Isle of Dogs (19 page)

“My, can you imagine?” he said. “I’ve always wondered why an egg. Why not something else if you’re going to make things out of precious metals and priceless jewels?”

“What would you have chosen for a theme?” Maude coyly inquired.

She had fallen swiftly for Crimm and his inquiring mind, and it occurred to her that she had always taken the Fabergé collection for granted. All these years, and she had never questioned why.

“Most certainly I would not have chosen an egg,” Crimm replied in a rich, important voice that lilted with the rhythm of the Old South. “A Civil War theme, perhaps.” He considered. “Maybe cannons of rose gold or Confederate flags fashioned of platinum, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires—the very stones and metals you should have around your lovely tapered white neck.” He traced her throat with a stubby finger. “A long necklace with a huge diamond at the end that would disappear into your bosom.” He showed her. “And remain tucked out of sight to tickle you when you least expect it.”

“I’ve always wanted a big diamond,” Maude said, looking around rather nervously, hoping nobody in the crowded room was paying them any mind. “You look like you’re wearing a
big diamond yourself,” she said, staring at the front of his tuxedo pants.

“The hope diamond.” He chuckled.

“Because you’re always hoping. I get it,” she said. “You know, I’m quite a collector, too, Senator Crimm.”

“You don’t say?”

“Oh yes. I happen to know a lot about magnifying glasses.” She continued to impress him. “Why, they go all the way back to the caves of Crete and there was once a Chinese emperor who used a topaz to look at the stars. That was thousands of years before the Baby Jesus was born, can you imagine? And I bet you didn’t know that Nero himself used to peer through an emerald when he watched the gladiators kill each other. I suppose so the sun didn’t hurt his eyes. So I think it’s very appropriate that you should have very special optic glasses, too, since you’re such an important, powerful man.”

“Why don’t we slip off to the men’s room and introduce ourselves to each other,” Crimm suggested.

“I could never!” Maude’s
no
was a
yes,
but Crimm would find out soon after their marriage that even a
yes
would be
no
when she was preoccupied with crown molding and cobwebs.

“The ladies’ room, then,” Crimm tried again.

Beautiful women had always ignored him before he went into politics. Now it was amazingly easy, and he felt he had been given a second chance. Having been born terribly short and homely with deteriorating eyes no longer mattered. Even the size of his diamond made little difference. It wasn’t like the old days at the Commonwealth Club, where all the up-and-coming males would sit around the swimming pool naked, making political decisions and discussing unfriendly takeovers.

“Not even half a carat,” Crimm remembered one of them whispering. Of course, voices carry across the water, and Crimm, who was sitting on the diving board, heard the tasteless remark.

“It’s the quality, not the size,” he replied. “And how hard it is.”

“All diamonds are hard,” said another man, who ran a Fortune 500 company that later relocated to Charlotte.

Crimm discovered in the ladies’ room that all diamonds are not hard. Maude’s birthmark had caused a bad result. Her
bottom looked like she had sat in a puddle of ink. It was hideously stained, and Crimm was afraid to touch it.

“What happened?” he asked as he recoiled and tucked his diamond back into his trousers.

“Nothing happened,” Maude said from her position flat against the cold tile wall. “If the lights are out, you can’t even see it. Some people find it attractive.”

Maude flipped off the light and kissed him hungrily. She mined for his diamond until she could find it again. “Talk vulgar to me,” she whispered in the dark restroom. “No one ever has, and I’ve always wanted to hear lurid things about what people, especially men, want to do to me. Be careful, the wall is hard when you bang me up against it like that. No, don’t pull me down on the hard filthy floor instead. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this in here. I’m going to have bruises.”

“We could go into one of the stalls.” Crimm could scarcely speak. “Then if people walk in, they won’t see us. If we make noise, we can cover it up by flushing the toilet repeatedly.”

Those amorous days had ended after the wedding. Bedford’s eyesight had continually disintegrated, and he had not laid a finger on Maude since Regina was conceived, despite the First Lady’s relentless efforts to look desirable, which was for the purpose of teasing and frustrating and camouflaging her true intention of
no.
Maude hadn’t fantasized about
yes
in a very long time, and as she thought about Andy Brazil, it entered her mind that maybe she should try
yes
again and mean it. After all, her husband was being so unfair about the trivets, and she spent all of her time these days relocating them throughout the mansion.

