Isle of Dogs (39 page)

 Possum didn’t notice the essay when it was first posted on the website because Smoke and the road dogs had returned to the RV not even an hour before, and dread had seized Possum by the back of the neck.

“I just wish you was here with me,” Possum was praying to Hoss. “I know I ain’t always done the right thing, but I’m trying to now. You be sure you tell Little Joe, Mr. Cartwright—and maybe Adam, if he ain’t left the show yet. Okay? If you hear me, Hoss, please round up a posse and meet me at the race. I’m real scared—the most scared I ever been in my life. I don’t know, but I got a bad feeling something ain’t gonna happen the way Trooper Truth thinks it will.

“And I can’t stand giving up Popeye. She’s the only thing warm and alive I can trust, Hoss. Think how you’d like it if you had to give away your horse or was worried a bunch of outlaws was going to ambush you when you wasn’t expecting it and shoot your horse! I know Popeye don’t belong to me and it ain’t fair for her to be locked up in this RV. I know I gotta do the right thing. But I need some help, Hoss.”

“Now listen up, little buddy,” Hoss said as he sat high on his beloved horse. “Outlaws are outlaws, whether they’re horse thieves or truck thieves, and you
do
gotta do the right
thing. Me and Pa and Little Joe ain’t sore at you, and you gotta believe that. We’re mighty sore at Smoke and his pack of gun-toting outlaws, though. Each and every one of them ought to be hung from a long rope. Now you do exactly what Trooper Truth told you, and don’t be scared ’cause we’re pulling for ya.”

Hoss faded from Possum’s mind and Possum dried his tears on the Jolly Goodwrench flag and sat up, noticing the Trooper Truth website glowing on the computer screen. He went over to his crate and clicked on the newest essay and read it with great interest, not certain but guessing what Trooper Truth had in mind. Taking a deep breath and telling Popeye to
stay
and
be a good girl,
Possum dashed out of his room and banged on Smoke’s door.

“Smoke!” Possum yelled. “Smoke, get up and look at this! You won’t believe it!”

Smoke was sitting cross-legged on his bed as he filled a hypodermic syringe with a poisonous mixture of solvents and rat poison that he had stolen from the hardware section of Wal-Mart when he had taken the road dogs out to find NASCAR colors.

“What the fuck do you want?” Smoke shouted at Possum. Smoke was high on beer, crack cocaine, and meanness after robbing another convenience store and discovering there was only eighty-two dollars in the cash drawer. “You seen Cat? Where the hell is Cat?” Smoke shouted again as he stuck the orange plastic cap back on the tip of the hypodermic needle.

Possum cracked open the door and peered through the space, his heart hammering.

“Smoke, I don’t mean to bother you none, but there’s something on the Trooper Truth web you got to see!” Possum said in a small, intimidated voice. “It’s got to do with a whole lot of treasure and we can get it if we think quick. What you doing with that needle?”

Smoke jumped up from the bed, his bare chest covered with tattoos and beaded with sweat. His eyes were glassy, and the only thing worse than Smoke was Smoke when he was high and needed to sleep it off.

“Pop-eye,” Smoke said with a cruel laugh as he pretended to inject Popeye with the syringe.

“Forget the fucking dog for a minute,” Possum said, faking the bad act he had gotten fairly good at.

“Don’t you fucking tell me to fucking forget anything, you little retard,” Smoke said, pointing the needle at Possum as if he might just inject him instead of Popeye. “See, this is how Smoke makes assholes pay for their sins. Right when that bitch Hammer and her fuckhead sidekick Brazil come rushing up to the pit to save the stupid dog, I whip out this syringe and inject Popeye with rat poison right in front of them. While they’re busy trying to save the dog, which will instantly go into convulsions and be in terrible pain, we shoot them in the head and run for the helicopter.”

The scenario was unspeakably horrible, but Possum played up to his name and had no reaction. In fact, he looked half asleep and inattentive to everything except the opportunity to seize the Tory Treasure before anyone else got it first.

“Or if one of them fishermen gets the treasure ’fore we show up after the race,” Possum said, “then we just wait for them back on the island and blow their brains out and dump their bodies in the bay and take the prize for ourselves. And Cat will already be there with everything set up, which is why he ain’t here now, and we even got our own trooper working for us, too. Man, everything’s phat, Smoke,” Possum bragged.

R
EGINA
felt everything was fat, too, but not in a good way, as she made her way down to the breakfast table later that morning. She had suffered another terrible night of tire dreams and was at last facing the truth: Andy’s interpretation was right. Life was passing her by. She was disgustingly fat and had a rotten personality. For the first time in her life, Regina’s conscience stirred and she felt a twinge of shame and regret.

“Good morning,” Pony said as Regina sullenly pulled out a chair and plopped down in it.

“Are you telling me it is or wishing it or just saying words that are meaningless?” Regina muttered, eyeing the steaming food Pony was setting on the table.

“Seems like a good morning to me,” Pony replied cheerfully. “I’m on my way to being a free man, Miss Reginia!
Only thing is”—he served scrambled eggs and link sausage on a plate shining with the gold Commonwealth of Virginia seal—“turns out I been in prison three years longer than I was s’posed to be ’cause of that Mr. Trader. Seems he did some messing with certain officials ’cause he didn’t want me let out.”

Regina stared at her food and realized with surprise that she wasn’t hungry. She couldn’t remember the last time she wasn’t hungry, unless it was when she had been sped to the hospital after eating Trader’s poisoned Toll House cookies. But her loss of appetite then had been transient and medically based and couldn’t be related to her present condition.

