The Mangrove Coast Read online

  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, Amanda 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.

  Maybe Tomlinson was right
. Maybe the lady was in more trouble than I suspected.

  Thought about Gail some more as I jogged Tarpon Bay Road to the beach, then turned toward Captiva Island. Occasionally, my thoughts strayed to Maggie, my married friend from Tampa. I hadn’t heard from her for a few days. Were we going to get together and work out this week?

  I stayed on the harder sand near the surf line, running at a pretty good pace. The sun was behind me, gathering heat. A little-known but potentially useful fact: When children wander away from their parents while on a beach, they almost always go in a direction that puts the sun at their back.

  Same with aging runners.

  For some reason my thoughts shifted from Gail Calloway to the apparent difficulties of maintaining a marriage. Running promotes a random, free rein of thought, so it seemed a natural progression to end up thinking about my own failed relationship with a woman who was as impossible not to love as it was impossible to be her lover.

  Pilar Fuentes Balserio, that’s who I was thinking about. Pilar is the prominent chief executive of the small Central American nation of Masagua. I’d met her when she was the wife of the President of Masagua.

  We became lovers nearly a year before her husband’s term came to an end. Shortly thereafter, she gave birth to a son. It was also at about that time that she ascended to power.

  I suspect I played more than a small role in her success, occupational and otherwise.

  There were reasons, all political, why I’d been able to see Pilar only occasionally. It became clear to me that circumstances weren’t going to change. How? Pilar had sat me down and told me in unambiguous terms.

  A very strong woman.

  Here’s what she offered: We could have a few days at Christmas, perhaps. Maybe a week when the Masaguan National Assembly recessed for summer. Maybe a weekend if she could wrangle a few days in Miami for research. And secretly. Always, always secretly, arranged in ways so that absolutely no one could know.

  But my feelings for Pilar are such that occasionally just wasn’t enough. So, slightly more than two months ago, I’d taken a few weeks to think about it, another week or two to build up sufficient courage, and then I sent her a telegram.

  The guy at Western Union seemed surprised by the request. In this age of E-mail, he did mostly money transfers, not messages.

  But I liked the style of the thing. Stupidly, I pictured a kid with a weird little hat pedaling up on his bike to make this dramatic delivery: “Telegram for you, ma’am….”

  The telegram consisted of four words.

  It was a proposal. The only one I’ve ever made.

  Hopefully, it will be the last.

  The first two words of the telegram began: Will you …?

  Pilar’s reply had come three thoughtful days later; the only time she’d ever risked telephoning me. She was tearful. She was resolute.

  Her answer was no.

  It had to be no, she said. She had no reasonable options.

  Consider, she said, who I was: A North American; a gringo. How could that possibly be accepted by her people?

  What she really meant was: Think about who you once were, about the work you once did to hurt my country.

  I felt like an even bigger dope than usual. I pride myself on being reasonable, but I hadn’t even taken the time to analyze her position. Of course she had to decline. She had no other choice. So why the hell had I risked her refusal? It was out Of character for me to put so much emotional currency on the line.

  Tomlinson’s assessment had been uncharacteristically blunt: “You’d have never asked her, Doc, if you thought for a minute she’d say yes. Most people live alone because they have to. But you … you live this way because you like it.”

  Was that true? I wondered about it as I ran along the beach.

  No, I decided. It wasn’t true. My proposal to Pilar had been genuine. I liked the idea of entering into a partnership with her … the woman and her handsome blond-haired son. That she could say no, that she had to refuse, still caused a jolt of disappointment in me that was as powerful as any physical pain I’d ever felt.

  One thing was obvious: If I did not marry Pilar, I would ultimately lose her. And she would not allow me to marry her….

  That realization created in me a feeling of internal deflation that seemed to wither my perceptions about whatever future I hoped to have. That is not a dramatic assessment. For weeks after making the decision not to see Pilar again, I felt like crap. I mooned around like some adolescent idiot. I felt embarrassed by my inability to control my own thoughts and feelings. The only emotion I’d ever experienced that was as intense was when I’d lost another good woman, a powerful woman named Hannah Smith. Finally,

  I began to get mad. Mad at myself, no one else. And that’s when I began the slow, slow process of recovery.

  Pilar was out of my life.

