Isle of Dogs

One

Unique First fit her name like a glove, or at least this was how her mother always put it. Unique came first and was one of a kind. There was no one else like her-and this was a damn good thing, to quote her father, Dr. Ulysses First, who had never understood what genetic malignancy blighted his only child.

Unique was a petite eighteen-year-old with long, shimmering hair that was as black as ebony, and her skin was translucent like milk glass, her lips full and pink. She believed that her pale blue eyes could mesmerize whoever looked into them and that by casting as little as a glance at someone she could bend that person's mind to fit her Purpose. Unique could haunt someone for weeks, building up unbearable anticipation until the final act, which was a necessary and frenzied release, usually followed by a blackout.

"Hey, wake up, my car's broke down." She knocked on the window of the Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler that was parked all by itself at the Farmers' Market on the fringes of downtown Richmond. "I'm wondering if you got a phone?"

It was 4:00 A.M., pitch dark, and the parking lot was poorly lit. Although Moses Custer knew very well that it wasn't safe to be out here alone at this hour, he had ignored his usual good judgment after fighting with his wife and storming off in his truck, where he intended to spend the night, alone and missing in action, out by the vegetable stands. That would sure show her, he always thought when their marital routine turned ugly. He opened the door of his cab as the knocking on the glass continued.

"Lordy, what's a sweet little thing like you doing out here at this hour?" Moses asked, confused and drunk, as he stared at the creamy, delicate face smiling at him like an angel.

"You're about to have a unique experience." Unique said the same thing she always did right before she moved in for her Purpose.

"What'chu mean?" Moses puzzled. "What unique 'sperience?"

The answer came in a legion of demons that kicked and pounded Moses and ripped at his hair and clothes. Explosions and obscenities erupted from hell, and fire seared his muscles and bones as savage forces beat and tore him to shreds and left him dead and drove off in his truck. Moses hovered above his dead self for a while, watching his mauled, lifeless body on the tarmac. Blood streamed out from under his head as rain smacked down, and one of his boots was off and his left arm was at an angle that wasn't natural. As Moses gazed down on himself, a part of him was worn out and ready for Eternity while another part of him regretted his life and grieved.

"My head's ruined," he moaned and began to sob as everything went black. "Ohhh, my head's ruined. Lord, I ain't ready! It ain't my time yet!"

Complete darkness dissolved to a floating airspace from which Moses watched pulsing emergency lights and urgent firemen, paramedics, and police in yellow rain slickers with reflective tape that glared like white fire. Flares hissed on wet pavement as a heavy cold rain fell, and voices were excited and loud and made no sense. It seemed people were yelling at him and it frightened Moses and made him feel small and ashamed. He tried to open his eyes, but it was as if they had been sewn shut.

"What happened to the angel?" he kept muttering. "She said her car broke down."

Unique's car was fine and she drove around downtown for a couple of hours, listening to radio news-breaks about the mugging and hijacking at the Farmer's Market and the speculation that it had been committed by the same gang of highway pirates that had been terrorizing Virginia for months. But this time Unique enjoyed the afterglow a little less than usual. She could have sworn that old black truck driver was dead, and she was irritated that her accomplices had been in such a hurry to run off that they had robbed her of a complete release. Had it been up to her, she would have finished what she started and made sure the truck driver never talked again.

But she wasn't worried about cops paying her any mind as she cruised around in her white Miata at this strange hour. Part of being Unique was not looking like what she was. Part of being Unique was not looking at all like what she did. She was so certain of her invincibility that she pulled off at Fred's Mini Mart, where a police car was parked.

Unique could spot an unmarked car from a block away, and she slipped inside the store as she eyed the handsome young blond man who was paying for a quart of milk at the counter. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and she searched for any sign of a gun and detected a bulge at the small of his back.

"Thanks, Fred," the blond plainclothes cop said to the man at the cash register.

"You bet, Andy. I've missed seeing you. This whole last year, it's like you dropped off the damn planet."

"Well, I'm back," Andy said, pocketing his change. "You be careful. There's a really bad gang out there. We just had another truck driver hit."

"Yeah, no shit! Heard it on the radio. How bad did they mess him up? I guess you worked the scene."

"Nope. Off duty. I heard about it the same way you did," Andy replied with a trace of disappointment.

