The Missing Manatee (13 page)

I was always making everybody into heroes or bad guys, but most people—even parents—were muddling around somewhere in the middle.

“Okay,” I said to Dan. “I give.”

He looked back at me, his scar stretching with his puzzled frown.

“I give,” I repeated. “You said one of us had to.”

He buried his face in his hands for a second, breathing a big sigh of relief, and only then did I realize how worried he'd been. He said, “I was hoping if I explained, you'd understand.”

“I do.”

He nodded, staring off into the distance for a moment. Then, his glance indicating the manatee, he asked, “Should we try to bury that thing?”

I looked up at the sky and pointed to the vultures, who were circling again, waiting. “Let's leave it,” I said. “Vultures have to eat, too, I guess.”

Eighteen

It was a day for surprises,
that was for sure. I got another one that afternoon, when I told Memaw that Blink had shot the manatee.

She listened, and didn't even yell at me for not going to Lenny's, as I'd told her I was doing. When she'd heard the whole story, she smiled real big and nodded as if it was exactly what she'd expected to hear.

“I had a feeling there was something more to it, Skeeter,” she said. “I couldn't get my mind around the idea that Dan would kill a manatee in cold blood. It didn't feel right somehow. He may look tough with that nasty old scar and all, but he's a squishy old marshmallow inside.”

“Memaw,” I said, “speaking of that scar, did Dan ever tell you the whole story of how he got it?”

She laughed. “Shoot, Skeeter, he didn't have to tell me. I was there.”

I was about to pour myself a glass of milk, and when I heard that, I nearly dropped the carton. “You were
there?
” I held the milk carton suspended, my jaw probably hanging halfway to the floor.

Memaw laughed again, and patted her hair.

“What happened, Memaw? Tell me!”

“Oh, darlin', it was a long time ago.”

“But you remember, right?” I asked.

“Like it was yesterday,” she answered.

I nodded to urge her along.

“Oh my, we were young, Dan and I. Your Memaw wasn't always an old lady, believe it or not.”

I nodded again, wanting to keep the story coming.

“We had just got out of high school, if you can imagine.”

I knew Memaw and Dan were about the same age. I tried to imagine them as high school kids, but the picture I came up with in my mind was kind of fuzzy—and pretty funny.

“So what happened?”
I begged.

“Well, it was graduation night,” Memaw began. “A group of us seniors got together to kick up our heels one last time before we all went off to get jobs, or get married, or whatever we had planned.

“We were picnicking and swimming up at the springs. It wasn't like it is now, all commercialized and crowded with so many people and tour boats and all. It was almost like our own little private swimming hole. Hardly anybody knew about it except us locals.

“There were some other, older fellows there, and they'd built a campfire down the shore from us, and they were getting pretty rowdy.

“Well, it got late and pitch-dark. I don't remember why, but I walked away from our group a little ways.”

Memaw stopped to pour herself a cup of coffee, and I sat down on the stool by the counter, dying for her to continue.

“Then, out of nowhere, it seemed, one of those older fellows showed up beside me and I saw right off he'd had much too much to drink. And, Skeeter, he wasn't talking—or acting—like a gentleman. I told him to get away from me, but he wouldn't listen. I called for help, and the boys from our group came running over.

“I was so relieved, thinking that would be the end of it, and we'd all just go home. But that older fellow had a little ax hanging from his belt. He'd been using it to cut tree branches for the campfire, we all saw him. Well, he took out that little ax and started swinging it around, and when he did that, all the boys backed off real quick. All except for Dan, bless his heart.”

A little ax,
I thought.
She's talking about the hatchet!

You could have knocked me over with the feathers on a tarpon fly. The mysterious blonde, the cause of the hatchet fight I'd imagined so often, was
Memaw!
I could not believe it.

