The Mangrove Coast df-6 Read online

  I thought: Jesus, you’re weird, Tomlinson.

  A few minutes later, he asked: “You’re absolutely sure this girl you’re talking about-Amanda? — you’re sure she’s really the biological daughter of your old friend? Him and his wife, I mean. She wasn’t maybe adopted or has a different father or something?”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “I’m just asking. The thing about the photographs bothers me.”

  The photographs again. What the hell was he talking about?

  I said, “I would bet that she’s the biological daughter of Bobby and Gail Richardson, yes. But no, I haven’t asked for a DNA test to prove it. But I look in her face, I can see her dad. No doubt about that. Something about the eyes. And her mom-I’ve only seen photographs-but she’s got her mom in her, too. I may not be an expert on sentiment, Tomlinson, but give me some credit for basic observation. Genetics aren’t easy to disguise. We’re necessarily bits and pieces of all the people who went before us. And don’t forget: I saw a picture of Amanda as a little girl.”

  There were other things that troubled him about the girl’s story. I drove and looked at the scenery, listening a lot, answering occasionally.

  We were driving into the heart of Fort Myers. Municipalities on Florida’s Gulf Coast tend to expand in population, bulging southward and northward until they finally rupture and are absorbed by the concrete artery that is U.S. Highway 41, a strip-mall corridor that is a mile wide and more than a hundred miles long. U.S. 41, or the Tamiami Trail as it is called, connects the rolling oak pastures north of Tampa with the saw-grass hardpan of the Everglades. The city of Fort Myers lies just off that fast conduit, a kernel of old buildings built of brick and coquina rock, a tiny Old Florida town at the core of massive, modern growth.

  Fort Myers is called the City of Palms. It is well named. Cuban royals lined the street. They are palms that look as if they had been made by squirting cement into a pillarous tube. The high fronds caught the spring sunlight. As Tomlinson talked, I watched the Sunday flow of joggers lope down the small town sidewalks. A girl with hair the tawny red of autumn leaves and honey-colored skin caught my eye. I watched her until she vanished from my rearview mirror.

  You see one like that, a woman with the physical sensibilities of a deer, and you wonder if she is The One, The One you have been waiting all your life to meet.

  You also worry that if you don’t immediately stop, if you don’t act on the strange urge to introduce yourself to a stranger, that you may have forever missed the chance…

  We were headed toward the city’s eastern border and an antique baseball complex named Terry Park. Since 1925, the diamonds there have been a hub of Grapefruit League spring-training activity. Terry Park is one of the reasons I didn’t mind making the long drive into town. It is among the last fields of its kind in Florida: a precise space of grass and red clay to which baseball legends once arrived by steam engine and, decades later, left for Opening Day by charter jet. The main stadium is made of tin and wood, everything painted gazebo-green. It looks small and shaded, as if it comes from the time of straw hats and nickel beer. It does. That’s why the modern major league teams have moved on to more sterile, twenty-first-century plants.

  But the dugouts of Terry Park are still cool little caves with slabs of wood for benches; benches that are pitted by seven decades of wooden bats, Copenhagen cans and steel spikes. And the base paths are still the exacting conduits over which ran all the boys of summer from all the summers past. Name a player: Ruth, Cobb, Berra, Mantle, Maris, Clemente, Mays, Brett, Blyleven. Name ten thousand players. They sat on those same benches, they ran the same base paths. They all came to Terry Park to play a game called baseball, and the game is being played there still… often by wannabes like Tomlinson and me. Not that we felt any shame in that.

  No indeed.

  I was looking forward to the game. We were to face an ex-minor leaguer; a left-hander named Johnson who was pitching for some Minnesota team that was using men’s baseball as an excuse to get the hell and gone out of the snow. Except for the snow, I could relate. The double-header was my mini-vacation away from the lab and island life.

  But Tomlinson wouldn’t let go of the Amanda Richardson story.

  “I’ve got some very serious concerns about the mother,” he said. “Children and middle-aged divorced women are the two most vulnerable groups on earth. Children, at least, are resilient. They’re mobile in terms of life options. But a middle-aged woman, she’s a sitting duck. Easiest target in the world.”

