The Manatee
They all knew about the manatee because someone in the neighborhood had posted a photo on the community Facebook page after seeing it swimming near their dock. What the animal was doing as far north as Chesapeake Bay was anyone’s guess. Some in the discussion went so far as to suggest it was photoshopped in by liberals who moaned about climate change, but soon enough other photos were posted in the thread. Soon, no one could deny that a manatee had made its way into St. Mary’s River.
Out on her dock with her morning coffee, Terry was swiping through the photos on her phone and wondering if global warming had disoriented the animal when the gunshot sounded. The sound ricocheted around the shoreline making it almost impossible to tell where it came from. Terry looked up, examining the wooden piers jutting out into the water up and down the river, then up toward the house to see if her husband Lex had come to window of his home office at the sound of the shot.
She swiped away from Facebook and into her messaging app. He’s at it again, she texted Lex who she imagined was already checking the markets and getting ready for calls with his overseas clients.
The September sky was as gray as the weathered boards of the neighbors’ shoreline docks. St. Mary’s was called a river, but really it was an estuary studded with coves and a lot of loblolly pine trees growing right down to the edge of the water. The scene was pretty quiet, save for the early-morning peeping of water birds and the sound of someone mowing their yard along the shore. In another thirty minutes or so, as the breeze died down and the sun rose above the tree line, the brackish water would begin to warm, the osprey would begin to screech and skim the surface looking for breakfast, and the home-owners, or their Airbnb guests, would bring their fishing skiffs off the placid morning water and swap them for sail boats and paddle-boards. Under normal circumstances, Terry liked taking advantage of the tranquil mornings out here on her pier, but lately the gun shots had disturbed the serene mornings.
While she waited for Lex’s response, she repositioned the pieces of driftwood and bleached shells on the little wooden table next to the rickety beach chair in which she sat. So much effort went into giving these piers the patina of authenticity. Decorated with hanging buoys, torn fishing nets, and tin lanterns fake-weathered a dirty turquoise, most of the décor was an illusion purchased at Pier One by the new money who had moved in over the past decades and didn’t know the first thing about fishing. There were few families left along the shore who really had a connection to the ocean-going merchants of the colonial days, even fewer of the Baltimore set who had bought these places as fishing camps in the forties and fifties. Ed, the shooter next door, was one of the few.
Her phone dinged. I heard, the message came back from Lex, followed by an eye-roll emoji.
Should we let his daughter know? she texted.
What can she do from Baltimore? It’s the police or nothing. I’d prefer not to open that can of worms.
It had taken a few days for the shoreline residents to compare notes and figure out that it was Ed Singer who was letting off the weapon over the last week. At 82 and tipping over into dementia, he shouldn’t even have been living alone, much less living with a gun, but his daughter wasn’t the first to note her father’s intractability. She would, as the saying went, only be able to pry the gun from his duck-hunting hand when he was cold and dead.
Shouting distracted Terry from her phone and she looked up to see Ed striding down his grassy yard onto his dock, yelling at something she couldn’t see. He was wearing a light blue fleece jacket with a fishing vest over it and he was buck naked from the waist down. He carried his over-under shotgun tightly under one arm, and with the other hand was spraying a can of insect repellent before him as he came. “Get away!” he shouted. “Go back where you came from!” He sprayed a wide swath of empty air in front of him.
Terry rose to her feet in alarm. She abandoned texting and called Lex.
“You’d better get down here,” she told him, putting her coffee mug down on the table.
Ed had reached almost the end of his dock, but in doing so he’d marched right through the cloud of bug spray, and was now coughing uncontrollably. “You fuckers!” he yelled in between coughing fits. “You think you can come to this country and poison our air!” He let loose a string of expletives so shocking, so out of character for the elderly man, that Terry felt herself shrink in dismay.
Spotting something in the water below him, Ed jerked upright, and threw the spray can at it. His sudden movement startled Terry into taking a step back even though she was a pier away.
“You!” he shouted, then shouldered his shotgun and fired into the water. The seagulls roosting on the pilings took off in a flurry of squawks as the recoil rocked the old man back on his heels where he lost his balance and sat down with a thump. Terry saw that Ed was wearing his boating shoes.
Lex was speed walking across their yard, already talking into his cell phone. As he stepped onto their dock, Lex kept an eye on their neighbor as he made his way down to where she stood.
Terry mouthed Police? to him when Lex reached her and he nodded. “They want me to stay on the line.” The couple watched Ed struggle to his feet, using the shotgun as a crutch to help him to his feet. Once up, the old man began marching up and down his dock again, peering into the water alongside and muttering curses at it.
