Moondogs - Alexander Yates [65]
NOT LONG AGO he would have sneered at a claim like this—seen it for the empty boast it was. But in the short time since joining up with Task Force Ka-Pow his world has gone topsy, and now anything seems possible. He’d always imagined his curse to be unique—kept those bugged-out wandering eyeballs a secret from his few friends among the Boxer Boys. The curse had, after all, rendered him a freak back home, in the village north of Tubigan. Someone to be feared and avoided. And everybody did. Everybody except for the Holy Man.
Like Efrem, the Holy Man was not born on their island. He arrived during a hard dry season, when the whole jungle inland seemed to yellow and shrug. Efrem was eleven and the island had changed in the short years since he’d run ashore on the deadboat. The fishing lanes had filled with trawlers, their synthetic nets brimming. Village fishermen, freedivers with rubber-sling hand spears, paddled their bangkas far beyond the breakers and still came home with too little. Some took up with the trawlers as deckhands. Others worked construction on islands big enough to build things on, or tapped rubber on Basilan plantations. Children on the island saw this rot as proof positive that Efrem was deadluck. But they never said so to his face, and scattered when he approached, arms cradling their heads.
The Holy Man received an equally cool reception—the villagers deciding early on that he was crazy. His hopeless motorboat leaked and he arrived all dressed from head to toe in silly white robes. One of his arms was missing at the elbow, and he wore a thick beard that cascaded down to where his navel probably was. He kept his little round sunglasses on even after sunset and spent his first evening on the island shambling from hut to hut so he could mumble thickly accented greetings to the men, and boys. He pitched a heavy tent on a small strip of level sand below the huts. Suspicious villagers watched him wrangling the poles with his one arm, not bothering to tell him that by midnight he’d have cold tidewater as a blanket.
They warmed to him in the weeks that followed, but not because he acted any less insane. He gave money away. Just like that—a stack of coins or some folded, rotting bills passed to anyone who asked for them. All he demanded in return was that you listen to his ramblings; stories of made-up countries and their made-up wars. He’d raise his nub high into the air and tell the children about how Communists shot his arm clean off. Communists were enemies of God and he had fought them among the dusty mountains of his imaginary homeland. God, according to the Holy Man, had a lot of enemies. And so, therefore, did the Holy Man. For God’s enemies were his, just as God’s friends were his friends. “Of course, you’re all God’s friends,” he said. “And I’m happy about that.” Not all of the villagers were won over, and those who were took time. But everyone became attached enough to the crazy stranger that they didn’t ask questions when he suddenly broke camp and hid in the bamboo for days. They even lied to the Manileño soldiers that came looking for him, saying they’d seen nothing of a foreign fugitive.
Efrem avoided the Holy Man as he did everyone else. He spent his days atop the seaside cliffs, seated in a favorite little hollow overlooking the cove and huts below. By that time he’d already been to Davao City with his uncle, and from this perch he had an easy view out across the archipelago, beyond faraway Zamboanga City, past the cloud-speckled crater-peak of Mount Apo, out to the very dock in Davao where they’d tied off. His pupils, dilated to near hemorrhage, retraced the back-alley route his cousins once led him on to find the outdoor cinema. On some lucky afternoons he’d discover a new Ocampo movie showing—Charlie Fuentes in the title role, unloading his trusty six-shooter, Truth, into some liar. Efrem would watch as long as he could, struggling not to blink. He didn’t want to miss a thing.
But on the hot afternoon that the Holy Man followed him up the cliffs there was no movie showing