The Mangrove Coast (29 page)

My mother by all accounts had been a gifted amateur naturalist and one of the earliest advocates for a save-the-Everglades movement. She spent a lot of time giving talks in the moneyed tourist cities or lobbying hard up in Tallahassee. There is a little brass plaque almost hidden by mangroves in Flamingo, once an isolated fish camp, now headquarters for Everglades National Park. My mother’s name is on the plaque, second column, about midway down.

I saw it once. I happened to be in Flamingo with nothing to do. I found the plaque and cleared some of the brush away. Had to get down on my knees to do it.

I told Amanda that a friend friend of my parents had once (not unkindly) described them as separate planets in the same orbit. Not that it mattered much to me. Early on, I discovered the more predictable and articulate world of biology and the natural sciences.

At one point, Amanda interrupted me to say, “The way
you’re talking right now, the way you tell it all so coldly, so … like you don’t really care. Hardly an emotion at all. It doesn’t bother you talking about it?”

I asked her how something that happened so long ago could bother anyone. I was simply trying to tell her why I would never trust Gatrell.

“The one thing that my parents had in common,” I said, “was they loved poking around the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands. They did a lot of boating. My father had a thirty-six-foot Daniels designed in Boca Grande and finished by a man named Preacher Brown in Chokoloskee. It was a fine boat. Beautifully done, solid as stone.

“I know how well it was built because, after it blew up and killed my parents, I spent the next two years putting what pieces I could find back together. About every spare minute I had, that’s what I did. You know how the FAA reconstructs wreckage after a plane goes down? I used the same method, but by pure coincidence. It seemed like the most reasonable way to do it, so that’s what I did.

I said, “What I want you to understand is, I wasn’t motivated by pain or a sense of loss. I was trying to determine what the authorities who investigated had tried but failed to figure out. I was trying to determine why the boat exploded. To me, it seemed so … haphazard to allow such an important question to remain unanswered.”

Amanda said softly, “You were only, what? Twelve or thirteen years old?”

“Um-m-m-m
… something like that. But what matters is, I discovered why the boat exploded. I figured out
exactly
why the boat exploded. Tuck has always fancied himself an inventor. An inventor and a songwriter—ask him and he’ll tell you. Not that he ever stuck with anything long enough to be good at it. No. He just dabbles and leaves the real work up to others.

“What I discovered was that someone had removed the boat’s brass fuel shutoff. It’s a little butterfly valve usually found astern on the transom. Or sometimes closer to the engine itself. This person replaced it with a type of pressure
valve made out of PVC pipe. It was an ingenious idea, really, but for one thing. To fix the valve in place, the person used Superglue. That or some kind of similar bonding agent. Switched the valves and didn’t tell a soul.

“Unfortunately, the person who did it didn’t take the time to test the valve under real conditions. If he had, he’d have realized that gasoline dissolves Superglue.”

Amanda said, “Your uncle, it was his invention.”

“Of course. He never had the courage to admit it, but, yeah. It was him. One Saturday morning, my parents headed out across Chokoloskee Bay for a romantic weekend. Fuel leaked into the bilge and the boat blew up. Quite an explosion. We lived in Mango, just a few miles from here. I was in my bedroom at the time, alphabetizing my beetle collection. The percussion blew out my windows.”

She was crying again. “I’m so … Doc, I’m so sorry. I like your uncle. I still like him. But I understand. And I understand now why you’re telling me this. Thank you for choosing me…. “

No … she didn’t understand.

I turned, faced her, put my hands on her shoulders. We were at a place where the deserted road curved away from the docks; stood near the water at the outer periphery of streetlight. There was the sound of our own breathing, the vectoring resonance of mosquitoes. Across the river in the Everglades darkness, mangroves created a surreal skyline of charcoal figures—“the Sentries of Isolation,” as Tomlinson had once described the night fringe of our own mangrove refuge, Dinkin’s Bay. The tops of the trees were individualized and set apart by a haze of stars. They were bonsai shapes, ancient and gothic, against the brighter sky.

