The governor broke out in a heavy cold sweat as the first explosion reverberated through his hollow organs in an awesome, foul wave and rolled with gathering momentum toward his orifice. Bedford Crimm IV's submarine armed its torpedoes and slammed shut its sphincter muscle hatch as he fled with great commotion to the nearest powder room.
Six
Once a week, Dr. Faux took the ferry to Tangier Island, where he donated his time and skills to people who had no local physicians, dentists, or veterinarians. It was his mission in life, he often said, to help the less privileged watermen and their families, who were unaware of his unusual billing practices and creative coding that routinely defrauded Virginia's Medicaid program.
Dentists, Dr. Faux thought, had no choice but to supplement their incomes at the expense of the government, and he sincerely believed that subjecting the Islanders to unnecessary or shoddy or fake procedures was only fair in light of his great sacrifice. Who else would come to this forsaken island, after all? Well, nobody, he reminded everyone he worked on or pretended to work on. He adjusted a lamp and moved a mirror around Fonny Boy's back molars.
"Seems to be a lot of commotion out there," Dr. Faux commented, deciding that the tooth he had just filled would require another root canal. "Now Fonny Boy, I strongly remind you to cut back on the soda pops. How many a day are you drinking? Be honest."
Fonny Boy held up five fingers as Dr. Faux looked out the window at all the women and children washing a mysterious painted stripe on the street.
"Entirely too many," he admonished Fonny Boy, who was fourteen, tall and lanky, with windblown sun-bleached hair and a nickname he had earned because of his funny habit of shirttailing and progging-or wading about with a stick or net, not in search of crabs but treasure. "You're clearly more susceptible to cavities than most folks," Dr. Faux pointed out the same thing he did to all of his island patients. "So I think you should at least switch to diet drinks, but preferably water."
Fonny Boy had spent most of his life on and in the water, and for him to drink it would be like a farmer eating dirt.
"Nah, I can't drink it," he said, and his numb lips and tongue felt ten times their normal size. "I'm so swelled up, I'm likete choke!"
"What about bottled water? They have some really good ones these days with fruit flavors and lots of fizz." Dr. Faux continued to stare out the window. "Why does that spotter plane keep circling overhead? And who is that soaking wet trooper with a paint bucket and a bottle of Evian and why is everybody chasing him down the street? Well, while I've got you doped up, I may as well adjust your braces."
Dr. Faux paused to jot down several codes and notes on Fonny Boy's thick dental chart.
"Nah!" Fonny Boy protested. "That gives my mouth the soreness. The braces, they are good enough save for the little rubber bands always flying out for neither good cause."
Fonny Boy had never wanted braces in the first place. Nor had he been happy when the dentist had insisted on pulling four perfectly good teeth earlier in the year. Fonny Boy hated going to the dentist and often complained to his parents that Dr. Faux was a picaroon, which was the Tangier word for pirate.
"He gave me a look at a photo of his car," Fonny Boy had said just the other day. "He got a huge black Merk and his lady got one, too, only of a different color. So how come he can have cars so dear if he works on ever one of us for neither money?"
It was a good question, but as usual, nobody took Fonny Boy seriously, and in part this was because of his nickname. His neighbors and teachers found him amusing and peculiar and loved to trade tales about his poking through the trash-strewn shore for treasure and his uncontrollable compulsion to make music.
"I swanny," Fonny Boy overheard his aunt Ginny Crockett comment after a recent Sunday prayer meeting. "He has a mind that ransacking the shore's gonna land him a barrel a silver dollars. Heee! His poor mom's always blaring at him, and I can't say as I fault her. She's done all what she can for that boy, and on back of that, I wish he's keep quite on the juice harp."
"I'm a die! He totes that juice harp everywhere and sure plays a pretty tune." Ginny's friend said the opposite of what she meant, because it was everyone's opinion that when Fonny Boy played the harmonica, which was constantly, he made nothing but an awful racket.
