Isle of Dogs (18 page)

 Black wrought-iron gates crept open and a stern capitol police officer looked on through the glass window of his booth as Andy approached the governor’s mansion.

“Where do I park?” Andy inquired, because the circular cobblestone drive was crammed with the governor’s fleet of black Suburbans and limousines.

“Just pull it off on the grass,” the officer replied.

“I can’t do that,” Andy protested as he gazed out at the recently manicured lawn and sculpted hedges.

“No problem,” the officer assured him. “The inmates will clean it up tomorrow. It’s good for them to keep busy.”

Pony was watching all this through centuries-old glass. The butler was not in a good mood. In the past hour, the mansion’s kitchen help had snapped at him repeatedly because the Crimm daughters—Regina, mostly—had protested the notion of a light supper, which typically meant trout or blue crabs freshly flown in from Tangier Island. Regina had a nasty habit of stalking the kitchen and peering under pot lids, and when she discovered a trout and several dozen blue crabs in the agonal stages of death in the sink, she pitched a fit.

“I hate fish!” she declared furiously. “Everybody here knows I hate fish!”

“Your mama told us the menu,” said Chef Figgie. “We just following her instruction, Miss Reginia.”

“My name is not ReGINIA!”

Chef Figgie resisted the impulse to tell her that she might be better off if her name were Reginia instead of the other. He stared at the trout in the sink and wished it would hurry up and die. It had a hook in its mouth and he couldn’t understand why it was still flapping around after all this time. The blue crabs kept trying to climb out and were banging around in the huge stainless steel sink, making a racket and training their periscope eyes on him with resentment and fear.

Chef Figgie resisted killing anything and was opposed, in a religious way, to taking the life from things smaller and less intelligent than him before he cooked them. He preferred food already dead and packaged when it was delivered. Most of all, he was violently against hog farming, and Regina had a passion for pork.

“What happened to ham?” she asked in that rude, loud voice of hers. “Why aren’t we having ham biscuits? That’s a light supper, and you know it, Figgie. You’re just doing this because you don’t like me. Look at those crabs staring at me. Let’s just put them out the back door and they can wander off somewhere.”

“The First Lady wouldn’t be pleased if we let them go,” he said.

“Who gives a shit?”

The crabs heard every word and climbed on top of each other so the one on top was close enough to the faucet to grab at it with a claw. They froze and pretended to be dead when Major Trader strutted into the commercially outfitted kitchen on the lower level, where, during the mansion’s last restoration, archaeologists had discovered thousands of artifacts, including fish bones and crude hooks, along with numerous arrowheads and musket balls.

“Why are the crabs all stacked up like that?” Trader stared into the sink. “Looks to me like they’re already dead, and the First Lady despises dead fresh seafood, Fig.” Trader always called Chef Figgie
Fig,
for short. “She likes them scuffling about and banging the sides of the pot as they boil alive so they’re very fresh when she eats them. Here.” He set down a
small tin box. “The wife made Toll House cookies for the governor. Nobody else gets one.”

Chef Figgie felt sick at the notion of boiling anything alive.

The crabs held their breath, their eyestalks paralyzed in terror as they stared at Trader. Over the centuries, blue crabs had developed highly refined eyesight in order to spot and evade their natural enemies, which included the watermen of Tangier. The Islanders were a horrible people who spent all their time on the bay in little boats stacked with crab pots that they baited with rotten fish and plopped into the water, knowing full well that blue crabs love rotten fish and have nothing else to eat if rotten fish or other dead things are scarce.

It happens like this: An innocent crab is scuttling along through the silt, minding his own business, when this big wire cage descends like an elevator and settles on the bottom in a cloud of murk. The crab smells rotten fish and spies chunks of it floating around inside the crab pot. He calls over several of his friends or family members and says, “Well, I’ll swagger. What do you think?”

“They’s potting,” one of them offers. “Mind your step.”

“God-a-mighty! But I sure has a hunger,” Baby Crab complains.

“Keep quite! Hadn’t I learned you about potting? You’ll get hung up in that thar thing!”

“Look,” Trader said loudly, “these crabs are already dead and the First Lady won’t like it a bit if she finds out when they’re on her plate. She’ll have you fired and then all your nidgettes won’t have a daddy anymore.”

Trader, loathsome racist that he was, thought this was a great idea and laughed blatantly. Seventeen more little black children out there with no father figure. They would all grow up to be drug dealers, hanging out in long lines at the methadone clinics, and then end up in the penitentiary just like their daddy. One day, they would work in the mansion’s kitchen trying to figure out if crabs were dead or not and whether the First Lady would fire them, too—them being the nidgettes, not the crabs, Trader qualified silently, as all of this seeped into his mind like sewage.

Andy had rung the bell three times now as Pony watched through the wavy old glass. It was essential that a butler give
the impression he was very busy and that the mansion was sprawling, requiring many moments to pass through gracious rooms and beneath sweeping archways en route to the entrance hall.

“Coming,” Pony said through cupped hands, to make his voice sound far away.

Andy knocked again, crisply rapping the heavy brass pineapple, which was the symbol of hospitality in Virginia. Pony walked briskly in place for a minute, working up a sweat and getting out of breath.

“Coming,” he said again, this time without cupped hands to make him sound closer.

He counted to ten and opened the door.

“I’m here to see the Crimms,” Andy said as he shook Pony’s hand, much to Pony’s surprise.

