“I made it,” he said when she answered. “I board the plane in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank God! Now I won’t have to figure out how to bake a cake with a file inside.”

“Well, there’s still the flight home.”

“Let’s not think about that yet. Call me when you’ve seen your father, and let me know how he is.”

“Will do. Love ya.”

“Love you too, Jack. Very much. Just be careful. Don’t talk to strangers or go riding in strange cars, or take candy from—”

“Gotta run.”

He wound up in a window seat in the left emergency row with the perfect traveling companion: The guy fell asleep before takeoff and didn’t wake up until they were on the Miami tarmac. No small talk and Jack got to eat the guy’s complimentary bag of peanuts.

The only glitch in the trip was a slight westward alteration of the usual flight path due to tropical storm Elvis. Elvis…when Jack had heard the name announced on TV the other night he’d done a double take that would have put Lou Costello to shame.

He wondered now if there’d ever been a tropical storm named Eliot. If so, had it been designated on the maps as T. S. Eliot?

Elvis was not expected to graduate to hurricane status, but was presently off the coast near Jacksonville, cruising landward and stirring things up, just as its namesake had in the fifties. Though the plane swung westward to avoid the turbulence, Jack could see the storm churning away to the east. From his high perch he looked out over the rugged terrain of cloud tops broken dramatically here and there by fluffy white buttes from violent updrafts. Elvis was entering the building.

9

“Don’t let her bite me, Semelee!” Corley cried.

Semelee lifted the shells away from her eyes and looked at Corley.

Corley’s good eye, the one he could open, rolled in its socket under his bulging forehead as he looked up at her from where he stood waist deep in the lagoon. Normally at that spot in the lagoon the water’d be up to his neck. But with this drought…

Corley was hard on the eyes, that was for sure, but that made him good for beggin’. They’d take him to town, sit him in a shady spot on the sidewalk, put a beat-up old hat in front of him, and wait. That hat wouldn’t stay empty for long. People’d take one look at that face and empty their pockets of all their spare change, even toss in a few bills now and then.

But Tuesdays weren’t no good for beggin’—not as bad as Mondays, but bad. So Mondays and Tuesdays became fishin’ days.

“Tell her not to bite!” Corley wailed.

“Hesh up and hold the net,” Luke told him.