Moondogs - Alexander Yates [97]
“You didn’t?” He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and struggled to light it. “Man. Maybe I should get new business cards.” The flame finally caught and he sucked in deep. “Or like, a custom shirt or something like that.”
“No,” Benicio said. “I mean I didn’t know you were serious about me.”
“Who’s serious?” Bobby looked at him. “So … is it the bandages?”
“I’m not gay.”
Bobby laughed, but he’d been dragging on his cigarette, so he also coughed a lot. “Then what the fuck are you doing with a pretty, strange boy like myself, on a pretty, strange beach? Why did you even come with us today? Don’t—do not tell me it’s for Katrina. Because that shit is a game.”
“I wanted to ask you about the woman in the green dress. The one in the ballroom. I wanted to ask how long my father’s been with her.” With sounded like the wrong word, but he couldn’t bring himself to say fucking.
Bobby looked at him. “Oh Benny.” He sounded disappointed. “Sneaky and dishonest is much worse than careless and deluded. It’s not any of your business.”
“It’s as much mine as it is yours. It’s more mine than it is yours.”
“This is a conversation you should be having with Howard.”
“He’s not around to have it with.”
Bobby lay back in the sand, filling the empty sky above him with smoke. “Since as long as I’ve known him,” he said. “Going on three years.”
“Is it a relationship?”
“If you’re asking if he pays, then yes. He pays.”
Benicio sat there for a moment. He felt more deflated than angry. It was no huge shock that his father, even as he tried to fix their relationship, kept on doing the same thing that broke it. He was a cheat before his mother died and that made him still a cheat now that she was gone. Benicio stood. “What’s this about a game?” he asked. “What do you mean about Katrina?”
Bobby flicked his cigarette straight up in the air and it landed a few feet downwind. “The bubbly bimbo thing is an act,” he said, “which I guess you would have noticed if you ever did more than just glance at her. She’s out for revenge. She had a thing for this boy, a while back. And I had a thing with him. Twice. She got mad. You were in her crosshairs as soon as she saw I liked you.” Bobby laughed and then, noticing his expression, said, “Oh, woe is you.”
Benicio left him where he lay. He headed down to the water, shattering what could have been perfect little shells under his dive booties. It struck him that Bobby and Katrina were just like his dad. They were all frivolous, irresponsible rich people playing screwed-up games. He again wondered about Bobby’s injuries. He imagined him crashing a borrowed car, or sleeping with the son of hardcore Catholics just to prove he could, and then having to reckon with a beefy uncle. Up ahead small waves crushed and sucked. His ankles went cold as he strode into the gentle surf.
Katrina was some yards out, standing in water up to her thighs. Odd lights swirled about her. Tiny, blue-green dots flicked atop the low waves, glowing in a thick band where they washed up along shore.
“Benny.” It was Katrina’s voice but it wasn’t her name to call him. “Are you seeing this?” She splashed the water a little and that agitated the lights, sent them sparkling. “Plankton! It washes up sometimes on this beach. Not all the time, though. We’re lucky.”
Benicio waded out to her. His mother had described a scene very much like this a few months before she died. It was Thanksgiving. He’d come home from Virginia, and Howard had come home from the Philippines. As always, Benicio hardly spoke to him. But this time his mother wouldn’t have it. She cornered him in the kitchen and said, “Sinvergueñza. Are you a man or are you a child? Whatever you’re mad about, get over it.”
“Whatever I’m mad about?” he asked. “You should be just as angry. It’s you he cheats on, not me.”
And then his mother slapped him. She slapped him so hard he almost lost his balance and fell to the kitchen linoleum like a decked welterweight. “What the hell do you know about it?” she asked, hardly trying to keep her voice from carrying