You Don't Know About Me (14 page)

When I did look up, he grinned, shaking his head in disbelief. “How in the hell did you know that verse?”

I shrugged. “When I was little I thought Jonah was the coolest book in the Bible. I memorized all four chapters.”

“What was so cool about it?”

“The fish. I had a pet goldfish, and I thought the great fish in Jonah was God's pet. But God's fish wasn't any fish; it knew
tricks
. God had taught him ‘swallow the man' and ‘hurl the man.' For months I tried to train my fish to swallow things and boot 'em back up, but it never listened. It
made me realize how powerful God was. When He talked, fish listened.”

Ruah laughed. “Man, you put the freak in Jesus freak.”

I slept on the couch. Ruah slept up in the loft.

Sometime in the night a sound woke me. It was the bathroom door shutting. I stared through the windows over the couch. At first I thought I was seeing a swarm of fireflies. But they were stars, thick as a bug cloud: the Milky Way. Mom once told me the Milky Way was a giant nest in heaven where the angels folded their wings and spent the night. Each morning the sun woke them up and they flew down to earth in a flock of blessings.

The toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, and Ruah made his way down the aisle past me. His body caught the starlight. In nothing but his white boxers, he looked like a pillar of glistening coal. He climbed back into the sleeping loft.

I wondered if I'd ever have muscles like that, or if I'd be stuck with a corn-dog body all my life. I stared at the Milky Way. Maybe one day an angel would dive down and turn me from corn dog to beefcake. You know, give me a total hunk-over.

I was dreaming of high-pitched birds, like canaries, when I woke up. I thought I was hearing morning birdsong, but when I popped out of the z-bag, it was pitch black. The Milky Way was gone. The chirping was coming from the oven racks as the camper got buffeted by gusts of wind. A
flash of lightning lit up the windows, followed by a rattling
boom
.

“Shut the windows!” Ruah yelled as he cranked a skylight shut. I slid the side windows shut. The rain slammed into us.

Maybe it was God letting us know He didn't appreciate how we'd used His Word to fool the visitor at our campfire. Or maybe T.L. was joining the fun of turning the camper into a great fish. Whatever, there's something about rain on a metal roof that tucks you in a drum of sound and comfort. I dove back into the z-bag deeper than ever.

In the morning it was still raining buckets. Water ran down the windows like liquid cellophane. I got up before Ruah and waited for it to let up. I would've walked to the highway and started hitching but I didn't have rain gear. Everything would've gotten soaked, including my GPS and the
Huck Finn
pages.

I got out the new
Huck
chapters and started reading. Huck and Jim were floating down the river on the raft at night and hiding during the day so they wouldn't be caught. They were a mini version of the Jonah story too. They had their great fish, the raft.

Ruah woke up and peered over the edge of the loft. “What are you reading?”

“An old book.”

He stroked his chin, in deep-thinker pose. “Hmm, I hear there's a lot of those.”

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,”
I told him.

He climbed down the ladder. In the daylight, his back muscles bunched and rippled like a bag of black snakes.

He pulled on a shirt. “What's a nice Christian boy like you reading a book like that?”

“I found it,” I said, stuffing the pages back in the big pocket on my shorts. No way was I going to let him see the highlighted words and numbers. “I wanted to know why so many people hate it.”

“Have you found out yet?”

“I get why some people might not like it, but I haven't gotten to the hate-it part. I mean, it's not as bad as I thought it would be.”

He moved to the kitchen area and started pulling out breakfast stuff. “How often does it say ‘nigger'?”

“A lot.”

He flipped a box of cereal in the air and it stuck a perfect landing on the table. “Where I went to school, that was the hate-it part. And how the black dude, Jim, is a step-'n'-fetch-it, bow-to-the-man, stupid nigger out of a minstrel show.” He put two bowls on the table. “Now, just 'cause I'm serving you breakfast, Masser Billy, don't get any ideas.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, and started to get up to help.

