You Don't Know About Me (5 page)

Stupid neighbors.

The sunlight filling the room surprised me. Mom usually got me up early for Bible meditation. I threw on some clothes. In the main room, there was a box of cereal on the table, along with a note saying milk was in the fridge and that she'd be back soon. I took a bowl of cereal out on the porch.

I was on my third bowl when Mom pulled up in front of the house. She jumped out of the car and slid something out. She came around the car carrying a cardboard box. She practically skipped onto the porch. The box was filled with junk mail and magazines.

She was good about having our mail forwarded to us when we moved. The only time she didn't have it forwarded was if we left a town where we'd broken a law they might chase us for. So far, nobody had sent a posse to hunt us down.

The only mail for me was usually from homeschool supply places or some ministry. One time, I got a Victoria's Secret catalog by mistake. Talk about make-you-dizzy “neighbors.” The underwear bunnies kept me entertained for weeks. Whenever I felt like they were luring me to hell, I told myself I was doing a Bible experiment to see what it had been like to be King Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines. The experiment ended when Mom found
the catalog under my bed and took her wrath out on me and the mailman.

Mom held the cardboard box like it was a Christmas present. “There's something for you.” I peered into the box. “Dig down.”

I fished around till my hand hit something big. I pulled a package out. It was heavy, wrapped in brown paper, and addressed to Charles William Allbright in squiggly writing. Whoever wrote it had a real wonky hand. “There's no return address,” I said.

Mom beamed. “There doesn't have to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just open it.”

I noticed a corner of the brown paper had been torn away. Something gold flickered inside. I had a hunch what it was; I suspected Mom knew for sure. I tore off the wrapping. It was a fancy Bible, bound in black leather, with gilt edges on the pages.

Mom scooted into the chair next to me as I opened the cover. There was no note, no inscription, nothing showing who it was from. Fifty-dollar Bibles don't show up in the mail every day. “I wonder who sent it.”

“Who do you think? It's from God, Billy. It's a miracle.” She was almost laughing with joy. “It's the sign we prayed for last night. The Lord's telling us He wants us in Independence.”

“Mom, if it's from God, why'd He send it to Tulsa first?”

“Doesn't matter. The Book found us here. It's where the water springs up that makes a well, not where you dig a
dry hole. Our new home is going to be a wellspring of hope and joy.”

I didn't buy it. I mean, I believe in everyday miracles, like biking through a jungle tunnel, catching a black widow in your helmet, and not getting bitten. Or the miracle of making a friend who's got a TV and an Xbox. Or the miracle of going rafting at Bible camp, getting pitched out of the boys' boat, and being rescued by the girls' boat. But I didn't believe God had his miracles forwarded by the post office.

I was looking for an earthly sign of who had sent it when I noticed a ribbon bookmarker. I opened the Bible to the marked page. It was the book of Joel. There was a verse highlighted in yellow.

Mom sucked in a gasp. “Two, twenty-eight,” she whispered. “Praise Jesus.”

I got a weird feeling. It was like someone knew about her finger-pointing providence checks and had done one for me.

“Go ahead.” She nodded at the yellowed verse. “Read it.”

“… and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.”

“It's more than a sign, it's a prophecy!” she exclaimed. She was so exalted I thought she was going to bust out in tongues. She went on about how the passage was an Old Testament prediction about the coming of Christ. But now, God had dropped a Bible in my lap marked with that verse, and that confirmed what she'd said the night before about
her purpose: to raise me up as a child of promise and a man of the Book.

Until I figured out who had sent the Bible I didn't want to rain on her exaltation parade. She was so juiced she began to overheat. She fanned her face with a hand, then went inside to fetch two glasses of ice water.

I stared at the “miracle.” I lifted it by the spine and flapped it. Nothing fell out. Except a feeling. Not a gut feeling, a finger feeling. The back cover was stiff, like something was inside the leather. I spread the back cover open. Near the binding, the leather was slit. Something was tucked inside.

