Isle of Dogs

Fourteen

Governor Crimm had been studying the latest Trooper Truth printout for an entire hour, and was fascinated, appalled, and disgusted by it. He repeatedly moved his magnifying glass over every word as Major Trader briefed him on matters of state and offered him a homemade chocolate-covered cherry.

"General Assembly will start up before we know it," Trader was saying. "And we're simply not prepared."

"You always say that," the governor replied as he absently ate the candy. "Who did shoot J.R., anyway? Has anybody pressed the archaeologists about this? And if not, why not? How do you think it makes us look if we can't solve a crime that was committed four hundred years ago and was certainly witnessed? I want you to call Jamestown and demand that the J.R. case be solved immediately, and we'll issue a big press release and show the citizens of Virginia that I will not tolerate crime."

"Juvenile crime," Trader added a helpful spin.

"Yes, yes," the governor agreed.

'And I think we can safely suggest he was shot by a pirate-or it might be in our best interest to claim as much, at any rate," Trader added. "We could say it was any pirate-doesn't matter, don't you see? All pirates were bad then and are bad now, so it doesn't make any difference whatsoever if we propose that J.R. wandered outside the fort to get a bucket of water from the river, and all of a sudden he spied a Spanish ship flying a Jolly Roger flag, and next thing he was shot."

"I thought we were avoiding drawing attention to our pirate problems."

"Highway pirates are another matter," Trader replied as he gloated over his secret pirate activities that would soon enough make him rich from booty.

Crimm stopped the magnifying glass on the word cannibal. "Imagine some settler salting down his dead wife and eating her," he said in revulsion as he envisioned himself dying of starvation, only to discover his voluptuous wife had passed away.

He thought of her nude, fleshy body and wondered how anybody could eat his wife without at least cooking her first, but he supposed if he cooked Maude, the other settlers would see the smoke and smell the odor of roasting human flesh and would hang him from a tree. Oh, what a hideous scenario, and the governor's submarine lurched and banged into something, sending a painful jolt through his hollow organs.

"That was a capital crime back then," Trader observed as if he were reading Crimm's mind. "The tour guides at Jamestown will tell you that anyone caught eating his wife or anybody else was immediately dragged off and hanged. Then they'd bury him very quickly and in a secret location so another settler didn't salt and eat him, too."

"I'm wondering if cannibalism is still a capital crime, because if it isn't, it ought to be." Crimm's submarine lurched more violently.

"It depends on the circumstances," Trader replied as he imagined his plump, nagging wife and wondered if he could ever be famished enough to consider, even for a moment, eating her, assuming she died unexpectedly and nobody else noticed that she had vanished. "For example, according to state code, there would have to be another serious crime involved," Trader explained. "If the man murdered her first and perhaps included a rape or robbery and then ate her-now that would be a capital offense and he would get lethal injection, unless you blocked the execution or granted clemency."

"I never block executions or grant clemency," the governor impatiently replied as his lens strayed over the printed essay and another shockwave rolled through him. "In fact, I want you to send out a press release and announce that anyone who engages in cannibalism will pay the supreme price, assuming those other crimes are included. I don't believe we've ever addressed cannibalism, and it's high time we did. Indeed, let's draft a bill and put it before this next General Assembly."

Trader was making notes with a pencil, which was his habit because he often found the need to erase whatever he had written.

"Maybe we should say that J.R. was caught in the act of cannibalism and was executed by a firing squad. How about that?" The governor peered up and gave Trader a magnified rheumy eye that was cloudy and bloodshot and getting glassy.

"It's not my understanding that shooting someone in the leg was a preferred form of execution," Trader pointed out. "I don't think the citizens would buy it."

"Of course they would. Everybody knows that guns back then were very unreliable. Now, let's talk about something else."

"Yes, on to other matters," Trader said, flipping a page in his notepad. "What do you want to do about this dentist who's being held hostage on Tangier Island? I'm sure you saw the newspaper this morning or heard the news, or did you?"

"Not yet." The governor groaned and clutched his bloated gut.

"Well, apparently the Reedville police talked to a reporter, and unfortunately, the word is out that this dentist's life could be in danger because the Tangierians are upset about VASCAR. I recommend we suspend our VASCAR initiatives immediately until the matter is peacefully resolved. I can tell you that I, for one, warned Superintendent Hammer about the consequences should the state police start painting speed traps. But of course, she didn't listen, as usual."

"It was her idea?" The governor was confused and lightheaded.

