“You lay a hand on me and I’ll have you arrested and sent to jail!” Trader threatened.
“Pay me what you owe for all my fishing tackle you ruined!”
“Watch your mouth. You’re talking to a very important government official,” Trader yelled back.
“I don’t give a flying fuck who you are!”
While the two men argued and bickered, the crabs quickly put together a plot to save themselves and the trout. “Play dead,” someone said.
Trader popped open the trunk and Caesar peered inside, angry but curious about the fresh seafood. The trout was belly-up with its eyes shut, and all the crabs were motionless, their eyes shut, too.
“You cheatin’ motherfucker!” Caesar screamed at Trader. “This seafood’s dead as a doornail. How long you had it in your trunk? A month? Peeee-yooo.” He waved his hand in front of his face as he lifted the bucket out. “You lying white trash. Here’s what I think of your fucking fresh seafood.”
Suddenly, the crabs and trout were sailing out of the bucket as if they were dashing out a fire. They flew through the air and splashed into the James River, where the crabs sank to the bottom and sat, looking around, stunned, as the trout swam in lazy circles over them.
“Look! I see the trout swimming down there!” Trader pointed at the shadow of the trout deep below the sparkling surface. “They’re not dead! You threw away my fresh seafood! Hand over fifty dollars!” he demanded.
“Nope.” Caesar gathered up his ruined fishing gear.
Trader’s pirate genetic coding was fired up and he punched Caesar in the eye. Caesar turned his fishing pole into a whip and stung Trader’s cheek with thirty-test monofilament and several small sinkers that Caesar had attached with his teeth shortly after arriving hours earlier on his bicycle. The two men fought fiercely with each other, rolling on the ground, yelling obscenities and beating on each other. Enraged and bleeding, Trader darted for his car, which Caesar began kicking before he smashed out the front windshield with his damaged metal tackle box.
Frenzied and out of breath, Trader dove into the driver’s side and fumbled for the flare gun he always kept hidden under the front seat. He cut his fingers on splinters of glass as he stuffed a .12 gauge flare into the wide barrel of the old flare gun that had been handed down in his pirate family since 1870. He rolled out of the car and pointed the flare gun in Caesar’s direction as the deranged fisherman hurled lead sinkers at him, one of which struck Trader on the nose, causing an instant reflex that twitched his trigger finger.
The flare exploded through the air like a small fiery missile, streaking straight toward Caesar and slamming into his chest. The crabs and trout watched in horror as the fisherman burst into flames and ran several steps before collapsing. Trader fled in his banged-up state car, the trunk still open, the windshield a spider web of shattered glass. When he limped into the governor’s mansion a little later, he was pale and bloody, his suit and tie torn. He was agitated, paranoid, and confused.
Regina was confused, too. She had never seen her mother so made-up and heavily perfumed. Had Regina run into her mother in a funeral home, she would have assumed Mrs. Crimm was full of formaldehyde and overlaid in putty and had gotten her clothes mixed up with some other dead lady who was much smaller and fond of fuchsia.
“What the hell happened to you, Mama?” Regina asked as she worked on a thick slab of honey-glazed ham that was tucked inside a huge biscuit dripping with butter and globs of mint jelly.
Mrs. Crimm, running a little late, seated herself at the foot of the table and lifted a fork to signal that everyone could begin eating.
“What do you mean, what happened to me?” Mrs. Crimm shot Regina a threatening glance. “And you’re not supposed to start eating before everyone else. As if I didn’t raise you better.”
Andy cut off the only morsel of lean ham he could find in the mound on his plate as Trader walked into the dining room. Andy noticed instantly that the press secretary was bloody and in shock and smelled faintly of burned chemicals and gunpowder.