Moondogs (37 page)

“Howard’s one lucky asshole, that’s who he is,” Reynato says. “He’s American. One of Charlie Fuentes’s buddies who had sense enough to donate a whole lot of scratch to the campaign. And those facts have
earned him the right to some scary-ass guardian angels.” Reynato cups his hands around the tip of his cigar, as if to block wind from fire that isn’t there, and puffs. He waits patiently while Efrem stares. “See him yet?”

“I see him. He’s hurt badly, but alive.”

“Fine,” Reynato says. “Super. I guess we’re going to have to keep him that way.” He shakes his head, as though amazed. “I help get the motherfucker elected and still he feels like he can call in favors. He swears this is the
last
one. Charlie wants us to rescue that clown.”

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME
Efrem’s used his ability to check in on people from afar. He’d been a frightened child; convinced his adoptive mother could fall ill at any moment. He used to cast long glances homeward, ready to sprint back if she stumbled in the rock garden or tumbled off the roof while mending thatching. He was beside himself when she let the Holy Man—self-appointed nurturer and interpreter of Efrem’s curse—take him away to practice soldierkilling. They motored about in the Holy Man’s low-lying boat for nearly a year, searching for and never finding a horizon beyond which Efrem couldn’t see. He knocked whole flocks of pelagic birds out of the sky with lengths of dried coral. The Holy Man gave him an ancient Russian rifle and taught him to shoot pigs drinking at the distant sulfur spring. Together they peopled a deserted island with fake soldiers, placing coconut heads atop driftwood bodies, scattering the wooden mannequins in beach caves and beneath the root-canopy of a giant strangler fig. They motored some fifty kilometers away and Efrem decimated the imaginary battalion in a quarter of an hour.

Years later, after he’d graduated from wooden soldiers to real ones, Efrem still glanced homeward to check in on his mother. He lived among rebels, fellow apprentices of the Holy Man who made fertilizer bombs and dug tiger pits. From their hidden camp he watched, helpless, as his mother woke in moonlight and struggled to find a position she could breath in. He watched his uncle and cousins load her into their boat, the
Hadji Himatayon
, giving her sips of fresh water as they raced
northeast to Zamboanga City. His uncle traded the unreliable outboard for a room near the hospital and sold the boat itself to pay the Manileño doctor’s fee. Efrem was still watching when his family returned home by slow ferry a month later—his mother’s symptoms diminished but not gone. No one aboard noticed the bomb hidden below a rice sack. It was a small charge, just strong enough to knock the knees off of an old man and punch a hole in the hull. His family survived the blast. They all escaped the sinking ferry. They swam for hours. Currents separated them, out of earshot, out of eyeshot. His cousins each drowned alone. His uncle drowned alone. His mother drowned in the arms of a stranger, held under by those arms till she screamed in a lungful of ocean. The stranger, a young rubber tapper, took her floating barrel for himself. He survived, washing ashore that afternoon and wandering about praising Jesus. He got a few hours’ celebration in before falling stone dead on a dark street, nailed to the ground by fifteen shots out of the sky.

Efrem would have liked to return to his village north of Tubigan. He would have liked to bury his uncle’s rubber-sling spear and his mother’s trowel together in a shallow grave. He would have liked to set the hut she once lived in on fire. But he didn’t want to raise suspicion. He wept when the Holy Man clutched him tight and told him that his family had been executed by soldiers in a gunboat—the story was true, after all. That’s how his first parents had died. But his new family had been killed by rebels—killed by the Holy Man.

Two weeks later he took up with some passing badjao fishermen. He rode with them to Davao City, lied about his age to army recruiters and became a Boxer Boy.

EFREM SLEEPS SOON AFTER CONFIRMING
that Howard Bridgewater is still alive. The next morning he wakes to the sound of unshod horse hoofs on tile floors. A taller, blacker, four-legged Elvis gallops up and down the hall. Lorenzo sits atop him, riding bareback, whooping as they wreck the dearly bought flat, the pair of them looking ridiculous and free. Reynato and Racha are in the kitchen, planning Howard’s rescue over pancakes and coffee, gazing at his syrup-stained photograph. The
kidnappers had posted poorly coded sale announcements on the Internet in the days before their failure at the Blue Mosque, and Reynato has contacted them under the guise of an interested southern buyer—someone who’d be happy to dress Howard in orange, lock him in a bamboo pig crate and make a home movie out of hacking through his neck with a bolo knife. Still bruised and gun-shy, the kidnappers insisted on meeting alone and in public. Reynato considers breaking out his bogus beard and brownface, but it strikes him as too risky. And besides, someone else in Ka-Pow already looks and sounds the part of a Moro terrorist. Efrem is the man for the job.