"His daddy ought to give him the dickens, but he's always bragging on that boy," Ginny replied, and in this instance, she meant exactly what she said, because Fonny Boy's father was hellbent on believing that his only son was the envy of the island.
"Soon as we get these braces off," Dr. Faux said as he pulled on a new pair of surgical gloves that would be billed for three times their value, "I'm going to recommend crowns for eight of your front teeth. You up for a little blood work this morning?" he added, because Dr. Faux had discovered there was quite a market for selling blood to shady medical researchers who were doing genetic studies of closed populations.
"Nah!" Fonny Boy jerked in the chair and gripped the armrests so tightly his knuckles blanched.
"Not to worry about crowns, Fonny Boy. I'll use precious alloys and you'll have a million-dollar smile!"
Just then, the old black telephone rang inside the clinic. The phone dated from the days when cords were covered with cloth insulation, and as usual, there was a lot of static.
"Clinic," Dr. Faux answered.
"I need to talk at Fonny Boy," a male voice said through loud crackling and humming over the line. "He thar?"
"That you, Hurricane?" the dentist asked Fonny Boy's father, who went by the nickname Hurricane because he had a temper like one. "You're due in for a checkup and cleaning and blood work."
"Let me talk at Fonny Boy afore the devil flies in me!"
"It's for you," Dr. Faux said to his patient.
Fonny Boy got out of the chair and took the receiver as he swatted at a lethargic fly. "Yass?"
"Look a' here! Lock up the door tight as an arster!" Fonny Boy's father said urgently. "Don't turn the dentist out! Now and again we got to do things for cussedness, honey boy. It's all what we know to do in a situation like this one here. That dentist mommucked up your mouth again?"
"Yass! He wouldn't do nothing to me, Daddy!" Fonny Boy said, which was over the left or talking backwards and meant, of course, that the dentist intended to mangle Fonny Boy's mouth badly.
"Well, don't you be out of heart," his father said, encouraging his son not to be depressed or discouraged. "We gonna give him a dost of his own medicine and make the example of him, and break the police of going on us all the time. We are all kin together, honey boy. Now you keep quite and we'll be right thar!"
"Oh my blessed!" Fonny Boy exclaimed as he sprang to the door and locked the deadbolt with the key hanging behind a painting of Jesus shepherding lambs.
He was not entirely clear about why he was supposed to trap Dr. Faux inside the clinic, but that durned dentist deserved what was coming and it was exciting that something was happening. Tangier was very boring for its young, and Fonny Boy had dreams of finding his fortune and one day leaving for good. He peered out the window at a crowd of watermen marching up the road in military formation, some of them armed with wooden oars and oyster tongs.
"Sit in the chair thar and mind your step!" Fonny Boy ordered the dentist.
"I need to get the cotton out of your mouth," Dr. Faux reminded his patient. "You need to sit in the chair, then
I'll sit in it after we're finished, if you want." Dr. Faux supposed the lidocaine had agitated Fonny Boy and precipitated a transient nervous disorder.
Even the most experienced dentist couldn't be sure how certain drugs might affect some patients, and Dr. Faux always inquired if the person had any allergies or adverse reactions to medications. But the Islanders were so rarely sedated or subjected to even the mildest anesthesia or mood-altering substances, except for the alcohol they weren't allowed to drink, that Dr. Faux's patients were rather virginal and perfectly suited for blind studies with placebos and other concoctions that various pharmace
utical companies wanted the FDA to approve and were happy to donate to Dr. Faux for experimental purposes. The dentist slid gloved fingers around inside Fonny Boy's mouth, fishing for the cotton.
"You didn't swallow it again, did you?" Dr. Faux worried.
"Yass."
"Well, you may be a little constipated for a few days. How come you locked the door and what did you do with the key?"
Fonny Boy felt his pockets to make sure the key was safely in his custody. It was not. What did I do with it? he thought, his eyes darting around the examination room as feet and angry voices sounded from the street. Excited, Fonny Boy popped the dentist in the nose, not with malice, but with sufficient force to draw blood.