"Of course it was her idea, Governor. Don't you remember when you and I discussed it the other day, I told you this was her latest act of poor judgment and you said, 'Well, good. Then if it causes a stink, make sure she gets the blame and not me.' So I said, 'Good enough, that's what will happen.' "

"Did she ever find her dog?" the governor inquired as he cleaned his magnifying glass with a special cloth and prayed his latest submarine attack would subside.

"It's theorized that one of her political enemies stole it," Trader gravely replied.

"What a shame she has so many people who strongly dislike her," Crimm said as he sat very still and the color drained from his face. "I had no idea when I appointed her that she would become such a hot potato. Why don't you ring her up and she and I will have a little chat? But not right now."

"I strongly recommend against that, Governor-not now or later," Trader was quick to suggest. "You don't want to be tarred with the same brush. She's a political embarrassment, and the more you distance yourself from her, the better."

"Well, I do feel bad about her little dog. I hope she got my sympathy note."

"I made sure she did," Trader lied as he thought of that note and numerous other communications to her that he had intercepted or blocked.

"You know, if something happened to Frisky," the governor wistfully went on with a gasp, "I'd never be the same, nor would Maude or the girls. What a dear, loyal friend Frisky is, and thank the good Lord I have EPU to make sure nobody nabs him for ransom money or to get back at me for some decision that is unpopular."

"Your decisions are never unpopular," Trader said emphatically. "At least not the ones that are your fault."

"Well, I'm sure I'll be blamed for the recent hate crime," Crimm supposed as his submarine plunged into foul waters.

"I strongly advise that we indicate that the Thrash murder is connected to Moses Custer's case, and therefore it's Hammer's fault that neither of the cases has been solved," Trader suggested with confidence and delight. "Maybe we can figure out a tie-in with J.R. being murdered by a pirate, while we're at it, and plant the notion in the public's mind that Hammer is to blame for that case being unsolved, as well."

The governor shot up from his chair and almost fell over as his submarine slammed precariously into submerged objects.

"Leave!" he ordered Trader, lurching and gasping. "I can't think about pirates right now!"

Possum could and was. He had been thinking about pirates ever since reading Trooper Truth early this morning. Possum was watching TV and pondering a very obvious failing on the road dogs' part that he excitedly believed he could use to manipulate Smoke and hopefully save Popeye.

Every self-respecting pirate from centuries past understood the necessity of flying flags from their masts to communicate with those they preyed upon. Raising the skull and crossbones, popularly known as the Jolly Roger, informed the soon-to-be-plundered ship that it had better surrender or else. If the ship ignored the fluttering black-and-white grinning death's head, this was followed by a red flag indicating the or else was imminent. If the ship continued to sail about its business, then cannon fire and other violence followed.

Modern pirates seemed to have forgotten the courtesy of flags. These days, when a crew of pirates roar up in a speedboat to overtake a ship or yacht, there is no warning whatsoever before mortars and machine guns open fire. Pirates have become a very cruel, bloody, shameful species of seafaring outlaws who don't believe in giving anyone a chance and are mostly interested in canned goods, electronics, carpets, designer clothes, tobacco, and more to the point, the drugs that hopefully are being smuggled aboard the hijacked vessel. If drugs are part of the booty, the victimized sailors who survive do not report the incident to the authorities.

Highway pirates should return to the courtesy of flags, Possum thought as he perched on his bed with the lamp off inside his tiny RV room that would have looked out over scraggly pine trees in back of the vacant lot if he didn't keep the curtains tightly taped shut. He never missed a rerun of Bonanza and constantly fantasized that he had a father like Ben Cartwright and brothers like Little Joe and Hoss. He imagined riding a fine horse through the burning map of the Ponderosa while that stirring theme of strumming guitars and drums galloped through his head.

"Dun daw daw dun daw daw dun daw daw dun daw daw DAW…!"

Just yesterday afternoon he had watched his favorite rerun-the one in which Little Joe's girl gets kidnapped by a carnival and is tied up in the fat lady's closet, several dressing rooms down from the Beautiful Girls of Egypt and the bearded lady. Little Joe convinces Hercules to help him, and they beat up the bad guys, knock the knife out of one bad guy's hand before he stabs the fat lady, and then Little Joe's girl kisses him at the end. Oh, how Possum loved to watch Little Joe swaggering off with his cowboy hat pulled low and that big gunbelt with its ivory-handled six-shooter slung from his hips.