Maybe she should give the governor something important to worry about and keep that gorgeous Brazil boy for herself, she resentfully thought. The hell with her daughters. Maybe if Maude seduced Andy, she would feel better about herself and become sufficiently distracted to cut back on her shopping. She applied another coat of thick black mascara to enhance her violently violet eyes. She slashed vivid red lipstick around her mouth, patted on more blush, and frowned, to see how her Botox was holding up.

“Oh dear,” she said to the mirror when she detected a trace of movement in her forehead.

Her collagen was wearing thin, too, and she dreaded a return trip to the maxillary-facial surgeon. It had gotten to where she simply could not endure another needle stick without a heavy hit of Demerol, and for what? Nobody cared. Nobody appreciated her anymore. Maude unhooked her bra and worked her way out of it without taking off her blouse, a trick she had learned at Sweet Briar College.

“Well, that was a wasted effort,” she muttered to herself impatiently as her breasts migrated to her waist.

Sighing, she put her bra back on and changed into an attractive sheer cashmere sweater that had been several sizes too small even when she was much thinner.

“There,” she announced to the First Dog, Frisky, who was asleep on the bed inside the adjoining master suite. “You have to admit I look pretty damn good for seventy, don’t I?”

Frisky didn’t stir. He was a very old chocolate Lab and was tired of the First Lady’s talking to him endlessly. It had been going on for nine years, and Frisky believed the First Lady had looked pretty overblown from day one. Now she looked especially bad, with her frozen face and swollen lips, and he didn’t intend to open his eyes or interrupt his favorite dream of being a ball boy at Wimbledon. He silently prayed that the First Lady, for once, wouldn’t wake him up.

“Come, Frisky!” the First Lady called her sleeping dog as she tried unsuccessfully to snap her fingers.

Mrs. Crimm shimmered with body lotion and her fingers were slippery. “Come!” Her fingers snipped rather than snapped. “Let’s go down and greet our company.”

 The blue crabs and the trout were about to have their luck change yet again.

Major Trader had volunteered to dump them in the river because he had his own secret, selfish agenda. He figured he could find someone fishing and sell the fresh seafood easily and for a pretty penny, and he was scouting for a good location for the drop-off of the waterproof suitcase full of cash that he expected to get from the pirates soon.

Right this minute, Trader was driving his state car, and the bucket was sloshing around in the trunk. Neither the crabs nor the trout could see a thing in the pitch dark, and they had an ominous feeling about the trip as Trader sped and jerked the car into curves and made sudden stops at lights.

“Jiminy Criminy, he must not got a GPS,” one crab said as it knocked into another one on the bottom of the bucket. “He’s lost. I can tell.”

“How?” said the trout as he floated above crabs clashing into one another with each hairpin turn and lurching start and stop. “I think he might have engine problems.”

“You ever been in a car afore?”

“Can’t say I have,” the trout replied. “But I’ve seen them pull up to the dock, from a safe distance, when the watermen
get out to fish. All their trucks and golf carts jump around and careen like this.”

The crabs tumbled to one side and landed in a pile.

“Ouch!” a crab complained. “That hurt! Get your claw outta my eye or you’re gonna catch it!”

“I’m hungry!”

“There’s neither rotted fish until we foller the water. Hold on!”

Trader drove over a curb and parked on the sidewalk, where Caesar Fender was fishing and not catching a thing.

“Hey! You just ran over my tackle box, you motherfucker!” Caesar yelled at the state car. “Who you think you are? I ain’t doing nothing. I don’t even have a car, so you got no right to pull over with your high beams on and run over my tackle box, like I was speeding or something!”

“I got fresh seafood fit for the governor,” Trader announced. “Sell it to you for fifty dollars. Bet you got a passel of hungry nidgettes at home. Bet they never had blue crabs before, and fresh trout.”

Caesar Fender was shocked by the big, fat white man’s slurs. “Just ’cause some black folks is short don’t mean they’re nidgettes,” he lashed back. “And you owe me two dollars for the tackle box and another seventy-five cents for all the hooks you bent and bobbers you busted. You step one foot closer and you’re gonna knock my can of worms in the water, and then I’m gonna kick your ass!”

“You lay a hand on me and I’ll have you arrested and sent to jail!” Trader threatened.

“Pay me what you owe for all my fishing tackle you ruined!”

