Isle of Dogs (29 page)

“I’ll try,” she replied. “But I’ve never kept a secret before.”

B
ARBIE
Fogg routinely listened to secrets and had a few of her own. Worried that Lennie might have secrets, too, she decided to take the next exit and loop around so she could return to the Exact Change tollbooth and confide to Hooter that Barbie was worried about her marriage.

“Lennie’s leaving town and came right out and said he wants a girlfriend! You don’t think he’s having affairs on the road because I won’t have sex anymore, do you?” Barbie poured out her heart to Hooter. “Well, anyway, Lennie sells real estate, meaning he’s often at home with nothing much to do, so he usually watches the twins and certainly has plenty of time for affairs. And to make matters worse, he’s heading out to Charlotte for an important meeting and I’ll pretty much be stuck at the house. Meaning it’s possible I won’t be seeing you for a whole week.”

Both Barbie and Hooter were disappointed. It seemed they had been friends forever.

“Oh dear, I didn’t realize how much I’m going to miss you,” Barbie confessed.

“Lord, Lord, I gonna have separate anxiety without you coming through my booth! Who I gonna talk to anymore? Why he gotta go to Charlotte? You know, I get so sick and tired of people going to North Carolina. Like it some kind of promise land or something. You know, I never even been to North Carolina. What so special about it, huh?”

“You got any vacation time with the city?” Barbie asked as more cars piled up behind her and blared their horns. “Why don’t you come to the NASCAR race with me tomorrow night? I would just love it and you could see all those handsome drivers. But you’d need to take the afternoon off because I like to get there early and hang around the pits and wait for the drivers to come out and climb into their cars. Sometimes they let you get your picture taken with them. Oh, if only you knew what that was like! Standing arm in arm with a
handsome stock-car driver in his tight, colorful fireproof jumpsuit!”

“Now, I sure as heck never been to no NASCAR race and I never seen no Afric-American drivers, neither. So I wouldn’t know.” Hooter paid no attention to the endless line of impatient motorists. “Maybe I take the whole day off! I ain’t had no vacation since my sister got married and I was in the wedding. The mattress of honor.” Hooter beamed at the memory of being decked out in that long pink dress with see-through sleeves and beads and bows. “That was sure a time, let me tell you, girlfriend.”

“Yeah! How about visiting with your fucking girlfriend some other time, you queerbaits, and hurry up!” Bubba Loving was back in his truck with mud flaps.

“What on earth is queerbait?” Barbie asked as she jotted down her phone number on a Post-it. “Something you catch strange fish with? And why is that same vulgar man screaming about fishing?”

“Take one to know one!” Hooter yelled back at Bubba.

“Here, sweetie,” Barbie said to Hooter, “you ring me up in the next few hours. I’ll be at the Baptist Campus Ministry, and you just call and let me know if you can come to the race so I don’t give the ticket to some other lucky person. Please come! Oh dear, I just love having girlfriends to talk to!”

“I just might do it. In fact, I will, I will. Damn right I will.” Hooter was getting excited by the idea. “You count me in unless I can’t get no one to cover my booth for me. How ’bout you pick me up right here at, well, let’s see. What time?”

“Two o’clock sharp.”

“I’ll slide on home and change and be waiting for you right here at my booth unless something come up. Then we have plenty of time to talk about your rotten sex life.”

“Wouldn’t that be wonderful.” Barbie cheerfully waved goodbye as she drove on and forgot the seventy-five cent toll, setting off the alarms. “The rainbow is working! Magic, magic everywhere!”

“Sweet-talk your girlfriend another time when we aren’t waiting until Heck freezes over to go through the tollbooth!” Lamonia yelled from her Dodge Dart.

Lamonia was understandably in a foul mood. First, she had
gotten handcuffed because of her bad night vision, now she was stuck in traffic because two interracial lesbians were flirting at the tollbooth and a racist redneck was engaging in road rage. What had gone so wrong in the world? Dear Lord, have mercy, Lamonia thought. The entire planet was self-destructing and it was just a matter of time before Jesus would get fed up and come back, and Lamonia wasn’t ready for the Rapture. No, sir. She told Jesus every Sunday to please hold on for a while, because Lamonia had so many friends and neighbors who were going to be left behind if He came in on a cloud and the Rapture lifted up all Believers.

“Give your life to Jesus,” Lamonia said to Hooter as she fed a dollar bill into a cotton-gloved hand.

“You tell it, girlfriend,” Hooter said, dropping three quarters into the bin and returning a quarter change.

“I’m not your girlfriend or anybody’s girlfriend!” Lamonia wasn’t the least bit subtle about it. “Ask forgiveness for your sins and pray to Jesus. Ask Him to take your life and do something with it, you hear me? Because He’s coming soon, and you don’t want to be sitting in that little booth of yours and giving in to perversions with strangers and suddenly find half the cars coming through don’t have drivers ’cause they’ve been Raptured up into Heaven!”

“Tell it,” Hooter encouraged the pulpiteer. “You tell it, girl.”

Lamonia needed no encouragement. “Two men are working in a field, and suddenly one of them is gone. Two women are doing laundry in the Laundromat, and suddenly, one of them is gone. You’ll be taking toll money, and suddenly half the drivers will be gone and you just better hope you aren’t still sitting in your booth, because if you are, that means you’ve been left behind!”

“I ready for the Rapture, girl,” Hooter assured Lamonia as the two of them exchanged phone numbers. “Oh yes, I ready and looking forward to it. Always have been looking forward to it! Jesus be coming back. I always knew He would.” Hooter stared up at the ceiling of her booth. “You come on now, Je-sus. You just come right on. I be waiting for you and won’t even charge you no toll when you float down on your cloud!”

“No!” Lamonia protested. “Don’t tell Him to come now! There’s too much work to do, you silly woman! Look out
there at all them sinners! Just miles and miles of them. Pray for them first, child!”

Hooter gazed out at miles of honking cars.

“Yeah, you right, girl. Most them folks out there ain’t ready for Jesus. Look how upset and nasty they is. Hmmm hmmm.” Hooter shook her head sadly. “So we ask Jesus to hold off a little longer. Just give us a little time, Jesus,” she prayed loudly as Lamonia lurched out of the tollbooth and rear-ended another car. “Please, Lord in Heaven, just give me Saturday afternoon off, you got that? Just one little vacation,” Hooter prayed. “That all I ask, Jesus.”

 “Dear Lord in Heaven,” Dr. Faux prayed as he and Fonny Boy drifted in the bateau. “We’ve been out here all night and half the morning, and I’m so cold and hungry I don’t think I’ll survive another hour. Please help us.”

Fonny Boy had given up on trying to get into the locked compartment and was blowing sour sounds on his harmonica and trying out various methods of hand effects and breathing techniques. He was on the verge of wishing that he and the dentist would be captured and returned to the storeroom, and regretted he had not bothered to carry sodas and food on board. But then, he had assumed they would reach the mainland long before supplies became an issue.

“Lord-a-mercy, I reckon the current’s taking us clean back to the island,” he told Dr. Faux.

“I don’t see land at all. Not anywhere, Fonny Boy. And if we were near the island, we would have been spotted by now and maybe blindfolded and forced to walk the plank. I think we might just have drifted into the sanctuary, and if so, no watermen will be in the area, and we will languish and die out here.”

“Nah,” Fonny Boy replied. “You can make out the current.” He pointed out gentle ripples of moving water. “But nigh as
peace, they’ll figure we made off in the bateau and if we don’t make a hurry now, they’ll be on us and we’ll have to cite the Bible!”

“Unless they figure we’re on the mainland, and you know they won’t look for us there. You sure you can’t remember the combination to that damn padlock? Maybe there’s a flare gun in that compartment or even a mirror for sending signals.”

Fonny Boy had known the combination at one time, and he was terribly frustrated as he strained to recall it. He had tried every birthday in his family, Tangier’s zip code, and several telephone numbers, all to no avail. He rapped the harmonica on the side of the bateau to knock out excess spit and tried a little straight harp, playing a melody in the key of C, and as usual, starting with hole 4.

“Think hard, Fonny Boy,” Dr. Faux tried to encourage him. “Usually people use tricks to remember things, so my guess is your dad used some sort of association to come up with a combination that he wouldn’t forget. Are there any other numbers that might be important to your dad? What about your parents’ anniversary?”

Fonny Boy couldn’t remember that, either. He drew on the low end of the harmonica, trying a little blues jamming, like his hero, Dan Aykroyd.

“Now, I know some of the watermen use compasses,” the dentist kept trying. “Possible there is a compass heading your father routinely uses when he comes out to check the crab pots?”