Oh, what Possum wouldn't give to walk out of his cheap, sour-smelling room and find Ben, Little Joe, and Hoss waiting for him instead of Smoke, the other road dogs, and that bizarre girl Unique, when she happened by the RV, which was increasingly less often. Sometimes a tear slid down Possum's face, and he had to glaze himself over when it was time to turn off the TV and emerge from the kinder world he lived in during the day while the other dogs slept off hangovers and late nights of meanness. Possum had never hurt anybody before Smoke stole him away from the ATM machine, and now look at the mess Possum was in.

He had shot that poor truck driver who was minding his own business in his truck, waiting to sell a load of pumpkins when the Farmers' Market opened in the morning. Possum was afraid to sleep ever again, so sure he was that he would have nightmares about what he had done to Moses Custer and all those pumpkins they hauled over to the Deep Water Terminal and dumped into the James River.

For days, the news had run stories about thousands of pumpkins floating along and getting hung up on rocks. Of course, it didn't take the Richmond police long to put two and two together and deduce that the floating pumpkins might be connected to the ones that had filled the stolen Peterbilt. Possum sure hoped Mr. Custer didn't die or end up a cripple. Possum also dimly realized that the reason Smoke had made him the trigger man was so that Possum could never leave the road dogs without going to jail or maybe even death row. He wished he could send Trooper Truth an e-mail and beg the trooper to save him and Popeye, but what if Trooper Truth turned him in to the police? Popeye might end up in the pound and Possum for sure would end up in juvenile detention with people just as bad as Smoke.

It was dark and quiet as Possum sat on his bed petting Popeye and thinking about a way to convince Smoke to fly a flag from the RV and the Land Cruiser. Why wouldn't Smoke go along with it as long as Possum could figure out how to make him think the flag somehow was his own idea and a good one? The Jolly Roger might be too obvious, Possum considered in the dark, and Smoke probably wouldn't know what it was. Possum went over to the computer, intending to check Captain Bonny's website to see if the pirate had his own colors, and if so, what were they and how did he display them?

But Possum was distracted when he clicked on FAVORITES and accidentally pulled up Trooper Truth instead of Captain Bonny. Possum was surprised to see that Trooper Truth had posted yet another essay.

"Now what do you think of that?" Possum excitedly whispered to Popeye, who was snoring on the bed. "Two in the same morning! Man, that Trooper Truth's up to something."

The people of Tangier Island are a secretive, sensitive people who know little about the facts of their origin because, unsurprisingly, when one begins to spin legends and pass down misinformation, he eventually forgets what really happened and believes his own distortions.

Throughout the centuries, the people of Tangier hid the truth of their pirate past, preferring to believe their own legends. One afternoon while disguised as a reporter, I visited the island and talked to a local woman who had dropped by Spanky's because things were slow at the gift shop.

"I guess you get fed up with all these tourists invading your island," I commented to the woman, whose name was and perhaps still is Thelma Parks.

"I don't suffer them poorly when they leave us be," she replied, eyeing me with suspicion.

"And I assume they don't."

"Nah, they don't. The other day, they was in my shop with the video camera and they was videoing me and I wanted none of it."

"Did you tell them not to videotape you?" I inquired, taking notes.

"Nah."

Thelma went on to tell me that she now charges a quarter for all photo opportunities while she works the cash register, and the added income makes it somewhat easier for her to tolerate the host of strangers who seem to find her Tangier gift shop exotic and unlike anything they've ever seen, which is inexplicable, she confided. None of the trinkets, such as the plastic lighthouses, crabs, crab pots, lobsters, fish, skiffs, and so on, are made by hand or in America. In fact, she added, lobsters are not common in the Chesapeake Bay and most islanders have never seen one except on TV or in seafood restaurant ads that regularly run in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

From Spanky's, I continued my wanderings and happened by the medical clinic. I stepped inside and found no sign of a dentist, doctor, or nurse-only a lanky young man with blue eyes and a mop of blond hair. He was sitting in the dentist's chair, staring off, lost in reveries and completely unaware of my presence. I assumed he was a patient and the dentist would return momentarily, not realizing that the dentist was, in truth, being held hostage, since neither his abduction nor the threat of civil war had been made public at that time.

"Hello?" I politely announced.

The boy's eyes were glazed and he was unresponsive.

"Are you there?" I asked.

He wasn't.

"I'm wondering if I might find any medical staff who have a minute to talk to me," I said. "I'm working on a history of our nation's beginning and present condition and believe Tangier Island is key."

