Moondogs - Alexander Yates [31]
Alice nodded. “It’s not like you’re going to Iraq,” she said. “Take it easy. Have fun. And try not to be a jerk.” This stung him, and she noticed. “What I mean is, go easy on him. I don’t know a lot about it, but I know your dad wants this trip to go well.”
“So do I,” he said.
“That’s good. Because it’s important for you. It’s important to have some family in your life.”
Benicio wondered for a moment if she was fishing for him to say something like: You’re all I need. But then, thinking about it, he decided she wasn’t. That’s not at all what she wanted to hear. “It will go well,” he said. “He and I both want it to.”
When they were done Alice gave him an open kiss on the mouth, the kind that usually means there’s more to come, and got up to find her keys. He walked her out to her pickup. He said the word love with gameless honesty and she said “me, too.”
Benicio spent the rest of that evening pouring leftover soup down his garbage disposal and waterlogging his houseplants. He called his father’s cell phone and then his hotel room phone but couldn’t get through on either and didn’t bother leaving messages. It was the second time he’d tried and failed to make contact since missing those two calls last week, but rather than worrying him, it was actually a relief. After all, the arrangements were set—he had tickets, a tourist visa, plenty of cash, hotel reservations in a room next to his father’s—and beyond that there really wasn’t anything to talk about. All that remained was to go.
AFRAID OF MISSING HIS CONNECTION, he decided to stay up and get some coffee. At the far end of the terminal he found one of those ubiquitous airport café-bars. There was a menu in English plastered to the wall, along with prices in yen. He stared at it for a while, trying to make the clumsy conversions.
“If you want it, just go ahead and buy it, but if I were you I wouldn’t do the math.” The man seated at the bar spoke in a brittle smoker’s voice. Benicio recognized him as a fellow passenger on the flight over from LAX. “Knowing that my Budweiser cost eight bucks means I ain’t enjoying it half as much as I could be.” Benicio smiled vaguely, ordered a coffee and joined him at the bar, leaving an empty stool between them. For a while they sipped in silence.
“So what brings you to Japan?” the man asked.
“Nothing does,” Benicio said, “I’m on my way to Manila.”
“The Philippines? No shit. Me, too. We must be waiting for the same connection. The name’s Doug.” He offered his hand and Benicio shook it. Doug finished his beer and ordered another from the woman behind the counter. He scrutinized the silver can draped in red calligraphy with a kind of suspicion before opening it. “So what brings you to the warmer world, then?”
“My father lives there.”
“That’s not bad,” Doug said. “Not a bad place for a grown man to live in.” He squinted awkwardly—maybe he was trying to wink? Either way, it was creepy. “I’ve got family there, too. I’ve got a wife there.”
Benicio nodded, looking into his coffee.
“Yep. She’s staying in this little place called Tay-Gay-Tay, or something like that. Looks real nice … hang on, I got a picture right here.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded postcard that he slid down the bar to Benicio. It was a familiar picture; he had almost the exact same shot on the front cover of his paperback history. The ridges of an enormous crater were visible around the edges of the postcard. They were high, and stony-green, with dense little bushels of fog collecting along them like droplets of water on the rim of a glass. Inside the massive crater was a lake, marked here and there by the irregular grid lines of fish nurseries. In the middle of the lake another crater sprouted up, smaller but steeper, and inside that was still another lake. The craters and lakes made up a series of rings, like a giant, irregular bull’s-eye on the surface of the earth. The sun burned orange under clouds on the horizon, and as he examined the