The Mangrove Coast

by Randy Wayne White

  I was in no mood to hear this. “Do you want me to call later? After you’re done listening to Tuck?”

  “Come on, now. Don’t be snotty. No … what I told Mr. Gatrell was I’d call him back when we were done. Know what he said?” Her chuckle told me that she found the man amusing. This twenty-some-year-old woman sitting in a Lauderdale condo linked by fiber-optic thread to an Everglades gangster who’d driven cattle on horseback and poached gators for a living. “What your uncle said was, ‘Well, lil’ lady, then you’ll be calling me back real soon, ‘cause Duke, he’s not a man to use two sentences when one word’ll do.’”

  Her impersonation was pretty good, but I didn’t want to encourage her.

  I said, “Really.”

  “Yeah. You two guys … do you want me to tell you why it is I think you don’t get along? It’s like when my mom and I get into these spats, it’s not ‘cause we’re so different, it’s ‘cause we’re so much alike.”

  “Take my word on this one, Amanda. Tucker Gatrell and I are nothing alike. Nothing.”

  “Jesus, you don’t have to bite my head off. It should be something we could at least sit down and talk about.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m leaving for Colombia tomonow. I’m taking the morning Avianca flight, and I’ve got a checklist of things to take care of before I leave.”

  She was very quiet for a moment before she said, “If you’re going to Colombia looking for my mom, I’m going. But you coulda at least given me a little warning. Your uncle, he wants to go, too.”

  “Tuck’s not going and you’re not going, either. There’s something I need to tell you—”

  “Hold it!”

  I raised my voice to make her listen. “Amanda, I have something very important—”

  But her voice was louder: “What you have to say can just wait, ‘cause I have something I need to tell you, too!” She practically shouted the last of it. Yep, she could be forceful and had chosen this moment to show it.

  In a normal tone, I said, “Okay, okay. We’ll do it your way.”

  “Damn right we will. What I need to tell you, buster, is you’re not the boss. I asked you to help, yeah. But if I want to go to Colombia, I’ll go. And if Tucker Gatrell wants to go to Colombia, he’s my friend and we’ll both by God go.”

  Her voice had more chill than fire. I was smiling a little, her tone was that familiar to me. The same pissed-off intonations that had been in Bobby’s voice when he was mad.

  First Bobby, now Frank Calloway.

  This woman had lost them both and didn’t even know it yet.

  Speaking of the death of her dad, Amanda had once told me, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  Didn’t I?

  Standing there with the phone to my ear, alone in my house, I decided to tell her something I’d never told anyone, not even Tomlinson. The circumstances made what I had to say relevant, but it was more than that. There was something about this girl that I liked and trusted.

  I said, “I want you to calm down. And I want you to sit down.”

  “If you think you’re going to talk me out of going—”

  This time, instead of raising my voice, I spoke more softly. “I’m not going to talk you out of anything, Amanda. If you want to go to Colombia with me, that’s fine. Or meet me there later. Whatever. But we need to have a talk first.” She was listening now.

  “I’m going to ask you a favor. It may seem like a strange favor, but if I’m willing to help you, then you need to be willing to help me. I’m going to tell you why I don’t want Tucker Gatrell around me. Or even near me. Let alone with me in Colombia. It’s something I’ve never told anyone, but I’ve decided to tell you, because … well, you’ll understand when I’m done.”

  She must have read something in my tone; hadn’t heard me this serious before. She said, “This isn’t about my mom, is it? My mother, she’s okay, isn’t she? If that man’s hurt my mom—”

  Her voice had a little-girl quality when she was frightened.

  “No, it’s not about your mom. But look … this favor I’m going to ask is important to me. What I’d like you to do right now, the moment we hang up, is get in your car and drive to …” Where? I’d thought about asking her to pick a hotel on Lauderdale Beach. Take her for a walk, give her the news that way, very gently. But no … it’d take me two hours to get there, which meant that she’d probably spend the next hour or so in her own apartment waiting. By then Skipper or the Sheriffs Department would have been in touch.