“Watch your mouth. You’re talking to a very important government official,” Trader yelled back.

“I don’t give a flying fuck who you are!”

While the two men argued and bickered, the crabs quickly put together a plot to save themselves and the trout. “Play dead,” someone said.

Trader popped open the trunk and Caesar peered inside, angry but curious about the fresh seafood. The trout was belly-up with its eyes shut, and all the crabs were motionless, their eyes shut, too.

“You cheatin’ motherfucker!” Caesar screamed at Trader. “This seafood’s dead as a doornail. How long you had it in your trunk? A month? Peeee-yooo.” He waved his hand in front of his face as he lifted the bucket out. “You lying white trash. Here’s what I think of your fucking
fresh seafood.
”

Suddenly, the crabs and trout were sailing out of the bucket as if they were dashing out a fire. They flew through the air and splashed into the James River, where the crabs sank to the bottom and sat, looking around, stunned, as the trout swam in lazy circles over them.

“Look! I see the trout swimming down there!” Trader pointed at the shadow of the trout deep below the sparkling surface. “They’re not dead! You threw away my fresh seafood! Hand over fifty dollars!” he demanded.

“Nope.” Caesar gathered up his ruined fishing gear.

Trader’s pirate genetic coding was fired up and he punched Caesar in the eye. Caesar turned his fishing pole into a whip and stung Trader’s cheek with thirty-test monofilament and several small sinkers that Caesar had attached with his teeth shortly after arriving hours earlier on his bicycle. The two men fought fiercely with each other, rolling on the ground, yelling obscenities and beating on each other. Enraged and bleeding, Trader darted for his car, which Caesar began kicking before he smashed out the front windshield with his damaged metal tackle box.

Frenzied and out of breath, Trader dove into the driver’s side and fumbled for the flare gun he always kept hidden under the front seat. He cut his fingers on splinters of glass as he stuffed a .12-gauge flare into the wide barrel of the old flare gun that had been handed down in his pirate family since 1870. He rolled out of the car and pointed the flare gun in Caesar’s direction as the deranged fisherman hurled lead sinkers at him, one of which struck Trader on the nose, causing an instant reflex that twitched his trigger finger.

The flare exploded through the air like a small fiery missile, streaking straight toward Caesar and slamming into his chest. The crabs and trout watched in horror as the fisherman burst into flames and ran several steps before collapsing. Trader fled in his banged-up state car, the trunk still open, the windshield a spider web of shattered glass. When he limped into the
governor’s mansion a little later, he was pale and bloody, his suit and tie torn. He was agitated, paranoid, and confused.

R
EGINA
was confused, too. She had never seen her mother so made-up and heavily perfumed. Had Regina run into her mother in a funeral home, she would have assumed Mrs. Crimm was full of formaldehyde and overlaid in putty and had gotten her clothes mixed up with some other dead lady who was much smaller and fond of fuchsia.

“What the hell happened to you, Mama?” Regina asked as she worked on a thick slab of honey-glazed ham that was tucked inside a huge biscuit dripping with butter and globs of mint jelly.

Mrs. Crimm, running a little late, seated herself at the foot of the table and lifted a fork to signal that everyone could begin eating.

“What do you mean, what happened to me?” Mrs. Crimm shot Regina a threatening glance. “And you’re not supposed to start eating before everyone else. As if I didn’t raise you better.”

Andy cut off the only morsel of lean ham he could find in the mound on his plate as Trader walked into the dining room. Andy noticed instantly that the press secretary was bloody and in shock and smelled faintly of burned chemicals and gunpowder.

“I’d rather know what happened to you,” Andy said to Trader.

Mrs. Crimm inferred from this that her handsome young dinner guest didn’t think for a minute that anything at all had happened to her. She always looked alluring and thoughtfully put together. It was irrational and Victorian for women to hide their bodies beneath thick layers of loose, long clothing. Andy’s attention would find its way down to the foot of the table any minute and linger to wander all over her. After dinner, the two of them would sneak up to the master suite and she would lock the door and say
yes
and mean it. Even if the governor came home, as long as she and Andy were quiet, he wouldn’t see them.

“Did you wander into a riot or a hurricane?” Andy’s
attention remained on Trader, who went into a lengthy, breathless explanation, talking so fast that his words tangled and ran into each other midair.

“What on earth did he say?” First Lady Crimm asked Andy every few seconds. “I wonder if he’s had a stroke!”

