Moondogs - Alexander Yates [93]
“Don’t tease!” Katrina said, taking Benicio’s wrist in a way that made him a little uneasy and also pleased him. “Given the choice between someone with no practice hitting faces and someone who is really good at hitting faces, I’d rather know, or get to know, the first person. The one with no practice.” She flagged down a passing waitress, pointed at Benicio’s bottle, and stuck two fingers in the air. “Come on, let’s not talk about it anymore.”
“Yes,” Bobby said as he slowly unfolded his napkin and laid it over his lap, “let’s not.” The waitress arrived with two more beers and Bobby lifted his to make a toast. “To America,” he said. “Let no one talk shit about her, lest they have their faces busted in by GI Ben.”
Benicio raised his own bottle. Despite the fight last night, and despite the discovery this morning, he felt himself relaxing. It was somehow very easy to be in this place, with these people. “Except for you,” he said as he clinked his bottle against Bobby’s. “You can talk all the shit you want because you’ve had your face pre-busted.”
Katrina coughed through an aborted swallow. Bobby lowered his San Miguel without drinking and looked at Benicio. “Well imagine that,” he said. “Who would have thought that there was a sense of humor underneath all that khaki?”
BOBBY ORDERED FOR THE TABLE and they ate quickly. Benicio found the food—like the language—hauntingly familiar. The pork adobo wasn’t totally unlike his mother’s adobo, and there was some pickled fish with peppers that resembled the ceviche she’d stopped making by the time he got to high school. Bobby let him pick up the check without an argument and led them, slowly, out to the lot.
It had cooled outside, and a breeze spilled fog up from the basin of the crater and out over the road. Benicio retrieved his dive bag from the Shangri-La sedan and followed Bobby and Katrina to a big white Expedition that took up two handicapped spaces right in front of the restaurant. “Hey,” Bobby said as he opened the back so Benicio could hoist his gear inside, “at least the parking’s better lately.” He shot Katrina a grim smile that she didn’t return and then took his time getting into the high driver’s seat. Benicio found space in the back between mesh bags overflowing with fins and wetsuits. He looked back as they pulled out of the lot, hoping to catch a glimpse of the volcano, or at least the inner rim of the crater. All he could see was a warm spot behind the clouds.
Their trip south brought them back along Taal’s outer rim and then down through fields of pineapple and palm. After about an hour, once the ground evened out and everybody’s ears popped, Bobby turned onto a dirt road cut jagged by tiny dry riverbeds. He winced as the Expedition bounced and jostled, but he didn’t slow down. The brush thickened about the road; a mix of bamboo and tree trunks that looked like premature driftwood, broken here and there by hand-painted signs advertising dive hotels. “That’s us,” Bobby said through gritted teeth, pointing out the window to a piece of plywood reading: Balayan Bay Dive Club—Welcome Friends!—Management not responsible for vehicles parked overnight. The lot was just a clearing of tire-flattened grass, and theirs was the only car.
They were still a few hundred feet above the water, and narrow concrete stairs snaked down a wooded slope to the beach below. Benicio looked down and saw the thatched roofs of whitewashed hotel bungalows—their backs to the dense hillside jungle and their doors opening upon the alternating indigo and turquoise of reef and sandy bottom. The deeper water was marked by the moving shadows of clouds, vast smudges that could just as well be the backs of great things that traveled beneath the surface.
“I’ll go first and get someone to help us with the bags,” Katrina announced. Bobby, who’d just managed to lower