Randy White: The Mangrove Coast

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 why 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.

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…

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.”