The Mangrove Coast df-6 Read online

  One of the oddities of living on a coast bordered by islands is that it is often faster-and a hell of a lot less nerve-racking-to travel by boat. Because of the configuration of roads and because it was close to peak tourist season, it would have taken me more than two and a half, maybe three, hours to drive from Sanibel Island to Boca Grande. Bad traffic and toll bridges. Lots of stoplights. Many intersections with Kmarts and Burger Kings, busy 7-Elevens and city-sized malls, their parking lots jammed with Winnebago clones and midwestern license plates. Acres of asphalt, drifting exhaust fumes and metal baking in the April heat.

  In my fast Hewes flats skiff, though, on a calm day, the trip was forty minutes of open water and good scenery.

  Not a tough choice to make.

  I left my piling house in Dinkin’s Bay on Sanibel Island at precisely 4:30 P.M.-plenty of lag time in case I saw something interesting and wanted to dawdle. I am, by profession, a marine biologist. I make my living collecting sea specimens, which I then sell to research labs and educational facilities. The name of my company is Sanibel Biological Supply. I am sole owner and lone employee. This means that dawdling-and the right to dawdle while on the water-is part of my job description.

  It’s one of the perks of working for myself.

  So I got in my skiff and I ran the inshore flats past Chino Island, Demere Key and Pineland, then cut northwest toward the blue convexity that is Charlotte Harbor. The bays and water passages of Florida’s west coast resemble lakes more than they resemble seacoast. It’s because they are hedged by mangroves. The mangrove is a rugged, wind-stunted tree that elevates itself above swamp on monkey-bar roots. Because the tree employs its arched roots to creep and expand, it is called the ‘tree that walks’; the name itself alluding to qualities of silence that hint at dark groves of speechless men.

  These roots grow so densely that mangrove forests not only protect; they also isolate. You can’t walk through a mangrove forest; you must climb. Which is why the most inhospitable sections of the world’s most inhospitable tropical regions are always, always marked by an expanse of mangroves. And yet, as seen from a distance, mangroves give the misimpression of lushness and shadow that one associates with fresh water.

  It’s an illusion. Mangroves denote harsh sunlight, salt and sulfur. When it comes to dependence on the chemical processes of the tropics, mangroves are as basic as lightning or ozone. Coconut palms are trees of tradewinds and ocean currents. Mangroves are creatures of muck and equatorial heat. Because of the primeval conditions in which they thrive, they are trees that seem more intimately related to the basic procedures of cellular life. It is one of the reasons that I am an admirer of mangroves.

  I am not troubled by illusions that I understand.

  So I headed north through long lakes created by mangrove islands. It was a good day for it. Lots of sun and very little wind. The starboard beverage locker was packed with crushed ice, bottled water and a couple of bottles of Bud Light. In the port locker, I had stashed swim shorts, towel, a mask, snorkel and my trusted old Rocket fins just in case I got the urge to get in the water. The bottom of my Hewes had been recently pressure-washed and I’d just had my 200 Mariner serviced and tuned, so the throttle handle was sensitive to the touch; a tempting energy conduit that, if pressed to sudden speed, seemed to dilute gravity as it created velocity.

  Just turning the key caused the fiberglass hull beneath me to oscillate like the skin of a nervous horse.

  I like that feeling: the feeling of being alone on open water in a fast boat. It’s more than recreation, it’s more than transportation. It is a chunk of the scaffolding upon which I hang my life. Going alone on water is an act that, at once, insulates and defines.

  It feels like freedom. It is freedom.

  Which is the way I felt on this hot, hot April afternoon, a Thursday. Heat radiating off the water created distant mirages that, as I approached at speed, dissipated into panels of quaking light. I flushed cormorants and wading birds. I left a billion swimming, crawling, oozing life forms-the living, breeding, breathing body of the tropic littoral-in my indifferent wake.

  April is also the front edge of tarpon season, and Boca Grande Pass is one of the most famous tarpon fisheries in the world. For two months out of each year, the water space between the islands of Gasparilla and Cayo Costa becomes a fiberglass municipality; a night-bright and morning-light city with its own rules and laws and procedures.

