I said, “What I’d like you to do the moment we hang up is get in your car and drive to… to Everglades City. You ever been there?”
“Well… sure. But that’s more than an hour from my place. I take Alligator Alley west, then south on highway twenty-nine. It’s a really narrow road; lots of swamp. So more like an hour and a half-”
“It’s about the same distance from Sanibel. If we both leave now” — I was looking at my watch- “we can meet there by ten. Earlier, if we push it. You know where the Rod amp; Gun Club is? The old hotel right on the river?”
“Sure, the Rod amp; Gun. The mansion-looking place with the alligator skins on the walls and the big fireplace. Yeah. I’ve had lunch there with clients. In fact, I was planning on driving over that way early next week to call on my accounts in Marco and Naples. So… I guess I could change things around, see them tomorrow, if it’s really that important to you.”
I said, “Whoever gets to Everglades first, go ahead and get a couple of rooms and order dinner. Better yet, I’ll call ahead and make reservations. It’s a nice night, so tell the woman there-her name’s Hortensia-tell her who you’re waiting on and that we’ll eat out on the porch by the water. All on me. My treat. She’s from Costa Rica, a friend of mine.”
“You’re serious.”
I said, “Very much so.”
“The reason you want me to leave my apartment, it’s not because I’m in some kind of danger or something is it?”
“Nope.”
“You scared me there for a minute. I thought there was something wrong with my mom.”
I said, “The Rod amp; Gun. I’ll meet you at the bar for drinks.”
I told Amanda, “The reason I don’t trust Tucker Gatrell, the reason I don’t like being around the man is because he managed to get both of my parents killed. I hadn’t quite reached my teens when it happened.”
She whispered, “Dear God.”
I told her as we were walking deserted streets along the Baron River. It was an hour before midnight on a moonless night with stars. Everglades City is a mangrove town built at the nexus of saw grass and brackish backwater that is the Ten Thousand Islands. It has had the same streetlights since the 1930s, milky glass bowls on elegant iron stems. The globes created incremental pools of light along the river. In each pool was a precise island of asphalt and lawn, of wooden dock and flowing black water. In some places, the streetlights found a framework of ficus limbs, vines and leaves.
When I said it-“He managed to get both my parents killed” — Amanda took a few more steps and then stopped as if frozen. Maybe it had taken a few seconds for her to realize what I was telling her. That’s when she whispered, “Dear God.”
Then: “Oh, Doc, I… I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” She put her hand on my elbow, then found my hand, meshing her fingers tightly into mine.
I found myself oddly uncomfortable with her reaction. The fact that she felt I would welcome an emotional demonstration so obvious and familiar surprised me a little.
I said, “I’m not telling you this because I need sympathy. It happened so long ago I don’t even think about it anymore. I’m telling you for a reason.”
“I know, I know… because it hurts. I know how much it hurts.”
I remained patient, evenhanded. “No, that’s not the reason.”
“But… how did your parents die? You’re uncle’s such a nice man. Why?”
“I don’t know why. Is there ever a reason good people die? But how it happened, that’s another story. It was an accident, but an accident that was completely unnecessary. The whole thing was pointless. But it did happen and all because of Tucker’s idiotic… his idiotic selfishness and his sloppy approach to life. That’s exactly how I define Tucker Gatrell as a person: selfish and sloppy. And what Tucker is as a person killed my mother and father. He’s careless. He has a random approach to everything. Tucker is the center of his own universe… his own chaotic universe, and that is the height of indifference.”
Now she locked her arm into the crook of my arm. “You’ve never told anyone this before?”
“No.”
“Will you tell me?”
We continued walking.
I didn’t embellish. Didn’t dramatize how it happened or romanticize the notion that I had suffered because of it. I gave Amanda the facts as coolly and unemotionally as I could.
She listened. She made empathetic sounds. Once I think she started crying, but didn’t want me to hear.
I told her that, while I never knew either of my parents well, I suspected I would have come to like them. My father had played a couple of years of pro football for Chicago and the old Atlanta organization before he took up running lobster traps down on the Keys. That and pompano fishing.
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.”