He chuckled and pushed me back down. “That was a joke. One breakfast ain't gonna make me your nigger.”

I felt my face go hot. I'd heard black people call themselves
the N-word, but not while they were fixing me breakfast. “Jim's not exactly stupid,” I said.

“How so?”

“In the chapter I just read, Jim makes wise King Solomon look like an idiot for wanting to cut a kid in half.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Ruah slid into the opposite bench with a carton of milk. He filled his bowl with cereal and looked out at the pouring rain.

“Not exactly hitchhiking weather, is it?”

“It'll let up,” I said. “If it doesn't, I'll go to the camp store, buy a garbage bag, and make a poncho.”

Ruah leaned back and looked at me like I had a morning booger the size of a walnut. “First you wanna hitch after you piss your pants, now you wanna hitch in a garbage bag. Are you sure you've earned your hitchhiking merit badge, scout?”

I started to feel hot again. “I know what I'm doing,” I muttered.

“Sure you do.” He took a spoonful of cereal, crunched, and swallowed. “Got a proposition for you, Billy.”

I shrugged. “What?”

“I'll keep driving you west.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “On one condition.”

“If it's calling my mom every ten minutes—”

He waved his spoon, cutting me off. “No, it's not that. You ride with me, you read to me.” He flashed a smile and
shoveled another bite of cereal. “
Huckleberry Finn
. I wanna know if it's as badass ugly as everyone says.”

I thought it was a great deal. I just had to make sure as I read the loose pages I didn't let him see the yellow highlights or my father's clue poems. After the fun we'd had last night, I trusted Ruah. He was a nice guy, but I had to remind myself: yesterday he'd turned out to be someone else; there was no telling who he might turn out to be today.

As we drove through the downpour toward I-70, the lashing rain smacked the windshield, and the wipers flung the water off Giff's giant eye. I watched water stream off the outside mirror and jump onto the side window. Then it wound in a swirl, like a churning whirlpool trying to bore through the glass. Giff would have none of it. We were high and dry inside the great fish.

Ruah wouldn't let me summarize the first eleven chapters of
Huck
that I'd already read. He wanted me to read it out loud from the beginning. I gave in when I realized I only had seven new
Huck
chapters from the geocache in Hunter. I didn't want to run out of chapters to read. Then I'd have to explain why I didn't have the whole book. So I started from page one.

I got as far as the middle of page three when I stopped midsentence.
“By and by they fetched the—”

“What?” Ruah asked. “Fetched the what?”

“I can't say it.”

“Can't say what?”

“The N-word.”

He laughed. “It's not like you're
using
it, you're just reading it.”

“I can't read it.”

He gave me a cockeyed look. “C'mon. In your whole life, you've never said ‘nigger'?”

“No, I mean, yeah, I mean”—just talking about it had me all flustered—“I've never said it.” And I hadn't.

He chuckled. “That's a
biiig
problem if you're reading
Huck Finn
. So lemme set you straight, dude. It's not the words you speak, it's how you speak 'em.” He gestured at the pages in my lap. “Now, go on. If we gotta stop every time we hit the N-word and give you nigger therapy, we'll never get past chapter one.”

I found my place on page three.
“By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers …”

Saying it wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be. Which wasn't necessarily a good thing.

I read as we plowed through the rain. It was still coming down hard when we hit I-70. I read the eleven chapters and started on the new ones from Hunter. The only time Ruah interrupted was when we got to the part where Huck stops two slave hunters from finding Jim on the raft. Huck fools
them into thinking the raft is infected with smallpox and they won't go near it.

“How bogus is that?” Ruah exclaimed.

I looked up from the page. “I dunno, I thought it was a pretty good trick.”

“Not the story.” He pointed up ahead. “The sign.”

I read the Colorado welcome sign as it shot by.
WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO
.

“I mean, what are they saying? Colorado's filled with people of color?”

I'd never been to Colorado. “Is it?”

Ruah looked at me like I had another walnut-sized nosepickium. “That was a joke.”

