Moondogs - Alexander Yates [18]
The other soldiers know about Efrem’s magic eyes, and when they see him staring—dilated pupils eclipsing his irises—they get excited. The officers make everybody stand and brush their trousers clean. Within a few minutes they all hear the puddle-splash and rumble of engines. The rain thins. Three jeeps emerge from the distant tree line and pass alongside the tenant farmers in their paddies. The boy with the puppy recognizes Charlie, and waves, and Charlie waves right back. The rain stops. The sun comes out like it’s on a schedule. Skinny puffs up his chest and leers at the soldiers in the back row who are standing funny now because they really have to piss. The convoy breaks in front of the assembled division but the drivers keep their engines running. The second jeep back is filled with news people and they begin to dismount, fiddling with cameras and notebooks and battery-operated microphones. In the last jeep are men from the American-trained Light Reaction Battalion wearing ghillie suits of burlap and twigs that make them look like fuzzy, dirty animals. They jump out and secure the convoy by circling it and lying flat on their bellies, making themselves virtually indistinguishable from the mud and grass. This delights the newspeople, who stoop to take photographs.
But the men in the lead jeep take their time. Brig Yapha, looking fatter than before he left, hands a fresh cigar to Charlie and, oddly, to the short man as well. Charlie lights his with a wooden match and offers up the flame, but the short man declines and pockets his cigar. They dismount and approach the division. Yapha walks out ahead, puffing smokily, while the other two lag behind. They’re an odd pair, but they look something like friends. Shorty’s workshirt is only half tucked, and a tattered baseball cap shades his eyes. His hands are tiny, like a child’s hands, and he’s got a duckfooted walk, tennis shoes pointing opposite directions like they each want to go a different way. Efrem figures he’s Charlie’s bodyguard, given the pistol grip sprouting out the waistband of his jeans. Then he checks to see if his hero is also packing, hoping for a glance of Truth—that pistol so famous it gets second billing at the movies—but no such luck.
Heat follows the rain and wet soldiers steam like embers. They titter as Charlie approaches. The officers nearly forget to salute Brig Yapha as he rushes past, and he returns their gesture just as distractedly, with his cigar hand. Charlie reaches the far end of the line and begins the inspection, looking like Efrem’s uncle when he’d shop for engine parts in the Davao port market. A much more glamorous version of Efrem’s uncle. He moves among the men with generous grace, adjusting collars, tugging too-long hair and giving easy words to thrilled and terrified grunts. Efrem cranes his neck to watch. Then somebody hisses his name and his head snaps back. It’s the brigadier general, moving up on him nose-to-nose, speaking, very strangely, in a whisper.
“Bakkar. I need your rounds, now.”
“Sir?”
“Your rifle. Unload it.”
Efrem hesitates only briefly before doing what he’s told.
“The round in the chamber as well,” Brig Yapha says, not looking him in the face. “And your spare magazine.”
Efrem hands it all over without a word. Yapha stashes the ammunition in his deep vest pockets. “Now, you do whatever he tells you,” he says, taking Efrem by the elbow. “But not a damn word.”
And with that he leads Efrem down the line, right in the direction of Charlie Fuentes, Tough Knocks, Snaggletooth, the hero of his childhood.
THE FIRST TIME Efrem ever saw an Ocampo movie was the first time he left his tiny island home. They had no cinema, of course—no electricity, no roads. The only running water was a sulfur-tasting