The Mangrove Coast df-6 Page 3

  One ring equaled a year’s growth, just as with many trees.

  And I did not tell him that I’d spent the last several days offshore with two Useppa Island friends and part-time treasure salvers, Harry and Jane Robb, aboard their forty-two-foot Shay, catching more grouper to bring back and dissect for a broader sample. Which is why I had only recently received his phone messages… not that I would have called him anyway.

  Why bother? In Tucker Gatrell’s vision of existence, all fellow life-forms were treated as props and sundries to better stage his own little forays against boredom and normalcy. He had no interest in what I was doing. More to the point, he had no interest in a process that could be weighed and measured and proven to be true.

  We were, in short, exact opposites. And, unlike some opposites, we repelled rather than attracted.

  Which is why I pressed the lie, continuing, “Yeah, the tarpon studies have been moving pretty well. And now that you explained to me where it is tarpon go to spawn, I should be able to wrap up the whole business in another day or two. After that, I’ll take a couple of weeks off. Kick back and relax.”

  There. Show him I could have as much fun as the next guy…

  Which I thought was cynical and witty and rejoining until Tucker said, “Only a day or two? Perfect.”

  Jesus, he believed me.

  I said, “Yeah, two days at the most, I should have the whole tarpon puzzle solved…” But then I caught myself and said, “Perfect? Why’s that perfect?”

  “Because that’s what I was hoping for.”

  The way he said that, I felt a little chill; as if I’d stepped on a false floor of bamboo-a punji pit-and could feel the bottom falling away.

  I listened to him say, “Reason is, I got a favor to ask and I felt bad about it. You being usually too busy and all.”

  I hated the feeling that gave me, of being so stupid. The old bastard seemed to have the ability to anticipate my thoughts, my moves, and neatly manipulate my reactions, just as he had once manipulated herds of his damn wormy cattle.

  I said, “Favor?”

  He said, “Yeah. Now that I know you got the time, it shouldn’t be a problem.” Then he added quickly, “It’s not for me, understand. It’s for a woman. Pretty little woman, by the sound of her voice.”

  Thinking, Is he drunk or insane? I said, “By the sound of her voice? You call me at midnight to ask me to do a favor for a woman you’ve never even met?”

  “Oh, I met her. I met her on the phone when she called huntin’ you. It’s just that I never seen her. You ain’t, either. Or so she says.”

  Was any of this supposed to make sense?

  I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Ain’t you listening? The woman who called me, the one I’m bringin’ to your house tomorrow morning. Well… actually, I’m driving my pickup and she’s gonna follow me in her own car. Unless I can talk her into ridin’ with me… which I damn sure hope to do. She says she needs to talk to you, but the only address she had was from back in the days when you had mail sent to my ranch. So she had to track me down first. Amanda Calloway. That name don’t ring a bell?”

  I said, “I don’t know anyone named Amanda Calloway.” I mulled it over a few more seconds before I said, “Nope… I’ve never heard of anyone by that name. So, with all the work I have to do, I don’t have time to meet her or anyone else-”

  He cut me off, saying, “Wait, I don’t mean Calloway. That’s her what-a-you-call-it… her adopted name, the name she goes by now. The name she gave me, the one she said you’d know is Richardson. Amanda Richardson. That’s who she used to be.”

  “Same thing. I don’t know any Amandas-”

  “And she said to mention Bobby Richardson.”

  It stopped me cold.

  Bobby Richardson…?

  I hadn’t heard his name spoken aloud in fifteen, maybe sixteen years. Not that I had forgotten him. No. Men like Bobby Richardson, you don’t forget.

  I said, “Amanda is Bobby’s widow?… wait a minute. That doesn’t sound right. His wife’s name wasn’t Amanda. Her name was…”

  I couldn’t remember. What the hell was the name of Bobby’s wife? He’d talked about her often enough during those long, soggy nights in the rain forests of Asia. It was stored somewhere in my memory, but I was having trouble bringing it to the surface.

  Tucker said, “The girl says her mamma’s name is Gail-”

  Gail. That was the wife’s name. Gail Richardson.

  “-but this is his daughter; she’s the one I’m talking about. Amanda. She’s the one who wants to see you, this man’s little girl. Or was the man’s little girl, I guess. She said he died when she was, what, less than five years old?”

  I said, “Bobby died when his daughter was a child. That’s right.”

  “Then she’s the one. The one who called me trying to find you and that I’m bringing with me to Sanibel tomorrow… now that you said you’re not too busy. ‘Cause she wants to talk to you and needs to ask a favor.”

  Bobby’s daughter? Just hearing the man’s name brought back memories of a time in my life and of a style of life that now seemed as remote as the far side of the Earth or as distant as a comet’s bright contrail.

  The girl was wrong about one thing, though. I had seen her before. I’d seen her in a photograph, long, long ago…

  When I hung up the phone, I wandered around the lab putting things away, getting dissecting table and instruments clean and neat so I could start fresh the next day. But I was operating on autopilot. My routine in the lab is so entrenched that it takes no conscious effort. Good thing, too, because my mind had locked onto the task of digging out and dusting off memories that were nearly two decades old.

  The photograph… I could still see the photograph of a little girl named Amanda Richardson in fairly precise detail… probably because Bobby had pulled it out and showed it to me so many times.

  It was one of those quick-print Polaroid shots, Easteregg bright colors, that someone back in the States had had the good sense to have laminated before sending it to our APO address in Bangkok.

  There’s lots and lots of rain in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Metal rusts. Cloth rots. Paper turns to paste. But, because it was laminated, the photo survived our months there.

  Unfortunately, Bobby had not.

  Here’s what I could reconstruct of the photo: a tiny girl with hair the color of freshly sheared copper wearing a frilly yellow dress, as if ready for a birthday party.

  That was it: the photo had been taken on Amanda’s birthday. Third birthday or fourth, I couldn’t remember.

  And… the girl wore plastic-rimmed, nerdish glasses… and gloves. Yes, gloves. Her small hands folded.

  Nothing very distinctive about that, but what I remembered better than the glasses was that the child’s left eye was turned slightly inward, a malady that I knew to be strabismus, or lazy eye, as it is sometimes called. Bobby said they’d have it fixed when the girl was old enough, not that he was worried about it. And buy her some more stylish glasses, too.

  To me, her wandering eye, that slight imperfection, implied a depth of character… or of vulnerability… that made the child’s face distinctive, lovely to look upon, and I told the proud father that he should think twice before getting the thing fixed. It was harmless flattery that he took seriously.

  “Doc,” he’d told me, “the only reason you say that is because you know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic vanity of women. Or about women at all for that matter.”

  True enough… but this from a man with a film-star face, a quarterback’s body, who was a little bit vain himself.

  No, not a little bit vain. Bobby was one of the sharpest, toughest and most dependable men I’d ever met, but that did not alter the truth that he was vain; very, very vain indeed…

  It was strange thinking about him after all the years that had passed. It was strange and unexpected and oddly, oddly unsettling, too.

  I am
not a nostalgia buff. I do not prefer to haunt a past softened and brightened by imagination. The past is constructed of memory, the future of expectation. I live most comfortably in the present, because that, in truth, is the only reality. It is all a reasonable person has.

  Besides, my memories of Bobby and Asia weren’t all that rosy. And I certainly hadn’t planned to stay up long past midnight thinking about old friends, old battles and long gone losses…

  No, what I had planned was a quiet night alone at home…

  I was looking forward to it: just me and the microscope in my lab, sea specimens arranged neatly and in order over the stainless-steel dissecting table… gooseneck lamp adding precise illumination… music on the stereo, if I wanted, or maybe the portable shortwave radio.

  I’d rigged an external antenna off the wooden water cistern outside, so I could pull in programs from Hanoi or Jakarta or Beijing, even Australia Broadcasting out of Perth, no problem at all.

  And there was, of course, the comet.

  When I needed a break from the microscope, it was a nice thing to walk outside and look into littoral darkness, still listening to some solitary radio voice that was ricocheting off stars from the other side of the globe. The electronic connexus is deceptively personal. It seemed to flow down out of space and directly into my remodeled fish shack which is built on stilts over water.

  So no, I didn’t expect or want to hear from Tucker Gatrell, and I certainly didn’t want to be drawn into a revisitation of my former life, my former occupation.

  Absolutely not. Lately, in fact, I had been restricting all my socializing to the guides and the liveaboards at Dinkin’s Bay Marina.

  Just wasn’t in the mood for outsiders.

  There was a reason, a very specific reason.

  My friend Tomlinson said it was because I had entered a reclusive period. The man is part savant, part goat, so he is usually at least half right about everything he says. An example: “Unrequited love, man. What a serious green weenie that is. Remember: love is what goes out of us, not what we take in. It’s the union of two solitudes, yeah. Two solitudes willing to protect and trust. But just ‘cause it didn’t work out doesn’t mean that you have to spend all your time alone.”

  Tomlinson talks like that; he really does. He says it is because he has evolved spiritually after years and years of study and meditation. I think it’s because his thought processes have been chemically altered during years and years of abusing marijuana and hallucinogenics.

  But it was also Tomlinson who, after cracking a cold bottle of Hatuey, told me, “Amigo, if it’s got tits or tires, you’re sure to have trouble with it down the road. Face it, man, she’s committed to Central America. Nothing you can do is gonna change that. So, the way I see it, it’s time for us to find you a new ride.”

  He was talking about a woman I knew, a woman I shared history with, a woman named Pilar. Pilar was a former lover.

  I had to keep reminding myself of that: Pilar was my former lover.

  It was not an easy truth to acknowledge.

  So, yeah, I’d entered a reclusive period. For weeks, I worked in the lab. I listened to my shortwave radio. I lived alone in my little sea-cabin house. At night, I’d sit on the porch listening to the mountain-stream gurgle of tide rivering past the pilings beneath me. I’d listen to the snap-crackle-pop of pistol shrimp and the bee-whah groan of catfish.

  I looked at the comet.

  Daytime was different. When the sun’s out, it seems reasonable to pursue goals. I defined mine by writing them each and every day in one of my notebooks. They were simple goals.

  Twice a day, seven days a week, I rededicate myself to getting back into shape. It was none too soon. I’d let myself go over the last several months, and in that very short time I’d gained maybe fifteen pounds. I felt soft and slow and grainy. I felt as if age and gravity were vines that were working their way up my legs, taking control. I was eating too much, drinking too many beers, sleeping way too much.

  So the rules were simple: beer on Fridays and Saturdays only. Absolutely no food of any kind after 8:00 P.M.

  It was time to take charge of my own life once again.

  Every year, getting into shape seems to be a tougher, slower, more painful process.

  Each year, my knees and shoulders and ankles seem to hurt a little more.

  Tough physical work was exactly what I needed. Pain is good. Extreme pain is extremely good. I punished myself with it and then I used it as a purge.

  I lost the fifteen pounds of fat, and then I lost five more for good measure. I spent so much time running up and down the beaches of Sanibel that I began to recognize the condo owners and individual vacationers at resorts such as Sundial, Casa Ybel, Sand Castles and Sonesta.

  They’d wave; I’d wave back.

  Gradually, I began to come out of my shell a little.

  On one of my runs, I was passed by a lean blonde with a ball nose and the thighs of a high hurdler. She had a good grin; a kind of jaunty we’re-both-distance-junkies attitude.

  I caught up and introduced myself. Her name was Maggie. She was married; lived in Tampa, but she and her husband were having problems. She’d taken a place at Breakers West for the week to be alone and think things over.

  We had a nice run. Same thing the next day and the next. She appreciated the insights of an objective man. I appreciated her humor and her strength. We became friends. We agreed that, considering her circumstance, it had to be a nonphysical friendship… which took all the pressure off both of us.

  We stayed in touch after Maggie returned to her life in Tampa. We decided that, as friends, we should meet a couple of times a week in some neutral place and work out together.

  She chose Pass-a-Grille, an off-the-track beach village south of St. Pete that, with its Mexican tile and palm-lined streets, reminded me of the best parts of southern California. Pass-a-Grille was a small town with history and humor and texture. People there were amused by their own isolation. It made them easy to meet. Maggie and I would run four or five miles, swim a mile along the beach, then we’d eat shrimp or crab at the Seahorse Restaurant. Sit there talking to Gary the bartender while we ate, then walk up the street to Shadrack’s and have a beer with Big Al, the owner.

  Big Al also owned Harleys.

  I was surprised to hear that Maggie the housewife had always wanted a motorcycle.

  It gave them something to talk about.

  Maggie and Pass-a-Grille were a good break for me. Getting away from Dinkin’s Bay and Sanibel reminded me that there was a big wide world out there. Other lives were going on whether I was reclusive or not. I have been in love only twice in my life and have gradually come to the conclusion that love is not a condition, it is a dilemma. Love, I believe, is chemically induced; created and maintained by the little-understood and complex chemistry of the brain. How we target and connect with our partners is anyone’s guess, but the resultant response has more in common with addiction than with rosy emotion.

  Realizing that helped me feel better, too. Chemistry is something I understand. It is chartable, predictable. Withdrawal from a chemical dependence would take time, but the chemical’s hold must necessarily grow weaker day by day by day.

  It made sense that the same would be true of Pilar’s hold on me.

  So slowly, surely, I began to resume my old life at Dinkin’s Bay as well as my old role as willing confidant, sunset cocktail buddy, dependable big brother, dispenser of cold beer and heartfelt advice and of confidential favors.

  In short, I was making the return to the quiet and peaceful life I’ve always wanted.

  Which is when Tucker Gatrell called…

  3

  The thing that first surprised me about Amanda Calloway (Amanda Richardson, as she told me to call her) was that she looked so unlike her father.

  Didn’t have Bobby’s perfect features, that’s for sure.

  No, he’d been tall and golden haired; of a type you sometimes hear women say, “He’s
too good looking,” as if, by dismissing him, they could distance themselves from a man who was probably beyond their wildest hopes anyway.

  Bobby knew it, too. Was very, very careful about his hair and his clothes. On R amp;R in Singapore or Bangkok, he had his favorite barbers, his favorite masseuses, his own personal tailors.

  Vain, yes. But a womanizer, no. He was committed to Gail, his wife. We spent four months together in Asia; he’d been there a couple of months before I arrived and there was not a single lapse. Not that he ever mentioned to me. No joking around about being “separated,” no locker-room winks and nudges. The man loved and was dedicated to the woman with whom he’d already had one child and hoped to have more. And half a year is a long time to be alone in a region we called the Back of Beyond.

  So it wasn’t women. No… Bobby just liked it; liked being healthy and handsome; the expensive life. The same way some men and women enjoy bodybuilding, he took pleasure in the details of an elevated lifestyle and the way he looked.

  “This is why I need to make lots and lots of money,” he’d tell me. Or: “Man, I was born to be rich. I got no other choice.” He might be modeling some silk suit; looking at himself in the mirror, being critical and enjoying it. “There’s no way I can afford this kind of stuff-a tailored Armani? Even a copy like this. Are you kidding? Not back in the States on what I make. I need to get the hell out of this work and start my own business. Or maybe the movies. What’a you think?”

  I told him he’d made a very strange choice, getting involved with Naval Intelligence and Naval Special Warfare, if he had aspirations of being a film star.

  He’d said that he couldn’t help himself. He was hooked, out of control or something like that-which was bullshit. He was playing a standard role, Mr. Adventurer, for standard reasons: “I’m a dead-on adrenaline junkie and where else can I get paid to skydive, scuba dive and sneak around at night wearing tac-paint while bad guys try to pop me? Carry a weapon, allowed to kill people? Jesus, anyplace else, what I do’d be illegal.”