He looked into the pickup. He stroked his snow-white beard for a bit, then reached in and grabbed Colonel Broussard’s arm and was about to swing him up in a fireman’s carry when Dak stepped up beside him.

“Here, man, we’ll give you a hand,” Dak said. The little guy looked confused, then did a few more bows in our direction. So Dak and I each grabbed a leg and we carried him. We arranged the limp carcass with his arms and legs hanging out of the wheelbarrow. He was still sleeping peacefully.

[25] The elf stood there a moment, twisting the shirt again. I noticed he seldom looked into our eyes, but then his eyes hardly ever settled on anything.

“T’ank y’all,” he said. “I owes y’all one, me.”

Dak started some sort of aw-shucks routine, but it was wasted. The guy grabbed the handles of the barrow and almost trotted away from us. Broussard’s arms and legs bumped up and down.

We all looked at each other, and Alicia had her fist at her mouth, biting hard on the knuckles. She held it as long as she could, till the guy was almost to the barn door, then she exploded in laughter.

“What a weird little man,” Kelly said, and she started laughing, too. It didn’t take long for me to join in. Dak looked at all of us and shook his head.

“Yeah, right. ‘I owes y’all one, me.’ Like we’ll ever see him again.”

“Did you notice there was no dirt or anything in the wheelbarrow? Like it never had anything in it.”

“Colonel Broussard’s personal rickshaw,” Kelly said.

“Yeah, every Saturday night he gets a ride home in the barrow.”

“Huh! More than every Saturday night,” Alicia assured us. “The guy looked like a stone alcoholic to me.” Alicia would know, I figured.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Kelly suggested.

So we all climbed back in Blue Thunder and bounced back to the highway, retracing our route except for the part on the Autopike. Dak didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get home, and neither was I. There’s an amazing number of things two people can do under a blanket in the back of a truck, and Kelly and I tried most of them. I didn’t think of Broussard or his odd little friend all the way back home, and after a few days I’d almost forgotten about them.

IT WAS OUR interest in going into space that had brought me and Dak together. We went to different high schools but not long after getting our diplomas we came to the same realization. The Florida public schools had not prepared either of us for a career in science or engineering. It had not even prepared us to pass the entrance exam for a good college. We had a lot of catching up to do.

But a self-motivated student can earn anything up to and including a doctorate on the University of the Internet just by logging on and sitting in on virtual classes. No books, no tuition, no housing costs. Not that a dot-corn doctorate was ever likely to rival a degree from Harvard, but you couldn’t beat the price. I encountered Dak there, in a remedial math class. In a chat room after classes we found out we both had an obsession with finding a career in space, and we lived only a few miles apart. So we got together to study and soon were spending a lot of our spare time together.

I’m smart, but I’m not a genius. I found high school easy, it never challenged me much. I didn’t work very hard. It came as a big shock that I didn’t do well on the SATs.

So whose fault was it that I was now slopping out toilets and making [27] beds, trying hard to catch up, instead of looking forward to my sophomore year at Florida, or State? What was to blame here?

Well, how about poverty?

Practically anybody can plead poverty these days when it comes to higher education. There are only three types of people who get into a school like Yale: the children of the wealthy, students on full scholarship, and those willing to accept student loans that can take the rest of your life to repay.

My family-Mom, my aunt Maria, and myself-owns property near the beach, and that is supposed to be a gold mine. But that property happens to be a battered, leaky, cracked and patched motel built in 1959, and every month we’re less sure we can hang on to it for another year. After taxes and upkeep, the wages we pay ourselves put us well below the poverty line. So there’s no doubt about it. We are poor. But that had nothing to do with my not studying hard enough.

So try again. How about The System? It’s always safe to blame the system. It is politically fashionable, it makes you feel better about yourself, and it is (at least partly) true. Did it really speak well for the Department of Education that a guy like me who attended regularly, did the work, and even graduated from Gus Grissom High School in the top 5 percent… did it make sense that after twelve years I wasn’t up to entry level in the state university system?

No, it didn’t make sense. The system really sucked, no getting around it. But it sucked just as hard for some of my classmates who were now going to school at Cornell and Princeton.

If it ain’t the institution, and it ain’t the money, then it’s got to be the color of your skin or the language you speak, right? It has to be racism.

I even mentioned it to my mother one day when I was feeling particularly put-upon and sour. It must be because I’m Latino, I griped. Well, half Cuban, anyway. When she had stopped laughing, she came close to getting angry.

“I hope I didn’t raise a crybaby,” she said. “Don’t you ever blame your own shortcomings or anything else on racism… not even if it’s true. When you see you are being discriminated against, you just make [28] the best of it. You deal with it, or else you see racism every time you turn around and spend your life moaning about it. And besides, you’re hardly any more brown-skinned than I am, and my Spanish is a heck of a lot better than yours.”

Which was the simple truth. I got most of my looks from her side of the family, which was Italian. My hair is dark brown and curly. I wouldn’t look out of place wearing a yarmulke. Only around the eyes, which are dark and deep-set and sometimes rather bruised looking, like Jimmy Smits, do I resemble the pictures of my dad. Sad to say, the rest of me doesn’t look anything like Jimmy Smits, but I get by.

Like Jimmy Buffett said, it was my own damn fault.

In a mediocre system, the talented have no need to excel. I’m a fast reader, I have a good memory, and I’m quick with figures. With those qualifications, about the only way you could fail at Gus Grissom High was to never go to class.

After twelve years of that kind of schooling, both Dak and I thought we knew how to study. You go home, you read the material for tomorrow’s classes. Thirty minutes, an hour, tops. Then you’ve got the rest of the evening and all weekends to do whatever you want.

In my case, doing whatever I wanted meant working about sixty hours a week in our family business, the Blast-Off Motel. That is, it was what I wanted if I also wanted to eat and have a roof over my head.

Dak and I got together to study in the hope of improving our self-motivational skills, which were sadly lacking. Sometimes it worked. If the weather outside wasn’t just too damn gorgeous. If the surf and the wind weren’t just so perfect it would be a sin to spend the day inside when you could be riding your windboard. If the college girls from up north weren’t too plentiful and beautiful stretched out in scantily clad rows, trying to bake a Florida brown before spring break was over…

ME AND MY family had what you’d call a love-hate relationship with the Blast-Off Motel. Without it we’d all have been looking for jobs instead of working in the family business. I’ve pushed a vacuum cleaner the equivalent of twice around the Earth at the equator. I know fifty [29] things that can go wrong with a toilet and I know how to fix most of them. I could pass the test for a Ph.D. in toilets.