I dug my fingers in and pulled the thing out. I stared at a silver disc in a paper sleeve. A DVD. I turned it over. Staring up at me, in the same shaky handwriting as on the brown wrapper, was:

My heart stopped; my breath stopped; the world stopped.

The clink of ice came from inside the house.

I jammed the DVD back inside the cover a second before Mom opened the screen door.

Mom handed me a glass of cold water. I bit my lip to stop myself from asking if my father could still be alive. If I did, she might make a connection to the fifty-dollar Bible.

I listened to her go on about how God had spoken, and how things were going to be so different in Independence that we might never move again. I thought I was going to explode from not being able to jump up, go find a DVD player, and see what was on the disc making my head spin with questions. Was it a fake? Some kind of joke? Was it him? If it was, what did he really look like?

After what felt like hours, Mom calmed down enough for me to say I wanted to go to the library to check out some books for camp. I went inside, grabbed my sneaks, slipped the DVD from its hiding place, and shoved it in my cargo-shorts pocket. As soon as I got out of sight, I started running. I didn't stop till I reached the library I'd spotted earlier.

The man at the information desk told me I had to do two things before I could use a computer: get a library card and stop sweating. I spent another five minutes of torture filling out a form.

I got my card and convinced the info man I was done sweating. He took me to a computer. He handed me a box of tissues and told me to clean the headphones when I was
done. I threw on the headphones and tried to feed the DVD into the slot. My hand shook so much it took several tries before the slot grabbed the disc and gorped it.

The screen started all black, then words came up:
FOR CHARLES WILLIAM ALLBRIGHT.
A picture blipped up. An old man stared out at me. He was in a bed, propped up on pillows. One hand, wrapped in tape, dropped to his lap. At first the hand looked bandaged, but it was a remote control taped to his palm. There was no guessing his age because he looked so sick. His gray skin hung on his head like a wrinkled sock. His longish white hair fanned back against a pillow. This can't be my father, I thought, it's Methuselah. I'd seen my dad countless times in the mirror, but the mirror door had swung open and a ghost was staring out at me. I wanted to shut that door, pretend it was a dream. I couldn't. The ghost had me hypnotized.

He blinked, real slow. His dark blue eyes disappeared, then reappeared. His mouth cracked open. “Hello, Billy. I know I'm not much to look at.” His voice was stronger than he looked. And it sounded like his tongue was shoveling sand along with his words. He sucked in a raspy breath. “Nevertheless, to quote Darth Vader, ‘I am your father.' ”

The last word shot a bolt of pain through my chest, like there was an invisible arrow sticking in my heart that he'd reached out and batted. Part of me wanted him to bat it again. He was my father, back from the dead!

His wrinkled face bunched into a smile or a grimace, I couldn't tell which. “I suppose it's rude and presumptuous quoting Darth Vader when your mother has probably shielded you from the corruption of popular culture. But
that's me, rude and presumptuous Richard Allbright.” The more he spoke, the more the life in his eyes spread into his face.

“Maybe you're wondering how I ascertained that you're called Billy, and that you've been raised as a God-fearing, Bible-thumping, Christo-terrorist. Well, I've been keeping my eye on you and Tilda for some time.”

His head slowly turned. His hand, the one with the remote, lifted and reached offscreen. I stared at his profile. Under the wrinkled curtain of skin, his nose was just like mine: a big beak. My stomach ballooned like I'd whoop-de-dooed over a hill. Before I could find the next piece of him that was me, he pulled something across the screen.

It took me a second to recognize what it was: a white board with a map of America's middle. Pushpins poked from the map in all the places me and Mom had lived. Colored string zigzagged between the pins. It was the zigzag path of my life with Mom. “I've kept track of you by Googling Tilda's name,” he said. He sounded so close in my headphones. “I've read the entertaining accounts of your exploits in police blotters and local newspapers.”

He pulled the board away and stared at me again. “Your mother's Christian zeal is why I've come to you tucked inside the Good Book. The Bible is my Trojan horse.”

