The Mangrove Coast

by Randy Wayne White

Just one more dazzling beachfront day in the village of Boca Grande. Yet the sound of waves underlined something else that I had noticed: The man on the floor did not appear to be breathing….

  In movies, blood and a body cause the fainthearted to scream and the brave hearted to rush to the fallen’s assistance.

  That hasn’t been my experience.

  Nope. The more common reaction is a mixture of atavistic dread and a reluctance to get involved.

  Most people do exactly what I did: we look, take a step back, then look again. Basically, we act like dopes.

  Maybe there’s a reason. It is in the milliseconds of shock that the brain has time to charge the flight-or-fight instinct with adrenaline, preparing to take control. Are we in danger? Has the predator struck and run? Or has the predator lingered?

  Then we stare; a stare interrupted with quick animal-glances over our shoulders and to our unprotected flanks. We draw closer, still staring. Is this death? Is this the thing we fear above all else in life?

  For most, death is a spiritual concept, not a chemical process, and the flesh-and-fluid reality of it cleaves a hole, a momentary hole, in our illusions.

  Death must be approached cautiously like an abyss … or like disease.

  I am not fainthearted, but neither am I brave. I stood for a moment, alert to the possibility that I was not alone in this stranger’s house. My eyes reconfirmed that the sliding glass door which opened to the pool had been knocked off its tracks and shattered.

  It was a big door. Lots of wrought iron and storm glass. It had required some animal force to tear it free of its casing. Calloway was big enough to do it. But why would he have done it?

  I noted the beach towel dropped in a heap on the kitchen floor. It appeared to be dry; no blood. There was a deliquescent sheen of water on the copper-red Mexican tiles.

  I turned my head enough to see the high-beamed great room behind me and a winding staircase that spiraled to a beach loft. Stained-glass windows—bottle-nosed dolphins leaping—allowed tubular blue sunlight through the hipped roof.

  In the living room below were islands of white leather furniture on an acre of white carpet.

  About her stepfather, I remembered Amanda telling me, “When my mom married Frank, he was a clinical psychologist. Her psychologist after my real dad was killed; that’s how they got together. Financially, I guess he did okay, but then he began to invest in land. Money, money, money, if you’re smart enough. And Frank’s pretty damn smart when he’s not thinking with his testicles.

  “Finally, he gave up his practice completely to organize Florida land syndicates. He had a knack for knowing what people wanted before they actually wanted it. It must have been the shrink in him. He got really rich just in time to divorce my mom and marry his secretary. Jesus, Skipper. Can you believe he calls her that?”

  Sure, I could believe it.

  What was a little harder to accept was that I would be the one to find Frank Calloway, the former psychologist who’d made all the money even though he occasionally thought with his testicles, but who was now lying in the glaze of his own blood, dead on the floor of the kitchen where he might have cooked me a gourmet dinner had he decided he liked me.

  The type of house in which I stood is becoming a fixture on Florida’s west coast: a passive totem of wealth reconstituted as imitation Old Florida architecture. It had the obligatory tin roof, the Prohibition-era lines, the driftwood coloring.

  Inside, though, it was diorama-neat, a model of interior design, a place through which to tour admiring guests. Note the terra-cotta tiles, the polyester and acrylic fabrics, the recessed lighting and beveled glass, the breakfast room in red cedar, the Monticello tubs and gold faucets, the saxony cut carpet, the imitation pecky cypress made of some kind of Du Pont synthetic.

  It was not a home. It was an emblem in which to live.

  Not even that anymore for Frank Calloway.

  I crossed the kitchen and knelt, cupping my hand around the man’s wrist: skin cooler than the tile beneath me, no pulse.

  I changed my position, considered the dried blood on the man’s face and neck. Something else: Streaking along the jugular area were two parallel red lines.

  What could have caused something like that? Had he somehow scratched his own neck as he fell?

  I gave it a few seconds before I touched fingers to the carotid area: coated hair bristles, skin dry as a mushroom, still no pulse.

  What I felt was relief. He was dead. Yeah, he was dead.

  Not a very admirable reaction. But I am seldom as admirable as I would like to be. Still, personal ethics are the measure of one’s own self-image, one’s own self-respect. Had I noticed normal body warmth, a hint of heartbeat, I would have done what was required. I would have rolled him over, checked to make sure his airway was clear and then performed the required CPR. Two breaths to five chest compressions.

  So, yes, I felt relief. But some regret, too: Death may be solitary, but it reverberates. In a few hours, somewhere, someplace, unknown people—probably good people—would be in shock, crying, perhaps shattered with loss.

  As Tomlinson says, and quite accurately, all life forms are symbiotic. Each life is interlaced.

  I pictured Amanda: the skinny, mousy woman and her New Age tough-guy feminist attitude. Was she too aloof to shed tears for her stepfather?

  It was something I would have to find out….

  I’d never met Calloway, but I’d spoken with him a couple of times on the telephone and Amanda had sent me a photograph. Black curly hair, styled neat. Nose and narrow chin that suggested Italian antecedents. Jowly middle-aged face, bright, aggressive brown eyes behind oval-rimmed designer glasses that made a calculated statement: taste, intellect, money—powerful but in tune; youthful.

  He wasn’t wearing the glasses, but this was Calloway on the floor. And, yes, he was dead; had been dead for … how long? I’m a marine biologist not a medical examiner, but it wasn’t difficult to make an educated guess. How long would it take for a pool of water to evaporate off tile on a balmy, April afternoon? How long did it take for blood to coagulate and dry? An hour? Two hours?

  Not long. He hadn’t been here long.

  I placed my hand beneath Calloway’s shoulder, lifted and turned him slightly. No blood on chest or bloated stomach … perhaps a hint of priapism.

  Did that suggest death by head wound? Maybe. I wasn’t sure.

  I let the body settle on the tile; tried to ignore the rumble of internal gases. Crossed to the kitchen sink and washed my hands—a compulsion I would not have felt had a living Calloway and I shaken hands or whacked each other on the shoulders while trading jokes over beer.

  Stood there knowing that my next logical move was to pick up the telephone and dial the police. Maybe Calloway had come wet from his swimming pool, slipped and taken a bad fall.

  It happens.

  Or maybe, just maybe, I had stumbled onto a crime scene. Either way, dutiful private citizens turn such matters over to the authorities.

  But I did not behave as a dutiful citizen should.

  There were reasons. Maybe they weren’t great reasons but they were my reasons. One reason is that I had made a promise to a determined woman. Another reason was an implied promise to a long gone friend, a guy named Bobby Richardson. The fact that Bobby had been dead for nearly twenty years seemed to matter less and less.

  A promise is a promise. Right?

  The promises I’d made created a couple of problems. For one thing, I hadn’t exactly been invited into Calloway’s house. I’d been invited TO his house. We were supposed to meet for drinks promptly at six. On the phone, he’d said, “But if you’re like a lot of these islanders, always late, tell me now. I’ll just keep working till you surprise me.”

  Meaning I’d better be on time.

  My reply had been a bit more terse than he’d expected: “Geez, Frank, I’ve got nothing better to do than bounce around doing favors for your family. Your ex-family, I mean. So, yeah, make it
six. I’ll try real hard.”

  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 wh
y 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.