“Hey there, Ed!” Lex shouted over. “Over here!” Lex raised his hand in greeting as the old guy finally figured out where the voice was coming from and caught sight of his neighbors. “Hi, there! What’s going on? Need help?”
“Damned illegals,” Ed yelled back to him, with a gesture wide enough to take in the air, the water, the world.
“Right,” Lex said agreeably. “Okay for ammunition? Have some if you need it. Just come on over.”
“What?” Terry exclaimed quietly to him. “Are you crazy?”
Lex maintained his relaxed posture, said under his breath to her, “We need to get the gun from him. Or at least find out if it’s still loaded.”
Terry turned back to Ed who was gazing intently at something below him in the water. He waved Lex off. He seemed not to know, or care, that he was pants-less. This gave the old man a sort of dignity that Terry had to admire even as she was abashed for him.
“We should call his daughter, too,” Terry said, watching Ed struggle to lower his knobby knees onto the splintered dock. With one thin hand, he braced himself against a piling and leaned over the water to get a better look. A string of curses drifted to them across the morning water, all of them directed at the danger he saw underneath his knees in the estuary.
Seeing how far out Ed was leaning, Terry held her breath.
“If he goes in, we’re going to have to get him,” she said to Lex. “We need to get closer.” She made a move as if to go, but her husband put a hand on her forearm and shook his head.
“Not while he’s got the gun. We don’t know if he re-loaded after the first shot.” He tipped his chin at her sun-tanned arm. The spit in her mouth dried suddenly as she realized he meant the Ecuadorian-inflected skin-color she’d inherited from her father. “If he raises the gun in this direction, don’t think; just dive,” Lex said, pointing over the edge of the dock.
Terry realized that the sound of sirens was drifting over the water from the main road. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw two state trooper cars speeding along the road that followed the curve of the shore in that direction. “They’re coming,” she told Lex.
When she looked back, Ed had paused his string of curses and lifted his head to listen, too.
“What is that?” Lex said, raising up on his toes and looking down at the water between their and Ed’s docks.
“What do you mean?” Terry said. “It’s the police, I just told you.”
“No,” Lex said, pointing. “That.”
“Oh my god,” Terry said, catching sight of the slow-moving gray mass beneath the surface of the water swimming toward them. The animal moved so slowly that the blood from the buckshot that had hit it was clearly visible drifting up to the surface. “He shot the manatee!”
Over on his dock, Ed had placed both hands on the boards and was pushing himself up like a toddler trying to gain its feet. He wobbled briefly on all fours as he tried to gain his balance with his bare ass in the air. Then he changed tact, using the piling for leverage and pushing himself to stand. As he took a shuffling step forward to catch himself, his toe caught the shotgun still laying on the pier and it skittered forward, muzzle out over the water and facing Terry and Lex. In a move that surprised Terry with its speed and deftness, Ed brought his foot down hard on the stock of the gun to stop it from going any further. He turned his face to the sky, as if testing the air, and for a moment he looked to Terry like a statue of one of those pioneer men who had staked his claim.
The sirens of the cars turning rapidly onto the shell-and-gravel driveway startled the crows from the pines and the birds burst from the treetops, the only visual sign of the arrival of the police officers.
“He shot the fucking manatee,” Terry said again in outrage.
“What?” Lex said, confused.
“I’ll explain in a minute,” she told him. She began scrolling through her phone contacts to find Ed’s daughter’s number.
Across the way, Ed leaned over to pick up the shotgun. Tucking it under his arm momentarily, he looked over to Lex and Terry and raised his left index finger to his lips, made a V with his index and middle fingers and pointed it first towards his eyes, then toward his house.
“Oh no!” Lex said and took off running down the dock toward the house, yelling into his phone, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” at the top of his lungs, his footsteps pounding on the boards as he ran.
Startled by Lex’s sudden movement, with her finger still poised over the phone screen, Terry looked up to see Ed striding back up his dock toward his house with a grace that seemed to come from some distant part of his past. As he moved, he swung the barrel of his shotgun up to rest in his left palm and slid his right hand to curl around the trigger guard. When he stepped onto the shore, she saw him raise the shotgun to eye level, pointing at something she couldn’t see.
Terry, finally understanding, dropped her phone and began to run, too, her footfalls echoing off her dock with hollow reports.
• • •
Photo Credit--Colin Douglas Usher
Elizabeth Rosen is a former Nickelodeon Television writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North American Review, Glimmer Train, Pithead Chapel, JMWW, New Flash Fiction Review, Atticus Review, and numerous others. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her story “Tracks” was the winner of the 2021 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition (literary/mainstream category). She is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses fried oyster po-boys and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves