The Mangrove Coast Read online

  Maybe Tomlinson was right, because I’d come to look forward to playing baseball on Sundays. Sometimes on Thursday nights, too, under the lights. And I wasn’t about to let Tucker Gatrell hold me up or make me late. So I hustled around my cabin, dressing myself in cup and supporter, stirrups over long white socks that were still known by the odd, antique name of “sanitaries.” Pulled on gray stretch baseball pants that buttoned tightly where white pinstripe jersey bloused at my waist, then settled my team’s ball cap on my head with no less care than knights of old who once added crowning balance to their personal armor-work.

  Presto. Marion Ford, Ph.D. and purveyor of biological specimens, was now a simpler man of purer purpose. I was number 13, proud member of the West Florida Tropics, catcher and occasional relief pitcher. Dress a seventy-year-old man in a football uniform and he’ll look idiotic. Put him in a baseball uniform, though, and he’ll look like he can play nine and steal a base or two. That is one of the sport’s mysterious qualities … so maybe Tomlinson deserves more credit than I give him when he speaks of baseball’s nonlinear aspects.

  Once dressed, I peeked out the window to make certain Tucker wasn’t on his way. Then I picked up the VHF microphone and hailed Tomlinson on channel 12, our personal channel of contact, saying, “No Más, No Más. This is Sanibel Biological Supply, Whiskey Romeo X-ray six-seven-nine-six. Copy?”

  Waited a few beats before I heard, “Got you good, Doc. I plan to drink a few beers after the game, so maybe you’d better drive.”

  Which was no surprise. I always drove to our Sunday games and Tomlinson always drank heavily afterwards. Besides, Tomlinson had no car.

  Then he said, “But we’ve got to stop at my farm on the way home.”

  Tomlinson’s farm: a small portion of rented lot off Casa Ybel Road where he was pouring a lot of time and energy into a new passion—growing chili peppers. Jalapeños, habaneros, Thai, Scotch bonnets, you name it. He grew them all. “The history of Anglo trade and corruption can be read in the pericarp of the humblest chili,” he was fond of saying.

  What that meant, I have no idea.

  Another claim: “The world chili market is dominated by the same three species that Columbus brought back to Europe from his first couple of voyages.” Talking like some first-rate ethnobotanist.

  I found that interesting: three species of wild plant had been spread singularly, hand to hand and generation to generation, among all races and cultures. There were now, of course, hundreds of varieties, but nearly all were descended from those same three species of wild chilies that had probably evolved in the Amazon valley.

  It was an unusual pastime for a man who’d spent most of his life at sea, but Tomlinson had apparently entered a back-to-the-earth phase; a revisitation, perhaps, of his commune days, when he lived on some California ranch with similarly long-haired kindreds who went by names like Moon Dance and Autumn. For a year or two, long ago, Tomlinson himself had assumed a name of choice. An “Earth name,” as he described it. He’d gone by the name of Lono, he claimed, out of respect for some Polynesian god he admired.

  He’d worked on the communal farm and now he’d been called back to the earth, or so he said. He liked to get his hands and knees black with the commercial growing humus he trucked in because of Sanibel’s poor, salty soil. Growing chilies suited a certain need in him, and I was beginning to find it interesting, too, because he had planted seeds from all over the world. Plus I love to eat chilies.

  “We can stop at the farm,” I radioed back. “I’m about out of jalapeños.”

  “Then after the game,” he said, “we stop at Hooters for chicken wings and beer. Or hey—we can boat over to St. James City and listen to John Mooney play.”

  John Mooney, one of the great blues guitarists, lived on Pine Island. Every baseball Sunday, we always did that, too.

  On the way into town I told Tomlinson about my conversation with Amanda Richardson. Glancing from the road over to this strange vision: cattle rustler’s face, hippie hair, goatherder sandals and baseball uniform.

  He smelled of primo glove leather (he was breaking in a beautiful Wilson A2000 infielder’s glove) and patchouli, the favorite perfume of dope smokers. Probably had a joint hidden somewhere on his person, too, for he had embraced some of his old habits. By unspoken agreement, he pretended not to know that I knew.

  Yet, for all his weirdness and his flaky spiritualism, Tomlinson is an attentive listener and he possesses an intellect of the first magnitude. I wanted his assessment of the situation. In hindsight, I realize now that I was not as open-minded as I generally pretend to be. Yeah, I wanted Tomlinson’s opinion, but I had already come to a conclusion about the so-called disappearance of Gail Calloway. My old buddy’s widow was being taken advantage of by one of the common cast of chubby, middle-aged Casanovas that infest every Florida beach town from Jacksonville to Pensacola. True, there were a couple of elements in Amanda’s story that I found unusual, even troubling. But the chances of Gail’s being in genuine danger were very slim indeed.

  Not that I wasn’t interested and not that I wouldn’t help. I’d do what I could, no questions asked. Bobby would have done the same for me. Besides, I liked his daughter a lot. Yeah … nice woman with an outsider’s gift for observation and a no-nonsense intellect.

  We all prioritize, and I had already put the problem on one of the middle burners: important but not so pressing that I needed to drop everything and go charging off to the rescue.

  So, also in hindsight, make note of another screw-up by the kindly, well-intentioned dumbass, Doc Ford. Add one more M2 to a growing list. M-squared as in double M—which stands for Major Miscalculation. It was not my first nor, unfortunately, will it be my last, for I seem to have a limitless gift for failing to heed my own instincts … particularly when the welfare of an innocent person is at stake.

  Why that is true, I cannot fathom. It hurts me. It makes Why that is true, I cannot fathom. It hurts me. It makes me furious. But the fact that I so seldom seem to meet my own expectations is probably the main reason why I hang in there and keep banging away, trying to get it right. I can forgive myself for being dumb or for lacking insight. I could never forgive myself for quitting.

  So, in truth, all I wanted from Tomlinson was for him to validate my view by echoing my opinion. Isn’t that what we ask most often from friends?

  Tomlinson, however, is not your run-of-the-mill friend.

  As I drove across the causeway, then north into Fort Myers, he listened patiently as I spoke. He grunted and humphed and made attentive listening sounds while he chewed at a strand of his scraggly blond hair, a nervous habit.

  He questioned me closely about certain details of Amanda’s story. At one point he asked, “Old photographs? Why was she going through her mom’s stuff looking for old photographs?”

  “Sentimental value? I don’t know. She wanted a picture of her mom and real dad.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Which she said she found in her mother’s hope chest. The photographs. That was the only place?”

  “No, what she said was, she was looking for old photographs and was about to give up. There’s a difference. Her mother had apparently packed them all away. Amanda said she’s a neatness freak.”

  Now Tomlinson was twisting his hair into a braid. “You don’t find that odd? I find that very odd.”

  “You find it odd that a woman who’s been a widow for nearly two decades has put away photos of her late husband?”

  “And of her own daughter, too, apparently.”

  “The girl did that herself. Because she once had a crossed eye. A lazy eye and she’s probably still ashamed of it.”

  “She told you that?”

  “You drive me nuts sometimes, Tomlinson. You know that? Yes, she told me that she’d put the pictures away. Hid them, that’s what she said. I’m guessing at the motive. But it’s a reasonable assumption based on circumstantial evi
dence.”

  “Like you said, man, sentimental value. A guy like you, a guy who doesn’t feel much emotion, it’s something easy to miss. But to a spiritual headbanger like me, it stands out like a sore beezer.”

  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?”