"Well, me-I agree with what the newspaper's saying about it being a hate crime thing," Fred said. "From what I hear, the leader's a white dude and all the victims so far are black, except for that female trucker a couple months back. But then, I think she was a minority, too, if you know what I'm saying. Not that I'm a big fan of dykes, but that was pretty horrible. Seems like I read somewhere she had a stick shoved up her and was cut… Oh!" Fred exclaimed, startled, as Unique appeared out of nowhere and set a six-pack of Michelob on the counter. "You slipped in so quiet, sugar, I didn't know there was nobody else in the store!"

Unique smiled sweetly. "I'd like a pack of Marlboros, please," she said in a small, soft voice.

She was very pretty and dressed neatly all in black, but her boots were scuffed and they sure were dirty, and she looked as if she had been caught in the rain. Andy noticed a white Miata in the parking lot when he got back in his unmarked Caprice, and he had scarcely driven off when the delicately lovely girl with the strange eyes climbed into the Miata. She followed him through downtown, all the way to the Fan District, and just as he slowed down to see if he could make out her license plate, she turned off on Strawberry Street. Andy had an odd feeling that he couldn't place, and as he returned to his small row house and fixed a bowl of cereal, he had the eerie sensation that he was being watched.

Unique knew how to stalk anybody, including a cop, and she stood across the street in the deep shadows of trees and watched Andy's shadow move from room to room eating something out of a bowl. Several times he parted the curtains and looked out at the vacant, still street. She cast her gaze in his direction and imagined the power she was having over his mind. He was feeling uneasy and sensed Something, she believed, because Unique had been around for a very long time and could trace her most recent possession back to Dachau, Germany, where she had been taken over by a male Nazi. Long before that-she had divined from tarot cards-she had been The Adversary and had eyes all over her body.

Andy parted the curtains again and by now was unsettled enough to carry his pistol everywhere he went inside his house. Maybe he was out of sorts because it really bothered him when a bad case went down, like

Moses Custer, and Andy wasn't part of the investigation. It depressed and frustrated him to hear on the news that the trucker was kicked, stomped and beaten, and left for dead, and Andy hadn't been anywhere around to see things for himself and make a difference. Or maybe he was in a dark mood simply because he had been up all night and was excited and scared about what lay ahead.

Andy Brazil had been waiting for this day for an entire year. After endless hours of bone-aching work, he was at last launching his first installment of a special series of essays that in several hours would be posted on an Internet website he called Trooper Truth. The project was both ambitious and unlikely, but he had been quite determined when he first approached his boss about it inside her formidable office at Virginia State Police headquarters.

"Just hear me out before you say no," Andy had said, shutting her door. "And you've got to swear you'll never tell anybody what I'm about to propose."

Superintendent Judy Hammer had gotten up from her desk and been silent for a moment, looking like a publicity portrait of power as she stood in front of the Virginia and United States flags, her hands in her pockets. She was fifty-five years old, a striking woman with keen eyes that could penetrate body armor or empower a crowd, and her smart business suits could not hide a figure that Andy had to resist openly staring at.

"All right." Hammer had begun her characteristic pace around her office as she considered what Andy intended to do. "My first reaction is-absolutely not. I think it would be a big mistake to interrupt your law-enforcement career so soon. And I'll remind you, Andy, you were a cop in Charlotte for only a year, then a cop here in Richmond for only a year, and you've been a state trooper for barely six months."

"And during that time I've written hundreds of crime columns for area papers," he'd reminded her. "That's my most important accomplishment, isn't it? Hasn't your major agenda been to use me to inform the public about what's going on and what the police are doing about it or, in some instances, not doing about it? The whole point has always been to enlighten people, and now I want to do that in a bigger way and to a bigger audience."

Andy's was an unusual career and always had been. He'd gone into journalism right after college and had gotten involved in law enforcement as a volunteer, riding with police and writing eyewitness pieces for the city newspaper. This had been in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Hammer had been chief at the time, and she had eventually hired him as a sworn officer who enforced the law while continuing to write crime columns and editorials. Hammer had allowed him this unprecedented opportunity because she was in an unusual position, too, having been given a grant by the National Institute of Justice that allowed her to take over troubled police departments and straighten them out. She had always seen beyond boundaries and had become Andy's mentor, faithfully bringing him with her as she moved on in her career, but as he sat in her office and watched her pace, he sensed that his plan struck her as ungrateful.

"I appreciate everything you've done for me," he had said to her. "I'm not turning my back on you and disappearing."

"This isn't about my worrying that you're going to disappear," she had replied in a way that made him feel that if he vanished for months she wouldn't miss him in the least.

