Isle of Dogs (4 page)

I
T
was past 6:00
P
.
M
., and Hammer packed up her briefcase and headed home. She drove through downtown feeling certain that VASCAR was going to ruin her career and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do about it. Was it merely coincidental that the very day Andy launched a website that was supposed to make the state police look good, the governor had decided to launch a program that would make the state police look bad? Was it mere chance that Andy had
rather much slammed Tangier Island by indicating that it had once been a nest for pirates, and now the governor was going after the Islanders? Not to mention, she was desperately short of helicopter pilots and the few troopers left in the aviation unit needed to spend their time looking for criminals and marijuana fields, as opposed to tracking speeders on a tiny island or elsewhere.

Hammer brooded about Andy as she continued working herself into a state of fulminating paranoia. She should never have allowed him to write his Internet essays uncensored. But that had been part of the agreement.

“I’m not doing it if you edit me,” he had told her last year. “One obvious reason for anonymity is that no one knows what Trooper Truth is going to say or has any control over it, otherwise the truth would be lost. If you read my essays before they’re posted on the Internet, Superintendent Hammer, then I know very well what you’ll do. You’re going to start worrying about criticisms, blame, and political problems. That’s what bureaucrats focus on, unfortunately. Not that I’m calling you a bureaucrat.”

“Of course that’s what you’re calling me,” she had said, deeply offended.

And maybe he was right, Hammer dismally thought as she followed East Broad Street toward her restored neighborhood of Church Hill. Maybe she
was
turning into a bureaucrat who was far too consumed by what people thought and said about her. What had happened to her firm but diplomatic way of dealing with complaints and demands from the public?

She called Andy on her cell phone. “We have a potential emergency,” she told him. “The governor wants to put speed traps on Tangier Island and all hell’s going to break loose.”

“I heard about it,” he said.

“How?” She was startled.

“I wish you had said something to me,” Andy added in frustration as he sat in front of his computer, going through the hundreds of e-mails Trooper Truth had gotten so far this day. “I didn’t even have a clue until Miss Friend sent me an e-mail. I may need an assistant. I’ll never keep up with all the mail I’m getting,” he declared as his computer announced
you’ve got mail!
four more times.

“VASCAR wasn’t my idea, for God’s sake!” Hammer replied. “And who is Miss Friend? The focus right now should be on these outrageous hijackings and assaults—not on speeding! Andy, I need your help with this. We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

“There’s only one thing to do,” he said as he typed. “I’ll go to Tangier Island myself and paint a speed trap and see what the response is. Better I should do it than someone else, and I can use Trooper Truth to counter any negativity directed at you and the state police, and I’ll show the public what a bad idea VASCAR is, and maybe the governor will drop the damn program and let us work real crimes. All I need is a couple cans of reflective, fast-drying paint, a brush, a helicopter, and a little time to appropriately revise tomorrow’s essay on mummies.”

“What the hell do mummies have to do with anything?” Hammer protested.

M
UMMIES

by Trooper Truth

Like most people, I grew up watching mummies in horror films. Having done a lot of archaeological research of late, I can tell you, the reader, that these terrifying depictions of a living dead person bound in strips of cloth aren’t accurate—or fair.

Mummies can’t hurt us unless they spread an infectious disease from antiquity, which isn’t likely, although I suspect you could suffer an adverse respiratory reaction after inhaling layers of dust in a creepy, cold place. I suppose you could injure yourself while looking for a mummy or find yourself lost deep inside a pyramid and die of thirst and starvation, or you could certainly encounter a grave robber and get into a violent altercation.

In death investigation, the term
mummy
refers to a dead person whose body has been exposed to extreme cold or aridness. Instead of decomposing, the body dries out and can remain in this state of preservation for decades or hundreds of years. This type of mummy, which typically shows up in cellars or the desert, is not a true mummy, but you can rest assured that anthropologists and others will refer to dried-out bodies as mummified because the term is here to stay. I will admit that it probably sounds better for an expert witness to say a victim was mummified than to admit that the poor soul
was shriveled up and dried out and looked like a skeleton covered with shoe leather.