  I didn’t want to hear it, because I’d already made up my mind about Gail Calloway.

  “What worries me most,” Tomlinson said, “is that business about Merlot changing his phone number. You don’t catch the significance of that?”

  I’d caught it-but I wanted to hear Tomlinson put it into words.

  He said, “What I think he’s trying to do is isolate her, man. Doesn’t want the woman to speak to her own daughter. Keeps her too busy to see her old friends. That is a serious damn red flag. It sounds like obsession, but what I really think it is, it’s the need for complete control. It’s a form of murder, man. Total dominance.” Tomlinson hunched toward me to make his point… then, still talking, he took out his billfold.

  Why the hell did he need his billfold?

  He said, “It’s what cults and dictators do. To control a country, you must first isolate it. No shit, Hitler, 1938. A nation needs information from the outside to know the truth. Same with individuals. To control a person’s future, all you have to do is cut off her past. That’s exactly what certain asshole husbands do, the abusive ones. The pea-brained creeps with their frightened little wives. And the perverts. The sickies. And a few really bad corporate bosses. Total control. You know what else worries me about that story?”

  I was listening more closely now. Baseball was still on my mind, but Tomlinson was impressing me, being uncharacteristically logical.

  Tomlinson was into it, on a roll. So I said, “What?”

  “The Stockholm Syndrome,” he said, “that’s what worries me. You know what I’m talking about? Back in the fifties, I think, this Swedish guy, a guy named Ofulsen, he robs a bank but gets cut off, so he takes hostages. Most of the hostages are women. By the end of the siege, every one of the women is madly in love with the asshole. I mean they’re telling the cops don’t hurt him, they love him, he’s just misunderstood. Him in there with a gun, swinging it around, threatening to kill everybody if the cops charge. The guy you’re talking about, this Jackie Merlot, if he really is a control freak, then the longer she’s with him-Gail I’m talking about-then the harder it’s going to be to pry her away.”

  I said, “The point I thought you were going to make had to do with the lying thing. Merlot telling Gail in advance that her own daughter was spreading lies. The daughter and the ex-husband both. It’s a device. Kind of a sinister device but pretty common. If he convinces Gail that her daughter and Frank are telling lies about him, then Merlot’s already diffused any damaging truth they might uncover. He can say, ‘I warned you, I told you they were going to say that.’ See what I mean?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I missed that one. Jesus, what a jerk. Seriously.” He had his billfold open… yes, he was removing a hard-wrapped joint. I watched him wet it between his lips as he patted his jersey mechanically, looking for a light. He said, “Another thing is, those postcards-”

  Smoking dope in my truck? I interrupted: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  His innocent expression asked, Who? ME? as he said, “I’m trying to relax, man. All this thinking has tightened my receptors. Christ! That woman’s in trouble, mark my word. It worries me. Makes me tense. You’re the one who always gets involved in this kind of shit, so don’t give me that look. And how do you expect me to hit the curveball if I’m not relaxed? We want to WIN, don’t we?”

  As I watched him light the joint I said, “If the cops stop us, I’ll help them cuff you. I mean
it. Maybe help them beat you if it comes to that.”

  “You would, too. You really would.”

  “I can’t believe you still smoke that crap, Tomlinson.”

  “Try it just once, you’ll understand. It’s herbal, you know. Grows right up out of the ground.” He took three more quick spasmodic inhalations, held his breath for several seconds before he added, “If it came from the ocean, oh man, you’d be all for it. Like if it was processed from a rare fish or something. But because it comes from the earth, you’ve got this, like, bias thing, man.”

  I said, “Jesus, Tomlinson.”

  “That’s very unfair.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He smoked intensely for a few blocks, everything focused inward, before he said, “Ah-h-h-h, um-m-m-m, yes… this is as natural as it gets. Very uplifting. Already I can feel the neurons returning to sync with certain rhythms. Earth rhythms, we used to call them. Yes, that was the precise terminology: Earth rhythms. Not that that would interest you. No sir, not mister big-shot marine biologist who hates anything that doesn’t come from the sea.”

