The Missing Manatee Read online

  “What time should I be at the dock?” I asked.

  “Six.”

  “What should I bring?”

  “I’ll keep your stuff, so just bring yourself. I got everything else we’ll need.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Dan.”

  “No problemo, Skeet.” He poured himself a fresh glass of butterfly milk. “Here’s to luck,” he said, and took a long slug.

  “Sounds like I’m going to need it.”

  “You’re going to need some sleep, too,” said Dan.

  That got Mac’s attention and he looked at his watch. “Oops, how’d it get so late? Skeet, you’d better get on home now or your mama’ll skin me alive and feed me to the sharks.”

  I went over to give Mac a hug and say good night to the other guys.

  “Sleep tight, Skeeter,” said Earl.

  “Okay,” I said. But I didn’t think there was much chance of that.

  Eight

  I ate a quick breakfast and got to the dock at ten minutes to six the next morning. Dirty Dan was already in his boat arranging my rod in the side compartment, where it would be safe once we got moving. Dan had a boat that was specially made for fishing on the flats, the big areas of shallow water where tarpon often feed. It was much smaller than Mac’s boat, or even my skiff, and could run in only six inches of water. On its side were the words Tarpon Man.

  “Push us off and let’s go, Skeet,” he said without taking his eyes off what he was doing. “We got ourselves a bluebird day.”

  I looked at the sky. It was still dark, with only the faintest sign of light in the east, and I could see the glitter of stars. When you’re hunting for tarpon in the shallows, you need to be able to see them. You want a bright, clear sky with no clouds, and that was what we had, or would have when the sun got higher.

  “Great,” I said. I unhooked the bow and stern lines from the cleats on the dock and hopped into the boat.

  Dan cranked up the engine, and we motored slowly through the restricted part of the river, sending herons, egrets, and cormorants into lazy flight. Mac and most of the other guides were just meeting their clients at the marina or having a last cup of coffee at Betty’s Diner, so we were the first boat to head out.

  I loved the river at this time of morning, when it was quiet and peaceful, with a haze of fog hanging over it. I could hardly believe that the day I’d thought so much about was actually happening.

  When we left the refuge area of the river, Dan opened it up and we sped through the curves and zigzags. We were hauling! The boat itself wasn’t much, but Dan’s engine was huge.

  He hollered over the noise, “There’s a big silver king out here with your name on it, Skeet.”

  I was already smiling from the speed and excitement, but I could feel my grin grow wider at that.

  We came to the mouth of the river and ran out in the gulf for about forty-five minutes. Then Dan pulled up to a long, deserted stretch of shoreline and cut the engine. He picked up his push pole and jumped up onto the platform above the motor. He was quick for a guy Memaw’s age. Immediately, he began to use the pole to move the boat slowly and quietly across the shallow water, his eyes scanning the surface intently.

  “Now hand me my butterfly milk, Skeet, and let’s catch you a tarpon.”

  I was surprised, not only because it seemed a little early for a drink but also because Mac never drank when he had a client in his boat. Some guides did, but Mac said it was asking for trouble. I wasn’t a client, though. I opened the cooler, thinking I’d get a glimpse of what Dan had brought for our lunch. There was nothing inside except the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a moldy hunk of cheese in a Baggie, some chewed-up tarpon flies, and a near-empty jar of mustard.

  I handed Dirty Dan the bottle and asked, “Where’s the rest of the stuff, up in the storage compartment?”

  But Dan didn’t seem to hear me, he was so focused on the water. I got my rod and stood up in my place on the bow. I looked back at Dan and said, “This is so great! I sure wish I could pay you.”

  “You catch a tarpon, Skeet, that’ll be pay enough.” He took a drink from the bottle, set it down between his feet, and kept poling. “Okay, now, till the sun gets higher, we’re looking for rollers,” he said. “You see any, tell me where and which direction they’re heading in, and I’ll try to get you in a position to cast.”

  I’d read as much as I could about tarpon, and asked Mac about a million questions over the years, so I knew about rollers. Tarpon are weird in the fish world, because they come up sometimes to breathe. When they break the surface to grab a gulp of air, it’s called rolling. You can see their backs then, or maybe a glimpse of a dorsal fin, and you can also tell which way they’re swimming.

  Spotting rollers sounds easier than it is. They’re up for only a second, and it takes a lot of experience to be able to tell which direction they’re heading in—experience that I didn’t have.

  I never saw anything, even though I was looking hard. But a minute later Dan said, “There.” He began poling faster but just as sneakily toward whatever he had seen. “Oh, they’re high and happy, exactly the way we want ’em, Skeet.”

  I squinted my eyes, but didn’t see anything.

  “Okay, get ready. There’s fish coming. See that nervous water?”

  When fish are moving, the water above them looks different, sort of quivery, or “nervous.” I’ve seen it sometimes when Mac’s pointed it out to me, times when the water was dead calm and glassy. But today there was enough of a breeze to give the entire surface a ripple, and all the water looked quivery.

  I nodded, but the truth was, I didn’t see what he was talking about. As far as I could tell, the only thing that was nervous was me.

  “They’re coming left to right at two o’clock, about a hundred twenty feet. You see ’em?”

  My heart was pounding like crazy. Dan’s directions were perfectly clear, or should have been. I knew that if the boat was a clock face, the bow where I stood was twelve o’clock. But I was so anxious that I had to stop and picture a clock, and think about whether two o’clock was to my left or my right. Right. Okay. But forget about calculating a hundred twenty feet. Instead, I turned to see where Dan was looking.

  “Okay, okay, they’re at a hundred feet. You ready?” asked Dan.

  “Yeah.” I started to lift my rod to cast.

  “No! Not yet! Wait till they’re closer. You see ’em?”

  “No,” I admitted desperately.

  “One o’clock now, eighty feet out. Okay, get ready. Ready? Go ahead and cast—now!”

  I did, but my timing was way off. Instead of landing softly and enticingly in the fish’s path, the fly landed with an ugly splat right on top of them. They spooked and took off, leaving only a muddy swirl where they had been. Casting to a real fish sure was different from casting to a pop can in the yard.

  Dan took a sip from the bottle.

  “Sorry,” I muttered miserably.

  “No sweat, Skeet,” he said calmly. “You’ll get the next one. The important thing is learning from your mistakes. Do you know what you did wrong?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  Dan didn’t disagree. He just asked, “What was the main thing?”

  I thought for a minute. “I never really saw the fish before I made the cast,” I admitted.

  Dan nodded. “You’ll get better at spotting ’em as the day goes on,” he said. “For right now, you don’t have to see ’em as long as you put the fly where I tell you. Now, what kept you from doing that?”

  “Jitters, mostly, I guess.”

  “It happens. You’ll settle down.” Dan was more confident of my improvement than I was. “Take another cast,” he directed. “Forty feet, nine o’clock.”

  I did my best.

  “Sixty feet, eleven o’clock.”

  We did this for a while. After every cast, Dan helped me figure out what I had done wrong. I was concentrating like crazy, and he was watching me real closely and analyzing every move I m
ade.

  Then he took the rod. “See that gob of seaweed floating over there?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to cast toward it. Watch how the line lays out on the water.”

  He made a beautiful, smooth cast. The fly and all the line landed lightly and delicately on the surface at the same time.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was perfect.”

  “Now, this time, watch my back cast. To get that nice, soft landing you gotta keep your loop tight on the back cast and time your forward cast just right.”

  “Wow,” I said again, after he’d demonstrated. “That was amazing.” What else was there to say? Dirty Dan wasn’t known as the Tarpon Man for nothing. If he’d been casting to a fish, there was no way he wouldn’t have caught it.

  He handed the rod back. “Okay, you try.”

  I made some more casts. They were all embarrassing, but Dan managed to find something encouraging to say after each one. I could feel myself beginning to relax a little.

