“Thanks, sir,” I said.

The old man just laughed.

Sooner or later I found it.

Turns out Pop was living in an old stilt house hanging over a tiny slough just a short ways off from where it met the river. Pop’s house wasn’t much, hardly a shack, but right then it seemed the most perfect place in all the world.

Just as the sun set over the cypresses and glinted white and blinding over the water, I saw him. He sat on a stump outside, his beard scragglier than I remembered it, his clothes a little rattier, sucking on a pipe, black smoke billowing up around him, like he was deep in some sad thought, like he was lost far off in the woods of his brain. He didn’t even see me walking up. Never had I thought the day would come when I could sneak up on my daddy.

“Pop?” I said.

He gave a little jump he was so surprised, the pipe snatched back from his lips. For just one second he looked like an animal about to bolt off into the woods and be gone.

But then he grinned, that sly, gold-toothed grin that he said was the key to everything and all of life, the magic to getting whatever you wanted, and his eyes lit up like the bonfires on the levee, and he leapt to his feet and gathered me up and swung me around laughing.

“My boy!” he hollered. “My Buddy boy come all the way down here to see me!”

He set me on the ground and out came the questions, dozens of them, that quick way he has of making you feel like every story you tell is gold, like you’re the most important person in the whole world. I told him all about my travels, about the horse with no mane, about the lady kicking me out of her carriage. He about lost his mind laughing over that. He kept calling me “my boy, my boy,” and I don’t even have to tell you how much that meant to me.

It was just how I’d always dreamed it, just how I’d always wanted it to be.

“So what brings you to my neck of the river?” said Pop, once we sat down in the house, sweet tea for me and a sip out of his jug for him.

“Well, I kinda sorta had to leave Mom’s house,” I said, “on account of how I lit the oven on fire. But it was an accident, I swear to you.” I almost told him about the one-eyed toad, but I didn’t much feel like making my dad think I was crazy on our first night back together. So I lied. “I fell asleep, I guess.”

“Out all night, causing trouble I bet,” he said. “That’s my boy. We weren’t made for early rising, no sirree. Folks such as you and I, we make our living by night, and the sunrise is just God’s way of telling us it’s bedtime. You don’t learn nothing from a morning anyhow.”