Moondogs by Alexander Yates Page A

favorite florist—would that be so hard? Outside the big man kicks Howard’s door and the taxi bobbles on its shocks. It gets hard for Howard to see because his contacts are hurting him and because he’s crying a lot. His big, stupid fingers have trouble finding the buttons.
    The large man kicks the cab again, and then whips the rear passenger window with the length of PVC pipe. Howard puts his free hand on his ear to block out the sound of cracking glass. Through his tears he finds Benny’s number and calls again. It rings once, twice, how many times before he hears his son’s recorded voice? “Sorry! I’m away right now. I’ll do my best to hit you back!” The window shatters before the beep. Chips of glass and raindrops rush onto his lap. A big hand reaches in, opens the door from the inside and grabs the phone from him. The men pull Howard out into the street. He tries to land on his elbows so he won’t cut his palms up on the glass. They whip the pipe along hisback, and legs. He pushes himself up and the pipe catches his cheek, breaking skin and knocking the molars loose. “You don’t need to,” he tries to shout, his hands in the air to demonstrate how he’s not fighting. “You don’t need to.” They hit his hands and the air around his hands. They hit him in the ribs and on his knees. They stop for moment and talk to each other—or rather the big one gets talked at by the little one. Howard closes his eyes and opens them. He feels rain, and glass, and everything falling.

Chapter 6
THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE
    There was something that Benicio had never told Alice about his mother. He’d shared it with no one, not even with Howard back when the two of them still spoke—not just regularly, but with warmth and eagerness. His mother was off. She thought she could see the future in her dreams. She believed it the same way that she believed that communion wine became the blood of Christ before passing through her lips, which is to say, with every ounce of her conviction. Benicio couldn’t remember when she’d first told him about what she called her
gift
, but it must have been when he was very young because for the longest time he’d believed it, too. Maybe that was why he’d never told the story to Alice—or to his father, which was conceivable now that the two were speaking again, however tentatively—because there was no way of telling it without including the fact that until his middle teens he’d believed something so foolish. Something that belonged to comic books or the summer movies based on them. He’d believed in superpowers.
    His mother insisted that her dreams weren’t just symbolic premonitions open to interpretation—Benicio had since come to find that Catholics, and Latinas chief among them, were especially skilled at this kindof kitchen-table fortune-telling—but visions of real people in real places doing things that would come to pass days, months and even years after the night they first marched into her sleeping head. He remembered a sunless afternoon, his mother tearing plastic wrap and translucent skin from a store-bought chicken, telling him with a rapt expression the story of how she met Howard in a dream before meeting him in San José. “It was three years,” she said. “Three years before I ever saw him, and I knew exactly what he would look like. I wasn’t even properly sleeping. It happened during a nap.” She dropped a handful of skin into the wastebasket and began to cut the bird in half with a knife from the drawer Benicio wasn’t allowed to open, working the heels of her palms over the back of the blade, throwing her shoulders into the job. They were just back from Christmas with his aunts, and as usual she returned from Costa Rica firmly resolved to cook more often and to experiment less while doing so. Benicio, who had been watching from the doorway, pulled up a stool and put his elbows on the cool marble slab of their kitchen island.
    “Mom,” he