The Missing Manatee Read online

  I worked systematically, following the meandering path of each channel to its end, then turning back to the river and going to the next channel and starting over. It was fun actually, and I was having a good time exploring all the secret, hidden places most people never saw. I spotted snook and redfish and little snappers in the shallow water, and lots of birds, and found a few new fishing spots I’d never have discovered otherwise. Once, I spotted a large, dark mass in the mangrove roots and got excited, but it turned out to be a plastic garbage bag.

  The tide became too low for my boat to navigate the backcountry waters, so I headed for home. I felt frustrated, and began to think maybe the police were right not to be spending their time on this.

  When I reached the house, Memaw was waiting for me. “Skeeter, your mama has to work late tonight, and she said for us to go ahead and eat without her. I’m thinking we ought to go to that new Chinese restaurant for supper. We can bring some back for her. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “Just let me take a quick shower first.”

  On the way to the restaurant, Memaw talked a mile a minute. “Now, Skeet, don’t be surprised if we’re supposed to take off our shoes and sit on the floor to eat. I heard that in China people do that. Or maybe that’s in Japan … I wore pants and these sandals slip right off, so I’m ready for anything. I know I said I’d sample whatever’s on the menu, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t believe I can eat a thing that’s still alive. I don’t relish the idea of my food fighting back when I stick my fork in it, do you? Although I suppose we’ll be using chopsticks. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I’ll try anything else—eel, octopus, that soup they make with bird nests, even though I heard it has bird saliva in it, can you imagine?—as long as it’s not squirming.” She paused for a second and asked, “Do you think your gramma’s a terrible ninny, Skeeter?”

  I told Memaw that I liked my food to be dead, too, definitely not alive or even wounded, and said I didn’t think that meant we were ninnies.

  At the Golden Moon, no one asked for our shoes and we were seated at a regular table instead of on the floor, and I thought Memaw looked a tiny bit disappointed. But she perked right up when we were handed our menus.

  Memaw read the first line aloud: “‘WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN MOON. YOU ARE THE CUSTOMER. THE CUSTOMER IS BOOS.’” She looked at me, a puzzled expression on her face. We both started laughing at the same moment, realizing that someone had typed “boos” instead of “boss.”

  Memaw composed herself and said, “Personally, I’ve always been partial to a restaurant where the customer is boos.”

  That set me giggling again. But Memaw had moved on down the menu. “Can you believe these prices, Skeeter? They’re so reasonable,” she exclaimed. “We can afford to get anything you like. Oh, look here! It says you can order a combination plate. You can try lots of different foods, just like we wanted to.”

  I scanned the menu to see what she meant. It was pretty cool. There were four columns, marked A, B, C, and D. If you ordered a combination platter, you could choose one dish from each column.

  “Let’s do that, Skeeter!” Memaw said excitedly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That way, we’ll be able to try eight different things, if we share.”

  “I’m just going to close my eyes and point and see what I get.”

  “I think I’m going to be more scientific,” I said. “I’m going to make sure no two things I order have any of the same words in them. That way, I’ll be sure to get a good variety, right?”

  “That’s just brilliant, Skeeter!” Memaw said, beaming.

  When we’d both decided what we wanted, I looked over the remaining pages of the menu. Pointing to a dish called Happy Family, I said, “That was us until Mom threw Mac out.”

  Memaw sighed. “I don’t know what your mama’s doing. I’m not sure she does. Right now she thinks being apart from your daddy is going to make her happy. But I’m afraid your mama has never had much of a talent for happiness. It’s something I don’t understand.”

  I thought about that. It was true that Mom always seemed to be thinking about what was wrong, or how things could be better. It was as if she couldn’t see what was good about our lives. She seemed to think everything that wasn’t perfect was Mac’s fault.

  “What’s going to happen?” I was afraid to hear the answer, even as I asked the question.

  “We’ll have to wait and see, Skeeter. I know it’s hard.”

