Moondogs (48 page)

And that was it. Efrem stood alone on the beach and Reynato lay near his feet, pretending to be dead among everyone who really was. Reynato felt himself go cold. Volcanic ash drifted out of dark sky and landed on his cheeks and lips. He hadn’t known it was the work of his beloved bruha at the time—he’d put this together later, in the hospital, when he started to get over his paralyzing fear. Efrem breathed heavily just above him. He walked out into the water and knelt to wash his dark forearms and face. He didn’t turn when Reynato stood and leveled Glock. Not when the first shot hit his back. Not when the second. Reynato watched him fall into the ashy waves. He curses himself, now, for not wading out and dragging Efrem’s corpse ashore. To be sure.

But Reynato didn’t go into the water. His self-inflicted wound was bleeding heavily, and he had money to hide. He grabbed the sack of bills and rushed into the undergrowth. He followed footprints up the slope—Howard’s chubby feet and Elvis’s paws. At the top he came to a concrete pavilion filled with meticulously preserved World War II mortars, their twelve-inch mouths gaping up in shocked silence, gulping ash. With some stretching Reynato hurled the money sack down the tallest barrel. He was fading, but he knew that if they found him here the pavilion would be searched, so he kept following the footprints. The ash thickened. The tracks, leading through the sagging jungle and out onto the road, started filling in. Reynato didn’t see Elvis till he tripped over his haunches and landed across his big wet neck. They lay eye-to-eye, Elvis’s big and bulging, all pupil the way Efrem’s would get sometimes. Howard was a few paces down the road, struggling to breathe. A pale bright form stood over him. A woman. A tourist. Flashlight in one hand and old-fashioned film camera in the other, she stood horrified and halogen bright.

DOCTORS AT MAKATI MEDICAL INSIST
that Racha’s coma is permanent. The parts of his throat that make words are still in the ocean somewhere. His mouth is a doomsday mess of gauze, rubber tubing and metal. But none of that keeps him from making himself understood when Reynato visits that evening. He snaps his fingers until Reynato gives him a little pad and pencil.

You find it?

“Find what?”

Racha pauses, drumming the eraser against his body cast.
You’re playing dumb with a man in my condition? After all we’ve been through?
He draws a little unhappy face below his lopsided, loopy sentences.

“You mean the money?”

Racha adds horns and little fangs to the face.

“Sure,” Reynato smiles despite himself. “I found it.”

All there?

“Every bit.”

Good. How many ways are we splitting?

“Just two.”

Racha draws a question mark and when Reynato doesn’t say anything he writes:
Shit. All of them?

“Elvis and Lorenzo for sure. Dead as the day before conception. Don’t know about Efrem. Shot him twice but I won’t be sure till I see the body. You overhearing anything about Howard?”

He’s done. A day more, maybe two. And he won’t wake up in between. You’re in the clear
.

“You mean we are, handsome.” Reynato leans back in his chair, hands clasped over his belly. “And you? They say yet when you can come off the vent?”

Well, at first they said I’m not going to last the chopper ride to the hospital. Then when I get here they say I’m going to die within the hour. Then when I made it through that they said I wouldn’t survive the night—even argued over what critical patient gets my bed when I’m gone! Come morning they’re all promising each other that I’m a corpse by midweek. And since then they’ve more or less stopped coming into my room. I think they’re mad
.

Reynato takes the pencil from him, sharpens it and hands it back. “They lack imagination,” he says. “You’ll be golfing by the end of the month.”

Not so sure
. Racha pauses, his hand twitching.
I feel different this time. I mean, I don’t think I’m dying. But I don’t think I’m getting better. It’s kind of nice actually. The suspense always used to kill me
.

Reynato stays quiet awhile. He tears Racha’s notes off the pad so he’ll have a fresh page to write on. “I have a question for you,” he says, his voice low and quiet. “Since the eruption, have you ever felt like someone is watching you?”

I feel it all the time. I tell you what, I’m a sight!

“That’s not what I mean.”

Racha begins writing something but crosses it out.
You look terrible. I mean really bad. Are you sleeping enough?
A pause.
You think Efrem’s still alive
.

