came by to light beachside torches anchored deep in the rocky sand. He toasted to Charlie Fuentes, and to his alter ego, the real Ocampo. And he toasted Howard, “Wherever he might be.” Torchlight flickered wickedly over his divided face. One of the boys returned to the table to say that, while they did have more beer to offer, it was all warm. Katrina suggested this was a sign that Bobby should go to bed.

“Nonsense,” he said, waving her off. “This is a problem that I have a solution for. I am a man of solutions. I am a solver.” He brought his empty beer to his lips and then, remembering it was empty, set it back on the table. “In my room. In my duffel bag which is in my room …” he paused. “I have a fifth of rye.”

“I think you’ve had enough,” Katrina said.

“You, my love, should talk.” He got up and left the restaurant, walking across the sand toward the guest bungalows. After getting about twenty yards away he stopped and pitched forward a bit, nearly stumbling.
They all seemed to realize at the same moment that he didn’t have his cane.

“I’m not bringing it to you,” she called, her voice carrying over broken shells. “If you’re going to use it to get more booze, I’m not helping.”

“Do I need help? I do not. I have the reflexes of a dancer,” Bobby shouted. “Onward.” But he didn’t go on, or come back. He stood for a long time in that spot. Then he sat and faced the water.

“He’s stubborn,” Katrina said in a low voice. “He’ll stay there until he falls asleep, likely.” Then she put her fingers around Benicio’s wrist, as she had been doing since the night before, when they’d met in his father’s restaurant. Could it really have been just the night before? “I’m going down to the water,” she said. “You should come with me.”

Benicio couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d already lost. Even if he didn’t do it, he really, really wanted to. “I think I’ll keep an eye on Bobby,” he managed. Katrina lingered at the table for a moment, still holding his wrist. Then she let it go and walked down to the shore, in the opposite direction that Bobby had gone. Benicio watched her fade to nothing in the torchlight. He picked up Bobby’s cane and went to sit beside him in the coarse sand.

“Hey,” Bobby said, “you want the key to my room?” He jingled it in the dark space between them. “The fifth is almost full.”

“I’m not getting it,” Benicio said. “You shouldn’t, either.”

“I shouldn’t,” Bobby agreed. “I should not.” He took his cane and worked it into the sand. A little mound rose above it, like the mounds of earth above Bugs Bunny when he tunnels somewhere. Benicio heard a noise behind them and turned. The shirtless boys were back there, watching from amid the palm trunks that caught the last traces of torchlight like a sieve. They stared back at him fearlessly, delightedly, before returning to the main bungalow at a fast walk.

Benicio turned back around and found Bobby’s face and mouth closer than they should have been. There was weight on his chest and dry, soft gauze against his cheek. He made sure not to push him away too hard, for fear of hurting him.

“I’m sorry,” Benicio said.

“What for?” Bobby rubbed the back of his hand over his lower lip. There was spit and sand on it.

“I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t?” He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and struggled to light it. “Man. Maybe I should get new business cards.” The flame finally caught and he sucked in deep. “Or like, a custom shirt or something like that.”

“No,” Benicio said. “I mean I didn’t know you were serious about me.”

“Who’s serious?” Bobby looked at him. “So … is it the bandages?”

“I’m not gay.”

Bobby laughed, but he’d been dragging on his cigarette, so he also coughed a lot. “Then what the fuck are you doing with a pretty, strange boy like myself, on a pretty, strange beach? Why did you even come with us today? Don’t—do not tell me it’s for Katrina. Because that shit is a game.”

“I wanted to ask you about the woman in the green dress. The one in the ballroom. I wanted to ask how long my father’s been with her.”
With
sounded like the wrong word, but he couldn’t bring himself to say
fucking
.

Bobby looked at him. “Oh Benny.” He sounded disappointed. “Sneaky and dishonest is much worse than careless and deluded. It’s not any of your business.”

“It’s as much mine as it is yours. It’s more mine than it is yours.”

“This is a conversation you should be having with Howard.”

“He’s not around to have it with.”

Bobby lay back in the sand, filling the empty sky above him with smoke. “Since as long as I’ve known him,” he said. “Going on three years.”

“Is it a relationship?”

“If you’re asking if he pays, then yes. He pays.”

Benicio sat there for a moment. He felt more deflated than angry. It was no huge shock that his father, even as he tried to fix their relationship, kept on doing the same thing that broke it. He was a cheat before his mother died and that made him still a cheat now that she was gone.
Benicio stood. “What’s this about a game?” he asked. “What do you mean about Katrina?”

Bobby flicked his cigarette straight up in the air and it landed a few feet downwind. “The bubbly bimbo thing is an act,” he said, “which I guess you would have noticed if you ever did more than just glance at her. She’s out for revenge. She had a thing for this boy, a while back. And I had a thing
with
him. Twice. She got mad. You were in her crosshairs as soon as she saw I liked you.” Bobby laughed and then, noticing his expression, said, “Oh, woe is you.”

Benicio left him where he lay. He headed down to the water, shattering what could have been perfect little shells under his dive booties. It struck him that Bobby and Katrina were just like his dad. They were all frivolous, irresponsible rich people playing screwed-up games. He again wondered about Bobby’s injuries. He imagined him crashing a borrowed car, or sleeping with the son of hardcore Catholics just to prove he could, and then having to reckon with a beefy uncle. Up ahead small waves crushed and sucked. His ankles went cold as he strode into the gentle surf.

Katrina was some yards out, standing in water up to her thighs. Odd lights swirled about her. Tiny, blue-green dots flicked atop the low waves, glowing in a thick band where they washed up along shore.

“Benny.” It was Katrina’s voice but it wasn’t her name to call him. “Are you seeing this?” She splashed the water a little and that agitated the lights, sent them sparkling. “Plankton! It washes up sometimes on this beach. Not all the time, though. We’re lucky.”

Benicio waded out to her. His mother had described a scene very much like this a few months before she died. It was Thanksgiving. He’d come home from Virginia, and Howard had come home from the Philippines. As always, Benicio hardly spoke to him. But this time his mother wouldn’t have it. She cornered him in the kitchen and said, “Sinvergueñza. Are you a man or are you a child? Whatever you’re mad about, get over it.”

“Whatever
I’m
mad about?” he asked. “You should be just as angry. It’s you he cheats on, not me.”

And then his mother slapped him. She slapped him so hard he
almost lost his balance and fell to the kitchen linoleum like a decked welterweight. “What the hell do you know about it?” she asked, hardly trying to keep her voice from carrying to the dining room, where his father sat alone at the table. “You’re a little saint, aren’t you? Well, I know for a fact that you’ll do the same thing. You’ll be on some beach, with some skinny muñeca’s tongue in your mouth while Alice is asleep, thinking that you’re nothing but good to her. It’ll happen, that’s a promise.”