  We were quiet for a while. Then Memaw pointed to something on the menu called Ten Thousand Delights. “Tell you what,” she said, smiling at me with a hint of mischief in her eyes. “Let’s order your mama this.”

  That was one thing I really loved about Memaw: it was impossible for her to stay gloomy for long. I smiled back and said, “Maybe it’ll cheer her up. It’s worth a try.”

  The waitress came then to take our orders, and I checked her out. She looked Chinese, but she was wearing an ordinary white shirt and black pants, and I realized I’d expected some sort of costume, like the ones I’d seen in National Geographic magazine. After Memaw placed her order, she asked, “Nothing in there will be squirming, will it?”

  The waitress looked puzzled. “Squirming?” I could see that she not only found the word difficult to pronounce but had no idea what it meant.

  Memaw said, “You know, squirming.” She did a little shimmy with her shoulders and wiggled her fingers in the air. “Alive.”

  The waitress looked distressed.

  “Still moving,” Memaw explained. To demonstrate further, she stood up, wriggled her hips, and snapped her fingers, making her eyes wide and lively, and smiling like crazy. I have to say, she looked alive, all right.

  The waitress, with an expression of alarm on her face, looked at me for help, but I was laughing too hard to say anything. She turned and fled into a back room.

  “Where did she go? And what is so funny?” Memaw said with surprise.

  Finally, a man came from the back and asked if he could help us. His English was a lot better than the waitress’s, and Memaw’s fears of wiggly food were put to rest.

  When our plates came, we tried gamely to eat with the chopsticks we were given, but we were both pretty hopeless. The waitress saw us struggling and brought us forks, so we were able to chow down. I didn’t know what I was eating half the time, but it was all good—and, as Memaw pointed out, definitely dead.

  “That paper you’ve got to write, Skeeter, what’s it about?” she asked.

  “A pet peeve.” I made a face. “Mr. G.’s idea of a ‘fun’ assignment.”

  “Well, it could be worse,” Memaw said. “You’ve actually got something you’re really peeved about.”

  “What?” I asked. Then, before she answered, I got it. “Oh, you mean the manatee. Yeah. Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”

  Memaw looked pleased with herself. Then she asked me what I’d done all day, so I told her about my fruitless search for the manatee’s body. She eyed me shrewdly. “You gonna give up?” she asked.

  “Well, it sort of seems like a waste of time,” I said.

  “You have some other big, important plans? Besides your schoolwork, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Memaw said, “it’s only Thursday. You’ve still got a three-day weekend ahead.”

  That was true. And even though I hadn’t found the manatee and didn’t really expect to, it had felt good to try. Especially since nobody else was doing anything.

  Memaw went on, shaking her head: “I can’t stop wondering who would do such a fool-brained thing.”

  I couldn’t stop wondering, either. Might as well do something as sit around and wonder. “I expect I’ll go back out tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’s the way, Skeeter,” said Memaw. “Stick to it. It’s like my singing.” She poked her hair modestly. “I have a certain amount of talent, Lord knows, He gave it to me Himself. But it was hard work and practice that won me that karaoke contes
t. Nobody ever got anywhere by giving up. Now, bring home your mama’s supper, will you?”

  I picked up the carton filled with Ten Thousand Delights and Memaw picked up the check. Then she reached for the menu and slipped it into her pocketbook. “I’m going to hang this on the refrigerator so I can think about what I’m going to order next time,” she said. “There are still oodles of things we haven’t tried yet.”

  There were oodles of places I hadn’t looked for the manatee, too, and I guessed I was going to try them all.

  Twelve

  I spent most of Friday searching the shoreline out in the gulf. Saturday, I went back to searching the backcountry channels. It had been kind of fun the first time, but by the afternoon I decided that looking for a channel marker in a heavy fog would be a lot easier than the task I’d set myself. I was about to give up and forget the whole thing.

  Then I spotted vultures circling in the sky.