Seeing the name in writing sets Reynato’s stomach churning. “He might be.”

And you think he’s going to kill you?

“Wouldn’t you?”

No. I mean, I love you. But I know what you’re getting at. You’re worried he’s going to get you. You’re worried he’s already got you. That he’s just waiting for the right time. Well, I wouldn’t stress about it. Efrem was never that malicious or creative. If he’s out there, then I’m sure he’ll take you in a private, dignified kind of way. Like when you’re in the shower or something
.

“This isn’t a joke,” Reynato says, running his palms across his wet cheeks. He can usually tear up at will and now he can’t will himself not to. He must be overtired. “Listen,” he says. “I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve decided to put this whole business behind me.”

Well behind. Far behind. Where’s the business? I don’t see it. You’ve got whatever you’ve got left to look forward to. You could run away with that white girl—the one with the temper. Hey, what happened to her, anyway?

Reynato doesn’t answer. He produces a syringe from his pocket, pricks it into Racha’s IV and pushes the plunger home.

Racha’s fingers tighten around the pencil.
Why would you do that?

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s true, he is very, very sorry. “This is more than just a money decision.”

Ba-ha-ha
. Racha’s body shifts slightly in bed. The pencil drops and rolls along the floor. Reynato retrieves it and gives it back.
I recognize that taste. That’s drain cleaner. Drank a capful of the stuff when I was ten. A bad day for Mom
.

Reynato smiles. Racha was always one of the shy ones, but when you got him alone he had this charming, unexpected, self-deprecating humor. But that’s in the past. Reynato knows that if he and his family are to survive Ka-Pow, he’ll need the cleanest break possible. “I’ll come back every day if I have to,” he says.

You’ll have to
.

“I’ll set the bed on fire if I have to.”

You’ll have to
.

“Why make this hard? I mean, honestly, look at yourself.”

Racha doesn’t write anything for a while.
It’s true. I’m a mess
.

“A big mess.” Reynato stands and gives him a squeeze. “Listen, I need to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I might not be alive tomorrow
.

“We can only hope.”

REYNATO TAKES THE PAD
from Racha—evidence, after all—and leaves his room crying like a big, stupid baby. He’s almost out of the hospital when, owing to a now unbroken stretch of shit luck, he bumps into Howard’s kid. Benicio must be returning to the hospital because he looks showered and clean and guilty for it. “Hey,” the kid says, taking him by the shoulders. “You did everything you could have done.”

“I know,” Reynato says, still dripping from all of his faceparts. “I know.” They share a wildly awkward embrace. Then, upon escaping, Reynato continues out to his parked, dented Honda. His beloved bruha’s ash still clogs up the filters and brake assembly. The inside still smells of her. A blackened sack of filthy money sulks in the passenger seat—a spot that Monique occupied not one week ago, on their mini-break to Subic. The cynic in Reynato would like to see this change as an improvement. The cynic in him says: You were just using her, so you can’t be sad about how it ended. To which the rest of Reynato replies: No one tells me what I can’t do.

Chapter 32

Benicio didn’t know that Alice had bumped up her departure date until he got out of the shower and found her packing. He dried himself in the doorway and watched as she laid out clothes on the bed, folded them into irregular quadrangles and stacked them in her suitcase. “I’ll be here for the funeral,” she said, a little curtly. “My flight’s not till the second.
That’s sooner than I wanted, but the week following is booked solid. And I need time to regroup before classes let out. My kids have been with rotating subs this whole time.” She sounded mournful at this. And who knows, maybe she was.

Benicio put a robe on and went to go sit on one of the red couches. He was supposed to see a funeral director about arrangements in just a half hour, but for the sake of privacy they’d agreed to meet in his father’s adjacent suite; so he had time. “That’s fine,” he said, even though he didn’t really think it was fine. He didn’t want Alice to go.

“It’ll be good for you, too,” she said. “You need time to yourself, with me out of your hair.”

