Twenty-Seven Bones

4

There were certain advantages to being an Apgard on St. Luke, where Lewis’s father, and his father before him, and his father before him, had run a government that distributed more per capita federal aid than any state or territory except the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

The plan was for Lewis and Dr. Vogler to meet for a fifty-minute hour every weekday this week, then three times a week until further notice. But because Lewis was an Apgard, and didn’t want to be seen entering the psychiatrist’s office, Vogler had agreed that their sessions would take place at the Great House. For a house call premium, of course.

They began at the stroke of noon, facing each other in twin red leather armchairs in Lewis’s study, which was still furnished as it had been in his grandfather’s day. “What I’m hoping to accomplish in our first session,” the psychiatrist began, “is to get an appreciation of your perception of why we’re here, why you’re entering into therapy, and what you hope to get out of it.”

Lewis, who could charm the birds from the trees when he set his mind to it, flashed the shrink a shy, skewed grin. “I’m afraid the better half insisted on it.”

Vogler, a plump bespectacled man who favored bow ties and seersucker sport jackets, nodded understandingly. “Tell me about yourself.”

Lewis began, as any Apgard would, with his pedigree. “My great-grandfather was the last Danish governor of St. Luke, my grandfather and father were the first two American governors. I was born in 1968. Scorpio, not that I believe in that shit. I’m an only child. My mother died two days after my birth. Something called eclampsia-you ever heard of it?”

“I received my MD from Johns Hopkins,” said Vogler, providing a little pedigree of his own.

“I guess that means yes. Anyway, my earliest memory is being hauled around by my wet nurse.”

“Wet nurse,” Vogler echoed, blinking furiously behind his thick lenses-wet nurse stories were catnip to psychiatrists.

“Her name was Queen Charlotte. When I wasn’t sucking her titis, I was riding her big old round hip like a little white monkey. Which is what she used to call me-her little white monkey. She used to take me everywhere-to market, to the washhouse, to church on Sunday morning. I cried like a baby-well, I was a baby-when the Guv canned her.”

“The Guv?”

“That’s what I called my father. That’s what everybody called my father. And his father before him. Anyway, the Guv declared unilaterally that my titi days were over, and I was put in the charge of his maiden sister Agneta.

“Given a choice, I’d have preferred a wicked stepmother. Auntie Aggie was of the opinion that children should be seen and not heard, and from what I could tell, she wasn’t all that crazy about seeing them, either. Or maybe she really liked children in general and it was only me she couldn’t stand. For whatever reason, she was a royal pain in the bumsie, from the day she moved into the Governor’s Mansion to the day she was raped and murdered.”

“Raped and murdered,” muttered Vogler, scribbling intently in his notebook.

“During Hurricane Eloise. You want to hear about it?”

“If you’d like to tell me about it.”

“I probably should-it was my fault.”

“Definitely, then.”

“Okay, well, I remember the rain and the wind, for sure, the bruised look of the clouds, that astonishing blue sky and the way my ears popped when the eye passed over us. Which happened twice-from what I understand, after stalling over St. Luke, the storm circled the island in a clockwise spiral and hit us a second time. I also remember how surprised I was and how strange it seemed when I looked out the window of my room on the third floor of the Governor’s Mansion and saw that Sugar Town had disappeared, swallowed up by the rising water.

“We lost phones and power the first day. On the second day we lost our water and ran out of batteries for the transistor radio, and by nightfall everybody had fled to higher ground except for Aggie, myself, Mr. Featherston, my father’s houseman, and his wife Bougainvillea, who was our cook. The Guv was in Washington, on government business, but he called just before the phones went down and told us to hold the fort.

“So hold the fort we did, but with Sugar Town gone and Dansker Hill half underwater by the third morning, looting had already begun. Then the looters freed the surviving prisoners from the holding cells in the basement of the police station, and all hell broke loose. The prisoners who’d survived, we later learned, had done so only by killing, stacking, and standing on the bodies of the ones that hadn’t, which meant that nature had Darwinned out all but the meanest of the mean and the toughest of the tough. And of course having been left by the authorities to drown in their cells hadn’t done anything to improve their dispositions.

“From that point on, anarchy reigned in the streets of Frederikshavn-those that were still above water, that is. Although I suppose it reigned in the drowned streets as well. The loyal Mr. Featherston, whom I remember only as a bald brown head with a woolly gray fringe, locked the spiked wrought-iron gates of the Mansion and sat outside under the dripping portico with a big old horse pistol across his lap. I suppose he was thinking that the mere sight of the antique Colt would serve as a deterrent. Instead, somebody shot him dead from outside the gates.

“Auntie Aggie dragged me into the huge mahogany wardrobe of her room, next to mine on the third floor, when the looters broke in a few minutes later. I still remember the smell-stale cedar potpourri mingled with Aggie’s sour powdery eau-de-old-maid-and the darkness, and the terrible sound of Bougie, who’d been screaming downstairs, being cut off in midshriek by a shotgun blast.

“After that there were footsteps and shouting, doors banging open and shut, heavy furniture being dragged around. I heard the worst language I’d ever heard in my life and so, I suspect, did my auntie, who clapped her hands over my ears. I wriggled away and put my eye to the crack between the wardrobe doors just as the bedroom door came crashing inward and two men burst into the room. One of them began rummaging through Aggie’s bureau; the other lowered his double-barreled shotgun and pointed it directly at the wardrobe-directly at me. It was an ancient side-by-side; I remember looking down those two black barrels. I pushed open the wardrobe doors and stepped out, hands in the air.

“ ‘Eh, eh, well me gad,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘Look heah, mon, we done ketch us a scuppy.’

“ ‘Me ain’ no scuppy,’ I told him. ‘Me a titi-bitah!’ ”

Lewis had dropped into the dialect that was a first language to him. Me ain’t no was pronounced as one word, meeyaino, the u sound in scuppy was halfway between uh and oo, a scuppy was a bony saltwater fish, an utter waste of bait, and titi biter was the local name for the freshwater mullet, Agonostomus monticola, which according to local legend lurked in streams in order to bite unsuspecting maidens on the breast when they went bathing.

“I remember the two men glancing at each other in surprise to hear a little white boy talking pure Luke-and full mout’ing them, at that.”

“Full mowting?”

“Sassing. That’s probably what saved my life. Instead of killing me on the spot, they laughed. Then the one with the shotgun waved it in the direction of the wardrobe, and whispered, ‘Anybody else in there?’ so softly I had to read his lips.”

As he paused for a much-needed sip of water, Lewis glanced at the psychiatrist, still scribbling furiously in his notebook. Vogler looked up. “What happened next?”

“Good question. What I told the Guv and the police was that the men just yanked me and my auntie out of the wardrobe.”

“I gather that’s not what really happened?”

“No. What really happened was that I nodded and stepped aside, out of the line of fire.”