  It is a city that drifts with the tide while its members, running beam-to-beam, jockey and leapfrog and shout and swear, all fighting to maintain strategic position over the pass’s deep ambush holes.

  With time to kill, I idled through and watched several hundred boats-from mega-yachts to Boston Whalers-moving in patterns that were no less strange than the deeply coded patterns of pelagic fish beneath. Sat there in my skiff riding the outgoing tide, taking it all in and enjoying myself. Boca Grande Pass during tarpon season is equal parts drama and slapstick comedy: a hundred million dollars’ worth of high-tech equipage designed and purchased so as to more effectively hook a chromium, six-foot fish that is primeval, unchanged, so primitive that it can breathe surface air, not unlike the first sea creatures that crawled landward out of the slime.

  I appreciated the irony of that. Plus, it’s a nice thing to sit on open water and watch pods of tarpon roll past.

  In hindsight, I should have stayed right there and fished. Could have pieced together my Loomis 12-weight fly rod, headed out to Johnson’s Shoals and casted to passing schools of daisy-chaining tarpon. Weeks later… months later, I would think of that moment, me floating there open and alone in the pass, and I would regret my decision to keep the appointment with Frank Calloway.

  It is an irony that I also appreciate but makes me forever uneasy: nearly all life’s passages, tranquil or tragic, hinge on a random intersecting of events, a chance meeting, or on some seemingly insignificant decision.

  Free will or not, none of us seems to have much control…

  By 5:30 P.M. I was tied up at Whidden’s Marina, south of Miller’s Marina near the waterside golf fairways of the Gasparilla Inn.

  Calloway had given me directions to his home. Very detailed, precise directions, too. Not that they needed to be. Boca Grande is a tiny little New England-sized village with tree-lined streets. Not a very complicated place.

  I took a slow, lazy walk across the island so that, at five-till-six, I was ringing the bell at Calloway’s house, a gray hulk built on stilts on the Gulf side, just off Gilchrist Avenue, set back behind a low brick wall and hidden in the shadows of casuarinas and palms and hedges of sea grape.

  No answer.

  Rang the bell a couple of more times. Same thing. Finally, I rapped on the door… and the door swung open.

  That was my first surprise. Why would Calloway, a punctual man and, by all accounts, a details freak, fail to be at home at the time of our appointment? And why would he not only leave the door unlocked but open?

  A very pretty friend of mine, who also happens to be very wise, once told me that the reason I prefer to live alone is because I abhor confusion. “With you, Ford, everything has to be orderly and understandable.”

  My pretty friend was caricaturizing with way too broad a brush. Yeah, I’m rational. Or try to be. But the reason I’m uncomfortable with confusion is because I realize that I don’t possess the peculiar genius required to arrive at intuitive but accurate conclusions.

  Tomlinson does. I know a few others who have the same kind of superior intellect.

  But not me. I’m the slow, steady, methodical type. I’ve got to think things out, take it step by step. I am a chronic neatener and straightener. In the lab and in the field, I’m compulsive about understanding behavior and interrelationships. Every action and reaction is sensible once the observer understands motivation and makes sense of the objectives.

  Calloway’s absence and the open door did not make sense.

  Which is why I pushed the door open a little wider… and why
I took the first few tentative steps into the living room, calling Calloway’s name the whole time… and how I happened to end up in the kitchen, uninvited, kneeling over a corpse.

  It put me in a delicate position. Individuals who find bodies while trespassing in a stranger’s house must necessarily spend lots and lots of time answering questions from edgy cops.

  It was not a major dilemma, but it was something I preferred to avoid.

  The second problem was trickier. The reason I’d boated all the way to Boca Grande was not just to speak with Calloway in person, but also because he’d promised to show me something: a manila folder with a sheaf of papers therein.

  He’d been very protective, very closemouthed about what was in that folder. “The guy I hired to put this report together,” he’d told me, “took some… let’s say unusual steps to get the information I wanted. So, no, I’m not going to mail it, and, no, I’m not going to make copies and, yes, it is very confidential.”

  I wanted that folder.

