Isle of Dogs (27 page)

 Possum read the latest Trooper Truth essay several times and felt certain that the anonymous web crusader suspected that the assailants he mentioned were Smoke and the road dogs.

“Why wouldn’t he figure it out?” Possum whispered to Popeye, who was snoring on the bed. “Everybody knows Smoke’s broke out of jail and is up to no good, ’cause he ain’t capable of being up to anything else. Oh Lord, Popeye, what if the police somehow find our RV and haul us away, or Smoke gets in a shoot-out with ’em and all of us end up dead?”

Popeye instantly woke up.

“It ain’t fair!” Possum went on, getting angrier. “What’d they have to go and kill that Seven-Eleven lady for? Now there’s a ’scription of Smoke on the news ’cause somebody saw the shooting!”

Possum took a deep breath and glanced back at the closed door several times.

“Well, it’s time I did something,” he whispered to Pop-eye. “And I’m gonna do it and just hope Smoke don’t find out!”

Possum typed an e-mail.

Dear Trooper Truth,

That Trader man you just wrote about is a pirate on the web who calls hisself Captin Bonny. I figured it out ’cause of what you said the other day on your web about Trader being relations with that woman pirate who I guess must be dead now.

I think you could trap Captin Bonny by sending him an e-mail and setting him up. Just say you will leave him a waterproof suitcase full of what he’s got coming to him and when he shows up, get him! Make up a screen name that’s the same as mine so he thinks the e-mail’s from me.

P.S. There is a score planned that has to do with Popeye! That Trader man is the one who set her up to be stolt!

Possum clicked on
SEND NOW
and glanced at the closed door with relief. Thank God, neither Smoke nor any of the other road dogs had seen what Possum had just done. Smoke would kill him for sure if he caught Possum sending an e-mail to Trooper Truth and turning in a source. Smoke would stomp, kick, and beat on Possum, leaving him for dead, just like Smoke had done to that innocent man Moses Custer, who, even as Possum was thinking all this, was being handed the telephone inside his hospital room.

I
T
’
S
the governor,” Nurse Carless said in a blaring voice as the cuff of her nurse’s uniform knocked over a cup on Moses’s food tray and spilled orange juice all over the front of his hospital gown.

“You sure?” Moses didn’t believe her and thought if she caused one more accident, he was going to find the emergency alarm button and push it hard. “I mean, what if it’s one of them pirates trying to find me?”

Nurse Carless took the phone away from him, clunking him in the chin. “I’m afraid he’s not here,” she said over the line as she wiped up orange juice and elbowed Moses in the Adam’s apple.

“No!” Moses grabbed the phone back from her. “What if it
is
the gov’ner? I can’t be hanging up on him! Who is this, if
you don’t mind me asking?” he said into the phone. “Before we go looking around room to room for Moses, assuming he’s even in this hospital or still alive, we need to make sure who wants to know.”

“This is Governor Crimm.”

“Which Gov’ner Crimm?” Moses asked, still unconvinced.

“Governor Bedford Crimm the Fourth. There is no other Governor Crimm because each time there’s been one, it’s always been me. I’ve been the governor of Virginia three times now. Or is it four?”

“We’re still looking for this Moses person,” Moses said, not ready to trust the familiar voice quite yet. “But while I got you on the line, you mind I ask the names of your mama, wife, children, and any pets, and their ages and shoe sizes?”

“I most certainly do mind your asking that and anything else personal,” the governor replied, deeply offended.

“Okay, okay. Hold on a second.”

Moses put his hand over the phone and his heart began beating hard. It was the governor, all right, because no governor was going to answer personal questions like that, and a pirate trying to trick Moses into thinking it was the governor on the phone would have made up the answers.

“Hello?” Moses said in a slightly higher-pitched voice. “Moses Custer speaking.”

“Yes, yes,” Crimm said with a touch of impatience as he sat in his upstairs mansion office, dimly staring out at the fine view of the circular drive and guard booth. “Things seem very disorganized at your hospital, and whoever answers the phone is very rude.”

“I tell you, it’s a mess here,” the strange, squeaky voice replied over the line. “Ouch!” he said to someone. “You’re caught on my cat tube! Don’t you be accidentally tugging that out again! It hurts like hell when you stick it back in!”

A muffled argument ensued, and the governor made out that Moses was tangled up in his catheter and refused to let the nurse remove it and switch him over to a bedpan.

“I ain’t using no pan!” Moses declared. “Knowing you, that pan will get slopped all over me and the bed! Just leave in my cat tube and take my tray outta here ’fore you spill something else or poke me with that fork! Okay, Gov’ner. I sure am sorry
about that. But something wrong with that nurse. I tell you, she got some kind of condition, like Parkerson’s or muscular dysentery, and every time she get near me, I get banged up as bad as I was after them pirates beat on me and stolt my truck full of punkins.”

“Well, I’ll certainly make sure I never go to that particular hospital,” the governor said as he scanned the latest Trooper Truth essay with his magnifying glass.

“Oh no, sir. You should never even drive past this place, and for sure, don’t never come inside. And it’s my heartfelt hope, Gov’ner, that you don’t ever need no hospital. I pray daily for your good health and prosperation.”

“What?” The governor returned to the advice Trooper Truth had directed personally to him. “What’s that about perspiration?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Moses puzzled, as Crimm assumed that the poor man must be heavily sedated.

“Now, listen here.” Crimm got to the point. “The terrible attack on you has come to my attention and I wanted to see how you’re doing and let you know that I have a personal interest in your condition and intend to make sure that you are protected when you leave the hospital.”

