The Mangrove Coast

by Randy Wayne White

  A light seemed to go on behind his eyes. Could see him thinking, Oh dear God, when he realized that I meant Amanda; that I had seen what Gail knew nothing about— the photo of him with her child daughter.

  “I keep the pictures in my office,” he said quickly. “I have a large safe there, humidity-controlled. Ask Gail, she’s seen it. I’ll take you there. Destroy them all, yes—I’ll help! I’ve been meaning to do it, really. To look at them now, it makes me sick. It really does. Ask her!”

  For a moment, only a moment, I let down my guard, as I turned to look at Gail for confirmation … and, too late, I heard her scream just before I felt the crushing impact of Merlot on me, his weight compressing my chest, one of his fat hands locked onto the revolver as he pushed me backward, backward toward the French doors of the little office we were in….

  I lost control of the pistol; heard it hit the floor.

  When his big hand moved from my right wrist to my throat, I ducked under the mass of him and punched him hard in the kidneys … then slapped his face when he turned into me; slapped him with forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand … saw his big nose burst, the blood pouring … and then I hit him chin-high with a heavy right fist that knocked him through the French doors, where he tumbled backward over the railing and disappeared.

  I picked up the revolver and went to the railing. He’d hit the ground hard, but was already on his feet. It is a distressing thing to watch fat people struggle to move quickly. They have been reduced by their own excesses, proof that suicide takes many forms. He was limping, but still trying to find cover as fast as he could move. The feverish determination reminded me of something … a wounded animal.

  Gail was looking at him, too. What she said then surprised me, because she said it without pause or emotion: “I meant it. You should have killed him.”

  I had my arm around Gail; had the money in the pillowcase as I led her down the steps to the driveway, where she waited while I straddled the Harley, got the kickstand up and ready to go.

  “You really were a friend of Bobby’s?”

  “Ask your daughter. She can show you the letters.”

  “Then you’re him. You’re Doc. He wrote about you.”

  “Yeah. I’m Doc Ford.”

  She slid on behind me, huddled close in the rain. Had her hands meshed together over my stomach, her head resting against my back. As I throttled off, I had to remind myself: hand clutch on the left; the Hailey’s foot gearing was one down, four up.

  There was something in the wind. Woodsmoke? Yes, I smelled smoke….

  It was the rainy season. Why?

  Then I could see flames ahead, not far away on the village street.

  I throttled toward the flames. Saw that it was one of the classic old Zonian houses ablaze … then I realized that I knew this place: Jackie Merlot’s office and headquarters for Club Gamboa. No fire engines around as we rumbled past. No sirens in the distance … but a few people out now and watching, their silhouettes backdropped by flames as the place burned to the ground.

  Matt Davidson had pointed out this building.

  Matt Davidson had insisted on knowing when I was going to nail Merlot.

  The man has videos of Taiwanese honchos misbehaving….

  Maybe because of that, or maybe something else. I would never be told because I had no need to know.

  As I throttled off toward Panama City, Gail pressed her lips against my ear and said, “I was with Merlot for the same reason I was with Frank.” I realized that she was still trying to answer my question: How had she ended up with such a freak? But that made no sense. Frank had been a good man; Merlot was a social anomaly. Or maybe it did make sense. Still talking into my ear, she added, “I was in love once. After that, other men are just a way of passing time.”

  20

  It is difficult for me to write about what happened next because I remember so little about it. The events of that Saturday afternoon at the Balboa Yacht Club come back to me in little vignettes of memory, small intrusions of nightmare.

  Once, weeks after I had been discharged from the hospital in Panama City, I awoke in the arms of a woman who was shaking me, then holding me. I sat bolt upright, looked around to find that I was safe in my little stilthouse on Dinkin’s Bay.

  That feeling, of being safe … it was such a relief.

  “You were calling out again,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t bear it anymore.” She touched her mouth to my cheek, then my lips. “It’ll go away. It’ll take time, but it will go away.”

  She meant Panama.