“Dan came to my rescue like a hero in a storybook,” Memaw went on. “He got a horrible cut on his face, and when the fellow with the ax saw all that blood pouring down Dan's cheek and onto his shirt, well, he turned tail and ran like a rabbit. We took Dan to the hospital to get his face stitched up, and that was that.” Memaw took a sip of her coffee and said, “I'll always feel responsible for that scar, and I've loved Danny Houlihan ever since.”

Danny Houlihan?
I laughed. I'd never heard him called anything but Dirty Dan.

When I'd recovered enough to speak, I asked her, “But if you love him, how come you don't marry him?” Then I remembered something and added excitedly, “I saw him kiss you after the karaoke contest! I bet he loves you, too.”

Memaw had a good chuckle over that. “I believe he does, Skeet, in his way. But some men are the marrying kind, Skeeter, and some aren't, and I can tell you for a fact that Dan
isn't.
There's four women out there who used to be his wives who'd agree with that. I was young and foolish, but even then I had a hunch Dan would make a much better friend than husband.”

I hardly knew what to say, I was so flummoxed by the news. I loved the story of Dan's scar more than ever now, knowing he got it fighting for Memaw.

“You know something else, Skeet?” Memaw said a while later as she was washing her coffee cup. “I believe your mama and daddy might be better at being friends, too, instead of husband and wife.”

I thought about that for a bit. Somehow, the way Memaw put it, it didn't sound so terrible.

“Do you think you could live with that?” she asked.

“I guess I might have to,” I said.

Memaw smiled at me. Then she put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows. “Now, young man, we have something else we need to talk about.”

Uh-oh. I knew what was coming. “Aw, Memaw, I'm real sorry I lied to you about going to Lenny's.”

“Apology accepted. But that's not what I was going to say.”

“It wasn't?” My mind scrambled to think of what else I'd done that was bad.

“Your mama and daddy are so distracted right now, neither of them thought to ask you why you didn't radio for Earl when you found the manatee. But I've been wondering.”

Before I could say anything, she went on.

“And my guess is that your radio's broken and you didn't want to tell your mama because it would cramp your style during your school break if you couldn't go out in your boat. Am I right?”

Memaw didn't miss much, I had to say that for her. “Yeah. It's the antenna,” I confessed. “I only need eight more dollars and I can get a new one.”

“Tell you what. I can't make heads or tails of the directions for setting up that karaoke machine. If you'll help me, I'll pay you ten dollars. You promise me you won't go back out in the boat until the radio works, and the whole thing can be our little secret.”

“Deal!” I said, and I gave her a hug. “Let's do it right now.”

I set up the amp, speakers, and microphone where Memaw wanted it in the living room. Then I showed her how to load the discs with the background music and song lyrics into the player. She got pretty excited when she saw that the kit came with five different discs, and that each one held fifty different songs. She especially liked the one that had country hits on it.

“Why, Skeeter, you're a mechanical genius!” she exclaimed when the music to a song called “Chattanooga Sugarbabe” began to play, and the words showed up on the screen.

We fooled around with the karaoke machine for a while. We were doing a duet of a song called “Crazy” when Mom came home and said that's exactly what we were.

Then she asked if I'd written my English paper yet, and told me I had about an hour to work on it before supper. I went to my room. I'd thrown my artistic trash collection off the bed the night before, and the objects lay scattered on the floor. I started to pick them up to put them in my backpack, and I remembered Mrs. Rathbun telling us that when we had our things gathered, we should take a real close look at them. “Look hard,” she kept saying. “Try to really
see
each object and its relation to the others. Look over, under, around, and through.”

I tried it. At first I just saw the same pile of junk. But after staring at that stuff for a while, I began to see the different angles and textures. I began rearranging the objects, and I saw how each thing changed depending on where it was in the big picture that included all the others. It was kind of cool, really, and I thought trying to paint them might be fun.

The paper was due the next day. I
had
to get started on it. But I couldn't write about the manatee, as Memaw had suggested. I wasn't “peeved” anymore, for one thing. And the other thing was, I didn't want to. As Dan had said the day I caught my tarpon, “Some things just oughtta stay secret.”