  I felt my heartbeat quicken and told myself to settle down. Sure, something beneath them was dead, but it wasn’t necessarily the manatee. I counted the vultures. There were twelve. Whatever it was had to be pretty big to attract that large a crowd. I thought there were probably more on the ground, already feeding. The problem was getting to them. I figured they were a quarter to a half mile away, as the crow flies. But I had to find a water route, and that was going to be tricky.

  It was. As the river heads to the ocean, it fans out into a lot of separate channels. There’s one main channel out to the gulf, well marked so tourists can follow it. But there are a bunch of other, smaller routes to the sea, so that if you know the area and how much water your boat draws, there are lots of ways to go. Then there are about a gazillion smaller channels that branch off those channels, leading into the backcountry. While this made our river interesting, it sure made my job harder.

  Keeping my eye on the vultures, I steered the boat down every little channel that appeared to lead in the right direction, but each route I took either came to an abrupt dead end or soon meandered away from where I wanted to go. Just as I began to be afraid that the tide would get too low for me to continue, I reached a large area of open, shallow water. At its far edge, I could see the hunched bodies of vultures feeding. I don’t know why, but the sight of them hanging around like a bunch of ghouls made me angry. I shouted, “Get out! Get lost!”

  The birds in the air rose higher and soared off as my skiff approached. The ones on the ground seemed reluctant to leave their feast, but I kept screaming at them, and one by one, with a lot of awkward hopping and wing flapping, they took off, too, leaving me alone with whatever it was they’d been eating. The smell wafted in my direction on the breeze.

  I cut the engine and drifted over to the lumpy mass lying in the tangle of mangrove roots. The vultures had eaten some of the evidence, but even in its stinky, disgusting state, it was obvious that this was the manatee. I let out a whoop. It was totally gross, but I’d actually found it!

  The birds had opened up its belly to feed, and I tried not to look at that part but at the head and face, which were clearly visible. Tied around its neck was a circle of blue nylon rope.

  I stood still, trying to push away the rush of thoughts that crowded my brain at the sight of that blue rope. I’d seen that same blue line—or, rather, a coil of line like it—just days before, in the bottom of Dirty Dan’s boat. After nearly slipping on it, I’d stowed it in the front storage compartment.

  Where the gun was.

  I leaned out of the skiff, picked up the end of the rope, and held it in my palm to feel its heft. It was the same weight line, I was sure. It was made of the same blue nylon.

  So what? I asked myself. Line like that is for sale at Larry’s, where anybody can buy it off a huge spool. I looked at it more closely. It was old and frayed and discolored where the sun had beaten down on it, just like the rope in the bottom of Dan’s boat. But that could have happened to a rope lying in anyone’s boat or on anyone’s dock. Just because there’s a piece of it around the manatee’s neck doesn’t prove anything.

  And what exactly was I trying to prove, anyway? Dirty Dan was the Tarpon Man. He was my hero. He was not a manatee killer. So what if he called manatees “live speed bumps.” He was only fooling around, griping, as Earl had said. The whole idea that he’d kill a manatee was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. My imagination was way out of control.

  Then I remembered the ball. At the scene of the crime, I’d picked up trash for my still-life project in art class. Among those pieces of trash was a ball, a fairly new yellow tennis ball. I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time. But now, in my mind’s eye, I saw Blink reaching into his pocket for a bright yellow tennis ball to throw for Blinky. Blink, who never went anywhere without a quarter for me to flip for him and a yellow tennis ball for Blinky to chase. Blink, who was Dirty Dan’s son.

  Blink, or maybe Blinky, could have dropped the ball in the boat, and it could have fallen out when Dan was working to hide his tracks. Or maybe Blink and Blinky had been with him in the boat that day.

  It didn’t really matter. Take the rope or the ball or the gun one at a time, and they could mean anything. Put them all together, and—No! I told myself. There’s got to be another way to look at this.

  I thought back to the day I’d found the manatee. I tried to recall Dan’s reaction to the news. He’d been at the River Haven Grill when Mac, Earl, and I had first discussed it. As far as I could remember, Dan hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t acted surprised and outraged like everybody else.

  Because he already knew? Suddenly, I remembered the feeling of being watched when I was standing by the manatee’s body that morning. Had I been seen? By Dirty Dan?

  He had listened to my story, and then he’d asked me if I wanted to go tarpon fishing with him.

  At the time, I’d been too thrilled to ask myself why. But now I wondered: Why had Dirty Dan the Tarpon Man asked me then, on that particular day, when I’d been dying to go fishing with him for as long as I could remember? And why me? I’d figured it was because I was Mac’s son, and had even dared to suppose it was because Dan liked me and thought I was finally a good enough fisherman to catch a tarpon.

  But what if he was only trying to keep me from thinking about the dead manatee? What if he was trying to get on my good side, in case I did somehow discover the terrible thing he had done?

  Of course that was it. Why would Dirty Dan spend a whole day poling me around after tarpon? What did he get out of it … except the hope that I wouldn’t discover what a slimeball he was, or, if I did, that I’d be too awed or too grateful to do anything about it? He’d played me for a fool, and I’d fallen for it.

  I sat in the skiff, my head in my hands, as alternating surges of anger and humiliation—and doubt—passed through me. What was I doing? I couldn’t just condemn Dirty Dan, who was Mac’s good friend and who had helped me catch my first tarpon on a fly. I had to be sure.

  Then I thought of a way. I reached into my pocket for my penknife. Trying not to gag, I leaned close over the manatee’s body and cut the rope from around its neck. Sawing through the line several times, I made eight small pieces. I pocketed both of the end pieces, one of which Dan—or someone else, I reminded myself—had cut from a larger coil. Then, at each turn that I came to as I worked my way back out toward the river, I tied a piece of rope onto a branch of a mangrove tree. Like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, the scraps of blue rope would mark my path back to the manatee. I wasn’t going to lose my proof again.

  There was just enough high water so that I made it to the river without getting stuck. Motoring up to Larry’s, I prayed that I wouldn’t run into Dirty Dan there. I didn’t know what I’d do if I came face-to-face with him. I had to be sure before I saw him. Then, when all my suspicions turned out to be wrong, maybe I’d tell him about it and we’d have a good laugh.

  I tied up my own skiff, and looked over at Dan’s slip. His boat was there. Looking around again, I saw no sign of Dirty Dan, and, thank
goodness, for once Blink wasn’t around, either.

  Feeling as if I were the criminal, I crept down the dock and into Dan’s boat. I opened the front storage compartment. The molded plastic gun case and the gun were gone. But the coil of rope was there. From my pocket I took the two pieces I’d cut from the manatee’s neck.

  I held one up to the end of the large coil. The strands met where they had been cut with a knife. They matched perfectly.

  Thirteen

  At home, there was a note on the refrigerator from Memaw. It was hanging right next to the menu from the Golden Moon Chinese restaurant, which I saw every time I got a snack or a glass of milk. The sentence “THE CUSTOMER IS BOOS” always caught my eye and cracked me up, but not now.

  Memaw’s note said that she was shopping and would be home soon, and that Mom had to work late because somebody was sick. In a way, I was relieved that I didn’t have to talk to either of them—or to anybody—yet. But I could hardly stand being alone with my thoughts. I paced from the living room to the kitchen and back, Dirty Dan’s treachery burning in my stomach like a hot stone.

  I went to my bedroom and took out my backpack, where I’d put my still-life objects for art class. I dumped them all out on my bed, and examined the tennis ball closely. It looked as if it had been chewed on, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Staring blindly at the pile of stuff on my bed, I wondered how the man I’d seen tenderly releasing a tarpon back into the water could be the same man who put a bullet into the head of a harmless manatee.

  None of it made sense.

  When Memaw came home, I was glad to have a break from my repetitive, useless thoughts. I helped her bring the groceries in from the car. “Your mama’s madder than spit that she’s ended up having to work extra on a day when you’ve got vacation,” she said as we were putting away the food. “She said to tell you she’s sorry.”