Isle of Dogs (16 page)

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.”

A S
HORT
D
IGRESSION

by Trooper Truth

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 thar.” 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 Blackbeard 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 Blackbeard 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 Blackbeard, 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 nei-ther 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.

P.S. 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!

 The minute Windy Brees blew into Hammer’s office, Hammer knew there was trouble.

“Heavens to Betty! Have you seen what Trooper Truth just put up on his website?” Windy declared.

“Yes,” Hammer replied. “I saw what was up this morning.”

“No! He’s put up something else, and you won’t believe what it says!”

“Put up something else?” Hammer was baffled, yet she was not about to let on that she had prior knowledge about Trooper Truth or his publication schedule. “That’s interesting,” she said. “I suppose I just assumed he posted only one essay a day.”

“Well, not so,” Windy said. “Whoever he is, he is one proliferated writer. I wonder what he looks like and how old he is. He must be old to know so much. All that history and everything . . .”

“What makes you think Trooper Truth is a man?” Hammer inquired as she logged on to the website.

“Well, he’s so smart, for one thing.”

When Hammer began reading the essay, she ordered Windy to leave her office and shut the door. She got Andy on the phone.

“That’s it!?” she said in an outraged whisper.

“A common Tangier expression,” Andy remarked.
“That’s it!
means the person saying it is really saying
none of your business.
For example, if I ask you if you’re mad at me for not telling you about my secret mission, or will you be mad if I tell you that something awful was left at my house last night, and you say
That’s it!
, you mean . . .”

“Meet me at . . . !” she interrupted him as she groped for a location.

There was really no place in Richmond either one of them could go without being noticed, especially if they were together.

“Meet me in the Ukrop’s parking lot in fifteen minutes!” she decided angrily.

“Which Ukrop’s?” Andy asked over the line. “And I can explain everything.”

“Not over the phone, you’re not. The Ukrop’s at Stony-point. We’ll talk in the car.”

M
AJOR
Trader had just read the essay, too, and he huffed and puffed as he hurried his considerable bulk into Governor Crimm’s office.

“Governor!” Trader exclaimed as he burst in without knocking. “Trooper Truth has been to Tangier and claims some island boy named Fonny Boy is the one holding the dentist hostage! He’s a journalist who wears a disguise!”

“What?” the governor inquired weakly as he emerged from his private bathroom and straightened his plaid vest, making sure the railroad watch that had been passed down for generations was safely tucked back into the watch pocket. “The island boy’s a journalist? What island boy? And what in thunder are you talking about, and you know not to just walk in on me.”

“Fonny Boy’s his name. Some island boy named Fonny Boy, and we’ve got a description,” Trader excitedly said. “And no. Trooper Truth disguised himself as a journalist, not Fonny Boy.”

“He’s disguising himself not as Fonny Boy but as a journalist?” Crimm fished his office magnifying glass out of a landfill of papers. “You’re supposed to be a bloody press secretary
and you butcher the King’s English, simply butcher it. Constantly and consistently. And for God’s sake, don’t you ever take your suits to the dry cleaners? Doesn’t your wife complain?” The governor cast an enlarged eye over Trader’s slovenly bulk. “You have chili on your shirt and your tie’s too short. You look like Big Daddy after he’s been on a goddamn bender, and I’m thinking very seriously about firing you one of these days.”

“Please, Governor!” Trader cried out. “Don’t kill the messenger. I’m not the one leaking all this classified and embarrassing information onto the Internet!”

“I certainly know that.” The governor weakly seated himself behind his desk and motioned for Trader to take a chair and lower his voice. “Whoever Trooper Truth is, he’s at least a writer.”

“Now, I take that very personally,” Trader said. “That was naughty, naughty to insult me that way. I think you should apologize for wounding my creative sensibilities.”

“The only thing creative about you is your rendition of the truth,” the governor retorted. “And if I weren’t so preoccupied with important matters, including my health, I would catch you in your lies more often and do something about it.”

“How
is
your health?” Trader sweetly asked.

“Did you bring me this latest essay?”

Trader unfolded the printout and smoothed it open on the ink blotter. The governor was silent for many long minutes as he moved his magnifying glass over Trooper Truth’s words and grunted now and then and made other inarticulate sounds of disapproval, surprise, and constitutional discomfort.

“There’s only one thing to do,” he decided in his most sovereign tone. “We’re going to have to find a special operative who will finger this Trooper Truth scoundrel and bring him to justice.”

“Bring him to justice for what, Governor? I don’t believe he’s committed a crime.”

“Why, I believe he might just be guilty of treason, don’t you? Isn’t he sticking his nose in state business and referring to my policies as being idiotic? Furthermore, I don’t appreciate this tireless obsession with pirates, when we’ve been working so hard to play down that problem. Now
Blackbeard’s even dragged into the fray and is on everybody’s mind.”

“I know, I know.” Trader couldn’t have agreed with him more as he gleefully thought of his Captain Bonny website. “We certainly don’t want the public thinking that Blackbeard was welcome in Virginia or was ever even in Virginia, not even once. What we need to do is emphasize that Blackbeard and North Carolina were as thick as thieves, and it was our own Governor Spottswood who . . .”

“You know how I feel about Spottswood!” the governor blurted out as his submarine went on alert. “I don’t want him getting any more credit than he already has, do you hear me? I have to live with his alleged descendants, and I’m sick and tired of being invited to their plantation pig roasts and shad roe plankings and hearing endless apocryphal stories about Governor Spottswood, who was probably a blowhard with gout and the clap.” The governor pulled out his railroad watch again. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you drop by the mansion for supper and we’ll discuss this further and come up with a plan?”