They meet that afternoon at an uptown cockfighting arena. Efrem approaches slowly, standing square in the entrance just as he’s been told. Down in the pit a fight’s about to start and the air shakes with shouted bets. Fists of folded bills wave like sea grass above four sets of wooden bleachers. Two men circle the arena, each holding a rooster high for the crowd’s appraisal. People push past Efrem to get inside, cursing him for slowing traffic, but he stays put. Then, as betting winds down, someone grabs his wrist.

“Are you Khalid Bakkar?”

“I am,” Efrem says.

The man—no shorter than him, but much smaller—smiles to reveal pointed gray teeth. “Good,” he says. “Put your arms out.”

Before Efrem can move he feels a pair of large, powerful hands come down on his shoulders from behind. He resists the instinct to throw them off, unsure if he even could. A big man with uneven hair spins him around and feels down his front. He jams his fingers into Efrem’s pockets, runs them along the inside of his pant-waist and up and down his thighs. “Apologies,” Ignacio says, tapping the tip of his swollen, crooked nose. “But our last buyer was not honest.”

Efrem nods, praying the search doesn’t stray to his head. Elvis, in the guise of a tarantula, hides out there under strands of his tussled hair. Reynato ordered him along—backup in case Efrem’s a screwup and needs it.

Littleboy finishes frisking and announces that Efrem’s clean. Eight legs drum his scalp in relief.

“That’s a good start,” Ignacio says, grabbing Efrem’s elbow and leaning in close. “But don’t be stupid. People know me here. If you start anything, the odds will be a lot worse than two against one.”

Keeping hold of his elbow, Ignacio leads him toward the dirt arena, along a narrow aisle, to an open spot atop the bleachers. Efrem sits between them, unsure who is supposed to talk first. Down in the pit final bets are in and the crowd settles. The roosters glare at each other while the sentenciador inspects the razor sharp longspurs fastened to their feet. Cradling their cocks, the owners enter a rough chalk circle drawn around the arena’s center. They bring the birds close, almost within pecking distance. This riles them. The owners step back, whisper encouragements and douse their beaks and combs with disinfectant to rile them even more. “You see the one on the right?” Ignacio asks, pointing. “The tan fringe? That one wins. He dies also, but he takes the match.”

The sentenciador blows a whistle and owners drop their birds and back away fast. The gamecocks eye each other. They turn sideways, crabwalking, circling the patch of dirt that one of them will die in. The arena is filled with crowing from caged roosters, but the two in the pit are silent. The tan fringe freezes, neck-feathers erect in a mane of greasy, trembling barbs. He jumps and meets his opponent in midair—a jumble of thumping wings and skinny kicks. They fall and jump again. They fall and jump again. The bird on the left sits down in a pile of his own feathers. His head lolls and rests gently on the dirt. The rooster with the tan fringe limps over and pecks at his head, nipping away pieces of comb.

The sentenciador approaches and lifts each bird by their ruffed back-scruff. He holds them knee high and drops them. The rooster on the left tries to stand and can’t. The sentenciador drops them again, and now the bird on the left does not move at all. The match is over, and the crowd erupts with cheers and groans as people collect and pay up. Owners retrieve the birds while the sentenciador sweeps away feathers and blood-whips with a dried palm frond. It looks as though Ignacio was right. Tan fringe’s owner sits on the lowest bleacher, struggling to sew up his winning bird while it twitches in a way that implies last breaths.

Ignacio drums his knees. “It’s easy to find a winner when you know what a winner looks like,” he says. He stares at Efrem, or rather, a space several inches in front of Efrem. They’re quiet for a long time. Elvis shifts uncomfortably on Efrem’s scalp. Ignacio keeps drumming, moving up his thighs, up his belly, to his chest. Then he stops, all his energy, it seems, invested in staying still. “What?” he asks. “What? You’re here to jerk me off?” He pantomimes jerking off.

Efrem says that is not why he is here.