  I said, “What I’d like you to do the moment we hang up is get in your car and drive to … to Everglades City. You ever been there?”

  “Well … sure. But that’s more than an hour from my place. I take Alligator Alley west, then south on highway twenty-nine. It’s a really narrow road; lots of swamp. So more like an hour and a half—”

  “It’s about the same distance from Sanibel. If we both leave now” — I was looking at my watch— “we can meet there by ten. Earlier, if we push it. You know where the Rod & Gun Club is? The old hotel right on the river?”

  “Sure, the Rod & Gun. The mansion-looking place with the alligator skins on the walls and the big fireplace. Yeah. I’ve had lunch there with clients. In fact, I was planning on driving over that way early next week to call on my accounts in Marco and Naples. So … I guess I could change things around, see them tomorrow, if it’s really that important to you.”

  I said, “Whoever gets to Everglades first, go ahead and get a couple of rooms and order dinner. Better yet, I’ll call ahead and make reservations. It’s a nice night, so tell the woman there—her name’s Hortensia—tell her who you’re waiting on and that we’ll eat out on the porch by the water. All on me. My treat. She’s from Costa Rica, a friend of mine.”

  “You’re serious.”

  I said, “Very much so.”

  “The reason you want me to leave my apartment, it’s not because I’m in some kind of danger or something is it?”

  “Nope.”

  “You scared me there for a minute. I thought there was something wrong with my mom.”

  I said, “The Rod & Gun. I’ll meet you at the bar for drinks.”

  I told Amanda, “The reason I don’t trust Tucker Gatrell, the reason I don’t like being around the man is because he managed to get both of my parents killed. I hadn’t quite reached my teens when it happened.”

  She whispered, “Dear God.”

  I told her as we were walking deserted streets along the Baron River. It was an hour before midnight on a moonless night with stars. Everglades City is a mangrove town built at the nexus of saw grass and brackish backwater that is the Ten Thousand Islands. It has had the same streetlights since the 1930s, milky glass bowls on elegant iron stems. The globes created incremental pools of light along the river. In each pool was a precise island of asphalt and lawn, of wooden dock and flowing black water. In some places, the streetlights found a framework of ficus limbs, vines and leaves.

  When I said it—“He managed to get both my parents killed” —Amanda took a few more steps and then stopped as if frozen. Maybe it had taken a few seconds for her to realize what I was telling her. That’s when she whispered, “Dear God.”

  Then: “Oh, Doc, I … I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” She put her hand on my elbow, then found my hand, meshing her fingers tightly into mine.

  I found myself oddly uncomfortable with her reaction. The fact that she felt I would welcome an emotional demonstration so obvious and familiar surprised me a little.

  I said, “I’m not telling you this because I need sympathy. It happened so long ago I don’t even think about it anymore. I’m telling you for a reason.”

  “I know, I know … because it hurts. I know how much it hurts.”

  I remained patient, evenhanded. “No, that’s not the reason.”

  “But … how did your parents die? You’re uncle’s such a nice man. Why ?”

  “I don’t know why. Is there ever a reas
on good people die? But how it happened, that’s another story. It was an accident, but an accident that was completely unnecessary. The whole thing was pointless. But it did happen and all because of Tucker’s idiotic … his idiotic selfishness and his sloppy approach to life. That’s exactly how I define Tucker Gatrell as a person: selfish and sloppy. And what Tucker is as a person killed my mother and father. He’s careless. He has a random approach to everything. Tucker is the center of his own universe … his own chaotic universe, and that is the height of indifference.”

  Now she locked her arm into the crook of my arm. “You’ve never told anyone this before?”

  “No.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  We continued walking.

  I didn’t embellish. Didn’t dramatize how it happened or romanticize the notion that I had suffered because of it. I gave Amanda the facts as coolly and unemotionally as I could.

  She listened. She made empathetic sounds. Once I think she started crying, but didn’t want me to hear.