  The sun was pretty high in the sky by then, and Dan said, “Okay, Skeet. You got your jitters out. The visibility’s good. We’re going to move to another spot.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, taking a drink from the bottle and setting it between his legs as he sat at the wheel. “I thought about blindfolding you, but I figure I can trust you, seeing as you’re Mac’s kid.”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “Of course, you understand that if you ever tell anybody about this spot, I’ll have to kill you.”

  I laughed, then looked at Dan’s face. I thought I saw a smile tickle the corners of his mouth, but I wasn’t sure. I laughed again, a little nervously this time. “Don’t worry. My lips are sealed,” I said.

  He nodded approvingly. “That’s the way, Skeet. Some things just oughtta stay secret.”

  Nine

  As Dan began slowly poling the boat, I saw what made this location so special. The water was four to six feet deep, with large stretches of light-colored, sandy bottom and hardly any grass.

  “The sun’s nice and high now,” said Dan. “What you gotta remember is that the water can be a mirror or a window. Look at it and all you’ll see is a reflection of the sky. Look through it and you’ll see what’s below the surface.”

  I practiced looking through the water. But when Dan said in a low, urgent voice, “Fish at ten o’clock, Skeet. Coming right toward us,” I didn’t see a thing.

  I looked toward ten o’clock and got my rod ready anyway.

  “Don’t cast yet, he’s still too far. See him? Two hundred feet.”

  “No,” I said, squinting in frustration, willing my eyes to see something.

  “Oh, boy, there’s three of ’em. See ’em now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Those glasses polarized?” Dan asked.

  I nodded. Without polarized lenses, there was no hope of seeing the fish, sun or no sun.

  “You looking through the water, not at it?”

  “Yeah.”

  I peered and scrunched my eyes tighter, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what Dan saw. Then, all at once, I did! Three dark shapes moving over the light sandy bottom. “I see ’em!” I shouted. “Coming this way!”

  “Okay, now,” said Dan very calmly. “Settle down, get ready, and think about your cast. You want to put it about three yards in front of ’em, nice and easy.”

  I made my cast, but it was too far to the right. The fish kept swimming, paying no attention to my fly, and finally spooked when they saw the boat. I muttered in disgust.

  But Dan only said, “The thing about a tarpon, Skeet, is that he’s lazier than an old dog in the noonday sun. Lots of the time, he won’t move five inches out of his way, even for a meal. You gotta put it right where he almost has to eat it, or else smack into it. And sometimes even that isn’t good enough.”

  He took another sip of butterfly milk and grinned. “It wouldn’t be any fun if it was easy, now, would it?”

  To be honest, I could have gone for a little easy fun right about then, but I wasn’t going to admit it to Dan.

  On my next cast, the lead fish in a group of four turned toward my fly. “Eat it, eat it, eat it!” Dan urged.

  When the fish turned away and kept on swimming, I moaned. “Aww, man, what do you want?”

  “Leave it, leave it!” Dan told me. “The next one might take it.”

  But the next one didn’t, and neither did the two after that. “Aww, man!” I cried again.

  Dan seemed happy, though. “That was real good, Skeet. You almost got ’em to eat.”

  Maybe it was all the talk of eating, but suddenly I was starving. Thirsty, too. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty. We’d been out for four and a half hours and Dan hadn’t sat down once, so neither had I. He’d been sipping from the whiskey bottle, but I hadn’t had anything. My legs felt a little wobbly.

  “I’m just gonna grab a drink,” I said, laying my rod carefully on the bow. “Where do you keep them?”

  “Cooler,” he said, but his attention was on the water, not the question.

  I’d already looked in the cooler, but I stepped down to look again. Could I have missed seeing a six-pack of soda and a sack of sandwiches? My foot landed on a coil of frayed blue nylon rope lying on the bottom of the boat, and I slipped on it and almost fell. Mac kept his boat shipshape, and had taught me to do the same, but I’d noticed Dan didn’t seem to care so much about neatness.

  “I guess you could stow that,” he said absent-mindedly, his attention, as always, on the water.