"Ouch!" Dr. Faux cried out in surprise and pain. "Now why did you do that?" he asked as the watermen yelled for Fonny Boy to unlock the door.
"I can't!" he yelled back to them. "I ain't got holt of the key! I disremembered where I put it at!"
"Why did you hit me?" Dr. Faux was shocked and upset as he dabbed his nose with a tissue.
Fonny Boy wasn't sure, but it seemed important to prove himself through violence. He rather much liked the idea of the watermen seeing that he had used force to subdue the dentist. Certainly, his father would be pleased, but Fonny Boy just wished he could recall what he had done with the key as the commotion outside intensified.
"He-ey! You have to broke the door!" he shouted to the angry mob.
The watermen did and thundered inside, waving their oars and tongs.
"Down with Virginia! Down with Virginia!" was their furious battle cry. "You daren't go back to the main, Dr. Faux, hear? You're wer prisoner!"
"You're going to catch it!"
"That's right! That's right!"
"Heeey thar, Dr. Faux. How feels it, you being the one stuck in that thar chair?"
"Give him the dickens!"
"I did!" Fonny Boy said, full of himself. "I scobbed him right in the nose and down he went ass-over-tin-cup!" he boasted.
"We should yank out ever one of his teeth! Look at all the teeth a' ours he always a' pullin'!"
"Take him potting, we should! And tie 'im up good and feed 'im to the crabs!"
"And that ain't no way to go, I tell you!"
"Durn it, if it ain't what he got comin'! Hear?"
"Wait a minute!" Dr. Faux protested loudly enough to briefly silence the watermen as he cowered in the dentist's chair and rubbed his nose. "I do hear! And what I'm hearing is first you're mad at Virginia, and now you've suddenly turned on me! Make up your mind!"
"We mad at ever one of you on the main," someone decided. "There's neither one from the main who don't take our advantage."
"Well, if you're fully decided on kidnapping me," Dr. Faux thought quickly and with fraudulent intent, "then your plan will only work if you send notice to the governor. Otherwise, no one will know I'm here and what good will it do to lock me up? And as for your unfair and ungrateful accusations about how I've taken care of your dental needs, I must point out that I have come here for many years with nothing but goodness in my heart, and without me you would have no dentist at all."
"Better none than you."
"My wife, she would still be with all her teeth. And I get the ache in my tooth when it gets right airish out. A tooth you fixed!"
"Well, maybe we should have another mind about this." One of the watermen had second thoughts and leaned his oar against a wall. "We don't want neither trouble."
"Exactly," Dr. Faux agreed. "You watermen are projecting. You're furious with the governor, and I can't say as I blame you. Clearly, you're being persecuted and discriminated against as usual, and I'm not sure what these painted lines are about, but they weren't put there with your best interest in mind."
"Nah, neither interest that might be a good turn for us."
"Don't listen to him talking at us!" It was Fonny Boy who took charge. "He's of the main, and how did it come to us that the troopers and him are here at the same time? He's spying, he is!"
"I'll swagger! What's in your head to make you notion him spying on us, honey boy?" Fonny Boy's father asked with growing anger and resentment.
"Spying on potting and drudging and then he go telling untruths about jimmies and sooks and arysters. Soon enough, they'll make the law that we have no business follering the water," Fonny Boy declared without the thinnest fabric of evidence.
"This one thar let on that to you?" Fonny Boy's father asked as he jerked his chin at the dentist.
"Yass. Durn if he didn't!"
"What words did he put to you?"
Fonny Boy shrugged, his yarn running aground, but the seed had been planted.
"Can't be taking no chances," another waterman spoke up.
"Nah."
"Nah. That's right."
"The governor already's cut our crabbing to the wick, and now that arster drudging is pretty near on us, what if are told to leave that off, too? Why, there'll be nothing in our pockets, neither a red cent."
"It ain't fittin'!"
"Nah. For sure it ain't!"
"I say we let 'im make one call over the phone and talk our intentions," Fonny Boy's father suggested in a wild, angry voice.
"Who's he gonna call for?"
