The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis (4 page)

Popeye peered at it with his good eye. “A Yoo-hoo box!” he said.

The boat was made out of a waxy cardboard Yoohoo chocolate drink box. Someone had made the box into a perfect boat, without a single piece of tape or staples to hold it together.

“I wonder where it came from,” Popeye said.

Elvis looked up the creek. “Where does this creek start?”

Popeye lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “I've been a pretty far ways up there,” he said, “but I've never been to the end.”

“How far'd you go?”

“Not that far, I don't reckon.” Popeye didn't want to tell Elvis that Velma wouldn't allow him to go farther than hollering distance from home.

Elvis peered inside the boat. “Hey!” he hollered. “There's something in here!”

He pulled out a tiny square of folded paper.

Popeye hopped from foot to foot while he watched Elvis unfold the paper.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then he peered over Elvis's shoulder and both boys read out loud together:

 

“Yoo-hoo! Ha! Ha!”

 

Elvis looked at Popeye and Popeye looked at Elvis.

“What the heck kind of dang ignoramus talking is that?” Elvis said.

But Popeye's heart was thumping in his chest, and he felt an odd surge of love for the person who had written the note and sent it down the creek in that perfect little boat.

Well, maybe not love.

But
like
.

Popeye
liked
the person who had sent the note down the creek in the Yoo-hoo box.

He studied the note in Elvis's hand. The words were scrawled in big, sloppy letters with a blue colored pencil.

“Serendipity,” he said.

Elvis's eyebrows squeezed together, and he frowned at Popeye. “What are you talking about?”

“Serendipity,” Popeye repeated. “It's like when something good happens all of a sudden when you're not expecting it.”

Serendipity
had been last week's word from Velma, so Popeye knew all about it.

serendipity:
noun
; the occurrence of events by chance in a happy way

Elvis nodded. “Yeah.”

They both leaned over and looked up the creek.

Popeye tried to imagine who in the world had sent that little Yoo-hoo boat down the creek.

Elvis brushed his hair out of his face and looked
at Popeye with narrowed, serious eyes. “We got to find out who sent this boat,” he said.

Popeye nodded solemnly.

“Let's hide it,” Elvis said.

The boys raked up a pile of rotten leaves with their hands. Elvis placed the boat on the ground beneath a crooked oak tree and they pushed the leaves over it, covering it completely.

“We got to keep this a secret from Calvin and them,” Elvis said.

A little tingle of excitement ran through Popeye. He and Elvis had a
secret
!

As they made their way back down the path through the woods toward the field, Popeye called out, “Hey, Elvis, is this our small adventure?”

But Elvis just kept on walking in that way of his—head down, fists jammed in his pockets. Taci-turn.

So Popeye turned to Boo and whispered, “Boo, I think this might be our small adventure.”

EDWARD III, RICHARD II, Henry IV, Henry V . . .

Popeye ate cereal at the kitchen table while Velma tried to keep from cracking up.

When she got to Elizabeth II, Popeye said, “Me and Elvis are gonna be back yonder at the creek today, okay?”

Velma pulled a couple of squishy pink curlers out of her hair and tossed them into the fruit bowl on the table. “Don't you be going too far into them woods, you hear?” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“There's snakes and I don't know what else back there.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And you keep your eye on that boy Elvis,” Velma said. “We don't know nothing about them people.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Seems to me like they oughta be gettin' that big ole trailer out of here, if you ask me.”

“It's a Holiday Rambler.”

Velma ran her fingers through her thin gray hair. “Who in the world ever heard of folks living like that, anyway? Them kids wouldn't be so wild if they lived in a house like normal folks.” She shook her head and made a
tsk-tsk
noise. “Running around here like a pack of stray dogs.”

Popeye put his cereal bowl in the sink and said, “They
like
living in a Holiday Rambler.”

Velma made a little
pffft
sound and flapped her hand at Popeye. She shuffled across the floor in her ratty old slippers and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Maybe if Dooley'd get off his dern lazy behind and help those people, they could get that contraption out of here and be on their way.”

Popeye felt a little knot growing in his stomach at the thought of the Holiday Rambler driving away with Elvis and all those kids inside, leaving a big
empty space in the road and a whole summer full of boredom ahead.

“Come on, Boo,” he called, and hurried out the front door. He hopped down the steps and raced to the silver motor home. The shiny gold lightning bolts on the side glittered in the morning sun.

He stood on his tiptoes, trying to see into the windows. He wondered if he should just stand there and wait or if he should go up onto that little platform step and knock on the narrow metal door. He sure was busting to get inside and check things out.

“Wait here,” he said to Boo.

He climbed onto the step and knocked on the door.

Walter's face appeared in the window. “Elvis!” he hollered. “That skinny-headed ding-dong kid is here.”

“Walter Jewell!” a woman yelled from somewhere inside. “If you're needin' some soap in your mouth, you say that again.”

The door of the motor home opened.

“I got to get my shoes on,” Elvis said.

Popeye tried to peer around him and see inside. Then, as if the good Lord had sent an angel to
answer his prayers, Elvis's mother snapped, “For heaven's sake, Elvis, invite the boy in.”

