Cornwell, Patricia - Andy Brazil 03 - Isle Of Dogs.txt

by Isle Of Dogs (lit)

  "Did you tell them not to videotape you?" I inquired, taking notes.

  "Nah."

  Thelma went on to tell me that she now charges a quarter for all photo opportunities while she works the cash register, and the added income makes it somewhat easier for her to tolerate the host of strangers who seem to find her Tangier gift shop exotic and unlike anything they've ever seen, which is inexplicable, she confided. None of the trinkets, such as the plastic lighthouses, crabs, crab pots, lobsters, fish, skiffs, and so on, are made by hand or in America. In fact, she added, lobsters are not common in the Chesapeake Bay and most islanders have never seen one except on TV or in seafood restaurant ads that regularly run in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

  From Spanky's, I continued my wanderings and happened by the medical clinic. I stepped inside and found no sign of a dentist, doctor, or nurse--only a lanky young man with blue eyes and a mop of blond hair. He was sitting in the dentist's chair, staring off, lost in reveries and completely unaware of my presence. I assumed he was a patient and the dentist would return momentarily, not realizing that the dentist was, in truth, being held hostage, since neither his abduction nor the threat of civil war had been made public at that time.

  "Hello?" I politely announced.

  The boy's eyes were glazed and he was unresponsive.

  "Are you there?" I asked.

  He wasn't.

  "I'm wondering if I might find any medical staff who have a minute to talk to me," I said. "I'm working on a history of our nation's beginning and present condition and believe Tangier Island is key."

  "The key is in my pocket." He suddenly blinked to and protectively covered his pocket with a hand. When he didn't recognize me, he was startled and jumped up from the chair. "What for are you doing here? I thought I locked the door!" He ran to the door and threw the bolt across.

  I heard muffled sounds coming from a back area and the scrape of a chair moving across the floor.

  "The dog's back than" The young man indicated the area the sound was coming from.

  "Why is he making a chair scrape?" I puzzled. "He tied up to it or something?"

  "Yass."

  The chair scraped some more.

  "It must be stuffy and lonely being tied up in there," I worried, not at all pleased by the idea of a dog tied to a chair inside a clinic. "Why don't we let him out so he can get a little air and attention?"

  "That's it!" The young man blocked the doorway leading to the area in question as the chair scraped again. "He bites. That's what for he's tied up. He's the dentist's dog."

  "Where's the dentist?"

  "Tied up, too."

  "Oh, he's busy. Well, maybe I can talk to him another time," I replied. "And what about your- teeth? I see you have braces and it appears you've had several extractions as well. And I'm noticing that your rubber bands keep flying off when you talk."

  "That's it!" Fonny Boy covered his mouth with a hand and looked embarrassed. "The dentist, he better mind his step!"

  "While we're chatting," I said, edging closer to the table, where a dental chart was out in plain view, "would you mind if I flipped through this chart and see what all you've had done? I assume this is your chart? Is your name Darren Shores?"

  "Ever one on Tanger calls me Fonny Boy."

  Fonny Boy and I fell into a conversation and he was very well versed in the lore of the island because of his fascination with the history of shipping, especially in the bay. As we got to know each other better and a level of vague trust developed, Fonny Boy got more specific and began to talk about pirates, or picaroons, as he called them. They used to be everywhere, he told me. At one time, there were so many pirate ships off the shores of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas that cities like Charleston were paralyzed. No one dared set sail out of the harbor for fear they would be seized by pirates who thought nothing of killing people in very unpleasant ways.

  Fonny Boy went into elaborate detail about Black-beard in particular, whose Christian name was Edward Drummon when he was an honest seaman in his home port of Bristol, England, in the late seventeenth century. When he decided to become a pirate, he changed his name to Edward Teach, which has frequently been misspelled in records as Thatch, Tache, and Tatch. After Queen Anne's War, Blackbeard sailed into Jamaica to go after French ships and began to cultivate the most vile, terrifying persona imaginable to entice other vessels to surrender without a second thought, assuming the warning flags weren't enough. He would braid his long beard into little pigtails and set them on fire with slow-burning matches, Fonny Boy said, and strap pistols, daggers, and a huge cutlass to his waist, and wear additional weapons on the bandoleer across his chest.

  Soon enough, Blackbeard and his flotilla began to haunt the North Carolina coast and the Chesapeake Bay. The people of Tangier would hoist the Jolly Roger whenever Blackbeard's ship was spotted nearby, and from time to time the ruthless, evil pirate himself would visit the island and drink Jamaican rum and carouse to his dark heart's content. Nobody wanted him on the island or slept much while he was visiting. Women and children hid inside their homes, and Blackbeard began to suppose that Tangier was an island of men only. This made his visits progressively shorter and less frequent. According to Fonny Boy and almost-nonexistent historical records, Blackbeard was most curious as to how an all-male island had survived down through the decades and could continue.

