Moondogs - Couverture rigide

Yates, Alexander

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0385533780 ISBN 13 : 9780385533782

Editeur : Doubleday, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Yates Alexander

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter 1

mr. orange

A man and a rooster exit a taxi idling on a crowded street. The man is short and thin, and the rooster is green, and the rooster belongs to him. The taxi belongs to him as well. He's wearing a fresh shirt, the blood all washed out, and his polyester slacks shine a little in the afternoon light. He's too young to be balding, but is. His mouth is a rotten mess, owing to bad hygiene and a shabu habit. His name is Ignacio. He and the rooster are villains.

Ignacio grips the open taxi door and stretches his legs. It feels good to be standing. The drive south from Manila should have taken only an hour, but he demanded that Littleboy--his idiot brother--make wrong turns so they'd be harder to follow. He'd barked instructions from the backseat, where he and Kelog pored over a soggy map and planned intricate double-backs. Kelog is the rooster. He's named Kelog because he's green, with red and orange in his tail, and a blood-red comb, like the rooster on the cereal. He used to be a fighting cock. He still would be, if not for the onset of blindness. He's retired now.

Littleboy stays in the family taxi, drumming his fingers on the wheel and singing along to the SexBomb Girls on the radio. Littleboy loves the family taxi. He never minds picking up Ignacio's shifts, and people tip him better, because he's a safer driver and doesn't look so scary. He looks big and soft. When the song ends he leans out the window and calls over to his brother.

"Is this it, Iggy? Are we there yet?"

"Not so loud, dummy!" Ignacio shouts. "What did I tell you?"

Littleboy looks embarrassed and squints. He hadn't been loud at all.

Ignacio holds Kelog tight and releases the open taxi door like a mother's hand. He steps into the after-lunch foot traffic, searches out a number above the shops and checks it with the address he'd written on his palm the night before. They're in the right spot--or close to it at least. They'll walk the final distance on side streets, just to be safe.

"Go park the car," Ignacio says. "I'll make sure we're alone."

"Be careful," Littleboy says, thumbing the scented Virgin Mother statuette on the dashboard. Ignacio watches him courteously reenter the slow moving traffic and then signal--who signals?--at the intersection ahead. He again thinks that maybe his brother isn't up to today's challenge. On a whole bunch of levels. Like maybe he's too softhearted. Or maybe he doesn't have sense enough to know he should be scared. Ignacio sure has sense enough. He's terrified. He appreciates the seriousness of the shit he's starting.

Ignacio shifts Kelog to his other arm, leans against the concrete wall of a store selling toilets and bathtubs and tries his utmost to look nonchalant. He scans the noisy street, all bathed in sweat from an unusually hot mid-May, even for the Philippines. Power lines sag dangerously low over speeding buses and jeepneys. Women hawk cool juice and duck eggs from tin kiosks, while men in a repair shop fold up their shirts to air out their guts. Two children chase a scalded cat down the sidewalk, but they get distracted by Kelog, and the cat escapes. "Is that a fighting cock, mister?" they ask. Kelog eyes the general area of the children with hungry disdain, and Ignacio tells them to beat it.

"Who are you talking to, pussy?" the smaller one says in a high, lovely voice. "This isn't your neighborhood, Manileño!"

The boys goose their crotches, spit near his shoes and run down the gravel sidewalk laughing. Ignacio presses himself into the shop wall and watches them go. He knows he looks out of place. But he's on the lookout for people even more out of place--scanning the street for the Americans that he's sure are following him. Men in suits ill-suited to the climate, peering out from behind menus in the karaoke bar and the buko pie shop. Pale men or maybe black men with sunglasses on their eyes and wireless earpiece-things in their ears. Blond freckled athlete virgins hiding in the lengthening shadows of stop signs; ready to pounce, ready to pull him into an SUV with diplomatic plates and tinted windows and take him somewhere dark and dress him in something bright and deprive him of sleep, ready to drag him screaming to ocean-distant rooms of electrified genitals and nudity-near-dogs, ready to lock him up with the real hardcore types at Guantanamo Bay, ready to laugh and eat pastries as they watch him get ass-raped through one-way glass. He's afraid of those Guantanamo types--his maybe future cellmates--the most. He isn't hardcore. And they'll know it in a second.

"How far is the mosque from here?" Littleboy's voice startles him so much that he drops Kelog, whose fighting spur--attached today for the first time in years--makes an ugly noise against the gravel.

"Idiot," Ignacio says as he reaches down to recover Kelog and coo to him. "Don't say that. Keep your mouth shut."

