Moondogs (18 page)

“Good news?” Benicio asked.

“It’s looking that way,” Bobby said. He put his cigarette out, lit a new one and turned back to Benicio. “Hey, I’m sorry about this,” he said. “Charlie hates to be alone. He can get a little pushy. Don’t feel like you need to stay.”

He’d already considered excusing himself, but his curiosity was piqued. He couldn’t, for the life of him, picture his father sharing a drink or even a conversation with this guy. “I’d like to stay,” he said.

“Well, I’m glad.” Bobby smiled, making his bandages pucker and
pinch. “You’ll be glad, too. We’re fun.” He picked up his glass and held it out, as though to make a toast. “Mabuhay,” he said. “You saw that sign at the airport? Mabuhay means welcome.”

Benicio lifted his own glass, eyeing the liquid a little suspiciously.

“Oh, it’s terrible,” Bobby assured him, but he said it as though terrible wasn’t so terrible. “Lambanog. Coconut moonshine, flavored with bubblegum. Don’t smile at me like that. You think I’m joking?”

Bobby clinked his glass and sipped. Benicio tasted the lambanog and found it so overwhelmingly foul and sweet that he couldn’t help but make a face. But Bobby was right. It was kind of fun, how bad it was.

“So how did you know I was a scuba diver?” he asked as he set his glass down and pushed it away, slightly.

“That was simple,” Bobby said, spreading his palms in a way that seemed to indicate he was going to start showing off. “There’s only so many reasons people like you, foreigners I mean, come to the Philippines. You’re not wide-eyed enough to be Peace Corps. You could be a Habitater, I suppose, but your hair doesn’t shout
cause
to me. You’re in good enough shape, but the granola backpack crowd doesn’t wear khaki. Neither do young businessmen, who should, no offense, be trying a bit harder to impress. Mormons wear plenty of khaki, but they also wear black ties, bicycle helmets and fuck-face haircuts. You’re not horrible looking, so I guess you don’t have trouble getting laid … do you?” He paused, clearly expecting an answer.

“No trouble,” Benicio said, restraining a half smile. While Bobby spoke he couldn’t help but imagine the circumstances of his accident. He’d probably crashed a jet ski or something frivolous like that.

“That’s good,” Bobby said, “you’ll live longer.” He extinguished his cigarette and lit a new one. “So, if it wasn’t sportsmanship, liberal guilt, romantic self-discovery, missionary work or the missionary position that brought you here, then I thought it had to be diving. I’m a diver, too. Or at least …” he flicked his knee brace with a fingernail and it made a pinging sound, “I used to be. You’ve come to a good place for it. A good—”

Just then something happened on the television that made Bobby quit his speech. The shot changed and his head whipped back up at it. “Ay nako,” he said, “fuck, where’s the sound?” He grabbed a rubber-tipped cane that had been propped against his stool and used it to stab at the volume button. The newscaster’s voice grew and people along the bar who’d been tapping their fingers to the music turned to give them dirty looks. The screen went blue and then a single number came up, followed by the headshot of a man in his early sixties. It was a picture of Charlie, so doctored that it looked like an artist’s rendition. Bobby let out something between a laugh and a yelp. He struck the bar hard with his fist, flipping his ashtray and sending butts flying. “Shit, sorry,” he said, shoulders dipping like scolded kid. He picked up a napkin and started wiping at the mess until the bartender came over and cleaned it with two strokes. He gave Bobby a fresh ashtray and put the television back on mute.

“What’s Charlie doing on TV?” Benicio asked.

“You don’t know? Oh, well, I guess … yeah, the whole not-talking thing. Well, Ben, you’ve landed right at the climax of our election season. Votes were cast on Monday, and they’ve been counting all week since. First results are coming in tonight. Looks like good old Charlie Fuentes has been elected to his first term in the Philippine Senate.”

Benicio was lost for words. He looked back out at the dance floor where he saw Charlie, the new senator, his father’s buddy, glad-handing the crowd. “That’s what he’s celebrating tonight?”

