You Don't Know About Me (20 page)

I stuck with my vow of silence. Okay, I was the one who'd said “gay” first, but it was an accident, like when you're talking to someone and food shrapnel flies out of
your mouth. There was no hitting a reset button, but there
was
changing the subject. My throat suddenly felt better; I began reading the last two chapters we had. Of course, just when you think you're doing the right thing to steer clear of “queer,” you run smack into it, not once, but
twice
.

At the end of Chapter 29 I had to read about Huck being “fagged,” even though I'm pretty sure it meant he was totally spent as he ran for his life. Of all the words the writer could've used—zonked, bonked, cashed—he had to go and use the F-word. I gave Mark Twain the benefit of the doubt on that one because it probably didn't have the same meaning back then as it does today. But then what he wrote at the end of Chapter 30 was unforgivable.

It's after the king and the duke's plan to swindle Mary Jane is discovered and they're busted. Huck and Jim have escaped and think they're finally rid of the crooks. But the king and the duke escape too and jump back on the raft. The swindlers fight over how they almost got hanged, till they get drunk, hug, and make up. Then, on the last page, things get mega-creepy. The king and duke crawl into the lean-to on the raft, get “lovinger,” and “went off a-snoring in each other's arms.”

It's gnarly enough riding shotgun with a homo; it gets skin-crawl creepy when what you're reading goes from a pretty decent story to one about two old queers sleeping together.

Ruah must've heard something in my voice as I read the last part. He said, “You're not thinking what I'm thinking, are you?”

I played dumb. “I'm not thinking anything.”

He didn't take the hint. “I mean, if we had the next chapter, would we find out the king and duke are
gay
?”

I caught his sarcasm, but I wasn't falling for it. I lied again. “No way. They're just a couple of old drunks who passed out.”

“Yeah, I think you're right.”

He tried to ask me a bunch of school questions, like what I thought was going to happen next and stuff like that, but I kept my answers snap-short. He finally got that I didn't want to talk and just wanted to watch the scenery.

The highway cut through a canyon with towering rock walls and the Colorado River tumbling along below the road. As I watched white-water rafters riding the rapids, I started thinking how differently things happen in life compared to in a book. I mean, on the white-water rafts there probably wasn't one person even close to being as bad as the crooks Huck and Jim had on their raft. The white-water rafters were just normal people looking for a thrill. But in a book it's all fireworks and drama. Like the king and the duke screaming at each other, beating each other up, then getting drunk before they hugged and made up. Real life was so different. Ruah and I weren't going to scream at each other, beat each other up, and get drunk. No, we were just going to ride along in silence, agreeing on one thing: we were done talking for a while.

The canyon widened, opening on the beginning of sunset. As the sun hit the rock walls, it lit up all the tiny layers in the cliffs. They looked like giant stacks of stone tablets. Like the place was God's Staples, and this was where He kept all the blank tablets He had yet to write on. Or maybe
they'd been written on already, and these were the stacks of stone journals God had kept ever since creation. Written on the tablets were all the things God had heard people
think
but never say. Things like the words I wanted to shout at my mom but didn't dare. Things Ruah wanted to say to me but stopped himself before he did. Things I imagined saying to my father, or he had imagined saying to me, but neither of us would ever get to say because he was dead. I liked thinking that all the unspoken things God had heard were buried in those cliffs. They were stone chapters in His Book of Life.

As we headed toward Grand Junction, Colorado, the sunset pushed the hills even wider. Everything was stubbled with sagebrush. It looked like land in need of a shave.

We hadn't said anything for so long it got weird. I told myself Ruah probably had plenty to think about. And even if he had the urge to share some of it, or if I had the urge to share my thoughts, it was like we were both taking Huck's advice: … 
kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble.

Just before the Utah border, we passed a big wood sign:
LEAVING COLORFUL COLORADO
. As the Utah sign shot toward us, Ruah started laughing. He swerved onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes. The camper almost did a nose wheelie in front of the billboard. It just said
WELCOME TO UTAH
. Below it was a picture of a ski jumper in midflight.

Ruah kept laughing and pounding the steering wheel. “That's the best one yet!”

I didn't get it. “What's so funny?”

“Look at it!” He swept a hand at the horizon. “We've gone from colorful Colorado to a frying pan of scorched desert, and what do they put on their welcome sign?” He cracked up before he could say it. “A ski jumper looking for a place to land!”

“Yeah,” I muttered, “it's kinda random.”

“Random? No way. It's totally a sign from God!” He broke up again.

I'd heard of some strange signs from God but never an actual billboard.

He stopped laughing and wiped his eyes. “A ski jumper in the middle of the desert? Don't you get it?”

I shook my head.

“He's as out of place as we are. There's me, a poof in the major league closet, and you, a homophobe-in-training, and we're riding together. But it's even more bizarre than that. We're about to do the whole desert-wandering thing, and we're looking for a place called Providence.” He looked up at the billboard. “Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful sign. I just wish I still had my phone.”

I tensed. “Why?”

He waved at the sign. “I'd take a picture of it. And every time I thought I was some freaky fag in the majors, I'd get out my picture of my buddy, the poor desert ski jumper lookin' for a place to land, and I'd say, ‘Pal, I know how you feel.' ”

I came super close to digging out the phone and handing it to him. But if he got mad about it, this was no place to get dumped. Like he said, we were about to go wandering in the desert.

He sucked in a breath and exhaled. “I think I need some coffee.”

We stopped to gas up, and I picked up fast food for dinner. I checked my GPS. We were 160 miles from Providence; the compass pointed north-northwest. We ate and kept driving. After it got dark, we turned north. I started nodding against the doorframe.