Elvis stepped aside, and Popeye climbed up into the Holiday Rambler and found himself in a world of wonder. All around him were kids and shoes and pillows and towels and cereal boxes and paper cups and dirty dishes and piles of clothes and magazines and board games. On one side of the motor home a bed was folded down out of the wall and heaped with blankets and scattered with playing cards and potato chip bags. On the other side was a table with booth-style seats, like in a diner. Giant plastic soda bottles and paper plates with half-eaten hot dogs and puddles of ketchup littered the table.

Beside the booth was a tiny television, strapped to the wall with a bungee cord. Behind it was a tiny stove and a tiny sink and a tiny refrigerator. Popeye felt like he was inside a dollhouse. He didn't say a single word, but in his head, he was saying, “This is awesome, and Elvis, you are so lucky. Trade places with me. Go live in my house with the heart-shaped water stain on the ceiling and Dooley on the couch and I will live here in this silver dollhouse.”

Then he was snapped out of his daydream by Elvis's mother, who said, “I'm Glory Jewell.”

She was sitting in a blue plaid chair up front next to the driver's seat, her feet propped on the folded-down bed and her hands resting on her stomach. She was a great big overstuffed pillow of a woman, the exact opposite of Velma, who was as hard and dried up as a peach pit. On the ceiling above her, a tiny fan whirred and rotated back and forth, blowing her thin dark curls off her forehead.

“You can call me Glory,” she said, fanning herself with a magazine. “I bet you hadn't counted on gettin' new neighbors, huh?” She grinned at Popeye.

“No, ma'am.”

“Furman's supposedly coming up with a plan to get this thing out of the mud, but I got my doubts.” She dabbed her neck with a paper towel. “I swear, if that husband of mine had an idea, it would die of loneliness.”

Popeye wasn't sure if he should smile at that or not, so he did a little half-smile thing and shrugged his shoulders. Behind him, Walter and Willis were kicking each other on the bed, their legs flailing and
their bare feet slapping each other's arms. Prissy was trying to grab something away from Shorty, and Calvin was standing on top of the kitchen counter writing on the ceiling with a marker.

“Calvin!” Glory snapped. “You got your stupid head on today?”

So Calvin jumped down onto the bed and landed on top of Willis and everybody was suddenly kicking and hollering and Elvis said, “Come on,” to Popeye and flung the door open and disappeared outside.

Popeye followed him, stepping down out of that noisy silver dollhouse and out into the real world.

POPEYE AND ELVIS spent all morning at the creek. The first thing they did was dig under the pile of leaves to see if the little Yoo-hoo boat was still there.

It was.

Then they decided to build a bigger dam than the one they had built the day before. That way, if any other boats came down the creek, they would get trapped.

They piled up rocks and branches and mud until they had a real good dam.

“There,” Elvis said. “That oughta do it.”

The next thing they did was sit on the mossy
bank beside the creek and wait, while Boo curled up in the soft green ferns beside them and napped.

“How long you think we'll have to wait?” Popeye said.

Elvis tossed pebbles into the creek.

Plunk.

Plunk.

“Beats me,” he said. “How long we been here?”

Popeye glanced up at the sky. “Beats me.”

They sat and they waited and they sat and they waited and after a while, Elvis said, “Aw, heck, this is stupid. Let's go see where this creek comes from.”

So the two boys and Boo made their way along the edge of the creek, farther and farther into the woods. Sometimes they had to push through pricker bushes or climb over fallen trees. Sometimes the creek went straight, and sometimes it curved around a corner and then straightened out again.

As he walked, Popeye could feel Velma's eyes on him, sharp as tacks. The farther he got into the woods, the sharper those tacks got. After a while, he could hear her voice, cutting through him like a knife.

Don't you be going too far into them woods, you hear?

There's snakes and I don't know what else back there.

But Popeye kept going.

The three of them walked and walked and walked, following the creek.

Elvis and Popeye and Boo.

One behind the other.

Finally, after it seemed like they'd walked about a million miles, Elvis said, “Dang! Let's stop.”

Popeye tried not to look too relieved when he said, “Okay.”

“Let's mark this spot so we'll know how far we came,” Elvis said.

They found two big branches and placed them beside the creek, one crossed over the other, to make an X. Then they turned around and headed back down the creek.

Elvis walked in that heavy-footed, head-hanging way of his, not talking. Popeye hummed a little as he walked. Just a hum, hum, hum, no-name tune. Every once in a while, Boo stopped to drink from the creek, making big slurping noises.

They hadn't gone very far when Popeye noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

Something yellow and brown and blue.

A boat!

A Yoo-hoo boat!

“There's a boat!” he hollered, making Elvis jump. “Look! Over yonder! A boat!”

Elvis stepped down into the water, shoes and all, and scooped it up. Then he climbed back onto the creek bank and he and Popeye examined it.

The boat was perfectly made, just like the first one. And tucked inside was a tiny square of paper, just like before.

Popeye could hardly keep still as he watched Elvis unfold the paper.

Once.

Twice.