The Mangrove Coast

by Randy Wayne White

  “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.”

  That kind of stubbornness. Her father had been like that….

  I was looking at her face, her hands, learning what I could about her: she’d once had braces, had had an eye surgery, was right-handed, a nonsmoker, had a pencil callus on the inside of her middle finger—probably meant that she was an artist or wrote in a journal. She kept her nails short, polished, too … but it had been a while. No dates recently. No one to look nice for, maintain all the little hygienic details.

  Maybe the woman had little emotional shelters for every occasion.

  So what choice did I have? I told Amanda that I would share what I knew. By which I meant that I would tell her all that I was allowed to tell her about our time in Southeast Asia … and maybe hedge a little bit by telling her more than I was allowed to tell. But not much more.

  I explained to her that, in the years following the Vietnam war, the United States maintained a military presence in places such as the Philippines, South Korea, places in Indonesia and Malaysia, so it wasn’t so unusual for her father to be pulling operations in places like Thailand. I didn’t mention that Thailand abuts Cambodia and I did not mention that an ethnic and political component of that nation, the Khmer Rouge, was slaughtering millions of its countrymen in nightly raids and in some hellishly one-sided firefights.

  Let her look at a map, read some history if she wanted to put the pieces together. It was all there; plenty of photographs of all those skulls piled up. How many millions had died?

  Something else I did not mention was that some very savvy and competent American intelligence officers—Bobby Richardson being one of them—were investigating the possibility that at least a few and, perhaps, several dozen, American servicemen listed as missing in action after Vietnam were actually being held in prison camps in the eastern regions of Cambodia.

  Bobby and his team didn’t necessarily believe it, but they were investigating: MIA guys too deeply hidden to fuel the rumors, but they were there, just across the border of Vietnam.

  Or so a few powerful people seemed to suspect….

  The MIA guys, that was Bobby’s pet project. I was never much involved, simply because I doubted that such camps actually existed. Why would the Cambodians or the Vietnamese invest sizable amounts of time and money to secretly maintain American POW camps? There was no political leverage to be gained, no monetary profit. The premise sailed all the familiar red flags that I associate with conspiracy theories, and I do not believe in large-scale conspiracies. If I ever meet more than three or four people who can actually keep a secret, then maybe I’ll reconsider.

  So … Bobby and I were both working in Cambodia. Along with his MIA project, he was assigned to train and lead guerrilla groups made up of a mountain people known as the Phmong. I was assigned to gather intelligence relating to the support or lack of support among Cambodian academicians for Pol Pot, leader of the CPK, the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

  That Bobby and I would be thrown together and work some of the same missions wasn’t in our official orders, but it was something that two Americans, alone and in Asia, would naturally do. It was a brutal, brutal time in a fascinating area, and had anyone discovered what we were doing and why we were doing it, there was no doubt about how we would have been dealt with.

  The story I had told Amanda about decapitation was true.

  And there were other scenarios. Worse things to fear …

  So, yeah, I watched Bobby’s back and he watched mine, and after just a few months we were buddies and confidants to a degree experienced only by those who have shared the uric-fear of being isolated and under fire in a foreign land.

  His letter home was quite correct: After what we’d gone through, a couple of decades changed nothing.

  I told Amanda Richardson, “Your father didn’t die in Thailand.”

  We’d found a quiet spot off by ourselves at the very end of the dock complex. She’d plopped down on the boards and sat with her legs dangling over the water like a kid sitting on a bridge.

  Now, as I spoke, she sat back a little and said, “Oh,” listening very closely.

  I pressed ahead. “Bobby … your dad … was killed in the mountains of Cambodia. It wasn’t on a training mission and it wasn’t because he was screwed up, made a mistake and stepped on a mine. He was a high-level intelligence officer—some said brilliant—who knew exactly what he was doing … who knew the risks involved. He died fighting for what he believed was a …” I paused. How to say it honestly? Bobby was a patriot in his way, but he was no toy soldier, he wasn’t naive. He didn’t believe in noble causes or that war was a contest between good and evil. Bobby was a pragmatist; a professional. Finally, I said, “He died fighting for what he believed was reasonable and … right. Few men have that honesty of conviction. As his daughter, you should be proud of that; be proud of him and the work he did. Something else is … what I hope is … that you’ll respect the code of silence that his work required. And still requires.” Looking at her across the table, I added, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Amanda? What I’m asking?”

  She didn’t respond for several seconds. Finally: “His death was no accident?” Shocked, but very calm about it.

  “No. Not more than any other death in war is accidental … random.”

  “Then how?”

  “He was working as an advisor … no, that’s not true. Your dad was in command of a group of Phmong guerrillas who were on a mission to blow up—”

  She interrupted: “What guerrillas?”

  “The Phmong. It’s a generic term; not a very nice one, really. But the actual name of a tribe—well, there were two tribes—the Saochs and Brao from the Elephant Mountains and near the Laotian border. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. Your dad was leading a group of Phmong men on a strike against a munitions storage dump. Or some village that had stockpiled a lot of weaponry. I’m not sure; he wasn’t specific when he talked about it. But somehow the government forces were tipped off and nailed your dad’s group with a mortar strike. It wasn’t a mine and it wasn’t a training mission. That’s how your dad died.”

  “And this was after the Vietnam war ended.”

  “Yeah. Way later.”

  “But why? Were we ever at war wi
th Cambodia? I’m no historian, but I can’t remember—”

  “We weren’t at war with Cambodia. Not officially. There was this Communist army, the Khmer Rouge, that took over the country right after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. It was led by an electronics student, Saloth Sar, but he called himself Pol Pot. The Khmer slaughtered anyone who got in their way. So it was like a war. Maybe worse.”

  “But why?”

  “You want the truth? Sar’s army was made up of many thousands of teenaged boys who were pissed off about having their farms and fields and families bombed during the Vietnam war. They were uneducated and they hated anyone who was educated. They had the weapons and they had permission. So they started killing and kept killing. That’s what your father was trying to stop.”

  “Then what you’re asking me, the thing you just mentioned, that’s why: a code of silence. Confidentiality is what you’re asking for. You don’t want me to repeat what you’ve just said.”

  “That wouldn’t be reasonable to ask, so I won’t ask it. What I’m saying is, be very picky about who you tell. Your mother, she should know. She deserves to hear the truth.”

  “When we find her, I’ll let you tell her.”

  I liked the way she said that. The confidence in her voice.

  I said, “And your children, they should know about their grandfather. Maybe your husband when you marry. But if you leave here in a huff and run to the newspapers crying about how your government lied to you about the death of your father, then I’ll disappear from the picture. That’s the silence I’m asking you to respect.”

  Another long, thoughtful pause. “You’re sure about this? Were you there when my father was killed?”

  “No. I learned of it two, maybe three, days later. Some of the Phmong told me, the mountain warriors. They had tremendous respect for your father.”

  “They’re the ones who brought back his body?”

  I could have said, “What was left of it.” Instead, I said, “He was killed in a mortar attack. Yes. They were there and brought him back. It happened not too far from our camp.”