  What I remember most consistently is a simple thing that Gail Richardson told me while still in Gamboa: You should have killed him.

  My brain plays and replays that simple sentence. I can be jogging or preparing slides in the lab or sitting on the porch of my home looking at the lights of the marina, listening to liveaboards crack beers beneath Chinese party lanterns while Jimmy Buffett or Danny Morgan sing about their good, good lives on Captiva or in one particular harbor or Leadville or in Margaritaville.

  That sentence will return: You should have killed him. Here is what I remember: I remember checking into the Hotel Panama in downtown Panama City. A classic old hotel decorated with fiftyish chrome and marble and a good-sized pool beneath palms.

  I remember Gail crying. The two of us talking, holding each other, as she buried her face in my shoulder and she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  We were in the bar? Yes, the bar. I had requested that the band play a song for her: “The Twelfth of Never.” Something else: the shower … she commented on the shower. About how good it was to be clean. The way she said it, it reminded me of an observation that Garret had made while I was in Colombia, something about the Turk. Something about the difficulties of getting clean. Or was that Tucker?

  No … not Tucker. It was Tucker who had said, “You won’t give me a chance to make it up to you!”

  Tucker and Gail. Both right.

  The rest of it jumps ahead in time. It is all blurry, so jumbled that dredging it up plays through the memory like a badly framed home movie. Here are little snippets of video that remain with me:

  Gail holding my hand as we walked down the yacht club’s wooden steps to the bar on a verandah of worn gray marble. Seeing the big water, sailboats out there anchored with their wind fans spinning, the Panama Canal and the volcanic gloom of islands beyond…

  Then hearing a familiar voice: “Hello!” Amanda standing topside aboard a large canary yellow racing boat, a Scarab. Waving at us from the cement pier, this huge grin on her face and maybe a little teary-eyed as she called, “I just got here! Haven’t even put the groceries away yet!”

  The boat’s name in red letters, Double Haul, I remember reading that, plus a little surge of pleasure at seeing the lines of the Scarab, the implicit speed, and thinking it was going to be fun running a boat so fast and well designed up Panama’s jungle coast.

  Then … and then Gail is helped aboard and hugged by her much relieved daughter … the two of them disappearing below deck, each with a bag of groceries in hand … and suddenly, unexpectedly, I hear the shout of a man’s voice: “Get them off that boat!”

  I turn to see Tuck and the black bartender from Club Nautico charging down the steps toward me. Fernando? Yes, that was the man’s name.

  What the hell were they doing there?

  Fernando and Tucker running, their expressions panicked, Tucker’s feet going clump-clump-clump on seagoing wood that had probably never been fouled by a cowboy boot.

  It made no sense seeing them. Tucker was in Colombia. I’d left him there at the little marina where his Freemason buddy worked as a bartender. How had they gotten to Panama? And how could Tucker possibly know where to find me?

  “Marion! Marion! GET THEM OFF THAT BOAT!”

  I was on the finger pier now, about to step aboard. From the galley below deck, I could hear Gail and Amanda laughing. Heard one of them say, “Where’s the power switch?”


  I stopped; looked at the open hatch, then looked at Tucker, who was still yelling: “The Turk, he was getting Amanda’s E-mail! You understand?”

  No. Nothing made sense. I stepped toward Tucker, my hands held out to stop him, but he charged right past me, almost knocked me into the water, as he jumped aboard the Scarab. Moved pretty good for a man that old. Was still yelling: “Amanda. Amanda! Don’t touch a damn thing. They know you’re here, that you’re meeting your mama. You told ‘em in your letter.”

  I couldn’t hear her, but Amanda must have asked what or why, because Tucker said, “That Ohio woman. What the hell’s her name, Betty? You’ve been writing to a church lady named Betty, but it’s really the fat man!”

  Which is when I was blinded by a light so devastatingly bright that it was as if a shard of ice had been driven through my brain….

  Then I was in the water. I was in the water and deaf, stone deaf, before a bright and busy inferno, from which tumbled the frantic shapes of people I had once known but could no longer recognize….