I told Amanda about Frank. Told her that Frank Calloway, her stepfather, was dead. Told her about finding him and that his death was probably accidental, but that I wasn’t certain.

“I’ll be in Colombia,” I told her. “If the police have any reason at all to suspect murder, I need to know. I need to know just as soon as I possibly can. If Merlot was behind
it, there’s a big difference between tracking down a con man and tracking down a killer. You need to keep tabs for me. You need to find out what you can.”

I watched her face. She was puzzled. Frank is … dead? Then there was the numb, confused look of shock. He’s
dead?

I said, “There’s something else.” I took out the scarf I’d found. “Did this belong to Frank or his wife?”

She took it. I noticed that her hands were trembling. She moved closer to the nearest streetlight and inspected it carefully. She sniffed it, then looked at it again. “You know … it seems familiar, but I’m not sure why. Frank’s? No, it isn’t Frank’s. God … I mean it
wasn’t
Frank’s. And not my mom’s, either.”

“Then how could it be familiar?”

“I don’t know. Just an impression, that’s all. Maybe I saw a scarf like it someplace. Where’d you get it?”

I told her.

“Shouldn’t you have left it for the police? Frank wouldn’t have owned anything like that, and it’s too … cheap and common for a woman like Skipper.”

I stuffed the scarf back into my pocket. “I don’t know why I took it. But I did.”

Amanda seemed determined to remain aloof, untouchable. For an hour, maybe more, she didn’t allow the news to bother her and she refused to demonstrate to me that she took anything more than an objective view of her stepfather’s death.

Well, his dying so young, it was a shame, because Frank was starting out on a new life and while they were no longer close, she certainly never wished him ill. Yes, she would contact the private investigator Frank had hired— Castillo was his name?—and try to finagle a copy of the report on Merlot. But if she did that for me, I had to promise to call her when I found her mother.

“When you find her, I’ll fly down. I can’t wait to see my mom. I miss her so much!”

Amanda told me that she was so eager to hear about
what I found in Colombia that maybe she’d get another phone line installed in her apartment. That way, she could still mess around with the computer, stay in touch with her E-mail pals but not risk missing the call from me.

I said, “You really spend that much time on the computer?”

Her reply seemed a metaphor for an entire generation: “You kidding? The Internet’s the future. And what else do I have to do?”

The way she behaved—very rational, completely in control—she seemed to be saying to me, “See? Doesn’t bother me a bit. I don’t need him or any other man in my life.”

About 3:00 A.M., though, lying sleepless in my little cabana room near the Rod & Gun Club’s main building, her tough-guy façade cracked and then crumbled.

I heard a tentative tapping at the screen, then louder.

When I opened the door, she whispered, “That poor … poor man,” and then she fell into my arms crying, crying, trembling like a small wounded creature. She moaned: “He used to hold me. When I was a little girl and frightened, Frank used to hold me.”

Which is exactly what I did for her then.

Held her. Let her bury her face in my chest, sobbing. Allowed her to walk me backwards until we were both on the bed, wrapped as tightly as we could wrap ourselves together, not alone anymore or isolated or set apart, either of us. I could feel her skinny little washboard body spasming beneath my hands, bare-legged and wearing nothing beneath her T-shirt, her face wet against my neck, then … and then … my face wet and buried in her hair … both of us unprepared for the degree of emotion that we felt and the depth of that which neither of us had probably ever admitted: our pain.

More than once during the night, I asked myself:
Is this wrong?

More than once, she answered for me:
No.

But it wasn’t right; something about it just didn’t work.

There was an undefined tension; a sad, sad unwillingness that seemed to go to her very marrow. I realized it and then she admitted it. Not verbally, but by accepting what it was and the way we were and by not posing or pretending. It was okay. We were just fine.

We held each other.

We held each other.

The next morning, in the first water-colored light of morning, I saw her T-shirt on the floor:
Thirty-Second Rule Strictly Enforced.

She was still asleep, hair mussed on the pillow in a rusty halo around her tomboy face, as I closed the door quietly behind me.

In that soft light, she looked very pretty. Amanda looked at peace.