  I wanted that folder because I’d already promised Calloway’s stepdaughter, Amanda, that I would look through it and help her if I could.

  It’s another quirk of mine: I take personal promises very, very seriously.

  If the cops arrived, though, the house would be sealed. I wouldn’t get the folder. It wouldn’t matter if Calloway had died a violent death or from natural causes. I would have to leave empty-handed.

  Still standing at the sink in Calloway’s gourmet kitchen, I looked again at the man’s body; stood there feeling the weight of adverse air and the twittering, skittish afternoon silence. Finally, I reached for a dish towel.

  It was yellow with green embroidered dolphins. Bottlenosed dolphins were, apparently, a domestic theme.

  I used the towel to wipe clean the faucet I had touched, then continued to use it to wipe away fingerprints as I methodically searched the drawers of Calloway’s bedroom, then his study.

  I thought to myself: Christ, I speak with Tucker for the first time in years and, next thing I know, I’m burgling a dead man’s house.

  Meaning Tucker Gatrell, my late mother’s only brother and so my only living relative.

  Which, in truth, is how the whole business in Boca Grande, and then in Panama, started.

  All because I made the mistake of listening to Tuck…

  2

  Tuck called me during the last minutes of a breezeless, moonless Saturday night, April 19, in a spring remembered for the Comet Hale-Bopp.

  For more than a month, I’d had a great view of the comet: a foggy contrail in the western sky that resembled a fragment of some far-off navigational beam. Shift your eyes one way, there was Mars, a bright pellet of rust colored ice. Move your eyes another way and there was Venus, solitary and blue. Turn your head a little farther, and there were the lights of Dinkin’s Bay Marina casting yellow pathways across the black water.

  Each evening, I’d walk out onto the porch, stand peering over the mangrove fringe of Dinkin’s Bay, then wander back inside. It got so I was working later and later just to take advantage of the nice diversion.

  I was still working the night Tuck called, even though it was nearly midnight. I normally wouldn’t have answered the phone, but I have a short list of longtime friends who sometimes suffer the beery blahs or late-night panics and who are welcome to call at any time, from any place in the world. Midnight on the Gulf Coast of Florida could be a troubled lunch hour in Brisbane or a desperate morning in Kota Kinabalu. So at the first electronic warble, I left the grouper I was dissecting, trotted across the open-air walkway of my stilthouse and pushed open the screen door to the little cabin that is my home.

  I was wiping my hands on a towel when I heard, “Duke? Jesus, it used to be easier calling Truman than gettin’ holt of you. Back when I was guiding, I mean.”

  I recognized the voice immediately… which is why I was immediately sorry that I’d answered the phone.

  The voice said, “As in Harry Truman-you maybe heard the name? Which, a’course, was when both us was still alive and fishing the islands down off the ‘Glades.” There was a pause before he added, “Him being the dead one, of course. Me being still full of ginger.”

  “Your fishing buddy, the president,” I replied. “Yeah, I think you mentioned him a couple of times before.”

  I then heard the sound of a belch, part gas, part grunt, followed by: “Whew! Little bastard snuck right out the front hatch. Well… they say beer’s got body so it’s sure as shit got soul, and that was the sound of a six-pack headed south.! Vaya con Dios, mi amigo! The beer, I’m talkin’ about, Duke.” Then he belched again.

  So the man was drunk. No surprise there.

  Into the phone, I said, “Look… about that name-you can call me anything you want. Ford or Doc or even Marion. But not Duke. You say it, I look around, like, ‘Who’s he mean?’ I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

  He said, “You serious? Goddamn, you are serious.”

  “It’s a small thing to ask,” I said.

  “But, hell, I thought up that nickname my own self.”

  I told him, “I think we’ve discussed that a couple of times, too.”

  Said it nicely.

  Why had I spent so much of my life trying to be nice to the man?

  Tucker Gatrell: line up a thousand men and he’s the one you’d vote most likely to die in a trailer fire or while replacing the shocks on some beat-up half-ton Ford.