The word
mummy
is derived from the Arabic word for bitumen, which in the original Persian form meant
wax.
So
mummy
is a substance such as bitumen, which is a type of asphalt used in Asia Minor, and
a mummy
is a person or animal that has been preserved by artificial means, although it would not be accurate in modern times to refer to an embalmed body as a mummy. The reason for this is simple. Bodies embalmed with formaldehyde are not necessarily well preserved. If you dig up an embalmed body a hundred years later, depending on where it was buried, you are probably going to find that the dead person isn’t as well preserved as a thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy.

In our society, we do not fill the embalmed person’s belly with pure myrrh, cassia, and other perfumes, nor do we stuff bitumen into the limbs or steep the body in the mineral natron for seventy days before tightly binding it in strips of flaxen cloth that are then smeared with gum, which is what the Egyptians often used instead of glue. A modern embalmed body is not placed inside a human-shaped wooden case that is leaned up against a wall inside a cool, dry sepulcher.

I’m not saying that you couldn’t preserve your dead loved one in this ancient manner, assuming you are able to find a trained scribe to mark the body for the embalming incision and then a practitioner called a
ripper up
to assist with a sharp Ethiopian stone before he flees because the Egyptians considered it a crime for anyone to physically violate the dead, even if the ripper up was legitimately hired to do so, according to the Greek historian Diodorus. And assuming you’re willing to pay for it, a deluxe embalming in the Egyptian fashion costs about one talent of silver, which is approximately four hundred U.S. dollars, depending on inflation and the exchange rate.

Not so long ago, my interest in mummies led me to Argentina where scientists were in the midst of doing numerous tests on them, such as MRIs, CAT scans, and DNA needle biopsies. I got in touch with
National Geographic
to see if I
might be allowed to visit the mummies, and I was told, “Okay,” as long as I didn’t say a word about it until after the cover story was published.

It was a cool, bright morning when I arrived in Salta, a city in northwestern Argentina that has become a center of archaeological investigations of Inca and other pre-Columbian Indian cultures. There I joined the archaeologists who had headed the expedition on an Andean volcano peak on the Argentine-Chilean border, where they had discovered three perfectly preserved five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been offered as ritual sacrifices and buried with gold, silver, and pots of food. The archaeologists took me in a Jeep along a dusty road to Catholic University, where a small building had been turned into a temporary laboratory that was heavily patrolled by guards armed with machine guns. Grave robbers, like pirates, have remained a constant threat to our society, even in remote locations.

As I watched the archaeologists carry the first small bundle from a freezer and set it on a paper-covered examination table, I realized that unwrapping the frozen remains of two Inca girls and a boy who had been killed half a millennium ago was not unlike my working car accidents and violent crime scenes. The major difference is that in archaeology, the artifacts and causes of death are studied with no thought of bringing anyone to justice, but rather to interpret a mysterious and elusive past, which in this case was that of a people who had no written language but revealed their history through elaborate textile weaving and art. I confess that I didn’t care much about diseases, diets, costumes, and customs, but was preoccupied with whether the Inca children had been unconscious, due to altitude and ritual alcoholic drinks like
chicha
(corn beer), when they were buried alive.

I wondered what the two girls and boy thought when they were dressed in fine woven outfits, feathered headdresses, and jewelry, and taken by processions up 22,057 feet to the summit of Mount Llullaillaco. I hoped they didn’t know what was happening when they were wrapped in cloth and
placed sitting up in deep graves that the Incas finally filled with rocks and earth in hopes that the gods would be pleased.

I can still envision the faces of those three murdered children, especially the boy, who was possibly around eight years old when he was dressed in fur-trimmed moccasins and a silver bracelet, and sent on his journey to the Afterlife with two extra pairs of sandals and a sling for hunting. His expression was one of distress and protest, and his knees were drawn in a fetal position, his ankles tightly bound with cord. I suspected he had been alert and none too happy about his role in religion, and I had a bad feeling that he resisted and was awake as he was smothered with soil and stone. The girls, possibly eight and fourteen, were not bound and looked rather placid, but oddly, one of their graves had been struck by lightning, and when the little mummy was unwrapped in the makeshift lab in Salta, I could still smell the odor of burned human flesh. It seemed to me that the Almighty had let the Incas know that He wasn’t pleased in the least about their burying little children alive.