Littleboy shuts his mouth and breathes through his whistling nostrils. He takes obvious glances over each shoulder and then puts on what he must think is a nonconspiratorial expression. He looks like he's trying to pass something so big it hurts a little. He makes Ignacio sick.

"Come on," he says. "Walk behind me, and don't say anything to anybody."

Without another word, they make their way along the street. Ignacio slips down the first pedestrian alley they come to and walks the labyrinthine footpaths in the general direction of their destination: the Blue Mosque. He's not happy to be getting so many curious glances from passersby, and his hands shake, his long nails scraping audibly on his cheap slacks. The paranoia and the shabu have kept him awake for days now. The bags under his eyes are swollen so dark it looks like he's weeping tar. People avoid him in the narrow corridors between shanty walls; sometimes stepping in sewage to do so, as though they're afraid what he's got might be catching. When they pass Littleboy--dutifully a few steps behind--they've got no choice but to keep hugging the walls. He's almost as big across as Ignacio is tall, his head large as a breadfruit. He's got to duck every few steps to avoid do-it-yourself power lines, stolen cable and jagged aluminum siding.

But of the three of them, Kelog by far gets the most attention. Ignacio expected this--bringing him along is a calculated risk. He's conspicuous, but if shit goes down he'll be needed for protection. Even in retirement he's an impressive bird. His comb stands erect as a crown, the plume of his tail is thick and his talons are solid as a fat kid's fingers. Back in his heyday he put larger opponents away in the first round, leaving them open and disgorged like fancy unpacked handbags on the arena floor. He has thirty-three wins to his name, which may as well be thirty-three thousand considering the lifespan of your average working gamecock. If he hadn't started going blind he'd still be at it. And Ignacio would still be spending his earnings unwisely. And he wouldn't be doing something as dumb, and risky, as this.

The alleys widen as the villains get farther from the main road. Palms compete with makeshift antennas for canopy space, each a perch for sooty pigeons and wild sparrows still dyed red and green from the holidays. Shanty windows breathe talk radio in the heat, their corrugated roofs shimmering like skillets. The squat buildings seem more solid out here, built of concrete masonry blocks and insulated with mortar and foam. Some have fenced-in gardens; sunny resting places for chained dogs or old men chained by gravity to rattan lounge chairs. The old men heckle passersby as though it's charming.

"Hey!" one of them says, noticing the spur fastened to Kelog's foot. "You're going the wrong way, pal. The arena is that way." He points.

Ignacio quickens his pace. He can see a blue-capped minaret ahead and it's all he can do to keep from gawking. The alley opens further and they come abruptly to a white outer wall with a sprawling low dome beyond. The area around the mosque is quiet, save for a pair of shirtless teenagers in black-and-white crocheted caps playing basketball on the pounded dirt. The one with the ball freezes mid-pivot to look at the strangers and then, as though he's deemed them boring, shoots against the plywood backboard.

Ignacio and Littleboy walk along the wall to the arched entrance. It is trimmed with indigo and a vein of stone-inlaid Arabic script. "You'd better wait here," Ignacio says. "Don't come in unless you hear me yelling. Or, if I don't come out for a long time, then you can come in."

Littleboy bites his bottom lip and it quivers under his front teeth. His eyes glisten.

"Don't do that," Ignacio says as he hands Kelog over. "I'll be just fine. But if I'm not, then don't you dare run away. Come in and help me."

Littleboy gravely tries to shake Ignacio's hand, but Ignacio pulls away. He walks through the mosque entrance and finds himself in an empty courtyard surrounded on all sides by a white colonnade made featureless and bright in the midday sun. Dark arched doorways lie at irregular intervals beyond the columns, some of them open and others closed. Ignacio peeks inside one and sees a pair of concrete tubs filled to the brim with water, ringed by shallow troughs and drains. A young man in reading glasses sits on a stool beside one of the tubs, running water from a spigot over his bare feet. He looks up at Ignacio and smiles warmly. Hoping to look like he knows what he's doing, Ignacio stumbles into the room. He dips his hands into one of the tubs and washes them. He wets his forearms and his face and the back of his neck. He exits, dripping, and hears the young man behind him chuckle.

Ignacio peeks through arched doorways until he finds the large prayer room--confident that the Imam should be in there. He kicks off his shoes, grabs a knit cap from an empty desk by the doorway and walks inside. The carpet is the color of sand and feels good against his feet. It bunches up, here and there, around several white pillars garlanded with strands of beads. "H...