  When I looked in the front storage compartment to find a place for the rope, I saw a handgun lying in a molded-plastic gun case. Either the case had been left open or it had jiggled open from the movement of the boat. I wasn’t too surprised to see it since where we live lots of people have guns. Pickup trucks like the one we’d seen at Fat Boy’s, with a gun rack behind the driver’s seat, were a common sight.

  It drove Mom crazy. Mac had had a gun for a while, but she’d made him get rid of it. I knew Larry kept one behind the counter at the marina. Of course Earl had one, being a deputy.

  Dan must have noticed me looking at it because he said, “Next hammerhead tries to steal a fish of mine gets shot between the eyes. I’m too old to be out in the water wrestling sharks.”

  I grinned the way I did every time I pictured Dan bonking that hammerhead on the noggin with his club. “Aww, but shootin’ ’em doesn’t make half as good a story,” I answered.

  That made me think of the story of how Dan got his scar, in the hatchet fight over the blond-haired lady. Maybe Dan would tell me the whole thing while we had lunch. I put the line away and opened the cooler again to look for something to drink. There was the same hunk of cheese, which I now saw had been nibbled on, and the empty mustard jar. There hadn’t been any food or sodas in the storage compartment, either. With a sinking feeling, I realized that Dan hadn’t brought lunch, and neither had I.

  “Just bring yourself,” he’d told me, and, stupidly, that’s what I’d done. Dan had said he had everything we’d need, and I guessed from his point of view we did. We had fishing gear—and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  Mac always kept some cans of soda, some munchies, and a big jug of fresh water in his boat, and so did I. It was another of Mom’s rules, for “just in case.” If she had been up when I left the house, she would have asked a million questions: Do you have your lunch? Your drinks? Your hat? There are life jackets in the boat, right?

  But she had left all this to Mac, saying he was in charge. And Mac wasn’t used to worrying about whether or not I had lunch. It was the kind of thing that had been happening ever since Mac moved down the street. Some things fell through the cracks.

  As for me, I’d been so jacked up about this trip, I hadn’t thought about anything but tarpon. I gulped, and my throat was so dry I could hardly swallow.

  I took another look in the storage
compartment. There was a plastic milk jug half hidden underneath a wadded-up rain slicker, next to an open bag holding paper cups.

  “Is this fresh water?” I asked.

  “Fresh enough,” Dan replied.

  I poured some into a cup and took a big swallow. Warm. Hot, almost. Yuck. I dumped out the rest and screwed the cap back on the jug.

  For the next two hours, I tried not to think about how thirsty I was as Dan continued to pole us over the flats. I felt kind of swimmy-headed, and the sun off the water was lulling me into a daze. I couldn’t understand how he did it, but Dan seemed as alert as ever. There was no way I was going to punk out first when he was the one who was doing the hard work.

  By two o’clock, I estimated I’d made a million casts and done a million things wrong. I’d stepped on my own line, gotten it caught in my belt buckle, worked it into some spectacular tangles, cast too far, not far enough, and in the wrong direction. I’d stuck the hook of the fly in my own back, and, once, would have taken Dan’s eye out if he hadn’t been wearing sunglasses. I figured I’d spooked every fish in the entire Gulf of Mexico.

  Through it all, Dan never got mad or impatient, and he didn’t yell at me once. He actually managed to act as if he believed every cast was going to be the one, long after I’d secretly given up hope.

  I ate the piece of cheese, figuring it was probably Blink who had nibbled on it. I was so hungry it actually tasted okay. By then, that sun-warmed water was going down pretty good, too. Whenever I took a sip, I pretended it was Memaw’s homemade lemonade sliding down my sandpapery throat, cool and wet and sour-sweet.

  “Fish! Eleven o’clock!”

  Dirty Dan’s shout startled me out of my daze, and I just about fell overboard. I shook my head to clear it. I couldn’t see anything but the sun’s reflection on the water, and I forced myself to concentrate and peer through the wicked glare on the surface. After a couple of seconds I saw the long, dark shape coming closer. Coming fast. I was going to have to make a short cast, but a tricky one.

  “Take it easy, Skeet,” Dan said, almost in a whisper. “Just drop it in front of him, real gentle.”