He swallowed as slow as he blinked. “But why, you may be wondering, has your ancient, deadbeat father suddenly materialized? First the bad news. By the time you see this I will have
un
materialized. I will be dead.”

“No!” For a second I couldn't understand why he didn't hear me.

He kept going. “I may sound like I've got some time, but I assure you my hour upon the stage is up. If it wasn't, I'd—” His hand waved the thought away. “Enough of that. To the news that isn't bad. I'll let you decide how
good
it is. It comes in two parts. The unvarnished truth about the past. And a possible truth about your future.”

He took another raspy breath. “I don't know what Tilda has told you about your birth. Here's what I know. We met on a Mississippi riverboat. She was there to get gamblers to bet on Christ. I was there taking part in a conference on Mark Twain and giving a talk on one of his books. That's who I was, and still am: an expert on Twain, and a professional collector and trader of all things Twain. I've sold everything from first editions of his books to a strand of his hair I found in his dictionary. I call myself a Twainiac.”

I was in a trance, hanging on his every word.

“Your mother, the beautiful Tilda Hayes, wandered into my talk. We spoke afterward and fell in love. I don't know why a Twainiac and a Bible-thumper fell for each other, but we did. Maybe it was Twain playing a joke on me from the grave, or God playing a joke on both of us. In any case, our undying love lived long enough for me to come to Jesus and for you to be conceived in a reckless moment of passion. Then the trouble began. As you grew inside Tilda, the life-in-Christ growing in me miscarried. The unbeliever I'd been before meeting your mother was born again. I kept offering to marry her, but she refused to wed a man who hopscotched from sin to salvation and back to sin again. For her, there was only one explanation for her dire circumstance. I had been sent by Satan to tempt her and she
had failed God. When she was four months pregnant she disappeared without a trace. The only thing she took was my name.”

The throbbing pain in my chest was back again, worse. Now he was grabbing the arrow and twisting it. He was calling me a bastard. I wanted to rip the pain from my chest and plunge it into him. But I couldn't even talk back to him.

He sucked in another breath. “For years I didn't know what had happened to Tilda, or to my child. After I found you on the Internet, I wrote letters to you. I suspect she intercepted them, because I've never heard back. Perhaps she has intercepted this. I even showed up at some of the places you lived, hoping to see you. But you had always moved on by the time I got there.”

I wondered if he was telling the truth. I wondered how hard he'd really looked for me. The answer I got was a twisted smile. He went on. “I don't have the strength to dwell on past failures. I want to talk about your future. I have something for you. Your inheritance. Like me, it doesn't look like much. It's only a book.” His white eyebrows lifted. “I call it the ‘bad book.' Of all the things I've held in my hands that Mark Twain once held in his, the bad book is the most valuable of all.”

I had no clue what he was talking about, but as he spoke his craggy face filled with life. His gray skin shaded pink. His cheeks seemed less sunken. He began to look like the Reverend Richard Allbright I'd always seen in the mirror.

He pushed his head off the pillow. A strand of white hair slipped to his shoulder. “The world has never seen the brilliant story Twain feverishly scribbled in the bad book. It's
the sequel to his masterpiece,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. For scholars, the story is priceless. For collectors, it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. For me, it's the only thing I'll ever give to my son”—his eyes shut, he leaned back into the pillow—“Charles William Allbright.”

I didn't care about some book. I didn't care about the money. I only heard the echo of his words—“my son.” I wanted to hate him for never finding me, for never being my father. I couldn't. How could I hate a man who'd pushed open the mirror, like a lid on a coffin, and uttered my name? He was my Rip van Winkle sleeping all this time. He was my father.

His eyes opened again. “Here's the problem. I can't send you the bad book. If your mother saw it, she'd say it was written by the devil and destroy it. If I could, I'd bring it to you myself. I can't. You have to fetch it, by yourself. And because I fear Tilda might be watching this, finding the book won't be easy. It will be a treasure hunt.” He swallowed and went on. “Your first clue is a riddle. Here it is: Where do you find the book of Genesis and human conception?”