“I like you in my hair.” He watched as she closed the suitcase, stood it upright on its wheels and then laid it flat again to see how things had shifted inside. “I dreamed about this,” he said. “A few days before my father died I dreamed of you packing up your things. But we weren’t here. We were back home, in my apartment. The window screens were frozen over. The suitcase was open on the couch. You weren’t being careful at all.” He took a Fuji apple from the fruit bowl and held it, casually. “You threw clothes in on their hangers, no folding. Your saucepan was dirty on the stove but you just threw it right in also. It got oil on everything.” He set the apple back in the bowl. “I think you were leaving me.”

Alice looked up from trying to make her suitcase less top-heavy. “Well, I’m not leaving you,” she said. “I’m just going home. And that’s a weird fucking thing to say, besides.” She was mad about something.

“I’m sorry,” Benicio said. They looked at one another from opposite sides of the suite. “Just a dream,” he said.

Alice quit fussing with the suitcase. “Who’s Solita?”

He straightened up. “Did she come to the room?”

“No. She telephoned. It was a few days ago, when I was back here getting clean clothes. She said they won’t let her into the hotel now … something you did. So I met her outside. Who is she?”

“She’s the girl Hon mentioned.” He paused, remembering he’d lied at the time about not knowing her. Alice remembered, too. “Dad was
having an affair with her. I mean … not an affair. He was paying. I met her before you got here, before I knew what happened to him. She’s after money.”

“She said you’re fucking her.”

“She’s after money.”

“A woman who looks like that tells me you’re fucking her and you want me to infer the no?”

Benicio stared at Alice. This somehow had the feel of a play fight—Solita was a front for something else. “You know I’m not fucking her,” he said. “I was with her on the night of the eruption, but only to talk. Only to ask her about Dad.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “If this is about you leaving, you can just tell me. If being here with me, through this, is too much for you, that’s fine. You don’t need an excuse to bail.”

She stared at him quietly, almost coldly, as though weighing options. Then she returned to the suitcase, unzipped the external pouch and extracted something no bigger than a dime. She dropped it into Benicio’s hand, and he felt a little sick. It was a stray piece of the birth control packet that he’d destroyed on the night she arrived. “I assumed I’d left them home, at first,” she said. “So I filled a new prescription at the drugstore in Glorietta.” The anger had drained from her voice. “How’s this for an excuse to bail?”

“It’s a good excuse,” Benicio said. He’d forgotten about the infantile act—it’d happened only minutes before he overheard Solita ransacking his father’s room, and he hadn’t given the pills a thought since. “That was a creepy, fucked-up thing for me to do,” he said, keeping his voice even. He felt that there was a lot riding on the next thirty seconds or so. “I don’t have a good excuse. My bad excuses are that I was upset and overtired. And I didn’t do it for … I did it out of guilt. We’d just had sex, and I felt really good, and I felt really guilty about that. I felt like we should cool it.”

“Well, now I feel like we should cool it,” Alice said. “I’m not leaving you, but I’m leaving. And you should take your time coming back.”

Benicio stood and went to her. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

Alice teared up and let him hold her. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t be all you’ve got.”

Then she pulled out of his grip and returned to her suitcase, unpacking and repacking.

BENICIO WAS STILL UPSET
when he met with the young man from Crespo Funeral Services in his father’s suite. The shy mortician was joined—to Benicio’s surprise—by Hon and a somber-looking Bobby Dancer. “I hope we’re not intruding,” Bobby said.

“You were Howard’s friends,” Benicio said. “You’re welcome.” He led them to his father’s study where they sat in leather office-style swivel chairs circling the round table. The funeral director glanced nervously from the kitchenette to the balcony doors as he laid out Howard’s pre-need contract. Signed in the summer of 1999, it originally stipulated that should Howard die in-country Crespo would restore and embalm the body and ship it back to Chicago for a service and interment. But just four months ago—a month after Ursula’s death—Howard had amended the pre-need to stipulate that his remains not leave Philippine soil. He’d ordered cremation and a private service held on a parcel of land he owned near Mainit Point, in Batangas. After the service his ashes were to be scattered in the ocean.