“That’s right, you’re not,” Ignacio says. “Now get your hands off me and listen. My terms are fair and easy. This is how much I want …” he hands Efrem a crumpled paper with a number written on it. Efrem glances down and nods. “That’s in dollars, not pesos.” Efrem nods again. Ignacio looks very surprised and then tries to hide that he’s very surprised by drumming his knees again.

“Also, if we do this deal we do it
tomorrow
, no later. I’ll only meet you outside the city, on Corregidor Island. You know that place? It’s in the bay. You come with one other person, not more. You buy two roundtrip Sun Cruise tourist passes to the island. Me and my brother take our own boat there and land on the northwest side, past Battery Point, away from the ruins and the hotel. We trade on the beach. You give us your return tickets and we go home with all the tourists. You take our boat and the American and you go wherever the fuck you want.”

Elvis strays down Efrem’s temple and dips his spider head into his ear. Efrem repeats his whisper as though the words are his own. “That’s a bad idea. Corregidor Island is full of foreign tourists. That’s the worst place in the world if you get caught.”

Ignacio smiles and quits drumming himself. He glances about. “No,” he says, “it’s the worst place in the world for a
Moro
like you to get caught. You try anything and I’ll be star witness at your trial.” His voice goes up an octave: “Oh, the terrorists were trying to kill our foreign guests! They shot that poor American. They desecrated the ruins. Their geopolitical vision would erase our history, depress our economy and embarrass our leaders! You got me, Moro?”

Efrem imagines killing this tiny man with the change in his pocket.
He could go to Howard Bridgewater right now and rescue him. But for all that’s happened, he still trusts Reynato and Reynato wants it done this way. “I get you,” he says.

“Good. I’ll need some cash now, too. Like, an advance. I’ve got a little boat down by the harbor, but it needs gas. And I’ve got to rent a truck to move him through the city.”

“Whatever you need,” Efrem says.

Down in the pit another fight begins. Gamecocks paw the dirt and puff up large. They leap at each other just as they’d do on any farm; neither realizing that the longspurs on their feet mean higher stakes.

EFREM ONLY SAW THE HOLY MAN
once after leaving home. It was in Davao City, in front of a shabby enlistment office abuzz with electric fans. Efrem had just come from the outdoor movie house, his resolve to sign up hardened by an afternoon watching Renny-O stick up for the unstuckup for, when he noticed the Holy Man lurking by garbage bins across the street. He was almost unrecognizable in torn slacks and a bright Lakers jersey that fell past his knees. His scalp and chin were bald and razor-burned. All he retained were his little round sunglasses and the lopsided look of an amputee.

As Efrem crossed the street the Holy Man busied himself picking through trash, not daring to look up. “This is humiliation!” he said, his voice trembling on the sharp edge of a whisper.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Efrem said, with real concern. “It’s not safe.”

“Not for you either.” The Holy Man grabbed at his shirtfront. “This is mistaken,” he hissed. “Come home with me.”

Efrem shook his head.

“Apostasy! You betray your people!”

“My people are dead,” Efrem said, his throat tight. “The people who became my people are dead, also. One of your bombs sank their ferry. I watched them drown.”

The Holy Man let go his shirt and smoothed it out. “Efrem. Son.” Tears rolled from behind his dark glasses in perfectly straight lines as
though along tracks. “The ferry was an accident. We did not know they would be there … we
failed
. But I beg you not to do this. The army kills even Moros among their own ranks. Ask the twenty-eight Jabidah commandos, murdered by their officers. Wearing their uniform is no protection.”

“I don’t need protection,” Efrem said.

The Holy Man’s face loosened and went blank. The pistol in his hand, half concealed by garbage, was no surprise. Efrem had noticed it from across the street. “I cannot let you do this,” he said, his tone resigned but still pitchy with fear. “My death will be a martyr’s.” He raised the pistol and in one move Efrem snatched it from his grip and tossed it skyward. It didn’t land.

“You may be martyred,” Efrem said, “but not by me.” He turned and walked back across the street and into the recruiting office. Outside the Holy Man waited some moments for his pistol to fall back to earth before finally giving up and retreating down the street. In coming years Efrem would never regret letting him live. It pleased him to know that wherever the Holy Man was—the wreckage of a jungleside camp, picking garbage in Davao, riding through a dust storm to his made-up country—that he would forever be frozen in that aspect; neck craned and face up. Always afraid of the long fall. Always afraid of Efrem’s vengeance coming down, plummeting out of the cloudless afternoon sky.