  I told her that, while I never knew either of my parents well, I suspected I would have come to like them. My father had played a couple of years of pro football for Chicago and the old Atlanta organization before he took up running lobster traps down on the Keys. That and pompano fishing.

  My mother by all accounts had been a gifted amateur naturalist and one of the earliest advocates for a save-the-Everglades movement. She spent a lot of time giving talks in the moneyed tourist cities or lobbying hard up in Tallahassee. There is a little brass plaque almost hidden by mangroves in Flamingo, once an isolated fish camp, now headquarters for Everglades National Park. My mother’s name is on the plaque, second column, about midway down.

  I saw it once. I happened to be in Flamingo with nothing to do. I found the plaque and cleared some of the brush away. Had to get down on my knees to do it.

  I told Amanda that a friend friend of my parents had once (not unkindly) described them as separate planets in the same orbit. Not that it mattered much to me. Early on, I discovered the more predictable and articulate world of biology and the natural sciences.

  At one point, Amanda interrupted me to say, “The way you’re talking right now, the way you tell it all so coldly, so … like you don’t really care. Hardly an emotion at all. It doesn’t bother you talking about it?”

  I asked her how something that happened so long ago could bother anyone. I was simply trying to tell her why I would never trust Gatrell.

  “The one thing that my parents had in common,” I said, “was they loved poking around the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands. They did a lot of boating. My father had a thirty-six-foot Daniels designed in Boca Grande and finished by a man named Preacher Brown in Chokoloskee. It was a fine boat. Beautifully done, solid as stone.

  “I know how well it was built because, after it blew up and killed my parents, I spent the next two years putting what pieces I could find back together. About every spare minute I had, that’s what I did. You know how the FAA reconstructs wreckage after a plane goes down? I used the same method, but by pure coincidence. It seemed like the most reasonable way to do it, so that’s what I did.

  I said, “What I want you to understand is, I wasn’t motivated by pain or a sense of loss. I was trying to determine what the authorities who investigated had tried but failed to figure out. I was trying to determine why the boat exploded. To me, it seemed so … haphazard to allow such an important question to remain unanswered.”

  Amanda said softly, “You were only, what? Twelve or thirteen years old?”

  “Um-m-m-m … something like that. But what matters is, I discovered why the boat exploded. I figured out exactly why the boat exploded. Tuck has always fancied himself an inventor. An inventor and a songwriter—ask him and he’ll tell you. Not that he ever stuck with anything long enough to be good at it. No. He just dabbles and leaves the real work up to others.

  “What I discovered was that someone had removed the boat’s brass fuel shutoff. It’s a little butterfly valve usually found astern on the transom. Or sometimes closer to the engine itself. This person replaced it with a type of pressure valve made out of PVC pipe. It was an ingenious idea, really, but for one thing. To fix the valve in place, the person used Superglue. That or some kind of similar bonding agent. Switched the valves and didn’t tell a soul.

  “Unfortunately, the person who did it didn’t take the time to test the valve under real conditions. If he had, he’d have realized that gasoline dissolves Superglue.”

  Amanda said, “Your uncle, it was his invention.”

  “Of course. He never had the courage to admit it, but, yeah. It was him. One Saturday morning, my parents headed out across Chokoloskee Bay for a romantic weekend. Fuel leaked into the bilge and the boat blew up. Quite an explosion. We lived in Mango, just a few miles from here. I was in my bedroom at the time, alphabetizing my beetle collection. The percussion blew out my windows.”

  She was crying again. “I’m so … Doc, I’m so sorry. I like your uncle. I still like him. But I understand. And I understand now why you’re telling me this. Thank you for choosing me…. “

  No … she didn’t understand.

  I turned, faced her, put my hands on her shoulders. We were at a place where the deserted road curved away from the docks; stood near the water at the outer periphery of streetlight. There was the sound of our own breathing, the vectoring resonance of mosquitoes. Across the river in the Everglades darkness, mangroves created a surreal skyline of charcoal figures—“the Sentries of Isolation,” as Tomlinson had once described the night fringe of our own mangrove refuge, Dinkin’s Bay. The tops of the trees were individualized and set apart by a haze of stars. They were bonsai shapes, ancient and gothic, against the brighter sky.