"I'll make it worth your while, Superintendent Hammer," he promised her. "It's time I have more to say than just who robbed who or how many speeders were caught or what's the latest crime wave. I want to put criminal behavior into the context of human nature and history, and I believe it's important, because people are only getting worse. Can you help me get a grant or something so I can pay my bills while I do the research and write and take flying lessons-?"

"Who said anything about flying lessons?" she had interrupted him.

"The aviation unit's got instructors, and I think I could be much more useful to you if I had my helicopter pilot's license," he'd explained.

Hammer let him have his way, perhaps because she realized he was going to leave her anyway. He could launch a website as a special, classified project while he continued to work for her, she said, but the condition was that he had to remain anonymous, because Governor Bedford Crimm IV, who was an aristocratic, autocratic, impossible old man, did not allow Hammer to disseminate information to the public without his approval. Clearly, whatever Andy wrote could not be directly connected to the Virginia State Police, but at the same time had to reflect favorably on it and encourage the public to support it. She had added that Andy had to be available for emergencies, and if he wanted to learn to fly, he could work that out on his own schedule.

He pushed his luck by asking, "Will I have a travel budget?"

"For what?" Hammer asked. "Where are you going?"

"I'll need funding for archaeological and historical research."

"I thought you were writing about human nature and crime." Hammer had begun to resist him again. "Now what? You're flying helicopters and globetrotting?"

"If I discuss what's wrong with America today, I need to show what was wrong with it when it got started," he'd explained. "And you need more pilots. You've already had two quit on you in the past three months."

Andy sat at the table in the dining room, which had become his hopelessly cluttered office, and typed his password into his computer and opened a file. After twelve months of arduous research and writing, and flying lessons and ground school, he was desperate to get out and chase lawbreakers and investigate violent crimes from both the ground and the air. He was eager for people to read what he had to say, and often he fantasized about riding or flying with other troopers or working a scene and overhearing people talk about what they had read on the Trooper Truth website that day. No one would have a clue that Trooper Truth was in their midst gathering even more information from their comments. Only Hammer knew the truth about Trooper Truth, and she and Andy had been meticulously careful to protect his identity.

When, for example, he had done archaeological research and traveled as far away as England and Argentina gathering facts, he never let on that he was a journalist-cop doing research. He was simply a twenty-eight-year-old man who was doing graduate work in history, criminology, and anthropology. It was the first undercover job Andy had ever had, and it still amazed him that no one bothered to check on whether he was actually enrolled in a university graduate program or was even who he said he was.

Although Andy was not the sort to stare into the mirror and see himself the way others did, he was aware that he had many gifts in his favor. He was tall with a sculpted build, and his features were so perfectly proportioned and refined that as a boy he had been teased for being pretty. His hair was light blond, and his blue eyes changed with his thoughts and moods very much like the sky reflecting shifting clouds and light. He could look stormy or peaceful or extremely intense. His intellect was quick and facile, and his words could shine like silver and be just as hard when necessary.

It had never been difficult for Andy to get what he wanted because people, as a rule, were drawn to him or at least mindful that he was a presence they could not dismiss. He also worked hard to compensate for the emptiness of his early years. His father had been murdered when Andy was a child, leaving no one but an alcoholic mother who never acknowledged that her son was special or decent, but rather exiled him to a lonely realm of relentless preoccupations and fantasies.

Had he not grown up that way, he could not have endured the isolation that was necessary for him to explore and write what the world was about to read. But now that the moment had come, he felt as disturbed and gloomy as the morning beyond his windows. Heavy clouds hung over the city. As a vein of lightning pierced the dark dawn, it occurred to him that it would be a terrible omen if the power went out and his computer crashed. He was startled out of his preoccupations when the telephone rang.

"At least you're awake," Judy Hammer said without so much as a good morning. "I'm-

"I thought you were going to call me out in emergencies," he interrupted her. "I wish you'd let me know about the truck driver at the Farmers' Market."

"You weren't needed," she said.

"Same M.O.? Was he cut on?"

"I'm afraid so. Several cuts to his neck with what looks like a razor, but none of them lethal," she replied. "Apparently, the assailants left in a hurry, and he came to long enough to call nine-one-one. The reason I called is, I'm waiting, Trooper Truth," Hammer let him know. "I thought you said your website was going up at six-thirty. That was five minutes ago."

It was her way of telling him good luck.

The rich early history of the U.S.A. is based largely on eyewitness observations described in letters, true adventures, testimonies, maps, and books published in the early seventeenth century. Most of those original accounts have been lost forever or are silently maintained in private collections. Other historical documentation, sadly, was stored in Richmond and burned up during the Civil War so Northerners could rewrite the facts and convince schoolchildren the world over that our country really got its start in Plymouth, which is simply a lie.