  I said, “You’re hopeless.”

  “Uh-huh, keep thinking that. They said the same thing about the Edsel and look how much those things are worth. So I’m just biding my time, man. Biding my time till the big dogs start barkin.’ Us strange ones, we keep getting closer and closer to the head of the line. Count on it. And remember that you heard it first from me.”

  I was shaking my head as he inhaled again and added, “Hey… wait a minute. I just flashed on something: Have you ever stopped to realize that a right-hander’s curve-ball-picture it now. Follow along with what I’m saying. I’m saying that a right-hander’s curveball spins in the same direction and with the approximate same degree of inclination as the Earth. Which is a very heavy dose of symmetry, if you dig where I’m headed with this. Squatting back there, Doc, looking through your catcher’s mask, you ever notice the similarity? Watched a baseball spinning toward you like this quantum miniature of Planet Earth?”

  I said, “What I’ve noticed is, the more you smoke, the weirder you sound.”

  “Really? Humph… Wait a minute, did I say ‘symmetry’? I meant redundancy. Gad, no wonder I didn’t make sense. It supports my Redundancy Theory. Remember my book, No End in Sight? The premise is that time and change are an illusion. Time is an invention. Change is a misperception. The proof is all tied to my Redundancy Theory, which states that all life is repetition of a solitary design. And that design has been inexplicably set in motion.

  “Have you ever noticed that the six points of a snowflake precisely reproduce the design of a pine-tree bough? Or… you want something from the ocean? How about the polyps of a coral colony? They’re the mirror image of neuron cells in the human brain. That’s all the brain is-a colony, little synapse junctions, all interconnected just like coral. You know that.

  “You want a simple example of my Redundancy Theory? An echo. Seriously, man, a simple echo. If you yell into a cave, the echo you hear is not a new sound. Right? Same with all life, man. We are shadows and echoes set in motion. Understand what I’m saying?”

  No. I’d heard this theory before, but had never gotten it straight

  … or maybe it was just that Tomlinson’s shaky memory recalled it differently each time. I said, “The stuff you’re smoking, it affects you so quickly, is it laced with something? They soak it in some kind of chemical?”

  “No-o-o-o, man. Just really good shit, that’s all.”

  “It has that odor. Kind of sickening sweet.”

  “Yep. God aw’mighty how I love the smell of cannabis in the morning. This is a little bit of White Russian that some compadres of mine grow. I won’t tell you where. All those buddies you got in the DEA, you might find it too tempting. No offense, Doc, your sense of righteousness is one of your best qualities, but it’s also among your worst. And like I said, this is completely natural. Same with chili peppers.”

  This was too much. I said, “Don’t even try to make a comparison.”

  “If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’, man. The alkaloid that peppers contain-capsicum, the stuff that burns, I mean-it causes the brain to secrete endorphins. Same thing. People say they’re bad for ulcers? Bullshit. That’s an old wives’ tale. Plus a chili’s got more vitamin C than a whole grapefruit. They make you feel GOOD, man. That’s why the more you eat, the more you want. Why else would the indigenous peoples keep eating them, even though-and let’s face it-the little bastards make our assholes hurt.”

  I said, “Are you going to be too stoned to play ball?”

  “Are you kidding? Back in high school, I woulda never been named All State if it wasn’t for cannabis. Drugs give me the little extra edge that’s so important in athletics. Jesus, I didn’t even understand what baseball was really all about until I developed a personal relationship with the herb.”

  We were on Palm Beach Boulevard, headed east, and I could see the entrance to Terry Park just ahead: a convexity of oaks and palms beyond railroad tracks, a military surplus store, a boat dealership. I said, “You really think Gail Calloway is in trouble?”

  He nodded reflectively as he inhaled.

  “You started to say something about the postcards.”

  He was still nodding: “They were sent approximately one month apart.”

  “Yeah. That bothers me, too. Even if they’re gunkholing, using Cartagena as a base, it’s the rare cruise that only gets near a post office once a month.”