  A blazing cowboy hat worn by a flailing old man who had been long shadowed by the guilty memory of the very thing that now killed him…

  A woman who might have been Gail, but it was difficult to be certain because she had no face…

  A third person blasted from the flames who was so badly damaged that I refuse to attempt description. I will not do it.

  The Panamanian police asked me about Amanda, saw the look in my eye and did not ask again.

  Seventeen days later, when I awoke from what the good doctors described as a “life-threatening concussion,” Fernando had recovered sufficiently to tell me what he had already learned.

  Tucker had been shipped back to Florida and buried with full Masonic honors. But not until after word of some lingering trouble in Cartagena. Someone had beaten the Turk senseless, pissed on him (I didn’t ask how that was verified), pick-axed his computer plus all its gear, stolen his hookah and then nosed the Turk’s old junk wind freighter out into Cartagena Bay, where the federales did, indeed, impound the cache of hashish aboard, arrest the injured man and take him to a prison hospital.

  “Your uncle was mucho hombre, much man, much man!” Fernando said. “But I would not return to Colombia for a while. Tucker Gatrell became famous there in a very short time. It will be remembered by some small and angry people that you are a relative.”

  Amanda, dear sensitive Amanda, was also killed instantly in the blast. Gail, however, though badly burned, had held on for many days before finally succumbing to pneumonia.

  “One day I went to see her, but her bed was empty,” Fernando said. “She was just gone. Disappeared. They told me that she had been flown back to Florida to be laid to rest next to the daughter and the first husband, the husband she loved.”

  Fernando gave me two more interesting tidbits of news. Our huge hospital bills had been paid in full by someone, they wouldn’t tell Fernando who.

  The men in the blue shirts, probably. Their generosity was unexpected, but not out of character. Matt Davidson had been right; the intelligence community tries to take care of its own.

  Other news was that Panamanian authorities, working with the FBI and Interpol, were after Jackie Merlot and whomever he’d hired to rig the bomb in the boat.

  So far, there was no sign of him.

  It was as if he’d vanished from the earth.

  Epilogue

  For the next six months, I concentrated on my work and getting my health back. Physically, I recovered quickly. I was running and swimming as fast and as far as ever, but my mental health vacillated between depression and rage.

  It worried my friends. I could see the concern on their faces when they thought that I wasn’t looking.

  It worried me, too. Something I did not tell them was this: I feared that I was slowly, inexorably, going insane.

  That sentence, You should have killed him, came to haunt me in a way that I suspect Tucker Gatrell had been haunted by a mistake he had made many years before. To experience such a thing revealed to me much about why my uncle behaved as he did. To openly discuss what had happened would have invited a weight of despair that might have crushed him. So he locked the guilt away in a little room. He lived with the monster.

  I was now living with my monster.

  Much of my time alone was spent anticipating the day when I would comer Jackie Merlot and once again stand face to face with him. The authorities still had no leads on his whereabouts. Nor had my many contacts worldwide from the intelligence community been able to supply me with any hint of where the man was hiding.

  I became so obsessed with finding him that I bought a superb computer and modem and spent my evenings trolling the chat rooms, asking people if they’d ever been contacted by Merl or Darkrume or Betty of Unity.

  All of them the fat man.

  I have never quit anything in my life.

  Our day would come.

  Something helpful was that Maggie, my workout partner from Tampa, finally separated from her husband, and she took it upon herself to oversee my recovery. At first, the Dinkin’s Bay women were less than friendly. I was THEIR patient and no long, leggy blonde from Hyde Park was going to come onto THEIR docks and take charge.

  As JoAnn Smallwood said in a moment of pique, “What’re you doing with this Maggie woman, Doc? She doesn’t even like to fish.”

  No … but Maggie made me laugh. She could make faces like a sit-com comedienne. She was smart and kind and thoughtful and I liked the smell of her and I could crawl naked into bed beside her and, for ever longer periods of time, I felt at peace … at peace until I drifted off and the dreams returned….