  I told Amanda about Frank. Told her that Frank Calloway, her stepfather, was dead. Told her about finding him and that his death was probably accidental, but that I wasn’t certain.

  “I’ll be in Colombia,” I told her. “If the police have any reason at all to suspect murder, I need to know. I need to know just as soon as I possibly can. If Merlot was behind it, there’s a big difference between tracking down a con man and tracking down a killer. You need to keep tabs for me. You need to find out what you can.”

  I watched her face. She was puzzled. Frank is … dead? Then there was the numb, confused look of shock. He’s dead?

  I said, “There’s something else.” I took out the scarf I’d found. “Did this belong to Frank or his wife?”

  She took it. I noticed that her hands were trembling. She moved closer to the nearest streetlight and inspected it carefully. She sniffed it, then looked at it again. “You know … it seems familiar, but I’m not sure why. Frank’s? No, it isn’t Frank’s. God … I mean it wasn’t Frank’s. And not my mom’s, either.”

  “Then how could it be familiar?”

  “I don’t know. Just an impression, that’s all. Maybe I saw a scarf like it someplace. Where’d you get it?”

  I told her.

  “Shouldn’t you have left it for the police? Frank wouldn’t have owned anything like that, and it’s too … cheap and common for a woman like Skipper.”

  I stuffed the scarf back into my pocket. “I don’t know why I took it. But I did.”

  Amanda seemed determined to remain aloof, untouchable. For an hour, maybe more, she didn’t allow the news to bother her and she refused to demonstrate to me that she took anything more than an objective view of her stepfather’s death.

  Well, his dying so young, it was a shame, because Frank was starting out on a new life and while they were no longer close, she certainly never wished him ill. Yes, she would contact the private investigator Frank had hired— Castillo was his name?—and try to finagle a copy of the report on Merlot. But if she did that for me, I had to promise to call her when I found her mother.

  “When you find her, I’ll fly down. I can’t wait to see my mom. I miss her so much!”

  Amanda told me th
at she was so eager to hear about what I found in Colombia that maybe she’d get another phone line installed in her apartment. That way, she could still mess around with the computer, stay in touch with her E-mail pals but not risk missing the call from me.

  I said, “You really spend that much time on the computer?”

  Her reply seemed a metaphor for an entire generation: “You kidding? The Internet’s the future. And what else do I have to do?”

  The way she behaved—very rational, completely in control—she seemed to be saying to me, “See? Doesn’t bother me a bit. I don’t need him or any other man in my life.”

  About 3:00 A.M., though, lying sleepless in my little cabana room near the Rod & Gun Club’s main building, her tough-guy façade cracked and then crumbled.

  I heard a tentative tapping at the screen, then louder.

  When I opened the door, she whispered, “That poor … poor man,” and then she fell into my arms crying, crying, trembling like a small wounded creature. She moaned: “He used to hold me. When I was a little girl and frightened, Frank used to hold me.”

  Which is exactly what I did for her then.

  Held her. Let her bury her face in my chest, sobbing. Allowed her to walk me backwards until we were both on the bed, wrapped as tightly as we could wrap ourselves together, not alone anymore or isolated or set apart, either of us. I could feel her skinny little washboard body spasming beneath my hands, bare-legged and wearing nothing beneath her T-shirt, her face wet against my neck, then … and then … my face wet and buried in her hair … both of us unprepared for the degree of emotion that we felt and the depth of that which neither of us had probably ever admitted: our pain.

  More than once during the night, I asked myself: Is this wrong?

  More than once, she answered for me: No.

  But it wasn’t right; something about it just didn’t work.

  There was an undefined tension; a sad, sad unwillingness that seemed to go to her very marrow. I realized it and then she admitted it. Not verbally, but by accepting what it was and the way we were and by not posing or pretending. It was okay. We were just fine.