The Mangrove Coast (10 page)

Her expression changed again. “Oh my
God.
You’re not exaggerating, are you?”

“Wish I was. So, yeah, I can understand why you wouldn’t trust someone like me to deal with a guy who might be taking advantage of your mother. This … what’s his name again?”

Reevaluation time: Maybe I wasn’t such a bookish, nerdish type after all. “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie Merlot.”

I was still smiling when I said, “Gee, a guy like that, I’d just love to meet.”

I
got a fresh notebook from the lab and, in my small, blocky print, jotted down all the useful phone numbers and addresses that Amanda could provide.

Someday, if the notebook became important, I would attach a label, give it a file name, then lock the notebook away with the others I’d kept and saved over the years. There were some interesting titles in that fireproof box:

There were others.

All contained the carefully kept details of a lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics; necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine
work, as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.

The notebooks added order. They allowed me a sense of purpose, even though much of what I’ve done in my life now seems absurd, nearly existential because of the violence to which I’ve contributed.

Tomlinson knows a little bit about it. Not much, but enough to attempt to comfort me one beery evening when he said, “You’re not the Lone Ranger, Doc. Take the seventies, for instance. It wasn’t a decade, man. It was a damn crime scene. And you worry about the little bit of political stuff you were involved in?”

As I said, Tomlinson doesn’t know much about it.

So Bobby Richardson’s ladies were allotted their own notebook. When I’d finished with phone numbers and addresses, I asked Amanda if she’d thought to bring the four postcards she’d received from her mother. She had. They were in the envelope that contained her father’s letters. She paced around studying my overloaded shelves of books while I studied the postcards.

All the cards were postmarked Cartagena, Colombia, and onto each was pasted a hundred-peso stamp that paid tribute to emeralds, the gem for which the country’s jungles are famous. Cartagena is an ancient seaport city built like a fortress during the 1500s, when conquistadors shipped gold and silver to Madrid. I’d been there a number of times, but that had been years ago.

Three of the cards were photographs of sites I recognized as Cartagena tourist attractions: the clock tower entrance to the old walled city; a busy street vendor scene; a small Spanish garrison (stone walls with gunports overlooking Cartagena Harbor) that was now a restaurant, according to the card, called Club de Pesca.

Had I once eaten at that restaurant? It was possible. There was a little marina close to that old Spanish garrison. I’d maybe stopped at the marina for a beer, but I couldn’t remember the name of the place.

Who could I check with to find out? I’d have to think about it.

The fourth postcard showed a roomful of polished ship’s bells—“a magnificent nautical museum,” according to florid Spanish on the back of the card. The place was apparently a private museum near Cartagena called CoMarCa.

The cards were not dated, but they were postmarked: 6 January, 12 January, 16 February and 20 March, respectively.

On the back of each postcard, in flowing, ovoid script, were typical tourist inanities: “Everything is so different here!” … “The weather is very warm because we are so close to the equator!” … “Miss you, wish you were here!”

They contained nothing more personal than that.

There was no mention of Jackie Merlot, of where they were staying, or of where they planned to travel.

Each card was written in black ink from what might have been the same rollerpoint pen. I also noticed that each of the last three cards had suffered a few water smears, as if the wet ink had been splattered with random raindrops … or maybe beads of sweat.

I found that very odd. But still … there was a benign explanation. Wasn’t there?

I said to Amanda, “Are you absolutely certain this is your mother’s handwriting?”

“I’ve seen enough of it to know, yeah. Everything about her is so beautiful; even her letters are rounded and neat and perfect. It’s definitely my mom’s writing.”

“You mind if I hang on to these, maybe give them a closer look later?”

The woman shrugged. “They’re not exactly what you’d call private and personal. She could have been writing to a stranger instead of her daughter.”

“It’s one of the things that bothers me.”

That stopped her. She glanced up from the book she was
leafing through. “Which tells me there are other things about them that bother you.”