O
n the air approach to Cartagena, the parrot-blue of the Caribbean Sea is gradually murked by a long cusp of beach that flattens into a hardpan of mud and mangroves and plum-colored slums. Beyond is a fortress city that looks like something dreamed up by Hollywood, its bastion walls built by the Spaniards in the 1500s to intimidate pirates, its narrow streets clogged with motor scooters and smoking cars and wooden donkey carts.

Fortresses and pirates are still an intricate part of Cartagena today.

I stepped off the plane into the rain forest heat, Loomis travel bag in hand. At immigration, a little man in a blue uniform checked my passport, eyed me carefully, then rewarded me with a huge smile. “Welcome to Colombia!” He seemed surprised that I was there.

No wonder.

U.S. citizens do not visit Colombia much anymore. The lone exception is Bogota which, of late, has been doing a brisk business in the mail-order-bride business.

To be accurate: computer-ordered brides.

I’ve never heard anyone argue the point: Colombia produces
the most beautiful women in the Americas. Single U.S. men, perhaps tired of being treated as social villains, have been flying here in ever-growing numbers to find kind and gentle mates to marry.

There is a second, darker attraction: Because of its beautiful women … and its hungry and desperate children … Colombia is also a favorite destination of sexual predators. Unknown to most, impoverished Third World countries have little choice but to turn a blind eye on their own booming sex trade. They need the money. They have come to rely on it. Behavior that is considered felonious back in the U.S. is, in poor countries such as Colombia, not only tolerated, it is accepted.

That is a tragedy….

Contributing to that tragedy is the United States Congress, which has done absolutely nothing to discourage our sexual deviants from crossing the border and preying on poor and desperate children.

But, aside from men seeking women, U.S. tourists seldom visit Colombia anymore. Not even the cruise ships bother to make landfall. Too much bad press. Maybe the little man at immigration took my arrival as a good omen. A North American tourist? Perhaps the world’s attitude toward his country was changing!

My smile told him: Maybe soon but not yet.

Which is unfortunate. Colombia is one of the most beautiful countries in the Americas and its people are among the most gifted, the friendliest and attractive people in the world.

But Colombia is also the world’s chief exporter of cocaine. Each and every drug cartel has its own meagerly equipped small army. When a cartel goes under, its army tends to stay together because there’s so little work available. How do these guerrilla bands survive? Their members have embraced the very profitable vocation of kidnapping and extortion to keep food on the table.

It is estimated that between a hundred and two hundred people are kidnapped and ransomed each month in Colombia.
If relatives of the victims do not pay the ransom quickly and in full measure, the victims are executed in cold blood. There is a spoken procedure:
Get down on your knees and I will then press the muzzle of this pistol to the back of your head….

The second casualty of poverty is conscience. The first is the local environment, so it is business, nothing more. Kill a hostage promptly and efficiently and you may be sure that relatives of the next victim will be more highly motivated to cooperate.

The irony is that Colombia, in terms of overall violent crime and theft, is no more dangerous than Miami or L.A. Tourists don’t hesitate to visit those places. But mention the name “Colombia” to an unseasoned traveler, and the reaction is predictable: Colombia? Too risky!

Not really. Besides, such statistics mean very little to me when it comes to travel. I love Colombia, have always loved Colombia, so facts and figures about crime carry little weight. Not when the beauty of the country, the kindness and humor of its people, are weighed in the balance.

Which is why I was both chagrined and irritated at myself when I realized how long it had been since I’d treated myself to a return visit. Had I unknowingly become so tangled in the cheerful social web of Sanibel that I was now what I had always dreaded: dependent, addicted to routine, immobile?

When I got home, I’d force myself to take a hard look at my life. Do some reassessing, maybe make some changes.

For now, though, I felt the thoracic glow of being alone again, focused and under way far outside the boundaries, on the road once more.

I worked my way through Cartagena’s small terminal to the street outside, where four or five taxi drivers stood braced against their little cars, dozy in the heat. By old habit, I chose the third cab in line (never take the first or second car in a country where an attacker might anticipate your arrival). It was a punch-drunk Toyota with a parade
of dashboard saints. The car might have once been red but was now sun-bleached pink.