"The key is in my pocket." He suddenly blinked to and protectively covered his pocket with a hand. When he didn't recognize me, he was startled and jumped up from the chair. "What for are you doing here? I thought I locked the door!" He ran to the door and threw the bolt across.

I heard muffled sounds coming from a back area and the scrape of a chair moving across the floor.

"The dog's back than" The young man indicated the area the sound was coming from.

"Why is he making a chair scrape?" I puzzled. "He tied up to it or something?"

"Yass."

The chair scraped some more.

"It must be stuffy and lonely being tied up in there," I worried, not at all pleased by the idea of a dog tied to a chair inside a clinic. "Why don't we let him out so he can get a little air and attention?"

"That's it!" The young man blocked the doorway leading to the area in question as the chair scraped again. "He bites. That's what for he's tied up. He's the dentist's dog."

"Where's the dentist?"

"Tied up, too."

"Oh, he's busy. Well, maybe I can talk to him another time," I replied. "And what about your- teeth? I see you have braces and it appears you've had several extractions as well. And I'm noticing that your rubber bands keep flying off when you talk."

"That's it!" Fonny Boy covered his mouth with a hand and looked embarrassed. "The dentist, he better mind his step!"

"While we're chatting," I said, edging closer to the table, where a dental chart was out in plain view, "would you mind if I flipped through this chart and see what all you've had done? I assume this is your chart? Is your name Darren Shores?"

"Ever one on Tanger calls me Fonny Boy."

Fonny Boy and I fell into a conversation and he was very well versed in the lore of the island because of his fascination with the history of shipping, especially in the bay. As we got to know each other better and a level of vague trust developed, Fonny Boy got more specific and began to talk about pirates, or picaroons, as he called them. They used to be everywhere, he told me. At one time, there were so many pirate ships off the shores of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas that cities like Charleston were paralyzed. No one dared set sail out of the harbor for fear they would be seized by pirates who thought nothing of killing people in very unpleasant ways.

Fonny Boy went into elaborate detail about Black-beard in particular, whose Christian name was Edward Drummon when he was an honest seaman in his home port of Bristol, England, in the late seventeenth century. When he decided to become a pirate, he changed his name to Edward Teach, which has frequently been misspelled in records as Thatch, Tache, and Tatch. After Queen Anne's War, Blackbeard sailed into Jamaica to go after French ships and began to cultivate the most vile, terrifying persona imaginable to entice other vessels to surrender without a second thought, assuming the warning flags weren't enough. He would braid his long beard into little pigtails and set them on fire with slow-burning matches, Fonny Boy said, and strap pistols, daggers, and a huge cutlass to his waist, and wear additional weapons on the bandoleer across his chest.

Soon enough, Blackbeard and his flotilla began to haunt the North Carolina coast and the Chesapeake Bay. The people of Tangier would hoist the Jolly Roger whenever Blackbeard's ship was spotted nearby, and from time to time the ruthless, evil pirate himself would visit the island and drink Jamaican rum and carouse to his dark heart's content. Nobody wanted him on the island or slept much while he was visiting. Women and children hid inside their homes, and Blackbeard began to suppose that Tangier was an island of men only. This made his visits progressively shorter and less frequent. According to Fonny Boy and almost-nonexistent historical records, Blackbeard was most curious as to how an all-male island had survived down through the decades and could continue.

The answer Blackbeard got was lost forever until a three-hundred-year-old account book was discovered. This extraordinary find, according to legend, somehow made it from Blackbeard's ship Adventure into the attic of a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the governor of Virginia during Blackbeard's bloody rampages. The account book focused on the disposition of the loot Black-beard took and offered details of his sadistic cruelty and lust for chopping people into pieces and shaking his empty rum cup at the heavens and daring God to defy him. Blackbeard's handwritten entries mentioned one hundred and forty barrels of cocoa and a cask of sugar he had stolen and buried under hay in a North Carolina barn. There was a cryptic reference to buried treasure that only Blackbeard and the devil knew the location of, and to this day it has not been found.

I realized it wasn't possible that Tangier could have remained populated without women and pressed Fonny Boy for the explanation Blackbeard was given. Fonny Boy repeated what had been passed down through the generations.

"Damnation seize your soul if you are lying to me!" Blackbeard thundered to a clever but untruthful islander named Job Wheeler, a childless widower who, as the story goes, invited the pirate into his home on an area of the island known today as Job's Cove.