The sign reminded me of a game I played with all the welcome signs I'd seen moving from state to state. I'd rewrite them. I also needed a reading break. I only had a chapter and a half left before I ran out of pages, and then I'd have to make up something about not having the rest of
Huck Finn
. “Maybe the sign would be better if it was ‘Discover the Color in Colorado.' ”

He nodded. “Cool, or how 'bout, ‘Colorado—You're Not in Kansas Anymore.' ”

I didn't get it. “Is that a joke too?”

He slid me a look. “You're kidding, right?”

I shook my head.

“ ‘We're not in Kansas anymore.' ”

“I know,” I said. “We just crossed the line.”

He pulled his head back like a turtle. “Are you telling me you've never seen
The Wizard of Oz
?”

“I've heard of it but never seen it. My mother says it's part of the toxic culture.”

“What's toxic about
The Wizard of Oz
?”

“There're witches in it, right?”

“Oh, right, forgot about the witches. You folks don't like witches and Wiccans, black magic and all that satanic stuff.”

“Exactly.”

“So, according to your mom,” he said, waving to the pages I was holding, “what's toxic about
Huckleberry Finn
?”

I scoffed. “That's a no-brainer. Huck lies, steals, smokes, and makes fun of Christianity.”

“Even worse, he saves Jim from slave hunters.”

I ignored his sarcasm. “Yeah, well, maybe that's not so bad.”

“But he's breaking the law.”

When he said that, it suddenly hit me. “He's an antinomian.”

“A what?”

I explained how that's what mom and I were, and how we answered to a higher law than the law of the land. We answered to the law of God. Huck, in his own way, was an antinomian too.

When I finished I realized the rain had stopped. Also, I'd forgotten how far St. Petersburg was into Colorado. I told Ruah I had to take a piss. I had put the GPS device in my cargo-shorts pocket so I could check it now and again.

In the bathroom, the GPS had St. Petersburg 93 miles away. The compass was pointing to about eleven o'clock,
north-northwest. Pretty soon I needed to stop going west and head north.

When I got back to the front, we were on dry interstate in bright sunshine.

“You gotta keep reading
Huck
,” Ruah said, putting on his sunglasses. “I'm totally into it, and besides, you've learned to say ‘nigger' with the best of 'em.”

I laughed at his joke this time. He was right. Saying “nigger” in front of him—reading it, anyway—had become just saying another word. I pulled out the chapter I'd been reading.

“By the way,” he said, “what's with all the loose pages? Didn't your
Huck
come with a cover?”

“Yeah, but I bought it used and it was falling apart.” I held up the pages, making sure the top one didn't show any highlighting, and tried to make a joke of it. “You can't judge a book by its cover when it doesn't have one.”

He chuffed a laugh. Even better, he stopped asking questions. I read out loud for another five minutes till his cell phone rang. He picked it up and checked the caller ID. He dropped the phone on the console.

“It wasn't my mom, was it?” I asked.

“No.”

He didn't say anything else. He seemed lost in thought.

After a while, he said, “Oh man, sorry. I totally forgot about
Huck.
”

“That's okay.”

“Do you wanna take a break or keep reading?”

“My voice is getting kind of scratchy.”

“Yeah, let's take a break.”

It was weird that he suddenly wanted to stop. I mean, part of me wanted to stop because I was almost out of pages. But part of me wanted to keep reading, because we'd reached a part where Huck's caught in a longtime feud between two families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and a new shoot-out was about to begin. I figured whoever had called Ruah must've upset him.

When we got to the Colorado Welcome Center, Ruah took the exit and pulled into a parking spot. “I gotta make a phone call,” he said. He got out and walked onto a grassy strip.

I checked my GPS. We were 91 miles from St. Pete. The compass was pointing almost straight north. I checked the map in Ruah's atlas. All the roads up to northeastern Colorado were north-south. I could either cut north from the welcome center, or go another twenty to thirty miles west and then go dead north.