Isle of Dogs Read Free

As a vein of lightning pierced the dark dawn, it occurred to him that it would be a terrible omen if the power went out and his computer crashed. He was startled out of his preoccupations when the telephone rang.
    “At least you’re awake,” Judy Hammer said without so much as a good morning. “I’m—”
    “I thought you were going to call me out in emergencies,” he interrupted her. “I wish you’d let me know about the truck driver at the Farmers’ Market.”
    “You weren’t needed,” she said.
    “Same M.O.? Was he cut on?”
    “I’m afraid so. Several cuts to his neck with what looks like a razor, but none of them lethal,” she replied. “Apparently, the assailants left in a hurry, and he came to long enough to callnine-one-one. The reason I called is, I’m waiting, Trooper Truth,” Hammer let him know. “I thought you said your website was going up at six-thirty. That was five minutes ago.”
    It was her way of telling him good luck.

A B RIEF E XPLANATION
    by Trooper Truth
     
    The rich early history of the U.S.A. is based largely on eyewitness observations described in letters, true adventures, testimonies, maps, and books published in the early seventeenth century. Most of those original accounts have been lost forever or are silently maintained in private collections. Other historical documentation, sadly, was stored in Richmond and burned up during the Civil War so Northerners could rewrite the facts and convince schoolchildren the world over that our country really got its start in Plymouth, which is simply a lie.
    That lie and others should come as no surprise. So much of what we know as “fact” in life is, in truth, nothing more than propaganda or a well-meant reflection on how events and people are perceived by those with a bias and poor vision. Tales pass from lips to lips, from news story to news story, from e-mail to e-mail, from politicians to us, from witnesses to jurors, and eventually we are led to believe all manner of things that are grossly distorted if not patently false. This is why, as I begin to have these conversations with you, the reader, I will rely on my own primary research and experiences, and focus on science and medicine, which have neither imaginations nor personalities nor politics nor grudges.
    DNA, for example, frankly doesn’t care if you did it. DNAdoesn’t care if you didn’t do it. DNA knows exactly who you, your parents, and your children are, but has no opinion about it and no interest in being a friend or getting your votes. DNA knows it was you who left seminal fluid in someone, but is neither judgmental nor voyeuristic about how or why that deposit might have occurred. So I am far more inclined to trust DNA than the defendant on the witness stand, and it is a shame that DNA is too busy working crimes and pedigree disputes to reconstruct the history of the United States. If DNA had the time, I suspect we would find that most of what we presently believe about the past is tainted, perhaps shockingly so.
    Since DNA isn’t available to serve as our narrator in this series of essays, I will do the best I can to tell you what I have discovered about the beginning of English America, in hopes that it will serve as a metaphor for who we are and what has become of our society. The story begins with a small but significant turn of events on the docks of London, December 20, 1606, when thirty-six mariners and one hundred and eight settlers said painful goodbyes and no doubt comforted themselves in alehouses on the Isle of Dogges, as it was spelled on a 1610 map of London.
    The settlers and the mariners who would pilot the ships to Virginia descended the Blackwall stairs to the docks, where these brave adventurers, who wanted more in life, including gold and silver, boarded the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and began their historic voyage to the New World by being stalled in the mouth of the Thames for six weeks. Records cite the reason for