You Don't Know About Me (39 page)

I jumped in. “Don't let him!”

Ruah turned to me. “He may be a total scumbag, but he's always been a good agent.” He looked back to Joe. “Tell 'im baseball's favorite saying about agents.”

Joe scowled and spit, “Born an asshole, died an agent.”

“He doesn't deserve it,” I protested. “He's worse than a scumbag.”

Ruah half smiled. “Don't worry. I've got my own little punishment worked out for him.”

He wouldn't say what it was. Instead, he gave Joe two orders: (1) He had to drive himself to the hospital and get his knee worked on. When Joe claimed he couldn't drive, Ruah told him he'd purposely broken his left kneecap so he still could, and (2) Joe had to meet Ruah the next morning in Seattle, where, he said, they'd “finalize their deal.” Joe agreed, and Ruah sent me to fetch his car, parked down the road. Giff was parked behind it.

After we helped Joe into his car and he drove off, Ruah and I sat on the porch. I told him everything that had happened with my father and Joe. Then I asked him how he knew to come to the farmhouse. Ruah told me he had gotten suspicious as soon as Joe had shown up at Boot Heel Collectibles. It meant Joe knew too much. Ruah pretended to ditch me to see if Joe would follow me after I left the store. He did, and Ruah tried to follow Joe in a taxi but lost him. Then he went back and turned Boot Heel Collectibles upside down until he found the address carved in the floor. That was how he found the farmhouse.

Ruah rubbed a hand over his head stubble. “Here's what I don't get. Joe got to the Potlatchers in Idaho—he told me
that in front of the store—but how? The last time Joe had any kind of bead on us was back in Denver.”

For a second I thought about Hucking-up and concocting a story about how it all came about. But there's no way I could lie as good as Huck and Tom. I went inside and got my backpack. I dropped it on the porch and dug out the cell phone.

Ruah stared at it in disbelief. “You had it all the time?”

“I always wanted to give it back,” I explained. “I know it's a lame excuse.” I handed him the phone.

I watched him connecting the dots. He looked over at me. “It was the call record, wasn't it?”

I nodded.

He chuckled. “I'll be damned.”

I couldn't believe he wasn't yelling at me. “Aren't you pissed off?”

“Nah.” He shook his head and whacked me on the shoulder. “Once a rattlesnake skin starts a string of bad luck, no one can stop it. You just let it run its course.” He stood to go.

“You know, you could spend the night,” I said. “My father will be rested up by morning, and it'd be great if you met him.”

“I'd love to,” he said, “but I gotta be in Seattle tonight.”

“Okay, but you can't leave without something.” I went into the living room, collected the paperback pages of the last ten chapters of
Huck Finn
, and gave them to Ruah. “It gets pretty wild in the end.”

“You finished it?”

“Pretty much. My dad has a fancy copy with pictures.”

“So does Huck go to hell?”

I shrugged. “You'll have to wait and see.”

As we walked down the driveway, I asked what he meant when he told Joe they'd “finalize the deal” in Seattle.

He grinned. “You'll have to wait and see.”

We stopped at the end of the driveway. He chuckled at the awkwardness of the moment. “So, what do you wanna do? Shake? Hug?”—he raised a fist—“Knuckle-bump?”

I laughed nervously.

“Or we could pray.”

I shook my head. “Last time we did that I ended up in a fight and got a bloody lip.” As he laughed at the recollection, my last word jogged a memory. “Remember when you told me about the Jewish baby? You know, the one who knows the Torah by heart, but then an angel touches him on the upper lip and he spends the rest of his life relearning his religion?”

Ruah nodded. “Yeah.”

“That's what I feel like now.” I tapped the groove above my lip. “Like my dad touched me here, and I've forgotten everything I ever learned. How to be a Christian, how to talk to my mom, how to live, even how to say goodbye.”

He flashed a smile. “I know what you mean.” He poked his upper lip. “Reset, reset, reset.”

“What do you have to reset?”

“How to play baseball like God wants me to.”

“How's that?”

“I found the answer in the Book. Job five, seven.”

I waited. “You're not gonna tell me?”

