“Yea. One and the same been coming to Tanger for so long, I disremember when,” she replied, more self-conscious than unfriendly now, her lips crinkled like crepe paper around big, fakey teeth.
“There are a lot of bad dentists out there,” Andy said gently. “Everybody I’ve seen here so far has clearly had an astonishing amount of dental work, ma’am, and although it’s none of my business, maybe you folks ought to consider getting a different dentist or at least having the one you use thoroughly investigated.”
His comment and his bright, perfect, natural teeth cut Ginny to the wick, which was Tangier talk for saying something went deep and caused excruciating pain. It wasn’t that the Islanders didn’t quietly gossip at gatherings about the visiting dentist. But without him, they would have no one.
“I don’t suppose you read Trooper Truth,” Andy said to her as he resumed painting the stripe. “But he has some interesting things to say about facing the truth and, in fact, demanding truth. But the only way you get truth, ma’am, is to stare what you fear straight in the eye, whether it’s a mummy or a shifty, harmful dentist.”
Ginny was unnerved and had no idea what to make of this young trooper with his kind ways that didn’t seem to fit with his threatening uniform and his trespassing and violating the road in front of her house.
“Now, don’t you be throwing off about the stripe like you ain’t paintin’ it right afore my very eyes,” she declared, changing the subject.
“I’m not,” Andy said. “I have to paint this speed trap– on the orders of the governor, ma’am.”
Ginny had never heard of such a thing and was instantly inflamed. There were fewer than twenty gas-powered land vehicles on the entire island, most of them rusting pickup trucks used for hauling things. Pretty much everybody either walked or got around on golf carts, scooters, mopeds, or bicycles. Tangier was less than three miles long and not even a mile wide. Only six hundred and fifty people lived here, and why would the governor care if one of them got a little frisky in his golf cart? Life was slow on the island. Roads were barely wider than footpaths, few of them paved, and one wrong turn could send you headlong into a marsh. Speeding on land had never been a community problem, and in fact, Ginny had never heard of the mayor or the town council taking up this particular issue.
“Well, theys many a road on the main and you don’t need to be a painting up ours. Doncha stop that? Afore you’re going to catch it, young feller!”
Andy wasn’t sure what the island woman had just said to him, but he detected a threat.
“Just doing my job,” he said, dipping the brush in the paint can.
“What happen you drive over it?” Ginny pointed at the wet painted line on the road.
“Nothing yet,” Andy explained in an ominous tone, in hopes he might encourage the woman to complain and provide him with a few good quotes for the next Trooper Truth essay. “I’ve got to paint another one exactly a quarter of a mile from this one. Then when our helicopters patrol the island, the pilots can time how long it takes for a vehicle to get from stripe to stripe. VASCAR will tell us exactly how fast you’re going.”
“Heee! Jiminy Criminy! They going to bring NASCAR here to Tangier?” Ginny was shocked.
“VASCAR,” Andy repeated, and he was thrilled that Virginians might confuse VASCAR with NASCAR. “It refers to a computer that knows if you’re speeding.”
“Then what?” Ginny still didn’t understand, and her mind was roaring with stock cars and drunken fans.
“Then a trooper on the ground goes after the speeder and gives him a citation.”
“What he gonna to recite at us?” Ginny envisioned the young trooper in his big hat and dark glasses sternly reprimanding some poor Tangierman on his bicycle, probably pointing his finger, trying to scare him as the trooper recited something like one of those Miranda warnings Ginny was always hearing about on programs she picked up on the satellite dish that was surrounded by glass balls and other yard ornaments.