The Mangrove Coast Read online

  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 ’em, 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 groupe
r I’d caught, then counting annuli, or growth rings, using my powerful Wolfe compound microscope.

  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 abo
ut 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.”