“You do?” Moses’s voice went up several more notes as what sounded like a food tray crashed to the floor.

“Of course I do! You’re a Virginian and it’s my sworn oath to take care of every citizen in this uncommon and magnificent Commonwealth of ours. Now, when are you checking out of there?”

The governor watched as the well-mannered Trooper Brazil drove through the front gates and parked his unmarked car in front of the mansion. Crimm couldn’t remember if there was a reason for the young man to show up this morning, but it seemed it had something to do with Regina, and this was a tremendous relief. Regina needed something to occupy her attention, and the governor needed someone to protect Moses Custer.

“I believe they’re saying I can go home ’fore the day out, assuming that nurse don’t break my head or give me the wrong medicine,” Moses was saying. “I sure do appreciate this. I can’t believe I’m talking to the gov’ner hisself! Here I
am being beat on one minute and all my punkins gone, then next thing the gov’ner hisself is on the phone saying I’m gonna be protected. And the gov’ner hisself even said he was sorry about what happened, even if it wasn’t his fault, and I wasn’t going to be in no kind of trouble for all them punkins clogging up the river.”

“Of course, you’re in no kind of trouble,” the governor said as he watched Andy get out of the car and Regina bound down the front steps, dressed in safari clothes.

“By the way,” the governor said in an effort to end the conversation and create a goodwill press situation. “Saturday night, you’ll fly in the helicopter with me and sit in my box at the Winston Series race. And a state trooper named Andy Brazil will be at the hospital to safely escort you home.”

“My Lord in heaven!” Moses was surprised and delighted. “I ain’t never been to no real NASCAR race, not once in my life. You got any idea how hard it is to get tickets or find a parking place? I musta woke up in Oz!”

C
RIMM
made his way out of his office, preoccupied with questions about minihorses and what it would be like to be led around every minute. He supposed he might as well give himself up to it. His vision was getting worse daily. This morning, when he had made his way down the mansion’s sweeping staircase, he’d had to hold on to the banister with both hands. Then he’d sat in the Windsor chair in the ladies’ parlor again and ordered two eggs over easy and a strip of crisp bacon. When no one responded, he had gotten up and wandered across the entrance way into the men’s parlor and tried again. Finally, he’d ended up inside the elevator, where Pony had found him moments later as he was carrying fresh linens up to the second floor.

“Where am I?” the governor had puzzled as Pony led him to the family breakfast room.

“Have a seat, Governor,” Pony had said as he pulled out a chair and draped a napkin over the governor’s lap. “Did you sleep well, sir?”

“I didn’t,” Regina had answered as she piled butter on a mountain of grits. “I keep having the same bad dream.”

Since no one at the table had seemed the least bit interested in her dream, she had decided to tell Andy about it the minute she climbed into his unmarked car.

“It’s just like last time,” she started in. “I don’t know what it is about tires. Why do you think I keep dreaming about tires? One dream after another, there’s all these tires rolling down the highway with no cars attached, just rolling all by themselves.”

“Where are you while this is happening?” Andy asked her as he fastened his seat belt and indicated she should do the same.

“In my own bed, as if it’s any of your business.”

“In relation to the tires,” Andy rephrased the question.

“I’m jumping out of their way. What do you think?” she retorted.

“You’re on foot, then.”

“Of course I am! None of us are allowed to drive while Papa’s governor. We have to be driven around everywhere, and I’m sick and tired of it.”

“I think it’s pretty apparent why you’re having tire dreams,” Andy said. “You feel like you aren’t going anywhere. You’re like a car with no tires or tires with no car, and in either case, you are stuck on life’s highway, helpless and threatened and frustrated and feeling that the world is passing you by.”

The governor and the First Lady watched Regina and Andy through the window.

“They seem to be arguing,” the First Lady observed.

“We can’t have another dog,” the governor decided.

“Who said anything about another dog, dearest?”

“I can’t get a Seeing Eye dog,” the governor said. “Trooper Truth’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to Frisky to have another dog in the mansion. Maybe a cat, but I don’t think they have Seeing Eye cats, and I hate cats.”

“I’m sure they can’t train cats that way, dearest,” Mrs. Crimm said. “I would think they would jump up on things and crawl under other things or simply do nothing, and that would be pretty tricky if a cat did all that while you were tied to it.”

“They don’t tie you to the animals,” Faith said as she walked in on the conversation and jealously watched her dreadful younger sister leaving with the handsome trooper.
“You hold on to a little handle. And I just read in Trooper Truth that they have Seeing Eye horses, too, and he wants you to get one immediately. I don’t think Frisky would mind a horse, Papa.”

“Well, we most certainly can’t have a horse in the mansion,” Mrs. Crimm protested.

“I want one,” the governor decided. “Today.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about Regina going to the morgue,” Mrs. Crimm worried as Andy and Regina drove out of sight.

“Maybe it would be good for her,” the governor considered. “Might make her count her blessings and stop complaining so much.”

“I agree,” Faith said. “She should be happy she’s alive.”

The governor walked away and bumped into a life-size portrait of Lady Astor.

“Excuse me,” he muttered.

B
ARBIE
Fogg was bumping into things as well this morning. Bleary from too many lemonades, she collided with a sharp corner of the bed, cracked her funny bone on the toaster, and just seconds ago, almost bumped into the car in front of her as her attention wandered all over the interstate. Usually, when she drove her minivan to the Baptist Campus Ministry, where she was a volunteer counselor, nobody paid much attention to her. But other motorists were certainly staring at her this morning, and in her stuporous state, she was finding their scrutiny very distracting.