The Mangrove Coast df-6

by Randy Wayne White

  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

  F or 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 foreground 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?”

  I said, “I’m fine. In fact… this is the best I’ve felt in a while. But give me a minute, okay?”

  There was a typed, unsigned note attached to the photograph.

  I read: The guy you know as Matt Davidson told me what I never doubted: You can be trusted. Over here we still operate on a need-to-know basis
and here’s what I think you need to know. After what you did, my friend, it’s what you deserve to know, too. There are about forty of us still living here. Not because we have to but because we’re all so screwed up we figured the only thing we could do back in the World is join the circus, maybe work as freaks. The POW camp my team was searching for? What it turned out to be was a collection of good guys who had too much pride to be a burden to their families. No one’s really sure how it got started, but there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that’s where I wanted to go once I realized that mortar round had turned me into a monster. MIA guys who didn’t want to return. That’s something we never figured on, huh? It’s hard to find men who don’t want to be found. For the first six months, I thought I’d die. For the next year I hoped I would. Lots of us did. Those of us who didn’t, realized something: We still had our brains and we had some of the best training in the world. I’m now a rich man, Doc. Rich beyond imagination. Every gay in our little company has made a bundle. Intelligence, weapons, brokered information to the CIA, NSA, Mossad, the big-money boys. We are the perfect middlemen because freaks are like clowns: we’re invisible behind our masks and we don’t show pain. We’ve also started buying petroleum leases throughout Asia and investing in politicians. In terms of income, we are our own small country now. It’s all we think about It’s all we do. Once a year I come to Florida. I always stay in a little town called Gibsonton-I won’t say why. It’s too embarrassing. In previous years I always came with the hope of getting a couple of glimpses of my girls. I’d do it quick, from cab windows. Or late at night outside their house. I just wanted to make sure they were happy, didn’t need anything. Once, when Amanda was seven and alone in the backyard, she smiled at me. She actually said a few words to me. I didn’t scare her. It is one of the treasured moments of my life. It means even more now that she’s gone. And I thought I was beyond tears! When I heard that Gail was in trouble, I was a step or two ahead of you. At first, anyway. Then I was always a step or two behind. Frankie Calloway’s death was an accident He panicked when he realized who I was and what I wanted. I sometimes forget how truly frightening I am. Unfortunately, there is no way that either of us could have seen what was coming. And that’s what this letter is about Remember that idea we messed around with in the jungle, what we called the Perfect Law? In case you forgot, here it is: In any conflict, the boundaries of behavior are defined by the party which cares least about morality. Merlot chose the boundaries. Check out the enclosed photo. He ended up with a whole different viewpoint, huh? I thought you might enjoy this other picture, too. For the first time in many years, Doc, I am at peace.

  It was another glossy photo and, in ways it was more shocking than the first. The extraordinarily handsome and vain man that I knew as Commander Bobby Richardson no longer existed. I wouldn’t have recognized him. Ever.

  He was so changed by his wounds and by the years, that I prefer not to describe the half-man in that photo, so I will not. What I noticed-and what I prefer to remember-is that he looked happy.

  Bobby was smiling. Smiling a big, crooked country-boy grin as he posed with a tiny woman in Asian dress and black equatorial hair… a woman who could have passed for a Vietnamese burned, perhaps in a napalm attack. Yet there was a lovely expression of grace and acceptance on her ruined face; an expression elevated to devotion by the glow of her eyes as she looked at the man she loved: one eye the powder blue of turquoise, the other a deep jungle green.

  She had drawn a heart on the photograph and signed it: THE TWELFTH OF NEVER!

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