The Mangrove Coast (41 page)
Read The Mangrove Coast Online
Authors: Randy Wayne White
I looked more closely.
Yes, flies.
Even so, those eyes seemed directed at the mound of flesh at the base of the pole.
Someone had positioned the head so that it faced its own body. Perhaps the Phmong were right. Perhaps Merlot’s brain had functioned long enough. Perhaps the last thing he saw was his own decapitated corpse….
“Doc … ? Doc, please! Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me, Doc.”
I was standing again. Kept the photos with me—no one could ever see them. Ever. I rushed to my dresser, opened the botton drawer, and pulled out the scarf with the raspberry red checks that I’d found the afternoon Frank Calloway died.
I was grinning at Maggie. I could see in her face that she thought that maybe, just maybe, I really had gone mad.
I told her, “I know what this is now. Finally! It’s a traditional scarf that the mountain people wear. It’s called a
kramas.
And the smell—the odor it had. It’s this fermented fish sauce. Terrible stuff, but the locals get addicted to it. Like Vegemite in Australia, only this stuff is rotten. It’s called
nuoc mam.”
The smell of it had tainted the air at Frank Calloway’s house. But that is not what had frightened the man and caused him to panic.
I looked at the second photograph: There on the eight-by-ten glossy was the man who had frightened Calloway, caused Calloway to panic … and he was wearing a scarf like the one I had found.
I could hear Annie at the Temptation Restaurant telling me, “I just saw Crab Man hangin’ around here.”
I could hear Merlot reminding Acky of the beggar that he’d caught snooping.
I looked at the photograph and felt dizzy. I said to Maggie, “Would you mind bringing me a glass of water? Then giving me a few minutes alone?”
Her eyes were welling up. “Ford, please tell me you’re okay. What is it?”
I said, “I’m fine. In fact … this is the best I’ve felt in a while. But give me a minute, okay?”
There was a typed, unsigned note attached to the photograph.
I read:
The guy you know as Matt Davidson told me what I never doubted: You can be trusted. Over here we still operate on a need-to-know basis and here’s what I think you need to know.
After what you did, my friend, it’s what you deserve to know, too.
There are about forty of us still living here. Not because we have to but because we’re all so screwed up we figured the only thing we could do back in the World is join the circus, maybe work as freaks. The POW camp my team was searching for? What it turned out to be was a collection of good guys who had too much pride to be a burden to their families. No one’s really sure how it got started, but there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that’s where I wanted to go once I realized that mortar round had turned me into a monster.
MIA guys who didn’t want to return. That’s something we never figured on, huh? It’s hard to find men who don’t want to be found.
For the first six months, I thought I’d die. For the next year I hoped I would. Lots of us did.
Those of us who didn’t, realized something: We
still had our brains and we had some of the best training in the world.
I’m now a rich man, Doc. Rich beyond imagination. Every gay in our little company has made a bundle. Intelligence, weapons, brokered information to the CIA, NSA, Mossad, the big-money boys. We are the perfect middlemen because freaks are like clowns: we’re invisible behind our masks and we don’t show pain. We’ve also started buying petroleum leases throughout Asia and investing in politicians. In terms of income, we are our own small country now. It’s all we think about It’s all we do.
Once a year I come to Florida. I always stay in a little town called Gibsonton—I won’t say why. It’s too embarrassing. In previous years I always came with the hope of getting a couple of glimpses of my girls. I’d do it quick, from cab windows. Or late at night outside their house. I just wanted to make sure they were happy, didn’t need anything.
Once, when Amanda was seven and alone in the backyard, she smiled at me. She actually said a few words to me. I didn’t scare her. It is one of the treasured moments of my life. It means even more now that she’s gone. And I thought I was beyond tears!
When I heard that Gail was in trouble, I was a step or two ahead of you. At first, anyway. Then I was always a step or two behind. Frankie Calloway’s death was an accident He panicked when he realized who I was and what I wanted. I sometimes forget how truly frightening I am.
Unfortunately, there is no way that either of us could have seen what was coming. And that’s what this letter is about Remember that idea we messed around with in the jungle, what we called the Perfect Law? In case you forgot, here it is:
In any conflict, the boundaries of behavior are defined
by the party which cares least about morality.
Merlot chose the boundaries. Check out the enclosed photo. He ended up with a whole different viewpoint, huh?
I thought you might enjoy this other picture, too. For the first time in many years, Doc, I am at peace.
It was another glossy photo and, in ways it was more shocking than the first. The extraordinarily handsome and vain man that I knew as Commander Bobby Richardson no longer existed. I wouldn’t have recognized him. Ever.
He was so changed by his wounds and by the years, that I prefer not to describe the half-man in that photo, so I will not. What I noticed—and what I prefer to remember—is that he looked happy.
Bobby was smiling. Smiling a big, crooked country-boy grin as he posed with a tiny woman in Asian dress and black equatorial hair … a woman who could have passed for a Vietnamese burned, perhaps in a napalm attack. Yet there was a lovely expression of grace and acceptance on her ruined face; an expression elevated to devotion by the glow of her eyes as she looked at the man she loved: one eye the powder blue of turquoise, the other a deep jungle green.
She had drawn a heart on the photograph and signed it:
HE
T
WELFTH OF
N
EVER!