  Fine. I had my work, my routine, my fish tank, my boats.

  And no more proposals. Not of that kind, anyway.

  One night, when I had dumbly observed, “Love can be extraordinarily painful,” Tomlinson had sagely replied, “No shit, Sherlock.”

  An insightful man.

  But not me, I told him. Never again.

  I tried Calloway a couple of times at his office on Monday, didn’t get him. It was a Lauderdale area code. Apparently Frank did his work over the phone or by computer and probably made the occasional cross-state commute.

  By car, Boca Grande to Lauderdale would have been two and a half, maybe three hours.

  By chopper, maybe forty minutes.

  I wondered if the efficient secretary who took my messages was the infamous Skipper. The wise thing to do when in doubt is to ask, so I finally asked.

  No, indeedy, I was told. I was speaking with Ms. Betty Marsh, Mr. Calloway’s executive secretary. Without prompting, she added, “Ms. Worthington hasn’t worked since she became Mrs. Calloway.” Her tone carried the careful professional indifference that is designed to mask disapproval. I also noted the judgmental ‘hasn’t worked’ instead of the more specific ‘hasn’t worked here.’

  Calloway’s longtime secretary clearly did not approve of her boss’s new young wife.

  I wondered how far she was willing to go with it. I said, “I was aware that Frank married her, but I didn’t know she’d left the office.”

  “Well, she has. Hasn’t worked here for nearly a year now.”

  I said, “Must be nice,” with the slightly cynical, the-world-just-isn’t-fair chuckle that always accompanies that phrase.

  And that’s when she closed the door just a little. “Who did you say you are?”

  “Ford. First name Marion, middle initial D, which is why most people call me Doc. I’m a friend of Amanda’s.”

  Her voice brightened. “You are? In that case, I’ll save you another phone call: Mr. Calloway won’t be available till tomorrow morning, maybe early afternoon. You try then, I’ll put you right through if he’s here in Lauderdale or give you the number where he’ll be. She’s one of the good ones, Amanda is. Enough character in there for two or three people. He’s in meetings today with investors, the whole bunch of them working late. Over in Tampa.”

  So I went back to the lab where I’d spent much of the day carefully removing otoliths from grouper I’d collected.

  It was exacting, painstaking work. First I used my Buehler low-speed saw to cut paper-thin sections, then Histomount to mount the sections of bone on a slide. Careful polishing was then required to make the annuli visible.

  When I was done, the tiny white discs were as bright and delicate as cultured pearls. And so thin that a puff of wind could blow them around like autumn leaves.

  If the annuli were readable (all too often, they weren’t), then and only then was I able to count the rings through my compound microscope.

  One ring equaled one year of growth.

  Painstaking work, yeah. Sometimes frustrating, but it’s the kind of work I enjoy. It requires precision and offers clarity.

&nb
sp; So why was I spending so much time trying to figure out the age of a fish? Simple. The black grouper is no ordinary fish. It’s a large, aggressive bottom dweller that inhabits coral reefs and rocky ledges from North Carolina to southern Brazil. It’s a popular sport species as well as the most important commercial species of grouper in South Florida.

  You see grouper on a restaurant menu, it’s most likely black grouper. Translation: economically, it is a very, very valuable animal.

  An interesting thing about the fish is that, like most grouper species, black grouper are hermaphrodites.

  That’s right, hermaphrodites.

  Protogynous hermaphrodites is the exact scientific term. What that means is, all grouper are born female and, at a certain stage of maturity, most (perhaps not all) make the transition to male.

  The data compiled by doctors Crabtree and Bullock had already produced some interesting statistics. We’d examined 1,164 black grouper and found that approximately 50 percent of the female population had reached sexual maturity at an age of slightly more than 5 years. By the age of 15.5 years, half the sampling had transformed into males.

  This was noteworthy because Florida imposes both recreational and commercial regulations on black grouper caught in state waters. To be killed, a grouper must be at least twenty inches in length—a fairly large fish.

  In isolated regions of rock and reef, did this mean that the largest fish, all males, would be the first to be exterminated? And, if so, would grouper respond differently to fishing mortality than typical gonochoristic species?

  In plain English: Would the depletion of male stock cause the species to adapt more quickly? Would smaller, younger females make the transition to male in order for the species to survive?