Not much ever changes, I’m sorry to say. Continuing to research our past, I spent time at the Jamestown excavation site and made pilgrimages to Great Britain, trying to connect the First Settlers with those who had gotten stalled in the Thames. I explored Isle of Dogs downriver mud, marshes, bars and car parks, and the Millennium Dome that rises like a giant poached egg spiked with gold-painted cranes, but I could find no trace of John Smith or his fellow travelers and not one living person who could remember a thing.

Nor did anyone in the pubs and alehouses I visited seem remotely impressed with the little-known fact that Tangier Island has an Isle of Dogs connection because Tangier was discovered by Captain John Smith in 1608.

What I’m leading up to, my new reader friends, is unfortunate news.

Tangier Island has been discovered again, and not just by tourists interested in crab cakes. Unseemly people in power have decided to use the simple Islanders to make political
points, and this is unfair, regardless of the watermen’s tainted pirate past. I will address this in unvarnished detail soon.

Be careful out there!

 Hammer closed the Trooper Truth file in frustration and befuddlement. What did Andy think he was doing? What did mummies and Jamestown have to do with current problems in Virginia and crime?

This was all most inappropriate and destined to cause nothing but problems, she thought as she slammed a drawer shut and wished someone knew how to make decent coffee in this place. How was she supposed to feel after reading his mummy essay?

It was a few minutes past eight and everyone at headquarters, it seemed, was reading Trooper Truth, and the comments were an audible buzz in offices up and down the halls. Hammer had been shocked and unnerved when she’d heard
Billy Bob in the Morning
talking about the mummy essay on the radio as she was driving to work.

“Hey! Guess what we’re gonna do! We’re gonna start a contest right here on
Billy Bob in the Morning
. Our listeners out there can call us up with a guess about who the real Trooper Truth is. Cool? And whoever gets it right wins a special prize that we’ll figure out later. Wow! Look at that! Our switchboard’s already lighting up. Hello? This is Billy Bob In The Morning. You’re on the air, and who’s this?”

“Windy.”

Hammer couldn’t believe it when her secretary’s high-pitched voice had drifted out of the car radio. Based on the poor connection, Hammer assumed Windy was calling on her cell phone, probably from her car as she drove to work.

“So tell us, Windy, who’s Trooper Truth?”

“I think it’s the governor, only he probably has a ghost pen.”

Hammer fussed with paperwork at her desk, her ear trained toward Windy’s adjoining office. The minute the secretary blew through the door and dropped her bag lunch on the desk, Hammer jumped up from her chair and swooped in on her.

“How could you do such a numbskull thing?” Hammer demanded. “And what the hell is a ghost pen?”

“Oh!” Windy was thrilled but a bit taken aback by Hammer’s ire. “You must have heard me on the radio! Don’t worry, I just said I was Windy and didn’t give my last name or say where I work. What ghost pen? Oh yeah. You know, someone who gets someone else to secretly write for him, probably because he’s not a good writer.”

“I think you have ghost writer and pen name mixed up,” Hammer said with controlled fury as she paced in front of Windy’s desk and then thought to shut the outer door. “Don’t I have enough trouble with the governor without you calling up a goddamn radio station and accusing him of being Trooper Truth?”

“How do you know he’s not?” Windy touched up her lipstick.

“This isn’t about how I know or don’t know anything. It’s about indiscretion and poor judgment, Windy.”

“I bet you know who Trooper Truth is,” Windy said coyly, giving Hammer a little flutter of heavily mascara-coated eye-lashes. “Come on. Tell me. I just bet the band you know exactly who he is. Is he cute? How old is he? Is he single?”

Before this moment, Hammer had given little thought to what it might feel like if people started asking her if she knew who Trooper Truth was. It wasn’t her nature to lie unless an arrest or confession required it, or she was leaving for a trip and hid the suitcases and assured Popeye she’d be right back. Why Hammer would think of Popeye this very moment was hard to say, but images of her beloved Boston Terrier, who
had been stolen during the summer, knocked Hammer hard and forced her to retreat into her private office, where she shut the door and took deep breaths. Tears welled up inside her.

