He cut into one of the steaks, peered inside, and looked up.

“Who likes ’em so rare they’re still chewin’ their cud?”

Alicia and Travis did. Dak and I said medium rare would do. That left one on the grill, and Travis pushed a button on the outside wall before he sat at the table. Beyond the empty pool the barn door opened and the short, roly-poly guy came out. Travis heaped fries on all five plates.

“Jubal, these are friends of Dak. Alicia, and Manny. Y’all, this is my cousin Jubilation. Everybody calls him Jubal.”

[55] Jubal nodded awkwardly, bowed his head, then looked up again.

“Travis, would you offer a blessin’ over dis here food?”

“Shouldn’t we wait till your steak gets here, Jube?”

“You kin bless it from ovah here, you.”

And by golly we all bowed our heads and Travis offered a short prayer. When it was over, Jubal tied a big cloth napkin around his neck and dug in to the plate of fries. When his steak arrived, mostly black on the outside, and not much better on the inside, he ate that in record time, then shuffled off to the barn again.

“Don’t take offense,” Travis told us. “Jubal never caught on to polite manners. He’s just never seen the use of saying good-bye… saying a lot of things, actually. But I’ve got him pretty well used to ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ ”

I couldn’t tell if he was pulling our legs or not.

“What’s he do out there in that barn?” Dak asked.

“Invents stuff. Allows me to go on living in the style I don’t deserve but have become accustomed to without having to go out and look for work.”

This time all three of us waited for the punch line, but there wasn’t one. Well, it was his house and his food. He could tell us as much or as little as he wanted.

I ATE MORE steak than I should have. I don’t get top-quality sirloin that often, and I figured I’d make up a little for feasts I’d missed out on, growing up. In other words, I made a pig out of myself. But I wasn’t the only one. We all sat around for a while, picking our teeth, trying to keep the belching down to a level that wouldn’t frighten the swamp creatures.

Then Dak asked Travis to tell that story he’d told Dak the other day, you know the one, about what you did to that senator from Utah who finagled himself aboard the yearly “inspection” junket to International Peace and Cooperation Station… and Travis said that was no senator from Utah, that was a congressman from Oregon, and besides, he has recovered by now, though he walks with a slight limp and jumps at [56] loud noises, and besides, it wasn’t me, and if you ever say it was I’ll have your ass in court for libel. We all laughed, and Travis said that called for another beer, and I decided I could safely have one, and he was off to the races.

Travis was a terrific storyteller. The great thing was, though they might not have been strictly, 100 percent true, they were all based on fact. And that was good enough for me, because they were stories of space, and of rocket piloting, of guys and girls actually getting out there and doing it. Kissing the sky.

When Travis got off a really good one, one of us would reach for the remote unit attached to the mechanical pool alligator by a cable, and start pressing the buttons. The phony reptile would rear up, thrash his tail, and let fly with a roar that sounded more like a grizzly bear to me-not that I know a grizzly bear from Yogi Bear, but I have heard pissed-off gators a time or two.

The rubber alligator was a story in itself. One of Travis’s friends used to work as a mechanical animator at Disney World. Travis invested with the man when he left Disney and tried to start his own studio. The alligator was for a place called Gatorland. The day before it was about to open, some radical animal rights group, Free the Animals or something like that, broke in and let all the real gators go.

Gatorland wasn’t exactly in the swamp, it was in a suburb of Tampa. In half an hour nine of the freed gators had been hit by cars when they tried to cross a freeway. Several people were injured in the crashes, and all the alligators were killed. Others had to be pulled from backyard swimming pools and rounded up on downtown streets, and some had to be shot. Later, a dozen neighborhood dogs and cats could not be found.

By the time all the lawsuits were settled Travis’s friend was bankrupt and all that was left of their investment was the gator. So he and Travis took the very realistic critter to the home of the president of Free the Animals and… but Travis said the statute of limitations hasn’t expired on that one yet, so he’d better be quiet about it.

“Not that the prick would likely press charges,” Travis said. “They’ve all been keeping a much lower profile since the Gatorland fiasco.”

[57] I could have listened far into the night, but after a while Travis looked at his watch, drained and crushed his beer can, and told us to go get our computers.

You’re kidding, I thought. But he was not.

So we set them up out there on the patio, plugged into his ground line, and signed on to the Infinite Classroom.

IT WAS ONE of the better ideas Dak ever had. Travis knew this stuff, he’d worked with numbers all his professional career. There were basic concepts in calculus that had been giving me hell, I’d started to wonder if I’d ever make the breakthrough, ever really make the grade. Maybe I ought to get a job selling shoes. It would be better than shining them, like my great-grandfather used to do in Havana.

“There’s just things it’s real hard to learn out of a book,” Travis said at one point, not long after getting me to finally see a point I’d been struggling with for a whole month. “Math’s one of them. I don’t think I’d ever have got it if I didn’t have a good teacher to help me over the rough spots.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think this Internet U is a great thing… up to a point. But in pretty much any subject you get to a point where words and pictures on a screen aren’t enough. You either have to get some hands-on experience, or get somebody to walk you through it, one on one.”

“SO AM I going to hear how this all came about, or is that a secret?”

Dak looked over and grinned at me from under his helmet.

“Just dropped by a few days ago to see how the poor bastard was doing,” he said. “Cousin Jubal had told him all about that night and Travis wanted to say thanks. I think he was pretty impressed we didn’t take him for everything but the lint in his drawers. He’s a man who has some experience in these matters.”

“I’ll bet,” I laughed.

“Oh, yes,” Alicia said. “Travis has been mugged before.”

[58] She was puttering along in her little 1965 VW Bug, ahead of us on the bikes. Dak had been helping her restore it. In fact, that little Bug was how they met in the first place. The outside was coated with primer except for the two front fenders, which were “screamin’ yellow and hollerin’ orange,” according to my mom. Alicia hadn’t yet decided what color to go with.

“We cracked a few brews, sat around shooting the breeze, making that rubber crocodile walk around on the bottom of the pool.”

“And he offered to do our homework for us?”

“Not at first,” Dak admitted. “He said, any little thing he could do for us, all we gotta do is ask. The dude may be a drunk, but he knows a lot of people, and I think a fair number of them still like him. These are the kind of people who can drop a hint, call in a favor from the right person at the right time, I figured. We got a long ways to go between here and the moon, Manny my man. We need to use every leg up we can get.”

“No argument, pal,” I said. “I just wish you’d let me in a little sooner. I felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party.”

“Sorry about that, man.”

There was a momentary silence in our earphones.