"I say he talk at the state police, that's what. They was the ones who painted on the street out thar. And maybe the dentist is spying for the police on part of the gov'ner."
Dr. Faux was handed the old black phone, and after calling directory assistance and going through a series of transfers, he got Superintendent Judy Hammer on the line and prayed she wouldn't think to run a record check on him.
"Who is this?" Hammer asked, and she could hear angry murmuring in the background.
"I'm a dentist from the mainland," a voice replied. "I take care of Tangier Island and am here now and in a passel of trouble because your trooper painted stripes on Janders Road and the governor is taking over the island so he can turn it into a racetrack."
"What in the world are you talking about?" Hammer asked, and she almost hung up on the so-called dentist, who clearly was a whacko, but then decided that maybe she ought to hear him out. "The stripes are a speed trap and part of the governor's new VASCAR program."
"If you don't remove the stripes immediately and sign an agreement that prohibits the state police, coast guard, and others from ever molesting the Islanders again, they're going to keep me as a prisoner against my will!"
"Who is this?" Hammer asked again, taking notes at her desk.
"I'm forbidden from giving you my name," the voice said.
"Down with Virginia!" someone with a strange accent cried out in the background.
"Neither body here voted for the-gov'ner, as I recollect it."
"We ain't done nothing but fish our floats and make an honest living, and what we come home to? Stripes on the street and him, the dentist, pulling out ever one of our teeth!"
"I haven't pulled out every one of your teeth!" the dentist objected with his hand over the phone, but Hammer heard him and everybody else anyway.
"All right," Hammer said in an authoritative voice. "Just what exactly do you want us to do? I'm confused."
Her question was followed by silence on the line.
"Hello?" she asked.
"We're all wore out with being interfered," she heard someone say. "Talk at her and say to pass at the gov'ner that we was having a right good time of it before his meddling, and what we want is our own independence from Virginia!"
"Yass!"
"That's right! Neither more revenuers or police coming on the island! We'll take our own independence!"
"Neither more money going to tax! Neither a penny!"
"And no more telling us to hold down our catch!"
"Yass!"
"Well, you heard them," the dentist said to Hammer. "No more fishing restrictions, state taxes, policing, or interference. Tangier Island wants to secede from Virginia, and," he added, lowering his voice in a conspiratorial way, "the ransom for my release
is fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills that you are to express mail to P.O. box three-sixteen in Reedville. Please meet these demands immediately. I'm a hostage in the medical clinic and have already been beaten and am bleeding and my life is in danger!"
Before Hammer could respond to what she interpreted as madness and blatant extortion, the dentist hung up on her. She tried to find Andy to no avail and left him a voice mail explaining what had happened.
"Your mummy essay has caused considerable damage," she added at the end of her recorded message, "although I can't say as fact that anyone on the island read it. But you certainly have set the stage for making people believe that Tangier Island is being persecuted by Virginia and you'd better do something to set the record straight, Andy. Call me."
Andy did not get the message until late that night because after he and Macovich had flown back to Richmond, Andy had quickly thrown together a secret mission that had required a disguise and a borrowed civilian helicopter. He had spent the rest of the day on Tangier Island, gathering information, and when he finally got home, it was close to midnight. He played his voice mail and returned Hammer's call, waking her up.
"My God," he said. "I had no ideal If only I had known before now."
"Where the hell have you been?" Hammer's groggy voice came over the line.
"I can't tell you," Andy said. "Not now. I know that may seem rude and unfair, but I've been doing research and investigating a matter that I really don't have time to discuss at the moment. But suffice it to say that when I outlined the essays I planned to write for the website, my agenda did not include Tangier Island or dental fraud, so I've been busy-very busy-trying to find out everything I can about the Islanders, and I've got to get off the phone and start writing…"
"Andy!" Hammer was wide awake and offended. "You can't keep secrets from me! Where have you been all day? Have you heard the news? Apparently not," she added with emotion. "A woman was viciously murdered on Belle Island and the killer carved your name on her body!"
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