“No. You check it out.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

There was nothing more to say.

He wrapped me in a bear hug; I hugged back. It didn't feel strange at all. We were just good buddies saying bye.

As I walked back to the house, lights spilled through the ground-floor windows. The upper floor was dark in the moonlight. I thought I saw something move in my father's bedroom window. I figured it was a curtain again.

I went upstairs to check on him. When I put the bad book back on his bed, his eyes opened. He started telling me about the dream he'd just had. In the dream, he was standing at his bedroom window and looking into the moonlight. He watched two figures walk down the driveway to the road. But they weren't any figures. It was Huck Finn, walking Jim to freedom.

I told him it wasn't a dream. He'd woken up, gone to the window, and seen me walk down the driveway with my friend Ruah.

He gave me a puzzled look, then shook his head. “No, I know what I dreamed; I know what I saw. When you see Huck and Jim, you can't mistake them for anyone else.”

I didn't argue. I sat on the edge of the bed until he went back to sleep.

I took the letters off the hall table and into the study. There were two envelopes, both torn open and probably read by Joe Douglas. On the first envelope, my father had scrawled
For Billy, if you came too late
. The other envelope said
To be opened only upon my death
.

I pulled out the first letter and read what he had typed on his store's stationery.

• He apologized for not living long enough to meet me.
  
• He gave GPS coordinates that would lead me to his
  “genizah”
  and “the last cache.”
  
• He asked me to read the final chapters of
  Huck Finn.
  

I left the second envelope on his desk. I took the fancy copy of
Huck Finn
to the living room, lay on a couch, and finished “Chapter the Last.”

When I got to the last paragraphs, where Jim tells Huck that his father, Pap,
ain't a-comin' back no mo'
, and Huck realizes that his father is dead, it was too creepy. I had to go check on my own pap.

He was sleeping, breathing steady and quiet.

Back downstairs, I turned out the lights and stretched out on the couch. Slipping into the z-bag never felt so good.

First thing in the morning I checked on my dad. He was awake but too weak to get out of bed. All the excitement from the day before had wiped him out. I made him breakfast: tea and toast. We turned his bed into a breakfast table for two.

When I told him I'd finished
Huck Finn
, he asked me about the last chapters. I said I was disappointed by the ending. I thought it was weird that Tom's escape plan for Jim was so goofy and far-fetched, and that it felt like Tom and Huck were being cruel to Jim. It also made Huck, who'd begun to treat Jim like a person and not a slave, seem like he'd totally backslid to treating him like a “nigger.”

As I told him all that, I had a little revelation. The end of
Huck Finn
, with the bolted-on drama, might've been the first case of an audience getting GLASSED. The first known case of George Lucas Action Sequence and Special Effects Disease.

I explained to my father about that, and he enjoyed hearing a little about the Potlatchers. After that, he told me that lots of people didn't like the ending of
Huck Finn
. “But what they don't get,” he said, “is that it's written that way because Twain was setting up a sequel.” He dropped his hand on the bad book on the bed. “That's what's so important about this.

“You see,” he went on, “at the end of
Huck Finn
, Jim, the slave, is free, but Huck, the boy, is still a captive, a slave to Tom's foolishness. The story of Huck and Jim isn't over until
both
of them are set free.” He tapped the bad book. “Twain's sequel is the story of Huck, Tom, and Jim lighting out for Indian Territory and Huck winning
his
freedom.”

“From what?” I asked. “From being GLASSED by Tom?”

“Much more than that.” He pushed the bad book toward me and told me to open it to page 108. “Read the note Twain has written in the margin. Out loud.”

I read the penciled words.
“H becomes converted.”
I looked up. “Converted to what?”

“An Indian religion. Huck and Tom abandon Christianity and take up Indian beliefs. Tom eventually returns to ‘sivilization,' but Huck doesn't. He wins his freedom from Tom, ‘sivilization,' and Christianity.”

I stared at him, not quite believing it. “What happens to Jim?”

His wrinkled mouth pushed into a sly grin. “What's the worst thing you can do when talking about a book?”

