Free Moondogs by Alexander Yates

his arm up in a wave, his opposite hand supporting his elbow to keep it airborne. They hadn’t been close. Efrem keeps his arms at his sides. The driver releases the emergency brake. The engine shouts, and they’re rolling. Down the marching green, past the tenant farmers and their wounded carabao, out into the trees still wet with dog’s blood, away from the Boxer Boys.

Chapter 5
THREE STRAYS
    Howard leaves the club an hour after it closes, and when he gets out to the lot all the waiting taxicabs have left. That’s all right. It’s a fine, unusually quiet night, and he’d like to walk some of this drunk off anyway. He crosses Roxas to the promenade and heads south, hardly stumbling. The bay crumbles gently on the seawall to his right. It isn’t long before he hears a sound in the darkness; something like a cough behind him. He hears it again—a sick sound, followed by footsteps and heavy breathing. He turns and sees three stray dogs, slouched and stinking. They’ve been skulking around the club for a month now. He’s complained to the owner, but has she done anything? No, she has not.
    “Get!” Howard says, but the dogs don’t get. One of them approaches with a floppy, careless step. It looks at him and lets out another cough that skids into a faint, trembling growl. With some difficulty, Howard gets down on one knee and pantomimes picking up a stone. His chauffeur at the hotel taught him how to do this—our strays know what it means to have rocks thrown at them, he explained. The strays pace and whine, but they don’t scatter. Howard holds up his cupped, empty fist. He makes a throwing motion and the dogs flinch, but regroup. They glare, awash in bluish moonlight. “Go home!” he says. The words ring lame in the empty night.
    The closest dog, its patchy hair yellow as hay, takes another step. Howard drops the fake stone act and starts searching for a real one. Hesitant to take his eyes off the dog, he quickly scans the chipped, honeycombed promenade. Nothing but paper and gum. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his ratty old wallet, swollen with receipts. He chucks it at the dog, striking it on the nose. The animal yelps in surprise and all three scamper darkly back across Roxas, making an off-duty taxi brake hard. Howard chuckles, bracing his hands on the sidewalk as he recovers his wallet and tries to stand back up. It takes some time. He’s a large man.
    Howard keeps walking. The promenade is silent and empty, as it never is in the daytime, and that puts him in a sentimental state of mind. He thinks about the busy day that brought him here. Meetings from midmorning until evening and food at every meeting. At breakfast he discussed slab marble with lesbians from Bangkok. Then to the Mandarin for good sushi and a bad argument. Dinner in the car on the way to the airport to pick up some prospective investors fresh in from Sydney and full of energy. He got them drunk on Red Horse and took them to the club, where they had a fabulous half hour before vomiting and retreating to private rooms upstairs—lightweights all.
    Howard looks up as he walks, feeling disconnected from his feet falling invisibly below him in that pleasant, drunk way. The smog is low tonight, and the moon is full and weird looking. He stops and rubs his eyes. Is it just his drying contact lenses? He looks again and sees that, no, it isn’t—the moon has a ring around it. An unbroken halo of hazy light, about two thumb-to-forefinger lengths from the center as measured by his outstretched arm. The far ends of the ring are marked by a faint pair of flares, looking like lesser siblings to the nearly full moon. Howard knows what they are. He’s always had a memory for scientific miscellany—especially something as beautiful as this. They’re called moondogs, caused by ice or some such in the upper atmosphere, and God, aren’t they something? The sight delights him. He wants to tell somebody about it. He wants to tell his son,