The Missing Manatee (7 page)

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.”

Maybe because I didn't have too much time to think about it, that's what I did.

“Good, good, now strip your line in, strip, strip…” Dan was saying to me in a low voice. Then, to the fish, “Eat it, eat it, come on, eat it…”

And the fish ate! He took my fly!

“Okay, keep stripping. He's gonna feel it in a minute,” Dan said. “Wait till he starts to turn and—
Now! Set the hook!
”

I pulled back hard to make the hook dig in. And two seconds later that tarpon came busting right out of the water, thrashing its whole body in an amazing, acrobatic arch, trying to throw my hook and escape.

“Don't pull back on him now, Skeet!” Dan hollered. “Drop your rod tip—remember, you gotta bow to the king when he jumps. Give him line and let him run. I'm pretty sure he's hooked in the corner of his mouth. It's not coming out.”

I “bowed to the king,” dipping the end of my rod to give the fish plenty of line while it was fresh and full of crazy fight. I let him run, and when I heard the
zzziiing!
of the line flying off my reel, I shouted, “
Weee-oooow!
”

Dirty Dan was shouting, too. “
Yee-ha, Skeeter! Look at him go!
”

“I guess that lazy old dog's awake now!” I hollered. “And he doesn't seem too happy!”

At the end of his run, the fish came up out of the water again in a dazzling leap of silver, shaking his head, his big mouth wide open.

“He's
humongous!
” I cried.

“He's big, all right!” said Dan, sounding just as excited as I was. “Hundred twenty pounds, hundred thirty, maybe.”

“He's a
monster!
”

“Yessir, he's a beauty,” Dan agreed. “Okay, now, okay, let's get him in. We ain't got him yet, Skeet.”

My heart was racing so fast I had to stop and make myself take a deep breath and try to settle down. I knew Dan was right: hooking him was only half the battle. Now I had to get him to the boat. I'd heard enough fishing stories over the years to know that this was the time when Murphy's Law was most likely to kick in. Apply too much pressure—or not enough pressure—at the wrong time, and the line would break. Leave too much slack, and the line could get wrapped around the fish, or be cut by its sharp gill plates. One of the knots might let go. There was no end to what could go wrong.

But with Dirty Dan the Tarpon Man coaching me, I managed not to do anything seriously stupid. I fought that fish for close to an hour. Time and time again I'd get him close to the boat, thinking he was tired enough to bring in, and he'd make another furious run, taking out all the line I'd gained. My arms ached from lifting and reeling, lifting and reeling, over and over again. I knew if this went on too long, he could chew through the leader and get away.

“I'll let you go, honest,” I called to the fish. “Just let me get you in and touch you!”

The fish responded by making another run.

“That run was shorter, Skeet, you see that?” Dan said. “You got him beat now if you don't let up. Keep the pressure on. Don't let him rest.”

When do
I
get to rest?
I wondered. My arm muscles were burning, but I kept the pressure on.

“Now give him the down and dirty,” Dan told me.

I knew all about the down and dirty from all the stories I'd heard over the years about catching tarpon. As soon as a fish showed signs of slowing down, you hit him with the down and dirty, trying to wear him out. I lowered the tip of my rod so it was under water, and pulled back on it strong and steady, turning the fish around. When he started coming the way I'd turned him, I switched back the other way.

“That's it,” said Dan. “Keep after him. Anything he wants to do, don't let him. Everything he tries to do, show him he can't. Turn him around till he doesn't know which way is up.”

I gave him the down and dirty over and over again. Man, he was one tough fish. I was beginning to think I was no match for him when finally I could feel the fight go out of him. Soon after, I was able to reel the end of my leader through the eye at the tip of my rod, the sign that a fish was officially “caught.”

I took a long look at that beautiful creature, trying to memorize everything about it. It was six feet from its head to the tip of its tail! I reached out to touch its big, tough, silvery scales. They were huge, probably four inches across. I'd heard of people pulling one out to keep for a souvenir, but it seemed a sorry thing to do to such a spectacular creature.