I said, “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I smiled. “It means I’m not sure. Relax. I’m on your side. I’m not hiding anything. But give me some time to think about it.”

She wanted to talk some more—I could tell, but she was also getting restless. Maybe she was uncomfortable in the close quarters of my little ship’s cabin cottage. The spartan furnishings and the near-absence of decoration make some women uneasy. Tomlinson says that it is because my lack of creativity strips away all pretense and therefore reduces sexuality to its most basic and unromantic components.

Personally, I think the soft but constant gurgle of the many aquarium pumps keys a urinary restlessness.

While I was questioning her, she happened to mention that she liked boats; hoped to one day buy a sailboat and do some cruising through the islands. So I said boats? She liked boats? Then how about the two of us go roam around the docks, do some window-shopping?

Dinkin’s Bay is among the last of Florida’s old-time fish camp marinas: wobbly docks, bait tanks, tackle shop, fish market, some deep-water dockage on the bay side and lots of shallow water slips along the mangrove shoals. Everything built of wood, everything sun-leached gray. It was a Sunday in April: busy day with lots of Sanibel day-trippers roaming around, lots of cars coming and going in the shell parking lot. And all the slips were full.

People with the boat bug—and it was apparent that Amanda had a bad case of it—are never happier than when they are poking around marinas, fantasizing about owning other people’s boats. It’s a disease that costs more to cure than any other single common learning disability.

So we crossed the walkway to shore, skirted the hedge of mangroves and the two-story marina office, where we saw Jeth walking down the steps from his apartment.
Heard him call to me, “Your uncle Tuh-tuh-tuck … he’s inside speaking with Mack.”

I waved him off—let Mack deal with the neurotic old fool—and steered Amanda past the Red Pelican clothing shop and down the long main dock so that she could look at sailboats to her heart’s content. I stopped only briefly to say hello to a couple of the fishing guides who were in for lunch, and then to introduce Amanda to JoAnn Small-wood, who lives aboard the soggy old Chris-Craft,
Tiger Lily.
Stood there listening to the two of them talk, then, as we parted, JoAnn gave me a little wink—a private sign among our small marina community that indicates approval of an outsider.

It spoke well of Amanda … and it also said quite a bit about the quick assessment process common to women in general and to the ladies of
Tiger Lily
specifically. JoAnn had inspected, interviewed and evaluated Amanda as quickly, as efficiently, perhaps as accurately, as two dogs unexpectedly met on a sand road. It is something most of us pretend that we don’t do. But the ladies of the
Tiger Lily
do not posture. They are precisely what they seem to be. Not that I pretend to understand their own particular reality. They are honest women; they speak their minds. It is a rare thing and enough for me.

As we moved off by ourselves, Amanda said, “I like her. There’s something very … solid? Yeah, solid about her.”

I said, “I’m glad to hear that. JoAnn and Rhonda—Rhonda Lister, that’s her roommate—they’re two of my closest friends.”

“Do you mean roommate as in someone who shares the rent? Or as in ‘Roommate’?”

“The former. Not that I’d ever impose by asking.”

“I wasn’t being judgmental. Just curious. In fact, I’m surprised it even crossed my mind.”

“From the signals they give out, they’re happy, healthy heterosexuals. A nice change in this day and age, huh? Mostly they’re nice people … good ladies. Men come around sometimes. If the guides approve of them, sometimes
the men even spend the night. I’ve watched a couple of those guys leave. The smile on their face, it’s hard to describe. Do people still use the word
dreamy
?”

She seemed amused. “People your age probably do.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t mean to offend. It’s what I was thinking.”

“Well, it’s an eloquent word,
dreamy
, and it fits. What goes on when Rhonda and JoAnn don’t have men guests is none of my business.”

“The tone of your voice, I can tell you’re protective. You look after the both of them.”

“More like the other way around. They treat me like their slow-witted brother. And for good reason.”

