“You weren’t scared?”
He shook his head. “I had been to war.” Then he stopped, considering. “I suppose a little. Creature haunted my dreams when I was a kid. And there he was. But after taking on Saddam? What’s a critter like Napoleon gonna do?”
“Well, what did he do?”
“Threw me a dead wink and swam away. The flood receded a couple days later, and I haven’t seen him since.”
It was an odd story and deliciously creepy.
I thought of something. “You were eleven when you first saw him. That would be 1968?”
“Uh huh.” He nodded pensively, already seeing where I was going. “A minute after, your daddy shipped out. He was…” Uncle Willard trailed off. “Summer of Love, right? Heh.” He laughed weakly at nothing in particular and then blew into his now-finished flute. It was a shrill little whistl