“Just tonight if I’m lucky,” Bobby said. “But he’s probably going to want to party all week.”

“But, he didn’t even know if he’d won.”

Bobby waved him off. “How big he’d win was the only real question, and the news there looks good. Those jerks in Malacañang will be sweating in their sheets tonight. Malacañang—that’s like our version of the White House. Similar to your White House, it’s full of jerks.” Bobby chuckled.

“But … Charlie didn’t even want to watch this. How could he have been so sure?”

“He was sure because I told him to be sure. And I was sure because I managed his campaign, and I’m good at what I do, and I saw it coming.”

“Oh,” Benicio paused. Now he was the one back on his heels. “Wow.”

“Thanks, but there’s not so much
wow
about it. It wasn’t as big as an American campaign, but we do our best, God bless us.” Bobby lit another cigarette and smoked it the way people in movies smoke cigarettes in bed after sex—languidly and happily. “Charlie has some money. A lot of money. So that helps. And he’s a movie star. That helps even more. I mean, with his filmography, winning was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The voters know his name. They come out for all the speeches and parades. His movies are big with the jeepney set—all bang-bang and save the girl. Or girls. Or orphans. And this one time, an endangered eagle. He always plays a poor cop who doesn’t take prisoners. The Ocampo Justice series. Heard of them? Just think of Schwarzenegger or Reagan, but with less experience. And I’ll tell you, they eat it up. Charlie comes on stage, and they’re playing his theme music, and he has this replica six-shooter holstered to his belt … it’s a show! He’s not your average baby kisser.”

It was hard not to get caught up in Bobby’s energy, and though he’d hardly touched his lambanog, Benicio felt a little tipsy. He felt as though his life—or at least his night—had become as opulent as the ballroom itself; filled with light and crystal and music and melodrama. It was exciting.

“I’m going to text him the good news,” Bobby said, removing a cell phone from his jacket pocket. “You should know that he’ll probably want to go someplace more booze-oriented than this. You can still bail out if you need to.”

“No,” Benicio said, “I’d love to come along.”

THEY FINISHED THEIR LAMBANOGS
while they waited for Charlie to finish schmoozing. Benicio got cozy on his stool and watched as a song ended, giving dancing guests an opportunity to sit and the sitting guests an opportunity to get up and dance. The instructors all stayed
standing. As a new song began a woman in the crowd caught his attention and held it. A Filipina in a green dress stood near the edge of the dance floor, tapping lightly on shoulders as she tried to get by. She had black hair and skin a shade darker than most other women in the room. Her dress shimmered a bit as she turned, clinging loosely to her body and to the full swell of her small breasts. He watched her as she went, taken. Not just taken—turned on. She was heading for the bar.

The woman slid into the open space between him and Bobby. She leaned across the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention. The back of her dress was open and Benicio watched her muscles and shoulder blades move beneath the surface of her skin. Green fabric hung low around her hips—so low that he guessed she must be using some kind of tape to make sure the top of her ass stayed hidden—and then met again in a metal clasp at the back of her neck. The bartender came down to their end and her dress moved as she leaned farther forward to order a gin. He asked for her key and she patted down the sides of the dress, as though there were pockets there, and told him a room number.

“I’m sorry, I can’t charge to a room without a key. You have cash?”

The woman snapped at him in Tagalog and to Benicio’s surprise the bartender, who’d been so patient with Bobby, snapped right back at her. She sighed with theatrical exasperation and looked as though she were about to storm off. It could have been the lambanog, or the bright, buzzing feeling that his father’s friends had given him, but Benicio felt something misguided rising inside him. He reached into his pocket, took hold of his key card, and paid for her drink. “She strikes again,” Bobby said, with surprising humorlessness.

The woman in the green dress didn’t look at either of them—she just watched as ice tumbled into her glass. When the bartender handed over the gin, she turned to Benicio.

“Thanks,” she said a little flatly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” He couldn’t tell if she was slurring, or if it was just her English.

“Then you shouldn’t have,” Bobby said. He avoided looking at her with the kind of practiced disdain that older siblings have for younger ones. They must have known each other.

Benicio, for his part, did not avoid looking at her. She stood so close that her breath cooled his cheeks. Her face had an odd, beautiful economy to it. Her lips, painted chrome red and slightly pursed, the rouge on her cheeks, her plucked eyebrows, the single strand of black hair tumbling down and dividing her expression into unequal halves; they were all collected with a loose precision. Every part of her seemed to fit together like shaved bits of colored glass with no spaces in between and no overlap. She was stunning.

“Who is your friend, and why is he looking at me like this?” she asked. “Do I know him?”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Bobby asked.

“I’m busy for the next …” she held her naked wrist up to her face for a while and stared at it. “I’ll be done soon. Will you still be here, new friend?”

“No,” Benicio said, gripping his empty glass like an actor grips a prop. “I won’t.”

She shrugged, took her gin in hand and made her way back through the crowd. It wasn’t an effortless or graceful exit. She took her time, sidestepping the jostling shoulders, trying her best not to spill the gin. Benicio couldn’t look away. He saw her sit at a far banquet table next to an older white man who wore a dark turtleneck against the air-conditioning. He leaned in when she arrived, took the gin from her, and gave her a kiss on the cheek that wasn’t fatherly. He was drunk, but not sloppy drunk.

“What’s your budget?” Bobby asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you loving. She’s not the most expensive, but she won’t be cheap. At least not in this economy. You’re interested?”

Benicio looked back at him. “I couldn’t be less,” he said.

BUT THAT WAS A LIE
. As Charlie returned to announce, very sadly, that Renny would not be joining them, as he led them out of the hotel, as they caught a taxi in the hot, dark night, Benicio kept thinking of
the woman in the green dress. He felt foolish about the drink thing, but not so foolish that he wasn’t still, twenty minutes after the fact, deeply turned on. She reminded him, vividly, of the first woman he’d ever loved. Or at least, the first woman he ever consistently fantasized about—his Costa Rican dive instructor. He remembered watching her pull her wetsuit off under the rush of an outdoor showerhead more clearly than he remembered any of the dives themselves. She was from the Gulf of Papagayo and taught the introductory courses at one of the resorts his father helped manage. At fifteen he’d been just old enough to get an adult certification, and for the next three years fantasies about fucking his instructor in the tank room beside the deep but narrow training pool became an important part of every orgasm he had—including those he arrived at with a high school girlfriend whom he no longer spoke to. The instructor was, in retrospect, not amazing looking—certainly nothing close to the woman in the green dress. She was taller than Benicio by a few inches, she had a broad back, a mannish jaw and thick thighs. She seemed perpetually short of breath and her bust heaved even when she was relaxed. But in her one-piece bathing suit and cutoff denim shorts she was, to teenage Benicio, beyond desirable.

His father noticed him staring during their first classroom session and said: “I don’t blame you. She’s a hottie. You should stay after. Chat her up or something.”

“I can’t talk to her,” he’d said, shocked. Because she was, after all, an adult. And he was a kid. And she was Costa Rican. And he was pretend Costa Rican. They were hardly the same species.

“You can do whatever you want,” his father said. “I tell you what, before our next class I’ll put a good word in for you.”

And he did.

Chapter 11

Efrem Khalid Bakkar remembers it all. He remembers drifting. An unpainted badjao boat. Running aground on the island that would become home. It was a bad tide, overhigh, stranding parrotfish and jellies on the doorsteps of thatched huts. The waves carried his boat up past the tree line and left it near the center of the village; a new house sprung up overnight. Efrem remembers noontime, villagers returning from their dry cliffs to account for washed-out gardens and drowned hens. From his hiding place he watched them circle the boat, listened to them wonder aloud how long the dead aboard had been that way. The old woman who would be his mother was first to climb in. “No rice or fish,” she said, “maybe they starved.” A still older man, he would be Uncle, shook his head and fingered little round holes in the knotted decking.