The words
crab pot
floated out of the barely moving bateau, then settled into the water and began to drift to the bottom, where a large collection of
Callinectes
(Greek for “beautiful swimmer”)
sapidus
(Latin for “tasty”) were enjoying the quiet and security of the crab sanctuary. Clustered together were the fugitives from the bucket, and one of them, an especially handsome jimmy with big blue claws and arms, decided to investigate the human voices and faint strains of a harmonica. He swam up through the murk, leaving his friends behind in a cloud of silt, and from some twenty feet below the surface of the bay he spied the bottom of a bateau and heard voices again.

“Nah. He don’t use neither compass. Don’t need one,
noways,” a young male said, and the crab recognized the voice as belonging to that skinny blond Islander who was always talking about pirate treasure when he was out potting in the dark early mornings.

“Hmmm. What about your post office box?” another voice asked, and the jimmy didn’t recognize this one, but he sounded as if he was from the mainland.

Fonny Boy tried that number, but the padlock wasn’t interested.

“A lucky number, maybe? Does your dad have a lucky number?”

The only luck-related number Fonny Boy could think of was thirteen, and the padlock wouldn’t budge. He tried playing straight harp style and “Oh Susannah” was almost recognizable.

“What about a favorite food or drink that might have a number in it?” Dr. Faux was not going to give up. “Such as Heinz fifty-seven sauce, Seven-Up, or two-alarm chili?”

“My daddy, he likes the Seven-Up,” Fonny Boy said with a glimmer of hope. “He’s right fond of it with Spanky’s ice cream, drinks more’an it of anybody I ever seen. But the combination, it takes four numbers and seven is only one number.”

“What if you added the
up
part?”

Fonny Boy decided to stay in the middle of the harmonica and stick to blow notes.

“Is there a number that might mean
up,
Fonny Boy? Come on, think!”

“The compass, it ain’t got neither
up
on it. Only north, south, east, and west,” Fonny Boy replied.

“Up could be north, now couldn’t it?” Dr. Faux persisted. “You know how people say they’re going
up
north to New York or
down
south to Florida. Try three-sixty. That’s three numbers and is due north. So maybe he used seven and three-sixty for
seven-up
.”

The jimmy’s fusiform body propelled itself quickly back down to the bottom, where he warned his frightened friends.

“There’s seven of ’em up thar!” he exclaimed. “And they’se breaking the law by potting in the sanctutary and I’m of a mind to get ’em warranted!”

The jimmy assumed that the seven watermen up there in the
bateau were a posse looking for the crabs and the trout, although the crabs hadn’t seen the trout for quite some time. Or maybe the
Seven-Up gang,
as the jimmy began to think of them, were pirates the governor had promised immunity to if they would find the crabs and the trout and return them to the mansion in the bucket. Blue crabs were quite familiar with pirates and were neither impressed with nor afraid of them. Pirates were too angry and drunk to bother chasing after crabs, and this had been true for hundreds of years. Nor was the life of any crustacean made a whit better by all of the old cannons, coins, and jewels that crabs routinely scuttled over on the bottom of the bay. Crabs frankly didn’t give a damn about treasure.

But that blond Islander named Fonny Boy certainly did, the jimmy thought as he scuttled through billowing silt to a shelf in the bay floor, where the wreckage of a sloop appeared in the murk. The old wreck had been blasted with cannon fire and sank in a shoal, and over the centuries the current had nudged the broken vessel along the bottom of the bay until it had settled in its present location. The jimmy rooted around near a rusting anchor and seized a small piece of iron. He paddled furiously with his swimming legs and sculled back up to the bateau, climbed on the small outboard motor, and tossed the piece of iron up in the air. It landed in Fonny Boy’s lap right when he was in the middle of practicing a
fish face
by sucking in his cheeks to play cleaner single notes on his harmonica.

“Why, I’ll swagger!” Fonny Boy cried out in surprise. “Look!”

He studied the piece of iron and knew it was extremely old and very likely from a sunken ship.

“Treasure’s nigh as peace falling from Heaven and it’s for to tell there’s a picaroon ship down thar!” he exclaimed in uncontrollable excitement as he realized that finally, after such a hard life, he had met his destiny. “We have to mark the spot or we likete lose it!”

The only way to mark the location was to drop a crab pot into the water, and minutes later, the fugitive crabs watched a wire cage descend through the depths and dangle well above the bottom, because the rope was too short.