“Hammer,” she brusquely said when her private line rang.

“It’s Andy.”

She could barely hear him and sniffed loudly, steadying herself.

“We’ve got a terrible connection,” Hammer said. “Are you on the island?”

“Roger. Just letting you know we landed at oh-eight-hundred . . . I’m on Janders Road. Figured that might be a good one . . . not as heavily traveled as . . . and . . . stupid . . . who cares . . . ?”

“You’re breaking up, Andy,” Hammer said. “And we’ve got to talk about this morning’s essay. I can’t believe it. This can’t continue. Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

The line was dead.

“Dammit!” Hammer muttered.

T
ANGIER
Island had no cell antennas and few of the watermen used cell phones or the Internet or cared a whit about Trooper Truth. But it wasn’t lost on any of the Islanders that a state police helicopter had chopped in from the bay and landed at the airstrip only an hour ago. Ginny Crockett, for one, had been looking out her window ever since. She took a moment to feed her cat, Sookie, and when she returned to the living room of her neat, pink-painted house, she saw a state trooper in his gray uniform and big hat painting a wide, bright white line across the broken pavement of Janders Road. The inexplicable and ominous stripe began right in front of The What Not Shop on the other side of weeds pushing up through broken pavement and was headed straight for the family cemetery in Ginny’s front yard.

Water ran coolly in her crab farm’s three steel tanks just off the porch in the shade of crab-apple trees. Peelers—as blue crabs in the process of shedding their shells are called—were out of season and would not be looking up at tourists with resentful telescope eyes the rest of this year. But that didn’t stop
Ginny from posting a sign and charging tourists a quarter to take a peek at the big jimmy, or male crab, she kept in one of the tanks. In fact, she had named the crab “Jimmy,” and so far he had earned her twenty dollars and fifty cents. Maybe that trooper was only pretending to be painting the road so he could spy on her. The authorities were always snooping, it seemed, to find out if people like Ginny were paying taxes on the revenue their entrepreneurial activities earned.

The Islanders had learned over the decades that tourists would buy anything. All you had to do was nail together a little wooden box, saw a slit in its top, set it somewhere, and post a notice saying what you were selling and giving its price. The most popular items were recipes and street maps written and drawn by hand and photocopied on colorful paper.

Ginny walked to her chain-link fence to get a closer look at the trooper working his way across the street with a wide brush and a can of special paint that, based on what Ginny could make out on the label, promised to be waterproof, to dry quickly, and to glow in the dark. He was a young, handsome fellow moving slowly in a crablike fashion, and to give him credit, he didn’t appear to be enjoying himself very much.

“You hadn’t orte do that!” Ginny complained that no one should be painting up the road. “It ain’t fittin’!” she added loudly in the odd, musical way the people of Tangier have expressed themselves since emigrating from England centuries ago and remaining in a tightly closed population on their speck of an island.

Andy fixed dark glasses on her and noticed right off that she had the worst dentures he had ever seen. When he had stopped off in The What Not Shop earlier to buy Evian, he had noticed two other island women inside, and they also had terrible dental work.

“Does your island have a dentist?” Andy asked the old woman who was watching him suspiciously from the other side of her chain-link fence.

“Ever week he come in from the main,” she reluctantly replied, because the dentist was a sore subject and all her neighbors tended to deal with it by denying what was obvious.

“The same one been coming here for a while?” Andy asked
from his squatting position on the street. He had stopped painting for a moment.

“Yea. One and the same been coming to Tanger for so long, I disremember when,” she replied, more self-conscious than unfriendly now, her lips crinkled like crepe paper around big, fakey teeth.

“There are a lot of bad dentists out there,” Andy said gently. “Everybody I’ve seen here so far has clearly had an astonishing amount of dental work, ma’am, and although it’s none of my business, maybe you folks ought to consider getting a different dentist or at least having the one you use thoroughly investigated.”

His comment and his bright, perfect, natural teeth cut Ginny to the wick, which was Tangier talk for saying something went deep and caused excruciating pain. It wasn’t that the Islanders didn’t quietly gossip at gatherings about the visiting dentist. But without him, they would have no one.