A
NDY
already had a plan, but he feared Hammer was too riled up to listen, as he watched her storm out of her car and stride through the Ukrop’s parking lot in his direction.

“Unplug the website immediately,” she said as she yanked open the door of his unmarked Caprice. “That’s it! You’re totally out of control. Am I to believe you’ve been doing undercover work on Tangier Island and you never bothered to let me know? And what awful thing turned up at your house last night?”

“I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about my secret mission. But I was afraid you’d try to stop me,” he replied calmly. “And you can’t unplug a website. I could close it down, but you don’t want me to do that, trust me. There’s too much at stake.”

“The only thing at stake right now, it seems to me, is my career and good name and the life of a dentist,” she retorted.

“A scoundrel of a dentist. You should see the chart I looked at! And what about Popeye?” Andy asked.

Hammer’s grief resurfaced and silenced her.

“I believe there was a lot of premeditation involved in her dognapping, and therefore it is most likely the work of someone who has something personal against you,” Andy told her.

“That could be half the universe,” she dismally replied.

“This isn’t about money, not directly,” he said. “If it was about a ransom, you would have been contacted long before now. I think someone has something pretty nefarious up his sleeve. And I’ve been getting some clues because of Trooper Truth—e-mails that are suspicious. I believe if I continue posting my essays and following every lead I can, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and a lot of other things. And I swear to God, if Popeye is alive, I’m going to find her for you.”

“I refuse to get my hopes up,” she stoically said. “Do you really think she’s still alive?”

“It’s just an instinct. But yes. For one thing, Boston terriers are not a hot item for dog thieves. They have bat ears, bulging eyes that look at the walls, and their little nub of a corkscrew tail doesn’t cover anything important, if you know what I mean. Not to mention their flat faces, their tendency to get bald in spots, and their intelligence, which far surpasses that of most of their owners—not including you, of course. I would assume the dogs of choice for thieves are Labs, miniature collies, cocker spaniels, and maybe dachshunds.”

“Then Popeye may have been stolen as part of some bigger scheme that we don’t know about yet,” Hammer deduced.

“Exactly.” Andy nodded as their conversation steamed up the glass.

“That was very risky and probably foolish and reckless for you to pretend to be a journalist and go to Tangier Island,” Hammer then said.

“Look,” he replied, “based on an e-mail tip to Trooper Truth, I knew even before I went there to paint the speed trap that the state police was being set up for a political fall to take attention away from the governor, who is increasingly viewed as a blundering potentate because of that asshole Major Trader. It’s just a crime that nasty slob of a press secretary manipulates him so blatantly, but the poor old man can’t see it because he can’t see anything, period. You wouldn’t believe
some of the stories I’ve heard when I’ve been poking around this past year.”

“Such as?” Hammer was getting interested.

“It seems, for example, that every time Trader brings Crimm cookies or candy, the governor soon after gets a gastrointestinal attack that completely debilitates him. And let me add, the goodies are always chocolate or have chocolate in them.”

“No. You don’t think . . . ?”

“I most certainly do, and I intend to prove it just as soon as the labs complete testing on the chocolates the governor supposedly sent you and what’s left of a fudge cake Trader had sent over to Ruth’s Chris.”

“You sent those to the lab?” She was shocked.

“Of course I did. I’d heard the rumors and the governor never even calls you, so why would he send you chocolates through
guess who
? I think that bastard, no-good Trader is lacing the governor’s goodies with Ex-Lax and has been doing it for years. What better way to confuse and manipulate someone than to have that person doubled over with cramps and embarrassment whenever it’s time to make key decisions, which, in the case of the governor, is daily?”

“That’s criminal!” Hammer said in disgust as she vaguely recalled being interviewed for the superintendent’s position, and Trader’s offering her a silver bowl of chocolate-covered peanuts, which she refused because she didn’t eat sweets or anything else fattening.

“Oh, there’s more,” Andy ominously said. “I’ve been doing some pretty thorough checking on Trader. For starters, his mother’s maiden name was Bonny.”

“I don’t see the significance.”

“You’re about to.” Andy met her eyes as the sun began to go down and shoppers hurried to and from their cars, oblivious to the very important conversation that was taking place in their midst. “The Bonnys are originally from Tangier Island. Trader’s mother married a waterman named Trader and Major Trader was born on the island on August the eleventh in 1951. He was delivered by a midwife, who apparently had a very difficult time with the birth because he came out feet first,
which sort of seems appropriate since he inverts the truth and upends everything moral and decent.”

“So you’re suggesting that initiating VASCAR on Tangier Island was a deliberate set-up on Trader’s part,” Hammer supposed.

“Oh, yes. And one thing is certain, Trader knows the Islanders, all right, and probably still knows people on that island. Yet he’s made no effort whatsoever to intervene for at least one very good reason.”

“Which is?”

“The Bonny family is descended from pirates,” Andy replied. “And I’m afraid I have more bad news,” he added, and then he told her about the trash bag and envelope left at his house last night.

Hammer listened to the entire story without interrupting once, which was most unusual for her. But she was clearly shocked and concerned.

“According to some of the e-mail tips Trooper Truth’s been getting,” Andy went on, “Trish Thrash went by the initials T.T., and of late people had been teasing her about being Trooper Truth. Because of the initials, I’m saying. And she was getting a big kick out of it and often commented that she wished she was Trooper Truth because she wanted to be a journalist but ended up a data entry clerk for the state.”