  Black rain, banana leaves fauceting water, lunar halos, small precise breasts, a woman’s eyes diminished by uncertainty, a mangrove shore…. Moon, wind, water, blood …

  Those images and words came back to me in an endless, repetitive chorus that was maddening.

  But it helped that Maggie was there. And because she is a kind and valuable person, the Dinkin’s Bay women soon accepted her and she became a member of the community.

  I was getting better.

  It was Maggie who brought me the hand-wrapped little package that arrived via UPS on a blustery December afternoon. The afternoon was cold enough for a fire in the little wood stove that I’d installed myself only weeks before.

  Woodsmoke and turtlenecks and thick socks on Dinkin’s Bay. It was a nice change.

  I’d been drinking a mug of hot chocolate that the lady had provided me.

  I should have put the mug safely on a table when I opened the package.

  I did not.

  When I opened the package and saw what was inside, I dropped the mug. Hot chocolate all over me and the floor, but I didn’t even notice.

  “Doc? Doc?” Maggie said hurrying toward me. “My God, you look like you’re going to faint. What is it?”

  I had my mouth open, forcing myself to breath. I took a few steps back and sat heavily in the reading chair beside my Celestron telescope near the north window. Finally, I had enough air to speak. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a photograph of … of someone I knew.”

  “What’d you mean, don’t worry about it? You’re white as a ghost!”

  She moved to put her arms around me, but I gently, very gently, nudged her away. I couldn’t let her see this photograph.

  Two photos, actually.

  One was gruesome beyond imagination. It was a stock print of a sort that I recognized from my years working in the foreign service. It was clean—which is to say it was printed via a process that could not be traced.

  It was a vertical shot, eight-by-ten color glossy. It had been taken early in the morning or late in the day in a mangrove swamp. The light was very rich: golds and iridescent greens beneath a peach-colored sky. It could have been taken anywhere. Florida, Central America, Asia. Anyplace that had been isolated by mangrove coast.

  Mangroves were in the background. In the f
oreground was a stout pole that had been planted in the muck. Atop that pole was Jackie Merlot’s pumpkin-sized head. His mouth was a round dark hole, a defining void, and his black eyes were opened wide but glazed with something. Flies?

  I looked more closely.

  Yes, flies.

  Even so, those eyes seemed directed at the mound of flesh at the base of the pole.

  Someone had positioned the head so that it faced its own body. Perhaps the Phmong were right. Perhaps Merlot’s brain had functioned long enough. Perhaps the last thing he saw was his own decapitated corpse….

  “Doc … ? Doc, please! Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me, Doc.”

  I was standing again. Kept the photos with me—no one could ever see them. Ever. I rushed to my dresser, opened the botton drawer, and pulled out the scarf with the raspberry red checks that I’d found the afternoon Frank Calloway died.

  I was grinning at Maggie. I could see in her face that she thought that maybe, just maybe, I really had gone mad.

  I told her, “I know what this is now. Finally! It’s a traditional scarf that the mountain people wear. It’s called a kramas. And the smell—the odor it had. It’s this fermented fish sauce. Terrible stuff, but the locals get addicted to it. Like Vegemite in Australia, only this stuff is rotten. It’s called nuoc mam.”

  The smell of it had tainted the air at Frank Calloway’s house. But that is not what had frightened the man and caused him to panic.

  I looked at the second photograph: There on the eight-by-ten glossy was the man who had frightened Calloway, caused Calloway to panic … and he was wearing a scarf like the one I had found.

  I could hear Annie at the Temptation Restaurant telling me, “I just saw Crab Man hangin’ around here.”

  I could hear Merlot reminding Acky of the beggar that he’d caught snooping.

  I looked at the photograph and felt dizzy. I said to Maggie, “Would you mind bringing me a glass of water? Then giving me a few minutes alone?”

  Her eyes were welling up. “Ford, please tell me you’re okay. What is it?”