“I don’t suppose you read Trooper Truth,” Andy said to her as he resumed painting the stripe. “But he has some interesting things to say about facing the truth and, in fact, demanding truth. But the only way you get truth, ma’am, is to stare what you fear straight in the eye, whether it’s a mummy or a shifty, harmful dentist.”

Ginny was unnerved and had no idea what to make of this young trooper with his kind ways that didn’t seem to fit with his threatening uniform and his trespassing and violating the road in front of her house.

“Now, don’t you be throwing off about the stripe like you ain’t paintin’ it right afore my very eyes,” she declared, changing the subject.

“I’m not,” Andy said. “I have to paint this speed trap—on the orders of the governor, ma’am.”

Ginny had never heard of such a thing and was instantly inflamed. There were fewer than twenty gas-powered land vehicles on the entire island, most of them rusting pickup trucks used for hauling things. Pretty much everybody either walked or got around on golf carts, scooters, mopeds, or bicycles. Tangier was less than three miles long and not even a mile wide. Only six hundred and fifty people lived here, and why
would the governor care if one of them got a little frisky in his golf cart? Life was slow on the island. Roads were barely wider than footpaths, few of them paved, and one wrong turn could send you headlong into a marsh. Speeding on land had never been a community problem, and in fact, Ginny had never heard of the mayor or the town council taking up this particular issue.

“Well, theys many a road on the main and you don’t need to be a painting up ours. Doncha stop that? Afore you’re going to catch it, young feller!”

Andy wasn’t sure what the island woman had just said to him, but he detected a threat.

“Just doing my job,” he said, dipping the brush in the paint can.

“What happen you drive over it?” Ginny pointed at the wet painted line on the road.

“Nothing yet,” Andy explained in an ominous tone, in hopes he might encourage the woman to complain and provide him with a few good quotes for the next Trooper Truth essay. “I’ve got to paint another one exactly a quarter of a mile from this one. Then when our helicopters patrol the island, the pilots can time how long it takes for a vehicle to get from stripe to stripe. VASCAR will tell us exactly how fast you’re going.”

“Heee! Jiminy Criminy! They going to bring NASCAR here to Tanger?” Ginny was shocked.

“VASCAR,” Andy repeated, and he was thrilled that Virginians might confuse VASCAR with NASCAR. “It refers to a computer that knows if you’re speeding.”

“Then what?” Ginny still didn’t understand, and her mind was roaring with stock cars and drunken fans.

“Then a trooper on the ground goes after the speeder and gives him a citation.”

“What he gonna to recite at us?” Ginny envisioned the young trooper in his big hat and dark glasses sternly reprimanding some poor Tangierman on his bicycle, probably pointing his finger, trying to scare him as the trooper recited something like one of those Miranda warnings Ginny was always hearing about on programs she picked up on the satellite
dish that was surrounded by glass balls and other yard ornaments.

“A ticket,” Andy went on in a stern voice. “You know what a ticket is?” His paintbrush found the edge of the pavement, mere inches from Ginny’s fence and all the dead family members whose headstones were worn smooth and tilting in different directions. “We write you a ticket and then you go down to the courthouse and pay a fine. Cash or check.”

He knew very well that Tangier Island did not have a bank, and a check, in this old woman’s mind, was what the Coast Guard was always doing or what the tourists got when they ate the crab cakes and corn pudding at Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House.

“How much you make us pay when we get warranted, if we do?” Ginny was getting increasingly alarmed.

Andy stood up and stretched his aching back as he struggled to decipher what the woman had just said to him. Then he recalled his visit to The What Not Shop right before he had started painting the stripe and overhearing two Tangier women whispering about him and saying something about someone being warranted and that they couldn’t fathom who had done what, but it was probably
that Shores boy who live cross from the school. He’s got more mouth than a sheep and here his daddy’s poor as Job’s turkey. That’s right, Hattie. Durn if his daddy don’t foller the water even when it’s the dog days while that Mr. Nutters a his can’t be learned nothing. Spends all his time progging, he does. Well, I swanny, Fonny Boy ain’t neither smarter than a ticky crab, Lula.