That lie and others should come as no surprise. So much of what we know as "fact" in life is, in truth, nothing more than propaganda or a well-meant reflection on how events and people are perceived by those with a bias and poor vision. Tales pass from lips to lips, from news story to news story, from e-mail to e-mail, from politicians to us, from witnesses to jurors, and eventually we are led to believe all manner of things that are grossly distorted if not patently false. This is why, as I begin to have these conversations with you, the reader, I will rely on my own primary research and experiences, and focus on science and medicine, which have neither imaginations nor personalities nor politics nor grudges.

DNA, for example, frankly doesn't care if you did it. DNA doesn't care if you didn't do it. DNA knows exactly who you, your parents, and your children are, but has no opinion about it and no interest in being a friend or getting your votes. DNA knows it was you who left seminal fluid in someone, but is neither judgmental nor voyeuristic about how or why that deposit might have occurred. So I am far more inclined to trust DNA than the defendant on the witness stand, and it is a shame that DNA is too busy working crimes and pedigree disputes to reconstruct the history of the United States. If DNA had the time, I suspect we would find that most of what we presently believe about the past is tainted, perhaps shockingly so.

Since DNA isn't available to serve as our narrator in this series of essays, I will do the best I can to tell you what I have discovered about the beginning of English America, in hopes that it will serve as a metaphor for who we are and what has become of our society. The story begins with a small but significant turn of events on the docks of London, December 20, 1606, when thirty-six mariners and one hundred and eight settlers said painful goodbyes and no doubt comforted themselves in alehouses on the Isle of Dogges, as it was spelled on a 1610 map of London.

The settlers and the mariners who would pilot the ships to Virginia descended the Blackwall stairs to the docks, where these brave adventurers, who wanted more in life, including gold and silver, boarded the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and began their historic voyage to the New World by being stalled in the mouth of the Thames for six weeks. Records cite the reason for the delay as either no wind or wind that blew in the wrong direction.

If any of the stranded settlers looked back toward the alehouses and experienced a change of heart, we know nothing about it, but the math indicates that no one jumped ship. During the voyage, one settler died in the Caribbean, possibly from heatstroke, and on May 14, 1607, when the three ships finally tied up at Jamestown Island on the north shore of the James River in Virginia, one hundred and seven settlers disembarked. Soon after, three settlers were killed by Indians, and in July, the ships sailed back to England for supplies, leaving one hundred and four settlers to fend for themselves.

Their number dwindled quickly and dramatically as the mariners and Captain Newport made the endless voyage back to England. There, I suspect, the men restored themselves and made plans in Isle of Dogs alehouses and at the Sir Walter Raleigh House while the settlers waited for supplies and tried to develop peaceful relations with the Indians-or Naturals, as the settlers called the Native Americans-by giving them bits of copper and trading other trinkets for tobacco and food.

No one thus far has been able to give me a definitive explanation for why the settlers and the Naturals had such an inconsistent relationship, but I suspect the answer lies in human nature, which inspires people to overpower others and to be touchy, bigoted, selfish, greedy, deceitful, and to beat up innocent people and steal trucks. Nor could anybody tell me why the Isle of Dogs was named such, and I can only speculate the obvious:

The name may refer to sea dogs, since it is known that many Elizabethan sailors and pirates patronized the alehouses while resting from where they had been or waiting to sail out to wherever they were going.

I will go into great detail about pirates soon enough, for they certainly were a powerful presence when America was trying to get started, and we still have a problem with them today on our highways and high seas, although the pirates' mode of transportation, equipment, and weapons have dramatically evolved over the centuries. It is unfortunate, I'm sorry to tell you, that modern pirates have the same personality and modus operandi as pirates of old. They remain cruel-hearted cutthroats whose creed is dead men tell no tales, thus justifying their seizing of ships and tractor trailers and murdering everyone in sight. Lest Virginians assume their history is untouched by such despicable character disorders, let me remind you that the Chesapeake Bay once bristled with pirates, and Virginia's Tangier Island openly traded with and hosted them and, as legend has it, was visited by Blackbeard himself.

As I begin sharing truths with you, the reader, I hope you will reflect upon your own life and try very hard to put at least one other person's needs and feelings before your own this day. Just as objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, so The Past rides our bumper along life's highways and may, in fact, be inside the car with us. Who we are is who we were and the more things change, the less they do, unless we start with our hearts.

Be careful out there!