The jimmy crooked his funny mouth into a smile, certain
what would happen next because the Islanders were so predictable. The Island boy’s greed would excite him into poor judgment, and soon enough, the Seven-Up gang would be in jail.

P
OSSUM
’
S
scheme was going along well, too, as he cut up different colored T-shirts and sewed and glued the pieces into a pattern that was beginning to resemble a flag.

“See what I’m doing, girl?” Possum whispered to Popeye.

He smoothed the flag on the bed, and Popeye was startled by a grinning skull smoking a cigarette.

“We got us a NASCAR flag for the races,” Possum proudly whispered. “See, we hang it up at the pit where we pretend to be a pit crew and I’ll make sure somebody look for the flag and come save us. Or if that don’t work, maybe Smoke will like the flag so much, he’ll be nicer to us, and when we escape to Tangerine Island, I’ll find a way to sneak off with you and we’ll run to the nearest fisherman’s house.”

Possum dipped the needle in and out of the flag, sewing on letters that spelled
Jolly Goodwrench.

“Then I’ll give you back to Sup’intendent Hammer, and the police will forget all about me shooting at Moses Custer. Maybe I even get to come see you now and then. Maybe Sup’intendent Hammer give me a job babysitting you. What do you think?”

Popeye thought this was a wonderful idea. Possum continued to piece together the flag with the T-shirt scraps, needle and thread, and Super Glue. The result was not quite what he had intended, because he was realizing that the flag would be one-sided and would have to be mounted rather than displayed from a pole, antenna, or stick. Otherwise, he was pleased with the result, which was not recognizable as NASCAR or a Jolly Roger, but a hybrid of both.

Possum tacked the finished work up on the wall and sat on his bed imagining Smoke’s reaction as Possum worried about going to the race on Saturday and wondered what plans and hopes might fly apart. Possum sure didn’t want any more trouble. If only he could go back to his family’s basement and wander the streets after dark again without any fear of being
arrested. Possum had seen on the TV news that Moses was still in the hospital, and thank goodness, his condition was now stable. Possum’s heart trembled as he recalled pointing the pistol at the poor man on the pavement and jerking the trigger.

He still didn’t understand what had gotten into him, except that he was frightened of Smoke. Possum also knew that if he acted different from the other dogs or seemed to have a conscience, he was going to end up with a bullet in his head one of these days. Oh, how his momma would scream and cry if she heard on the news that Possum had been murdered, his body dumped somewhere along with the carcass of a little black-and-white dog. If only Ben Cartwright or Little Joe or Hoss could help him out. But in all the episodes of
Bonanza
that Possum had watched, he had never seen a black boy on the Ponderosa.

“Maybe he don’t like blacks,” Possum talked to himself as he envisioned Ben Cartwright with his leather vest and snow white hair. “Blacks was slaves. So who I’m fooling thinking anybody on a horse is gonna ride in to rescue me? Least the Cartwrights don’t fly no ’Federate flag, though.” Possum gazed at his Jolly Goodwrench flag displayed behind the TV. “Never seen no ’Federate flag or slaves on the Ponderosa neither, just Hop Sing and he’s Chinese and could come and go as he pleased, long as he cooked and cleaned.”

Possum wondered if there might be something he could do to make it up to the Cartwrights, who certainly must be terribly disappointed in his recent run of criminal behavior.

“I sorry about Moses,” Possum was talking to Hoss now.

“Well, little buddy, what you did was wrong,” Hoss answered.

“B’lieve me, I know, Hoss. But I was scared and Smoke woulda killed me or beat me bad and maybe drowned Popeye if I hadn’t pulled the trigger. I wish I could do it over and run away before it was too late. But it is too late, and here I am in the clubhouse.”

“You gotta make it right, Little Buddy,” Hoss said from beneath his white ten-gallon hat. “What’s done is done, but it ain’t too late to make it right.”

“How?” Possum asked Ben this.

Ben was sitting high on his horse, ready to ride off to Carson City on an errand. He looked down at Possum and smiled a little.

“Why don’t you start with calling Moses and apologizing?” he suggested, flicking the reins. “Then you’re probably going to need to turn yourself in to Sheriff Coffey,” he added as he galloped off.

Possum sat in the dark and slowly flipped open his cell phone. His heart thudded and he strained to make sure no one was stirring inside the RV. He heard not a sound and called directory assistance and for fifty cents was connected to the hospital where he’d heard on the news Moses Custer was a patient.

“Moses Custer, please,” Possum said quietly.