Isle of Dogs (21 page)

He waited until Trader limped off before taking the First Lady aside for a private word with her.

“Listen,” Andy said. “I hate to impose on you or intrude upon your privacy in any way, First Lady Crimm, but it looks like it may be a long night and I’m wondering if I could borrow a computer for just a minute so I can check something.”

“Why certainly,” she replied, and she couldn’t wait to lead him upstairs to her private parlor where she spent many secret, delicious hours sitting at her antique Chinese desk, shopping the Internet.

She felt a tingle of salacious excitement as she led Andy up the stairs and sat him down in her chair.

“Do you need me to show you how anything works?” she asked, leaning over him and brushing her big, trussed-up bosom against the back of his head.

“No, thank you,” Andy said as her perfume excited an allergic reaction and he began to sneeze. “If you can just leave me for a moment. I’m afraid this is classified police work and for my eyes only, ma’am.” He sneezed three more times.

“What are they doing up there?” the governor jealously asked, looking in the direction of upstairs. “What in thunder are they up to? Who’s sneezing?” he demanded as his wife smeared her lipstick a bit and mussed up her stiff hair as she made her way back downstairs.

Andy posted his next essay, which he had finished early that morning. The timing could not be better, and he got up from the desk just as Regina lumbered into the parlor and demanded to know what he was doing.

“Mama’s all messed up like you two were making out,” she delicately offered. “And it’s just a good thing Papa can’t see what she looks like!”

“She wasn’t messed up a minute ago,” Andy replied. “She just showed me to the computer and left. And she looked exactly as she did when we were all at the dinner table.”

“What are you doing in here?” Regina’s tiny eyes were bright with suspicion. “I bet you’re Trooper Truth, aren’t you!”

“What a thing to think,” Andy said.

“Prove you’re not!”

“It’s rather difficult to prove a negative,” Andy replied as Regina squeezed her way past him and sat before the keyboard.

She logged on to the Trooper Truth website and made a startled sound when she noticed there was a brand-new essay. She clicked on it immediately.

“See,” Andy said. “You tell me. Is it possible Trooper Truth could be off writing a new essay and yet be here with the First Family for a light supper at the same time?”

“Well, I guess you’re right,” Regina said as she eagerly began to read.

A W
ORD
A
BOUT
A
NNE
B
ONNY
The Most Notorious Female Pirate Who Ever Lived
(Note: Many authorities on pirates differ in their accounts of Anne Bonny.)

by Trooper Truth

Her story begins with her birth in County Cork, Ireland, on March 8, 1700, the illegitimate daughter of a successful Irish lawyer named William Cormac and his wife’s maid, whose name never made it into the records. When the scandalous tryst was revealed, William had no choice but to flee from Ireland with his new family and settle in Charleston, South Carolina, where he no doubt befriended Blackbeard and corrupt politicians. Soon enough, William became a very wealthy merchant and lived on a plantation just outside the city.

Not much is known about Anne as a child, except that she was a beautiful redhead with a ferocious temper that prompted her to kill one of the servant women with a carving knife after the two of them squabbled. By the time Anne was old enough to pick out her own clothes, she began to dress like a man, and many male admirers began to call on her. Uninvited sexual advances were met with such violence that one suitor ended up bedridden for weeks.

(Note: I pause here to emphasize to you, the reader, that Anne’s behavior almost from the start would indicate that she was a sociopath with bad genetic wiring that, unfortunately, she would pass down through the generations to present-day Virginia, where one of her direct descendants is currently employed in a position of great influence and power.)

When Anne was sixteen, she continued on her blighted path by getting tangled up with a poor worthless sailor named James (Jim) Bonny, who was determined to have her family’s plantation for himself. He decided the easiest way to do this was to marry Anne, whose attire he either didn’t notice or didn’t seem to mind. Anne’s father did not approve of Jim Bonny, and the newly wed couple did not get the plantation or even a decent room should they have wished to stay with Anne’s family.

The young couple left Charleston in a huff and sailed off to New Providence in the Bahamas, where Anne soon became fond of a local establishment called the Pirate’s Lair, which was exactly what the name implied. Jim was a weak, pitiful example of manhood and courage, and he began to rat on various sailors he didn’t like, accusing them of being pirates, even if they weren’t, while his dissatisfied, psychopathic wife spent increasingly long hours at the Lair.

Many of the rough seamen who became her drinking buddies were ex-pirates and bored. One day, Anne, who the ex-pirates thought was a man, was slugging down rum and complaining about the nasty, mean-spirited sister-in-law of Jamaican governor Lawes, who had told Anne she wasn’t worth knowing. What isn’t clear from the records is whether the woman made this rude comment when Anne was disguised as a man or dressed normally. But it is well documented that Anne’s response was to knock out two of her teeth, which was much more serious in the eighteenth century than now, since there were no dentists or prosthodontists to speak of and a gap-toothed smile was irreversible.

