Moondogs - Alexander Yates [62]
Reynato laughs from the driver’s seat. “What did I tell you? Damn near indispensable. Can you imagine this boy in a gunfight?”
His chuckling cuts short when a bird strikes the base of the windshield, slides up its length and topples dead into the open-backed jeep. Lorenzo picks up the bird—a warbler just passing through—and opens its thin beak with his fingernails. He squeezes the bird and a playing card, rolled tight as a cigarette, pops wetly out of its gullet. He hands the card to Efrem, who unrolls it. It’s the king of hearts—but now the illustrated king is Efrem’s own spitting image, leering up at him like a shadow self.
“Now you’re just showing off,” Reynato says, sounding proud.
Efrem looks from the card to Lorenzo. “How did you do that?”
“Shit, don’t Moros do birthdays? If I say how, it’ll ruin—”
“No … that’s not …” Efrem glances up at Racha, still bleeding lightly, at Elvis, who is no longer a spider, and asks the same question he’s never been able to answer of himself. “How are you this way?”
“How did we get our magic, you mean?” Lorenzo asks, not relinquishing the spotlight. “That’s easy, I got mine from the people. From the People Power Revolution. I’m a child of EDSA, born in the last hour before Dictator Marcos left our soil aboard a GI-Joe helio. Mom, a lefty, left my sisters at home for a February march; never mind she was nine months full of me. She stacked sandbags, laid down flat in front of tanks and led seven million with her rendition of “Bayan Ko.” I was born to the sound of cheering, the sound of Cardinal Sin on Radio Veritas, the sound confetti makes in your hair.” He puts on a contemplative look, sort of sad-happy. “The way I see it, People Power has a special kind of meaning for me. Can’t help but think I represent—”
“Don’t listen to his bullshit,” Reynato interrupts. “He’s teasing you, Mohammed. People Power has nothing to do with it. You want the truth?” He pauses to glance back through the rearview. “We are the way we are on account of gamma rays. The ones we all got exposed to in space. Out on the Balut Thirteen, first Pinoys to land on the moon. Maybe you saw us up there, with those eyes of yours. Planted flags all over that motherfucker.”
The bruhos of Task Force Ka-Pow bray wildly, and they roll on. The road turns to asphalt. Trees thin. They hit light traffic and Reynato switches on a siren to get by.
THAT EVENING THEY ARRIVE at what Reynato calls a safehouse, but it isn’t a house at all, it’s a suite in the luxurious Secret Valley Hotel in Davao City. Lorenzo and Racha claim beds first, leaving Efrem to drop his bedroll on the floor. Still full from lunch, he follows his new friends downstairs and across the street to a dingy grill operated by a pink, peeling Australian. A thick waitress takes their order and returns Lorenzo’s sex-eyes. After they eat, Ka-Pow orchestrates a party that they are the life of. Reynato sings with the house band on stage while Elvis commandeers the drums. Efrem accepts a single mug of warm beer—his first—but stops drinking when he discovers a raw pork cutlet floating near the bottom. He rushes to the bathroom with a finger down his throat. Lorenzo blames the bartender for the prank, so Efrem puts the bartender on the floor. The police are called and Reynato talks them down, autographing their billy clubs with a fancy pen that has glitter in the ink. They return to the Secret Valley an hour before dawn, where they’re told by sleepy telephone voices that the kitchen is closed, and there will be no room service. Lorenzo, a man of solutions, produces a white rabbit and a brace of Mindanao doves from his straw hat. Racha butchers them in the bathtub, Elvis roasts them over sinkfire, and they all have something to eat come breakfast time.
By midmorning the air is heavy with promise, and the day begins much like Efrem’s beloved Ocampo Justice movies. Reynato summons Task Force Ka-Pow to the roof of the hotel where, free from prying eyes and perked ears, he