  He was more than a decade older than my late mother. He looked seventy when I was fifteen. By the time I was thirty, he still looked seventy and he still wore skinny-legged Levi’s and pearl-buttoned shirts. Cowboy clothes, because he owned a mud-and-mangrove ranch in a backwater called Mango; little tiny fishing village south of Marco Island where he kept a horse and a few cows.

  Journalists loved the guy; saw him as an Authentic Everglades Voice. That he claimed to have guided a lengthy list of rich and famous sportsmen added fabric. More than one writer said Tuck resembled an older Robert Mitchum, but that had more to do with his attitude than his looks. He had the Jack Daniel’s swagger, the polar blue eyes, the shoulders and scrawny hips, but he lacked the style. Not that any journalist ever nailed down the man’s deficits.

  No. They saw in him whatever they wanted to see. That was an indicator of Tucker’s one true gift: He had the qualities of a mirror. That he lacked depth was part of the deal. Not that anyone, except for me, of course, was critical enough to notice.

  There were reasons I didn’t like or trust Tuck. Several very good reasons, indeed.

  So now he’d called, I’d answered, and I’d have to listen to him… but that didn’t mean I had to stand there wasting time when there were fish waiting to be dissected in my lab.

  I said to him, “Did you telephone just to see if I got your messages? Or is there actually a reason?”

  “So the boys at the marina told you I’ve been callin’.”

  “They stick my messages on the board just like everyone else’s. But you never said what you wanted.”

  He seemed momentarily miffed. “God dang! I got to have a reason to call my own nephew?”

  “At midnight? Yeah, you need a reason. It doesn’t have to be a great reason, but a reason. I was trying to sleep.”

  Another lie. The man brought out the very worst in me. Which he seemed to realize… and it delighted him.

  “That right? You don’t sound the least bit sleepy. ‘Fact, you sound chipper as can be.”

  His way of demonstrating that he had good instincts for what was true, what wasn’t. Infuriating.

  I said, “I was getting ready to go to bed. That’s what I meant. I’ve been working in the lab.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ve got a lot of things going on right now. Some of us have obligations.”

  Jesus-he had a knack for making me sound like a pious little geek.

  Tuck replied, “You were always the busiest kid I ever seen. Lotsa people get shit stacked on ’e
m, but you’d always grab a shovel and dig your way towards the bottom of the pile. Couldn’t tell if it was ’cause you got a bad sense of direction or just loved being alone.

  “A man who can’t find time to have a little fun, I always kinda wondered about.”

  Before I could reply to the implications of that, he asked, “Still studying them baby tarpon?”

  This was another part of his ritual, talking about tarpon.

  Knowing what was coming, I listened to him say, “Still putting them under microscopes and stuff just to figure out where they spawn? I coulda solved that one for you years ago, saved all you busy biologists the trouble. You want me to tell you where tarpon spawn?”

  He was going to tell me anyway, so I said, “I’m all ears.”

  He said, “The tarpon, they come shallow to spawn, which is why you find so many baby tarpon up the creeks in the Ten Thousand Islands. All you got to do is go out and look with your own eyes. I know places way up in the sawgrass the water’s so fresh they’s gar and bass and bullfrogs. But there’re plenty of them baby tarpon, too. Why else? ’Cause the males and big cows migrate shallow to spawn, just loaded with milt and roe.”

  He was right about finding immature tarpon in fresh water, but he was wrong about everything else.

  Typical Gatrell.

  More than once, I’d patiently explained the facts to him: despite the folklore, research indicated that tarpon spawned in deep water… but I wasn’t going to waste my time going through it again.

  I said, “Yeah, tarpon. I’m still working on tarpon.”

  Another lie.

  Truth was, for the last couple of months, I’d been helping doctors Roy Crabtree and Lewis Bullock of the Florida Marine Research Institute on a study they were doing on the age, growth and reproduction of black grouper in Florida waters.

  I found the subject fascinating.

  Tucker Gatrell would not.

  So I did not tell him that, for the last many weeks, I’d spent my time in the lab preparing thin sections of otolith-ear bone-taken from grouper I’d caught, then counting annuli, or growth rings, using my powerful Wolfe compound microscope.