“I should have knocked out all her teeth,” Anne boasted to the ex-pirates as they drank in the Lair. “Then tied her to a tree and gave her neither bread nor water and let a myriad of fiery stinging ants swarm over her nekkid body.”

“Yay, ye should have.” Pirate Captain Calico Jack nodded in agreement. “Would ye have her all nekkid, including her privities?”

“All nekkid,” Anne replied. “ ’Tis better not to cover her privities, making the stings of the ants more fiercely painful.”

“Yay, ’tis better.”

Anne and Calico got very friendly with each other and she
finally made certain he knew she was a woman by unbuttoning her man’s shirt one day. He offered to buy her from her spineless husband, Jim, who instantly snitched on both of them to South Carolina Governor Rogers. Anne was ordered to show up for a flogging and then return to her rightful husband, so she and Calico decided they would slip into the harbor, both of them dressed like men, and steal a sloop and begin their lives together as a pirate couple.

Over the next few months, Anne and Calico Jack raided many ships and shore installations. Her gender remained a secret to all but him, until they captured a Dutch merchant ship and recruited a number of its sailors from the crew, including a strikingly handsome, blue-eyed, blond young man. Anne took a liking to him and unbuttoned her shirt to reveal her true identity. The man then unbuttoned his shirt and showed that he was Mary Read. It is not known if both women were disappointed to discover that neither of them was a man, but they became a pirate duo, skilled with rapiers and pistols, and fought bravely whenever their boarding crew stormed onto unsuspecting merchant ships.

Anne and Mary loved being pirates and became well-respected, bloodthirsty buccaneers who swung their blades and boarded ships with more daring than any man. They became pregnant at the same time, and in 1720 suffered a stunning defeat when a pirate turned pirate-hunter raided them while the crew was drunk and hiding below deck, leaving only Mary and Anne to fight furiously in thick cannon fire.

“If there’s a man among ye, ye will come out and fight like the men ye are thought to be!” Anne shouted as she furiously swung her cutlass and fired her pistols.

The men below did not answer back, and all were captured and hanged except for the two pregnant pirates, who went to jail. Mary died of a fever inside her tiny damp cell and Anne is believed to have been granted a pardon. She disappeared from the seas and historical records.

My theory of what became of Anne Bonny is based on reviewing written accounts of her life, and then reaching a conclusion that is within the realm of possibility. We can be certain that Anne would not have been welcome back in the West Indies, nor was she likely to return to her husband or to
the life of an active pirate. I suspect she had her child and decided on a compromise of breaking the law while avoiding the traditional life of a woman, and doing so in a place that was a safe harbor and agreeable to her need for adventure. She would have known that Blackbeard and other pirates frequented Tangier Island and regularly traded with the Islanders, and that if she continued dressing like a man, she could be a waterman and at least get out in a bateau and teach her child the ways of weather, the bay, and fishing.

This child, I suspect, was a son, and I believe it is from this cutthroat lineage that one certain governmental official descended. And if the governor is reading this essay, I ask him to think back on all of the times a certain disloyal, despicable individual has given him a sweet that is soon followed by an explosive gastric attack.

It is just a shame that this scoundrel, who for now will remain nameless, offered no warnings when he applied for a high-level state position and was subjected to the usual background checks. But background checks are largely ineffective these days. They do not reveal motivation, which in this person’s case, like that of his ancestor Anne Bonny, is to have control, adventure, and access to military and police power, and to know the rules well enough to break them whenever he pleases.

Be careful out there!

 Paramedics did not try to resuscitate Caesar Fender, who remained unidentified as he smoldered and smoked near his smashed tackle box. The body was charred in a very odd pattern. Only the chest had burned, and there was no evidence of a fire in the local vicinity that might account for his appalling death.

“It’s like his heart caught on fire,” Detective Slipper said. “Or maybe his lungs. Could smoking do that?”

“You mean, if you was smoking and somehow your lungs caught on fire?” said Treata Bibb, who had been driving an ambulance for fifteen years and had never seen anything like this. “No,” Bibb then answered her own question upon reflection. “Not hardly. I don’t think smoking’s got a thing to do with what killed this unlucky guy.” She squatted to get a closer look. “It’s like he’s got a crater burned in him all the way through, from front to back. Look, you can see the pavement through this big hole. See here?” She touched charred flesh with a gloved finger. “Even the bones in the middle of his chest burned up. But the rest of him is fine.” She was amazed and disturbed, wondering who had done this and how and why.

Cars were pulling off the road, and people lined the street as if waiting for a parade. Police were having a difficult time
controlling the gathering crowd of sightseers and reporters as word spread that a fisherman had exploded into a ball of fire just off Canal Street, very near where Trish Thrash’s mutilated body had been found on Belle Island.