A weird little idea had been in the back of my mind ever since Memaw and I went to the Golden Moon, and I decided to write about it. I finished the first draft right before Mom called me to dinner. Afterwards, I asked if I could ride my bike over to the marina. Memaw winked at me. I guessed she knew why I was going.

Larry didn't have the antenna I needed in stock, but he said he could get it in two days. Halfway home, I saw Earl driving toward me. He pulled over next to me in his police car and stopped, and suddenly I felt scared. What if the police had finally decided to do an investigation? Now that I'd made such a big thing out of the manatee, how could I get Earl to back off without betraying Dan?

Luckily, Earl spoke first. “Dan came to see me a while ago,” he said quietly. “He told me what happened to the manatee. I guess he told you, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then, quickly, I asked, “What happens now? You're not going to—to
do
anything, are you? I mean, to Dan or to Blink?”

Earl gazed out at an inflatable raft with a bunch of kids in it passing on the river. “Police officers have a certain amount of discretion when it comes to enforcing the law, Skeet,” he said slowly. “Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Well, it means that sometimes I need to look not just at the crime but at all the circumstances surrounding that crime. And then I have to decide what course of action best serves the people I'm supposed to be protecting.” He paused and added, “All afternoon, I've been asking myself, what good would it do to follow the letter of the law in this case?”

I thought I knew what he was getting at. But I needed to know for sure. “So what did you decide?” I asked.

“I think by now the vultures have pretty much taken care of the body, and what's left will soon sink down into the muck and disappear. And that's where it'll stay. That's what I think.”

I nodded, and smiled.

“Case closed?” he asked.

“Case closed.”

Epilogue

Here's the paper I handed in to Mr. Giordano. He wants me to change a few things, but mostly he seemed to like it. He wrote “very original” in the margin, and “good idea” and “I'd like to meet your Memaw.”

When I showed that to Memaw, she told me to invite him to the next karaoke night at the River Haven Grill, 'cause she's planning on singing.

Skeet Waters

English/Mr. Giordano

MY PET PEEVE

or

THE SKEET WATERS GOLDEN MOON MENU

METHOD OF GROWING YOURSELF UP

(First Draft)

My pet peeve is the way grownups always ask kids, “What do
you
want to be when you grow up?” Half the time they just want to tell you what they think would be good for you. Or else they're being polite, waiting for you to say, “A doctor,” or “A lawyer,” or “A gravedigger,” so they can say, “Oh, isn't that nice?” and go talk to somebody else.

But saying what job you'll have doesn't tell anything about who you'd really
be.
I mean, isn't it more important to know what
kind
of gravedigger you would be? Would you be the kind who leaned on his shovel half the day and dug the holes only three feet deep instead of six? Or the kind who yelled at kids who cut through the cemetery on their way to school? Would you be the kind who chopped worms in half with a shovel when he came across them? Or the kind who placed them gently on the dirt pile?

It also bugs me when people say, “You're the spitting image of your father,” or “You certainly are your mother's son.” It sounds as if you and your mom or you and your dad are
exactly
the same, which you're not. It also sounds as if you don't have any choice about it, which you do.

From now on, people who ask me what I want to be when I grow up had better be ready to hear about the Skeet Waters Golden Moon Menu Method of Growing Yourself Up. The way it works is this. You make columns headed with the names of people you admire. If you feel like it, you can add people you don't really
know,
but know
about,
like maybe Abraham Lincoln or Mother Teresa or Tiger Woods. You can even put in characters from books or movies, as long as the characters seem real to you. Animals are okay, too.

So you write down the names, as many as you want. Then, under each person's name you write traits about him or her that you have observed. You can't use boring adjectives such as “nice,” or “bad,” which don't really mean anything. You
can
use groups of words. For example, under the name Abraham Lincoln, you might put “read lots of books, even though he had to walk far to get them and there was hardly enough light in his log cabin to see,” which explains what you mean better than the word “determined,” although, now that I think of it, that's a perfectly good word and you could use it if you wanted to.