Trader’s story could easily be summed up, although he took a long time to tell it and the facts changed like clouds. The gist was this: He arrived at the river at nineteen hundred hours and an African-American male was fishing out by his bicycle. Trader greeted the man and they discussed the weather as Trader dumped the crabs and the trout overboard.

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Crimm interrupted. “He didn’t toss the crabs into the James, did he? Unless they can find their way back to the bay, they’ll die, sure as shooting.”

Trader rushed ahead with his story.

“He says there was a shooting, now that you mention it,” Andy translated. “A Lincoln with New York plates roared up and a Hispanic male in his twenties started firing a nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer pistol out the window and yelling obscenities. He shot the fisherman at very close range, probably in the chest, and the fisherman possibly caught on fire, possibly from burning gunpowder that was possibly fueled by a Bic lighter that was possibly in the fisherman’s shirt pocket.”

“How come he doesn’t know anything for sure?” Regina reached for another biscuit. “Didn’t he even check to see if the poor man just might still be alive or if he was really burning up? Why didn’t he try to put the fire out or call for help?” She fastened her eyes on Trader as she ate. “You just rush off and not try to help or anything? What kind of person are you?”

“He shit at me!” Trader raised his voice, not realizing that his sudden speech problem was due to post-traumatic stress that had somehow activated a genetic code that caused him to talk like a pirate.

“We don’t talk that way at the table!” Mrs. Crimm fired back at him.

“He shit at me again and again! I was afeared to get near him!”

“I can’t stand this.” Regina covered her ears. “Someone talk for him. Andy, just tell us what he says. And does he really mean to imply that the Hispanic was doing
number two
at
him? Doing it or throwing it?” She scowled. “What does he mean that the gunman
shit
at him?”

“Regina!” her mother scolded her. “We don’t talk about bathroom habits at the dinner table!”

Trader started to make the point that he was talking about a shooting, when Andy cautioned him not to say the words
shoot, shot, shooting,
or
shooter,
but to simply simulate by mutely pointing his finger and firing it like a gun. This worked, and the First Family settled down and resumed eating as Trader claimed, through Andy, that he was certain the Hispanic was the one committing the hate crimes and was coming after the First Family next, so Trader had raced back to the mansion instantly to make sure all were safe and protected.

“He say he hated Crimm,” Trader blurted out. “And he thinks all Crimms should be put to death.”

“You sure he didn’t mean criminals, as opposed to Crimms?” Regina considered as she chewed. “Papa’s very much in favor of sending criminals to death row and is known for it.”

“Honey, that wouldn’t make much sense,” Mrs. Crimm replied. “The Hispanic is clearly a criminal himself, so why would he be on a spree of hate crimes that target people similar to himself?”

“Damnation seize my soul, the villain meant
ye!”
Trader pointed at each Crimm in an ominous, morbid way. “
Crimm.
Not criminals.”

Faith was frightened. “We won’t be able to leave the mansion ever again, Mama.”

“What if he’s out there somewhere?” Constance’s eyes were wide, and she kept refilling her wine glass with nervous hands.

“I’ve never heard of anyone catching on fire when they’re shot.” Andy pressed Trader on this point. “Did you really see smoke and flames and his clothes igniting? I realize you’re saying you didn’t hang around long and were frightened and also concerned for the Crimms and may have suffered a small stroke, but I’m having a very hard time with your story.”

Trader rather condescendingly replied that it was a well-known scientific fact that people do burst into flames and have
cremated themselves unannounced since the beginning of time.

“It’s called spontenuous combusting,” he said. “Look it up.”

Andy didn’t need to look it up. He was quite familiar with spontaneous human combustion and the stories of people suddenly bursting into flames for no good reason.

“Well,” he said to Trader, “we’ll see what the medical examiner has to say.”

“You don’t think that psycho’s gonna come here and set all of us on fire, do you?” Constance worried aloud.

“Why would he hate us?” Grace couldn’t make sense of it. “What did we ever do to him or any Hispanic? And we’re not a minority except for our practically being a royal family, and there certainly aren’t many of those.”

“We don’t even know any Hispanics,” Faith reminded her family as she looked around the table, her horse-shaped face wavering in soft candlelight. “And Papa hasn’t a single Hispanic working in his administration and never has. So what do the Hispanics have to be resentful about?”