“What’s going on?” a housewife named Barbie Fogg asked through the open window of her minivan.

“You’ll have to read about it in the paper.” An officer motioned with his flashlight for her to move on.

“I don’t get the paper.”

She shielded her eyes from his waving flashlight and wondered why on earth all these big helicopters were flying around with searchlights probing the city and neighboring counties. “There must be some violent serial killer that broke out of jail or something,” she decided with horror as a chill tickled up to the roots of her frosted hair. “Maybe the same one who murdered that poor woman the other day! And now I won’t know enough to protect myself and my family because I don’t get the paper and you won’t tell me the smallest detail. And you wonder why people don’t like police.”

She sped off, and another car stopped, this one occupied by an old woman whose night vision wasn’t what it used to be.

“Excuse me, I’m trying to find the Downtown Expressway,” the old woman, whose name was Lamonia, said to the officer with the flashlight. “I’m late for choir practice. What’s all that racket up there?”

Lamonia peered up at Black Hawk helicopters she couldn’t see. But there was nothing wrong with her hearing.

“Sounds like a war going on,” she declared.

“Just a little situation, but we’re handling it, ma’am,” the officer said. “The Downtown Expressway’s over there.” He pointed the flashlight. “Turn left on Eighth and it will run you right into it.”

“I’ve run into it before,” Lamonia said with a pained, humiliated catch in her voice. “Last year, I hit the guardrail. To tell you the truth, officer, I probably shouldn’t be driving at night. I can’t see at night. But if I keep missing choir practice, they’ll kick me out, and it’s really all I have left in my life. You know, my husband passed on two years ago, and then my cat died when I accidentally backed the car over him.”

“Maybe you’d better pull over.”

Lamonia stared blindly to her left and right and thought she detected a speck of light that reminded her of those eye tests that required her to center her face in a machine and push a clicker every time she saw a little light in her peripheral vision. Last week, she had hit the clicker randomly and often in hopes she could fool the eye doctor again.

“I know exactly what you’re doing,” the eye doctor had said as he put drops in Lamonia’s pupils. “Don’t think you’re the first one who’s tried,” he added.

“What about laser surgery again?”

According to the eye doctor, there was no hope for Lamonia’s bad night vision. She had been managing all alone only because she had a pretty good memory and knew how many steps led up to the porch and exactly where the furniture was. She could tell by feel which skirt or dress she was putting on in the dark, but driving at night was another matter. The city streets had not changed, but memory could not help Lamonia when cars switched lanes or stopped in front of her, or pedestrians decided to cross to the other side. She was explaining all this to the police officer, who was no longer there.

“So if you can just point your flashlight, I’ll follow it and pull over,” Lamonia said as another helicopter thundered into a low hover and its searchlight blazed on the crime scene.

She detected an illumination and headed toward it, bumping over a curb and then something that crunched under a tire.

“Now what was that?” she muttered as she hit a stretcher and sent it sailing into the river right before she rear-ended the ambulance.

“Stop! Stop!” Voices all around her Dodge Dart screamed.

Lamonia slammed on the brakes, even though she was already stopped. Confused and frightened, she shoved the car into reverse and backed up through a perimeter of crime-scene tape and felt another bump under her right rear tire.

“STOP!” The shouting voices were more urgent.
“STOP!”

H
OOTER
Shook sensed something urgent was going on when Trooper Macovich showed up with a trunk full of traffic cones and flares.

“Hey! What you doin’ closing off all these lanes?” Hooter
called out to him as he arranged the blaze orange cones that always reminded her of the Cap the Hat game she used to play as a child.

“Setting up a checkpoint,” Macovich informed her as he dropped hissing, lit flares across 150 North, a busy four-lane interstate that led in and out of the city.

Hooter watched with interest and a little anxiety as Macovich barricaded every lane with a wall of blaze orange plastic and fire, leaving only her Exact Change lane open, forcing all northbound motorists by her window, where they would directly place money in her glove. She was a senior tollbooth operator for the city and remembered the days when she didn’t have to wear surgical gloves that were always getting punctured by her artificial nails. In modern times, all the operators seemed to worry about was coming in contact with a driver’s fingers, when in truth, cash and coins were far dirtier than some stranger’s hands.

Money was touched by millions of people, Hooter knew. It was picked off the ground and rubbed up against other money inside dark wallets and little coin purses. Coins jingled against each other inside pockets that may not have been laundered in recent memory. Cash was porous paper that absorbed bacteria like a sponge, and in local topless bars, men stuffed dollar bills into skimpy clothing and the money came in direct contact with diseased body parts.

Hooter could talk for weeks about all the places money visited and how filthy it was. So she was happy to wear gloves when she finally realized the city didn’t mind if she switched to cotton ones that her nails couldn’t tear. But it did make her feel bad when she stuck a gloved hand out of her booth, as if the driver were Typhoid Mary. She hurt thousands of feelings every shift and never had time to explain to the driver that in her mind, the glove wasn’t about him or her, but about the unsanitary condition of the economy.