“Oh,” Pony replied, his mind going blank for an instant. This young man was polite and nice. He was trying to look Pony in the eye and Pony simply wasn’t accustomed to this and had to somehow get hold of himself and play his role. “And who may I tell them is here?”

Andy told him and instantly felt sorry for Pony. The poor man was run ragged by his job, and unappreciated.

“I like your jacket,” Andy said. “You must iron it all the time. Looks like it could stand up without you in it.” He meant this as a compliment.

“My wife works in the laundry downstairs near the kitchen. She irons it for me and is rather heavy-handed with the can of starch,” Pony proudly answered. “We never see each other unless I’m working because the rest of the time they got me in lockup.”

“That must be very hard.”

“It ain’t fair,” Pony admitted. “The last six governors, including Mr. Crimm three of those times, always promise to have my sentence commuted and then they get busy and never give it another thought. That’s the problem with term limitation, you ask me. All people do is worry about what’s next.”

Andy walked into the entrance hallways and Pony shut the door.

“Exactly,” Andy agreed. “The minute they get elected, they’re already thinking about what they’re going to do next
because they have only four years, and half of them must be spent campaigning or going to job interviews.”

Pony nodded, feeling encouraged that someone at last understood what it was like to be assigned to the mansion. “You here to see the Crimm girls? ’Cause you sure don’t look like their type.”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Andy said, suddenly suspicious of the First Lady’s real motive for inviting him to the mansion.

Regina, too, was suspicious.

“These crabs are not dead!” she yelled. “One of them just looked at me. I just saw its eyes move. How could I possibly eat anything with eyes bugging out of their heads the way they do? It hurts my eyes to watch. You would think stuff would get in them all the time because of the way they stick out and don’t have lids.”

“It’s so they can hide in the sand and still see,” Trader explained to her. “There’s a reason for their eyes being periscopic like submarines.”

He deliberately alluded to submarines to mock the governor’s constitution behind his back. Trader was respectful to his prominent boss only when he had no choice, and it was his habit to abuse mansion staff and say whatever he wanted when Crimm wasn’t present or was unaware.

“Take them down to the river and let them go,” Regina ordered Chef Figgie. “The fish, as well. It’s looking at me, too. And take that damn hook out of its mouth first. You let it go with that hook in there, it will get caught on stuff and the poor thing will drown. I want ham biscuits with butter and mint jelly, you hear me? What happened to the rest of that pie we didn’t finish? The peanut butter pie?”

She ran tap water on the crabs and the fish, waking them up a little, as she loudly ordered people about.

“There’s a bucket in the corner,” she said. “The one they came in. Put them in it right now. And don’t you ever bring another crab or fish into this mansion. I’m sick of deer meat, too. How do you know the Indians don’t poison the deer first to pay us back? They drag this carcass up the steps, thinking we’re so lucky they give us gifts.”

“You’re not supposed to call them Indians, Miss Reginia. They’re Native Americans and it’s very thoughtful of them to
bring us deer.” Chef Figgie was offended and not the least bit intimidated by her.

“Native Americans, huh?” Regina’s face darkened with rage. “Oh really? That’s the same thing as us calling your people
Natives.”

“It most certainly isn’t.” Chef Figgie looked directly into Regina’s tiny, hard eyes, which reminded him of raisins imbedded in rising bread dough. “And if you ever refer to any of the mansion help as Natives, I’ll report you to the NAACP. I don’t care if you are the governor’s daughter.”

“Get these crabs out of there this minute!” Regina screamed. “Or they’re gonna die and smell.”

The crabs waved their claws in celebration as Chef Figgie gently lifted them and the trout out of the deep sink and set them in the bucket. He got wire cutters and snipped off the hook, sliding it free of the fish’s sore mouth.

Pony wasn’t so lucky. Nobody had ever let him off the hook for any reason. Oh, how he would love it if Chef Figgie would carry him down to the James River in a bucket and let him go. Pony watched the chef walk through the dining room, heading to a side door, water slopping out of the bucket as the crabs and fish talked to one another, making plans. Regina was close behind and stopped in her tracks when she saw Andy.

“We’re not having a light supper, after all,” she told him.

“Whatever,” Andy politely replied. “I think we need to hook me up with your father as soon as possible.”

“Are you making a tasteless pun because of the fish?” She scowled.

He didn’t know her well enough to make puns, and Regina had no doubt that this handsome man was not going to be nice to her. None of them were or ever would be.

Andy noticed the fish swimming inside the crowded bucket and realized he had misspoken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see the trout until just this second. Otherwise, I never would have used the word
hook
in its presence. I meant no disrespect. It’s just that I sincerely hope I get a chance to speak to the governor tonight.”

“You can call me Regina.”

No, he couldn’t. Andy couldn’t possibly say that name without feeling very uncomfortable and embarrassed.

“Do you go by any other names?” he asked. “What about Reggie?”

“No one has ever called me Reggie.”

She was knocked off balance by his kind interest and had to steady herself against the polished mahogany bannister that curved out of sight, leading upstairs to the First Family’s private quarters, where this minute Maude Crimm was spraying her hair, unhappy with the reflection that was spraying its hair in the mirror.

She had been beautiful once. When Maude and Bedford had first spotted each other at the Fabergé Ball, she had been voluptuous but petite, with a bowed red mouth and expressive violet eyes. Maude was gazing into a showcase at a jeweled egg that had led to the Bolshevik Revolution and the mystery of Anastasia, when Bedford Crimm IV, a freshman state senator, had gallantly appeared at her side and stared through an old magnifying glass at the lovely shapes scarcely covered by her low-cut gown.