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Spoil the ending. But I'll tell you why Twain never wrote his sequel. The story would have caused riots and ruined his reputation. He would have been hanged from the nearest steeple. That's why I call it the bad book. Yet even today, Huck turning his back on Christianity will rub people the wrong way. But in our world, on the brink of a war in which the feuding sides both hold books of mass delusion in one hand and weapons of mass destruction in the other, the story of Huck's escape from the dark side of Christianity is more important than ever.”

I didn't get everything he was saying, but one thing was crystal clear. I knew why he didn't send me the book in the mail. Mom would've taken that hatchet off the wall and pulped it.

My father sank back on the pillow and shut his eyes. I thought he was going to catch a nap. I started clearing the breakfast things. He grabbed my hand and held it.

His eyes slowly reopened. He looked up at me with a bitter sweet smile. “At the end of
Huck Finn
, the boy
doesn't completely escape his past. That's what makes Huck so believable. It's the same for all of us. The past is inescapable. Your mother's no different. Sit down, I want to tell you something.”

I sat on the bed.

He gathered his thoughts. “As a child, Tilda was repeatedly beaten by her father. To survive the terror of his beatings, she had two choices. To fight back and probably die, or to submit and live. She submitted. Her surrender was so complete, she ended up bowing down and worshipping her abuser. It forged her compass for living. Life was to be spent trembling at the feet of a higher power.”

I was so shocked, at first I didn't believe what he was saying. My brain went into lockdown against it.

He took a difficult breath and went on. “There are two things I'd like you do to for me.”

“What?” I heard myself whisper.

He reached out his quavering hand and tapped my hand. “Love your mother for who she is. But don't waste your life trembling before a higher power.” His finger tapped my hand again. “Treat God, and all the other gods you meet in your long, happy life, as the most fantastic friends ever invented by humankind.”

“I'll try.”

“Good.” He slid his hand off mine and shut his eyes. “I need to rest now.”

I didn't know if he wanted me to stay or go. Even if he'd asked me to go, my legs wouldn't have carried me. My body was paralyzed by what he'd told me. But not my mind. It flooded with a vision.

I was walking in a fog-buried forest. My mother was with me. In the heavy curtains of mist, she was only a shadowy silhouette. She held my hand, keeping me from stepping off the trail and plunging into the swallowing fog. This shadow Mom didn't scare me; she had always looked this way to me. Then light penetrated the forest, and the fog began pulling up through the trees. For the first time, I saw my mother's shadowy silhouette become shape. She looked like one of those hybrid creatures in mythology. She was half woman, half beastly father. Seeing her this way didn't scare me, or even startle me. If anything, it made me sad. It made me want to grip her hand tighter.

Like one of those flying dreams that don't stop, the vision kept playing. I watched the sunlight push the fog higher in the giant trees. Then I spied another creature, high in a tree, on a big branch. It was a little girl with long dark hair, pale skin, bright eyes. She laughed and twittered a song as she danced along the branch. The little girl was Mom too. The little girl I'd never imagined: the free and singing bird she'd once dreamed of becoming, Tilda Hayes before the talons of life swooped down and reshaped her into a Jesus-throated Whac-a-Mole.

A buzzing fly invaded my daydream. I blinked away the vision, and watched the fly land on a half-eaten piece of toast on my father's plate. I gathered the dishes and started out.

“Billy,” I heard my father whisper.

I turned back. His eyes were shut. “I'm here,” I said.

“Last night, you told me something about a man with a strange name.”

“Ruah,” I reminded him. “His name is Ruah Branch.”

“Who is he?”

I thought about all the things I could tell him. But it could wait. “We shared an adventure together.”

“After my rest, I want you to tell me the adventure of Billy and Ruah. Promise?”

“I promise.”

I went downstairs and sat in my father's chair. Even though it was only midmorning I felt wasted. I was still trying to sort through everything he'd told me. Especially about Mom. Talk about another reset button getting punched. I mean, given all the things I was going to have to rethink—Mom, Dad, the Bible, gays, even the end of
Huckleberry Finn
—it felt like God had delivered on my big prayer request, put me in high school early, and buried me in
homework
!