“Germs,” Macovich said as he smoked, waiting for the next car as he stood outside Hooter’s booth and talked to her through the sliding window. “Everything’s ’bout germs. Wooo. I ’member learning CPR on those life-size rubber dolls, and you was lucky if they wiped the rubber mouth off before you pinched the rubber nose shut and smacked your
lips right over its rubber lips, blowing away. Now, you roll up on a scene and see someone unresponsive and bleeding bad, you got to double glove and drape the face with a sheet of plastic that’s round with a hole in the middle, sort of like those ’sposable toilet seat covers you see in public restrooms. You just hope the person don’t sneeze on you or puke or start moving around, and you pray they ain’t got AIDS.”

“Bet you could get AIDS off of money,” Hooter said, nodding at her own convictions. “How you know some homosensual don’t meet up with another homosensual and have sex in a park and then before washing his hands, he buys a sandwich and pay for it with a five-dollar bill. That same five-dollar bill is shut up inside a little cash drawer with hundreds of other unsanitarian bills, and then goes to the bank and is picked up when some other man dying of AIDS cashes a check. Next thing, that five-dollar bill is smacked down on a filthy bar and the waiter puts it in his unwashed pocket and decides to drive downtown and comes to my window.”

“That will be next,” Macovich thought out loud, and the conversation was making him uneasy and causing him to wonder if he would ever touch money again. “We’ll have to wear gloves morning, noon, and night if we’re gonna pay for things. Thank God we don’t got to take money direct when we write tickets.”

“Yeah, you mighty lucky in that department,” Hooter said.

Macovich stepped out into the lane and held up his flashlight at the approaching Pontiac Grand Prix. It was an older model with dents, and his pulse quickened when he recognized New York plates and an expired inspection sticker. He walked over to the driver’s door, his hand conveniently touching the snap release of his holster.

“License and registration,” he said as the window cranked down, and he shone the flashlight on the frightened face of a Mexican boy who didn’t look old enough to drive and was obviously an illegal alien. “You speak English, sir?”

“Sí.”
The Mexican made no move to deliver either his driver’s license or the registration.

“Why don’t you ask him if he
understands
English,” Hooter loudly suggested from her booth, which had nothing
inside it except a stool, a fire extinguisher, and her Pleather pocketbook.

Macovich repeated Hooter’s question while the Mexican averted his eyes from the blinding scrutiny of the flashlight.

“No,” the Mexican said, getting more frightened by the second.

“No?” Macovich frowned. “Yeah? Well, if you don’t understand English, how did you understand it enough to know I was asking if you understood it?”

“Creo que no.”

“What he say?” Macovich turned around and looked at Hooter, who was hanging out of her booth now.

“Guess I may as well come on out since the lane’s all blocked with you and that big Pontiac,” she said to Macovich as she opened the door and stepped outside.

“He said that?” Macovich was baffled. “He said he’s getting out of his car? ’Cause it don’t look to me like he has any intention of getting out or cooperating in any way.”

Hooter caught only fragments of what Macovich was saying as she buttoned her overcoat and slipped a lipstick out of a pocket. She pecked her way over the asphalt in six-inch high-heeled red Pleather boots. One thing about being a toll collector was that it involved a constant exposure to the public. Hooter was fastidious about fashion and fresh make-up and making sure every dreadlock was in place and interwoven with bright, colorful beads.

“It ain’t good to not cooperate, honey.” Hooter peered through the Mexican’s open window. “Now you cooperate with this big trooper. Nobody wants no trouble, ’cause they be looking for a suspect right this very minute who could very well be you. So you best cooperate and not make things worse for yourself . . .”

“Hooter, don’t tell him so much,” Macovich whispered loudly in her ear, her perfume rushing up his nostrils and enveloping his brain. “What that you got on?”

“Poison.” She was pleased he’d noticed. “I got it at Target.”

“How’d you know we was looking for a suspect?” he whispered into her perfume again.

“Why else you be blocking off all the lanes except the
Exact Change line, huh?” she replied. “You think I was born yesterday? Well, I been around, let me tell you, and I’m the senior operator at this toll plaza.”

“Wooo, I wasn’t putting you down or nothing, Senior Operator.” Macovich teased her a little.

“Don’t you be smart mouthin’ me!”

“Wooo, I ain’t smart mouthin’ no one, least of all a pretty lady like yourself. How ’bout you and me having us a drink after our shifts?” He thought happily of the crisp hundred-dollar bill Cat had handed over after their quick helicopter lesson.

The Mexican was rigid in his seat, his eyes wide and shielded by a hand. He was shaking and gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were blanched.