  “And you said the cards looked as if they were all written with the same pen.”

  “That, too.”

  “You see what I’m getting at?”

  “Of course. That maybe the cards were all written at the same time and are being mailed periodically by someone other than Gail. But that’s melodramatic. And unlikely.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Sure.”

  Tomlinson looked at me, trying hard to focus. “In that case, there are serious discrepancies between datum and reasonable, healthy expectations of normal behavior. So, yeah, you bet. The lady, she’s in trouble. Maybe more than you think, man. Fuckin’ A.”

  7

  That night, I telephoned Frank Calloway. He was in the middle of a dinner party, he said. Could I call back another time?

  There was New Age music playing in the background. It sounded tribal: tom-toms and chanting and wind chimes only slightly softer than the conversational drone of people making polite conversation. I could picture them up there in wealthy Boca Grande, glasses in hand, Windows showing no horizon, the Gulf of Mexico probably, through the sea grapes right outside.

  I said, “I’ll call you tomorrow at your office if you want, Frank. Or you can call me later this evening.”

  He said, “You say you’re a friend of Amanda’s?” As if he had no idea why I was calling; as if he’d never heard my name before.

  Maybe he hadn’t, but that was unlikely. According to Amanda, she’d told him that she and I were going to meet and that I might call to ask him some questions. But the big-money guys are necessarily suspicious, plus there is a behavioral dynamic that may well account for some of their success: They are very, very reluctant to give away information, or anything else, without getting something in return. To profit, they must get the upper hand. Gaining control of dialogue is a first step, a brand of gamesmanship for which I have zero tolerance or interest.

  I told him, “I don’t know Amanda well enough to claim her as a friend, Frank. If you doubt my motives, talk to her. Get her on the phone. When you’re satisfied, she has my number. Call and we’ll talk.”

  In an articulate baritone, the voice of a don’t-screw-with-me CEO, he said, “There’s no need to get indignant, Dr. Ford. I get a lot of calls from a lot of people. I want the best for my ex-wife, but I have to be careful. She has enough personal wealth to attract every third-rate con man for miles, thanks to our divorce settlement. Count on it, I’m protective. Without apology.”

  Yeah, A
manda had briefed him.

  I said, “Did you start protecting Gail before she ran off with Jackie Merlot? Or was it after he managed to slip through your security?”

  “Making moral judgments is an attractive trap. Personally, I’m trying to evolve beyond that.”

  “I don’t have much interest in evolving, Frank. As a biologist, I know it takes more time than I’ve got. I called because Amanda’s mother is apparently in trouble.”

  His thin laugh said he wasn’t going to comment.

  I said, “You have dinner guests to deal with. Check with Amanda, then give me a call.”

  He said, “When I can,” and hung up.

  I was up early, as always. Watched the sun push a mesa of gaseous pink light out of eastwardly mangroves. The circumference of the sun was precise, huge, orange as a Nebraska moon. It energized the shallow water of Dinkin’s Bay; changed the color from gray to cobalt to purple to tangerine as wading birds glided on an air-foil of their own reflection.

  The birds ascended, then banked away to feed.

  I lit a propane burner on my little ship’s stove, put coffee on and did my pull-ups while it perked. I did what we used to call a ‘Chinese series.’ I don’t know why we called it that, but we did. You do ten pull-ups, then nine, then eight; work your way down to one in decreasing increments. On the last set, you do as many as you can. Result: You end up doing at least fifty-five pull-ups, but usually more.

  Pretty good workout for arms and shoulders.

  I checked all the delicate pumps and filters on my main fish tank and smaller aquaria while I drank coffee and munched on an English muffin upon which I’d slathered a healthy layer of Vegemite. Vegemite is an Australian concoction; a yeast spread that’s as dense and meaty as bone marrow and once you get used to it (it takes awhile) the stuff is damn near addictive. Sat at a little table on the outside deck watching the morning and thinking about Gail Calloway. Decided that, if I hadn’t heard from ex-hubby Frank by noon, I’d call his office.