Revue de presse

"Dazzling....engaging....Mr. Yate's most impressive feat is to synchronize a sort of gradual reconciliation between the father and son without the two even meeting. But that is only half of the action....[and] Mr. Yates attacks this twist with shoot-'em-up verve.....readers will be gratified by the ambition and raw energy on the display in this particularly promising debut"--Wall Street Journal

"Weird and weirdly affecting Philippines-set novel. The multiple story lines — involving an American businessman, his bumbling kidnappers, his estranged son, an embassy worker having an affair with a Filipino national hero, and an A-Team of supernaturally enhanced soldiers — languorously intertwine, thankfully without the soulless Swiss-watch efficiency that often governs books with such large casts. Yates, who spent part of his youth on the archipelago, caulks the cracks with local detail, but leaves enough room for Moondogs' narrative to breathe." --Entertainment Weekly

"[A] debut novel that combines magical realism, geopolitics, and comic book-style superheroics with shoot-’em-up action, domestic drama, and daddy issues..... fizzy, funny, and tone-perfect....highly entertaining.... Yates achieves an extraordinary synthesis of tenderness and brutality, making us question our own sympathies"--The Boston Globe


"The kidnapping of an American businessman in the Philippines sets in motion an odd series of events involving his estranged son, a hard-boiled cop who inspired a hugely popular film series and a ragtag strike force with special powers. Yates' accomplished debut is an unlikely mix of folktale, Tarantino-esque pulp fiction, island adventure and geopolitical novel. Howard Bridgewater, a high-rolling ugly American whose firm services resorts, has been living in the Philippines for five years. Prompted by his ex-wife's death in Chicago, he convinces his grudge-ridden son Benicio, who lives in Virginia, to come over for a visit. By the time Benicio arrives, Howard has been abducted by a hapless, meth-addicted cab driver named Ignacio who plans on selling him to Moro terrorists. Problem is, he can't find any buyers. The bigger problem is that shady supercop Reynato Ocampo is after him, backed by an impressionable kid who can shoot anyone or anything at any distance (he's a devout fan of the "Ocampo Justice" movies) and a soldier who can turn into a dog or horse or spider. (Ignacio's nasty sidekick is a rooster who smokes.) Reynato is having an affair with Monique, a stressed U.S. Embassy officer who recently relocated to her native soil from America with her insomniac husband and kids; Solita, the prostitute, is demanding support money for the boy who may or may not be Howard's, and Charlie, the actor who plays Ocampo, is shamelessly running for political office. Yates handles the multiple points of view and fragmented narrative flawlessly. As outrageous as the action gets, he keeps his distinctive voice consistent and his tone measured, masterfully modulating the comic and violent effects. There's unexpected depth of emotion in the relationships and in the characters' connection to the land. The author lived in the Philippines when he was a teenager, and later returned to work at the U.S. Embassy. His feeling for and physical descriptions of the islands strongly reflect that experience. An unusual and unusually involving first novel with strong characters and nifty supernatural effects."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review 

"[G]ritty, ambitious.... entertaining....Yates develops considerable narrative momentum....The vibrant and convincing setting coupled with the well-drawn major characters make for..... much to enjoy here."
--Library Journal

"Like one of his own characters, Yates is a bruho, endowed with magical vision that allows him to see the invisible strands of fate and luck that bind people to each other.  He is also a sharpshooter, able to survey an entire city of millions, and then, in an instant, train his sights on an individual target, focusing with great precision on delicate movements of the head and the heart." 
–Charles Yu, author of How To Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe
 
 "MOONDOGS is the thrilla’ in Manila, a rollicking mash-up of magic and mayhem that grabs you by the collar and won't let go.  Alexander Yates sizzles."
—Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child and Angels of Destruction
 
 "An electric and fierce debut novel where strangers share a world with the estranged, and their hidden secrets and open hostilities are equally combustible.  Yates writes with a sense of color and heat that crackles in the voices of his star-crossed characters and adds a vivid glow to the streets of Manila and waters of the Philippines.  MOONDOGS beckons, drawing readers onward with a vibrant intensity that is both lyrical and thrilling. -Ravi Howard, author of Like Trees, Walking
 
"Yates is the real thing; a unique literary voice and natural storyteller with indelible characters, thrill-ride geopolitics and narrative mastery"—Arthur Flowers, author of Another Good Loving Blues
 
"The greatest of Yates' many talents is his ability to make us feel like insiders in so many different worlds and minds. He has Elmore Leonard's logistical chops and Charles Portis' sense of humor but the juggling act of MOONDOGS is entirely his own—and nothing ever touches the ground."—Roy Kesey, author of All Over and the upcoming Pacazo
 
 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0385533780
• ISBN 13: 9780385533782
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 339
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible