Moondogs - Alexander Yates [39]
The driver shouted at the squatters and leaned on his horn. He put the shuttle in reverse, pulled around them and grazed one with the sideview mirror hard enough to bend it. Monique watched out back as they scampered to the median. The woman they’d struck gave chase for a few paces, shouting angrily but still trying to make a sale.
“No need for all that,” Joseph said, not daring to look up at the front seat.
“No, there wasn’t. Not till you opened your window.”
Jeff was quiet the rest of the trip. He disembarked at Magallanes with cool nods for them both. “Why do you always have to do stuff like that?” Monique asked as soon as the armored door slid shut.
“Do not speak to me in absolutes. I do not always do anything.”
“That woman could have been hurt.”
“I didn’t accelerate. I didn’t hit her. All I did was buy flowers from a little girl. And thanks, by the way, for backing me up.”
“That’s not my job, Joe.”
“Actually, yes, it is.”
The driver continued northeast, reporting about their bickering in a bemused voice over the CB. He let them out at Greenbelt—a multistory outdoor mall at the heart of Makati with air-conditioning so strong you could feel it a block away. Joseph hated what it represented. Monique hated that it was nothing like the home she remembered and had hoped for. But it was close, convenient, and the only place they could ever settle on.
MONIQUE’S CHILDHOOD HOME felt to her now like a different country. Subic Bay was leafy, clean and open. Her father had been stationed there when she was born. He still liked to joke raspily over the telephone that she’d been only minutes away from a Pinoy passport—her mother’s water broke a month early on a hike up nearby Pinatubo. The delivery wasn’t till later that evening, but the way he told it you’d think Monique popped out the moment his speeding jeep crossed the first MP checkpoint.
For most of the 1970s her family bounced around between Pacific bases—Monique still kept report cards from Guam and Hawaii in her scrapbook. She celebrated her first, seventh, tenth, and eleventh birthdays at Subic. On the last tour, the one she remembered best, they were assigned to a freestanding house some hundred yards down from the married officers quarters. It had a flagstone path lined with pink lava rocks and a back porch that opened out to sagging, vine-heavy woods. They shared a cleaning woman—or more of a girl, actually—with the family next door, and for reasons inexplicable to Monique, memories of this long-lost person held an intensity that nostalgia failed to account for. On some lucky afternoons, when her mother was away at the officers club or shopping at the PX, the cleaning woman would lead Monique on walks through the woods out back. Together they mapped out trees where flying foxes slept in the daytime, and discovered the little corner of All Hands Beach where hawksbill turtles laid their eggs. The cleaning woman threw stones at a troop of roadside macaques that kept getting too close. She taught Monique to coax spiders from their holes with balls of wax. Once, when the woman was away, Monique got bit by one of those spiders. She sat in the front yard bawling until her father came out and crushed it with his naked fingers. “Just like Peter Parker,” he said. “You’re a little hero now.”
Greenbelt had nothing in common with that squat little house. The streams were artificial, the palms were potted, and guards flanked the flagstone paths leading in and out. There was a long line at the checkpoint that night. Men were frisked; women had their handbags searched. One of the guards noticed Monique and Joseph at the back of the line and tried to wave them through, but Joseph insisted on waiting like everybody else. They continued up a narrow neon alleyway and came to the door of their favorite restaurant—the only Italian place they’d found that didn’t overcook or oversweeten. They took a table on the second-floor terrace overlooking the main courtyard. Monique ordered a light beer. Joseph leafed through the menu for minutes. He asked