“You strike me as being anything but slow-witted. But what I meant was, you guys take care of each other. I’ve got friends like that. Not many but, yeah, I’ve got them. That’s why she was giving me the eye, trying to figure out what my intentions are toward you.”

“This is a very small marina, and it is a very large and dangerous world outside the marina gate. We’re careful about who we let in.”

Amanda said, “A safe place, that’s good.”

I said, “Yeah. They’re getting harder and harder to find.”

I could tell that she’d been thinking about it, how to get me back on the subject of her father. Looking at her, seeing the intensity—being so careful about how to bring it up—it crossed my mind that her unanswered questions about Bobby were nearly as important as telling me about Jackie Merlot.

I listened to her soften me up before risking the subject: “It explains a lot,” she said, “meeting you. I can see now why you and my dad were buddies. About why he said to come to you if I needed help. It tells me a little. I look at you, his friend, and I think, okay, that’s the kind of man he was.
This
is the kind of man he was.”

“I guess I’m flattered,” I said.

“It’s been strange thinking about him so much lately. I mean, I’m an adult now, close to the same age he was when he died, and finding these old love letters to my mother, it’s like he’s become a real person. It’s like meeting the man for the first time.”

“He was a good one.”

Me saying that, it meant something. I could see it in her face.

“You wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would you?”

I thought for a moment before I said, “Yeah, I would. A guy I knew nearly twenty years ago? His daughter shows up out of nowhere and she asks me what he was like? Yeah, he could be the biggest jerk of all time and I’d tell her he was a nice man. But Bobby was something special. He was a friend. And a good man. A very good man. I don’t say that lightly.”

She was nodding, letting the subject build its own momentum. “We’ve got a lot of unanswered questions about him. My mom and I, we used to talk about it. Not much and not very often. She married Frank, started a whole new life, plus it hurt her, remembering him, because they were so much in love. But the times we did talk, she didn’t know a lot. About what happened, I mean. My father never said what he was doing or where he was doing it, and the Navy never gave us much of an explanation.”

I waited for her to ask and she finally did: “So … maybe you know. At least you have to know more than they told us. You were there. You were the military guy he was closest to when he was killed.”

Feeling increasingly uneasy, I said, “It’s a minor point, but I wasn’t in the military.”

“You weren’t? But he wrote about you. You had to have been there with him—”

“I was there. Yeah, we were together a lot. All I’m saying is, I was over there for a different reason.”

“See? I don’t even know where ‘over there’ is. It’s with little things like that you can help. Fill in some of the holes if you don’t mind talking about it. Bobby Richardson was
killed in an explosion during a training exercise, that’s all my mom was told. A couple of times in his letters he mentioned Thailand, so we assume it was in Asia. She wrote and made phone calls, but never got another speck of information. Something else she said was that she tried to get in touch with an old buddy of his. She musta meant you. Who else? But that she never heard back.”

I was shaking my head. “I wrote your mother a letter after it happened. Whether she got it, I don’t know. I never received any calls or letters from her. That doesn’t mean she didn’t try. More likely, I was out of the country, on the road, no way for me to receive mail or messages. That was pretty common in those days.”

“I don’t get it. You weren’t in the military but you were that far out of touch?”

I said, “I was talking about the area your father and I were in. Primitive, that’s the point I’m making. You want me to answer questions about your father, I’ll answer as best I can. Ask me anything you want. But I’d rather deal with the present than talk about the past.”

A change of subject, that would be nice.

She wouldn’t be put off, though. “I’m his daughter, his only child. I think I have every right to know what happened to my own father, Doc. You don’t know what it’s like growing up without a real dad.”

Didn’t I? She could ask Tucker Gatrell about that. Not that Gatrell had ever been known to treat that subject with much honesty.

I stood there saying nothing. Listened to her say, “Tell me what you know. That’s all I’m asking. I’ve come a long way. And I’ve waited one hell of a long time.”