“You aren’t eating, Miss Reginia,” Pony worried, standing across the table from her in his stiff white jacket, a linen napkin draped over an arm.

“You shouldn’t have been in prison, anyway,” Regina surprised herself by kindly saying. “I’ve never seen you do anything wrong and have never been afraid of you.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Reginia.” Pony smiled but was puzzled. He was unaccustomed to Regina’s having any opinion about his welfare or even noticing that he might have a life of his own. “I ’preciate that, and I think I can help you with Trip. What it’s looking like is, he only respond to one- or two-word commands. If you start trying to conversate with him, he gets confused and don’t listen.”

Regina perked up a bit.

“How ’bout I write up a list of commands and maybe you can help out with him at the race tonight?” Pony suggested. “I been reading some of the papers the trainer left, and that little fella is quite the traveler. All you gotta do is put a diaper on him and you can stick him right in the limo or helichopper. My wife’s down in the laundry room this very minute fixing a fancy blanket with the Comm’wealth of Virginia seal on it that he can wear under his harness.”

Regina’s mood continued to improve, as if anger and depression had been a stationary front all of her life and suddenly the oppressive, solid layer of unhappiness was moving away. She thought of Andy and his lecturing her about showing compassion, and she rehearsed an empathic line or two in her head as Pony continued to tell her about Trip’s being
housebroken and how to put on his tennis shoes and that he liked to snuggle when he wasn’t working.

“I’m glad Papa’s straightening out your prison mess,” Regina repeated what she had rehearsed several times in her mind. “But I hope you’ll still work for us, Pony, even if you don’t have to anymore.”

Pony was startled and wondered if Regina had a fever. She did look a little pale this morning and wasn’t touching her food, and it sure wasn’t like her to be nice.

“I would like it a lot if you wrote down that list of commands for me.” Regina continued to baffle Pony with kindness. “Papa will need some help with Trip at the race, and I want to make sure I know everything I should. I’m glad Papa has a Seeing Eye horse. Maybe he won’t need all those magnifying glasses anymore.”

Regina got up from the table and neatly folded her napkin as Pony looked at her as if she had magically turned into someone else.

“Thank you, Miss Reginia,” Pony said. “I’ll make you that list and maybe show you a few things, if you want.”

“Thank you, Pony,” Regina said as she headed upstairs to her parents’ master suite.

The First Lady was seated at her ornate Chinese desk, scrolling through something on the Internet, her attention rapt.

“Where’s Papa?” Regina asked, pulling up a chair to see what her mother was so engrossed in.

“I believe he’s in the garden with the pony,” Mrs. Crimm said, tapping the down arrow.

“We shouldn’t refer to Trip as a pony,” Regina replied in an unusually thoughtful tone. “He’s a minihorse, not a pony, and when Papa starts calling out
pony
this and
pony
that, Pony thinks he’s talking to him and gets confused and it probably hurts his feelings, too.”

The First Lady gave Regina a perplexed glance and said, “Well, I suppose you’re right. You seem in a strangely pleasant mood this morning. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you like this. Are you sick?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Regina said, staring over her
mother’s shoulder at what appeared to be a new essay by Trooper Truth. “But I dreamed about tires again, Mama, and it started me thinking about what Andy said to me on the way to the morgue. Then I started thinking about the morgue, too, and wondering if I would have ended up there if I’d eaten any more of those cookies Major Trader tried to hurt Papa with. And suddenly I started feeling a little bit of hope. You know, I’ve never thought there was any hope.”

“Of course there’s hope, dear,” Mrs. Crimm absently said as she wondered if those Tangier watermen would indeed find the Tory Treasure, which most certainly would include trivets from raided plantations—not that she assumed pirates used trivets, but they might have. Certainly, they cooked on their ships, and it would make sense to set a hot pot on a trivet to prevent wooden surfaces in the galley from getting burned.

“How long do you suppose a trivet could be on the bottom of the bay before it would rust away?” she questioned out loud as she peered through antique wire-rimmed glasses that were attached to a long, gold chain. “You should read this. It’s quite interesting, about an old piece of iron that most likely will lead to the Tory Treasure, and I’m assuming if a piece of iron would still be intact after hundreds of years of being under water, then why wouldn’t a trivet fare just as well? Many of them are iron.

“But I must say, your papa’s not going to be pleased when I read this to him. I can’t imagine he won’t insist that the Commonwealth is the rightful owner of the treasure. It doesn’t matter who Wheelin’ Bone stole it from. What right does North Carolina have to anything found in the Chesapeake Bay? What matters is that the treasure is here in Virginia and therefore belongs to Virginia, and therefore any trivets found should be given to the mansion.”

Regina got up to take a closer look at what her mother was reading. Although Regina had always been a strong advocate for
finders-keepers,
she wasn’t so sure what she thought in this case. If the Islanders found the treasure and did whatever they wanted to with it, then the rest of the world would never have the pleasure of viewing old cannons and coins and jewels in the Virginia Museum.

“Those old cannons and jewels should be shared,” Regina said as two sets of sneakers accompanied by slippered feet sounded behind them.

“What?” the governor posed his usual question as he caught the tail end of Regina and Mrs. Crimm’s conversation. “Go ahead and keep walking,” he said to Trip, who was already going ahead and didn’t need to be told.

“Papa, I think he does better if you use fewer words,” Regina tried to help.

“Okay,” the governor considered, and the word
okay
released Trip from any commands and he came to a standstill near the First Lady’s black-lacquered, mother-of-pearl-inlaid desk. “I didn’t tell you to stop, but that’s what I wanted you to do,” the governor chatted on to his minihorse and fondly rubbed his soft nose. “I think he understands far more than you might imagine, Regina.”