  The answer Blackbeard got was lost forever until a three-hundred-year-old account book was discovered. This extraordinary find, according to legend, somehow made it from Blackbeard's ship Adventure into the attic of a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the governor of Virginia during Blackbeard's bloody rampages. The account book focused on the disposition of the loot Black-beard took and offered details of his sadistic cruelty and lust for chopping people into pieces and shaking his empty rum cup at the heavens and daring God to defy him. Blackbeard's handwritten entries mentioned one hundred and forty barrels of cocoa and a cask of sugar he had stolen and buried under hay in a North Carolina barn. There was a cryptic reference to buried treasure that only Blackbeard and the devil knew the location of, and to this day it has not been found.

  I realized it wasn't possible that Tangier could have remained populated without women and pressed Fonny Boy for the explanation Blackbeard was given. Fonny Boy repeated what had been passed down through the generations.

  "Damnation seize your soul if you are lying to me!" Blackbeard thundered to a clever but untruthful islander named Job Wheeler, a childless widower who, as the story goes, invited the pirate into his home on an area of the island known today as Job's Cove.

  "I cannot spare the truth from you," Job told Black-beard, who was drinking cup after cup of rum and setting his beard on fire. "Although we had our beginnings in England long ago, we landed on this island by way of North Carolina."

  Job offered this blatant lie because he felt certain it would snag Blackbeard's attention, since it was well known that the pirate was in collusion with Charles Eden, the governor of North Carolina. For much of Blackbeard's nefarious career, he had navigated the shallow sounds and inlets of North Carolina with never a fear. Indeed, any plot hatched from other territories to defeat Blackbeard and his seadogs was always foiled by a letter from someone in North Carolina, much to the disgust of Virginia's Governor Spottswood, who was neither friendly with Blackbeard nor inclined for the pirate to remain in business or alive.

  "How can this be?" Blackbeard bellowed through curls of smoke, squinting one eye in a threatening manner that suggested Job best be telling "they God's truth or I will cut ye asunder into many pieces and send ye back from whence ye came, which is hell, ye villain!"

  "I am neither villain," Job promised. "From whence I came is North Carolina--not Hell--where ye have many friends and relations. Yet it cannot be known that we on this fair island originally came from North Carolina and managed to escape with our very lives because there was a terrible drought that withered our crops and parched our very tongues and we were
short of supplies, so we crowded into bateaus and made our way here, leaving no word except Crotoan carved into a fence post and Cro carved into a tree to give rise to the expectation that we had gone off to live with the Crotans."

  Blackbeard reminded Job that the name of the Crotan Indians was spelled C-R-O-T-A-N as opposed to C-R-O-T-O-A-N, to which Job replied, "Yay, that is God's truth. But it was not I who carved the tree, but another not as well learned as I."

  "Are you implying," I probed Fonny Boy, "that the Islanders descended from the Lost Colonists who vanished after Sir Walter Raleigh dropped them off on Roanoke Island? Well," I was talking to myself now, "it is a fact that when Walter Raleigh set out for the New World on May 8, 1587, his plan was to find a location on the Chesapeake Bay, but he was forced by hurricanes to settle farther south on Roanoke Island. So the Lost Colonists never wanted to be in North Carolina to begin with. I guess if you're going to relocate, you would certainly consider your original destination, and Tangier was described as a nice island, with the exception of there being no drinkable water.

  "However," I decided, "the chronology makes what Job told Blackbeard impossible, because the Lost Colonists were already lost by the time Smith headed to Virginia and supposedly discovered your island in 1608. So I am forced to dismiss this theory entirely. Furthermore, we can't prove, at least not to my satisfaction, that when Smith landed on Tangier, he wasn't really on Limbo Island, and all of you are therefore not Islanders but Limbonians."

  Fonny Boy had the vacant look again as he slouched in the dentist's chair, unfocused and twitching a little. The chair scraped again from somewhere in the back of the clinic and then banged loudly as it crashed to the floor, apparently overturned by the dentist's tethered dog, who may have been dreaming, too, or so I assumed at the time.

  "Well, I've got to run along," I told Fonny Boy. "I'll see what else I can find out about your people and why only Job Wheeler and Blackbeard knew the truth or the lies about Tangier's past. And also why, after Job died and Blackbeard eventually met his much-deserved violent end, those secrets and others remained hidden in the account book in the Spottswoods' attic."

  Fonny Boy's Rapid Eye Movement was picking up speed as he stared off in a trance, gripping the armrests of the dentist's chair as if he were watching an intense adventure movie. It was pointless to communicate with him further, and I left the clinic. I waved down a golf-cart taxi and headed back to the airstrip as theories and speculations clashed in my head and made little sense because I am neither a historian nor a historical novelist, although I do know people who are. As I set off for home in the helicopter, staying below 3,500 feet to avoid restricted area R 4006, then heading due south to avoid restricted area R 6609, I realized it was only fair and responsible for me to continue my arduous historical investigation on how this country started and what has happened to it since.

  "Watch out for that bird over there." My copilot pointed out a seagull that apparently didn't see us until the last second.

  "Wow, that was close," I commented as the bird dove under us, clipping its tail on a skid. "I hope he's all right." I nosed the helicopter west a few degrees to get a glimpse of the seagull as it sailed away, appearing to fly backward because we, of course, were going considerably faster than it.