“You can go in the back and get some sleep,” Ruah said.

“Are you gonna keep driving?”

“Yeah. Who knows, maybe I'll make it clear to Providence.”

As I got in my sleeping bag a thought kept nagging at me. Why was he still driving some kid he didn't seem to like? The only answers I came up with made me nervous. Maybe he had plans I didn't know about. Maybe he'd lied when he'd said I wasn't his type, and he was waiting to make his move. Or maybe he wasn't as rich as he said, and he wasn't any different than the king and the duke. Maybe he was planning to steal my inheritance.

What finally let me relax enough to sleep was a realization: there was a huge difference between me and Ruah in a camper and Huck and Jim on a raft. Nobody had to drive the raft; it floated down the river by itself. As long as Ruah had his hands on the wheel, I was safe. My last hundred thoughts before dropping into the z-bag were a mantra: If the camper stops, wake up … if the camper stops, wake up …

I bolted awake to a voice. “Run!” It shouted louder. “Run, Tony! Run!” It came from outside. I realized the camper was stopped; it was early morning. I looked through the window.

A man ran toward our campsite. He wore zebra-striped pants and a bright orange shirt. He was some kind of prisoner. He turned toward the camper. I fumbled in my pocket for my knife. The man grabbed the garbage can at our site and spun back to the road. A pickup pulled up, a trash container in its bed. Behind the truck was a flatbed with a bunch of men all wearing the same zebra-striped pants and orange shirts. The prisoner emptied the garbage can in the pickup, dropped it back on the ground. “Run, Tony, run!” one of the prisoners yelled, and they all burst out laughing.

I heard the curtain slide in the sleeping loft. The shouting had woken Ruah up. He groaned. I listened as he rolled over and went back to sleep. I was wide awake.

I went outside. The rising sun painted the mountain peaks to the west with light. The other campsites were dead quiet. I pulled out my GPS and turned it on. I was stunned to see we were only 6.9 miles from Providence. Ruah had driven most of the night. I wanted to grab my pack and start walking to Providence. I could be there in
two hours. But I also felt like I had to wait. I mean, he'd driven me so far.

I walked to the end of the campground, where there was a stone bench. It overlooked a sparkling lake with chalky cliffs on the far side. I sat down and tried to figure out what to do. Then it hit me. The garbagemen were actually a sign from God; they were His messengers. One was telling me, “Run!” The other, the man emptying the garbage can, was a warning. If I didn't go now, God was going to show up and dump me out of the camper like garbage. God was telling me His junior Jonah had traveled long enough in Giff. And just like Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of the Great Fish, I had spent three days and three nights in Giff. It was time for me to be spit out.

God's will had opened to me as clear and sparkling as the lake in front of me. My insides swelled with flowy giddiness. I remembered how Huck had put it when everything became crystal clear.
Here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face.

I slipped into the camper and lifted my pack. I thought about waking Ruah to thank him and say goodbye, but he was sleeping soundly. I wrote him a note.

Whether he came to Providence or not was up to him. I was giving him an out. If he'd finally gotten tired of riding with a “homophobe-in-training” and wanted to ditch me, he was getting his chance.

The campground was on the edge of a town called Hyrum. Following the compass arrow on the GPS, I walked up the main street to the highway. I put out my thumb and got a ride from a guy going to work in Logan. He dropped me on the commercial strip outside of Providence. As I walked into town, the GPS ticked down to 1.5 miles from the cache.

Providence was mainly nice houses on tree-lined streets. I walked up Center Street, following the compass toward a big hill rising behind the town. The cache site was looking very different from the first two. It wasn't in a dying little town, or the graveyard of a dead one. Of course, with a name like Providence, you'd expect something nicer.

But for all the nice houses, the town didn't seem to have a diner or any breakfast place. If Ruah was going to meet me for breakfast it would have to be back down on the strip.

At the top of Center Street was a lush green park called Vons Park. A mountain stream ran through it; the compass pointed up a trail next to the stream. My GPS ticked down to 0.35 miles.

Remembering how tree cover can mess with GPS reception and accuracy, I pulled out the last
Huck Finn
chapter—where the drunken king and duke fell asleep together on the raft—and read the clue poem my father had scrawled at the end.

I got that the “four sinners” were the king, the duke, Huck, and Jim. But why only one of them was going to burn in hell I didn't know. From what I'd read of
Huck Finn
, I would've guessed they were all going to hell, except maybe Jim. His only sin was running away from being a slave. He was pretty much an antinomian: breaking land law to obey God law. God doesn't believe in slavery.

I started up the trail along the stream. The path climbed through woods, opened onto a little meadow, then rose through thick woods like a tunnel. My eyes darted between my GPS and the shadowy ground; I didn't want to step on any snakes. At 0.1 mile it switched to 525 feet; the numbers ticked down super fast. My heart raced along with it.

I had no idea what my father meant by “River Styx” or “Charon's boat,” so I focused on “At trail's end is nature's span.” I figured I could decipher that one.

The trail got tighter and creepier as I got under a
hundred feet. I used a stick to do some cobweb clearing. I half expected to trip over a dead body.

Then I saw it. “Nature's span”: a tree trunk fallen across the creek. I tightroped over the trunk and almost fell in the water when my foot slipped. I looked in the undergrowth for “hell in a can,” whatever that meant. I thought maybe it would be a red gas can, you know, like fire in a can. I looked all around for twenty to thirty feet, but found nothing.

I checked the GPS. I was still 70 feet from the cache. With the heavy tree cover I could've been off by fifty or a hundred feet. I reread the poem's last line. “As you seek, don't be daft/Remember Huck is on a raft.” It made no sense. There was nothing like a raft, low, high, or anywhere.