"I cannot spare the truth from you," Job told Black-beard, who was drinking cup after cup of rum and setting his beard on fire. "Although we had our beginnings in England long ago, we landed on this island by way of North Carolina."

Job offered this blatant lie because he felt certain it would snag Blackbeard's attention, since it was well known that the pirate was in collusion with Charles Eden, the governor of North Carolina. For much of Blackbeard's nefarious career, he had navigated the shallow sounds and inlets of North Carolina with never a fear. Indeed, any plot hatched from other territories to defeat Blackbeard and his seadogs was always foiled by a letter from someone in North Carolina, much to the disgust of Virginia's Governor Spottswood, who was neither friendly with Blackbeard nor inclined for the pirate to remain in business or alive.

"How can this be?" Blackbeard bellowed through curls of smoke, squinting one eye in a threatening manner that suggested Job best be telling "they God's truth or I will cut ye asunder into many pieces and send ye back from whence ye came, which is hell, ye villain!"

"I am neither villain," Job promised. "From whence I came is North Carolina-not Hell-where ye have many friends and relations. Yet it cannot be known that we on this fair island originally came from North Carolina and managed to escape with our very lives because there was a terrible drought that withered our crops and parched our very tongues and we were short of supplies, so we crowded into bateaus and made our way here, leaving no word except Crotoan carved into a fence post and Cro carved into a tree to give rise to the expectation that we had gone off to live with the Crotans."

Blackbeard reminded Job that the name of the Crotan Indians was spelled C-R-O-T-A-N as opposed to C-R-O-T-O-A-N, to which Job replied, "Yay, that is God's truth. But it was not I who carved the tree, but another not as well learned as I."

"Are you implying," I probed Fonny Boy, "that the Islanders descended from the Lost Colonists who vanished after Sir Walter Raleigh dropped them off on Roanoke Island? Well," I was talking to myself now, "it is a fact that when Walter Raleigh set out for the New World on May 8, 1587, his plan was to find a location on the Chesapeake Bay, but he was forced by hurricanes to settle farther south on Roanoke Island. So the Lost Colonists never wanted to be in North Carolina to begin with. I guess if you're going to relocate, you would certainly consider your original destination, and Tangier was described as a nice island, with the exception of there being no drinkable water.

"However," I decided, "the chronology makes what Job told Blackbeard impossible, because the Lost Colonists were already lost by the time Smith headed to Virginia and supposedly discovered your island in 1608. So I am forced to dismiss this theory entirely. Furthermore, we can't prove, at least not to my satisfaction, that when Smith landed on Tangier, he wasn't really on Limbo Island, and all of you are therefore not Islanders but Limbonians."

Fonny Boy had the vacant look again as he slouched in the dentist's chair, unfocused and twitching a little. The chair scraped again from somewhere in the back of the clinic and then banged loudly as it crashed to the floor, apparently overturned by the dentist's tethered dog, who may have been dreaming, too, or so I assumed at the time.

"Well, I've got to run along," I told Fonny Boy. "I'll see what else I can find out about your people and why only Job Wheeler and Blackbeard knew the truth or the lies about Tangier's past. And also why, after Job died and Blackbeard eventually met his much-deserved violent end, those secrets and others remained hidden in the account book in the Spottswoods' attic."

Fonny Boy's Rapid Eye Movement was picking up speed as he stared off in a trance, gripping the armrests of the dentist's chair as if he were watching an intense adventure movie. It was pointless to communicate with him further, and I left the clinic. I waved down a golf-cart taxi and headed back to the airstrip as theories and speculations clashed in my head and made little sense because I am neither a historian nor a historical novelist, although I do know people who are. As I set off for home in the helicopter, staying below 3,500 feet to avoid restricted area R 4006, then heading due south to avoid restricted area R 6609, I realized it was only fair and responsible for me to continue my arduous historical investigation on how this country started and what has happened to it since.

"Watch out for that bird over there." My copilot pointed out a seagull that apparently didn't see us until the last second.

"Wow, that was close," I commented as the bird dove under us, clipping its tail on a skid. "I hope he's all right." I nosed the helicopter west a few degrees to get a glimpse of the seagull as it sailed away, appearing to fly backward because we, of course, were going considerably faster than it.

PS. To whoever is holding Popeye hostage, contact me before it's too late! And many thanks for the tips you, my faithful readers, have been sending me about Trish Thrash.

Be careful out there!