  PS. To whoever is holding Popeye hostage, contact me before it's too late! And many thanks for the tips you, my faithful readers, have been sending me about Trish Thrash.

  Be careful out there!

  Fifteen

  The minute Windy Brees blew into Hammer's office, Hammer knew there was trouble. "Heavens to Betty! Have you seen what Trooper Truth just put up on his website?" Windy declared.

  "Yes," Hammer replied. "I saw what was up this morning."

  "No! He's put up something else, and you won't believe what it says!"

  "Put up something else?" Hammer was baffled, yet she was not about to let on that she had prior knowledge about Trooper Truth or his publication schedule. "That's interesting," she said. "I suppose I just assumed he posted only one essay a day."

  "Well, not so," Windy said. "Whoever he is, he is one proliferated writer. I wonder what he looks like and how old he is. He must be old to know so much. All that history and everything ..."

  "What makes you think Trooper Truth is a man?" Hammer inquired as she logged onto the website.

  "Well, he's so smart, for one thing."

  When Hammer began reading the essay, she ordered Windy to leave her office and shut the door. She got Andy on the phone.

  "That's it!?" she said in an outraged whisper.

  "A common Tangier expression," Andy remarked. "That's it! means the person saying it is really saying none of your business. For example, if I ask you if you're mad at me for not telling you about my secret mission, or will you be mad if I tell you that something awful was left at my house last night, and you say That's it!, you mean

  ..."

  "Meet me at.. . !" she interrupted him as she groped for a location.

  There was really no place in Richmond either one of them could go without being noticed, especially if they were together.

  "Meet me in the Ukrop's parking lot in fifteen minutes!" she decided angrily.

  "Which Ukrop's?" Andy asked over the line. "And I can explain everything."

  "Not over the phone, you're not. The Ukrop's at Stonypoint. We'll talk in the car."

  Major Trader had just read the essay, too, and he huffed and puffed as he hurried his considerable bulk into Governor Crimm's office.

  "Governor!" Trader exclaimed as he burst in without knocking. "Trooper Truth has been to Tangier and claims some island boy named Fonny Boy is the one holding the dentist hostage! He's a journalist who wears a disguise!"

  "What?" the governor inquired weakly as he emerged from his private bathroom and straightened his plaid vest, making sure the railroad watch that had been passed down for generations was safely tucked back into the watch pocket. "The island boy's a journalist? What island boy? And what in thunder are you talking about, and you know not to just walk in on me."

  "Fonny Boy's his name. Some island boy named Fonny Boy, and we've got a description," Trader excitedly said. "And no. Trooper Truth disguised himself as a journalist, not Fonny Boy."

  "He's disguising himself not as Fonny Boy but as a journalist?" Crimm fished his office magnifying glass out of a landfill of papers. "You're supposed to be a bloody press secretary and you butcher the King's English, simply butcher it. Constantly and consistently. And for God's sake, don't you ever take your suits to the dry cleaners? Doesn't your wife complain?" The governor cast an enlarged eye over Trader's slovenly bulk. "You have chili on your shirt and your tie's too short. You look like Big Daddy after he's been on a goddamn bender, and I'm thinking very seriously about firing you one of these days."

  "Please, Governor!" Trader cried out. "Don't kill the messenger. I'm not the one leaking all this classified and embarrassing information onto the Internet!"

  "I certainly know that." The governor weakly seated himself behind his desk and motioned for Trader to take a chair and lower his voice. "Whoever Trooper Truth is, he's at least a writer."

  "Now, I take that very personally," Trader said. "That was naughty, naughty to insult me that way. I think you should apologize for wounding my creative sensibilities."

  "The only thing creative about you is your rendition of the truth," the governor retorted. "And if I weren't so preoccupied with important matters, including my health, I would catch you in your lies more often and do something about it."

  "How is your health?" Trader sweetly asked.

  "Did you bring me this latest essay?"

  Trader unfolded the printout and smoothed it open on the ink blotter. The governor was silent for many long minutes as he moved his magnifying glass over Trooper Truth's words and grunted now and then and made other inarticulate sounds of disapproval, surprise, and constitutional discomfort.

  "There's only one thing to do," he decided in his mo
st sovereign tone. "We're going to have to find a special operative who will finger this Trooper Truth scoundrel and bring him to justice."

  "Bring him to justice for what, Governor? I don't believe he's committed a crime."

  "Why, I believe he might just be guilty of treason, don't you? Isn't he sticking his nose in state business and referring to my policies as being idiotic? Furthermore, I don't appreciate this tireless obsession with pirates, when we've been working so hard to play down that problem. Now Blackbeard's even dragged into the fray and is on everybody's mind."

  "I know, I know." Trader couldn't have agreed with him more as he gleefully thought of his Captain Bonny website. "We certainly don't want the public thinking that Blackbeard was welcome in Virginia or was ever even in Virginia, not even once. What we need to do is emphasize that Blackbeard and North Carolina were as thick as thieves, and it was our own Governor Spottswood who . . ."